Vivid, hallucinatory exploitation homage from giallo enthusiasts Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani.
Arthouse powerhouse Steve McQueen goes the blockbuster route with this terrific crime saga,a movie sprawling in scope but intimate in its focus.
A strange and somber death dream in the cinematic language of 1980's video nasties. Panos Cosmatos, son of Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II director George Pan Cosmatos, is practically the rightful heir to the king of this genre, and with Mandy he makes his birthright known. And he has found the perfect star for his brand of delirious genre homage in Nic Cage. Our hero Red Miller is a stock exploitation movie type, a simple lumberjack living with his plain jane metalhead chick Mandy in the peaceful woods of the Pacific Northwest, transformed into an avenging angel when he and his lady love run afoul of a band of vicious demon-summoning hippies. Beaten, bloodied, and stripped of all he holds dear as formula demands, Red screams like an animal between swigs of liquor, forges an axe that looks like it came straight out of Grayskull, and sets out to smite his enemies mercilessly
Wes Anderson returns to the medium of stop-motion animation, delivering a fascianting new creation his usual wit and invention.
Can America be saved from itself? Hope for the future feels as weirdly radical today as the decency and all-encompassing compassion of Presbyterian minister Fred Rogers.
Here director David Lowery, a child of 70's cinema, ditches Malick for Altman. It doesn't really have the sprawl of, say, "Nashville", more a character study than an ensemble picture.
A terrifying monster movie with a novel premise and a tight character-driven script. If Krasinski and company had been able to write a proper ending for this story, I would rank this as a classic on par with "It Follows".
Bo Burnham brings his tween characters to life with creditable empathy, but there's a bit of an ironic remove from them, too. Good perfomance by Elsie Fisher as Kayla, and Josh Hamilton as her dad.
Shades of Schrader's Taxi Driver as an ailing Albany priest grows obsessed with a local polluter, all the while forming a bond with a married parishioner.
Just out of the hospital after recuperating from a grievous head injury, and still suffering from seizures and other ill effects, rodeo rider Brady longs to compete again even though it could kill him, and faces a life with few prospects if he abandons life on the range. This tale is essentially autobiographical; Brady is played by Brady Jandreau, a rodeo cowboy who suffered just such an injury. His real-life family and friends play themselves; none of them are trained actors, and it shows. Though Jandreau acquits himself well enough in the lead, the value of casting him becomes apparent when he takes a job taming wild horse, handling them with a gentle skill only a lifetime of practice can provide.
Overstuffed superhero mash-up handles its copious roster with a bit more panache than the unwieldy Age of Ultron. The fights at the beginning are a bit too choppy. With so many heroes to go around, lots of characters get short shrift. Somehow, even in a theater crowded with loud morons and their screaming children, I never found it in me to identify at all with Brolin's hulking purple Malthusian and his mission of compassionate genocide in the way that the filmmakers expected.
James Wan does the Zac Snyder superhero esthetic way better than Zac Synder ever did.
Stylish and colorful rom-com, with a fantastic leading lady in Constance Wu. Struggles a bit to give time to its many,many characters.
Uneven though it is, you can't accuse "Sorry to Bother You" of being unoriginal. In fact, it may be one of those rare movies that suffers from having too many ideas
A dedicated Bale performance can't entirely rescue this project from McKay's latest bag of smug tricks. There is a certain necessity to the trickery, I will admit; Dick Cheney is a laconic and gruff character, with no sympathy for others outside his little circle and deserving no sympathy from us. He does not emote, or explain himself. Even when famously telling Pat Leahy "Go fuck yourself" as the two men stand on the floor of the Senate, his fury is a buried seething contempt, and the words are flatly declaimed. McKay feels the need to open him up, and explain him. So in one scene Dick 'n' Lynne adopt the haughty tones of Lord and Lady Macbeth as they plot his ascendancy. It's a terrible scene, somehow made worse by explaining itself winkingly. An character played by Jesse Plemons narrates the film and frequently explains Dick's methods and motivations, even though he has never met the Cheneys and is not apparently any kind of Washington expert or insider. I would honestly not mind having some random omniscient narrator, but when the guy's connection to Cheney is revealed, it's in service of a metaphor both flimsy and heavy-handed.
