Ryan Reynolds Delivers Unexpectedly Intense Acting in Buried

Before he made it big as Deadpool, Ryan Reynolds was a common sight in indie movies. In fact, in the last three years before he got to play a comics-accurate version of The Merc With a Mouth, Reynolds worked with indie directors like Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck, Marjane Satrapi and Atom Egoyan. I'll always wonder, if Deadpool had never happened or even flopped, would Reynolds have just kept on doing these types of indie movies? Would he have just quietly fizzled out doing these movies or would he have eventually found the role that catapulted him to the status of indie darling? We'll never know now that Reynolds is busy doing Deadpool movies until the end of time.

Splice Is An Appropriately Unnerving Creature Feature

For the weekend of June 4, 2010, you had a couple of options in terms of new release movies. You could watch Killers, a Katherine Heigl/Ashton Kutcher romantic-comedy. You could also partake in Marmaduke, the newest attempt by Hollywood to make that Alvin and the Chipmunks lightning strike twice. Then there was Get Him to the Greek, starring Russell Brand (man, the movie stars of 2010 are such distant memories they might as well be the movie stars of 1920). Or you could watch Splice, an original horror film from Vincenzo Natali that goes in some...let's say strange directions. It's certainly not an ordinary film but I found it consistently engaging, even if only on a "What will they do next?" level.

The Twists Keep On Coming at a Riveting Rate in Mother

SPOILERS FOR MOTHER AND OTHER BONG JOON-HO MOVIES AHEAD


There's so much to love in the work of Bong Joon-ho but I especially love how unpredictable they are. Any old hack can populate a story with all kinds of easy twists and turns but in the works of this auteur filmmaker, you can see the ideal manner in which to pull off unexpected storytelling turns. The twists in Joon-ho's work actually have a major impact on the story itself, for one thing, they're not just around for the sake of having twists, they tend to reinforce themes in the story (like the twists in Parasite or Snowpiercer) and especially to emphasize the complex sense of morality that runs throughout his entire filmography. For example, though he may be a fighter for the little guy and played by Captain America himself, the lead character of Snowpiercer is no typical stalwart protagonist. 

Winter's Bone Propelled Jennifer Lawrence To Stardom And For Good Reason

Let's go back in time to 2010. It's the start of another decade. The iPad is the newest gizmo from the mind of apple. Kate Gosselin is trying to make Kate Plus Eight a thing. The House That Built Me is dominating the Billboard Country Music charts. And in June 2010, Winter's Bone got released to widespread acclaim and in the process, launched the career of one Jennifer Lawrence. Only the fourth movie she ever appeared in, Winter's Bone immediately propelled Lawrence onto the pop culture radar and her place on that radar would be cemented in the years to come with major hits like The Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook.

Dogtooth Is Weird, Warped And Well-Made. In Other Words, It's A Yorgos Lanthimos Movie.

Though he had directed two feature-length motion pictures before it, Dogtooth was the movie that really put Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on the map thanks to its widespread acclaim and a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. The same kind of rampant dark humor, understated line deliveries and grim tone that permeates the man's later directorial efforts like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are around in Dogtooth in abundance. In fact, Dogtooth feels very much like a precursor to The Killing of a Sacred Deer, not just in how it focuses on a family unit but also in how it feels like Lanthimos constantly dancing on the razor's edge of just how far he can push his actors and viewers with all the warped scenarios he puts them through.

Predators Has Creativity To Spare But Struggles To Use Said Creativity Properly

Nearly twenty years after Predator 2, the Predator franchise came back to life (though these aliens had appeared in the two Alien vs. Predator movies) in 2010 under the eye of producer Robert Rodriguez for a movie whose tone couldn't have been farther away from the cornball nature of Predator 2 unless it had maybe been Cabaret But With Predators. Predators was intended to be a grim n' gritty tale that took the Predator series into outer space and followed a wholly new cast (though, like Predator 2, there's a brief verbal reference to the events of the very first Predator movie) of characters trying to survive being hunted by these extra-terrestrial creatures.

This Is Gonna Sound So Weird, I Know, But I Wish Black Swan Was Much Freakier Than It Is

Remember how Black Swan was an actual box office phenomenon? This thing grossed well over $100 million domestically despite being such a crazy horror film that frequently relies on the kind of stylized atmosphere that audiences have rejected in many other motion pictures. It's odd, it's crazy, it gives ya a little hope for the world that something this strange can find such an audience. It's also a movie that obviously resonated with plenty of people too given its sheer ubiquity in pop culture since its initial release, though I must say I'm the Grumpy Gus of this scenario because I found Black Swan to be among director Darren Aronofsky's weaker movies, though it's still got plenty of virtues to extol.

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.

The Third Season Of Fargo Offers Dark Themes, Bold Storytelling And Loads Of Memorable Performances

MASSIVE SPOILERS FOR FARGO SEASON THREE AHEAD

Noah Hawley is an ambitious man, ain't he? Three years ago, he voyaged into the creatively perilous world of TV show adaptations of movies by making a TV show out of the 1996 movie Fargo and created something utterly fantastic in the process. For the second season of that program, he brought the proceedings to the 1970's, widened the scope and managed to deliver something even better than that first season. Just earlier this year, Hawley was the creative head on another FX drama called Legion that managed to fully embrace trippy storytelling and created maybe the best superhero TV show of all-time in the process.

