Effective Symbolism and Rich Performances Abound in The Souvenir

Sometimes, slow-paced subdued arthouse fare leaves me in a state of being impressed by the movie's craftsmanship but being cold on the film on a human level. As I've said in past reviews on similar films, that's more due to my own tastes than a reflection on any of those movies being innately bad, but it's still a recurring experience I've had with this subgenre of cinema. I was super nervous Joanna Hogg's The Souvenir (my first ever Hogg film) would be a quintessential example of this phenomenon, but it turns out one of the best-reviewed movies of 2019 has been so widely acclaimed for a reason. The Souvenir, as the kids these days say, absolutely slaps.

Brightburn Fizzles Out Before It Can Reach Its Fullest Potential

Over in Brightburn, Kansas, life is relatively peaceful enough. Kids go to school, parents go to work and Brandon Breyer (Jackson A. Dunn), son of Tori (Elizabeth Banks) and Kyle (David Denman), is a seemingly normal Middle Schooler. Except, well, he's not normal. Now, really, nobody is "normal", but Brandon is especially abnormal. His parents have concealed his true origins, which tie into his superhuman strength as well as why he's so attracted to some strange machine located in the Breyer family barn. Realizing he's far more powerful than he ever imagined, Breyer begins to revel in his powers by committing a series of murders around his hometown, which won't remain peaceful for very long now that Brandon A.K.A. Brightburn has come around.

Too Often, Echo In The Canyon Reduces Complex Rock Stars to Caricatures

Back in the 1960s, the introduction of The Beatles into the music scene basically turned all the rules of mainstream pop music on their head. Suddenly, a new age had dawned with artists like The Byrds, The Beach Boys and The Mommas and Poppas upending conventions with their blend of folk & rock music, extended runtimes for songs and more introspective lyrics. Many of these artists lived in a portion of Los Angeles called Laurel Canyon where, in their interactions together they each, managed to strengthen one another's music. Influence in the form of the presence The Beatles kicked off this era of music so it shouldn't be a surprise that influence would crop up again in the form of artists in this pocket of L.A. impacting one another's music.

Ma Is Best When It Gets Messed-Up and When It Comes To Octavia Spencer's Performance

The writer of Superhero Movie just wrote Chernobyl, one of the most thoughtful TV shows in ages, and one of the two dudes behind Movie 43 just directed a Best Picture-winning movie, so sure, why shouldn't the director of The Help, Tate Taylor, transition over into directing micro-budget trashy horror movies like Ma? Taylor hopping into this genre of filmmaking produces a feature that's honestly average in most regards but does produce its share of fun off-kilter moments. Whenever it dares to get strange and messed up, Ma does have a spark of life to it, even if most of it tends to be more rudimentary than disturbing. 

The Perfection Is An Extravagant & Messy Thriller But Also A Brilliant One

SPOILERS FOLLOW BECAUSE IT IS THE ONLY WAY TO TALK ABOUT WHAT THE HECK THE PERFECTION IS AND HOW IT FARES IN BEING THAT

When They See Us Is A Sprawling And Appropriately Harrowing Artistic Accomplishment

CW: Discussions of sexual assault, racism 

One of the core tenants of Ava DuVernay's filmmaking is her ability to transport the viewer directly into history. Under her directing, the works of Ava DuVernay have an ability to bring you into the past to a harrowing degree, as most notably seen in one of the most emotionally devastating scenes of Selma where Martin Luther King Jr. meets with a man whose son was just killed in a racist hate crime. It's an intimate scene and one where DuVernay captures it with such a raw quality that lays out the emotions of the characters bare that you feel like you're in that same room with that grieving father and Martin Luther King Jr. DuVernay's works like Selma, The 13th or her newest directorial effort When They See Us explore people of color dehumanized in their own eras of American history and proceed to make cinema about those same individuals so powerful that we're right there next to them in their moments of joy, in their struggles and in their humanity.

