Our main actors, the film’s only two and ambitious pairing at that, step to the occasion to address this microcosm with a sliding range of bravery and humor. While playing pretty aligned to their types, Duplass and Brown both generate and confront their fair share of WTF moments playing off each other during the compounding crisis. Naturally, viewers will be waiting for cracks of composure to arrive.
Read MoreWhen all the created entanglements and questions start to topple over in the labeled Part III of The Lesson, the calamities come to a head for a proper mystery. Smartly and economically with both budget and time in a very strong debut feature, MacKeith and Troughton avoid the gaudiness of involving other external factors like the press or police. Stepping through the stale air, playful woodwinds of Emma. composer Isobel Waller-Bridge’s score, and the skeleton-filled closets of the idyllic Sinclair property is all this film needs to squeeze nerves and keep viewers guessing where the comeuppance is coming.
Read MoreThe Crusades reminds us that seemingly every generation of teenagers has an extreme party movie that seeks to display all the unhinged wanton behavior that festers behind the confines of school responsibilities and juvenile expectations. From Animal House to American Pie, you can pace a culture’s timeline by its rising and falling raunch level. Step forward to see that there are two ranges of perspectives that go into those types of movies.
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 MoreNevertheless, the murderous glee factor of The Wrath of Becky never fizzles out. The movie is super tight, unraveling its mayhem in 83 minutes and change, where four of those minutes are logos and credits. Not a second is wasted on fluff. With origins out of the way and better villainy present, this is a rare sequel that counts as a noticeable improvement from its predecessor, complete with an open door for more chapters.
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 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 MoreFast-forward from Steve Zahn’s hey-day. Add a quarter-century of mileage to his bread-and-butter manchild buddy type and do what too few filmmakers have done over the years: Give Steve Zahn a lead part. Take his usual brand of rootless screw-up and give it central focus and real anchors. Then, let Steve’s charm radiate fully. Gringa rewards this actor’s worth with a real chance.
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 MoreTo say Showing Up is watching paint dry or, in the case, clay dry is far too mean. Quiet is one thing and introspective is another. Do you relish the glacial anticipation and personal payoff of creative culmination or are you just showing up to the art show at the end, as characters do here, for the wine and cheese.
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 MoreAll at once, this introductory mindset of dedication and gallows humor is both plucky and fatalistic. Exposing both curiosity and anxiety, Space Oddity inelegantly wrestles with those two prevailing traits. The realistic science fiction of its premise and the sunny gaze of the Rhode Island setting swirl up the whimsy. Lo and behold, we find out that quaintness has a limit when it comes to fulfilling the human condition.
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