Extraneous Raunch And Viagra Weakens The Charming Romance In Love & Other Drugs

Back in the late 2000's, specifically around 2009 through 2011, the American romantic comedy took a detour into the raunchy and R-rated. It's not like no film in the subgenre had gone to such terrain before, but the likes of The Ugly Truth, Friends With Benefits and No Strings Attached decided to unleash more nudity and F-bombs in the world of romantic comedies in order to entice moviegoers and keep things fresh (a friend of mine smartly pointed out how this trend was also likely a response to Judd Apatow's mid-2000's R-rated comedies like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up which had major romantic components to them). Ironically, the most financially lucrative romantic-comedy from this epoch was the PG-13 feature The Proposal!

I Love You, Phillip Morris Review (Classic Write-Up)

At the tail end of the first decade of the 21st century, Jim Carrey found himself in a state of cinematic experimentation. The 2005 feature Fun With Dick And Jane would turn out to be one of only three PG-13 comedies the actor would star in in the next decade, a shocking development considering how that exact type of movie had been his bread and butter in box office juggernauts like The Mask, Dumb And Dumber and Bruce Almighty. In the years since that Dean Parisot vehicle, he's participated in familiar territory like family movies, but has mainly stayed on the sidelines to participate in supporting roles in box office non-starters like Kick-Ass 2 and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

Steve Jobs Review

Now that I'm juuust old enough to put my younger years into a larger context, it strikes me that 2010 may have been one of the most formative cinematic years of my entire life. That specific period of 365 days brought out a number of important films that shaped me, including Toy Story 3, The Other Guys and the first Coen Brothers, Christopher Nolan and Edgar Wright films I saw on the big screen (hell, I could ramble on for hours on the personal importance of just Scott Pilgrim vs. The World!). Another film from that year that has cemented itself in my subconscious? The Social Network.

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.

Tim Burton Is Directing A Live-Action Dumbo Movie. I Swear, This Isn't An Onion Headline

Disney's recent surge of converting their classic animated films to live-action/CGI features has only been done twice (I'd say count Oz The Great And Powerful, but it's not technically an extension of a Disney movie), but those two films were Alice In Wonderland and Maleficent, which both made big bucks at the box office. Hell, Alice managed to gross over billion dollars, paving the way for a sequel to that 2010 film (which arrives in 2016), as well as a cavalcade of updates to classic Disney movies.

How DreamWorks Animation Lost Its Way

Last night, I gave one of 2014's most delightful films, Big Hero 6, a rewatch, and found it be such a glorious experience, especially since I watched it with two viewers who hadn't seen the film in theaters. That rewatch got me thinking about the American animation landscape, and my mind eventually turn it's attention to one particular studio that's been facing some "troubles", to put it lightly, lately: DreamWorks Animation.

The Despicable Me Minions Meet Sandra Bullock In New Minions Trailer

Illumination Entertainment's 2010 debut feature Despicable Me showed a lot of promise for the company, which Hop pretty much failed to live up to. Their third feature, The Lorax, had it's charms, but also had a clumsy script to hold it back. Despicable Me 2 is what really made me doubt the companies capabilities of creating more compelling features, as it just felt like a lazy cashgrab with no depth or interesting humor. A new entry in their biggest franchise, Minions, just dropped and fails to stir my confidence. You can watch it below.

Birdman Review

On A Wing And A Prayer

Films have the power to say things of incomparable substance. Some of the greatest filmmakers of all-time have used the medium of cinema to bring to life the kind of movies that help shape a generation via their underlying subtext and themes. It's neat to see any person undertake the mission of making a film that says something truly important, and it's pretty obvious that Birdman director (who also serves as one of the features four writers) Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu truly believes with all of his heart and soul that he's saying something meaningful within each and every frame of Birdman. I'm sure it's meaningful to him, and more power to him if it is. But for me, the message of the motion picture is like the movie itself; cluttered and underwhelming.

Toby Keiths New Song Brings Together Booze And Patriotism

I kinda owe my whole obsession with country music to Toby Keith, a guy I grew up listening to whose music was a constant fixture in my household. How Do You Like Me Now?!, Courtesy of The Red White And Blue, and especially I Wanna Talk About Me were songs I heard endlessly and adored. What's great is that those songs hold up wonderfully as an adult. They remain not only great to listen to, but also have great lyrics and tackle some nicely realized situations unique to country music.

Editorial: Warner Bros. And Disney Are Engaged In A Cinematic Civil War

 Recently, movie studios have made a release date for an upcoming movie far more than just a typical date. Oh no, it's as essential as any other part of the film, with studios grabbing release dates far, far in advance in order to give their film the best possible advantage financially. Studios have always been eager to pick the best release dates possible, but recently, two studios have been using it as a way to compete with each other on a massive scale.

Classic Write-Up: The Fighter Review

A Fight (And A Performance) For The Ages

David O. Russell has quickly become one of cinemas most prominent writer/directors thanks to his 2012 and 2014 features Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Both received critical raves and massive box office, as well as vocal approval from this particular film critic. Both of those films, especially Hustle, are expertly made films, with excellent performances and thoughtful screenwriting. So I was eager to finally catch The Fighter, the movie made just before Russell reached his current popularity.