Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm) is a negotiator. In 1972, he works for the U.S. government in Beirut. At a dinner party, he sums up the situation in Lebanon by calling the country a “boarding house without a landlord” that was thrown into confusion when the Palestinians “moved in.”
He continues talking in this politically-savvy way, as if he understands that the country is headed toward civil war. When he is brought back to Beirut 10 years later, however, he seems surprised at what he sees when he touches down.
In 1972, at the aforementioned dinner party, a person close to him is killed in the crossfire of a shootout. In 1982, Skiles is tasked with Continue reading Beirut (2018) Movie Review→
The rape-revenge genre is certainly not the most approachable one. It is one of the more controversial, to be certain. A squeamish one, for sure. Rarely can a film in this genre be called “fun.”
At its most primal, Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature Revenge is a bloody good time. In the tradition of its New French Extremity predecessors, the film goes full throttle into a place best described with words like Continue reading Revenge (2018) Movie Review→
The first sequence in A Quiet Place is one of the more immediately tense openings to a horror movie in recent memory. Without fully understanding the world, we understand almost from the first shot what sort of situation we have entered into. The film opens in an abandoned pharmacy, where a family is quietly perusing the aisles for supplies. The family speaks only in sign language, even though only the daughter (Millicent Simmonds) is deaf. It is clear that something bad comes with too much noise, so they don’t make a sound.
Ernest Cline’s science fiction novel Ready Player One is not just laced in nostalgia; it is fully marinated in it. The story takes place in 2045, where most people in the world are deeply entrenched in an MMO-style VR video game dubbed The Oasis. With the death of the video game’s creator, James Halliday (Mark Rylance, in the film adaptation), a massive game-wide hunt is afoot for an Easter Egg that will give its finder control over The Oasis.
In essence, it is a story about Easter Eggs created by a person with a strong fondness for Easter Eggs that itself is littered with Easter Eggs. It is a nostalgia vehicle. This is not inherently a bad thing.
In Pacific Rim: Uprising, the sequel to Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 film Pacific Rim, one-time military cadet Jake Pentecost (John Boyega) rips off junkers in a war-torn city to make his living. 10 years prior, Jake’s father (Idris Elba) sacrificed himself to stop a breach in the sea floor that allowed building-sized Kaiju into the world.
Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) moves from Boston to get away from her stalker (Joshua Leonard). In doing so, she gets a new job—as we see briefly in one scene where she glibly takes down a customer on the phone—and starts hooking up with people on Tinder—as we see briefly in one scene where she glibly tells a guy that all she wants is a one night stand.
When this one night stand ends in Sawyer seeing the face of her stalker in the man she has taken home, she goes to a psychiatric hospital to see a professional. During this meeting, she off-handedly mentions her previous thoughts of suicide. When the appointment concludes, she goes to leave, only to find that Continue reading Unsane (2018) Movie Review→
You wouldn’t know by looking at it, but Thoroughbreds is writer-director Cory Finley’s debut film.
In it, expelled prep school student Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) rekindles an old friendship with Amanda (Olivia Cooke), who admits to Lily that she feels no emotion. Upon observing Lily’s step father Mark (Paul Sparks), who Lily openly despises for the emotional abuse he exerts on her mother, Amanda brings up the notion of murdering him.
The film uses its morbidly comic lens to hone in on concepts of control and ownership in an upper-class, suburban setting. Waves of classism flow on the fringes of the narrative, from the Continue reading Thoroughbreds (2018) Movie Review→
Harold Soyinka (David Oyelowo), a low-on-the-totem-pole businessman working for a nondescript white collar business run by Richard Rusk (Joel Edgerton) and Elaine Markinson (Charlize Theron) travels to Mexico to take a meeting, only to find out that he is being used as a patsy by his employers.
The man that he is in Mexico to meet, it turns out, works for drug kingpin Black Panther (not that one), who, upon hearing that they are being cut out of Richard and Elaine’s business dealings, assumes Harold is Continue reading Gringo (2018) Movie Review→
Death Wish, the Eli Roth-directed remake of the 1974 film—both were adapted from the same novel source material by Brian Garfield—could not have come at a poorer time. That is what many reviews of this film are reporting, and, yes, it is unfortunate timing for this film release.
That said, there is a sect of the American public that would likely champion the efforts of Dr. Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis), the surgeon-turned-vigilante who Continue reading Death Wish (2018) Movie Review→
In Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence plays ballerina Dominika Egorova, who, after a less-than-accidental accident leaves her leg broken, is brought into the world of the Russian secret service by her uncle (Matthias Schoenaerts). She is sent to a special school that trains “Sparrows,” government agents who are trained to seduce their targets and to withstand any amount of force.
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