In Storm Rider: Legend of Hammerhead, you’ve got muscular, heavy-metal boats racing for survival through surf laced with dazzling electrical bolts dropping from the sky. That doesn’t have to be entirely serious. Swash that buckle up a bit and squeeze some more color and courage out of this spectacle.
Read MoreSometimes, the low point of a screw-up is the necessary springboard and not the “I told you so” gotcha moment. When that clarity is found in For Worse, it’s treated more as confirmation than a delayed epiphany, which plays truer to life than orchestrated movie moments that plant those revelations in grandiose gestures and climaxes.
Read MoreThat positive togetherness among solid friends is your stamped answer to Lesson #2. The small yet serious life-and-death situation does not need an extra roller coaster. This is a keen balance in a film that is rightly not trying to create pitfalls to rattle cinematic seismometers for the action junkies because the wisening emotions displayed are more than enough.
Read MoreEveryone who grew up with pets knows that they can teach us a lot about life. If we pay close attention, we see that the way we look at them often reflects our own inner demons, beliefs, and insecurities. Pets also show us what loyalty looks like in its purest form. At the same time, they can reveal how easily we grow overly attached, or where our ability to connect with others starts to falter.
Read MoreIt is the kind of dangerous amusement that advances the entire “eat the rich” schtick, even if there’s not a heap of thicker or more brazen commentary with it. Skipping the larger lectures, How to Make a Killing hovers at the amusing level more than a firebranded one. Not everything has to be a societal wrecking ball or message movie.
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 MoreClever comeuppance is not the same as legitimate consequences, and that’s where the stiff reality of real-life outside the dramedy movie crashes the party. Because Signing Tony Raymond hops back and forth between the sordid and the sincere without full potency for one or the other, the cinematic takedown of college football recruitment practices is half-strength, at best.
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 MoreFrom dramatizing or even romanticizing whistleblowers and activists to revolutionaries and rebels, these types of “based on actual events” stories have been featured in outstanding films that have stirred up their fair share of civil disobedience and positive social change. While Dead Man’s Wire rips from a nearly half-century-old headline instead of a modern one, this engrossing comeback film for director Gus Van Sant waylays its own inspiring level of personal and public vindication that echoes today.
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 MoreYet, here’s Max Walker-Silverman, following up the well-received A Love Song, with a drama that emphasizes true familial roots before anything else. When done right, those basics are bigger than any flashy extras. Instead of only “home is where your heart is,” Rebuilding asserts that home is where you are welcome, and, even after everything, Dusty says it like it is: “I don’t like anywhere better.”
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