It's mostly Bale's show here, but Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney, though featured less prominently, gives a performance just as capable (when she's not expected to do nonsense like the Shakespearean interlude).
Luca Guadagnino's unlikely follow-up to Call Me By Your Name feels at times like a masterpiece, at times like a bloated folly, but each minute feels like an ordeal.
Well, it's gotta be in the top 5 zombie Christmas musicals of all time, right?
Hopefully a better edit of this will come out, because it just feels like it's been cut to ribbons in some spots. there are moments of fun, and Shane Black's dialog crackles like, but it can't quite save this mess
When her bestie goes missing, mommy vlogger Kendrick decides to investigate. Kendrick is very funny, and Blake Lively is actually pretty good here too. Henry Golding is a bit too bland as the missing woman's husband; after Crazy Rich Asians, he's still stuck in dreamboat mode, and he needs to have a bit more of an edge for this part, to lend the mystery and romance a little danger. Feig is trying his hand at a Hitchcockian thriller here, which is ambitious, but he doesn't have the chops for it. IThe third act, when things should be ramping up, ought to be suspenseful but just feels busy
More of the same sequel. Admittedly, it has some great gags and funny lines, but it's hard to invest much emotion in film that prizes winking silliness above all else. After a tragic opening, it feels weird to be asked to laugh at the absurd deaths of Wade's new superhero squad. And much of the film is devoted to Brolin's Cable, the very embodiment of a grim 'n' gritty comic book hero. Perhaps in comics this is a rewarding partnership. In the movie, he's a dour presence that shows up time and again and snuffs out the comedy.
Ernie Cline's dumb-as-rocks vision of a dystopian future obsessed with 1980's pop culture gets a big boost from Spielberg's flair for spectacle, but it's still the same dumb-as-rocks story as the book.
I had major reservations going into this one. "Jurassic World" was a terrible movie that hinged on an idiot plot. The capsule summary of the sequel is even worse: "We need to save the dinosaurs from extinction!" Dude: they already went extinct. Some of them eat people. Let the frickin' volcano take care of them already.
Problem is, it has frickin' dinosaurs in it, and I'm not so jaded yet that I ain't gonna go see dinosaurs on the big screen. If anyone asks, naturally I'll say, "oh, the director is J A Bayona, who did 'El Orphanto', so it should be visually dazzling." But of course it' ll be visually dazzling, because it has dinosaurs. Gotta say, this franchise hasn't topped the spectacular effects of this first movie, and likely won't, since the dinosaurs are likely 100% digital. Still: dinosaurs.
Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt didn't exactly set silver screens on fire with their chemistry last time around, and nor do they now. Park director Claire is now an "environmentalist" lobbying for the government to save the dinosaurs, less because she has any passion about them and more because that's the plot they came up with. She and cuddly teddy-bear/raptor trainer Owen Grady are broken up, and he's moved out into the country to build himself a house all manly like. Hitherto unmentioned InGen partner Benjamin Lockwood, played by a sickly Farmer Hoggett, summons Claire to his deathbed to hire her to wrangle the dinosaurs off the island to safety. Lockwood's scheming underling Rafe Spall schemes a scheme with a comb-over-ed Toby Jones to sell off the dinosaurs at a black market gala auction. What could go wrong?
Now, if it ain't clear, that plot is a big ole mess, and Pratt and Howard are such weak echoes of heroes past that it seems like we're just supposed to root for the dinos to kill everybody. And Bayona has a lot of fun with his monsters. Before devouring a bad guy, the Indoraptor plays dead, cuing us in with a wink and a toothy grin. Flashes of light from spattering lava let us catch a glimpse of a huge carnivore approaching out oblivious heroes in a dark crawlspace. As the last boat leaves the fiery ruins of Isla Nublar, a hapless brontosaurus arrives at the dock, moaning in dismay at being left behind. And if I had to pick a favorite character from the movie, it would totally be the bonehead pachycephalosaurus, who's thick battering ram of a skull plows through a number of plot obstacles.
a fairly bland mishmash of scifi movie elements, even down to the casting of David Bautista as an adorably dense bruiser. Not awful, but rarely as good as the movies it liberally borrows from.
