The third major animated movie about yetis in the past year, DreamWorks Animation’s Abominable is far less annoying than 2018’s Smallfoot (from Warner Animation Group) but not nearly as inventive and witty as Laika’s Missing Link from earlier this year. Abominable falls into a bland, safe middle ground, placing a yeti nicknamed Everest into a familiar story about a […]
Hustlers
Based on a true story that went viral in a deep and revealing 2015 New York Magazine article, Hustlers takes a very specific story of former strippers building their own empire by poking holes in the golden parachutes of their wealthiest clientele and spins it into a rollicking swirl of female empowerment amid an interminable class struggle. […]
Monos
The final shot of Alejandro Landes’ Monos encapsulates everything that the film could have been but isn’t. A group of military troops have just flown over a jungle in Colombia and rescued Rambo (Sofía Buenaventura), a former child soldier in a FARC-esque guerrilla movement called “The Organization.” As the group prepares to land in an […]
It Chapter Two
It Chapter Two can’t decide whether it wants to chase after Stephen King or Steven Spielberg. Sure, to a certain extent those two media monoliths occasionally cross paths at the intersection of serial adventure and emotional nostalgia. However, there’s a disconnect when the slick visual polish and swelling musical score is applied to painful emotional trauma […]
Human Capital (2019)
The title Human Capital sounds like it should accompany a heavily researched social-issue documentary about the way that people have been turned into commodities. But Marc Meyers’ adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s 2004 novel is more of a soap opera than a polemic, although it does deal indirectly with income inequality and the dehumanizing effects of […]
The Riot Act
It’s hard enough to capture contemporary life in a low-budget movie, so attempting authentic period detail with very limited resources is always a dicey prospect. Writer-director Devon Parks takes a big risk by setting his small-scale indie production The Riot Act in 1903, as electricity was just becoming widespread and most people still traveled via horse […]
Don’t Let Go
The Blumhouse logo at the opening of Jacob Aaron Estes’ Don’t Let Go promises the potential for some creative budget-conscious thrills, but Don’t Let Go is unusually downbeat and somber for a Blumhouse genre movie, with a plot combining stock police-procedural elements and a supernatural twist that might have been passed over for the recent […]
Ready or Not
They say there is no movie without the screenplay, and that’s absolutely true…but of course a film is made up of more elements than just the words on the page. Ready or Not is an incessant 90-minute reminder of that fact, since this cleverly conceived, sharply scripted, wonderfully acted film constantly undercuts its many strengths with […]
Good Boys
To criticize the humor in Good Boys for being juvenile seems sort of redundant, since the whole point of the movie is to represent the perspective of a trio of hormonal 12-year-old boys. And yet it’s still a one-note parade of repetitive low-brow jokes pretty much all based on the premise that it’s hilarious to […]
Gwen
If you’ve ever read anything by Thomas Hardy, you’ll readily recognize the setting of William McGregor’s Gwen. Most of the film’s action takes place amid a majestic yet eerily impersonal mountain landscape in Wales. The one town we see is desolate and grimy, and its inhabitants are the kind of people who’d take pleasure in […]
Blinded by the Light
There may not (yet) be a Bruce Springsteen jukebox musical on Broadway, but filmmaker Gurinder Chadha makes a pretty good case for one with her exuberant Springsteen-themed coming-of-age drama Blinded by the Light. Based on the memoir by Sarfraz Manzoor (who co-wrote the screenplay with Paul Mayeda Burges and Chadha), Blinded uses Springsteen’s music as […]
Luce
The name Luce is packed with polarizing implications. It means “light” in Italian, but it is also derived from a particular type of Pike fish that is known to be aggressive, vicious, and even cannibalistic in certain circumstances. It’s that sort of exacting duality that not only pervades and ultimately defines Luce, a film that […]
The VelociPastor
The job of Brendan Steere’s The VelociPastor is pretty much accomplished with the title. Anyone who wants to see a movie called The VelociPastor is going to watch it regardless of the actual content, and nothing in the movie is likely to convince anyone turned off by the title to give it a second look. […]
The Kitchen
Before The Kitchen even begins in earnest, a glaring disconnect becomes apparent. Befitting the film’s ‘70s-era setting and indie comic inspiration, the production company logos display as retro-funkified preambles to what we presume will be a film of similar attitude and flair. No such luck as the film fades in on a clean and crisp exterior […]
Dora and the Lost City of Gold
Nickelodeon stalwart Dora the Explorer is great at teaching preschoolers about words and numbers, but she’s not exactly an exciting big-screen heroine. But Dora’s animated series has been on the air for nearly 20 years and has spawned numerous spin-offs, so like any modern corporate brand, she’s now required to headline her own movie. The […]
The Art of Racing in the Rain
There’s no easier way to tug on a movie audience’s heartstrings than to present them with a dying dog. That’s a lesson that author W. Bruce Cameron has learned very well, with the box-office success of adaptations of his novels A Dog’s Purpose, A Dog’s Way Home and A Dog’s Journey, and the rest of Hollywood […]
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
It’s kind of amazing to think that the Fast & Furious franchise started out with a mid-budget crime drama about street racing. By the time it’s gotten to spin-off film Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, absolutely nothing recognizable remains from the series’ origin. At least the main F&F films still focus on car-based […]
The Nightingale
“Grim” would be too gentle a word to describe what happens in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale. Set in 1825, the film opens by introducing us to Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irishwoman who’s been deported to a British penal colony in Tasmania. Not long after we first meet her, she’s raped by her supervisor, an abusive […]
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood
Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood is unmistakably a Quentin Tarantino film while also something of a conscious step away from the acute genre immersion of the filmmaker’s recent output. As opposed to emulating the styles and genres that QT so loves, the director’s latest centers his story on the industry where those genres […]
The Lion King (2019)
The Circle of Life is a beautiful concept introduced in the original 1994 animated film The Lion King. An ideology claims that everything in existence is in a delicate balance. That touching sentiment is reiterated in Jon Favreau’s 2019 remake, as the older, king lion named Mufasa tells his young, mischievous cub, Simba, about how […]