Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women Masterfully Uses Silence To Convey Internal Woe

All of director Kelly Reichardt's movies have made great use of silence. The extended trip to an outdoor sauna in Old Joy immediately leaps to my mind as a great example of this. Ditto the quiet endings of Meek's Cutoff and Leaves of Grass that eschew dialogue to allow the audience to fully absorb the entire movie. In her 2016 feature film Certain Women, a hushed quality washes over the proceedings even when characters are trading lines of dialogue. Everyone in this movie is plagued by some kind of woe that they've lived with for so long that they deal with it in subdued terms. Even a situation where a man holds another man hostage at gunpoint doesn't feature so much as somebody raising their voices.

For the character Certain Women, what's the point of yelling? Doing that in the face of their anguish would be like throwing a pebble at a tank. Writer/director Kelly Reichardt communicates this idea in a haunting fashion throughout the trio of stories that Certain Women explores. A hundred torture porn movies with all their grisly mutilations wish they had the harrowing quality of Reichardt's filmmaking in Certain Women.

Michelle Williams Walks A Financial Tightrope In Wendy and Lucy

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT

Wendy Carrol (Michelle Williams) lives a solitary life on the road. Accompanied only by her dog Lucy, Wendy is on her way to possible job opportunities in Alaska when she gets stuck somewhere in Oregon due to car troubles. Now she has to figure out how to get her car repaired with what little money she has in a region unfamiliar to her. It's a simple story, but one that serves as a great example of how character motivation, not scale, are the best informers for how emotionally intense a movie can be. Wendy's problems are intimate in size but they're harrowing to experience because of how writers Jon Raymond and Kelly Reichardt (the latter also directing) make it abundantly clear what how precarious Wendy's daily life with minimal money and no guaranteed shelter is.

Meek's Cutoff Is A Western Deconstruction Like No Other

As Meek's Cutoff opens, director Kelly Reichardt makes it apparent this movie will be adhering to a  transcendentalism style of filmmaking. Some of the core tenants of this filmmaking style, namely prolonged extended takes concentrated on minimal activity, turn out to be a perfect way to capture the experiences of the lead characters of Meek's Cutoff as they gradually make their way across the American frontier to an unspecified locale that's supposed to provide them all with prosperous riches. This is a journey that's arduous and slow with little in the way of actual progress to speak of so it's fitting that Reichardt opts to capture this voyage in a filming style that places an emphasis on slower pacing and minimalism.

Don't Get Too Close To Venom, It's Where Eddie Brock's Demons Hide...And Also It's A Dismal & Awkward Movie

Good God, the Venom movie is an outstandingly clumsy exercise in cinematic storytelling. This whole film is so awkward to watch it leaves one feeling uncomfortable, it's like watching someone repeatedly try to do a somersault but constantly failing at it in the most spectacular of ways. At least it establishes right from the get-go that this is gonna be a subpar production, Venom does not waste time in letting you know it's a flat-out disaster. The first twenty minutes are dedicated to establishing the character of Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) and who he is as a person. Hardy's wack-a-doodle performance constantly shifts Brock's personality from scene-to-scene, so don't expect to get to know this character very well in this section of the movie or any other part of it.

I Feel Pretty Has A Thoughtful Moral And An Abundance of Lackluster Comedy To Impart

I Feel Pretty is your basic middle-of-the-road comedy, but I do want to give it props for conveying an important message that more films need to carry. The idea of making a whole film dedicated to the idea of reminding women that who they are should define what they think is "pretty" instead of narrowly defined conventions of American society is way a more admirable thesis to pivot your movie around than what you would find in your typical disposable Adam Sandler or Kevin James comedy. Good on I Feel Pretty for having such a considerate theme fueling its whole story, though that story itself, and especially how it's executed, is woefully paint-by-numbers in too many respects.

Sequences Set In The Past Work Better For Wonderstruck Than Ones Set In 1977

For years, the norm was that books adapted into movies were typically brought to the silver screen with minimal, if there was any at all, assistance from the author of the original text. Perhaps because of long-time dissatisfaction with how these works were adapted or perhaps as a way to mimic the success Marvel Comics had with taking control of film adaptations of their own characters, authors like Mark Millar, Seth Grahame-Smith and especially Patrick Ness (who adapted his own books A Monster Calls and Chaos Walking for the big screen) have recently become more involved in how their works become translated to the world of cinema.

Money, Money, Money, It's Not So Funny In A Rich Man's World In All The Money In The World

The newest Ridley Scott movie, All The Money In The World, has generated plenty of discussion leading up to its theatrical release this past December and it's extremely easy to see why. Kevin Spacey had shot his entire role as J. Paul Getty earlier this year and the film was almost ready to go when news broke at the tail end of October 2017 about sexual allegations being lobbed at Kevin Spacey. All of a sudden, this motion picture found itself starring one of the most detested men in Hollywood and Ridley Scott undertook a preposterous-sounding task to rectify this: reshoot Spacey's scenes with Christopher Plummer instead playing the role.