Make Sure To Spend Some Time With The Creative Horror Comedy Happy Death Day

Though so many popular horror films (namely the Evil Dead movies) fall under the categorization of horror comedies, they haven't been much of a moneymaker at the domestic box office. That might be because too many modern-day examples of the trend are helmed by filmmakers who don't have the sense of tonal balance as, say, Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson and end up going too far in embracing the comedy side of that genre pairing, which can leave the horror feeling underwhelming. Then again, functioning more of a wacky dark comedy than as a straight-up horror film can have its benefits, just ask Happy Death Day.

Agnes Varda and JR Go On A Road Trip Packed With Engrossing Kindness In Faces Places

Iconic director Agnes Varda started out her filmmaking career with La Pointe Courte, a sobering look at a relationship in crisis, but her newest film is a complete 180 from 1955 feature in terms of tone. That newest directorial effort of hers is called Faces Places and one just feels pure joy from watching it. There are few movies I could say this about without some kind of caveat (The Muppets is one of the only other scant few titles I can think of to earn that distinction), but Faces Places really is that enjoyable to watch. From its humorous opening sequence establishing various ways that it's two lead characters did not meet to its heartfelt conclusion, Faces Places keeps a smile on your face and a sincere sense of kindness emanating from every fiber of its being.

The Remarkably Transfixing The Florida Project Is A Masterful Exercise In Humanization

There are two worlds constantly at war with each other in The Florida Project. The first of these worlds is that of the world of childhood, the other is the world of adulthood. In the world of childhood, especially in the summertime period of the year that The Florida Project takes place in, the greatest concern a child has is what exactly kind of fun they can get into next. The residents of the world of adulthood try their hardest to shield the children from fully grasping all of the horrors in our world. Though exceptions exist, young children only get the faintest glimpses of the financial struggles and other problems their parents go through to ensure they have basic necessities like a roof over their head.

Good Actors Try To Work With An Uneven Script In The Biopic Drama Marshall

Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Justice, finally got a biopic movie to headline. Instead of chronicling him being chosen for the Supreme Court, the movie Marshall concentrates on a 1940 court case that Thurgood Marshall (played by Chadwick Boseman here) served as a lawyer in. This court case involved Joseph Spell (Sterling K. Brown) being accused of raping a wealthy socialite, Elanor Strubing (Kate Hudson), a court case that seems to have the odds stacked against it, especially when Marshall, being an out of state lawyer dispatched by the NAACP, is forbidden from speaking during the trial, leaving all the in-court defense to Sam Friedman (Josh Gad).

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.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer Slaughters Normalcy With It's Depraved Farcical Storytelling. That's A Compliment.

If you saw 2016's excellent dark comedy The Lobster, then you're fully aware how much writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos loves to weave tales heavy on weirdness and people committing ever-escalating acts of depravity in the service of an extended metaphor. He keeps that spirit very much alive for his newest movie The Killing of a Sacred Deer, which is akin to The Lobster as well as last year's The Square in terms of being a dark comedy that keeps daring the audience to look away from the various hideous acts occuring on-screen. So utterly unconventional is The Killing of a Sacred Deer that I imagine writers Yorgo Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou started their first writing session with this simple statement:

The Documentary Spielberg Looks At An Iconic Career In An Engaging Manner

This morning, the nominations for the 90th Academy Awards were announced and among the nine films nominated for Best Picture was The Post, Steven Spielberg's newest directorial effort. With The Post securing a Best Picture nod, this meant, as pointed out by Mark Harris on Twitter, that Spielberg has now had eleven of his movies nominated for Best Picture, the second highest amount of movies a single director has ever had nominated in Best Picture (William Wyler has the most with 13 of his features scoring Best Picture nominations). That's an astonishing accomplishment and it's far from the only place where Spielberg's career has been marked with great success as anyone who's been to a movie theater in the last four decades can attest.

I Can Handle The Nastiness In Brawl In Cell Block 99 But Did It Have To Be So Meandering?

