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

The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 →

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

Saw X (2023) Movie Review

19 years ago, James Wan’s Saw became a surprising hit for Lionsgate and a meaningful propeller for the 2000s cycle of torture porn horror films. Since then, that grisly subgenre has fallen far out of fashion, and Lionsgate is in a potentially pivotal moment where it is hoping to rejuvenate past successes. Both Saw X and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes are prequels; this is fitting, given the studio is looking backwards to its most profitable franchises in an attempt at similar box office success.

The trajectory of the Saw franchise, aside from being packed with lore rendered nearly incomprehensible due to sequel ret-conning and increasingly inane plot twists, has its ups and downs. After Continue reading Saw X (2023) Movie Review →

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

Destination NBA: A G League Odyssey (2023) Movie Review

In June 2023, Scoot Henderson was drafted third overall in the NBA draft. At the age of 19, he had made his way from the G League to the Portland Trailblazers. He was the most visible and well-known figure in the G League the year prior. But hundreds of other players populate the League, fighting to get their chance at the big time.

Destination NBA: A G League Odyssey cherry picks a few heads from around the G League, following them through a season and interviewing them about their journey. Scoot is one of them, but he is Continue reading Destination NBA: A G League Odyssey (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 →