MOVIE REVIEW: Maestro

To say Bradley Cooper threw himself into his work is an understatement. He is a marvel to behold. The actor was operating with a spot-on imitation of Bernstein’s vocal annunciations, inflections, cadence, and tone. He found all the highs and lows of hubris, profundity, stress, dedication, and talent in front of and behind the camera. Is all of this in Maestro ostentatious hopscotch from Cooper? Probably, but what else would you expect from an energy like working at an insanely masterful level?

2023, 5 STARS, ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanNovember 23, 2023Maestro, Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, NetflixComment

MOVIE REVIEW: May December

While ambitious as a ripe tangent in borrowing a real-life scandal, the whole shadowing angle of May December overloads what was excessive enough as off-screen history to begin with. Applying a smattering of unlikely kinks and a confounding third act of insecurity swerves sinks the film. Haynes is left with a mood piece of examining taboo with more taboo. and it gets unattractively lost in just that very vibe.

JustWatch adds new lists feature and imports your IMDb lists

The JustWatch Lists feature now offers more than just saving and tracking your favorite movies and TV shows: Users can now create, share & import lists, discover list collections curated by our team and track their TV shows. Browse and save lists from other users or import IMDb lists straight into JustWatch to enhance the lists with the JustWatch feature set.

2023, Column, Home Media, LIST, NEWS, StreamingDon ShanahanNovember 22, 2023Comment

MOVIE REVIEW: The Killer

Among his peers and contemporaries, David Fincher conveys a commanding control of fluidity that few filmmakers can rival in this day and age. His stringent melding of staging, cinematography, performance outcomes, editing, and music rarely, if ever, stumble or loiter. Fincher’s mise-en-scène is an authority of total precision, arguably second to none. He simply doesn’t miss his marks, which makes The Killer and its propulsive narrative about a rare and fatal mistake so much more fascinating.

2023, 5 STARS, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanNovember 11, 2023The Killer, David Fincher, Tilda Swinton, Netflix, Andrew Kevin WalkerComment

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: Killers of the Flower Moon

For better or worse, that’s a microcosm of the entirety of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. As helpful as Robertson’s plucked metronome is to fill voids and create a foreboding cinematic heartbeat, your own pulse rate ends up matching that placidness. No matter what heinous deception, jarring murder, or well-appointed finery appears on screen, very little in the film intensifies or accelerates beyond that methodical drowning dirge.

MOVIE REVIEW: Foe

The linchpin of Foe becomes Saorise Ronan. With a strong and near-Method effort at being constantly jaded and exhausted, Paul Mescal impressively spends the majority of the film withering in the wringer he’s sent through by Terrence. He’s going for broke. Meanwhile, the real palpable depth of Foe comes from Hen’s female perspective. Since the beginning of the film opened on her crying in the shower, our perception of Hen has been the bigger question mark than the stranger Terrence.

2 STARS, 2023, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanOctober 14, 2023Iain Reid, Garth Davis, Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Foe, Amazon Prime VideoComment

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: Black White and the Greys

How did this all happen? What can tear apart a marriage? Most folks go straight to the tawdry daytime talk show topics of money and infidelity, neither of which are anywhere close to the catalysts in Black White and the Greys and there’s zero crowd to watch it all go down. Rather, the frost seeping into the cracks of the Grey family lies in a growing divergence of intellectual contrasts and moral conflicts.

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: Outlaw Johnny Black

Outlaw Johnny Black is a unique genre experiment that knows damn well what cookie cutter it’s using. Led by star Michael Jai White stepping into the director’s chair, these are the people that made the hilarious blaxploitation cult classic Black Dynamite 14 years ago. Yes! Go ahead and drop a Jules Winfield reply to that news. With a clenched fist and a tongue in its cheek, White and company are here to emulate and embellish the best and worst qualities of westerns by making a cool one of their own.

2023, 3 STARS, Independent Film, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanSeptember 20, 2023Outlaw Johnny Black, Michael Jai WhiteComment

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.

EVERY MOVIE HAS A LESSON

by Don Shanahan

BRINGING YOU MOVIE REVIEWS AND MORE SINCE 2010

CRYPTOCASINOS

TheVore.com Streaming options

Brilliantly

Content & Links