One of the best tricks a caper movie can pull is getting its viewers to root for the criminal. Typically, we’re pining for the righteous downfall, not a lucky escape, from the long arm of the law. Thanks to a very clever and uncommon twist that drops early on, Susie Searches has you, for a good while anyway, shaking your pom-poms and crossing your fingers for the guilty party. Riding that scandalous plot wave makes for an entertaining yarn of dark comedy.
Read MoreBelle is a striking new interpretation of Beauty and the Beast that presents that type of barren simplicity to a tale as old as time. With a rustic storytelling scythe, Silicon Beach writer-director Max Gold chops down the tall grass of finery and strips away the usual imperial accouterments. Melding the intimations of fantasy and horror, Belle gets down to the nitty-gritty of the classic saga’s dramatic center and its truthfully terrifying undercurrents.
Read MoreThis isn’t a movie presenting one day of nice gestures from a well-meaning old man to an off-course kid where all is better. Tiger Within spans several months where even Samuel’s greatest efforts are not a mystical salve for Casey’s personal fractures. Unlike some of the popular mentoring movies, Tiger Within promises no complete transformation because it knows full well no such automatic correction exists. What it can promise is its own best foot forward, and that’s happily plenty.
Read MoreOur 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.
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