Michelle Williams Walks A Financial Tightrope In Wendy and Lucy

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT

Wendy Carrol (Michelle Williams) lives a solitary life on the road. Accompanied only by her dog Lucy, Wendy is on her way to possible job opportunities in Alaska when she gets stuck somewhere in Oregon due to car troubles. Now she has to figure out how to get her car repaired with what little money she has in a region unfamiliar to her. It's a simple story, but one that serves as a great example of how character motivation, not scale, are the best informers for how emotionally intense a movie can be. Wendy's problems are intimate in size but they're harrowing to experience because of how writers Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt (the latter also directing) make it abundantly clear what how precarious Wendy's daily life with minimal money and no guaranteed shelter is.

Milk Is A Stirring Examination of An Everyday Human Being Who Became An Important Historical Figure

The 2000s were a tragically sparse decade for high-profile queer cinema. Whereas the 1990's contained a surprisingly steady stream of mainstream pieces of filmmaking with queer protagonists, such films had been relegated solely to arthouse cinemas in the first decade of the 21st century. Even after Brokeback Mountain scored widespread acclaim and a robust domestic box office haul in 2005, it'd be another three years before another film with a queer protagonist managed to get a wide enough release to make over $1 million domestically. That movie would end up being Milk, a Gus Van Sant directorial effort that turned out to be one of the most acclaimed features in the man's career.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button's Unique Story Deserved A Less Derivative Movie

When a movie makes a whole lot of money, the studio behind said movie (as well as other rival studios) tend to want to replicate that box office success. Normally this is done through sequels, spin-off's, cinematic universes, all that jazz, but back in the day it was a lot more common for studios to just make new movies that were clearly executed in the mold of prior box office successes. For example, two of the biggest movies of the 1990s for Paramount Pictures were its pair of Best Picture winners Forrest Gump and Titanic. Making sequels to such lucrative movies is a problematic idea because, for Forrest Gump, the key creative people behind that movie are just so busy while for the problems with making 2 Tit 2 Anic should be self-evident.

The Reader Is A Staggeringly Tone-Deaf And Poorly Executed Endeavor

CW: Discussions of sexual assault 

Did nobody when making The Reader stop to think that the plot of this movie was more than a touch icky while they were making it? While I'm aware they didn't make this story up since it's based on a 1995 book by Bernhard Schlink, surely somebody had to look around at what they were spending about $32 million on and think that maybe, just maybe, it could be better spent elsewhere. I suppose not though, which is a tragically likely scenario given how people all over the world tend to minimize sexual assault experiences of any kind. After all, in 2018, the President of the United States openly mocked a sexual assault survivor, perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that, a decade prior, a feature film like The Reader was made that treated the sexual assault of an underage boy as the topic of a weepie conventional romantic drama that doesn't seem to realize how disturbing its central premise is.

Great Performances And A Thoughtful Script Come Together Nicely For Frost/Nixon

Except for 2013's underappreciated racecar drama Rush and an acclaimed Beatles documentary from 2015, Ron Howard has spent most of the last decade doing genre work that's ranged from solidly diverting (Solo, Angels & Demons) to outright dismal (Inferno, The Dilemma). That's a shame since I'd say Howard actually works best as a filmmaker when he's doing more grounded dramas. Not every foray into this field works for him, as seen by the messy A Beautiful Mind, but he does tend to have a better track record here since, among other factors, he's usually working with better scripts on the likes of Rush or Apollo 13 than when he's helming mechanically crafted movie adaptations of The Grinch of The Da Vinci Code.

The Wrestler Is A Harrowing And Brutal Tale Of A Man Unable To Function In Reality

It's a pity that, in the decade since The Wrestler was initially released, Mickey Rourke seems to have vanished almost as quickly as his comeback arrived. After having major supporting roles in two 2010 movies that cracked $100 million domestically (Iron Man 2 and The Expendables), he did Immortals and Sin City: A Dame To Kill For and has otherwise been relegated to B-movie fare that, at best, will end up in the direct-to-video bargain bin. Finally seeing The Wrestler for the first time makes such a turn of events feel truly tragic given the massive amount of talent the guy exhibits in the lead role of this Darren Aronofsky directed motion picture.