If you liked Casino Royale, you might also enjoy: Quantum of Solace (2008), streaming on Netflix. Craig may have been a more no-nonsense, brutal Bond than predecessor Pierce Brosnan, but the venerable Bond franchise needs to be reenergized from time to time, and Craig's Bond maintained the series' momentum for five solid outings. This 21st official Bond movie (a sort-of reboot/sequel, according to the franchise's tortured timeline) seized upon a neophyte, rough-around-the-edges 007 as he first gains his infamous license to kill and seeks to thwart an all-time great Bond villain in Mads Mikkelsen's poker-playing Le Chiffre, and woo another all-timer in Eva Green's Vesper Lynd.
A controversial pick at the time (when is a new Bond not?), Craig claimed his place as the indefatigable British secret agent in Casino Royale with all the confidence in the world. With Daniel Craig having doffed the tux for the last time with 2021's fifth entry, No Time To Die, now's a fine time to revisit the actor's first outing as James Bond. If you liked 21 Bridges, you might also enjoy: The Batman (2022), streaming on HBO Max. (He also orders all of Manhattan to shut down to aid in his rampage, the city's 21 bridges of the title being blocked off to trap his prey.) Still, Boseman is a fine, thoughtful presence, his detective navigating the not-what-it-seems mystery behind the drug-related massacre in a way that at least muddies the Blue Lives Matter of it all. Simmons' superior that he'll use his penchant for Justified-style lethal force to bring down a pair of murderers. There's a queasy authoritarianism running through 21 Bridges as Boseman's antihero tramples some civil rights, all but promising J.K. When not in costume, Boseman's tortured detective here is something of a Batman figure, except that, as we see in his first scene in front of the NYPD's internal affairs investigators, he's made something of a habit of shooting down cop killers after the long ago death of his own policeman father. Boseman's versatility often saw him portraying heroes, both fictional and real, and while this above-average cop thriller didn't give him the same opportunities to stretch as films like 42, Black Panther, Marshall, and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, it still showed what Boseman could do at the center of a Hollywood action drama. The loss of Chadwick Boseman (who died shockingly of colon cancer in 2020) robbed us of what were sure to be decades worth of award-winning performances from one of the most magnetic leading men of recent years. If you liked Blade Runner 2049, you might also enjoy: Akira (1988), streaming on Hulu.
The director has been monkeying around with different versions of his sci-fi masterpiece movie pretty much since it was released, and this latest installment does not disappoint. Of course, you can always make it a double feature, as Scott's 1982 original is also on Netflix. The action, when it comes, is excitingly brutal, with human and replicant alike being hurled through walls and taking Blade Runner's future noir violence into this brave but crumbling new world. As the aging Ford and blankly handsome newer model Gosling square off, Blade Runner 2049 proves an evocative extrapolation of the original's questions about the nature of life and mortality. Not that this Earth is any less dystopian, as Gosling braves the irradiated wastes in search of answers from predecessor Harrison Ford's Deckard. At nearly three hours, there's plenty of ruminative, gorgeous squalor for Ryan Gosling's replicant robot bounty hunter to explore, as Villeneuve (with a masterful assist from cinematographer Roger Deakins) takes us into the future's future, and out of the rain-drenched, neon chaos of Scott's dystopian Los Angeles. His recent Dune erased the tinny taste of David Lynch's misbegotten version of Frank Herbert's beloved novel, while this earlier sequel to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner similarly expands upon its source material while allowing Villeneuve ample opportunity to knock our socks off, visually and otherwise. Denis Villeneuve has become the keeper of our sci-fi memories.
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