Two Sides of One Man Struggle to Coexist in Beach Rats

Frankie (Harris Dickinson) has a secret. He spends his night surfing internet chatrooms for gay men looking for hookups. It's all part of Frankie exploring his sexuality. Any person exploring this side of themselves should feel glorious getting to touch upon new parts of themselves. Unfortunately, Frankie is daunted by how his family, and especially his ultra-macho friends would take this news. So he keeps this side of himself buried away. Frankie remains firmly in the closet save for brief indulgences like nighttime sex sessions with men on those internet chatrooms. Frankie hopes to draw a firm line between "the real world" and his suppressed homosexuality. How long can the divide last? What lengths will Frankie go to keep this part of himself a secret?

My Life as a Courgette Uses Stylized Animation To Make Something That Taps Into Reality

More live-action filmmakers should give animated filmmaking a try. After all, animation isn't a filmmaking technique from another planet, it's just another way to tell a story. When masters of live-action cinema give animation a spin such as with Gore Vebrinski with Rango or Steven Spielberg with The Adventures of Tintin, the results can be dynamite. The imagination of these auteurs can be fully unleashed in the limitless domain of animation. See also Celina Sciamma, the writer/director of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, who penned the screenplay for My Life as a Courgette. Her gift for exploring people's internal struggles is utilized poignantly here in a tale that fully takes advantage of the unique aspects of animation.

Homophobia Creates an Inescapable Cage For The Main Characters of The Wound

Like many films exploring the perspectives of queer individuals in societies that refuse to accept who they are, The Wound is a movie all about identity. Directed by John Trengrove and shot in South Africa, The Wound is the story of Xolani (Nakhane), who is hired to serve as the guide for Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini) during a sacred initiation ceremony meant to turn boys into men. The adults in these ceremonies have a very clear idea of what a proper grown man should be and these rituals help mold their children into fitting that idea, one that does not have any place for the presence of homosexuality. At first, Xolani goes through the motions of his now regular annual job of being a mentor figure for a new kid, but he soon learns that Kwanda, like himself, is gay. This, along with Xolani's secret relationship with fellow mentor Vija (Bongile Mantsai).

Make Sure To Spend Some Time With The Creative Horror Comedy Happy Death Day

Though so many popular horror films (namely the Evil Dead movies) fall under the categorization of horror comedies, they haven't been much of a moneymaker at the domestic box office. That might be because too many modern-day examples of the trend are helmed by filmmakers who don't have the sense of tonal balance as, say, Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and end up going too far in embracing the comedy side of that genre pairing, which can leave the horror feeling underwhelming. Then again, functioning more of a wacky dark comedy than as a straight-up horror film can have its benefits, just ask Happy Death Day.

Last Flag Flying Is The Newest Thoughtful & Heartfelt Accomplishment From Director Richard Linklater

Some of the most famous movies made by director Richard Linklater tend to center on youthful protagonists, like the High Schoolers in Dazed and Confused, the college-aged fraternity boys of Everybody Wants Some!!! or the lead character who inhabits numerous stages of youth in Boyhood. Linklater has a knack for writing both realistic and dramatically involving younger characters, but Last Flag Flying shows he doesn't lose his talents as a screenwriter when he's dealing with older individuals (fellow entries in Linklater's dynamite 2010's run Before Midnight and Bernie are similar showcases for this), on the contrary, he seems to thrive when given the opportunity to explore more life-experienced human beings.

Agnes Varda and JR Go On A Road Trip Packed With Engrossing Kindness In Faces Places

Iconic director Agnes Varda started out her filmmaking career with La Pointe Courte, a sobering look at a relationship in crisis, but her newest film is a complete 180 from 1955 feature in terms of tone. That newest directorial effort of hers is called Faces Places and one just feels pure joy from watching it. There are few movies I could say this about without some kind of caveat (The Muppets is one of the only other scant few titles I can think of to earn that distinction), but Faces Places really is that enjoyable to watch. From its humorous opening sequence establishing various ways that it's two lead characters did not meet to its heartfelt conclusion, Faces Places keeps a smile on your face and a sincere sense of kindness emanating from every fiber of its being.

