A League of Their Own Is a Good Sport When It Comes to Delivering Heartfelt Comedg

We all like to think of Tom Hanks as America's Dad. He's just so darn loveable playing reliable authority figures we can turn to whenever trouble rears its ugly head. Why else would he be the perfect figure to play real-world figures like Sully or Mister Rogers? But Hanks has actually dabbled in darker roles throughout his career and frequently to great effect! His turn as a curmudgeon FBI officer in Catch Me If You Can is hysterical, he makes a perfect contrast to the zippy law-breaking protagonist. My personal favorite darker Tom Hanks turn, though, is easily his murderous British author in Cloud Atlas. Among that movies infinite pleasures are seeing Hanks totally knock that brief profanity-laden role out of the park!

A Look At Array Releasing, One of the Most Vital Modern Movie Studios

When it comes to American movie studios, we all likely know the Five Major Studios. Which studios occupy that group has shifted over the last seventy years (remember when RKO was part of this group?) but in the modern context, Universal, Disney, Warner Bros. Sony/Columbia and Paramount are the five studios we could name and whose logos we could recognize. Perhaps Lionsgate and A24 are also known by the broader public. Beyond that, though, the sheer number of studios and production companies out there means they inevitably tend to blur together. But one studio that should be on more people's radar is the independent distribution company Array Releasing.

Dolittle Does Little Successfully

"My dad left for a pack of seals and never came back." - Yoshi the Polar Bear (John Cena) in Dolittle.

If it was possible for a movie to sweat, Dolittle would be practically soaked in perspiration. Like a stand-up comic scrambling to find a punchline that will resonate with a crowd, Dolittle tries every well-worn trick in the book to please viewers.  Do you like CGI animals with celebrity voices? Do you like out-of-nowhere references to The Godfather? What about prolonged fart gags? Characters screaming endlessly at each other? It's all the worst kind of comedy that populates the lowest-common-denominator family movies and it's all Dolittle can come up with to try and entertain audiences. In its endlessly manic efforts to please viewers, Dolittle ends up creating the love-child of the worst Pirates of the Caribbean movie and Open Season. This is a combination that simply should not be.

In Laman's Terms: Ranking This Year's Best Picture Nominees From Worst to Best

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

It's been a long day. The discourse over the crops of nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards has already been draining after just 14-ish hours, especially in regards to how the Academy Awards constantly refuses to recognize diverse voices in its nominations. No women directors, only on person color recognized in the four acting categories, it's just ridiculous. For the sake of brevity on this taxing day, I'll cut to the chase: I've ranked this year's nine Best Picture nominees from worst to best. Sound off in the comments if you have any differing opinions on this matter and make sure to support cinema year-round from the kind of voices the Academy Awards and other awards bodies refuse to acknowledge even exist.

Rebecca Hall Unnerves and Impresses in Christine

How do you deal with tragedy? We all have our coping mechanisms. For example, one of the supporting characters of Christine, Jean Reed (Maria Dizzia), mentions that she likes to eat some ice cream and sing out loud whenever the world is becoming too harsh. We all need go-to outlets like that to turn to in order to fleetingly escape from the horrors of the world. Tragedy is a pervasive part of the world, so too should coping mechanisms to deal with that tragedy. Christine deals with the true story of Christine Chubbuck, a news anchor working for a Sarasota, Florida TV station in 1974 who has had heavy experience with adversity in her own life.

The Terminal Is Agreeable But Also Occasionally Awkward

In the early 2000s, director Steven Spielberg went into the most exciting creative period of his extraordinary career as a filmmaker. For the first few years of the 21st-century, Spielberg, the filmmaker routinely criticized for being too schmaltzy, delivered some of his darkest motion pictures that didn't hesitate to confront the moral ambiguities of the modern world. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Minority Report. Munich. Some of Spielberg's best and most daring movies were released in this period of Spielberg's career. In between grim titles like War of the Worlds, Spielberg also delivered one of his most frothy motion pictures in the zippy comedy The Terminal.

Kristen Stewart Gives 110% To The Generic Thriller Underwater

Movies have taught us all many things but they've been especially proactive in imparting wise advice regarding how dangerous underwater beasties can be. Free Willy and Flipper, they're the exceptions, not the rule. Large bodies of water are where Jaws, the Kracken, the Creature from the Black Lagoon and all manner of deadly creatures roam. Add the new Kristen Stewart vehicle Underwater to the long list of cinematic warnings about what lies beneath the water. Unfortunately, it's far from the best moisture-heavy monster tale, though it isn't without its charms. Plus, it's certainly a good deal better than your typical January horror fodder like last week's miserable feature The Grudge.

