MOVIE REVIEW: Saturday Night

The thing is embellishment couldn’t be more appropriate to venture into the storied origins of a high-concept sketch comedy show. The bawdy and rowdy new film Saturday Night is a fish story version of festooned truths. The stuff of nostalgic backstage lore made with embellishment then is retold in a loosey-goosey “based on a true story” fashion with its own embellishment now. When executed with flair, a good fish story that gets stranger and more exaggerated as it unfolds–and, hot damn, does this one ever do that–can engage and entertain.

MOVIE REVIEW: The Wild Robot

Alas, all of that jaw-dropping and triumphant artistry stands firmly behind The Wild Robot’s stirring power to massage hearts and minds with virtuous messages and an ideal balance of jovial humor. Much like how the rustic wear-and-tear discolors, dents, and dulls our shiny mechanical proxy parent over time, the sheer fortitude and kindhearted selflessness permeating The Wild Robot grows on you like the speckled moss on Roz.

MOVIE REVIEW: Sing Sing

That personal effect achieved through casting is a hell of a thing and one expanded throughout Sing Sing’s storyline. Unlike outside actors trying on characters they’ve researched for a few months in hope of doing them justice, Sing Sing laminates its dramatic license with layer of authentic courage. We’re watching formerly incarcerated men relive experiences from painful years with invigorated expression. By sharing them with the world now through a tribute film, their honor and liberation is multiplied.

2024, 5 STARS, Independent Film, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanJuly 30, 2024Sing Sing, Colman DomingoComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Guy Friends

Guy Friends circles its wagons and makes the fresh duo of Jaime and Sandy the core of the film. The main plot and their gestating sample examination of friendship establishment are shot in black-and-white by writer-director Jonathan Smith and mirror little full-color vignette testimonies of real people describing how they became best friends. In less witty hands, these arcs of burgeoning female connection and the well-worn looking-for-love plight would conveniently be vanquished in a grandiose and, in all likelihood preposterous, rom-com climax involving some kind of public shenanigans.

MOVIE REVIEW: Hit Man

This baked-in layer of brains amid the brawn in Hit Man is credited to Linklater and Powell working together to punch up a screenplay together allowing fun to frolic next to intrigue. All of the nerdy philosophy would normally feel like serendipitous mumbo-jumbo tacked on a less intelligent premise. Instead, Hit Man’s slick polish and playful panache combine to create witty smartness seething with sensational sexiness at a level higher and hotter than we have seen in years with romantic comedies and crime capers. This date night delight is just what this summer season needs, be that in a theater or on your Netflix couch.

2024, 5 STARS, Home Media, MOVIE REVIEW, StreamingDon ShanahanMay 24, 2024Glen Powell, Adria Arjona, Richard Linklater, Hit Man, NetflixComment

MOVIE REVIEW: Origin

The movie is here to make people feel by beautifying truths, creating kindred spirits, and it does so without losing or skimping an ounce of the subject’s powerful commentary smoldering with fire-branded parallels spanning the globe. One now exists to enhance the other. Origin can and should be a door-opener to Wilkerson’s work and the immense amount of testimonies, reflections, and avenues of learning that do not fit in a single film or book. Few movies generate as much library homework as tissue boxes to replace, but here we are, lifted better in our lives for receiving both assignments.

2023, 5 STARS, Independent Film, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanJanuary 20, 2024Origin, Ava DuVernay, Aunjanue EllisComment

MOVIE REVIEW: The Iron Claw

Let’s just say it now upfront. Folks are going to walk up completely unprepared for The Iron Claw. They’re going to see the old school wrestling setting and the ripped bod of Zac Efron and swoon a little. They’re going to want, as one WWE superstar of this era so hilariously expressed once, “big meaty men slappin’ meat.” That’s cute, but The Iron Claw is not No Holds Barred or Nacho Libre.

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: 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: 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: Barbie

Speaking of colors and style, I’ll leave you with this little tidbit of snazzy advice from the movie that mixes with the philosophical slant of Barbie itself. Pink goes with everything. Taking that further into color psychology, pink is said to be a contradictory color associated with innocence, calmness, sensitivity, and optimism as much as it’s the standard bearer for femininity. Those listed qualities are the fluttering feelings of Barbie worn with pride, and that’s a radiantly beautiful thing.

2023, 5 STARS, MOVIE REVIEWDon ShanahanJuly 18, 2023Barbie, Greta Gerwig, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Noah Baumbach, Kate McKinnonComment

MOVIE REVIEW: RRR

Deep down, all movies are passion projects for the people that make them. Sometimes, it is difficult to see that passion come through fully in the finished film. Uninspired moments, pretentious indulgences, shortcuts of effort, or even the limits of ambition will dilute the fervor of how the given movie came to exist. To that end, the rarer feat is a film that never, even for a second, loses or runs out of its passion. S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is one of those special movies.