A Private War Is the Best Kind of Biopic Drama In How Well It Explores the Humanity of a Historical Figure

It feels like the grim tone of A Private War was always gonna be a barrier to it becoming a widely-seen domestic box office hit but it's still a pity this feature came and went in such a quick fashion back in November 2018. Topping out at only $1.6 million, A Private War was one of the worst-performing wide releases of 2018 and one of a number of recent releases from Aviron Pictures (alongside Serenity and After) to go belly-up at the box office. As everybody knows, though, box office grosses are not an exact barometer for quality and A Private War is actually a well-made war drama that deserved far more attention than it got.

Willem Dafoe Delivers A Haunting Lead Turn In The Vincent van Gogh Movie At Eternity's Gate

Every Academy Awards ceremony, there's one movie that comes out of nowhere to score a nomination in the acting categories and then have no other Oscar nominations to its name. The most prominent example in recent years was the baffling nomination of Robert Duvall in The Judge in Best Supporting Actor while another modern example of this trend was Viggo Mortensen in Captain Fantastic. For the most recent Academy Awards ceremony, the film that kept this tradition alive and well was At Eternity's Gate, a new film from director Julian Schnabel that managed to get Willem Dafoe his fourth Oscar nomination (and his first ever in the Best Actor category) for portraying the painter Vincent van Gogh.

Shoplifters Is An Outstanding Empathetic Portrait of The Human Beings That Make Up One Chosen Family

The lead characters of Shoplifters are six people that society has tossed aside. Originally, this group merely consists of arried couple Osamu (Lily Franky) & Nobuyo (Sakura Ando), Aki (Mayu Matsuoka),  Aki's grandmother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) and a child named Shota (Kairi Jo) who all live together in a small house and get their money primarily through selling items they shoplift and through Hatsue's pension. but their ramshackle makeshift family expands to include a little girl previously living in an abusive household that they proceed to name Lin (Miyu Sasaki). Maybe the broader world is done with these people but they aren't done with each other as they create a chosen family unit that tries to support one another, particularly newcomer Lin.

Ralph Breaks The Internet Is An Episodic But Frequently Fun Voyage Into The World Wide Web

As Vanellope Von Schweetz (Sarah Silverman) notes early on in Ralph Breaks The Internet, the internet is a vast place. This sprawling domain is rife with possibilities for comedy and it's easy to imagine that writing up potential internet-based plot points or gags for Ralph Breaks The Internet would be an incredibly fun exercise. Unfortunately, the excess of potential in its central concept seems to have thrown Ralph Breaks The Internet off-kilter to a degree in terms of storytelling. Frequently, the films feels like a collection of stand-alone short films chronicling the exploits of the Wreck-It Ralph protagonists exploring the wide world of the internet rather than a cohesive feature-length movie.

The Favourite Is A Wickedly Fun Take On Traditional Period Pieces Dramas

I am really starting to dig this trend of costume period piece movies like Phantom Thread, Colette and now The Favourite that have their period-era characters talk and act like modern warts-and-all human beings. Though they didn't pioneer this trend (why, the Comedy Central TV show Another Period has been doing this for quite some time now), it is a nice departure from the norm in cinema where the default mode of doing these films is to depict historical time periods in a sacrosanct manner that has people acting as proper as possible. That's not quite the approach taken by The Favourite, which has more in common with a Marx Brothers comedy or even, in terms of ribald dialogue, a period-era version of a raunchy Seth Rogen comedy than it does with your average Stephen Frears film.

Character-Driven Thrills Make Cam Oh So Engrossing

What a difference a year makes, especially when it comes to the reputation of Netflix's original movies. This time last year, we were still a few days out from Netflix's big blockbuster Bright becoming one of the worst movies of last year, a miserable end to a year that primarily saw disappointments (like War Machine or Death Note) fill up Netflix's original film line-up. Flash-forward to December 2018 and Netflix, while not impervious to disappointing movies (remember that underwhelming Jeremy Saulnier film they released?) has been putting out high-quality films on a weekly basis, films like Private Life, Roma, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Other Side of the Wind and Cam.

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.

