Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Doesn't Trust Either Its Audience or Animation Enough

From the get-go, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron struck me as an attempt to do a Western version of Bambi. This was mainly because Spirit was also a tale of relatively non-anthropomorphized animals wandering around in the woodlands with a darker tone. Whereas Bambi committed to its darker tone (oh, did it ever), Spirit has trouble actually letting its more somber elements get executed properly. Nobody's expecting an animated kids movies from DreamWorks to achieve the bleakness of a Robert Bresson movie, but Spirit constantly struggles to achieve effective moments of poignancy because it never allows those moments to be as restrained as they should be. It constantly beats you over the head with its intent instead of letting the emotions sweep over you.

Good Actors Try To Work With An Uneven Script In The Biopic Drama Marshall

Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, finally got a biopic movie to headline. Instead of chronicling him being chosen for the Supreme Court, the movie Marshall concentrates on a 1940 court case that Thurgood Marshall (played by Chadwick Boseman here) served as a lawyer in. This court case involved Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) being accused of raping a wealthy socialite, Elanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), a court case that seems to have the odds stacked against it, especially when Marshall, being an out of state lawyer dispatched by the NAACP, is forbidden from speaking during the trial, leaving all the in-court defense to Sam Friedman (Josh Gad).

The Best Parts Of The Promise Frustratingly Tussle With Its Lack Of Substance

In 1914, young Armenian man Mikael (Oscar Isaac) has traveled to Constantinople, a city located in the Ottoman Empire, in order to further his education that he can pursue his career as a doctor. Being a medical student in this prestigious city is not cheap and his family can afford to send him here by way of a donation from a man in Mikael's village who wishes for Mikael to be arranged to marry his daughter. With both an arranged marriage and prospective years of education lying in front of him, the future seems rife with potential for Mikael, though a wrench is thrown into his marriage-related plans when he begins to fall for the already married Ana (Charlotte Le Bon).