Water Lillies Is An Intricately-Crafted Coming of Age Yarn

You tend to learn a lot about yourself when you're a teenager and that's all too true of the three lead characters of Water Lilies. The debut directorial effort from acclaimed auteur Celine Sciamma, the most prominent of this trio is Marie (Pauline Acquart). She's a teenage girl who usually spends her time getting into oddball mischief with best friend Anne (Louise Blachere). However, Marie is starting to spend more and more time with swimmer Floriane (Adele Haenel). Though ostracized by the other members of her swim team for her supposedly promiscuous ways, Floriane and Marie begin to develop an unexpected bond, one that leads them to discover that their sexuality is a lot more complicated than they initially presumed.

THX 1138 Kicked Off The Directorial Career of George Lucas With A Dark Future

In his time as a filmmaker, George Lucas has directed six feature films. Two-thirds of those are Star Wars movies, the franchise everybody associates him with. George Lucas is as directly connected to that galaxy far, far away as Walt Disney was to Mickey Mouse or Charlie Chaplin was to The Tramp. However, Lucas did manage to direct other films (two in fact!) beyond just ones set in the Star Wars saga. One of these was the 1973 box office smash American Graffiti, a feature following a group of 1950s teenagers over the course of one rowdy night. Aside from being a throwback to pop culture Lucas grew up on, it doesn't bear much resemblance to the cosmic adventures Lucas would become famous for.

Get Carter Works Best With Its Blocking And Its Michael Caine Lead Performance

Michael Caine has done a little bit of everything in his decades of on-screen performances. He's played the best version of Ebenezer Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol, he's done dark dramas, he's done goofy genre fare, there isn't an avenue of cinematic storytelling that Caine hasn't traipsed down. His extensive experience as an actor even extends to the world of gangster cinema. Caine headlined one of the most famous 20th-century British gangster movies with 1971s Get Carter. A cult classic that ended up being a favorite among filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino, it still endures to this day as one of many peoples go-to pick for Caine's best work as a leading man.

In Laman's Terms: Marmaduke And How Far Studios Will Go To Embrace Trends And Brand Names

The saga of the Marmaduke movie never fails to turn up a new interesting wrinkle. I have just discovered that modern posters for this feature highlight Owen Wilson & Emma Stone as the leads whereas the original poster didn't even mention Stone. Instead, Owen Wilson & George Lopez were the two above-the-title stars.

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Movie trends consist of a single movie coming along, becoming extremely popular and a whole slew of other movies try to copy its most surface-level qualities in a bid to replicate that success. The examples of this phenomenon are numerous. The avalanche of sex comedies that followed in the wake of Porky's box office success, which happened again after American Pie made bank. Don't forget about all those 3D movies that came out after Avatar became the biggest movie of all-time or all those postmodern fairy tale comedies after Shrek became a hit. In the moment, movie executives get swept up in all the hype over something new making money and decide to greenlight half-baked ideas or incorporate equally half-baked in-theater technologies in the hopes of getting some of that money for themselves.

Frozen II Delivers Good Musical Numbers But Its Script Is Too Dense For Its Own Good

Doing Frozen II was an inevitability. Disney is a franchise-minded studio, the first one made more money than is conceivable, nobody needs a road map to figure out what comes next. Only the fourth sequel* Walt Disney Animation Studios has done up to this point, Frozen II, thankfully, isn't content to exclusively regurgitate the events of the first movie again. Unlike the direct-to-video animated Disney sequels I grew up on, Frozen II doesn't just give Elsa a kid who wants the complete opposite of what the first film's protagonist desired. Thank goodness, would anyone wanna watch Elsa deal with a child who could spurt fire from their palms? That would get so gruesome so quick.

Only the Brave Focuses On Characters Much To Its Benefit

Only the Brave came and went in a shockingly quick fashion in its October 2017 theatrical release. True, its lead subjects weren't as much of household names as, say, Chris Kyle, so the project was never going to hit Avengers: Endgame box office numbers. Still, a film like Only the Brave that seemed to push all the right buttons for older audiences in its marketing wiping out like it did (it made only $18.3 million domestically, just behind the domestic totals of CHiPS and The Circle among 2017 new releases) was shocking. Hopefully it can one day pick up a second life as a cult classic because Only the Brave is a shockingly good movie, one that's more just forest fires and bro-tastic dialogue.

