Tag Archives: movie review

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Sports

Challengers (2024) Movie Review

One could describe great dialogue as like a tennis volley. In the case of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (dialogue provided by writer Justin Kuritzkes), the simile is essentially literalized. For three tennis players of differing star power, tennis is a contentious conversation, and contentious conversation is rarely far removed from talk of tennis. That is to say, as the relationships between Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) grow more knotty, melodramatic, and complex, the thin line that separates on-court competition from romantic interests is hopelessly blurred.

Frankly, describing this central premise which conflates sports competition and competitive romantic endeavors makes the film sound Continue reading Challengers (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Movie Review

Somewhere in the midst of the haggard kerfuffle that is the frozen empire of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore tells Dan Aykroyd’s Ray Stantz something to the effect of the old cliché, “we’re getting too old for this.” This does not come across like a self-aware nod toward the inherent redundancy and inessential nature of Hollywood reboot culture. It feels more like the film accidentally self-reporting.

Personally (and fortunately, perhaps), I did not have to get too old before realizing that it is a waste of one’s time and energy to Continue reading Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Civil War (2024) Movie Review

Alex Garland’s previous film, Men (2022), was provocative, but it provoked one’s attention for the sake of a statement without much depth to it. Civil War, the filmmaker’s latest, is marketed and branded as a highly provocative sign-of-the-times political thriller. It wants on the one hand to be an eerie premonition of where the United States Democracy is heading as the country trudges through yet another contentious election year. But it is, in execution, far less provocative than it hopes to be, despite claiming to have a deeply resonant statement to make.

If Civil War is on the one hand an aspiring premonition, it is on the other a Continue reading Civil War (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Drama, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

I.S.S. (2024) Movie Review

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s I.S.S. is a low-budget thriller set in the shoebox of a set replicating the International Space Station. The film sets out to be a slow-burn potboiler (despite a 95-minute runtime), where chummy colleagues are thrown into an international geopolitical dispute that sows distrust and paranoia. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) is greeted warmly by the crew of the space station, who hail equally from Russia and the United States. Her first day working as a biologist on the station ends in a drunken celebration and Kira looking out onto Earth’s surface. Weronika (Maria Mashkova) and Alexey (Pilou Asbæk) joke that Kira doesn’t understand the full weight of seeing the world from the outside, where you can no longer see borders.

The first 15 minutes of I.S.S. (and the last few moments of the film) harp on this obvious bit of foreshadowing: in the Space Station, there are no Continue reading I.S.S. (2024) Movie Review →

Action/Thriller, All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Leave it, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

Self Reliance (2024) Movie Review

With Self Reliance, Jake Johnson and The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, Akiva Schaffer) have made a broad comedy rendition of David Fincher’s The Game. After a bad breakup with his partner, an aimless Thomas Walcott (Johnson) jumps at the chance to play a mysterious game of life and death, to be live-streamed to the dark web. The rules are simple: Thomas must survive 30 days of being hunted by assassins from Greenland who may or may not ever find him and who cannot harm him if he is within striking distance of another person. Seeing this last part as an exploitable loophole (more of a rule than a loophole, as it were), Thomas accepts the challenge.

For the first few days, Thomas is golden. He wakes up, lazily rides a recumbent bicycle, has a few shots of whisky at a bar, and calls it a day. No sign of any “production assistant ninjas” ready to film his murder. Then, one night, a window breaks while he is sleeping and he discovers Continue reading Self Reliance (2024) Movie Review →

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

The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review

Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall was a pleasant surprise and a critical success for Netflix. His follow-up, The Book of Clarence, takes a similarly anachronistic approach to a familiar genre. This time, Samuel takes on the religious epic. The film presents an alternative biblical story adjacent to the story of the last days of Jesus Christ. This apocrypha is simplistic and familiar, so much so that when David Oyelowo’s John the Baptist exposition dumps the premise unnecessarily the plot itself almost feels like a punchline.

Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield) and his friend Elijah (RJ Cyler) owe a man known as Jedediah the Terrible (Eric Kofi Abrefa) money that they don’t have. To further complicate things, Clarence is Continue reading The Book of Clarence (2024) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Comedy, Drama, Like It, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review

Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents is not a heist film, but it does begin with an elaborate bank robbery. It is not exactly a thriller, either, though it borrows from plenty of the tropes you’d find in an exciting thriller film with a heist as its centerpiece. Elaborate planning, blackmail, prison politics, uneasy partnerships, paranoia of being found out, and the hiding of wads of cash all play an important role in the film. But The Delinquents is more like a slow cinema crime epic than the films it borrows these caper conventions from.

The three-hour-long film begins with a desire for cash and ends with a liberation of self. Morán (Daniel Elias) has spent a long career working at a bank, and he is still Continue reading The Delinquents (2023) Movie Review →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

The Taste of Things (2023) Movie Review

If someone tried to argue that cooking is the most cinematic activity, it wouldn’t take much to convince me. The Taste of Things would make a good Exhibit A (or Exhibit B under Tampopo. Or Exhibit C under Big Night. Et cetera). When done right, there is something about the film depiction of cooking that just feels whole, like a full experience. Cooking is tactile, textural, occasionally sensual. It brings all of the senses into harmony. For someone like me who doesn’t know the first thing about the craft or art of cooking, The Taste of Things might be the closest I’ll come to understanding that harmony (I don’t even know half of the ingredients in the dishes prepared in this film).

The French title of The Taste of Things is La Passion de Dodin Bouffant. It is a fitting title, in that the film is driven forward by Continue reading The Taste of Things (2023) Movie Review →

Lists, Long Reviews (>400 Words)

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

Another year over, another long year of movies ahead of us in 2024. 2023 was an odd year in movies for me. It took roughly 10 months before I saw more than one film that really blew me away. Since that point, though, I’ve seen a number of great ones. I was happy to see a diversity in the types of films in my top 50: a nice mix of genres, a balance between major studios and independents, a good assortment of non-U.S. films that I was glad to be exposed to, a few thought-provoking docs, a number of beautiful animated films, I could go on. After resigning myself to a sub-par year in movies, I end the year pleasantly surprised by a number of titles I will happily return to in the future.

These are the best movies I saw in 2023, along with 15 honorable mentions. Happy New Year.

Honorable Mentions:

  • All of Us Strangers
  • Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
  • BlackBerry
  • Earth Mama
  • Fallen Leaves
  • Four Daughters
  • Godzilla Minus One
  • Kokomo City
  • May December
  • Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
  • Nimona
  • The Promised Land
  • Skinamarink
  • Talk to Me
  • A Thousand and One

10. Rye Lane

Sometimes, a film can be wholly satisfying without any of the bells and whistles, by just relying on Continue reading The 10 Best Movies of 2023 →

All Movie Reviews, Drama, Long Reviews (>400 Words), Love It

The Iron Claw (2023) Movie Review

Sean Durkin’s films are about haunted people. In The Nest, the English manor the characters move to becomes a haunting symbol of their marriage crumbling down around them in the present. The protagonist of Martha Marcy May Marlene is haunted by her traumatizing past in a cult. The characters of the Von Erich brothers in The Iron Claw are haunted by their futures.

The reason for this forward-looking anxiety is the brothers’ parents. Their father, Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany), owns the Dallas-based wrestling league the WCCW, and he only really expresses pride and love for his sons when they Continue reading The Iron Claw (2023) Movie Review →