Ready Player One is the liveliest Spielberg film in a decade or more. You could spend hours pausing every frame of this film to discover and relish in the multitude of buried treasures, making the film’s rewatch and replay value tremendous. The nostalgia factor of this film should be a high-score badge of achievement and not a knock of pitiful pandering. Dream fulfillment is a worthy and ambitious target for audience inspiration. That tangible sensation equals the desired blissful excitement this film delivers.

Film Festival, 2018, MOVIE REVIEW, 4 STARSDon ShanahanMarch 27, 2018 Comments

MOVIE REVIEW: Mohawk

Their maddening pursuit for prisoners takes the opponents into a rustic valley of Mohawk turf with a river bordering one side and the full war on the other. One by one, grizzly deaths dwindle numbers on both sides until the prophetic zinger line of “we’re the only monsters left out here” brings forth another plane of peril. The aggressive hunt turns ethereal and truly primal towards a crackling climax of mist and fire.

2018, 4 STARS, Independent Film, MOVIE REVIEW, Film Festival, Video on DemandDon ShanahanMarch 25, 2018Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: Beauty Mark

Many internal and external situations can cause feelings of desperation. Straits get so dire that horrible choices become the only choices. For Angie in Beauty Mark, played by emerging TV actress Auden Thornton, the burdensome weights (and they are sure plural) around her neck are overbearing. When those burdens and stresses pile on at the same time, the desperation of her situation becomes overwhelming in this excellent and hardscrabble family drama from writer-director Harris Doran.

MOVIE REVIEW: Game Night

In many respects, the degree of difficulty to make the cheesy entertaining is not very high. Laughs of the low-hanging fruit variety are easy to come by and guilty pleasure films are created all the time. The real challenge is to make the cheesy, and the laughs that come with it, unexpected and fulfilling. Flush with snickering hilarity and scoring plenty of points for swerving surprises, Game Night is infectiously entertaining with any cheese it serves.

4 STARS, 2018, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanFebruary 22, 2018Showplace ICON X at Roosevelt CollectionsComment

REVIEW COLLECTION: The Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short Film

Here are my collected reviews for the Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short Film. Listed in order of rating and true to my website’s hook, each review includes a life lesson takeaway. A collected program of these films is available from various theater chains, including the Landmark Cinemas locations here in Chicago, starting on February 9th. In 90 minutes-and-change, you get five exceptional works for one ticket. Calling all Oscar completists!

DOCUMENTARY REVIEW: 42 Grams

Through 42 Grams, documentary director Jack C. Newell muddles away the self-importance and crafts his own dish laced with affinity and rapport. Following the trials and tribulations of gifted chef Chicago chef Jake Bickelhaupt and his wife Alexa, Newell’s film looks beyond the culinary decadence to reveal a core essence of ambition as relatable as any other version of the American Dream. The captive fascination swelling from that gathers attention and an audience where it normally would not.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hostiles

Scoot Cooper’s grizzled western Hostiles opens with a quote from novelist D.H. Lawrence that reads: "The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.” Those four adjectives and labels assigned by the English writer ring true for the late 19th century historical era he observed and also for the film itself you will watch. Each of those traits are embedded within Cooper’s difficult and impressive film.

4 STARS, Independent Film, 2017, MOVIE REVIEW, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, 2018Don ShanahanJanuary 3, 2018Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Throw out all of the Star Wars fan theories you’ve read or heard in the last two years. Ignore all of the online noise and irresponsible think piece editorials that have piled up on the web since Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Most importantly, relinquish whatever warped and selfish expectations that have been formulated by the blitz of marketing buzz. Star Wars: The Last Jedi takes its mountain of hype and shoves it away to make something nonconformist and wholly compelling in quite possibly the richest and most expressive entry of the storied franchise.

2017, 4 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, MOVIE REVIEW, SPECIALDon ShanahanDecember 12, 2017Dolby ATMOS at AMC River East 21Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: Darkest Hour

Darkest Hour and Gary Oldman exhibit tremendous fight to match the vigor of the era. The film builds its mounting prospects of calamity and clashes of dissension with polish and gumption, avoiding many of the dull notes normally saddling most other behind-the-war-room yak-fest. The screenplay shrewdly skips laborious biographical notes and tautly fixates primarily on the two weeks of debate leading up to Operation Dynamo

MOVIE REVIEW: The Shape of Water

Soaringly endearing elements of romance enrapture with a heading spoonful of the perverse for good measure. Fantastical triumphs of mortal spirit over evil forces are applied to inhuman oddities with jarringly violent consequences. This is a film of stark peculiarity that challenges your safe zones and clashes with your sense of normalcy for the themes at play. It asks you to relish in an abnormal spectacle that dazzles with vintage style and extraordinary boldness.

MOVIE REVIEW: Mercury in Retrograde

Michael Glover Smith’s words of mounting depth and weight turn idle chatter into soapboxes that eventually become proverbial fortifications built around questioned principles and shattered wills. The ensemble of performers delivers on the required heavy lifting from the director to make the multitude of human flaws believable yet still approachable. Mercury in Retrograde is a hidden gem.

MOVIE REVIEW: Coco

Wait until the rest of Coco’s stirring vibrancy awakens even more senses and heartstrings. Softening a setting of gallows humor as few films have, family entries or otherwise, Coco is a divine representation of the human condition rooted respectfully within marvelous cultural heritage. Nearly every pluck of an animated guitar string in Coco strums chords of creativity and compassion.

2017, 4 STARS, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanNovember 22, 2017AMC River East 21 Comments