The King Has Noble Intent But Only Intermittently Successful Execution

It's always difficult to suddenly assume a new job but it's especially trying when your the son of a King of England who doesn't want anything to do with the throne and then you're forced to become the King when your pops dies. Don't you hate it when that happens? Those circumstances have just befallen King Henry V (Timothee Chalamet), whose distaste with the throne is even greater than his thirst for alcohol. He didn't want this gig, but Henry V is trying to create a more peaceful kingdom compared to his far more trigger-happy father who was always going to war with everybody who gave him so much as a bad look. But The King is a dark drama and that means Henry V's ambitions for peace will not go according to plan.

The Lighthouse Is Like If Phantom Thread and Fritz Lang Had A Twisted Horror Movie Baby

You know how a recurring job interview question is "Where do you see yourself in ten years?" I'm sure if you had asked Robert Pattinson that question in 2009 when he was doing the press rounds to promote The Twilight Saga: New Moon, he would have listed a hundred different answers before thinking "I'll be in a black-and-white horror film with Willem Dafoe set entirely at a lighthouse." It may not be what Pattinson would first think of as his future career prospects circa. 2009, but The Lighthouse, like much of Pattinson's post-Twilight work, is both audacious and exceptionally well-made. Put simply, this new film from The VVitch helmer Robert Eggers is like if Phantom Thread, Swiss Army Man and Fritz Lang all had a super warped child.

Claire Denis Creates A Quietly Terrifying Voyage Into Space With High Life

High Life opens with its lead character, Monte (Robert Pattinson), doing some repairs on the exterior of the spacecraft he and his daughter are traveling in. During this process, he accidentally loses grip of a tool that proceeds to float off into the void of space. As both he and the viewer watch this tool escape his grasp, High Life's way of depicting the vastness of space is made clear. In this film, the terrifying vastness of space is treated bluntly, only towards the end of the movie do more traditional grandiose depictions of the cosmos emerge. For much of its runtime, space is depicted as something simple: endless blackness that spells doom for all that enter it. It's a terrifying domain made all the eerier by the frank way Claire Denis films space, she frames High Life's characters against this empty void with no pomp, no circumstance.

Wowzers, Good Time Is Excellent And Visually Magnificent Crime Thriller Cinema!

MILD SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING OF GOOD TIME ARE WITHIN! 

Good Time feels so much like a singular movie, like it's the manifestation of a precise one-of-a-kind take on the crime thriller genre. Directed by Ben Safdie and Josh Safdie (the two are commonly referred to as The Safdie Brothers), there's plenty of elements here that are immediately distinctive, most notably the visual aesthetic that leans heavily on a bright neon-infused color scheme that coats every environment the story wanders into which range from a bail bond office to an amusement park. Then there's the score by Oneohtrix Point Never, which pulsates right in your ear with its idiosyncratic sound as well as the camerawork that comes up with truly inventive ways to frame various intensity-driven sequences.

We Built The Lost City Of Z On Rock And Roll

In his 1995 review of Congo, Roger Ebert mentioned how the jungle adventure movie had "fallen out of fashion", which is true, we didn't really see a whole bunch of such movies in the years leading up to 1995. While last year brought the new Jungle Book remake from Disney and The Legend Of Tarzan, jungle adventure movies have otherwise been mostly scarce in 2010's cinema as well, a sign that that particular subgenre may really have just fallen by the wayside for a variety of reason. But just because it's scarce doesn't mean it's gone extinct. Case in point, last month brought a brand spanking new jungle adventure movie in the form of James Gray's newest directorial effort, The Lost City Of Z.

"You Better Hold On Tight Spider-Monkey": Journey Into Twilight: Part One

In the four years it existed as a film franchise, The Twilight Saga garnered a tidal wave of hatred, the kind reserved for the level of subpar cinema occupied by the likes of Disaster Movie and God's Not Dead. Rare was the joke in this era that didn't use the tale of Bella and Edward as a punchline, but was such a response solely due to them being bad movies? After all, bad blockbusters like Transformers are reviled, but they don't receive the sort of drubbing down that Twilight got, to the point where anyone who enjoyed the films was labeled as nothing short of a dimwit or a heathen.