Like Be Kind Rewind, Hearts Beat Loud Is An Exceptionally Endearing Movie About How Unifying Art Can Be

Hearts Beat Loud is 2018's answer to Bernie in that it's a sublime indie movie that totally would have been a big box office hit in both arthouse and mainstream movie theaters if only it had been distributed by a more high-profile movie studio that had actually given it a noteworthy theatrical release. Oh well, Hearts Beat Loud (as well as Bernie for that matter!) will live on long after a woefully small theatrical release thanks to just how entertaining it is. This is feel-good cinema done impeccably right that shows how well-realized characters, not unearned schmaltz, are what's needed to get one's heart soaring.

The Thoroughly Dismal Motion Picture Gotti Is A Poorly Put-Together Crime Drama

You'd think after Gotti became such a widespread laughingstock (and then briefly a point of much-needed conversation on how online user-generated movie rating systems like the Rotten Tomatoes Audience Score can be manipulated) this past summer that it's only inevitable for Gotti to end up being at least marginally better than its reputation if only because of lowered expectations. Instead, Gotti is one of the worst movies of 2018 so far and an abysmal addition to John Travolta's forty-plus years worth of acting credits that isn't exactly devoid of all-time turkeys before this (Old Dogs, anyone?). It wants so badly to be a Martin Scorsese crime movie take on the life of John Gotti but it ends up being a knock-off of an Asylum knock-off of a Martin Scorsese crime movie take on the life of John Gotti instead!

Three Identical Strangers Is Full of Twists And Humanity

We all know the phrase "Truth is stranger than fiction", it's one that's been used to death in describing real-life events that are so strange you can't believe they didn't just happen in a fictional piece of media. That turn of phrase feels especially appropriate in describing Three Identical Strangers, a new documentary from director Tim Wardle that covers the true story of three men, David Kellman, Bobby Shafran and Eddy Galland, realizing as young adults that they are, in fact, identical triplets separated at birth. These three men had no clue they had any blood-related siblings and now this incredible discovery has turned their whole worlds upside down just as they become the subject of widespread fascination by the American public.

Leave No Trace Leaves A Major Impression Through Masterful Uses of Subtlety

Leave No Trace is a movie as quiet and beautiful as the forest that the lead characters call home. Yes, Will (Ben Foster) and his daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie) reside in the middle of a forest separated from the rest of the world, per the wishes of Will who wants nothing to do with modern society. The initial scenes of Debra Granik and Anne Rosellini's screenplay goes through great pains to demonstrate what kind of day-to-day life these two carry out while being so distant from the rest of the world. We also get to see how the two help each other, with Will teaching Tom various lessons about surviving out in the wilderness as well giving her a general education while Tom helps her father cope with symptoms stemming from his intense case of PTSD.

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette Is A Crucial Piece of Deconstructive Cinema

Hannah Gadsby: Nanette starts out like so many of the seemingly millions of other Netflix stand-up comedy specials out there as a brief filmed segment gives way to a comedian heading out on stage and dishing out jokes to a large crowd. The comedian, in this case, is Hannah Gadsby, a woman hailing from Australia, Tasmania specifically, who begins to offer up her comedic observations on her life, including the inspiration for the title of this special hailing from the name of a woman Gadsby was briefly romantically interested in. Then, maybe about halfway through, Nanette mentions she's considering leaving the whole business of comedy, specifically the art of self-deprecating comedy that she had previously been well-known for.

Uncle Drew Drops A Character From A Pepsi Commercial Into A Traditional Sports Movie

A movie based on a Pepsi commercial? Well, if Battleship could get a movie, I suppose anything is possible! Yes, Uncle Drew, directed by Charles Stone III, is based on a series of Pepsi commercials starring basketball star Kyrie Irving, adorned in old man makeup, getting into wacky antics as the elderly Uncle Drew. These commercials went viral a few years back and now they've spawned this theatrically released motion picture, one that has decided that, in order to make the character work in a longer narrative, he should be just one player (no pun intended) in a larger cast in a straightforward inspirational sports movie, a smart move that allows the marketable Uncle Drew to headline a feature film while minimizing the risk of the character overstaying his welcome.

Tag Is It, With It Being "A Middle-of-The-Road Comedy"

For over 30 years, five childhood friends have managed to stick around in each other's lives thanks to engaging in an expansive game of Tag that takes place every single May. Once that month starts, all bets are off and this group of guys never know when one of their best buds will show up out of nowhere to declare that they're "it". The five friends are Hogan (Ed Helms), stoner Randy, paranoid Kevin (Hannibal Buress), cocky businessman Bob and the king of this tag game, health nut Jerry (Jeremy Renner). Jerry has never been "it", not even once, but Hogan is getting the other three guys together with the intent of finally making sure Jerry gets tagged just once.

A Man of Kindness Is The Subject of The Excellent And Emotionally Powerful Documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?

Kindness is so important. Considering how pervasively cruel the world can be, we owe it to ourselves and to those around us to try and impart kindness whenever we possibly can, even if such kindness manifests in the smallest of ways. But that's not really the default behavior of far too many in this world, with selfishness instead being the de facto behavior that people (myself, unfortunately, included) tend to engage in even subconsciously. If only we could look beyond ourselves and think about the well-being of others, maybe the world would be a better place. Maybe the world would be a little bit more like Fred Rogers, the subject of the documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? and a source of hope for so many over numerous decades.

