Pleasantville Is An Impressive Showcase For Effective Satire, Memorable Visuals And Jeff Daniels

It's so much fun to go in totally cold into a first-time watch of a movie and become totally enchanted by discovering where exactly that movie is going. Movie marketing can be so spoiler-heavy, it's totally a wonder when the secrets and plot outline of a movie remain a mystery, especially when it's twenty-one-years-old like Pleasantville! The directorial debut of Gary Ross, I was aware of this movie being a star vehicle for Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon and that it was done in black-and-white but other than that, the concrete details of the production remained a mystery to me. This meant my first-time-viewing of Pleasantville turned out to be such a delightful experience as I got to unearth all the joys this movie has to offer!

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."

Free State Of Jones Is As Tedious As It Is Sprawling

All good things must come to an end and that includes Matthew McConaughey's recent resurgence as a leading man. Starting with The Lincoln Lawyer in March 2011, McConaughey has had a streak of unique and high quality films like Mud and Magic Mike to appear in that showed new facets of what he could bring to the table as an actor. This past June brought out his newest starring vehicle, Free State Of Jones, which landed with a thud and quickly vanished without a trace from movie theaters across the globe. Having finally caught up with it, it's not exactly a shocker it had such a short theatrical life.