Monsters and Men Is a Timely Look at the Quiet Courage Needed to Confront Systemic Racism

CW: References to police brutality ahead 

Monsters and Men is a 2018 feature from writer/director Reinaldo Marcus Green that was intended to be inspired by the death of Eric Garner. Though we don't technically see the death of the Eric Garner stand-in at any point in Monsters and Men, pieces of dialogue (particularly mention of the now-deceased person being murdered by police for selling cigarettes) make it clear who this story is about. Of course, Eric Garner is not the first Black person to die at the hands of the police. Acts of violence on the parts of police officers motivated by racism have been going on since basically the police were invented. They've also certainly been rampant in the six years since Garner's death.

Free Solo's Outstanding Camerawork Is Nightmare Fuel For People With a Fear of Heights

If there's one job I'm just not cut out for, it's mountain climber. My vertigo kicks in if I go up a particularly high escalator, I can only imagine how distraught I'd be trying to ascend the side of a mountain. But there's plenty of people who don't just manage to actually climb up mountains, they excel at it and some even manage to do with without any ropes to provide protection for them. These climbers are known as free solo climbers and one of the most famous people in this field is Alex Honnold, the star of Free Solo, a documentary about his exploits trying to ascend the El Capitan rock formation over the course of two years. It's a monumental task with an equally massive level of risk attached to it but Honnold is not the kind of guy who just sticks to the safe and sound.

Final Score Is A Better Than Expected Take On The Die Hard Formula

There is a moment in the British action film Final Score where a reckless arrogant law enforcement officer refers to the sport of football as soccer only to be hit over the head by one of the non-Dave Bautista protagonists who staunchly informs him "It's called football!" It's one of the big crowdpleaser moments of Final Score that's clearly designed to elicit a big cheer from the audience. If that sounds too ridiculous to you, this isn't your movie. If you're like me and the mere concept of that moment sounded like a delight to you, right this way folks, Final Score is gonna be your cup of tea.

Hale County: This Morning, This Evening Is A Transportive Avant-Garde Type of Documentary

If you're a pleb like me, you were likely puzzled by at least one documentary nominated for Best Documentary Feature in the 91st Academy Awards ceremony that went by the name of Hale County: This Morning, This Evening. It was a nomination thought of as surprising far and wide simply due to the low profile of the film (Hale County has never played in more than 8 movie theaters in its domestic box office run), though thankfully PBS put the documentary up on their website for a week so that individuals like myself who were unaware of the existence of this film could finally catch up and see what all the fuss was about.

The Disastrous Life Itself Is Complex In Structure But Deadly Dull In The Details

Perhaps you've heard of the movie Life Itself. Maybe you saw the advertising for its September 2018 theatrical release or maybe you've only been exposed to it via ads on the Amazon Prime section of the Amazon website or there's a good chance your only exposure to Life Itself has been by hearing a loved one trying to recount its labyrinthine plot. There are many ways to be exposed to Life Itself but merely hearing about it or seeing a poster for it is nothing compared to actually watching the movie. This is a tragic trainwreck of a feature film, one that sees a murderer's row of actors get put to use on a film whose thematic substance is about as thin as roadkill on a Texas highway. 

Slice Is A Classic Example of an Overstuffed Movie That Still Feels Empty

You'd be forgiven if you began watching Slice and presumed, thanks to the shockingly dense amount of mythology it throws at the viewer, that it was part of some larger franchise, perhaps it's a sequel to another movie or even just a feature-film adaptation of an Adult Swim show. In fact, this is a completely stand-alone motion picture hailing from writer/director Austin Vesley that just has a wider universe it needs to establish before its plot can get underway. Peculiarly though, a proper story or anything else similarly substantive never really materializes despite a whole horde of characters and supernatural tomfoolery getting introduced, Slice instead just has a lot of chess pieces in play that it never bothers to move around the board.

The Old Man & The Gun Is The Newest Exceptional Directorial Effort From David Lowery

This is the third straight year that director David Lowery has delivered a new film and they're all quite different creatures. 2016 saw him enter the world of family movie filmmaking with the excellent Pete's Dragon, in 2017 he did an avant-garde exploration of life & death with A Ghost Story and now in 2018 he's delivered The Old Man & The Gun, which covers some common thematic ground with A Ghost Story. Specifically, both are wistful tales of how our own lives can impact others even after we're gone, though his newest directorial effort covers this material in a more light-hearted dialogue-heavy manner compared to the stripped-down nature of A Ghost Story.

