Category: Review
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Hidden Figures: A Film Worthy of that Pun
I only got the pun in Hidden Figures’ title as I was leaving the theatre. At that point it hit me like such a ton of bricks that all my bones simultaneously broke and I melted into a puddle on the floor. I’m not sure if that means it’s a good pun or a bad…
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The Founder: McDonalds The Great
The Founder is a capitalist nightmare. I mean, the events of the film are certainly, but the film could have been about it without actually being it. The film wants us to take some certain things for granted. That McDonalds is right, that McDonalds is a good, and that McDonalds was inevitable. Don’t see that…
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John Wick: Chapter 2: All About the Craft
John Wick: Chapter 2 wants you to think it’s not camp. It tries and tries and tries, with its serious faced men and its brutal action. But high class gentleman assassins? Lavish hotels serving as organizational safehouses? Sly deals executed with a wink and a handshake? Oh, it’s camp as all fuck. After retrieving his…
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The Great Wall: A Communist Spectacle
I am woefully underprepared to talk about Chinese film, it’s a huge whole in my knowledge i am desperately trying to fill up. Now we see the release of the most expensive, expansive Chinese film of all time and it’s hard to know what to make of it. Is it an attempt to position China…
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Fences: August Wilson’s August Play
Fences feels like an accomplished play. Everything that I’m sure shone throughout the various stagings of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize winning classic shines here. Under Denzel Washington’s direction though it never feels like it quite makes that leap to a film. That’s not to suggest inferiority by no means, I’ve never seen it staged (and…
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The Space Between Us: A Straight Fantasy
The most baffling thing about The Space Between Us is that it ain’t an adaptation. It reads like a YA sci-fi romance novel. It’s like someone saw only the title to The Fault in Their Stars a couple of years ago, heard about its success, and decided, ‘Sure, I could do that.’ That someone is…
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Fifty Shades Darker
It was getting incredibly spooky in the theatre playing Fifty Shades Darker. Appropriate, film is structured like a B horror movie, except instead of scares, the action here is far spookier in nature. Thing is, it’s a form that works with an audience, those enjoying the screening were the ones engaging in conversation, with themselves…
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Toni Erdmann
There is no reason why Toni Erdmann should work. It’s a near three hour long comedy conducted in German and English and Romanian in which everyone’s primary concern appears to be conducting a business transition that would involve the outsourcing of hundreds of local jobs. Our lead, Winfried Conradi, is the father of the consultant…
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The Lego Batman Movie
There’s a problem with making a Lego film franchise: nobody knows what Lego means. I mean, Phil Lord and Chirstiopher Miller’s The Lego Movie is a firework. Like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street it is so insistent that it demands more. Of course we’re getting more. But what, in this…
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Loving
It’s hard to get the measure of Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga’s Richard and Mildred Loving at first. Both of these characters seem too small, both waiting to be defined by someone coming in and taking life’s major. We don’t get to see them fall in love, they already are in the very first scene…
A Grand Quiet 