Movies I wish I had skipped. This could be for any number of reasons: the film was made sloppily, the narrative didn’t engage me, or I simply could not connect with the film in any way for whatever reason.
A pack of mercenaries on horseback take refuge in a cave and are attacked by a mysterious creature. Taking the creature’s severed claw, the two survivors of the attack (Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal) travel to a nearby kingdom on the Great Wall, where they are captured and pulled into a war.
In terms of effects work, the inaugural action set piece that establishes the film’s war of monster versus man is Continue reading The Great Wall (2017) Movie Review
Ray Wentworth (Bob Odenkrik) is a greeting card writer. The best, if you ask him. We first see him looking down the barrel of the camera in closeup, waxing poetic about the poetics of card writing. Writing novels are for hacks who cannot edit themselves. Cards are the real challenge.
Following this, Ray is Continue reading Girlfriend’s Day (2017) Movie Review
The premise of The Ring has always seemed silly. “You ever hear about the videotape that kills people in seven days?” This is one of the first lines of Rings, this third English-language installment of the franchise, itself a remake of the J-Horror sensation Ringu.
On a plane, two people who watched the tape are killed by Samara, the pallid, greasy black-haired monster of the film, as she climbs out of a monitor in the cockpit. This essentially unrelated cold open is the shoddiest scene in the entire film; a strange way to Continue reading Rings (2017) Movie Review
Son of the headmaster of his prep school, Jason Hodges (Alex Saxon) gets more than he bargains for during a mundane field trip to the U.S. Mint. While Jason attempts to get the school “hacker” to change his bio grade, his father is arrested for embezzling.
In the fallout of this, the school is forced to enact cuts to all extracurricular activities. And this is an adequate amount of parts for a Continue reading Coin Heist (2017) Movie Review
Patriots Day, the other 2016 film from director Peter Berg that stars Mark Wahlberg, is a big question mark of a film. It is not a question mark in terms of why it was made or how it was put together, but in how to approach it from a viewer’s perspective.
The film is a dramatic depiction of the Continue reading Patriots Day (2016) Movie Review
I was going to come home from the screening of The Bye Bye Man and write a scathing review. I was going to give it a quadruple F-. I was going to tear the film apart and bury the pieces.
But first I told my roommate about this terrible film. I let him know; I said: “Don’t go see this film called The Bye Bye Man…” As the words of the film’s title left my lips, though, I started hearing things. A coin dropping to the floor. Scratching on wood. The sound of my girlfriend having sex with my best friend.
I was going to write an F- review of The Bye Bye Man but…don’t pay money, don’t see it. Don’t Pay Money, Don’t See It. DON’T PAY MONEY, DON’T SEE IT!!
In 1969, a reporter (Leigh Whannell) goes on a murdering spree over a name that people in his neighborhood keep spreading around. “Don’t say it, don’t think it,” he mutters to himself as he paces around his suburban street with a shotgun, stalking people down and shooting them after they comically run away at half speed.
Flash forward to present day, three personality-devoid college students rent a seemingly mansion-sized house. The trio include a couple comprised of Sasha (Cressida Bonas), a character whose only character trait is that Continue reading The Bye Bye Man (2017) Movie Review
There is something cautionary about a film that opens with a scene that outlines a superficial context by having every line of dialogue out of the characters’ mouths point to the obvious mores of the day, to the point where a character has to exclaim what year it is to highlight the already obvious irony of their immediate situation.
It is this retrograde rose-tinting of history that plagues Hidden Figures. Morality films such as these often fall into this pitfall, where characters are hyper aware of their situation as if they themselves are looking back as we are. The film is designed around Continue reading Hidden Figures (2016) Movie Review
The Avalon II is on a 120 year course to a second Earth: Homestead II. 5,000 passengers sleep in hibernation pods until four months of the voyage remain. Except, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years too soon.
Passengers wants to be a lot of things. A Castaway story. A Titanic story. A 2001: A Space Odyssey story. What it fails to be is Continue reading Passengers (2016) Movie Review
Office Christmas Party. No synopsis required.
Except, the film presents itself as if there needs to be a thorough plot for this raucous party comedy. A struggling tech company faces layoffs due to sibling rivalry, the newly divorced CTO (Jason Bateman) is…yadda yadda yadda.
Office Christmas Party is slow to get started. The premise and characters are Continue reading Office Christmas Party (2016) Movie Review
Kevin Smith’s latest feature, the blatantly Canadian-set Yoga Hosers, feels at first like an unofficial Clerks 3 graduated to a new generation to include Instagram, yoga, an attempt at current slang, and a female empowerment angle. Indeed, most characters are introduced through an Instagram insert that adds no information to the character that was not already presented through narrative context.
The film is also a horror movie about bratwurst Nazis. And a musical, kind of. It paints Canada like a fantasy world completely alien to American audiences, so alien that Continue reading Yoga Hosers (2016) Movie Review
CineFiles Movie Reviews 