He Ain't Heavy, He's My Sisters Brothers!

The rootin'-tootin' titular siblings of The Sisters Brothers are two men who have developed a reputation for being handy with a gun and getting whatever assignment you give them finished, albeit finished in an unconventional manner. These two men are Eli Sisters (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix), with the former member of the duo looking to find a way out of this life of being a gun-for-hire for bloodthirsty rich folks while Charlie Sisters see's no other life for himself and his brother than the one they're engaging in right now. Meanwhile, a pivotal subplot involves another duo, this time consisting of Southern dandy John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) and chemist Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed), with Morris teaming up with Warm for a potentially lucrative prospecting gig after he was initially hired to hold Warm hostage for the Sisters Brothers.

Colette Is A Real Page-Turner (Because It's About An Author, Don't You See)

My favorite approach with historical dramas is ones that work around the clock to emphasize the relatable humanity of its lead characters. They may exist in a wholly different time period, but people are still people no matter whether it's 1718 or 2018 so it's nice when these kinds of period piece dramas make an effort to depict their characters as not sacrosanct caricatures of the past but rather flesh and blood people like you and me. Colette takes this approach to tell the true story of Gabrielle Colette (Kiera Knightley), a woman who broke all kinds of boundaries in European society as well as late 19th-century society in general without many even noticing.

A Simple Favor Is A Delightfully Unhinged Comedic Thriller

A Simple Favor is the latest in a long line of movies to be woefully mismarketed. Conventional trailers and commercials for the latest Paul Feig directorial effort try to portray the feature as being in the vein of recent financially lucrative Fall thrillers like The Girl On The Train and Gone Girl, but A Simple Favor is far different than those two movies. Instead of being a straightforward dramatic thriller, A Simple Favor is instead a movie that is to loopy thrillers what Rampage was to big monster movies, a big-budget star-studded homage to that just revels in all kinds of trashy twists and "Gotcha!" shock moments. Also like Rampage, A Simple Favor is super fun to watch.

Smallfoot Is A Solid Animated Musical Whose Best Traits Are Also Its Most Unique Ones

Smallfoot is a new animated family movie hailing from director Karey Kirkpatrick (director of the underappreciated Over the Hedge and the widely forgotten 2009 Eddie Murphy vehicle Imagine That) whose best qualities are the ways it tries to be unique and whose weaker aspects come from when it tries too hard to adhere to what it believes conventional American animated family fare has to be. The majority of our lead characters in Smallfoot are Yeti's who reside in a village located on the very top of a mountain. In this village, we find our lead character, Migo (Channing Tatum), who loves his simple life which is primarily spent preparing to take over the duties of his father, Dorgle (Danny DeVito), and adhering to ancient rules written on stones that nobody is supposed to question.

Quiet Dread Informs The Gruesome Violence In Lizzie

All these years later, we still don't know what exactly happened with the murder of Lizzie Borden's father and stepmother. That was perhaps the most surprising thing I learned while doing research on this topic after watching Lizzie, a feature film take on a segment of the life of Lizzie Borden, these murders are still shrouded in so much mystery, with many suspecting that Borden is the one responsible for them. The interpretation of how these events went down in Lizzie seem to be taking an inspiration from theories posited by Ed McBain that Borden killed these two in retaliation for, among other cruelties, Borden's father discovering that she's engaging in a romantic relationship with the families female housemaid.

Hold the Dark Is A Shallow And Tedious Journey Into The Cold Wilderness

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD 

I kept waiting and waiting for Hold the Dark to suddenly click into place for me, but that moment never came. Writer Macon Blair and director Jeremy Saulnier (the latter being the director behind one of 2016's best movies, Green Room) have delivered a feature that only gets more and more inert as it goes on as one gradually realizes that the slow-burn restrained atmosphere of the whole movie isn't going nowhere. Oh to go back to the start of the movie, when I still had hopes for this one realizing its potential. The beginning of Hold the Dark is easily the strongest part of the whole feature, as we're introduced to Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), an author who is contacted by Alaska resident Medora (Riley Keough) to help her find her son who was recently taken by wolves.

