Category Archives: Like It

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

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

A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review

No matter how you want to trace the lineage of the music biopic, we don’t arrive at a formula-to-an-absolute-fault film like Bohemian Rhapsody without first traveling through James Mangold’s Walk the Line. To see Johnny Cash resurface in Mangold’s return to the genre (now played by a perpetually suave Boyd Holbrook) is like witnessing a poltergeist haunting another film. Or a demon that somehow escaped total exorcism from Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, a superior take down of the music biopic and a film that remains culturally relevant so long as Hollywood continues churning out mediocre celebrations of celebrity.

Walk the Line was a crossover success, breaking $100 million at the box office, garnering generally positive reviews, and earning a number of accolades including an Oscar for Reese Witherspoon. A Complete Unknown is angling to do the same. The problem (perhaps) is that Continue reading A Complete Unknown (2024) Movie Review →

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

Review: Queens of Drama — Fantastic Fest 2024

Queens of Drama is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Alexis Langlois’s Queens of Drama is a riff on the A Star is Born formula, wherein the young, bright-eyed ingenue is thrust into a world of celebrity that bends and breaks them. The young star-to-be in question is Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), a quiet 18-year-old auditioning for an American Idol-adjacent singing competition. While there, she meets Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura), another competing hopeful. In some ways, their drastically different experiences with the singing audition paves the way for their diverging paths toward pop notoriety.

The film quickly establishes a dichotomy between the American Idol-ization of mainstream pop and a much more sonically potent underground music scene. In both cases, Continue reading Review: Queens of Drama — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Touched by Eternity — Fantastic Fest 2024

Touched by Eternity is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

The opening of Touched by Eternity suggests that the secret to immortal life is yeast. In particular, yeast KC1822V, which is the subject of experimental research to test its life-sustaining properties. A man who is never given a name, but he claims everyone calls him Fatso (Andris Keišs), lives alone in a trailer, watching video podcasts on the study of this yeast and purchasing it by the box load. He eats the yeast raw, despite the plea of scientists that doing so could be dangerous. This disclaimer proves to be, at least partially, true, as when the courier delivering the latest shipment curiously tries some himself, he keels over with foam bubbling from his mouth.

None of this is of too much consequence to the plot of Touched by Eternity, the quirky vampire film from Mārcis Lācis. Fatso stumbles upon a fitting substitute for immortal yeast: Egons and Carlos (Ivars Krasts and Edgars Samītis) two pansexual vampires that show up immediately following the delivery carrier’s poisoning in search of a screwdriver. Soon, Fatso is thrust into Continue reading Review: Touched by Eternity — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Bookworm — Fantastic Fest 2024

Bookworm is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

I recall seeing Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy back in 2019 at midnight at the Alamo Drafthouse during Fantastic Fest. I also recall being dead tired and not particularly jazzed by the Ant Timpson experience. I’ve since returned to his feature debut following an adequate amount of sleep, and I can still see why I had been turned off by the experience at the time. It’s slow-build story structure and unlikable characters require a little bit of patience. However, while the film is by no means perfect, it is clever and nasty in the right moments.

Timpson’s latest, Bookworm, is a much different type of film (although, both films have a fascination with estranged dads). Far from the oddball comedy thriller of Come to Daddy, Bookworm is an oddball, mostly family-friendly comedy about dangerous predators in the New Zealand wilderness.

After her mother falls into a coma due to a Continue reading Review: Bookworm — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: Ebony and Ivory — Fantastic Fest 2024

Ebony and Ivory is screening as part of Fantastic Fest 2024, which runs from September 19 to September 26.

Ebony and Ivory is absolute nonsense, and that isn’t entirely a bad thing. Imagine a biopic about the creative experience behind one of the best-selling duets in pop history (the Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder song of the title), then pay a back-alley surgeon to lobotomize that idea out of your brain forever. What remains might be Ebony and Ivory.

