Decent ‘VOYAGERS’ Is Teenaged Outer Space ‘Lord of the Flies’

April 9, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Archie Madekwe, Chanté Adams, Colin Farrell, Fionn Whitehead, Isaac Hempstead Right, Lily-Rose Depp, Neil Burger, Out in Theaters, Quintessa Swindell, Reviews, Tye Sheridan, Voyagers 1 Comment

In William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’, a shipment of young boys escaping the nightly bombardment of WWII England crash land on a remote uninhabited island and, left to their own devices, attempt to organize rescue and their own society. Reward and punishment is doled out with the knee-jerk brashness that would conceivably come with children-led governance and their laissez-faire island society quickly turns to brutish power struggles and, soon, murder. Neil Burger’s Voyagers borrows Golding’s premise and jettisons it into outer space, stirring in a rudimentary thought experiment about control, pleasure, and autonomy, to mixed results. Read More

Geriatric Horror ’HONEYDEW’ Serves Hospitality With a Heaping Side of Hostility

April 5, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Barbara Kingsley, Devereux Milburn, Honeydew, Horror, Lena Dunham, Malin Barr, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sawyer Spielberg 1 Comment

In Devereux Milburn’s Honeydew, the window-dressings of dustbowl farmland hospitality flakes off to reveal a disturbing underbelly; one crusted with human sacrifice, religious devotion, and, more likely than not, a good-sized serving of man-meat. The flame has been long extinguished between Sam (Steven Spielberg’s son Sawyer Spielberg ) and Rylie (Malin Barr), a waiter/aspiring actor and botanist graduate student respectively, but the two head to rural Massachusetts with plans to camp out and do some research for Rylie’s thesis on a medieval wheat-based neurodegenerative disease. When they’re forced off the property of a grumpy old timer named Eulis in the middle of the night only to discover that their car will not start, they seek assistance at a nearby farmstead. You can probably guess where this goes next. Read More

He Did It, He Actually Did It: The Journey of ‘ZACK SNYDER’S JUSTICE LEAGUE’

March 24, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Amy Adams, Ben Affleck, Ezra Miller, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill, Jason Momoa, Jeremy Irons, Jesse Eisenberg, Justice League, Ray Fisher, Reviews, Willem Dafoe, Zack Snyder 3 Comments

Pluck the plumage off the bird because I’m prepared to eat some crow. For years, I doubted the fact that the long-rumored Zack Snyder director’s cut of Justice League would ever exist in a format suitable to be watched outside of a producer’s screening room. It just didn’t make one iota of sense. With WB having moved on from Snyder’s vision after the director was forced to leave the film mid-production when his daughter tragically committed suicide, the “Snyder Cut” was incomplete, with tens of millions of dollars in VFX shots never even brought into post-production. Read More

Gratuitously Fun ‘NOBODY’ a Reverse John Wick Where Bob Odenkirk Kicks All the Ass

March 23, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Bob Odenkirk, Christopher Lloyd, Connie Nielsen, Derek Kolstad, Ilya Naishuller, Nobody, Out in Theaters, Pawel Pogorzelski, Reviews, RZA 1 Comment

You’ve seen it all before: a middle-aged off-the-grid specialist gets forced out of retirement when circumstances beyond their control stir up their humdrum life and curry them back onto a path of violence. Bryan Mills had a particular set of skills and hit the ground running when his daughter was kidnapped by Albanian human traffickers while John Wick’ skill with any sized caliber weapon came into sharp focus when Russian criminals killed his dog. In Nobody, no one has to kidnap his daughter or slay his pup to get Bob Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell all fired up, his pent-up rage and years of living live on his belly reaching a tipping point when some amateur home invaders break into the wrong house. Like a nobody should, he does nothing. Read More

Humanist Spy Thriller ‘THE COURIER’ Is On a Mission to Move You

March 16, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Abel Korzeniowski, Angus Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic Cooke, Ironbark, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Reviews, The Courier, Tom O'Connor 1 Comment

I’m calling an early shot here: if there’s one movie out of Sundance 2020 that stands a decent shot at a Best Picture nomination almost a year from now, it’s very likely The Courier (formerly titled Ironbark). The Cold War espionage thriller takes a classical approach to its telling, leaning into familiar biopic/historical nonfiction tropes, while viewing events through an extremely humanistic lens. Read More

