MOVIE REVIEW: Nyad

NYAD is the film adaptation of that incredible feat recounted in Diane’s autobiography Find a Way. Four-time Academy Award nominee Annette Bening is playing the title subject alongside two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster as her friend and coach Bonnie Stoll. This true chronicle lends itself to a sports movie’s narrative flow and swell of dramatic license, yet NYAD was made by a pair of Oscar-winning documentarians– the Free Solo husband-and-wife directorial team of Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin– giving it a purposeful backbone of authenticity to push some of those tropes to the side.

2023, 4 STARS, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanNovember 8, 2023Nyad, Annette Bening, Jodie FosterComment

MOVIE REVIEW: The Burial

For all of these reasons and more, we can be pleased and entertained that The Burial is here on Amazon Prime Video. Matching Lesson #2, it’s as stock and formulaic as it comes within the courtroom drama subgenre. Hot damn, that’s going to work every time. Within the formula, the heart and spine of the narrative will always be the two biggest ingredients. The backbone is a compelling case, and the beating pulse is the people embroiled in the affair.

MOVIE REVIEW: Fair Play

True to the sharp storytelling adage of “show, don’t tell,” Fair Play from writer-director Chloe Domont heightens its drama with these featured stares because you imagine the thoughts or predicted words before they are performed. Oftentimes, a viewer’s imagination can get riled up even worse than what is shown on-screen. The wallop of that effect is the characters will get their releases, retorts, and replies, but the audience members– short of shouting at the screen or clutching their armchair partner– do not. With sly effectiveness in hanging on every stare between the words, that’s how a movie like Fair Play gets you.

2023, 4 STARS, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanOctober 3, 2023Fair Play, Phoebe Dynevor, Alden Ehrenreich, Chloe Domont, NetflixComment

MOVIE REVIEW: The Creator

With The Creator, Gareth Edwards becomes one of those peerless fuels. His film may have informal traits from other sci-fi places that folks will criticize, but it has an emphatic beating heart all its own that cannot be contained and is wondrous to behold. Combining the genre’s penchant for implausible creativity and a powerful emphasis on existential connection, The Creator explores and reaches a special place within science fiction films.

2023, 4 STARS, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanSeptember 29, 2023The Creator, John David Washington, Gareth Edwards, Science FictionComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Dumb Money

With a title like Dumb Money, which references a Wall Street slang term for a group of individual and non-institutional investors and their money, one has to ask if “insane” is talking about a dollar amount or a measurement of wisdom or choices. Well, you’re going to need that shiny quarter to flip. A thoroughly entertained viewer will be finger-pointing insanity occurring, in some shape or form, at nearly every turn of this off-the-cuff, firebrand movie.

2023, 4 STARS, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanSeptember 25, 2023Dumb Money, Craig Gillespie, Paul Dano, Seth Rogen, Shailene Woodley, Pete Davidson, Nick Offerman, Anthony RamosComment

MOVIE REVIEW: A Million Miles Away

On this remarkable journey, the core always remained on the people more than the spectacle. Call this kind of movie sweet, simple, and old-fashioned, but there’s a dearth of entertaining movies like A Million Miles Away fit for families and classrooms. There’s not a second where this film’s heart is not in the right place, and this school teacher will take these submissions every chance he gets.

MOVIE REVIEW: Dreamin' Wild

Dreamin’ Wild comports itself unlike many other musical biopics. This one is not trying to strap a rocket to the back of its subjects and launch them to superstar heavens in front of massive crowds shining a barrage of spotlights and flashbulbs. That’s not the Emersons’ story whatsoever. As hinted at before, these songs, characterized, again, as a “dream-like symphony to teenhood,” came from an emotional place beyond what was captured on vinyl. Fragile care was needed.

2023, 2022, 4 STARS, Independent Film, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanSeptember 2, 2023Dreamin' Wild, Casey Affleck, Noah Jupe, Walton GogginsComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Past Lives

Though just a slight step short of that next level of swell and swoon matching the great romantic dramas of cinema, Past Lives’ modern collision of providence ignites a viewer’s rooting interests for how this will all turn out and engages a locked-in willingness to follow along to the absolute end. Without spoiling any more trajectories, the captivating and rarified results from Celine Song show mature restraint, reward patience, and disarm all sympathies for living and being alive.

2023, 4 STARS, Independent Film, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanJune 9, 2023Past Lives, Celine Song, Greta Lee, Teo Yoo, John MagaroComment

MOVIE: The Wind and the Reckoning

One of the most appreciable traits about movies is their ability to give faces and voices to human history across a myriad of cultures and time periods. If you ask them, astute film viewers will lose count how many “based on” or “inspired by” movies about true stories have instigated wider and deeper educational dives to learn more. The Wind and the Reckoning joins that honorable tradition and, even greater than faces and voices, it gives its depicted history a literal and figurative fighting chance.

MOVIE REVIEW: Peter Pan & Wendy

Bless his heart, David Lowery has not forgotten the sensation and formative power found in the analog brands of fantasy. Constructed with earthy textures, Peter Pan & Wendy is a glorious realization and extension of make-believe play that welcomes an old-fashioned conscience. Lowery, in his second foray with Disney after his phenomenal Pete Dragon from 2015, brandishes his own creative streak with a divergent freedom and zero shame for doing so.

2023, 4 STARS, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanApril 28, 2023Peter Pan & Wendy, David LoweryComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Air

Director Ben Affleck received Michael Jordan’s blessing and allowed Air to be a whiff at breathing in that legend again, a draw that cannot be discounted. Likewise, folks are coming to see familiar and reliable movie stars like Affleck, Damon, Davis, and Bateman spar. Those curious and poised to watch composures rattled, zingers exchanged, balls busted, and dreams fulfilled get all that and then some in Air.

MOVIE REVIEW: Tetris

Early on in Tetris, Taron Egerton’s main character Henk Rogers shares an admission with his furious boss about why he put himself into greater financial debt to back an unknown video game from The Soviet Union he stumbled upon at a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Leaning over and speaking low with clear eyes relaying bewilderment, he talks about seeing those soon-to-be iconic blocks still falling in his dreams hours and days after playing the game. Memories fill Tetris viewers, and they immediately picture the exact same thing.