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.
Read MoreTrue 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.
Read MoreWith The Creator, Gareth Edwards becomes one of those peerless fuels. His film may have informal traits from other sci-fi places that folks will criticize, but it has an emphatic beating heart all its own that cannot be contained and is wondrous to behold. Combining the genre’s penchant for implausible creativity and a powerful emphasis on existential connection, The Creator explores and reaches a special place within science fiction films.
Read MoreWith a title like Dumb Money, which references a Wall Street slang term for a group of individual and non-institutional investors and their money, one has to ask if “insane” is talking about a dollar amount or a measurement of wisdom or choices. Well, you’re going to need that shiny quarter to flip. A thoroughly entertained viewer will be finger-pointing insanity occurring, in some shape or form, at nearly every turn of this off-the-cuff, firebrand movie.
Read MoreOn 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.
Read MoreDreamin’ Wild comports itself unlike many other musical biopics. This one is not trying to strap a rocket to the back of its subjects and launch them to superstar heavens in front of massive crowds shining a barrage of spotlights and flashbulbs. That’s not the Emersons’ story whatsoever. As hinted at before, these songs, characterized, again, as a “dream-like symphony to teenhood,” came from an emotional place beyond what was captured on vinyl. Fragile care was needed.
Read MoreThough just a slight step short of that next level of swell and swoon matching the great romantic dramas of cinema, Past Lives’ modern collision of providence ignites a viewer’s rooting interests for how this will all turn out and engages a locked-in willingness to follow along to the absolute end. Without spoiling any more trajectories, the captivating and rarified results from Celine Song show mature restraint, reward patience, and disarm all sympathies for living and being alive.
Read MoreOne of the most appreciable traits about movies is their ability to give faces and voices to human history across a myriad of cultures and time periods. If you ask them, astute film viewers will lose count how many “based on” or “inspired by” movies about true stories have instigated wider and deeper educational dives to learn more. The Wind and the Reckoning joins that honorable tradition and, even greater than faces and voices, it gives its depicted history a literal and figurative fighting chance.
Read MoreBless his heart, David Lowery has not forgotten the sensation and formative power found in the analog brands of fantasy. Constructed with earthy textures, Peter Pan & Wendy is a glorious realization and extension of make-believe play that welcomes an old-fashioned conscience. Lowery, in his second foray with Disney after his phenomenal Pete Dragon from 2015, brandishes his own creative streak with a divergent freedom and zero shame for doing so.
Read MoreDirector Ben Affleck received Michael Jordan’s blessing and allowed Air to be a whiff at breathing in that legend again, a draw that cannot be discounted. Likewise, folks are coming to see familiar and reliable movie stars like Affleck, Damon, Davis, and Bateman spar. Those curious and poised to watch composures rattled, zingers exchanged, balls busted, and dreams fulfilled get all that and then some in Air.
Read MoreEarly on in Tetris, Taron Egerton’s main character Henk Rogers shares an admission with his furious boss about why he put himself into greater financial debt to back an unknown video game from The Soviet Union he stumbled upon at a consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. Leaning over and speaking low with clear eyes relaying bewilderment, he talks about seeing those soon-to-be iconic blocks still falling in his dreams hours and days after playing the game. Memories fill Tetris viewers, and they immediately picture the exact same thing.
Read MoreLike the GTFO fight-or-flight speed and freak happenstance of real-life, Herman delivers precisely that exhilarating sense of urgency. There are no shouted demands from a pursuing criminal that pretend to describe motive or what the encounter all means. Likewise, no wimpy and waffling “Wait a second. Can we talk about this?” pleads are attempted in return. Herman stays a mystery through the very end.
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