There Are Few Upsides To Watching The Upside

Technically, The Upside is a remake of a 2012 French movie entitled The Intouchables that, for a while there, became the biggest foreign-language movie of all-time at the worldwide box office. Given how successful it was, an American remake of that French feature was basically inevitable. Remakes have a negative stink about them, but like any genre, they can be good when executed properly. Just look at that seemingly pointless Child's Play remake that ended up being a delight. But in executing this remake of The Intouchables, given the title The Upside, director Neil Burger has delivered essentially a cornball TV movie from the 1980s that somehow managed to show up in 2019 movie theaters. 

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.

Isle of Dogs Is A Very Very Good Boy And Deserves A Belly Rub

One of the many pieces of connective tissue between the assorted directorial efforts of Wes Anderson is the element of families, Wes Anderson loves to explore complex, typically fractured, family dynamics. Whether it's the two brothers who lead Bottle Rocket, the expansive Tenenbaum clan or Mr. Fox and his kin, Anderson is fascinated by the storytelling possibilities offered up by complicated families. It's a recurring narrative pattern of his that has served him well in the past, but he's been eschewing it in his most recent works, first in The Grand Budapest Hotel and again in his newest feature Isle of Dogs. Both of these movies are superb works that indicate Anderson works just fine as a filmmaker without the aid of family dynamics in the stories he tells.

Wakefield Can't Come Up With Enough Depth For Its Lead Characters Journey Of Self-Discovery

Life has not been easy for Howard Wakefield (Bryan Cranston), a guy who feels like life has been piling up on him between a dissatisfying job, a fractured relationship with his wife and two daughters who'd rather he didn't exist at all. He's looking for some escape from his existence and he finds the chance for just that when he rediscovers the little attic space in his families garage (which is a separate building from their house). Here, he discovers there's a lot of room in here as well as a window through which he can watch his families comings and goings. Suddenly, an attic used to store seasonal decorations and camping equipment is looking mighty inviting.

Saban's Power Rangers Is...Diverting Fun? Wait, What, It's Actually Fun? Huh.

Someone at Saban Entertainment (the company that owns Power Rangers) obviously wanted to make a live-action feature film about the Power Rangers in order to cash in on the craze of big-budget live-action movies adapting childhood TV shows with massive nostalgia-driven fanbases. And so, lo and behold, the resulting project is Saban's Power Rangers, a $100 million budgeted motion picture whose starting premise basically amounts to "What if we merged The Breakfast Club and Pacific Rim into one movie?". That very much sounds like two motion pictures that should never ever be mashed together but they've gone and done just that. The resulting movie is....actually not bad, much better than I expected it to be, though this whole thing carries more than a few major shortcomings to its name.

The Infiltrator Review

Is Bryan Cranston just choosing his roles now depending on how much deceit his characters must exude? After playing Walter White for five excellent seasons on Breaking Bad, he's played Dalton Trumbo, a man who wrote screenplays in secret, and now, in his newest motion picture The Infiltrator, Cranston plays Robert Mazur, a man who regularly does undercover work (see where the deceit comes into play in this past?) for the U.S. Government. After a mission leaves him with a particularly nasty injury, he has the chance to retire...but he can't give up the chance to partake in a new mission that could take down tons of high-profile figures in the world of drug trafficking.

Kung Fu Panda 3 Review

Perhaps few franchises have managed to be as surprising in their overall quality as the Kung Fu Panda saga, with the first film being a tonal departure for DreamWorks Animation, going for a more restrained tone (no pop culture references to be found here) and carrying a screenplay far more reliant on characterization than past features from the studio like Bee Movie and Shark Tale. Thanks to its massive box office, a sequel, Kung Fu Panda 2, occurred, and it too bucked convention by being far more than cashgrab sequel. Going darker in its story (the entire premise of this follow-up hinges on panda genocide) allowed for the character of Po (Jack Black) to not just retread his arc from the first film but rather grow in new areas (namely, in overcoming his traumatic past).

Trumbo Review

Trumbo strikes me as a movie that could have been far better with a little bit of consolidation. Any individual portion of the life of Mr. Dalton Trumbo (here portrayed by Bryan Cranston) that's depicted in this film would made fine fodder for an entire motion picture unto itself. Crammed against the weight of trying to depict an entire decade of his existence, well, it doesn't work nearly as well as it should, despite a super game cast.

Summer Movie Memories: How Godzilla Got His Groove Back

Up until Labor Day, I'll be looking at seven different summer movies from Summer 2014 and analyzing what really made them stand out this summer, for reasons both good and bad. Obviously, SPOILERS for Godzilla lie ahead.