The Director of Phoenix Delivers Another Emotional Knock-Out With Transit

In many ways, Transit reminded me less of director Christian Petzold's previous film Phoenix and more of texts I read in my Literature Under Dictatorship class this past Fall. Centered around books like Ivan Angelo's The Celebration written about experiences living under South American dictatorships, these texts frequently featured extended gazes into the psyche of the author (Angelo goes on long diatribes about the perceived pointlessness of his own writing, for example) as well as telling numerous individual smaller stories rather than just focusing exclusively on a singular protagonist. This way, the reader can get an accurate view of how a dictatorship impacts people on a widespread level.

The Conversation Is A Sublime Thriller That's Only Grown More Relevant In 2020

Francis Ford Coppola's best movie, The Godfather: Part II, dropped in December 1974, in the process becoming one of the greatest films of all-time and a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. Also competing for that same award in the same year was another Francis Ford Coppola directorial effort entitled The Conversation. What a flex, not just dropping two movies in a year, but making both of them acclaimed motion pictures that traveled the 1970s zeitgeist while also scoring Best Picture nods. In this house called Land of the Nerds, we stan a legend, and such a feat alone renders Francis Ford Coppola as one.

Diane Is A Quietly Harrowing Exploration of Guilt

After we do something wrong, we say we're sorry, we promise to do better and then life goes on. That's how it's supposed to work, atonement from the sinner and forgiveness from those around the sinner. But it's never really that simple in life. No matter how much we apologize, no matter how much we try and rectify our behavior, the past still lingers in other people's minds and our own. Past sins tend to feel like some kind of endless tunnel we can never emerge from. Is there any way out? Even if there is, do we even deserve to find a way out? Such are the weighty questions plaguing the titular protagonist of Diane, an indie feature film from writer/director Kent Jones released last Spring.

Almost Famous Looks At Rock Stars and Finds Human Beings

In the 2010s, writer/director Cameron Crowe didn't have the best of luck when it came to his creative pursuits. We Bought a Zoo was a box office underperformer that spawned a wonderful Twitter account but little in the way of the acclaim that greeted Crowe's earliest films while Aloha....everything went wrong with Aloha. The trailer for Aloha looked like it belonged to a parody film, the actual movie was borderline incoherent and its racially insensitive casting is maybe the film's only legacy. Then there was the Showtime drama Roadies, which lasted a season and hasn't been mentioned since its final episode ended until this very moment.

The Hunted Has Two Exceptional Leads But A Boilerplate Story

For those two people out there who have been dying for an action movie that pits Tommy Lee Jones against Benicio Del Toro, well, the March 2003 feature The Hunted has got you covered. In this William Friedkin directorial effort, Del Toro plays a decorated U.S. soldier named Aaron Hallam who has had extensive experience taking down enemy forces with excessive gruesomeness. Now he's gone rogue from his handlers and committed a series of grisly kills on American citizens. Such slaughterings have caused local law enforcement to call in the aid of the normally reclusive L.T. Bonham (Tommy Lee Jones).

Gene Kelly and Company Engage in Delightful Musical Tomfoolery in On the Town

People who view movies through the lens of searching for "plot holes" or characters exclusively acting within logical frameworks would probably be driven batty by On the Town, a 1949 Gene Kelly musical that also saw Kelly stepping into the director's chair for the first time. You see, On the Town, like most old-school musicals, isn't dictated by logic, the behavior of characters isn't motivated by logic. Everything about the characters, and the movie itself for that matter, is influenced by what could make the most exciting musical numbers. Song and dance are the name of the game for On the Town and why wouldn't you have that be the primary motivators when your movie stars Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra?

Better Than Expected Disney Movie Togo Is All About A Snow Dog's Purpose

American cinema's current fascination with live-action dog movies continues onward. This time, instead of Sense8 Dog or Kevin Costner Racecar Dog, it's a real-life doggie, Togo, who was instrumental in pulling off that famous 1921 serum run during an Alaskan snowstorm that Balto got all the credit for. The aptly titled Togo can't help but remind one of how many live-action family movies about dogs we've gotten recently but it isn't long before it manages to establish its own identity and notably exceed the level of quality you normally see from these type of movies. In fact, it's probably one of the better features released by Walt Disney Pictures in recent years, though that's not saying something when the studios been focused on titles like The Lion King (2019).