Black Girl is a Masterful Reaffirmation of Its Titular Protagonists Humanity

SPOILERS FOLLOW

Gomis Diouana (Mbissine Therese Diop) came to this job as a domestic servant expecting one thing but got something else entirely. Originally residing in Senegal, she was enticed to take on this job working for a white French couple known only as Madame (Anne-Marie Jelinek) and Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) (two characters who smartly never get names so that they can only be known as people who carry on the legacy of racial horrors rather than as actual human beings) for the promise of money and taking care of children. Now that she's here, though, the truth comes out about what Gomis has actually become ensnared in. The children she was supposed to take care of are rarely around and she's stuck doing dehumanizing work for her employers while never being allowed to leave the house she lives in. Gomis came here to be an employee but she's instead become a prisoner.

Toy Story 4 Rules The Box Office Playground Again As Annabelle Comes Home Delivers Conjuring Series Lows And Yesterday Hits A High Note

Per usual for a PIXAR summertime sequel, Toy Story 4 reigned over the domestic box office for a second weekend in a row. Grossing another $57.9 million this weekend, Toy Story 4 fell 52% from its opening weekend, slightly better than the 56% second-weekend drop of Incredibles 2 from last year and roughly on par with the $59 million second-weekend gross of Toy Story 3 from nine years ago. Toy Story 4 has grossed $236.9  million in ten days of domestic release, putting it just behind the lifetime domestic gross of Brave ($237.2 million) and is slated to surpass the lifetime domestic gross of Toy Story 2 sometime this week. Now the question becomes can it beat Toy Story 3's $415 million domestic haul? It's still running about 5% ahead of Toy Story 3 in terms of overall domestic box office at the same point, but it's already having smaller weekend grosses. I say it's a coin toss at this point.

Enemy Has Audacity To Spare And A Top-Notch Jake Gyllenhaal Performance To Spare

Unless you're Jan de Bont or Simon Kinberg, blockbuster movie directors don't start their directorial careers helming big-budget features. Usually, they kick off their filmographies with smaller-scale tales that depart heavily in tone and genre from the blockbusters they'd eventually helm. Jon Watts, for instance, directed the small-scale thriller Cop Car before moving on to helm the MCU Spider-Man movies and Peter Jackson directed foul-mouthed horny puppets before he directed the epic fantasy movies Lord of the Rings. So it is with Denis Villeneuve, who is in the middle of directing a massively expensive adaptation of the sci-fi epic Dune, but just five years ago directed the highly unorthodox thriller Enemy.

Child's Play Is A Surprising Cut Above Typical Horror Movie Remakes

I've never seen a Chucky movie before (though I'm certainly familiar with the character), so I had little in the way of expectations for what I expected to be yet another subpar horror movie remake in the form of Child's Play. After all, 21st-century horror movie remakes, unless they're Suspiria, rarely turn out well, as the likes of Pet Sematary can attest while the peculiar decision to make a new Chucky movie while the original creator of the character, Dan Mancini, was doing his own series of separate Chucky movies really left a sour taste in my mouth. So color me shocked to report that the new Child's Play remake, hailing from director Lars Klevberg, is actually a pretty well-crafted and fun enterprise!

Julie & Julia Offers Up Two Pleasant True Stories For The Price of One

The saddest part of watching Julie & Julia in 2019 is that it feels as foreign from modern American cinema as 1953's The Big Heat (another movie I watched for the first time yesterday). Can one even imagine the current version of Sony/Columbia, whose present-day slate features Peter Rabbit, Men in Black International and a Morbius the Living Vampire movie, spending $40 million on a delightful mid-budget movie like this? Julie & Julia was mighty profitable in its initial theatrical release and scored a Best Actress Oscar nomination, but if they tried to make it today, well, they'd have to make it as an eight-episode Netflix miniseries, there's just no room in the modern American marketplace for movies that aren't made for under $10 million or over $250 million.

Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers Share Delightful Chemistry In Stage Door

One shouldn't be surprised to learn that Stage Door originated as a stage play, its heavy emphasis on tight-knit dialogue exchanges set over a minimal amount of different locales certainly makes that abundantly clear. Though certain stage shows have had trouble translating into the world of film, Stage Door manages to achieve a smooth translation mainly by taking advantage of all the opportunities the artform of film has to offer. For instance, feature films, by their very nature, bring the viewer much closer to the characters in visual terms, there's really no way to accomplish a close-up in a stage show. This means the movie version of Stage Door can incorporate more tiny details in costumes and props dealt with by ancillary characters that may never get seen properly in a stage version of the same story.