Rocketman Shows How To Do A Music Biopic Right

Just as Avatar ushered in a barrage of movies released in digital 3D and It ensured that no Stephen King book would be spared from a film adaptation, the box office success of Bohemian Rhapsody has guaranteed that the music biopic is about to be omnipresent in cinema once again. After nearly a decade of dormancy only interrupted by Straight Outta Compton, that Freddie Mercury biopic made more than enough money to ensure that the subgenre won't be facing an absence like that for quite a long time. If we're gonna get a whole heap of music biopics, can more of them be like Rocketman? Imaginatively made, fun to watch, actually thoughtful when it comes to exploring its real-life subject, as Anakin Skywalker might say, now this is music biopic filmmaking!

Ali Wong and Randall Park Shine In The Charming Romantic-Comedy Always Be My Maybe

One of the genres the Netflix Original Movies have smartly zeroed in on has been the romantic-comedy, a genre most major American movie studios have ignored in the last decade. Netflix, meanwhile, has been filling a void in the marketplace with the likes of To All The Boys I've Loved Before and The Kissing Booth that have managed to become among the most talked about titles on the streaming service. That means we're bound to get more Netflix rom-com's in the future and their newest foray into this genre is Always Be My Maybe, directed by Nahnatchka Khan and starring and written by Ali Wong and Randall Park.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters Is More of a Pauper Among Modern Monster Movies

The greatest enemy Godzilla can never seem to defeat is not King Ghidorah nor Biollante nor Baragon. No, it's boring human characters, even the rightfully iconic 1954 Godzilla movie that introduced the world to this gigantic lizard couldn't evade the problem of having the majority of its human characters be dull. Why they don't just let Godzilla and the other monsters take the spotlight in these movies, I'll never know, but here we go again with Godzilla: King of the Monsters, which ramps up the amount of monster mayhem compared to Godzilla (2014) but ends up devoting way too much screentime to an overstuffed cast of disposable humans.

Bodacious Booksmart Brings Bevy of Brilliant Belly-Laughs

MILD SPOILER ALERT

It's the last day of High School for Molly (Beanie Feldstein) and Amy (Kaitlyn Dever), long-time best buddies who have put their noses to the grindstone and spent all their time in High School studying in the hopes of getting into the best possible colleges. But on this day before graduation, Molly realizes that all the other kids in their school who spent so much time partying also managed to get into good colleges. There isn't much time left for them as high schoolers, so Molly and Amy decide to step outside of their respective comfort zones and go to a party for the first time. Sounds like a simple plan, but getting to that party is going to be far more of a trek than they could have ever imagined.

Aladdin Is No Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland But It Still Falls Short of Being Something Magical

If you've seen Disney's original Aladdin movie, you've basically seen the new live-action Aladdin feature from director Guy Ritchie, albeit with more inspired animation and exciting musical sequences. To be fair to this new Aladdin movie, it is probably one of the least offensive entries in this series of live-action remakes of animated Disney movies as it lacks the distracting editing of Beauty and the Beast or the repugnant visual sensibilities of Alice in Wonderland. It's inoffensive, sporadically entertaining but even entirely disregarding comparisons to the original Disney film, it's still a strangely empty exercise despite being a Disney musical directed by the man who brought the world Snatch.

Wine Country Delivers A Vacation That's At Its Best When It Comes To Easygoing Comedy

Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey, Rachel Dratch and Ana Gasteyer are the six leading performers of Wine Country. That's quite the roster of talented folks to headline a movie and Wine Country finds plenty of amusing comedy out of just the camaraderie of this troop of actors interacting with one another over a single weekend. Interestingly, though, the biggest problem with Wine Country is how it doesn't lean on such simple comedic pleasures enough. Instead, its story ends up leaning too hard on predictable conflict-laden storylines between the individual six leading characters that make one yearn for more grounded sequences of just these six performers trading witty dialogue back-and-forth. 

Knock Down the House Is An Inspirational And Humanizing Exploration of American Politics

Let's not sugar-coat it, the last week of American politics has been a particularly vicious form of disheartening, which is saying something given how the last two-and-a-half years have been the physical manifestation of a nightmare. We need an ounce of hope wherever we can get it and goodness knows movies have always functioned as a go-to format for providing stories that offer up some hope to the world in times of crisis. For the Rachel Lears feature film Knock Down the House (which is now streaming on Netflix), hope is offered through a documentary that follows a quarter of female politicians looking to shake the status quo in American politics.

