My internet research tells me Yang was born in California to parents who emigrated from Taiwan, so it’s not exactly clear if the film is biographical. If it is rooted in real-life experience, then the historical and cultural inconsistencies and inaccuracies are rather odd.
Read MoreLewis is not glimpsed in character for an asphyxiating amount of time. Tollman seems to want to save his reveal like Spielberg teased the shark from Jaws. In the meantime, instead of building a tense cat-and-mouse game between Bram (Platt) and the people protecting Ford, the characters stay in their own bubbles, never crossing paths or ever giving the sense that they’re doing anything to outmaneuver each other.
Read MoreUnlike Cats, we can now look at the main character without skin-crawling existential horror. But in making Sonic look more like he does in the games, it only brings the movie out of the depths of “so bad it’s good” and up to merely “meh”.
Read MoreI had all the ingredients for a brisk, 109-minute ride of joy – a wonderful pastel palette, funny characters, well-choreographed action – but I was also thrown into each and every one of its numerous directions at dizzying speeds, and by the end of it I felt like it was, for the most part, a hit.
Read MoreThe Oscars are once again in the rear-view mirror, so now that the real winners are confirmed, it’s time to take stock. Did the “right” people win? And did the telecast actually deliver a fun experience? We can think of no better antidote for bruised feelings than the second edition of the Kinetoscope Awards, or as we’ve taken to calling them: the Scopies!
Read MoreThere’s still a chance that the Film-Twitter ApprovedTM foreign-language nominee Parasite may act as a dark horse and make history in the Best Picture race, but I’m not putting a huge amount of faith in an Academy that only last year gave the award to Green Book, a (not terrible!) but thoroughly plain choice in a far more accomplished field. With less than one week to go, on to the picks!
Read MoreHalf the time I was amused by how Ritchie can keep the most convoluted plots with an extraneous number of screwball characters interesting, but the other half of the time I’m fiddling with the keys in my pocket pretending I have some sort of fast forward button.
Read MoreThe violence is a lot gorier than I had remembered from the previous two films, but even with a different director at the helm – long-time collaborators Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah – the DNA remains much of the same.
Read MoreRobert always makes fun of me for saying “this year hasn’t been great for movies,” but he’s right, every year there are always a bunch of films worth watching. So, I’ll gladly eat my words and spit out a few as well. Here are my most anticipated films for 2020.
Read MoreIf it isn’t already apparent, I love these movies. I recognize their flaws, and I’m okay with them. I expect them to function on a basic story level, but none more so than the original movie, with its Joseph Campbell formula, where Lucas draped his rich world-building. For me, The Rise of Skywalker is decidedly middle-tier Star Wars. It’s not nearly as frustrating as many clickbait-y headlines, thirsty for the partisan rage that kept pundits in the black when The Last Jedi came out, will attempt to argue.
Read MoreIt turns out that observing how time withers men who believe they’re impervious to everything, especially the law, is an essential add-on to Scorsese’s body of work. Appropriately, it’s a movie about the ravages of time that would have been impossible to make without the hundreds of years of collective experience of the cast and crew.
Read MoreIf Walk the Line was panned for being a solid but profoundly clichéd film, then Ford v Ferrari should be similarly panned. There's nothing to really dislike about this decent film, but if you're looking for some deeper philosophy on how close racing is to death, why egos get so huge, Italians vs. Americans, old vs. new, risky vs. safe, etc. etc. then Mangold's not very interested in discussing it.
Read MoreEven if you’re not the superstitious type, Eggers is able to make you believe that a violent encounter between Winslow and a one-eyed seagull is like Winslow signing his death warrant.
Read MoreSo you take a comedy about the polarization of politics and the spread of nationalist rhetoric and set it in the context of the Second World War. These are issues that were relevant then and are still so today, but by viewing it in a different context, it gives us some breathing room.
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