Dee Rees' Narrative Film Directorial Debut Pariah Vividly Realizes Coming-of-Age Queer Experiences

SPOILERS FOLLOW 

In my review for BlacKkKlansman last year, I mentioned how one virtue of the feature was how it was clearly made without any thought of placating or sugar-coating things for white viewers, it was about the stark reality of how racism permeates American society to this very day. A similar quality informs Dee Rees' 2011 feature Pariah, though in this case, it's a movie clearly made explicitly for and from a queer perspective. Pariah is a film exploring the turmoil that ensues when a family isn't accepting of their child's sexuality and benefits mightily from not wasting time to assure heterosexual viewers that "not all heterosexual people are like that" or similar platitudes. That's not what Pariah is here for. Its focus is bringing specifically queer experiences to a cinematic format of storytelling and it does that marvelously.

In Laman's Terms: Remember When Robert Zemeckis Was Going To Make A Yellow Submarine Movie With Motion-Capture Animation?

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!

With this Friday's new release, Yesterday (which, as of this writing on Tuesday afternoon, I have yet to see), we see the newest in a long line of movies inspired by the iconic music of The Beatles, a band whose songs have a widespread presence in cinema with films hailing from a whole assortment of filmmakers ranging from Julie Taymor to Jessie Nelson. As for the band itself, they have a more sparse presence in terms of people portraying versions of them in music biopics. Plenty of movies have been made about the era in which The Beatles music changed everything but few have actually dared to star actors playing The Beatles.

Despite The Presence of Danny Boyle and Lily James, Yesterday Is Let Down By A Lackluster Script

You know Summer 2019 is coming up short on quality cinema when even Danny Boyle is delivering average fare. Whereas fusing Danny Boyle’s direction with the writing of Aaron Sorkin turned out to be a match made in heaven in 2015s Steve Jobs, merging his directorial skills with the writing of Richard Curtis (of Love, Actually fame) in the new feature Yesterday turns out to be a match made in…certainly not Hell, but somewhere in between (Milwaukee, maybe?) Though Yesterday has one of the more unique premises for a mainstream movie in a blue moon, the execution of that premise leaves much to be desired.

Wildlife Is A Quietly Haunting Portrait of Family Chaos from Newbie Director Paul Dano

Hollywood, when it comes to non-indie fare, has always seemed to struggle with what to do with Paul Dano as an actor, usually putting him in the roles of either a disposable sidekick (Knight & Day) or a whiny slimeball (Cowboys & Aliens). Despite that, Dano has managed to procure a number of memorable performances over a little over a decade of steady work in offbeat indie fare like There Will Be Blood, Love & Mercy and Swiss Army Man, to name just a few. Over the course of a quietly impressive acting career, Paul Dano's become quite a fascinating actor and now we can add talented director to his resume with his directorial debut Wildlife.

Too Often, Echo In The Canyon Reduces Complex Rock Stars to Caricatures

Back in the 1960s, the introduction of The Beatles into the music scene basically turned all the rules of mainstream pop music on their head. Suddenly, a new age had dawned with artists like The Byrds, The Beach Boys and The Mommas and Poppas upending conventions with their blend of folk & rock music, extended runtimes for songs and more introspective lyrics. Many of these artists lived in a portion of Los Angeles called Laurel Canyon where, in their interactions together they each, managed to strengthen one another's music. Influence in the form of the presence The Beatles kicked off this era of music so it shouldn't be a surprise that influence would crop up again in the form of artists in this pocket of L.A. impacting one another's music.

Sunnyside Is More Average But Still Pretty Humorous Charlie Chaplin Fare

Sunnyside, released 100 years ago this year, is about par for the course for a late 1910s Charlie Chaplin comedy featurette. Wacky physical comedy, Chaplin playing a kind of precursor to The Tramp character, a thinly-sketched love interest for Chaplin's protagonist to pine after, it's all here. That means Sunnyside offers little in the way of surprises but if one is watching Charlie Chaplin films from the 1910s, it's doubtful you're looking for a twisty-turny thriller on par with Se7en. If you're just looking for the kind of amiable comedy only Charlie Chaplin could deliver, Sunnyside will do alright.

