When done right, heady ideas and anchors of the human condition can move a viewer as much, if not more, than spectacle. Filmmaker and animator Andrew Stanton’s latest foray into live-action, In the Blink of an Eye, available on Hulu, desperately wants to be the highest kind of exemplar for favoring the evocative over the explosive.
Read MoreIn the end, what is more interesting? Is it the past that made these loose characters, or the future that was foretold to open the movie? One could beg it’s the latter and not the former. The messy hodgepodge of it all feels random for randomness’s sake, and the character behaviors too often match that ridiculousness rather than win you over.
Read MoreThanks to umpteen versions and retellings, this whole thing has become a bit of a bedtime story, no matter how it’s sliced. Moving to the beat of that aforementioned tiny music box and not something deeper, Besson’s Dracula, and its selection of emphasized overtones and reduced undertones, are misaligned to become a lullaby from what could have been grander results.
Read MoreThe plot of Islands tries its hardest to add doubt to the current conundrum, but it does so in such a soft fashion. Peeks are weaker than pokes and prods every time. Not enough stings about this mystery. A film like this, using such a prime, exotic setting to add awe and infinite scope, should be putting us through our paces and making us sweat.
Read MoreIn Atropia’s type of satire, where war—and all its ugly realities—is being practiced as a performance for misplaced dominance, more than one mouthpiece is needed. Alia Shawkat’s oppositional firebrand is not enough. Callum Turner has to pull his weight.
Read MoreAsking Albert Birney to paint with a little more zip than dread would take away from his distinctiveness. This route will have its cult fans who stoke the fires of commentary comparing today’s anti-social generation with the past one. However, it’s still a course that regrettably shrinks the contagious wonder the premise of this daring jaunt could have generated.
Read MoreLess would have been more, and less was already enough with The Dutchman. The movie never had to leave the train or the topics unleashed there. The originally intended inescapable struggle is demystified the moment it treads away from it. Worse, by leaving and constantly pointing at the fact that the very theatrical setting exists and supposedly still looms large, it negates what made it powerful and great in the first place.
Read MoreWhere James Cameron previously succeeded in his lengthy epics was when scripts were flipped at some point to shift power dynamics and emotional anchors dramatically. Look no further than the leap and advancement from The Terminator to T2. Shockingly, a copy machine was used in place of a springboard, and the disappointing storytelling results show—no matter how pretty it all looks.
Read MoreThe extremes between comedy and trauma are woeful and disorienting. The more she’s tuned out or weighted down by nutty anxiety, the more we, the audience, are squelched from hearing and being inspired by the full gusto potential of Ella. It’s colossally disappointing Ella McCay did not do better by the character the audience needed to root for.
Read MoreGetting swept up in the stylish pageantry, big or small, of a wedding grabs audiences consistently and well. Curiously, My Mother’s Wedding unfurls as a dramedy where the nuptials in question might be the most inconsequential part of the movie. That’s not a bad thing, as it has happened before in celebrated wedding movies, so long as the film has more to say or is interesting elsewhere. Actress Kristen Scott Thomas’s directorial debut generously tries its hand at offering more than just pure ceremony.
Read MoreThroughout Four Letters of Love, two 1970s families in Ireland—one living on a remote western island and another from a more urban city home—experience difficult roads of distressing life events. Between them, there’s a drastic career change, the transition to a new school, future career uncertainty, parental abandonment, a few cases of writer’s block and artist’s block, relationship woes and competing affections before marriage, parental approval of their children’s paths, a handicapping injury, and two losses of parents and spouses.
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