I’m quite the generous reviewer, as you may have noticed. However, I’ve learned that when my inspiration is lacking, it’s usually because the film I’m reviewing isn’t as exceptional as I’d initially believed. Such is the case for Set It Up, directed by Claire Scanlon. A cute film, just not an overly exciting one.
To paraphrase Josh Brolin’s character Matt Graver in Sicario: Day of the Soldado – “20 years ago, the biggest export for Mexican Cartels through the US border was cocaine, and today? People.”.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom delivers all you’ve come to expect from the blockbuster series, and more, with director J.A. Bayona’s imprint all over this sequel.
Ideal Home is a lighthearted comedy about a bickering couple who suddenly find themselves thrust into parenthood, that comfortably finds a home somewhere in the feel-good realm of 2006’s Little Miss Sunshine.
Chilean director Sebastián Lelio offers a forbidden love story set within the insular context of an Orthodox Jewish community in his first English-language feature, Disobedience.
I like to think that I am a child at heart since my eagerness to climb trees and run through sprinklers has not dissipated at all despite me being well into my twenties. However, it seems I’ve got nothing on the guys (and gals) in the new release movie Tag.
Upgrade pays homage to a mixture of 80’s sci-fi and action films as well as giving itself its own heart and soul, which in a way, leaves it a mixed bag of some greatly executed ideas and some equally poor ones.
John and Ella Spencer sally forth on an impromptu geriatric road trip bound for ‘The Ernest Hemingway Home’ in Key West, Florida (between Miami and Cuba), in their RV named The Leisure Seeker.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s reboot of the 1960’s film Ocean’s Eleven was an overwhelming box office success grossing over $450 million worldwide when it opened in 2001. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, who’d won an Oscar that very same year for Traffic, the star-studded affair was a stylistic shift from the traditional heist film with personalities driving audience intrigue.
I often try to imagine what it would’ve been like for the audience who first saw The Exorcist at the cinema in 1973. I wasn’t born then, but it is well documented that the film generated intense reactions, even mass hysteria. A palpable fear that resonated deeply with its audience and sent a gurgle through the collective unconscious of the age. Hereditary is probably the first horror movie I’ve seen at the cinema that has a comparable sense of dread. It’s certainly the most chilling and psychologically disturbing film I’ve seen in over a decade.
Gringo is reminiscent of the early Tarantino and Coen-brothers films that dominated the mid-90’s. Sadly, director Nash Edgerton lacks the skill and finesse to bring the multiple plots and double-crossing characters together with the same style.
Falling in love across continents is the going thing these days, what with technology and travel making it that much easier to maintain long distance relationships. Ibiza captures what new-age romance is all about; an intriguing mix of modern millennialism combined with the more traditional notion of love at first sight.
Director Philip Gelatt’s They Remain is a horror movie, that sadly, in spite of a strong build and bucketloads of potential, fails to drench the audience with its much-promised fear.
We meet awkward teenager Jeffrey Dahmer in 1970’s Milwaukee, and as we view his troubled life through the eyes of his peers in high-school, we learn that there is much more to him than one would expect.
Solo: A Star Wars Story recalls the early days of one of the franchise’s most beloved characters, Han Solo, played here by Alden Ehrenreich. It’s an entertaining romp through the Star Wars extended universe, but fails to deliver anything fresh to audiences.
In Times of Fading Light is an intimate, slow building portrait of a family of German communists, during the tumultuous, typically jubilant period of German history when the Berlin Wall came down.