Despite Lots of Potential and A Great Cast, Captive State Is An Underwhelming Attempt At Sci-Fi Social Commentary

At one point in time, Captive State was one of my most anticipated movies of Summer 2018! Yes, in a dark era before I knew what Monster Factory or Lil' Nas X was, Captive State was slated for an August 17, 2018 theatrical release and I was eagerly awaiting this new directorial effort from Rupert Wyatt given how much I adored his 2011 feature Rise of the Planet of the Apes. But then Focus Features delayed the title for March 2019 where it came and went so quickly at the domestic box office that I never got a chance to see it in theaters. Finally seeing it now, alas, Captive State turns out to be a movie so messy that it would have been a dissapointment even if I had never heard of it before prior to watching it.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is An Emotionally Intoxicating Examination of the Homes That Shape Us

A home is not just a home. Where we're raised becomes a part of ourselves. For good, for ill and for everything in between, wherever we're raised tends to become deeply ingrained into the fabric of who we are as people. We can fight it, we can deny it, but the influences of where we're raised tend to creep in eventually. This part of who we are as people serve as the centerpiece of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a fascinating tale contemplating the relationship between ourselves and the places we call home. For this particular story, the real-life saga of Jimmie Fails (here portrayed by himself in his first ever feature film performance) and his desire for his childhood home is told against the backdrop of San Francisco.

The Toys Are Back In Town With Toy Story 4's $118 Million Bow As Chucky Slices Up An OK Bow And Anna Misses Box Office Mark

Is a $118 million domestic opening disappointing? God no. However, that's the amount Toy Story 4 opened to this weekend and it did indeed come in notably below both Disney and industry expectations. $118 million is big but, admittedly, Toy Story 4 was supposed to be even bigger and its debut came in below the $135 million debut of Finding Dory and the massive $182.6 million bow of Incredibles 2 from last year. Still, that $124 million sum is the fourth-biggest animated movie opening weekend of all-time, the third-biggest opening weekend of 2019 and the fifth-biggest June opening weekend in history. Disney would have liked an extra $15-20 million, and Gods know anyone involved with the domestic box office would have loved Toy Story 4 to be as big as possible given the otherwise dismal June 2019 box office, but a $118 million debut is still a fine haul all in all, especially since its $120 million foreign box office bow gives it the biggest worldwide opening weekend ever ($238 million) for an animated movie.

Stray Dog Meditates On Morality With Great Performances and Exceptional Blocking

Akira Kurosawa is handily one of my favorite filmmakers of all-time. Not exactly the most original sentiment, I agree, but gosh, I just love his movies to pieces. In particular, I love the blocking in his films, the arrangement of characters in a given shot, not to mention their body language, can be immediate visual indicators of who these characters are as people. Take a shot (pictured below) from Stray Dog, for instance, that films three characters in an interrogation room head-on. The woman being interrogated is closest to the camera and clearly evokes a sense of assured confidence that she can get out of this situation, while in the far back is the films protagonist, Detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune), all buttoned up, nervous and kept at a distance from someone he wants answers from.

Heartbreak Provides A Springboard For Enjoyable Comedy in The Breaker Upperers

Everybody's gotta make money somehow. Me, I make money through working at Walgreen's and also through writing about movies on the internet. For the two lead characters of The Breaker Upperers (which is now streaming on Netflix), Jennifer (Jackie van Beek) and Mel (Madeleine Sami), they make their money through a service that sees them being hired by people to break up their failing relationships. Jennifer and Mel, who became best pals and business partners after they found they were seeing the same man, then proceed to concoct some sort of scheme to tear the two people apart and make a solid sum of money in the process. It's been a reliable business for quite some time, but now challenges have emerged threatening this set-up.

Too Many Lifeless Aspects Drag The Dead Don't Die Down

In the quiet small American town of Centerville, some strange occurrences are happening. Just when it's supposed to be night outside, the sun is shining as if it's the middle of the day. Animals are vanishing. Did I mention that polar ice caps are being so severely fracked that it's adversely affecting the Earth's axis? Yep, lots and lots of strange occurrences happening around Centerville. Police officers Ronald Peterson (Adam Driver) and Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) are perturbed by such events and they only become even more concerned once two local citizens are slaughtered in a vicious fashion. Only a zombie could do such a slaying. Oh boy. This is not going to end well.

In Laman's Terms: Ranking the PIXAR Movies From Worst to Best (Part Two)

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!

Back on Tuesday, I began my ranking of the twenty PIXAR films from worst to best. With ten films out of the way, we now come to my top ten favorite PIXAR films, which kicks off with...

Manila in the Claws of Light Uses Restraint To Vividly Capture Its Characters Agony

Julio Madiaga (Bembol Roco) is on a mission, though he isn't exactly upfront about it. He has come from his home in Marinduque to the city of Manila seemingly just for the purpose of finding construction work. It's a job he's able to eventually procure and while on this job he makes a handful of friends, some of whom gradually learn why Julio has come to Manila in the first place. The love of Julio's life, Ligaya (Hilda Koronel), has been kidnapped and brought to the city of Manila and he's on a mission to find her and bring her home, even though he has very little in the way of information on where she could be beyond knowing the identity of the woman who lured her to Manila in the first place.