Category Archives: Leave it

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.

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

IF (2024) Movie Review

John Krasinski’s IF is something of an imaginary creature in today’s cinema landscape. Paramount’s aspirant blockbuster is a full-on big budget children’s film with no attachment to established intellectual property. Compare this to essentially every other family offering coming up this summer: Despicable Me 4, The Garfield Movie, Inside Out 2, Harold and the Purple Crayon. The big purple elephant in the room is the weird imaginary friend movie that is a big studio risk in desperate search for an audience. This audience, one imagines, is families. The kids come for the colorful creatures that are wholly unrecognizable to them, and the parents stay for…potentially life threatening heart surgery?

The shame is that the diverse array of computer-generated imaginary things (they prefer to be called “ifs” for whatever reason) are mostly great visual effects, and they also are occasionally characters with personality. The potential for this to be Continue reading IF (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review

Wes Ball’s The Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes moves the world of the 2010s Apes trilogy multiple generations of apes into the future. Caeser (Andy Serkis) long deceased, the planet of the apes has mostly forgotten his impact on their world. Apes now live in clans, scattered around the ruins of human cities. One gorilla, who has adopted the name Caeser for himself, wants more than a clan. He desires an empire. Proximus Caeser (Kevin Durrand) violently destroys neighboring clans and brings the surviving apes into his kingdom.

This includes the “Eagle Clan” of which young Noa (Owen Teague) is a part. Noa witnesses the death of Continue reading Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) Movie Review

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare tries hard to be a rag-tag action film with a roguish, rugged charm. Based (however loosely) on the book Churchill’s Secret Warriors by Damien Lewis, about the small group of fighters covertly deployed by the British military during World War II, the film depicts Operation Postmaster. Postmaster was a mission to steal three German cargo ships that provided essential supplies for the Nazi U-boats. As the movie tells it, the U-boats were vital to the German’s control over the Atlantic Ocean, and thus cause for reticence when it came to the United States’ decision to join the War.

The film tries hard, and you can feel it. You can feel the four screenwriters – some possibly brought in simply for punching up the quips – producing the dialogue. You can hear the hope for Continue reading The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Movie Review

Somewhere in the midst of the haggard kerfuffle that is the frozen empire of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore tells Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz something to the effect of the old cliché, “we’re getting too old for this.” This does not come across like a self-aware nod toward the inherent redundancy and inessential nature of Hollywood reboot culture. It feels more like the film accidentally self-reporting.

Personally (and fortunately, perhaps), I did not have to get too old before realizing that it is a waste of one’s time and energy to Continue reading Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Civil War (2024) Movie Review

Alex Garland’s previous film, Men (2022), was provocative, but it provoked one’s attention for the sake of a statement without much depth to it. Civil War, the filmmaker’s latest, is marketed and branded as a highly provocative sign-of-the-times political thriller. It wants on the one hand to be an eerie premonition of where the United States Democracy is heading as the country trudges through yet another contentious election year. But it is, in execution, far less provocative than it hopes to be, despite claiming to have a deeply resonant statement to make.

If Civil War is on the one hand an aspiring premonition, it is on the other a Continue reading Civil War (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

I.S.S. (2024) Movie Review

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S. is a low-budget thriller set in the shoebox of a set replicating the International Space Station. The film sets out to be a slow-burn potboiler (despite a 95-minute runtime), where chummy colleagues are thrown into an international geopolitical dispute that sows distrust and paranoia. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) is greeted warmly by the crew of the space station, who hail equally from Russia and the United States. Her first day working as a biologist on the station ends in a drunken celebration and Kira looking out onto Earth’s surface. Weronika (Maria Mashkova) and Alexey (Pilou Asbæk) joke that Kira doesn’t understand the full weight of seeing the world from the outside, where you can no longer see borders.

The first 15 minutes of I.S.S. (and the last few moments of the film) harp on this obvious bit of foreshadowing: in the Space Station, there are no Continue reading I.S.S. (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Self Reliance (2024) Movie Review

With Self Reliance, Jake Johnson and The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer) have made a broad comedy rendition of David Fincher’s The Game. After a bad breakup with his partner, an aimless Thomas Walcott (Johnson) jumps at the chance to play a mysterious game of life and death, to be live-streamed to the dark web. The rules are simple: Thomas must survive 30 days of being hunted by assassins from Greenland who may or may not ever find him and who cannot harm him if he is within striking distance of another person. Seeing this last part as an exploitable loophole (more of a rule than a loophole, as it were), Thomas accepts the challenge.

For the first few days, Thomas is golden. He wakes up, lazily rides a recumbent bicycle, has a few shots of whisky at a bar, and calls it a day. No sign of any “production assistant ninjas” ready to film his murder. Then, one night, a window breaks while he is sleeping and he discovers Continue reading Self Reliance (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review

Zack Snyder’s latest is a two-part space opera epic with the classic rebels-versus-empire dynamic popularized in the cinema mainstream by Star Wars (the film began its life as a Star Wars film pitched to Disney). This dynamic is purposefully simplistic, with basic white hat heroes and black hat villains. The issue with Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire is that these characters are not only simplistically drawn, but they are never particularly compelling figures to begin with.

The first sign that this script has character issues is an emotional monologue given by Sofia Boutella’s Kora. She speaks of being unable to Continue reading Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words), musical, Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Wonka (2023) Movie Review

There is something both unnecessary yet totally fitting about the new musical prequel to the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (itself an adaptation of the Roald Dahl book of a slightly different name). It makes sense, in that director Paul King received much acclaim for his adaptation of another beloved children’s literature property in Paddington. It is unnecessary in the same way that any modern-day IP reboot has to justify itself beyond the motivation of cashing in. Wonka is far less lazy than most of these reboot efforts, but it also never shakes the sense of being inessential.

The film’s opening number does a clever job of establishing the basic premise (in short, consumer capitalism suppresses true entrepreneurial spirit and creative innovation for the sake of monopolistic stability and commodity homogenization). It is also Continue reading Wonka (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — River, Femme, #Manhole

River, #Manhole and Femme are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

River

Junta Yamaguchi’s Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes was a delightfully quirky experiment with time travel tropes. The film was rough and tumble from a visual standpoint, but its charm withstood its Continue reading Fantasia Festival 2023 Movie Reviews — River, Femme, #Manhole →