Puncture Wastes A Promising Story On a Clumsy Screenplay

"Sometimes the brightest light comes from the darkest places" is an oft-repeated line throughout Puncture. It's one of a number of dialogue motifs throughout Chris Lopata's screenplay, which also includes a large number of food-based metaphors. Unfortunately, none of these recurring fixtures manage to amount to a thoroughly compelling courtroom drama. That's a shame given that Puncture is based on an interesting true story. A lawyer mired in drug addiction who also sought to take down hospitals that were jeopardizing medical workers by continuing to use bad needles. That's an intriguing set-up that doesn't get executed well.

Moneyball Is Even Better Than You Remember

I revisited Moneyball on a whim mostly because of how much Ad Astra had given me a hankering to watch other quality Brad Pitt star vehicles. Having seen the film twice in its original theatrical release, I was very familiar with Moneyball, but I hadn't seen in it in about eight years. It was time for a rewatch. Sometimes coming back to a movie years later reveals that a film is lesser than you remember it being, your growth as a consumer of a cinema makes the cracks in a film you loved more apparent. Luckily, rewatching Moneyball was not one of those experiences. In fact, I garnered a whole new level of appreciation for this excellent feature and the qualities that make it as engrossing as it is.

Dee Rees' Narrative Film Directorial Debut Pariah Vividly Realizes Coming-of-Age Queer Experiences

SPOILERS FOLLOW 

In my review for BlacKkKlansman last year, I mentioned how one virtue of the feature was how it was clearly made without any thought of placating or sugar-coating things for white viewers, it was about the stark reality of how racism permeates American society to this very day. A similar quality informs Dee Rees' 2011 feature Pariah, though in this case, it's a movie clearly made explicitly for and from a queer perspective. Pariah is a film exploring the turmoil that ensues when a family isn't accepting of their child's sexuality and benefits mightily from not wasting time to assure heterosexual viewers that "not all heterosexual people are like that" or similar platitudes. That's not what Pariah is here for. Its focus is bringing specifically queer experiences to a cinematic format of storytelling and it does that marvelously.

Who Let The Dogs Out? And Who Allowed Love on a Leash To Be Made?

Dziga Vertov's works have always been challenging and that's especially true of Love on a Leash, a hodgepodge of footage of a canine and a woman that, among many other unorthodox filmmaking touches, frequently eschews audio entirely over sequences that should typically have dialogue or music. Clearly, Vertov is using this mechanism to speak to the emptiness of the human condition, there is truly nothing in the souls of these characters so why should they be accompanied by sound or music? It's a bold approach to filmmaking that's accompanied by similarly off-kilter choices like returning to a pair of ducks swimming in a pond as a sort of visual motif. There's also a disjointed style of editing that sees entirely new sequences beginning before you even realize prior sequences were over.

The Ides of March Is A Shallow Exploration of American Politics That Wastes So Many Talented Actors

MASSIVE SPOILERS WITHIN!!

George Clooney is a great actor. He's usually always a charming presence in whatever he pops up in but he's especially stellar playing more troubled characters that serve as a subversion of his movie star persona, like in Up in the Air or in his outstanding voice work in Fantastic Mr. Fox. He also seems like a decent fella in real life and his 2005 directorial effort Good Night and Good Luck was a well-made piece of historical drama cinema. All of that being said, Clooney's attempts to direct and/or star in films that have some kind of sociopolitical message in the 2010s (Suburbicon, Money Monster, even Tomorrowland) have been a big o'l miss, Clooney always ends up being a part of films that have really nothing need to add to the conversation, they just add surface-level observations at best and downright nonsensical takes on real-world problems in the worst instances like Suburbicon.

Meek's Cutoff Is A Western Deconstruction Like No Other

As Meek's Cutoff opens, director Kelly Reichardt makes it apparent this movie will be adhering to a  transcendentalism style of filmmaking. Some of the core tenants of this filmmaking style, namely prolonged extended takes concentrated on minimal activity, turn out to be a perfect way to capture the experiences of the lead characters of Meek's Cutoff as they gradually make their way across the American frontier to an unspecified locale that's supposed to provide them all with prosperous riches. This is a journey that's arduous and slow with little in the way of actual progress to speak of so it's fitting that Reichardt opts to capture this voyage in a filming style that places an emphasis on slower pacing and minimalism.

