White Boy Rick Is Frequently Scattered But Also Frequently Engaging

For better and for worse, there's a whole lot that the crime drama White Boy Rick wants to explore in depicting the life of non-fictional individual Richard Wershe Jr. A.K.A. White Boy Rick (played by newcomer Richie Merritt), a 15-year-old from Detroit, Michigan who was hired by the FBI and the local law enforcement to become a supplier for local drug dealers as a way of gaining information needed to bring these people into justice. Despite being a teenager, Wershe is basically just dragged into being an informant under the threat of his father of the same name (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), who sells guns, if he doesn't cooperate. Wershe is basically trapped between a rock and a hard place and he decides to get out of it by agreeing to serve as an FBI informant.

Annihilation Is A Well-Made Intentionally Disorienting Thriller

Alex Garland already had a solid foothold as a noteworthy name in American science-fiction cinema with his work as a writer on projects like Sunshine and Dredd, but with 2015's Ex Machina, he made a high-quality leap into the world of directing. His follow-up directorial effort to that feature is Annihilation, a feature film adaptation of a novel by Jeff VanderMeer, that allows Garland to expand his scope as a filmmaker without losing the contemplative nature of Ex Machina. Interestingly, despite having a larger canvas to work with this time, as well as a major studio footing the bill, Garland has written a film that engages in more unorthodox narrative techniques than Ex Machina, believe it or not.

Wowzers, Good Time Is Excellent And Visually Magnificent Crime Thriller Cinema!

MILD SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF GOOD TIME ARE WITHIN! 

Good Time feels so much like a singular movie, like it's the manifestation of a precise one-of-a-kind take on the crime thriller genre. Directed by Ben Safdie and Josh Safdie (the two are commonly referred to as The Safdie Brothers), there's plenty of elements here that are immediately distinctive, most notably the visual aesthetic that leans heavily on a bright neon-infused color scheme that coats every environment the story wanders into which range from a bail bond office to an amusement park. Then there's the score by Oneohtrix Point Never, which pulsates right in your ear with its idiosyncratic sound as well as the camerawork that comes up with truly inventive ways to frame various intensity-driven sequences.

Atypical's Brief Moments Of Promise Are Overshadowed By Lazy And Stereotypical Writing

For a TV show whose very title places an enormous emphasis on being unique, Atypical is a tragically conventional show in nearly every respect. Risks of any kind are kept to a minimum on this program and the positive qualities are even more sparse. It's the kind of TV show that struck can go eight episodes (each running from 29-37 minutes in length) without really carving out its own distinct identity or making its characters interesting or even just delivering some solid jokes. Worst of all, it ends up falling prey to some of the most egregious flaws found in typical American pop culture portrayals of people on the Autism spectrum.

Anomalisa Review

So, uh, what the hell is Paramount Pictures doing handling the distribution of Anomalisa? The same studio responsible for ushering in the Transformers sequels, as well as the 2014 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film and Terminator: Genisys, are now in charge of a stop-motion animated Charlie Kaufman film dealing with pervasive loneliness and its effects on the human psyche. Versatility is the name of the game, and to be fair, Paramount also financed Nebraska and let Darren Aronofsky go hog wild on the tale of Noah's Ark.

The Hateful Eight Review

In his past two movies, Quentin Tarantino went wider in scale than he ever had before, allowing Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained to depict the time period their stories were set in an appropriately sweeping manner. One got a sense of the scale of depravity that Nazi's and slave owners in these movies were inflicting on individuals via the scope that each plot possessed. Now, with his newest film, The Hateful Eight, Tarantino goes smaller, much much smaller. Much more in the vein of Reservoir Dogs, The Hateful Eight sticks to one location for the majority of its run time and centers itself on eight morally dubious individuals existing a few years after the Civil War has concluded. And none of these eight fellows can be trusted.