Brawl In Cell Block 99 is a grimy nasty movie, one that finds human beings as simply vehicles to experiment new forms of torment on and I can guarantee you that the features writer/director S. Craig Zahler would take that as a major compliment. He's made a film that's just stacked with depravity, which isn't a bad thing at all inherently, there are movies I absolutely love that are way more grim than this prison-set action film (Au Hasard Balthazar would eat this thing up for breakfast and then go back for seconds). But could it at least be depraved in an interesting way? Could its warped worldview manifest in ways that are actually entertaining instead of frequently meandering?

Be Open and Vulnerable With The Work

Emotional barriers are a daunting entity. They don't carry a physical form, but they still occupy space in our lives by affecting our decisions, how we interact with certain people and even our own personalities. Too many choose to just shove those emotional barriers to the back of your mind, hoping the o'l "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" axiom will end up applying for these internal problems. More often than not though, that just ends up exacerbating the issues you've been grappling with and leaving you in a worse position than where you started. Like I said though, these emotional barriers are a daunting thing to confront, so how does one go about actually handling these barriers?

It's Hip To Be Square In Ruben Ostlund's Successfully Uncomfortable Dark Comedy The Square

The modern-day idea of art being created solely for the sake of pushing people's buttons has taken on a negative connotation and that's really not unwarranted. You've got countless animated and live-action TV shows trying to ape the bawdy humor of the likes of South Park and Family Guy whose only concept of comedy is just saying stuff that they think will make people made but just makes them look tired and ignorant (this also applies to Family Guy) and numerous further attempts by modern-day art to hit back at a non-existent "politically correct boogeyman" come off as similarly having nothing to say beyond "I M EDGY BROOOOOOO".

Thank You For Your Service Has Some Meaningful And Well-Realized Things To Say On Post-War Trauma

Soldiers face all kinds of struggles when they return home from war. Adjusting to the calmer intricacies of civilian life after being stuck in combat mode 24/7 is a primary one as are the lingering mental health problems many in wartime situations develop. These are the kind of issues the lead characters, a group of young soldiers returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq circa. 2007, of the Jason Hall-directed motion picture Thank You For Your Service. The soldier that serves as our protagonist of this project is Adam Schumann (Miles Teller), a staff sergeant who now has to come home to his wife, Saskia Schumann (Haley Bennett) a more tranquil family life that he internally struggles to adapt to.

Mindbogglingly Middling Mob Movie Mars Suburbicon

So this is the part of the review where I'd normally recap the plot of the movie I'm reviewing but for Suburbicon, that seems like a momentous task simply given that concisely recapping the plot proper of this George Clooney directed feature film is a little difficult given how all-over-the-place the story of Suburbicon actually is. But I'm never one to shy away from a challenge, so lemme give this a go. The motion picture starts with an African-American family moving into Suburbicon, a supposedly idyllic suburban paradise, in the year 1959 much to the intense anger of their white neighbors, who sign petitions to get the new neighbors kicked out and yell & scream outside the families house each night.

Cover Your Mouth And Don't Inhale Breathe

For Robin Cavendish (Andrew Garfield), life was peaches and cream, especially once Diana Blacker (Claire Foy) came into the picture. The two met at a croquet match and after a brief montage that doesn't allow the viewer to properly process how or why these two would work together as a couple, they're married! No wait, they're also expecting a child! Lots of stuff is happening in these opening scenes. Something else tremendous occurs for the couple when Robin is stricken by polio, which leaves him permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Now a guy who was previously all about doing exotic traveling and parties is confined to a hospital bed, a situation that has Robin convinced his life is over.