The Best Aspects of Ferdinand Stand In Sharp Contrast To Its More Derivative Elements

Blue Sky Studios has been producing animated movies for sixteen years now and they're currently occupying what one might call an awkward phase in their history. The studio's big cash cow, the Ice Age movies, has finally run out of gas and their second attempt to create a big franchise in Rio never really took off after puttering out after two movies. Meanwhile, they're still producing only one movie a year, far less than even PIXAR who've been able to do two movies a year twice now, and their recent films that aren't The Peanuts Movie have failed to really take hold of the general public. They also seem to be struggling creatively with recent films like Rio and Epic that aspire to be bold and unique but end up succumbing to some of the more conventional traits of modern-day American animated fare.

The Painless But Messy LEGO Ninjago Movie Needed to Show More Discipline In It's Storytelling

Walt Disney once said "For every laugh, there should be a tear." A large swath of modern animated family movies have taken that axiom to hear, particularly the films made by PIXAR which frequently leave adults sobbing as much, if not more so, than their young offspring. The LEGO Ninjago Movie is an example of taking this saying too far, an odd occurrence given how well the other two LEGO movies (The LEGO Movie and The LEGO Batman Movie) were at deftly mixing wacky humor with heart. But that's just happened, as this feature film adaptation of the LEGO Ninjago toys shoves far too many badly-executed attempts at tugging on the heartstrings into its story.

The Breadwinner Puts Traditional Storytelling And Hand-Drawn Animation To Good Use

The importance of stories is the foundation on which The Breadwinner chooses to build itself and it proves to be to be quite the strong foundation. Hailing from Cartoon Saloon, the Ireland-based animation studio behind Oscar-nominated features like The Secret of Kells and Song of The Sea, The Breadwinner begins by establishing the relationship between father Nurullah (Ali Badshah) and his young daughter Parvana (Saara Chaudry). While selling items in a local marketplace to make a living for their family, Nurullah attempts to educate his daughter, frequently through the method of telling her stories. Neither the attempts at education or him telling her these stories interest Parvana all that much.

The Remarkably Transfixing The Florida Project Is A Masterful Exercise In Humanization

There are two worlds constantly at war with each other in The Florida Project. The first of these worlds is that of the world of childhood, the other is the world of adulthood. In the world of childhood, especially in the summertime period of the year that The Florida Project takes place in, the greatest concern a child has is what exactly kind of fun they can get into next. The residents of the world of adulthood try their hardest to shield the children from fully grasping all of the horrors in our world. Though exceptions exist, young children only get the faintest glimpses of the financial struggles and other problems their parents go through to ensure they have basic necessities like a roof over their head.

Good Actors Try To Work With An Uneven Script In The Biopic Drama Marshall

Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, finally got a biopic movie to headline. Instead of chronicling him being chosen for the Supreme Court, the movie Marshall concentrates on a 1940 court case that Thurgood Marshall (played by Chadwick Boseman here) served as a lawyer in. This court case involved Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) being accused of raping a wealthy socialite, Elanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), a court case that seems to have the odds stacked against it, especially when Marshall, being an out of state lawyer dispatched by the NAACP, is forbidden from speaking during the trial, leaving all the in-court defense to Sam Friedman (Josh Gad).

Step Has Got Impressive Dance Moves And Emotionally Resonant Sequences To Spare

How was Step not a bigger deal in its theatrical release back in August 2017? I know documentaries typically struggle to garner mainstream approval at the domestic box office but the film itself is like the coolest inspirational sports movie premise that actually happened! One gets to witness real people struggle in their pursuit of an education and then find varying individual forms of triumph! It's a fascinating feel-good piece of cinema that totally feels like it could have been a major word-of-mouth phenomenon with the proper marketing. Even if it didn't get the reception it should have received in its theatrical release, I am here to tell you today that Step is indeed an awesome uplifting movie.

The Process of Cristian Mungiu's Graduation Is Not Without Dire Consequences

How far would you go to help your child? It's a moral quandary that comes up a lot in movies, but typically such movies face that question in the form of a thriller or an action movie (the latter type of presentation typically stars Liam Neeson). For Romanian director Cristian Mungiu's newest movie Graduation, he decides to explore this question in the confines of a grim drama, one that's heavy on realistic conversations and bleak storytelling. Graduation follows the lengths a father will go to in order to help his child not by showing the father fighting off an army of kidnappers but rather by trying to get his child into a good college so that she can have a better future.

