Those who expected another Raw or Titane may be disappointed while watching Julia Ducournau’s latest movie, Alpha. This film takes a more subdued approach than the character-centric insanity pieces that immediately propelled the French filmmaker to critical acclaim. With only three features under her belt, Ducournau has already established herself as one of the most compelling genre artists working today. Especially
Read MoreFor a long time, I’ve asked myself the following question: Have I aged out of Pixar, or has Pixar lost its magic? With Daniel Chong’s Hoppers, we finally have an answer to this question. It was the latter. In a post-Incredibles 2 era, only Turning Red felt like the masterpieces the animation studio consistently released and pushed the medium forward in
Read MoreI was fully expecting to hate Patrick Hughes’ War Machine while watching it. Another Netflix piece of content that essentially amalgamates known films into one another and tries to pass it off as an “original film”? What could go wrong? For the first twenty minutes or so, a compact montage that distills the backstory of Staff Sergeant 81 (Alan Ritchson) as
Read MoreMany might not know that John Patton Ford’s latest film, How to Make a Killing, is loosely based on Robert Hamer’s 1949 classic Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets. The 1949 film was adapted from Roy Horniman’s Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal. If you’ve seen Hamer’s film, chances are you’ve seen Patton Ford’s reinterpretation. It sadly doesn’t do much to
Read MoreNirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is Matt Johnson’s continuation of the television series of the same name, which follows the fictitious antics of Johnson and his best friend Jay McCarrol as they attempt (and fail) to book a show at The Rivoli, as if the Toronto-based café was as complex to book as Madison Square Garden. Before propelling into the
Read MoreMamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet, a derivative adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The film begins with the most spiritually charged image of the Japanese animator’s career as the titular character (voiced by Mana Ashida) arrives in the “Otherworld,” a purgatory that stands between life and “nothingness.” Scarlet attempts to fight her internal (and external) demons and prove to the forces that be that
Read MoreIt appears that Ric Roman Waugh is this year’s Richard Linklater, having released two movies in the span of a month. While the first title of his January compendium, Greenland 2: Migration, unfortunately did not have a theatrical release outside the United States, his latest effort, Shelter, is getting a global rollout, and it might just be the most January movie
Read MoreIt may be easy to dismiss Ángel Manuel Soto’s The Wrecking Crew as a fake-looking piece of “content” that only serves to fill an ever-expanding algorithm on Prime Video. You could be right to think this way, since none of the promotional materials have fully advertised the film’s pleasures the way they should have. The movie was also essentially dumped on
Read MoreThe great formalist Sam Raimi has done it again with Send Help and continues to prove why he’s one of the best genre artists working today. Of course, it (pun intended) helps that his two leads, Rachel McAdams and Dylan O’Brien, go all in with Raimi’s flashy, kinetic expressions, as the two protagonists fight for survival within the confines of a
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