Writer/Director Joel Edgerton Manages To Find Humanity To Accompany On-Screen Torment In Boy Erased

After his directorial debut, The Gift, proved to be a surprise success, Joel Edgerton decided to follow that project up with a classic sophomore directorial effort move: it was time to get serious. It was time to deliver an "artsy" motion picture that proved to the world that Edgerton was no one-trick pony, no, this was a guy who was capable of creating powerful art in addition to fun genre fare. The result of this drive to deliver a more serious-minded feature is Boy Erased, which really aims for the full nine years in terms of dark storytelling material by covering the experience of a gay teenager going to a conversion camp designed to "correct" his sexuality.

The Front Runner Is Lackluster Fare Desperately In Need Of Some Personality

The Front Runner is a movie after Dragnet's heart in that it's very much a "Just The Facts, Ma'am" kind of production based on the three-week-long scandal that sank the Presidential chances of Democratic Party candidate Gary Hart. It presents the events that happened, a bunch of the real-life people involved with them but never creates a perspective or a personality of its own in the process. Going the "Just The Facts, Ma'am" route may have helped Dragnet solve some crimes in his own TV show, but doing the same approach here ends up meaning The Front Runner just feels empty as a movie. It's a wannabe political thriller without any of the brains, thrills or thoughtfulness that define the best entries in this subgenre.

Green Book Is Occasionally Agreeable And Occasionally Cringe-Inducing

It's very strange to finally enter the critical discourse on Green Book, which has been in full swing ever since the movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival nearly three months ago, solely because the most I have to offer up on the movie is that it's usually passable but not much more than that. Green Book is very much a traditional crowdpleaser movie, the kind of upbeat easygoing fare that usually wins a lot of Oscars and that general moviegoers go ga-ga for, it's the kind of paint-by-numbers production that doesn't offer up one the chance to say much beyond "Well, maybe your parents will like it?  Especially if they loved The Blind Side and Million Dollar Arm?"

Overlord Is Simple But Also Frequently Entertaining

Bad Robot Productions has been stepping up their output lately to include a lot more projects that aren't just J.J. Abrams directorial efforts. What used to be a rare occurrence (a Morning Glory here, a Cloverfield there) is now making becoming an annual tradition that promises to grow in prominence in the years to come. Ramping up the amount of movies they make means it was inevitable that they'd eventually make their first R-rated film, which comes in the form of Overlord, a B-movie that keeps things simple and gory. If you're looking for a bit of gruesome counterprogramming during the holiday season movie landscape heavily populated by family movies and prestige dramas, well, you could certainly do worse than this.

Creed II is Satisfying But Disappointingly Not Very Surprising

Creed II is not as good as the first movie. That was inevitable because Creed is one of the best movies of the last few years, how could you possibly top it? Trying to follow up that motion picture was gonna be a difficult task for anybody and new director Steve Caple Jr. (taking over for the original Creed's director Ryan Coogler who is now off in Wakanda) does a commendable job expanding on the story of Creed from the first movie. Even without comparing this sequel to its predecessor though, one can't help but feel like some spark of originality is missing from Creed II. This movie knows how to pack a punch but you can always see the punch coming.

Instant Family Stumbles In Trying To Make Heartfelt Family Fare

Pete (Mark Wahlberg) and Ellie Wagner (Rose Byrne), the two leads of Instant Family, have been debating for a while now whether or not they wanna make the dive into having kids. They finally decide to commit to it though upon learning more about the foster care adoption process which they dive headfirst into by way of doing all the necessary training. None of that training can prepare them for when they actually adopt three kids, teenager Lizzy (Isabela Moner) and her two younger siblings Juan (Gustavo Quiroz) and Lita (Julianna Gamiz), and their whole lives get turned upside down. A whole lot of chaos might just help them become a family, yee-haw.

Thoughtful Heist Movie Widows Is The Very Best Kind of Expansive Cinema

Widows is so jam-packed with so many plotlines, themes, and social commentary that it feels like it shouldn't work at all, this should be the quintessential case of an overstuffed movie that people refer to as something that should have been an HBO miniseries instead.  A heist thriller with so much going on at once really does sound like it should be the kind of ambitious project that exceeds an artists grasp. Instead, Widows is more than just "not overstuffed", it's phenomenal cinema from top-to-bottom, an immensely impressive achievement that, like an expert magician pulling a tablecloth off a table without disrupting any items actually on the table, manages to do the seemingly impossible so effortlessly.

