The creative pairing of Aaron Moorhead and Justin Benson have produced three feature films: Resolution, Spring, and now The Endless. I will admit that I have not seen their previous two films (although, they made a short for the anthological horror sequel V/H/S: Viral that I did not care for).
Without the context of their previous work, and not really knowing anything about The Endless prior to seeing it, I found the experience of the film to be Continue reading The Endless (2018) Movie Review
Andrew Haigh’s 2015 film 45 Years is a fantastic film. Quietly fascinating, it dissects a seemingly mundane 45-year marriage at a pivotal point of fracture. His latest film, Lean on Pete, has shades of this. It travels with a 16-year old boy named Charley (Charlie Plummer) at a crucial period of adversity.
Both Pete and Years watch as the notion of quaint compassion becomes strained to the point of near collapse. Both have a genuine sense of Continue reading Lean on Pete (2018) Movie Review
Sure, you can walk into your multiplex, purchase a ticket to Marvel’s latest having seen none of their previous films, and understand at the most basic plot level what is happening in the film. But this is really a film made for those who have committed to the franchise from the beginning. It is a culmination of 10 years, 18 films, and 38 hours of screentime.
And I’ve been using runtime as an excuse for not watching Ben-hur, Lawrence of Arabia, and Spartacus…
Infinity War is the big one. It is the type of comic book endgame arc that could Continue reading Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Movie Review
Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here doesn’t concern itself with much plot. It doesn’t concern itself with much of anything in regards to narrative, as a matter of fact.
What it does concern itself with is Joe (Joaquin Phoenix), a hired hitman who is tasked with recovering the kidnapped daughter (Ekaterina Samsonov) of a New York Senator (Alex Manette). Mainly, it is concerned with Joe’s means of coping with his present job and his rocky past.
We first see Joe through a mask of plastic. The material slowly crinkles inward and then
Continue reading You Were Never Really Here (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
Through the endless minutes of exposition at the front-end of The Titan, we hear a lot of what we have heard before in dystopian science fiction. Population is rising, while resources are dwindling. Pressures for survival have lit up violent conflicts across the world. Scientists and military personnel are desperate for a solution. Terraforming Saturn’s moon, Titan. Biogenetic enhancements to survive such a move. Medical trials gone wrong. Yadda yadda.
Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington) is one of these test subjects. A military man who was once thought MIA while in the Syrian desert, it is this incident that convinces the government that he is Continue reading The Titan (2018) Movie Review
Bjorn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) is the number one ranked tennis player in the world. The only thing between him and winning a fifth straight Wimbledon is American John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf). McEnroe is an outspoken, emotional player who doesn’t follow the decorum of the sport.
Borg, on the other hand, is soft-spoken. He lacks emotion. He is very particular about his play and his fame, which he actively avoids. He is the apparent antithesis of McEnroe in almost every respect. Except, of course, that they both Continue reading Borg vs. McEnroe (2018) Movie Review
Rampage is a 1980s arcade game in which three giant, mutated animals—a gorilla, a lizard, and a wolf—stomp through city skylines. The monsters tear down buildings, destroy military vehicles, and eat people. All for points. The game was popular enough to be ported over to multiple video game consoles.
The video game has no story and few characters (the monsters are given names, at least). Yet, somehow, Hollywood has managed to give the intellectual property both of these things. At least, enough of these things to produce a marketable movie.
It isn’t as if the creatures of Rampage are Continue reading Rampage (2018) Movie Review
On the last day of Spring Break in Mexico, Olivia (Lucy Hale) is convinced by a man she meets at a bar (Landon Liboiron) to travel to an abandoned and remote convent with her friends. There, the stranger asks them to play an innocent game of truth or dare. One of Olivia’s friends remarks with a flippant comment along the lines of, “What, like we’re in seventh grade?”
Just to be clear, they’re not. The grown adults proceed to play the game in one of the more tonally awkward sequences of Truth or Dare (or Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare, an attribution tagged on seemingly due to the success of last year’s Get Out and Happy Death Day). The scene is meant to Continue reading Truth or Dare (2018) Movie Review
A band of robbers hide away in a hamlet in the Mediterranean desert after stowing 250 kilos worth of gold bars in the trunk of their car and picking up a family of hitchhikers on their way back from the heist. Two police officers show up, and the whole thing devolves into a shootout.
It is an exceedingly simple premise to a film, one that reeks of a cliched action-crime genre re-hash. But Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s Let the Corpses Tan is anything but simple, and Continue reading Let the Corpses Tan (2018) Movie Review
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