The Snowman Is A Frosty Murder Mystery Misfire

Do you want to build a snowman? C'mon, your snowman can't turn out any worse than Tomas Alfredson's new thriller The Snowman, a film that clearly was meant to be a snowy Silence Of The Lambs but ends up being more incoherent than anything else. The premise of The Snowman, alas, does not revolve around a crime-solving snowman, but rather Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender, and yes, multiple characters solemnly intone that name throughout the film) taking time away from his favorite past time of drinking booze and passing out on playground equipment so that he can concentrate on a local missing person case, with the individual that's missing being a mother who's having marriage troubles.

Silly Fun And Disaster Mayhem Are In Short Supply In The Rote Geostorm

The erratic weather patterns of planet Earth, which have only grown worse and more deadly as the years go by, have finally caused the various nations of the world to come together to conjure up a solution for these weather-related problems. Their remedy arrives in the form of a system of satellites, nicknamed Dutchboy, that hover above Earth and control the weather. Natural disasters are a thing of the past and the man behind designing Dutchboy, Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler), is a hero. Unfortunately, Jake Lawson is a rowdy guy who doesn't respond well to authority and him mouthing off to a U.S. senator ends up costing him his job.

The Foreigner Needed, To Quote Toby Keith, A Little Less Talk And A Lot More Action

As The Foreigner starts, we're given no real introduction to the character of Ngoc Minh Quan (Jackie Chan), there's no flashback sequence to inform the audience of some kind of tragic backstory, he's just a dude who's trying to get his teenage daughter to a local store so she can get the dress she needs for a school dance. Right after he drops her off to go into that store while he parks the car, a bomb goes off that kills Quan's daughter, leaving him distraught and shaken. His daughter was the only family he had left, and as we later learn Quan had previously family members under similarly tragic circumstances, this seemingly normal guy snaps and begins a quest for vengeance.

Professor Marston And The Wonder Women's Best Moments Reinforce How Clunky Some of its Storytelling Is

Now that Wonder Woman is the star of one of the biggest superhero movies of all-time, the character's backstory is pretty well-known by the general public, but the life of the creator of Wonder Woman is likely still a mystery to many. Well, in order to fully process who was behind the character of Wonder Woman, we have to go all the way back to the 1930's, when husband/wife duo William Moulton Marston (Luke Evans) and Elizabeth Holloway Marston (Rebecca Hall) are trying to hit the big time at the college they work at, a college that, incidentally, does not recognize Elizabeth's intellectual achievements solely based on her gender.

The Meyerowitz Stories Is One Of Noah Baumbach's Strongest Efforts Yet As A Director

The fact that the plural version of the word story is utilized in the title of the new Noah Baumbach movie The Meyerowitz Stories should indicate to the average viewer that this one film contains multiple different tales it plans to tell. All of the assorted plotlines follow the Meyerowitz family, a group of assorted artists at differing stages of life. The member of this family most prominent in the film itself is Danny Meyerowitz (Adam Sandler), a piano player whose going through a divorce and also dealing with his 18-year-old daughter leaving home for college. Meanwhile, his half-brother, wealthy accountant Matthew Meyerowitz (Ben Stiller), is coming up from Los Angeles to sell their dads home.

The Mountain Between Us Is So Trite And Dull, It's Chilling

Rare is the trip by airplane that goes exactly as planned. You're bound to end up getting transferred to another flight or missing some piece of luggage or landing hours later than originally expected if you end up choosing this mode of transportation. Dr. Ben Bass (Idris Elba) and Alex Martin (Kate Winslet) were already facing the kind of mundane difficulties we all go through when trying to embark on a flight, namely being unable to get on flights they absolutely need to get on for extremely important personal events (Bass has a patient he has to perform surgery on while Martin is getting married the next day).

Thoughtfulness And Gorgeous Visuals Are Very Much In Supply With Blade Runner 2049 (SPOILERS!!!!)

Discussing Blade Runner 2049 in any kind of detail requires spoilers, so be forewarned, this entire review is lathered in spoilers. Want a spoiler-free reaction to the movie? Then I shall tell you this is a great movie with beautiful visuals and thoughtful ideas. If you want to hear me get more in-depth then that, then read on but BEWARE OF SPOILERS