Nightmares ‘COME TRUE’ in Genuinely Scary Sleepwalk Through the Subconscious

March 10, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anthony Scott Burns, Come True, Daniel Weissenberger, Horror, Julia Sarah Stone, Landon Liboiron, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tedra Rogers Leave a comment

A few nights into a mysterious university sleep study, Sarah finds herself perusing a bookshop, pulled towards the Phillip K. Dick entries on the shelf. Jeremy, her primary researcher and maybe-stalker, suggests she give Dick a read, referring to his work as “hauntingly sad”. This description – hauntingly sad – accurately captures the weirdly affecting (and low-key terrifying) tonality of Come True, a descent into sleep paralysis and ancestral nightmares coming to life. Vividly tragic, but always in a darkly unspeakable way, Come True captures that in-between realm separating sleep and dreams and twists it into a malevolent manifesto about the collective terror that lingers in the mysterious netherworld of slumber. Read More

‘RAYA AND THE LAST DRAGON’ Is Disney Dominance on Autopilot

March 4, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adele Lim, Awkwafina, Benedict Wong, Carlos López Estrada, Daniel Dae Kim, Disney, Don Hall, Gemma Chan, Kelly Marie Tran, Qui Nguyen, Raya and the Last Dragon, Reviews, Ross Butler, Sandra Oh 1 Comment

For the better part of a century, Disney has been carefully formulating a template for blockbusting success. Churning out mega-hit after mega-hit on a semi-annual basis is no happy accident and the family-friendly behemoth has gotten that formula down pat – they’ve even exported it to the god-knows-how-many subdivisions of their corporate content creation stations. But going into any Disney animated movie specifically, you have a basic idea of what to expect: there will be a brave, slightly defiant female protagonist who doesn’t quite fit in with her community; an unbearably cute little animal sidekick who manages to be snarky even if they can’t talk; a quest to restore a kingdom; and a dead parent or two. You can never forget about the dead parent bit. Read More

Sprawling Opioid Drama ‘CHERRY’ a Sometimes Entertaining Jumbled Mess

February 25, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Angela Russo-Otstot, Anthony Russo, Cherry, Ciara Bravo, Damon Wayans Jr., Forrest Goodluck, Jack Reynor, Jessica Goldberg, Joe Russo, Michael Gandolfini, Nico Walker, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tom Holland 1 Comment

Once you pop you just can’t stop. Or so goes the philosophy of the Joe and Anthony Russo when it comes to telling the story of a college-drop-out turned bank-robbing, dope-addicted war vet in Cherry. The directorial pair who rose to the highest of box office heights helming a handful of Marvel’s most critical and commercial smashes (including the last two Avengers mega-hits) prove uneasy with actual drama. Their telling of Nico Walker’s semi-autobiographical best-seller of the same name – adapted in part by screenwriters Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, is meandering and unjustifiable long-winded. Read More

God Save the Elderly Because Rosamund Pike is Here to Swallow Them Whole in Wicked ‘I CARE A LOT’

February 23, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Chris Messina, Dianne Wiest, Eiza González, I Care a Lot, J Blakeson, Out in Theaters, Peter Dinklage, Reviews, Rosamund Pike Leave a comment

J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot wears a lot of hats. What starts as a genuinely electrifying satire centered around a morally repugnant legal guardian who grifts the elderly out of their assets and autonomy slinks into all kinds of genre territory; becoming at various points a pulpy thriller, a tongue-in-cheek dark comedy, and a pointed takedown of our national tendency to slide the old and aging out of public view. It is at times trying to do too many things, and is noticeably better in certain arenas than others, but when Blakeson’s lampoon of carnivorous capitalism sinks its teeth in deep and his performers rein fire and brimstone down upon each other, I Care a Lot‘s fiendish joys are simply irresistible. Read More

Tender ‘MINARI’ Tells a Specific Story of Family Struggle With Universal Appeal

February 9, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alan Kim, Lee Isaac Chung, Minari, Noel Kate Cho, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Steven Yeun, Youn Yuh-jung 1 Comment

The pull of the American Dream lies at the heart of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari, a story about a Korean immigrant family seeking out their chunk of economic ascension on Arkansas farmland. Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead) is Jacob Yi, an uncompromising patriarch dedicated to leaving his illustrious career of chicken sexing behind (more on this later) to grow crops from back home for the ever-increasing Korean-American population. Read More