2018 Summer Box Office Predictions

Every year, I like playing a little game of Summer box office predictions. The rules are simple (and the game is played officially at Trivia Club and /Film, if you’re interested): Pick which 10 films, and three dark horse candidates, that you think will gross the most money domestically during the Summer movie season.

This year, the game’s outlets are shifting their definition of what the Summer movie season is in order to include Avengers: Infinity War. Avengers was initially slated for release on the first weekend of May, but Disney pushed its release up a week.

For the sake of this article, I’m just going to keep the traditional definition of Summer movie season, which is the first weekend of May to Labor Day weekend. It kind of makes the predicting harder, given that Avengers is almost certainly going to be the highest grossing movie of the year, and if the film were included in this competition it would be number one with a bullet.

All the same, this year’s crop of Summer movies is pretty strange from a box office standpoint.

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The Top Ten: Continue reading 2018 Summer Box Office Predictions →

Bad Samaritan (2018) Movie Review

Dean Devlin is a producer known for work on big budget, blockbuster action movies: Independence Day, Godzilla (1998), etc. Last year, he made his big screen directorial debut with the heavily panned Geostorm, which itself was a big action film aiming to be a blockbuster.

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With Bad Samaritan, Devlin returns to feature directing. Only, this time the subject matter is a lower-budget dramatic thriller. Sean Falco (Robert Sheehan) is a wannabe photographer who works a valet business with his buddy Derek (Carlito Olivero). To make ends meet, however, the two of them run scams using Continue reading Bad Samaritan (2018) Movie Review →

Overboard (2018) Movie Review

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.

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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 →

The Endless (2018) Movie Review

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).

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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 →

Lean on Pete (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.

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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 →

The Ending of Avengers: Infinity War Kind of Ruins itself

Note: As you can see with the title of this article, this discussion of Avengers: Infinity War contains massive spoilers about the ending of the film. So don’t read this if you haven’t seen the film and want to see it spoiler-free.

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All right. I even put a picture in-between the spoiler warning and the spoilers. Just in case. So now you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Continue reading The Ending of Avengers: Infinity War Kind of Ruins itself →

Avengers: Infinity War (2018) Movie Review

Hollywood, ever since it has had the capability to make them, loves their epics. Ben-hur. Lawrence of Arabia. Spartacus. And now Avengers: Infinity War, an epic that has been running for 10 years. And that isn’t a figurative statement.

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.

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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 →

You Were Never Really Here (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.

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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 →

Super Troopers 2 (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.

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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 (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.

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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 →

One man. Thousands of movies.