The Grinch Is Painless And Average Which Puts It Above Most Dr. Seuss Movie Adaptations

Adapting Dr. Seuss works into feature films is a process that does not have a great track record, to put it mildly. The live-action Grinch and Cat in the Hat movies were abominations, The Lorax missed the darker underpinnings of the story it was adapting and Horton Hears A Who! was the one exception here, being a reasonably charming fare, probably one of the better Blue Sky Studios movies and definitely the best Dr. Seuss film adaptation. The Grinch (this time fully animated compared to the live-action 2000 Ron Howard directorial effort) is the newest film to try and tackle this daunting task and the result is something that's just inoffensive enough to probably rank in the upper pantheon of both Dr. Seuss movies and Illumination Entertainment films, though neither of those are high bars to clear.

The Coen Brothers Return To Westerns In Successful Fashion With The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The anthology film refers to movies that are comprised of individual, typically stand-alone, short segments instead of one grander story. Modern examples of this trend are few-and-far-between, but they've been most common in the horror genre which has produced the various V/H/S movies and The ABC's of Death. I guess the wretched 2013 abomination Movie 43 would count as an anthology movie? Easily the most high-profile modern example of this type of feature has to be the newest motion picture from Joel and Ethan Coen, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, which sees the iconic duo weaving six separate stories each inhabiting the Western genre they previously explored with 2010 directorial effort True Grit. 

Fantastic Beasts: The Crime of Grindelwald Leans Heavily On Poorly Developed Characters To Dismal Results

SPOILERS AHEAD

One of my favorite childhood memories is when I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the very first time as a nine-year-old boy. I'd heard so much praise regarding about The Boy Who Lived from my friends and family members but it was a whole other experience to actually read it and get enveloped into this world of wizardry and wonder populated by well-realized characters I could relate to so easily. There was so much vivid humanity that informed Harry Potter, his friends and his enemies, it just made that world so compelling. With the newest entry in this sprawling Harry Potter universe, clumsily entitled, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the world, specifically all kinds of extended mythology that takes place in it, has taken precedence over the characters and that results in a total mess of a movie that would be wretched even if it wasn’t connected to an infinitely superior series of books & films.

Outlaw King Impresses With Its Production Value But Underwhelms With Its Characters

The Hollywood epic was a common sight in the 1950's and 1960's as Hollywood tried to combat the rise of television programming with a horde of movies that used gargantuan budgets to bring to life massive-in-scale stories that usually took place in ancient periods of history. How funny then to consider that the newest Netflix original movie Outlaw King, which reunites director David Mackenzie with his Hell or High Water leading man Chris Pine, is an obvious homage to those types of movies, complete with a $120 million budget that makes it the most expensive Netflix movie yet (Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is waiting in the wings for its chance to turn to Outlaw King and say "Hold my beer!"), yet it'll be seen by the vast majority of people on...televisions!

It's Taken Forty-Plus Years To Get Released, But The Wait For The Other Side of the Wind Was Worth It!

This is my 1,000th movie review for Land of the Nerds! Over the course of about four-and-a-half years, I've watched and written about a ton of movies and I'm grateful to each and every one of you readers for supporting my cinematic pursuits, which include a most unique motion picture to serve as the subject of my 1,000th review!

You take the good with the bad. Yes, Netflix may finance annual Adam Sandler comedies, one of which features the sight of David Spade physically beating Paula Patton while shouting about what a good guy he is, but at least they've done good for the world of art by using their seemingly endless oceans of money to complete Orson Welles final film The Other Side of the Wind. This project started filming in the early 1970's and after a six-year-long filming process began an extensive post-production session that Orson Welles didn't finish before his passing in October 1985. In the more than three decades since then, the footage for this film has been mired in endless legal controversy that prevented it from being finished up.

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms Is In A Constant Battle Between Being Derivative And Being Weird

It is late in the evening. Rain comes down outside an office on the Disney lot as a group of Disney executives contemplate what their next big blockbuster should be. What public domain fantasy-IP can they turn into a motion picture next? They've already done so many, there can't possibly be any left....and then somebody remembers that The Nutcracker Suite exists, why not make a movie based on that famous piece of ballet music? Disney's adapted that material before with a Mickey Mouse short and kind of sort of in a Fantasia 2000 segment, surely a live-action adaptation is only the next logical step for the studio! Those Disney executives likely thought they had a surefire family movie hit on their hands, but what they got is The Nutcracker and the Four Realms, a movie that excels most when it's just being as odd and campy as possible.