Like Many of the Best Time Travel Tales, See You Yesterday Merges Sci-Fi With Intimate Human Experiences

There are plenty of drawbacks to Netflix's method of releasing its movies with little in the way of prominent promotion but it also has its benefits, most notably in how it can lead to the fun experience of a whole bunch of people across the world discovering and enjoying a new Netflix original movie and watching them spread the word about it across social media. Watching that word-of-mouth work to turn a previously unknown film into something everybody's talking is utterly fascinating to watch. If there's any justice in the world, the cleverly concocted time travel tale See You Yesterday will be the next Netflix film to receive that kind of treatment from audiences.

The Intruder Is Insultingly Forgettable

MILD SPOILERS FOR THE INTRUDER WITHIN

Scott Howard (Michael Ealy) and Annie Howard (Meagan Good) have decided to step away from city life and buy up a home in the Napa Valley so that they can raise a prospective family in a more serene environment. The humble abode they've purchased previously belonged to Charlie Peck (Dennis Quaid), a widow who has spent decades taking care of this house that now belongs to the Howards...in theory. See, Charlie Peck just won't leave the couple alone. First he shows up to mow the lawn, then he keeps popping up every day to do odd jobs around the house. Annie thinks he's harmless but Scott has a bad feeling about Charlie Peck that turns out to be more accurate than either of them could imagine.

John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum See's The John Wick Series Continuing To Slay

What a wonderfully out-of-nowhere creation this John Wick series has become.  Not based on any pre-existing source material, the first movie was quietly filmed in 2013 and didn't start its marketing campaign until two months before its October 2014 debut. It was flying so far under the radar yet it ended up becoming a sleeper hit and deservedly so, it was a blast of an action movie that made good use of both Keanu Reeves and well-shot action sequences. Nearly five years later, John Wick has turned into a full-blown saga that continues onward with John Wick: Chapter 3- Parabellum (that title is the worst thing to emerge from this series) and manages to maintain the level of quality that made the first two movies such joys.

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu Has A Messy Script But Lots of Delightful Pokemon Antics

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu does not begin with the titular hat-wearing critter, rather it starts with  Tim Goodman (Justice Smith), a young twenty-something living out a mundane life working for an insurance firm in a small town. That quiet existence is upended when he gets news that his distant father has been killed. Tim heads off to Ryme City, a city Tim's dad lived in where humans and Pokemon live in harmony together, to simply say good-bye to his deceased pops, but those plans change when he discovers a talking Pikachu (voiced by Ryan Reynolds) in his dad's apartment, one that is convinced Tim's dad was embroiled in a larger conspiracy he and Tim now must solve.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile Wastes Interesting Casting On A Lackluster Script

Nobody would have ever suspected Ted Bundy (Zac Efron) of being anything but just a handsome fella with a Volkswagon bug. Why would they? On the outside, he seems like a perfectly pleasant person who leads a serene life with girlfriend Liz Kendall (Lily Collins) and her daughter Molly. But then everything changes once Ted is arrested on charges of kidnapping and murder. Ted maintains his innocence in the face of so many accusations and tries his mightiest to evade police custody in escape attempts that eventually lead him to be arrested on further charges of grisly murders. On the surface, Bundy would never have been anyone's idea of a serial killer but it turns out he's been committing crimes fitting of the title of Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.

Long Shot Is More Agreeable Than Memorable But At Least It's Frequently Funny

Though they usually have enough gross-out gags to fill out an army of Seann William Scott starring vehicles, comedic vehicles for Seth Rogen and his fellow cohorts like Judd Apatow have always had a penchant for treating romantic subplots with surprising levels of seriousness. Starting with The 40-Year-Old Virgin back in 2005, these types of films seemed to make a promise to viewers to keep the jokes about male genitalia coming at a steady rate but also to treat romance as something with actual weight and heart. Trying to balance raunch with heart has had varying degrees of success, but it is an element that separates it from, say, Happy Madison or recent Will Ferrell vehicles where heartfelt moments feel obligatory rather than affecting.