In different hands and with weaker goals, A Tourist’s Guide to Love would be a hot-and-steamy romp of debauchery in a hot-and-steamy country. There’s certainly a place for that in the streaming scroll for the Netflix-and-Chill crowd. Alternatively, there’s a place for cuddly chastness too. A Tourist’s Guide to Love respects its characters, its audience, and its cultural depictions with more tact and nobility than the norm, giving us a refreshing and relaxing PG-rated romantic drama.
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 MoreTo Catch a Killer unravels to become one of those manhunt movies where the pursuit is better than the prize at the end. Wild Tales director Damien Szifron provides several platforms for the central law enforcement characters to pontificate the importance of what they are doing to stop the present public menace. The actors squeeze every bit of seriousness they can, and you believe their motivations and intentions. Yet, when To Catch a Killer reaches its climax and it becomes the hidden villain’s turn to reveal their intentions, the suspense shamefully evaporates.
Read MoreOne True Loves has one of those paperback novel premises that can only seem to work as a screwball farce or a serious melodrama when brought to the big screen. Wouldn’t you know it, the movie is based on a book from New York Times best-selling author Taylor Jenkins Reid (Daisy Jones and the Six). The novelist was lucky enough to have the opportunity to adapt her own novel with her TV screenwriter husband Alex J. Reid.
Read MoreThere was a measure of true cleverness possible in inserting a throwback maverick character into the present day. Paint wanted to bend a vibe with fiction and flexed too far, to a place where its main character would not survive personally or professionally in the first place. The surrounding characters chipping away at the fraud underneath Carl Nargle– an arc amusingly not all that different from the esteemed Oscar-nominated TAR when you really think about it– exposed nothing we could not already see for ourselves.
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 MoreAs a feature film, Boston Strangler finds itself buried in the massive snowbank of true crime content available. Eager viewers have a buffet of binge-able rabbit holes, available in long and short forms, on dozens of channels and platforms at home. Held up against that docu-drama marketplace, a traditional two-hour fictionalized yarn playing in theaters feels nearly trite and tame by comparison, even if it dabbles with and challenges a theory or two about who really perpetrated these murders.
Read MoreEvery now and then, I get tabbed as the published film critic to contribute ideas on a movie-related question or topic for other websites. Recently, I feel like I was profiled for a second signature trait of mine. The publishers for NaturalTransplants.com must have seen my social media profile picture featuring a shorn head because they pitched me to name my Top 5 iconic bald movie characters. I’m not kidding when I say that I’ve had that exact list in mind for a while, so I couldn’t resist the assignment.
Read MoreThrough small world happenstance, I’ve come to know hosts Mike Osborn and Curtis Menke of the irreverent and laugh-filled podcast “Let’s Talk About Flix.” They are two college classmates split across Illinois, and I was introduced to them through a high school classmate of mine, who is cousins with Menke. I caught on to them early in their run, and they have been appointment listening ever since. On the side, I recruited them to join the Chicago Indie Critics group that I co-direct. I was honored to be asked on as their first-ever guest for their “guilty pleasures” month. For that excellent theme, I brought them 1997’s Anaconda.
Read MoreMany of those conspiracy theories are precisely outlandish enough for savvy Hollywood screenwriters to find pithy movie premises for an eternity. The truly fun part is that any single theory, with the right spin, could be crafted and played as a either comedic farce or a terrifying thriller with equal entertainment potential. With 88, filmmaker Thomas Ikimi, better known as Eromose, takes a rich conspiracy concept and runs with it.
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