From moment one of Superfly, the remake of the 1972 blaxploitation film of the same name, there is over-indulgent bombast. Not to demean the song that kicks off the film. Future curates the original music throughout, which is lush and appealing, if not an impossible comparison to Curtis Mayfield’s scoring of the original film (his “Pusherman,” which is one of the best original songs made for a film, gets reprised in this movie).
Music, in fact, might be the strongest aspect of Director X’s vision of enigmatic Atlanta drug pusher Youngblood Prince (Trevor Jackson). It makes sense, given the man’s lengthy history as a music video director.
That also likely explains why the plot of the film begins in a highly-active strip club. This sequence is, more or less, a hip-hop music video. And the rest of the film Continue reading Superfly (2018) Movie Review→
Paul Schrader first came into prominence with the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. There are shades of Taxi Driver in Schrader’s latest. The protagonist of First Reformed, Reverend Toller (Ethan Hawke), lives a mostly solitary life as the pastor of a small church—funded by a larger televangelist church—in Snowbridge, New York. He has begun a test of self by setting out to write a journal of his thoughts for 12 months.
Gary Ross’s Ocean’s 8 is an all-female reboot of the wildly popular Ocean’s trilogy from the 2000s (those films directed by Steven Soderbergh). In the film, Danny Ocean’s sister Deborah (Sandra Bullock) gets paroled from prison after almost six years of detention. During those five plus years, Debbie planned an intricate heist of a $150 million Cartier diamond necklace.
Debbie and her partner (Cate Blanchett) round up a crew of criminal specialists (Helena Bonham Carter, Rihanna, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Awkwafina) to pull off the heist during the Met Gala, where they have arranged Continue reading Ocean’s 8 (2018) Movie Review→
Hotel Artemis, the science fiction crime film set on the backdrop of the rioting streets of 2028 Los Angeles, could be described as clunky. Bloated. Over-loaded. An exploitation action film in the clothing of a classier sheep. A lot of slick talk with little substance.
It is all of these things. And quite blatantly. But Drew Pearce’s film is also a helluva lot of entertainment value stuffed into a 93-minute feature.
There are some horror movies that make you jump. There are some that make you squirm. There are the rare ones that raise questions about the human condition. And there are the few horror movies that do all three and manage to conjure images that stick unshaken in your head long after you’ve left the theater. Hereditary is of this latter breed.
To be fair, Hereditary does some of these things much more effectively than others. Namely, the questions it raises about the nature of grief and the things we do or do not say about tragedy fall by the wayside when Continue reading Hereditary (2018) Movie Review→
Where to begin with Chloe Zhao’s The Rider? We could start by tossing around words like “rare,” “must-see,” “transcendent.” It is, after all, a rare construction that transcends the limits of form to make it a must-see film-going experience. Simple buzz words don’t really do it justice, though, as The Rider is comprised of so many artistic strokes done great.
Zhao’s film blends fiction with reality by employing non-actors to play fictional versions of themselves in a story so immensely human that it truly feels at times like Continue reading The Rider (2018) Movie Review→
Action Point is like Jackass, in that it contains dangerous stunts and people finding humor in harming the human body. It is also far removed from Jackass, in that it is a narrative film. This is to say that, you know, it has a narrative.
This is the first misstep that Action Point makes. The plot goes about its business, setting up set pieces and montages that show off the back-breaking stunt gags. It does this fine. Sure, it can be funny the first or second time that Continue reading Action Point (2018) Movie Review→
Adrift tells the true story of Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley), who, while sailing a yacht to San Diego with her boyfriend Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin), gets caught in a storm that leaves the boat in tatters. With a search area too large for anyone to conceivably find the yacht, Tami uses her tact and pure force of will to navigate the boat toward Hawaii, a target small enough that any miscalculation could mean missing landfall and, thus, certain death.
The five minutes of screentime after Woodley’s Tami comes to and takes stock of her situation, where she kicks herself into gear and Jerry-rigs the half-destroyed boat into a functioning machine, is Continue reading Adrift (2018) Movie Review→
Driving home from the theater last night, I saw something really quite lovely. Turning down a curved street, and entering my line of vision for no longer than a second, I saw two people in conversation sitting on a ledge outside of a hotel. The pair—one a man, his back to me, and the other a woman, a warm smile on her face and a soulful tenderness in her eyes—each sat with their legs pulled up to their chests, almost as if they were mirrors of each other.
They were experiencing a genuinely human moment, captured through the film of my windshield. It was a silent movie. It ran for 1.5 seconds or less. But that snippet had more life, energy, and emotion than every shot in Solo: A Star Wars Story put together.
Now, you may be thinking: what do two people sitting on a ledge in real life have to do with a multi-billion dollar franchise’s sequel/prequel? In execution: nothing.
The HBO film Fahrenheit 451, adapted from the book by Ray Bradbury, begins with a quote attributed to the Bill of Rights: “It is better to be happy than free.” The attribute is erroneous. It’s fake news. (See what they’re doing here?)
Ramin Bahrani adapts the Bradbury novel to address new media, and this fake quote encapsulates the central mission statement of the vague government body in the film. This is a government who tasks fire fighters with burning books instead of putting out fires, the aim being to Continue reading Fahrenheit 451 (2018) Movie Review→
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