Jim Hosking, the director behind the divisive cult gross-out film The Greasy Strangler, brings the two legendary musical icons together in a cabin in rural Scotland, only to Continue reading Review: Ebony and Ivory — Fantastic Fest 2024 →

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

Review: House of Sayuri — Fantasia Festival 2024

House of Sayuri is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Koji Shiraishi, known for the unsettling Noroi: The Curse, gives us in House of Sayuri an initially by-the-numbers haunted house film that pleasantly surprises with a second act rug pull. The film focuses on a family moving into a new home, where strange things immediately start occurring. It becomes evident that a violent ghost is haunting the family, bringing death and darkness to anyone who stays the night in the house.

House of Sayuri spends a good portion of its runtime recycling the same scare formula. A person wanders through the narrow corridors of the new home at night, finds themselves in Continue reading Review: House of Sayuri — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: Black Eyed Susan — Fantasia Festival 2024

Black Eyed Susan is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Scooter McCrae could be described as an underground filmmaker. His three features have all been made on shoestring budgets and have provocatively challenged conventions. I remain a neophyte to McCrae’s work (I promise I will watch Sixteen Tongues very soon, but I didn’t have time to catch up with it ahead of this review). At the same time, I imagine I will see similar themes and moods to Black Eyed Susan present in his earlier films.

In the film, a man with a history of alcohol dependency and aggressive outbursts, Derek (Damien Maffei), is hired by an acquaintance to work at an artificial intelligence development company. The technology the company wants to push to market, and which Derek is tasked with testing, is a highly realistic Continue reading Review: Black Eyed Susan — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

Review: Cuckoo — Fantasia Festival 2024

Cuckoo is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

I can’t help but feel that Cuckoo is a series of intriguing parts in search of a sum. Writer-director Tilman Singer introduces potentially fresh approaches to well-worn horror-thriller ideas, but these ideas never fully culminate in something satisfyingly original.

In the film, Gretchen (Hunter Schafer), a young rebellious teenager, moves from the United States to Germany to live with her father in a secluded estate in the Alps with his new wife and her young daughter. It is a decision she quickly regrets. Feeling homesick, she calls her mother and leaves a message saying as much. More than this, she is put off by the home, the neighboring resort at which she is given a job, and the people populating the area. In particular, Mr. König (Dan Stevens), the owner of the resort and Gretchen’s father’s employer, unnerves Gretchen.

Par for the course with horror films, strange and inexplicable occurrences start bringing themselves to Gretchen’s attention. Her mute half-sister Alma (Mila Lieu) starts convulsing in her bedroom in an apparent seizure brought on by a sound coming from the nearby woods. Women coming into the resort lobby occasionally fall suddenly ill and vomit. Mr. König insists that Gretchen not Continue reading Review: Cuckoo — Fantasia Festival 2024 →

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

2024 Fantasia Festival Movie Reviews — Carnage for Christmas, From My Cold Dead Hands

Carnage for Christmas and From My Cold Dead Hands are screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Carnage for Christmas

Alice Maio Mackay is a fascinating case. A super-low-budget filmmaker, Mackay has made, by my count, five feature films, among other projects. Given that she’s only 19 years old, that’s quite a prolific start to a career. Carnage for Christmas is the first Continue reading 2024 Fantasia Festival Movie Reviews — Carnage for Christmas, From My Cold Dead Hands →

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

Review: FAQ — Fantasia Festival 2024

FAQ is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

FAQ is an interesting little creature. It has an infectious personality, driven by the child actor at its center. For a small-scale story about childhood and parenting, it is doing quite a lot (perhaps too much). Even as it is unclear exactly where it is going, what its odd plot points are progressing toward, the film gets by on heart and charm and liveliness.

At its core, FAQ is a film about a daughter and a mother. Dong-chun (Park Na-eun) is a quiet, curious, and restless child who, despite an excelling mind, struggles to make sense of her studies. Her mother (Park Hyo-ju) is worried about Continue reading Review: FAQ — Fantasia Festival 2024 →