The Truth About The Leads of American Animals Is That These Are Not Bright Guys And Things Got Out of Hand

When plotting out how to do American Animals, one must imagine the creative personnel involved in this project were torn between doing a documentary or a traditional narrative feature covering the real-life story of a bunch of college dudes who, on basically a lark, decided to plan a heist of their Kentucky college's highly expensive books. Trying to decide between these two ways of telling this story in movie form likely was a trying decision until somebody came up with the idea of just merging the two by way of having present-day testimonies from the people involved in this heist sprinkled throughout a traditional feature film based on these men's exploits.

Set It Up Is A Delightful Romantic Comedy With Two Awesome Lead Performances

Netflix is coming up on the third year anniversary of their big push into creating original films, an initiative that began with Beasts of No Nation. In that time, Netflix has gotten a whole bunch of movie stars like Brad Pitt and Will Smith to headline their various high-profile motion pictures, but aside from Bright (which really became more of a cosplay staple and internet punching bag than anything else), none of these movies have really garnered all that much attention, a pity for gems like Blue Jay, Mudbound or 6 Balloons. But two weeks ago today, Netflix released their first original film to really take the public by storm and it was one not based on exceptionally well-known source material or starring big names or even carrying a bunch of splashy visual effects.

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Is The Cinematic Equivalent To Kid Rock's All Summer Long

I sure do hope anyone who goes to see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is familiar with every little detail of the original Jurassic Park film because this movie is obsessed to a creepy degree with homaging that particular entry in the franchise. All kinds of nostalgic fan-service moments crop up throughout the story, ranging from an appearance by the cane topped by an ambered mosquito that John Hammond once carried around to an appearance by the flipped over Jurassic Park van that fell into the T-Rex paddock to a comically extraneous cameo appearance by Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum). Colin Trevorrow and Derek Connolly pack their dismal script with all kinds of references to the original, a task they become so preoccupied with that they forget to make all that much that is unique or interesting for this brand new Jurassic Park adventure.

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."

Hotel Artemis Is An Unusual But Delightful Getaway Spot

I've stayed in a number of oddball hotels in my life, including one located somewhere in Texas that totally felt like the sort of location that characters go to get either arrested, shot or both in a Coen Brothers movie, but I've never stayed at a hotel like the Hotel Artemis, a hospital/hotel exclusively for criminals located in Los Angeles in the near future. It's a place run by The Nurse (Jodie Foster) and her dutiful assistant Everest (Dave Bautista), who take care of any criminals who need some under-the-radar fixing up so long as said criminals have an official membership. The newest people to check into this hotel are bank robbers Sherman (Sterling K. Brown) and his intensely damaged brother Honolulu (Brian Tyree Henry).

Alex Strangelove Is A Tragically Messy Coming-of-Age Comedy

Though the fact that Alex Strangelove, a movie about a high school dude coming to terms with not being heterosexual, could even exist as a reasonably budgeted feature film is very much something that could have only happened in recent years, the film's tone is more of a relic from the early 2000's when everyone was trying to rip-off the style of American Pie by making raunchy coming-of-age comedies about High School and college-aged dudes trying to "score". Though comedies starring older characters like the works of Judd Apatow and The Hangover put an end to that trend, here is Alex Strangelove, seemingly ripped straight out of that era of American comedy yet debuting on Netflix just earlier this month.

Writer/Director Brad Bird Provides A Fun Return To A Super-Powered World With Incredibles 2

The various films released by Pixar Animation Studios (there's exactly 20 of them now) has become heavily associated with the big heartfelt moments that leave adult audiences reaching for the tissues. Remember the endings of Toy Story 3 and Coco? Remember that montage of married life from Up? Remember every other scene from Inside Out? Big moments of pathos that pay off well-developed characters and result in moviegoers becoming a puddle of tears are a staple of the studios canon so it's interesting that Incredibles 2 is the first film from the studio since maybe the first Incredibles and maybe even A Bug's Life to not even attempt a moment of overwhelming poignancy, something even recent Pixar sequels like Cars 3 and Finding Dory incorporated multiple times in their own storylines.

Hereditary Is Heavily Impressive And Also Heavily Disturbing

A constant refrain from director Brad Bird is the simple truth that animation is not a genre, but rather, a medium of storytelling. Horror is similar to animated tales in this regard in that movies belonging to this format of storytelling are largely seen as being highly similar to one another whereas the truth is many different types of stories can be told in horror-based filmmaking. You can do an action movie in a horror story, you can do a comedy, you can do a psychological thriller, you can do all sorts of different types of filmmaking while engaging in the process of scaring people. The versatility of horror films as an art form gets reinforced once again in Hereditary, the feature film directorial debut of Ari Aster and a motion picture that functions more as an examination of a families psychological turmoil in response to loss than what might be considered a conventional horror movie.

Exciting Gruesome Action And A Clever Lead Character Are The Best Features of Upgrade

Upgrade takes place in a near future world where technology is omnipresent and Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) doesn't like that one bit. He's an old-school kind of guy who spends his day fixing up classic vehicles and refuses the aid of technological advancements as much as possible. Despite being a guy who despises technology who lives in a world run by technology, Grey has a pretty good life, especially since he's married to the love of his life, Asha Trace (Melanie Vallejo). But everything changes for him when Trace is killed in a mugging that also leaves Grey paralyzed from the neck down, a condition he learns can be reversed by the placement of a cyber-enhancement chip called STEM into his spine.