Category Archives: Like It

Movies I liked but likely won’t watch again. Something was off that I wish had been done differently.

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Romance

The Fall Guy (2024) Movie Review

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David Leitch’s The Fall Guy is, in many respects, a love letter to the stunt performers that have allowed cinema to function properly for many a decade. At this level, the film definitely excels. Stuntman Colt Seavers’ (Ryan Gosling) opening voiceover monologue keys us in to the philosophy of the stunt performer: they keep everything looking exciting and propulsive, but their job is to be invisible by design. The best stunt performer disappears. Remember this; it will be important later.

Leitch’s comedy-action-romance benefits from the residual effects of the dump-truck of charisma that was Ryan Gosling in Barbie. Fittingly, the film opens the 2024 Summer movie season and promises an Continue reading The Fall Guy (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Horror, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Late Night with the Devil (2024) Movie Review

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Since I was a preteen, I have been insomniac off and on. Thus, I spent a good number of nights in my formative years in my parent’s basement flipping through television channels, broadcast and cable. I suppose late night TV, as a result, has something of a hold on me. Not late night in the Jay Leno sense, but in that sense of discovering weird programming that no self-respecting network/station exec would allow to be aired in the daylight. Footage of Anton LaVey on PBS, things of that nature.

Films like Ghostwatch, WNUF Halloween Special, VHYes and the like play into the odd draw of analog media, asking the question of what happens when Continue reading Late Night with the Devil (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sports

Challengers (2024) Movie Review

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One could describe great dialogue as like a tennis volley. In the case of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (dialogue provided by writer Justin Kuritzkes), the simile is essentially literalized. For three tennis players of differing star power, tennis is a contentious conversation, and contentious conversation is rarely far removed from talk of tennis. That is to say, as the relationships between Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) grow more knotty, melodramatic, and complex, the thin line that separates on-court competition from romantic interests is hopelessly blurred.

Frankly, describing this central premise which conflates sports competition and competitive romantic endeavors makes the film sound Continue reading Challengers (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review

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Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall was a pleasant surprise and a critical success for Netflix. His follow-up, The Book of Clarence, takes a similarly anachronistic approach to a familiar genre. This time, Samuel takes on the religious epic. The film presents an alternative biblical story adjacent to the story of the last days of Jesus Christ. This apocrypha is simplistic and familiar, so much so that when David Oyelowo’s John the Baptist exposition dumps the premise unnecessarily the plot itself almost feels like a punchline.

Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and his friend Elijah (RJ Cyler) owe a man known as Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa) money that they don’t have. To further complicate things, Clarence is Continue reading The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review

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Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of being found out, and the hiding of wads of cash all play an important role in the film. But The Delinquents is more like a slow cinema crime epic than the films it borrows these caper conventions from.

The three-hour-long film begins with a desire for cash and ends with a liberation of self. Morán (Daniel Elias) has spent a long career working at a bank, and he is still Continue reading The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Leave the World Behind (2023) Movie Review

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Leave the World Behind, Netflix’s buzzy new film from writer-director Sam Esmail and based on the popular 2020 novel of the same name by Rumaan Alam, imagines how Americans would cope if the daily technologies of life were stripped away and information was cut off at the pass by some unknown enemy. It is more thought experiment than substantive film, in that the characters are intentionally self-absorbed, conceited, not particularly three-dimensional, and, in some cases, full-on nihilistic.

The film begins with Amanda Sanford (Julia Roberts), the matriarch of a nuclear family, declaring to her husband Clay (Ethan Hawke) that they will be going on a spontaneous vacation because she has come to the realization that she hates people. Not much more is said on the matter; it’s pretty much smash cut from this conversation to the ornate home outside of New York City that the family will be staying in. They are essentially just far enough from the city to be considered “out of town.”

Following an indefinite loss of cell service and wireless internet, and a freak accident involving a beached oil tanker, the family’s first day in relative seclusion ends with Continue reading Leave the World Behind (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Poor Things (2023) Movie Review

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I’ve enjoyed pretty much all of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films (Kinetta is a bit of black sheep for me, but it has its interesting moments). Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Favourite are all in my personal top 10 from their respective years. Alps and Killing of a Sacred Deer intrigue me enough that rewatches could easily lift them into top 10 lists of their own. Lanthimos makes exciting and unique films. He has a fantastic grasp of tone and morbid humor. And he pulls great performances out of his casts. Although Poor Things is imperfect, it checks all of these boxes, as well.

Poor Things is something of a libertine Frankenstein story. In Victorian England, a surgeon called God (short for Godwin Baxter) tasks a young medical student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) with Continue reading Poor Things (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

All of Us Strangers (2023) Movie Review

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Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is a story about a haunted man, which becomes a film about a (potentially more literal) haunting. The film’s main preoccupation is with conversations which never happen. Adam (Andrew Scott), an aspiring screenwriter, is using the script format to try and crack into his inner visions of his deceased parents. Hypothetical conversations play out on screen, where Adam divulges to his parents things he never had the chance to while they were alive. His mum and dad (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) appear younger than Adam; they are the last version of them he can remember, as they died in a car crash when he was still a boy.

These dialogues are the heart of the film, despite a great performance by Paul Mescal that props up the film’s other half: a budding romance between two lonely men who are living in an almost entirely empty high rise. As the film progresses, the Continue reading All of Us Strangers (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Godzilla Minus One (2023) Movie Review

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I am not a historian. It doesn’t take a historian, though, to understand that the 1954 film Godzilla is about the devastating possibilities of human-made destruction that was realized in the wake of World War II. What we are capable of, as a species, was demonstrated in many different ways in those years, and Godzilla bottles the anxieties surrounding our own extinction into a distinct (and now very recognizable) figure. Ishirō Honda’s film is most remembered for introducing kaiju monsters to the mainstream, but it is as much a film about the human characters on the ground who must deal with what is towering over them as it is about Godzilla.

What has been lost in the Americanized iterations of the Godzilla IP is not so much this human focus (there are plenty of human characters, I just couldn’t tell you any of their names). What is lost is the Continue reading Godzilla Minus One (2023) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Killer (2023) Movie Review

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The quiet, ruminative introduction of David Fincher’s latest presents a haggard Michael Fassbender – the eponymous killer. An assassin staking out his target, he is disillusioned and tired, and his voiceover reiterates lines familiar to this genre, bromides regarding one’s luck if they never meet this cold-blooded killer, regarding the absence of true justice in this world, regarding luck being a false construct. Fassbender looks like a genre convention through most of this sequence, too, with an outfit that looks like it was pulled from Le Samourai. The opening scene could be considered a riff on Rear Window. These allusions, whether intentional or not, come off as unimportant as they would to the “Killer” himself – they are empty gestures to spectacular fictions regarding how crime operates.

As the V.O. monologue goes on, it bleeds into something more intriguing, something Continue reading The Killer (2023) Movie Review →