2017 Academy Awards, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Short Films

Joe’s Violin (2016) Short Film Review

“How long can you live with memories?”

This is one of the first lines of Joe’s Violin, coming from the eponymous Joseph Feingold. It is an expression of his carefree attitude about donating one of his most prized possessions: a violin. What Joe’s Violin aims to do, however, is supplant that throwaway notion with the creation of new memories.

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Joe’s story is one of Holocaust tragedy. At the age of 17, in eastern Poland, Feingold was taken by the Russians and put into a Siberian labor camp. Of the few things he had after his time in the camp his violin becomes, in retrospect, a Continue reading Joe’s Violin (2016) Short Film Review →

Box Office Predictions

Weekend Box Office Predictions: 2/24-2/26

Oscar weekend sees the wide release of three new films. Two of these three, as far as I am concerned, have received zero marketing. These would be the films Rock Dog (um…) and Collide (…what?). The third film, also the widest new release of the weekend, is Jordan Peele’s much anticipated and well-reviewed Get Out. The horror film stars Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams and is likely to make a splash this weekend.

Returning to the fight are LEGO Batman, Fifty Shades Darker, and The Great Wall. The LEGO Batman Movie, having won the box office in its first two weekends, is likely to remain somewhere in the top three, although anything could happen.

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Box Office Predictions: Weekend of 2/24

Continue reading Weekend Box Office Predictions: 2/24-2/26 →

2017 Academy Awards, All Movie Reviews, Short Films

2017 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts Breakdown Review

The Academy Awards are this Sunday, and as such it is fitting to take a look at one of the more overlooked categories: Best Animated Short Film. While the favorite to win is clearly Piper, although the short film categories always have a chance to hold an upset, it still is warranted to put a spotlight on all five films.

 

Borrowed Time

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Borrowed Time is perhaps the Continue reading 2017 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts Breakdown Review →

All Movie Reviews, Like It, Short Films

La Femme et le TGV (2016) Short Film Review

A woman named Elise (Jane Birkin) who lives by the train tracks with her pet bird, an irresponsible youth in a sports car, and a series of correspondences with an unseen train engineer are the backdrop of Switzerland’s La Femme et le TGV.

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The film strikes a great tone of Continue reading La Femme et le TGV (2016) Short Film Review →

2017 Academy Awards, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Short Films

Ennemis Interieurs (2016) Short Film Review

An Algerian-born man (Hassam Ghancy) applies for French citizenship. At least, that’s what he thinks he’s there for. Instead, he becomes party to prejudiced politics and interrogation.

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Ennemis Interieurs is a series of elongated conversation scenes between the man and the government official (Najib Oudghiri). They are scenes largely told in Continue reading Ennemis Interieurs (2016) Short Film Review →

All Movie Reviews, Like It, Short Films

Silent Nights (2016) Short Film Review

A Salvation Army volunteer (Malene Beltoft Olsen) struggling with an alcoholic mother (Vibeke Hastrup) and a homeless refugee (Prince Appiah) dealing with racism and an impoverished family in Ghana come together in Silent Nights, a short film whose title is a play on the somewhat irrelevant time of year in which the film takes place.

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The film is a bitter examination of the underbelly with a sliver of a silver lining of heartfelt humanism. The doomed romance of the film is introduced as Continue reading Silent Nights (2016) Short Film Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

A Cure for Wellness (2017) Movie Review

The first note I wrote down about A Cure for Wellness, which I wrote after the film’s opening scene, was as follows:

“Is A Cure For Wellness a masterfully shot slog?”

This notion came out of how the trailer clips and first scene of the film is shot and that I knew how long the film was going to be (this was, I should mention, my second film of the day). So my assumption going in was that this film was going to be a struggle between patience and style.

Is the film a well-shot slog? Well…yeah.

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Rising white collar man (Dane DeHaan), referred to throughout the film only by his surname of Lockhart, takes hold of that next rung of the corporate ladder, and as a result is thrown into a legally questionable Continue reading A Cure for Wellness (2017) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Leave it, Quickie Reviews (<400 Words), Sci-Fi/Fantasy

The Great Wall (2017) Movie Review

A pack of mercenaries on horseback take refuge in a cave and are attacked by a mysterious creature. Taking the creature’s severed claw, the two survivors of the attack (Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal) travel to a nearby kingdom on the Great Wall, where they are captured and pulled into a war.

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In terms of effects work, the inaugural action set piece that establishes the film’s war of monster versus man is Continue reading The Great Wall (2017) Movie Review →

A Movies, All Movie Reviews, Documentary, Love It

I Am Not Your Negro (2017) Movie Review

In archive footage, we see at the beginning of I Am Not Your Negro an interview with the subject of the documentary: writer James Baldwin. The interviewer, when addressing with Baldwin the plight of the black man in American during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, he says “Is it at once getting better and still hopeless?” To which Baldwin responds, quite simply, that there is no hope to it.

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I Am Not Your Negro is a literary chronicle set to motion through photographs, film clips, and sweeping landscape shots. The raw power of Baldwin’s words is something Continue reading I Am Not Your Negro (2017) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Leave it

Girlfriend’s Day (2017) Movie Review

Ray Wentworth (Bob Odenkrik) is a greeting card writer. The best, if you ask him. We first see him looking down the barrel of the camera in closeup, waxing poetic about the poetics of card writing. Writing novels are for hacks who cannot edit themselves. Cards are the real challenge.

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Following this, Ray is Continue reading Girlfriend’s Day (2017) Movie Review →

One man. Thousands of movies.