Luce Is Morally Complex And Fascinating Fare

The titular lead character of Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) is an ideal High School student. The adopted son of Amy (Naomi Watts) and Peter Edgar (Tim Roth) is in every extracurricular you can think of, he's a great speaker, he gets along equally well with his fellow students as he does with his teachers. Well, most of his teachers at least. Luce doesn't really get along well with his English teacher, Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer). Up to this point, Luce's just been mildly annoyed with his teacher. But things take a turn for the worse when Wilson calls Amy into her classroom to inform her that her son has written an extremely disturbing and violent essay and has also been keeping illegal fireworks in his locker.

Ma Is Best When It Gets Messed-Up and When It Comes To Octavia Spencer's Performance

The writer of Superhero Movie just wrote Chernobyl, one of the most thoughtful TV shows in ages, and one of the two dudes behind Movie 43 just directed a Best Picture-winning movie, so sure, why shouldn't the director of The Help, Tate Taylor, transition over into directing micro-budget trashy horror movies like Ma? Taylor hopping into this genre of filmmaking produces a feature that's honestly average in most regards but does produce its share of fun off-kilter moments. Whenever it dares to get strange and messed up, Ma does have a spark of life to it, even if most of it tends to be more rudimentary than disturbing. 

Water You Waiting For? Go See The Thoughtful And Engrossing Romantic Monster Movie Drama The Shape of Water

Fairy tales have always been used to impart larger ideas regarding the societies they originated in within the confines of something palatable to the general public and Guillermo Del Toro, a fellow whose filmography clearly indicates a love for fairy tales, has used his movies that are heavily informed by fairy tales of old as ways to explore all kinds of weighty ideas or societally relevant concepts. The Devil's Backbone is ostensibly a ghost story but it's also a tale of how people show off their true selves in times of war while his project most explicitly evocative of fairy tales, Pan's Labyrinth, is set in the real world conflict of the Spanish Civil War. Even his movies about robot and monsters punching each other takes time to demonstrate how walls dividing countries only create more problems, a concept that's become all the more relevant as the years go by.

Gifted Is Far From Original But It Has Its Moments And Proves (Once Again) That Chris Evans Has Dramatic Acting Chops

Chris Evans is so assured and natural in his multiple performances as Captain America that I think we all take for granted just how good he is as a performer to make that character (which many in the public had dismissed as a jingoistic one-note caricature before the 2011 Captain America film) feel so real and dramatically investable. You can see the guy's talent as an actor in plenty of other works too, including Sunshine (which way more people need to see!), Snowpiercer (ditto) and in his small but hilarious role as Lucas Lee in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Evans gets to flex his dramatic muscles once more in the new Marc Webb drama Gifted.

Skip The Shack And Go Stay At The Love Shack (Baby, Love Shack!) Instead

In terms of the general type of quality found in the Christian movie subgenre, The Shack is slightly better than average, which means, for general cinema, it lands slightly below mediocre. That's a drastic improvement over the likes of the two God's Not Dead movies, but it's still plagued by plenty of sins, er, flaws, of its own. Based upon a book I've never heard of but a lot of people I know just can't stop raving about, The Shack attempts to separate itself from many other recent Christian movies by tackling some darker material in its plot, particularly within the confines of a prologue that seems like it could easily serve as a supervillain origin story.

Hidden Figures Is A Total Charmer Of A Movie With A Strong Cast

When ya think about it for even a microsecond, the achievements in space exploration done by NASA truly are incredible, some of the best accomplishments done by our species in the 21st century. We've been probing heretofore unknown territories, truly going, to quote Star Trek, "where no man has gone before". Tragically, NASA has seen massive budget cuts and what not in the decades past but Hidden Figures takes place in an era where we were all invested in NASA on a patriotic level, where it's accomplishments were simultaneously demonstrations of what kind of glorious achievements our country could grasp.

Five Actors Who Deserve Better Roles

There are some actors who get all kinds of great roles of all shapes and sizes, but what about the talented actors who just can't seem to get the kind of work they more than deserve? Thanks to renewed discussion about one of the actors in this article, I've decided to examine five actors who deserve more and better work than they're currently getting in Hollywood.

The Divergent Series: Insurgent Review

To Live And Divergent In LA

In the year since Divergent was released, so much has changed for the cast. Shailiene Woodley (along with Divergent co-star Ansel Elgort) dazzle in The Fault In Our Stars, Miles Teller starred in one of the best movies of the past few years, Whiplash, and Theo James did.....uh, I think he signed on to star in a reboot of the Underworld movies. Simply put, these guys have done some great work since the first Divergent film, which makes seeing them return to this franchise disappointing, especially considering how lackluster it is.

Black Or White Review

A Race To The Bottom

Kevin Costner has had one of the more bizarre cinematic career resurgences I've seen in a while. while someone like Matthew McConaughey has built his comeback on the likes of True Detective, The Lincoln Lawyer, Magic Mike, Dallas Buyers Club and Interstellar, Costner seemed to get a massive boost solely from a Hatfields & McCoys miniseries. After appearing in only two movies from 2008-2012, he's managed to pop up in five different movies over the past year and a half, with two more to come this year. The reason such a comeback puzzles me is because none of the performances I've seen (I haven't watched the aforementioned Hatfields & McCoys miniseries) were that good. I've never seen him give a wretched performance or anything, but two of his 2014 films wound up being among the worst of last year.