The Cast Steals The Show And Then Some In The Fun But Visually Derivative Ocean's 8

Director Gary Ross proves to be a far better filmmaker helming Ocean's 8 compared to his last two directorial efforts The Hunger Games and Free State of Jones, both of which, particularly the latter disaster, suffered from amateurish direction that heavily stilted the already struggling stories they were bringing to life. However, Ross as a filmmaker still finds himself struggling with Ocean's 8 as he (along with the cinematography by Eigil Bryld and some of the editing by Juliette Welfling) channels the visual style and rhythm of Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven trilogy in a manner that ends up feeling evocative of those three films without ever being fully accurate or satisfying. It's so familiar yet distinctly not the same, it's like, as Jenny Nicholson once put it in describing a Porg toy from Target, "...waking up to everything in your house shifted a few inches to the right."

The Visuals In Valerian And The City Of A Thousand Planets Are Glorious But Why Did They Have To Be In Service Of Such A Clunky Story?

Twenty years after The Fifth Element premiered to initially mixed reviews and then a massive cult following, Luc Besson has returned to the world of gonzo science-fiction, this time adapting the late 1960's French comic by Jean-Claude Mezieres that Besson loved as a kid and managed to serve as an inspiration for his own The Fifth Element as well as plenty of other high-profile science-fiction projects. Fifty years after that comic originally premiered, it's gotten its own big-budget French movie (though the dialogue is entirely English save for extra-terrestrial languages), one that attempts to replicate the artistic success of The Fifth Element.

Home Review

Home (But Not So) Alone

The world of sci-fi animaton is surprisingly sparse of huge successes, despite the presence of huge hits like WALL-E and Big Hero 6. Some of the biggest box office bombs of modern animation, whether they be deserved (Mars Needs Moms and Planet 51) or unwarranted (Titan A.E.) can be found here, and while early box office returns suggest Home will easily find it's way into the former category, it's also got more than enough flaws to come up as lacking entry in this subgenre of the animation medium.