The Scream franchise is not one that wants to be taken seriously as a straight horror film. From the first iconoclastic installment so many years ago, its aim, it’s very raison d’être, was to call out the conventions of slasher films and then serve up a gory slashfest to an audience primed to laugh at… Read More »
65
65 is that most satisfying of CGI films, the type that doesn’t wallow in what it can do visually, but rather uses the technology in furtherance of a moving film. It posits a visit to our planet 65 million years ago by humans who arrive at a momentous moment for our big blue marble. The… Read More »
OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE
There is little of the old Guy Ritchie to be found in OPERATION FORTUNE: RUSE DE GUERRE. That Guy Ritchie delivered crackling editing, provocative visual impunity, and dialogue that burned with self-reflexive irony. They were films that all but defied gravity as they rushed headlong through their paces leaving audiences breathless and invigorated. I miss… Read More »
COCAINE BEAR
COCAINE BEAR is a joyously peculiar amalgam of carnage, comedy, and horror that respects few rules of cinematic storytelling aside from insuring that (spoiler alert) the dog is okay. It’s an impudent thing that thumbs its nose at convention while seeing to it that, despite broken laws and the slaughter of innocent (and not so… Read More »
EMILY
EMILY begins with its titular character, Emily Brontë (Emma Mackey) swooning. It’s a cleverly deceptive beginning to the story of a 19th-century rebel, and of the inspirations for her masterpiece of gothic fiction, Wuthering Heights. As played by Mackey, with an immersive and experiential script by screenwriter, Frances O’Connor, Emily is anything but the delicate,… Read More »
MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE
Narrated with precocious prescience by a character too young to see the film on her own (or parts of the stage show within it at all), MAGIC MIKE’S LAST DANCE asks the age-old question, “What do women want?” This being a film about a preternaturally talented male stripper, the answer can only be a lap… Read More »
KNOCK AT THE CABIN
Perhaps it’s having a child at the center of a film that provides M. Night Shyamalan with the added spark necessary to making a solid, thoroughly enjoyable film. I refer not just to THE SIXTH SENSE, which catapulted the director to rock star filmmaker status, but also to WIDE AWAKE, the film just before that… Read More »
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD
WHEN YOU FINISH SAVING THE WORLD is a melancholy comedy about blindness and boundaries. Grounded by performances by Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard that are wonders of anger and pain and absurdity, it examines the volatile emotions lurking beneath a family’s thin veneer of civility as it reaches a breaking point when reality intrudes on… Read More »
MISSING
Full of slick misdirections and clever plot twists, MISSING rises above the novelty of its online footage subgenre to take its place as a solid mystery-thriller. Not that it doesn’t take excellent advantage of the limitations of its chosen subgenre. Au contraire, it incorporates those very limitations as integral plot points. In it we find… Read More »
BABYLON
In BABYLON, Damien Chazelle has given us several films about the last hurrah of silent films and the birth of synchronized sound. Some of them are good, some of them are muddled, and one of them is superb. Chazelle’s ambitious attempt to encapsulate a time and place provokes respect for the effort, even when it… Read More »
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