Posts in 4 STARS
MOVIE REVIEW: F1

Right on down to frequent fireworks that reach a Blow Out level of enveloping, spectacular dazzle, the athletic and moviemaking muscles are flexing in tandem to a stupendous degree in F1: The Movie. Goodness gracious, you could bottle this movie’s testosterone and outsell Nugenix and burn the publishing presses of Men’s Health to the ground with its vigor. Through it all, there Brad Pitt is, glowing like a lithe, tanned, and tattooed demigod putting everyone else to shame. 

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MOVIE REVIEW: Familiar Touch

Filming for Familiar Touch was done in collaboration with the residents and staff of Villa Gardens Continuing Care Retirement Community in New York. Backed by casting agent Betsy Fippinger (Eighth Grade and Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret), 67 residents, 13 staff members, and 12 caregiving and geriatrician consultants were credited for their involvement in making the movie, granting a tangible and uplifting authenticity that we’re being shown a positive standard of care and not an entirely sugarcoated movie version, just to perk up a plot with conflict. 

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MOVIE REVIEW: How to Train Your Dragon

Maybe the animated one was training wheels for the day this human-rich one could be made with advanced technology. The inevitable comparisons will be divisive for some and a coin toss of preference for others. Either way, both movies are solid enough to stoke that fiery and spirit-stirring excitement for audiences new or old. Let’s show our own mercy and have both.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Materialists

For a stretch of Materialists, confidence is rattled, the hope of love is lost, and any rom-com gamemanship ends, as a more necessary, heavy, and therapeutic arc takes over. Admittedly and appreciably, for as bracingly honest as this swerve is in Materialist to emphasize the aforementioned risks that embody the reality of dating for many people—luxury level or otherwise, it is such a downer of a turn that it threatens to mar the good graces established by that opening scene’s instinctual simplicity of a shared flower.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Predator: Killer of Killers

Larger than that, though, what transpires bends time and expands on previously unseen lore for the franchise, revealing borderline revisionist prophecies to the history and purpose of the whole shebang and saga. They mark a progression that promises to continue in Dan Trachtenberg’s next live-action film, Predator: Badlands, coming this November. Love them or hate them, the implications made by Dan and company are awesome and huge, and precisely the mature and heady injection this franchise sorely needed

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Life of Chuck

One could go on and on, playing out those hypothetical scenarios and more after the movie. If you can reach this plane of empathetic understanding through the abnormal twists and turns of The Life of Chuck, you have found yourself one marvelous movie. If you can’t, or swaying between bliss and death makes you cynical or uncomfortable, you might be a little dead inside. That’ll be on you and not Mike Flanagan.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning

From “living manifestation of destiny” to “mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos,” the pedestal positioning of Ethan Hunt—and therefore Tom Cruise—playing him has only gotten taller and taller, much like the heights the actor scales with his stunts. Here, at the announced finishing chapter of Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning of the now-iconic character enduring nearly thirty years in our cinematic lives, we’ve witnessed the progression of him as a top spy with more lives than a litter of cats to something far more starry and radiant.

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

To say it most simply, The Legend of Ochi is a go-out-and-get-dirty movie. It is a methodical trek of a self-reliant kid left to their own devices, though none of them are of the smart or touchscreen varieties. Emanating from its very foreign, rustic setting, seemingly light on modern amenities, this is a no-tech, rocky, mossy, and muddy fairy tale that most studios don’t make anymore. Go ahead and call it a lost art.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Warfare

When a movie like Warfare enters a concluded historical period, such as the Iraqi front of the War on Terror from nearly 20 years ago, some viewers will curiously require the film to have a “stance” on said war. Those captious people—looking down their noses with 20/20 hindsight to relitigate the past—are going to be disappointed with Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, and falsely so.

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SHORT FILM REVIEW: Liquor Bank

Liquor Bank knows that audiences don’t often see the stories that continue after the big commitment to change. They don’t see the temptations, choices, relapses, and secondary victories. In showing Eddie broken in losing a benchmark achievement, Marcellus Cox is unshy to shed light on a time of defeat instead of victory with Liquor Bank. 

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MOVIE REVIEW: Magazine Dreams

There is an unmistakable lure to the intensity and damaged textures. Majors’ narration, reactions, and jaded silent acts infuse a more layered human lost underneath the monstrous muscles and vices. He is undeniably impressive in those feats. True to form—beast and all, the actor and the film deservedly earned fair and imposing recognition for never shying away from the good and bad light cast against them on screen and off.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Suze

Witnessing this journey is an absolute pleasure to behold in Suze, a little gem that can unite wayward young audiences with the jaded adult parents out there both trying to make sense of shifting crossroad moments of their lives. When Suze and Gage come to say “I’m really glad you’re here,” you will find yourself nodding in agreement about the sweet movie itself, and it all started with a convincing himbo.

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