None of Disney's Star Wars movies have been classics, but Solo is the first I'd call a dud. It starts out fine, but in its rush to hit all the obligatory touchstones of the origin story, it never establishes Solo as the character we know. The miscast Alden Ehrenreich comes across like a sweet little puppy, not like a hard-bitten lifelong criminal; a childhood spent scamming and conning for a Fagin-like mobster on Corellia should have imparted more in the way of street smarts. When he leaves Corellia for the galactic crime syndicates, he comes off as a fish out of water, not just a little swimmer in a far bigger pond. It's not all bad; Don Glover is a great Calrissian, and his droid sidekick is fun. Still, this movie should have built upon the myth of a great character, and instead diminishes him.
Playing Samuel Alabaster, a dandy who heads west to claim his bride, Robert Pattinson gives a daft and energetic performance that carries Damsel for the first hour. But the object of his intentions isn't the damsel in distress Alabaster and the other men of the frontier imagine; in fact the men who want to save her are often the authors of her distress. The sexual politics aren't the only thing that feels incongruously modern in this half-assed mumblecore western. The jokey set dressing and goofy props and the contemporary dialog don't seem to be there for any reason just to be silly, and having made its point about male entitlement, the movie proceeds to make the same point again and again
Even a very game Kurt Russell can't make this indifferent fantasia into anything other than a chore.
City Cinema Village East NYC 70mm re-release I cried when HAL gets deactivated.
At the Museum of the Moving Image
Varya is a mousy little Russian woman, a math teacher who's come to Crimea, an area of disputed ownership between Russia and Ukraine, to meet the people face to face, to sit down and have conversations, to get a view of the situation beyond that which can bee seen via internet browser. This actually is kind of radical in this day and age; isn't that sad?
I'm probably projecting a bit of my geopolitical naivete onto the film, but Varya seems to walk away with little more insight than, "Gee, the situation sure is complex", and brings this message back to a little townhall back in her Moscow apartment, where she tries in vain to placate the worst fears of her paranoid countrymen.
50th anniversary screening at the Alamo
AFS Cinema First time watching a Nicolas Roeg movie in ages. This is a weird one. In Walter Tevis' novel, on which the film is based, a spindly alien comes to our world, disguised as human, scheming to find a way to save his dying world. By patenting the superior technology of his homeworld, he quietly amasses a corporate empire. But he begins to neglect his righteous endeavor in favor of worldly vises, and ultimately finds himself a prisoner of the world he has made. Roeg does not greatly depart from this story, but his frenetic intercutting feels more a distraction than a showcase for the story, and he pushes the film into a surreal direction that serves little purpose. Why does Bowie, out for a country drive with his boozy mistress, catch a glimpse of settlers of a bygone era out on the frontier, and how is it that they can see him too? It's a maddening bit that never comes up again. There is a lot of gratuitous nudity, too, which didn't bother me as a college freshman, but now seems hardly necessary.
Thankfully, we saw only a much-abridged version, courtesy of Austin's Master Pancake Theater.
drafthouse. Not Brooks' best film, but it has a bunch of great laughs.
As a wise man once said: "That's gonna be a no from me, dawg." Part 2 of this generic YA dystopia was laughably terrible; if part 1 ever managed to establish credible characters or a reason to care about what happens to them, and it may be overly generous to think it did, by now that's been squandered.
just adding this to say, forget this garbage. Ain't even going to watch it. Last time around, with 10 Cloverfield Lane, JJ optioned some guy's screenplay and had his writers mold it into the next chapter of the wholly unnecessary Cloverfield saga. Here he took a movie that had already been filmed, or was in the midst of filming, and reverse engineered it into his dumb franchise. That's JJ Abrams in a nutshell: a hack with an active contempt for original ideas and the craft of writing itself. Go stuff it up your ass, JJ.
The Terry Gilliam jinx is still in full effect, with the film in legal limbo due to a frivolous lawsuit by a producer formerly attached to the project.
America demands FREAK SHIFT. Bring us FREAK SHIFT, Hollywood, that we may feast on it with our all-devouring eyes.
ain't gonna watch this neither. more crap from JJ Abrahms, looks like. Nazi zombies, very original. somehow, a concept too bold and revolutionary to add Cloverfield in post