Lee Hayden (Sam Elliott) is a washed up white-hat Western hero dreaming of his next movie while smoking joints and recording voiceover for advertisements. The Hero is a movie about a sad old man, a lightly humorous meditation on living with differing physical and mental ages.
Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Lee wanders through his twilight existence trying to find Continue reading The Hero (2017) Movie Review
Joe (Michael Caine), aging, out of a job, no pension, defaults on his mortgage and is on the verge of losing his house. To solve this problem and stick it to those who wronged him in the process, he decides to recruit his friends (Morgan Freeman and Alan Arkin) to help him rob a bank.
Zach Braff’s direction in Going in Style yields a social problem comedy that is Continue reading Going in Style (2017) Movie Review
Golden Exits is a film about the over-lapping lives of people they don’t make movies about, as admitted by the film itself.
Nick (Adam Horovitz), a mild-mannered archivist, is married to the increasingly depressive Alyssa (Chloe Sevigny), who is sisters of Gwen (Mary Louise Parker), a client of Nick dealing with the death of her father, who has an intimate relationship with the mentally troubled Sam (Lily Rabe), who is friends with consoling Jess (Analeigh Tipton), who is married to her boss Buddy (Jason Schwartzman). And all wrapped up in this is a young Australian woman abroad in New York (Emily Browning).
Browning’s Naomi is a character that the film touts as a glorified siren, a sexual object to tempt Continue reading Golden Exits (2017) Movie Review
A seeming momma’s boy with blunt high standards and commitment issues (Kieran Culkin), two dopey lackeys with differing levels of alcohol intake (Kevin Corrigan and Martin Starr), and a take-no-prisoners, fast-talking white collar type (Nick Offerman). In short, a bunch of cold, insensitive pricks.
Thus is the cast of characters initially established in Infinity Baby. They all work at different rungs of the ladder for the eponymous company, whose aim is to get rid of thousands of babies who never age. A botched stem cell experiment, compliments of Mitsubishi.
The film fully acknowledges the laundry list of flaws that this infinity baby premise presents. In fact, it Continue reading Infinity Baby (2017) Movie Review
In an indefinite future, cybernetic enhancements have become a growing trend. On the forefront of this advancement is Major (Scarlett Johansson), a human mind placed into a robotic shell. To some, the perfect weapon.
The premise of Ghost in the Shell leaves the narrative bleeding with Continue reading Ghost in the Shell (2017) Movie Review
The Dark Tapes is an independent found footage horror anthology. It is a film in the same family as the V/H/S films, The ABCs of Death, and the recent XX. The difference between those films and this is that, while other anthology films split its work among multiple directors who each take on a self-contained short, The Dark Tapes is a film written by one screenwriter (Michael McQuown, who also shares directorial credit with Vincent Guastini).
As such, the frame narrative should share some cohesion across the film. The immediate impression, thus, is that the various “chapters” bleed together. Glitches transition between the shorts on the “tape.”
What this does at first is cause Continue reading The Dark Tapes (2017) Movie Review
March is coming to an end, and it is has been a healthy month at the box office. Beauty and the Beast has continued to dominate over its first two weeks and is looking to add to its domestic gross.
Two new releases take aim at the Disney giant: Fox’s Boss Baby and Paramount’s Ghost in the Shell. Both are opening in over 3,000 theaters. But can either of them contend with the Beast?
A family of three move into a quaint rural home that was once the site of a double homicide, perpetrated at the hands of a man (Pruitt Taylor Vince) who hears the voice of the devil in his head.
Jesse Hellman (Ethan Embry), father and husband, is a contract painter and metalhead. He’s a young-at-heart, hippie-looking pot smoker who hates painting flowers for banks. And he also picked the wrong house to move into.
Sean Byrne, whose directorial debut The Loved Ones provided an Continue reading The Devil’s Candy (2017) Movie Review
CHiPs. California Highway Patrol. Also, an ’80s television show starring Erik Estrada that is no longer culturally relevant.
There is not much to say about CHiPs, so I will try and keep this short. For a silly reboot comedy, this film about two motorcycle police officers goes dark in weird atonal ways. Heroin, sex addiction, and suicide are all introduced as plot devices within the first 10 minutes of the film.
As a comedy, the film is, by and large, serviceable. Continue reading Chips (2017) Movie Review
On the International Space Station, a similarly international skeleton crew of astronauts receive a crucial sample from the surface of Mars. What they find in it, however, is more than merely sand and sediment deposits.
What they find is a Continue reading Life (2017) Movie Review
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