Assassination Nation Is An Imperfect But Admirably Ambitious Middle Finger To The Patriarchy

If nothing else, Assassination Nation has its finger very much on the pulse of all corners of internet culture and how it impacts people, particularly my generation. It was borderline strange to hear a major theatrically released motion picture actually reference internet slang like #NotAllMen or see teenage characters engage in conversations rife with meme references or have a story that recognizes how much bigotry can be found on social media websites like Twitter. Writer and director Sam Levinson has clearly decided to make an ambitious treatise on how internet culture can amplify already existing toxic societal behaviors towards women that's fascinating to watch but sometimes stumbles in execution.

White Boy Rick Is Frequently Scattered But Also Frequently Engaging

For better and for worse, there's a whole lot that the crime drama White Boy Rick wants to explore in depicting the life of non-fictional individual Richard Wershe Jr. A.K.A. White Boy Rick (played by newcomer Richie Merritt), a 15-year-old from Detroit, Michigan who was hired by the FBI and the local law enforcement to become a supplier for local drug dealers as a way of gaining information needed to bring these people into justice. Despite being a teenager, Wershe is basically just dragged into being an informant under the threat of his father of the same name (portrayed by Matthew McConaughey), who sells guns, if he doesn't cooperate. Wershe is basically trapped between a rock and a hard place and he decides to get out of it by agreeing to serve as an FBI informant.

The Land of Steady Habits Thoughtfully Probes The Long-Term Consequences Of A Persons Actions

Watching Ben Mendelsohn get interviewed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! this past Thursday allowed me the chance to become even more impressed with Mendelsohn as an actor than I already was and I already was pretty impressed with him! Ben Mendelsohn exuded a self-deprecating yet quietly confident charm in his interactions with Kimmel, a sharp contrast to the scummy morally duplicitous characters he usually plays in films and television programs. The whole process of acting is about immersing oneself in a role drastically different from their own everyday persona but one can take for granted just how wide the gulf between a person's performance and their actual personality can be until you see the guy who helped create the Death Star being a total charmer on late night TV.

Mandy Is The Best Kind of Cinematic Madness

SPOILERS FOR MANDY FOLLOW

I feel like Scrat from Ice Age would love Mandy because this movie is absolutely nuts. The newest directorial effort from filmmaker Panos Cosmatos, Mandy can be best summed up as being the demented spawn of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall Past Lives and John Wick. Though it may echo two other recent features, and its editing and atmosphere certainly evoke past auteurs of dream-like motion pictures like David Lynch, make no mistake about it, Mandy is very much a one-of-a-kind creation that constantly had me either questioning what the hell I was even watching or cheering on the mayhem transpiring on-screen. It's two hours of the most excellent kind of madness, the kind that was tailor-made for Nicolas Cage's gifts as an actor.

The Predator Is A Staggeringly And Tragically Inept Feature

The Predator is a movie that feels like it's been put through a meat grinder and then put through numerous cycles in a blender. Good luck keeping track of where characters are or why crucial plot points are even happening amidst the ramshackle editing that renders the whole movie choppy & frequently incoherent. The disastrous editing isn't all that goes wrong here though in this motion picture whose extremely low level of quality is tragic to see. You'd think pairing up Shane Black, the mind behind Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys, with a new Predator movie (Black had previously appeared in the first Predator film in a support role) would be the easiest recipe ever for surefire entertainment, but The Predator is instead a total waste of potential that rarely feels like a Shane Black movie, and I'm not just saying that because it doesn't take place at Christmastime!

I Cannot Forgive The Nun For Its Sins Against Good Horror Filmmaking

The only thing that's gonna really scare you while watching The Nun is realizing how little effort has been put into this shockingly empty film. Considering not just how good the prior entries in the Conjuring saga have been but also the level of quality and creativity seen in recent horror films like Hereditary and A Quiet Place, The Nun's shallow attempts at horror filmmaking feel all the more egregious. Probably the highest compliment I can offer to it is that it at least gives the immensely talented Demian Bichir his first opportunity to headline a high-profile American film. Oh, and it's also better than The Bye-Bye Man, I suppose that's a plus.