The Zachtastic Movie Blog

The first Star Wars spin-off film, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story , was released in theaters on December 16, 2016. Gareth Edwards directed the project after having completed his work on Godzilla (2014). Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy wrote the screenplay based on an idea conceived by longtime Star Wars VFX artist John Knoll. Lucasfilm produced the film, which was ultimately released by Disney. The film’s cast includes Felicity Jones, Ben Mendelsohn, Diego Luna, Forest Whitaker, Donnie Yen, and Riz Ahmed, in addition to vocal work provided by Alan Tudyk and James Earl Jones. IMDb reports the synopsis of the film as such: “The daughter of an Imperial scientist joins the Rebel Alliance in a risky move to steal the Death Star plans.” We had a full discussion of this movie for over half an hour, so feel free to check out the video above if you are curious to hear our thoughts.

Pixar has had a rocky number of years throughout the 2010s. I wouldn’t go anywhere near the assumption that the studio is dead and completely devoid of creativity, but their motion picture output certainly hasn’t been as impressive as their near-perfect winning streak from 1995 to 2010. With many forgettable misfires like the Cars sequels and The Good Dinosaur , along with a couple of decent franchise films inferior to the originals, they’ve had some rough patches. But that’s not to say that the still-relevant and deeply respected animation studio isn’t churning out meaningful films. In fact, some of their work from the past several years has been among their best. I, for one, found moments in such recent films to be quite touching and effective pulls on the heartstrings. With that being said, since Toy Story 4 came out this past weekend, I have been curious about whether or not it features emotional beats quite like previous ones seen in Pixar films. By the time you read t...

Dark Phoenix was written and directed by Simon Kinberg, a longtime X-Men scribe who made his directorial debut. 20th Century Fox released this film as a production collaboration with Marvel and TSG Entertainment. The film also serves as the “final” installment of the current X-Men cinematic timeline that started back with the release of X-Men in 2000. The film's cast includes Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Nicholas Hoult, Tye Sheridan, Alexandra Shipp, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Evan Peters, and Jessica Chastain. IMDb states that the film’s official synopsis is the following: “Jean Grey begins to develop incredible powers that corrupt and turn her into a Dark Phoenix. Now the X-Men will have to decide if the life of a team member is worth more than all of humanity.” For my full thoughts on the film, refer to the YouTube thumbnail above, which links to my video review. It has a timecode of 6:59. Dark Phoenix is unequivocally a ...

Another E3 has come and gone, and some will definitely argue as to whether or not Christmas had come for gamers. We look forward to exciting reveals each June just like insatiable children eagerly wait for gifts from Santa. Gamers will have their opinions on what conferences they were most excited for, what announcements/presentations pleased them, and what ultimately disappointed them. Personally, I’m much more partial towards Nintendo than other major gaming companies, but I hoped for something interesting from everybody. I own all three current gen consoles so I had equal opportunity to be excited and let down. Some games definitely piqued or destroyed my interest, but there are only a select number of titles that actually caused me to do double takes. Everyone has different expectations for this annual trade show, though, so please recognize that these picks reflect my own personal interests. The fact that I didn’t feature Halo Infinite here, the latest installment of on...

Welcome to another recap of all the movies I saw in a given month! For this particular post, I give you my rankings of those movies which I saw in May 2019. With the month of May ushers in the summer movie season. In this, we get a steady slew of blockbusters and franchise films meant for boosting Hollywood’s quarterly earnings. Because of this, we sometimes get good blockbusters, and on the flipside, we get some cynical, reactionary, and just plain bad ones. And, of course, there are the odd films between the studio profiteering that try to make it on their own merits: indie films, documentaries, or other smaller projects that try to succeed simply because talented artists wanted to create something memorable. May 2019 certainly brought about a lot of these kinds of different movies. I may not have seen everything that came out last month, but I tried my best to catch up with what I truly was interested in. With that, I hope you enjoy my rankings for May. If you’d pre...