Sometimes, 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 MoreWhen 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 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 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 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 MoreThe passionate nucleus and alluring aura here are still exceptionally strong and superior, in many ways, to previous film adaptations. While it may be blackly moody and garish for pruder crowds, this Wuthering Heights is precisely the big-screen escapade ornately fashioned to fluster the hot-and-bothered in all the best ways.
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 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 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 MoreTributes and the flutters of nostalgia exist for the weirdest things in the oddest places, even for a cheesy 1997 movie that made $65 million after being #1 for two whole weeks. It was a helluva time to be alive then, and it’s helluva time to be alive now to see Anaconda both lampooned with love and gilded with the guts of its many victims…err… fans.
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