Leave No Trace Leaves A Major Impression Through Masterful Uses of Subtlety

Leave No Trace is a movie as quiet and beautiful as the forest that the lead characters call home. Yes, Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) reside in the middle of a forest separated from the rest of the world, per the wishes of Will who wants nothing to do with modern society. The initial scenes of Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini's screenplay goes through great pains to demonstrate what kind of day-to-day life these two carry out while being so distant from the rest of the world. We also get to see how the two help each other, with Will teaching Tom various lessons about surviving out in the wilderness as well giving her a general education while Tom helps her father cope with symptoms stemming from his intense case of PTSD.

Hostiles Tries To Be A Woke Western But It Can't Quite Get It's Eyes Open

I've been beating the drum on director Scott Cooper for some time now, mainly thanks to how highly I thought of his 2013 feature Out of The Furnace (his 2009 motion picture Crazy Heart is also notably good). Thought it received an overall divisive critical reception upon initial release, I myself thought it was a great movie that managed to take the basic premise of a revenge action movie and imbue both a terrific Christian Bale performance and thoughtful grimness into it. Taking my love for his past works in mind, it breaks my heart to say that Scott Cooper's newest movie Hostiles, handily his most ambitious feature yet in terms of themes and scope, is a mess and an unpleasant one at that.

The Punisher Is So Lacking In Creativity Even John Travolta Phones It In As A Mob Boss

Over the course of a 19 year period, we got three different Punisher movies, none of them direct continuations of each other. Instead, we got a trio of attempts to launch a series of movies based on this Marvel Comics character, none of which left all that much of an impact, especially compared to how well-received Jon Bernthal's take on the character on the Daredevil TV show was. The second of these three Punisher movies is the 2004 film by Johnathan Hensleigh, simply called The Punisher, which is one of only two movies (along with that 2005 Man-Thing film that ended up becoming a TV movie) to emerge from an extensive deal Marvel made with now-defunct movie studio Artisan Entertainment to turn various Marvel characters into various pop culture properties.

There's Plenty Of Excitement To Be Had In Hell Or High Water

It's always nice to see movies that actually understand Texas and don't treat it like some idyllic postcard that's an ode to "the good o'l days". Instead, Texas as depicted in Hell Or High Water is very much true to life, full of people struggling to make the ways of farming work in the modern day world (one dude who's trying to wrangle his cattle during his thunderstorm jokes about how he wonders why his kids don't wanna do this job), red Coke cups in every diner and those smaller towns that aren't just an anomaly in America but even in Texas itself which is, in 2016, dominated by bustling metroplexes.