Will Smith and Michael Mann Prove to be The Greatest Parts of Ali

Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) was a larger-than-life figure. Ergo, it's no surprise a movie about his life like Ali begins with a similarly grandiose bang.  Michael Mann's 2001 chronicle of the boxer and civil rights advocate kicks off with a nine-minute sequence that covers a whole lot of ground in a short period of time. Set against a rendition of Bring It On Home to Me, Ali proceeds to show its titular lead in the middle of a boxing match, meeting best friend Drew Brown (Jamie Foxx), enduring rigorous training and even a flashback to adolescent Ali having to sit in the back of a segregated bus. It's an appropriately expansive kick-off for what turns out to be an expansive motion picture.

Just Mercy Is A Courtroom Drama With Plenty of Empathy And Great Performances

Lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) has just graduated from Harvard with a law degree, which means there’s only one clear course of action to take one. That’s right, Stevenson is going to move down to Alabama and create a non-profit law firm that specializes in providing free legal services to death row inmates. It’s a crusade that’s highly unorthodox, to put it gently, especially considering Stevenson is a Black man trying to fight against a justice system that inherently sees people of color as immediately guilt. However, Stevenson wants to use his lawyer's gifts to help the most underserved of American citizens. After all, these are not inhuman monsters, but people who could be anybody. Heck, Stevenson himself observes to his Mother at one point that “It could have been me, Mama”

Law Abiding Citizen Is Another Gerard Butler-Headlined Disaster

In each era of American history, the then modern-day American political climate seems to always seep into our countries action movies. Sometimes they manifest in interesting ways but other times history has shown that action cinema chooses to reflect the real world in toxic ways that try to soothe the frayed nerves of privileged members of society in order to ensure that everything is just hunky-dory with the actually troublesome status quo. Much like Rambo and other testosterone-fueled action movies of the 1980s were very much made as responses to the post-Vietnam climate of the country, Law Abiding Citizen is a movie made for the era of the PATRIOT act as good guy detectives proudly deliver “heroic” lines like “Fuck his civil liberties” and a mayor played by Viola Davis makes a sweeping speech to urge law enforcement officers to bend the law to take down Gerard Butler’s baddie. The end justifies the means for Law Abiding Citizen, a thriller seemingly handmade for people who would dismiss Taxi to the Dark Side as “fake news”.

Ben Mendelsohn Excels In An Otherwise Average Take On The Robin Hood Mythos

Robin Hood has been a fixture of movie theater screens for exactly 110 years now, with everyone from Percy Stow to Errol Flynn to Disney to Mel Brooks to Ridley Scott giving their own unique take on the Robin Hood mythos. The newest take on this material comes from director Otto Bathurst, making his feature film directorial debut with this project, working from a script by Ben Chandler and David James Kelly that reworks the Robin Hood mythos into something that kind of wants to make the character into a superhero but also into a grounded n' gritty individual as well as a figure of political intrigue. Why they didn't also try to make him into a screwball comedy leading man while they were at it is beyond me.

Prepare To Take A Snooze With Sleepless

 Is this really the best Hollywood can do by way of Jamie Foxx and Michelle Monaghan, sticking them in some already long forgotten January action/thriller? C'mon, both of these actors are so much more talented than this! Oh well, here's hoping both of them get better projects in the future, which should be (in theory) be easy cuz the 2017 movie that brings them together, Sleepless, is a thoroughly forgettable endeavor. In this feature, Foxx plays an undercover cop named Vincent Downs whose devotion to trying to go on the inside and take out Las Vegas drug crimelords has made him distant from his wife and son.

When It Comes To Creating A Top-Notch Crime Thriller, Collateral Is A Real Beauty

Tom Cruise, like fellow late 20th-century movie star Will Smith, seems to be stuck in a rut in the current stages of his career that see's him just trying to do one type of role in one type of movie (lead heroes in blockbusters) as a way to keep his career going when in fact his fame used to come from doing all sorts of different types of roles in a wide variety of genres. In fact, looking over his pre-2005 meltdown, starred in non-action films by filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson, Oliver Stone and Stanley freaking Kubrick while his three best 21st-century action blockbuster movies (Minority Report, War Of The Worlds and Edge Of Tomorrow) have him inhabiting more interesting and complicated individuals rather than the generic leads in recent fare like Jack Reacher, Oblivion, and The Mummy.

Please Give Some More Love To The Thrilling And Endearing White House Down

Back in 2013, Roland Emmerich returned to the White House, the location that served him quite well when he blew it to pieces in the first Independence Day movie. But just like returning to the world of Independence Day itself didn't yield any box office results comparable to that 1996 movie, Emmerich's 2013 return to the White House was similarly DOA financially. That's a shame because White House Down might just be the best movie Roland Emmerich's done, one that leans heavily on charismatic actors, over-the-top characters and constantly escalating in absurdity action to deliver the right kind of bombastic blockbuster filmmaking.

Take A Ride With The Gloriously Energetic And Meticulously Crafted Baby Driver

Considering how Edgar Wright's first four movies had such heavy doses of high-quality action, stylish editing, and rapid-fire dialogue, it dawned on me midway through Baby Driver that Wright's basically been toying with the key ingredients of gangster movies for his entire career. It's like he's been fine tuning his instruments in various ways across his four previous classics until he was finally offered the chance to make an out and out gangster film. Well, now he gets to do just that with Baby Driver, a new crime movie he's directed that's been generating insane amounts of praise for months now ever since it premiered at the South by Southwest festival back in March.

Dreamgirls Is Frequently Entertaining But Not Quite A Dream Come True

Certain movies have these massively iconic sequences that have, in many cases, managed to become even more famous than the movies they originally came from. Notice how the scene of Adolf Hitler breaking down from the Oscar-nominated 2004 German drama Downfall has garnered far more notoriety than the actual movie due to that scene being appropriated for comedic reasons so that the subtitles in that particular scene have Hitler reacting to more mundane modern-day circumstances. Such a phenomenon also includes the 2006 musical Dreamgirls, which has a certain showstopper musical number so powerful it eclipses the rest of the movie it appears in.

Classic Write-Up: Django Unchained Review

Movies always have a natural disconnect between the viewers and what's happening on screen. However, several movies have this selfish attitude in them where it seems like the filmmakers behind the endeavor are having tons of fun with the plot, but refuse to allow the viewer to connect or engage with what's happening onscreen. In Django Unchained, it's pretty freaking apparent Quentin Tarantino is having an absolute blast with the cinematic adventure he's concocted thanks to how great it is. Plus, he eagerly allows anyone and everyone to join him in having fun with the venture.