A Wistful Take On Life Is Beautifully Realized In Lucky

Some of my favorite movies ever are simply laid-back movies following a normal human being going about their lives over the course of a few days. When you do those type of films right, you get something just so riveting, a cinematic replication of either the world we live in everyday or a glimpse into an authentic portrait of a world we're unfamiliar with. Want a great recent example of this strain of cinema done well? Look at Lucky, a small-scale dialogue-driven drama that serves as both a star vehicle for the late great character actor Harry Dean Stanton as well as the directorial debut for John Carroll Lynch.

Sequences Set In The Past Work Better For Wonderstruck Than Ones Set In 1977

For years, the norm was that books adapted into movies were typically brought to the silver screen with minimal, if there was any at all, assistance from the author of the original text. Perhaps because of long-time dissatisfaction with how these works were adapted or perhaps as a way to mimic the success Marvel Comics had with taking control of film adaptations of their own characters, authors like Mark Millar, Seth Grahame-Smith and especially Patrick Ness (who adapted his own books A Monster Calls and Chaos Walking for the big screen) have recently become more involved in how their works become translated to the world of cinema.

An Inability To Be More Introspective Hinders Darkest Hour Greatly

Winston Churchill certainly has been a popular figure in pop culture lately, hasn't he? The likes of Michael Gambon, Brian Cox and John Lithgow have all portrayed him in major roles on various film and television programs over the last two years. Add the Joe Wright-directed Darkest Hour as the newest piece of evidence that Winston Churchill is having a resurgence in his modern-day pop culture presence as Gary Oldman, with the aid of extensive makeup work, becomes the newest actor to portray this former British Prime Minister who played a crucial role in a number of events during World War II.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer Slaughters Normalcy With It's Depraved Farcical Storytelling. That's A Compliment.

If you saw 2016's excellent dark comedy The Lobster, then you're fully aware how much writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos loves to weave tales heavy on weirdness and people committing ever-escalating acts of depravity in the service of an extended metaphor. He keeps that spirit very much alive for his newest movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which is akin to The Lobster as well as last year's The Square in terms of being a dark comedy that keeps daring the audience to look away from the various hideous acts occuring on-screen. So utterly unconventional is The Killing of a Sacred Deer that I imagine writers Yorgo Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou started their first writing session with this simple statement:

Bill Morrison Makes A Captivating Portrait of The Past With Dawson City: Frozen Time

As a lover of film, the lack of care that was given by early 20th century individuals into preserving many of the earliest pieces of cinema is utterly heartbreaking. A number of motion pictures that were immensely popular in their day and age have been lost to the ravages of time thanks to the carelessness of the people handling them (the fact that such films were exhibited on easily flammable film didn't help matters of course). So much of the earliest history of cinema has been lost, a devastating occurrence that Bill Morrison's documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time chronicles by taking the viewer on an extensive voyage to Canada in the last few years of the 19th century. 

A Fun Horror Movie Homage Awaits In The Void

It's good for an artist to know where the strengths in their work are. You need to be cognizant of the flaws too, obviously, but once you recognize what traits you're really excelling at, you can polish those specific traits into tip-top shape and try to orient yourself in the direction of those areas where you manage to work so well in. For The Void, a Canadian indie horror film financed through an IndieGoGo page, it knows right off the bat that it's greatest strengths lie in it's macabre creature designs and the practical effects used to bring those designs to life. Thus, those are the two facets of it's production that receive the greatest emphasis and the feature is all the better for it.

Mermaids! Monstrous Murder! Musical Numbers! It's All Here In The Lure!

Remember that brief period in the early 2010's when we had gritty reimaginings of fairy tales? It didn't last long, mostly because more classical retellings of those fairy tales proved to be far more financially lucrative, but for a moment, we got just enough of these titles to qualify as a mini-trend in American cinema. Jack The Giant Slayer, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Snow White & The Huntsman all emerged as attempts to rework children's fairy tales into dark PG-13 or R-rated cinema. In the end though, most of these attempts to be "adult" just ended up feeling derivative of other movies or tv shows and resulted in lackluster motion pictures (I do remember Giant Slayer being decent, to be fair).