Attack The Block Provides A Clever Twist On Alien Invasion Movies

2009 to 2012 was a strange era for American indie cinema. To make a long story short, back in 2008 a number of high-profile American movie studios, like Warner Independent Pictures, Miramax and Paramount Vantage, dedicated to releasing limited release fare shut down. The major studios did not move to take over releasing such films and there were no new indie-centric studios created to fill the gap. While 2013 saw a comeback of sorts begin for American indie fare, mainly because of a number of sleeper hits at the 2013 box office that reinvigorated limited release fare and especially the creation of studios like A24, Amazon Studios and Netflix, indie features that tried to break through the American marketplace from 2009 to 2012 were the ones who suffered due to this dark period for indie fare at the domestic box office.

Tucker & Dale vs. Evil Is A Mostly Successful Deconstruction of Horror Movie Stereotypes

Hillbillies are one of the prime stock stereotypes for villains in American horror cinema right up there with any sort of fictional entities like witches or ghosts and other real-life creations like creepy-looking dolls. Of course, unlike dolls or werewolves, people with physical appearances, mannerisms and voices that get referred to as hillbillies actually do exist and such a long-standing stereotype has certainly helped perpetuate the idea that everyone who would fit under the moniker of a hillbilly, in reality, is made in one exact mold. The 2011 horror comedy Tucker & Dale vs. Evil, which was written and directed by Eli Craig, looks to combat those long-standing stereotypes by doing a conventional horror movie from the perspective of the hillbilly characters the audience would normally think of as the adversaries.

We Need To Talk About How Harrowing And Excellent Lynne Ramsay's We Need To Talk About Kevin Is

How does one go in in the face of tragedy? When our conventional world is so shattered by unexpected events, it seems impossible to just keep on going with our normal lives. Tragedy has a way of just sticking around in our lives and there's no surefire way to cope with that. Over the years, we've had a large number of movies covering the process of trying to going on with our lives in the wake of tragedy, some of them rising to the level of greatness in their level of overall quality (for instance, Manchester By The Sea is one of the most realistic portraits of this process). But hands down, one of the best films covering this specific experience is Lynne Ramsey's 2011 motion picture We Need To Talk About Kevin. 

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives Is An Utterly Unique And Transfixing Feature

I know it'll sound a pretentious descriptor on par with "It's really a tone poem" or "The city is a character unto itself", but it does feel appropriate for me to note that Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives feels more like a dream mixed with a fairy tale than it does a traditional piece of cinema. Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 motion picture heavily utilizes the more abstract and fantastical nature that most dreams and fairy tales have with aplomb to create something thoroughly unpredictable (one can never tell just what heightened imagery the next scene might bring) as well as something emotionally powerful on an intimate level too, which, come to think of it, is where many particularly memorable fairy tales and even dreams tend to resonate.

You Should Press Pause On Passion Play

Back in, oh, I'd say...2010, I say an image from Passion Play in an issue of Entertainment Weekly with the publication promoting said image as "an exclusive first look" of an upcoming movie starring then-recent Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke and one of the lead characters of the Transformers movies. I simply assumed from that moment on that Passion Play would be a high-profile release only for the feature film to vanish off the face of the Earth afterward. It received a small May 2011 theatrical release in two locations that summoned up a massive $3,669 domestic gross and five years later I've finally managed to watch this movie.

The Infiltrator Review

Is Bryan Cranston just choosing his roles now depending on how much deceit his characters must exude? After playing Walter White for five excellent seasons on Breaking Bad, he's played Dalton Trumbo, a man who wrote screenplays in secret, and now, in his newest motion picture The Infiltrator, Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a man who regularly does undercover work (see where the deceit comes into play in this past?) for the U.S. Government. After a mission leaves him with a particularly nasty injury, he has the chance to retire...but he can't give up the chance to partake in a new mission that could take down tons of high-profile figures in the world of drug trafficking.

Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides Review (Classic Write-Up)

No one involved with Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides gave two shits about it. Normally, I'd refrain from engaging in the fallacy known as hasty generalization, but here, it's impossible to escape the deafening lack of vigor on display in everything from the acting, plot, action sequences, hell, even Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow (so entertaining even in the weakest parts of Dead Man's Chest) feels more often than not tired in this particular adventure, which is not the sort of impression you want your zany and unpredictable leading man to convey.

Young Adult Review (Classic Write-Up)

"Money can't buy happiness" as that old saying goes, and Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) could not be a better example of this phrase. She isn't at a Bill Gates-level of financial prosperity, but she's got her own book series going on and she was quite popular in high school. Yet, she feels emptiness inside, which she tries to combat by projecting a "holier-than-thou" attitude on all that cross her path. In order to further outrun her inner despair, Mavis is returning to her hometown to reconnect with an old flame, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), who she's convinced is her soulmate. The only problem; Buddy is happily married with a kid. This is the sort of thing Mavis considers to be merely a bump in the road to her inevitable happiness.

The Trailer For Irrational Man Brings Woody Allen And Joaquin Phoenix Together

Seeing Midnight In Paris back in 2011 is easily one of my favorite theatrical experiences ever. I had never seen a Woody Allen movie before, so witnessing the writer/directors work in the context of that endlessly charming 2011 movie was quite an adventure. That sort of memory isn't the only reason I'm excited for Allens next movie, Irrational Man; this new feature also pairs up two of my favorite actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone! A trailer for this film has been unveiled, and you can watch it below!

A Little Bit Stronger Is Incredible, Country Strong Is Terrible. It's An Interesting Dichotomy

Welcome to a new bi-weekly column called When Good Songs Happen To Bad Movies, in which I look at pretty well done songs that just so happened to debut in more subpar features.

First off, I'll freely admit this one's a bit of a cheat, since A Little Bit Stronger debuted as a single in September 2010, a few months before Country Strong's release, but it was still released again at a later date as a single from the movie, so I'll count it for this column. Plus, it gives me a chance to talk about one of the "sleeper" bad movies of recent years, which really deserves a more prominent reputation for it's awfulness: Country Strong.

Melancholia Review (Classic Write-Up)

When The Stars Align

Well, this is gonna be tricky. That was my first thought when I set myself on the task to review Lars Von Triers 2011 feature Melancholia. This is an unorthodox film that mixes a humongous event (the end of the human race) with a minuscule scope, setting its sights on two sisters as the vessel to tell the tale of humanities final days. To put in terms so simple they feel sorta insulting for a movie of this complexity: some of it works, some of it doesn't, but at least it all, in some shape or form, leaves an impression on you.

Focus Review

The Con, The Chef, The Wife And His Lover

There's a lot of money stolen, exchanged and gambled in Focus, a con artist feature that's kind of a drama, sort of a comedy at times, and mostly functional without ever being memorable. I doubt anyone will get bored by it, but I also doubt you'll be quoting it weeks later or contemplating the more intricate aspects of it's performances. It's the kind of movie that's born to be sold for five dollars at your local Kroger, but that doesn't mean Focus is without it's distinctive charms.

Sex Tape Review

I Just Watched Sex Tape! (SEX!) It Wasn't That Goooo-ooood!!

I'm pretty the entire existence of Sex Tape came when Columbia Pictures executives were trying to pitch new projects for Cameron Diaz and Jason Segel to star in after the success of the 2011 comedy Bad Teacher. One of the ideas mentioned was "a comedy about a sex tape" and they worked backwards from that phrase to conjure up a story. That's my theory for this features origins, and I'm sticking to it. After all, this films slipshod quality does a fine job supporting my claims.

The Trailer For Terrence Malicks New Movie, Knight Of Cups, Has Christian Bale Doing Things

When I saw Tree Of Life in 2011, it was the first Terrance Malick film I'd ever seen. I had no idea what to expect, except for dinosaurs, I knew dinosaurs were in it. Well, I got the dinos, but nothing much else of substance. The film was ambitious, I'll give it that, and the cinematography was beautiful. But it felt like it was trying too hard to be impactful without doing anything actually impactful. It sort of became blur of visuals after a while.