I am serious…and don’t call me Shirley.
In Overboard, Kate (Anna Faris), a mother of three who is working two jobs in order to support her family and pay her way through nursing school, is hired to clean the yacht of a spoiled, wealthy man who has never worked a day in his life. The man is Leonardo (Eugenio Derbez), and he is about to take over his ailing father’s business.
That is, until he suffers amnesia after falling off the boat. He wakes up in an Oregon hospital unable to Continue reading Overboard (2018) Movie Review
You know what? If you like Super Troopers, then you might like Super Troopers 2. If you’re a die hard Broken Lizard fan, then you’ll probably find it uproarious.
I enjoy Super Troopers just fine. It’s the best thing I’ve seen from Broken Lizard when it comes to feature length affair. And Super Troopers 2 is better than a film like Club Dread, which left me baffled.
I’ll frame it another way. In my sold-out screening of Super Troopers 2, there were Continue reading Super Troopers 2 (2018) Movie Review
I Feel Pretty takes on a familiar cinematic conceit—think Big or body-swap comedies—where a woman named Renee (Amy Schumer) hits her head in an accident during SoulCycle and wakes up in the body of a perfectly gorgeous woman. At least, that’s what she thinks in her head.
In reality, nothing about her outward appearance has changed. Armed with the delusion that she has become a physically different person, however, she Continue reading I Feel Pretty (2018) Movie Review
Marlo (Charlize Theron) is about to give birth to her third child. One of her other children, Jonah (Asher Miles Fallica), acts out, causing Marlo problems at home and at Jonah’s school. He is described as “quirky,” a word that ultimately means little and does nothing to ease Marlo’s troubles.
Marlo’s husband Drew (Ron Livingston) continues working when Marlo goes on paternity leave (which she begins just three days before her due date). When he comes home, he helps the kids with their homework and then disappears behind a video game controller and headset. All the while, Marlo is Continue reading Tully (2018) Movie Review
Many choice words have been used in describing Wes Anderson and his body of work. One of the more apt descriptors is “meticulous.” With Isle of Dogs, the director’s second foray into the realm of stop motion animation, meticulous is perhaps an understatement.
There is an exacting precision to every shot and animated piece of mise en scene on display in the film, which tells the story of the aftermath of Continue reading Isle of Dogs (2018) Movie Review
Prom night. It is movie shorthand for virginal teenagers vying to no longer be virginal. A cliche that has worn a comfy groove for itself with a number of teenage rom coms, raunchy comedies, and the like.
Prom night is the setting of Blockers, the directorial debut of Pitch Perfect screenwriter Kay Cannon. And, surprisingly, the film finesses its way around the pitfalls of such a cliched locale quite well.
The film centers on three parents (Leslie Mann, John Cena, and Ike Barinholtz) who discover that their daughters (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Gideon Adlon) have made a pact to have sex for the first time on prom night. How the parents decide to react to this knowledge is Continue reading Blockers (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
Annie (Rachel McAdams) and Max (Jason Bateman) have a relationship that was founded on the competition of game night. They first meet at a bar trivia night. Max proposes during a game of charades. Years later, they continue the tradition of a weekly game night with their friends (Lamorne Morris, Kylie Bunbury, and Billy Magnussen).
The only issue on this particular weekend is that Max’s upstaging big brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler) is in town and ready to blow Max’s game night out of the water. Brooks plans a game night at his luxurious home that he claims will be unlike any other. He’s not wrong, but even he does not foresee what is about to happen.
Game Night is a broad comedy with a sprawling plot that sends this small band of characters across the city, pitting them, at first unbeknownst to them, in Continue reading Game Night (2018) Movie Review
Paddington 2 has a simple message, but one that is nevertheless easily forgotten. Be nice to people. Pay it forward. Yadda yadda. It sounds obvious, and it sounds like it would play saccharine in a children’s film about a naive little bear. But, for the second time, it doesn’t.
I would like to make the argument that this second film is Continue reading Paddington 2 (2018) Movie Review
CineFiles Movie Reviews 