SUNDANCE 2020: Benh Zeitlin’s Gritty Pan Redux ’WENDY’ A Gorgeous Hot Mess

January 27, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Benh Zeitlin, Devin France, Reviews, Sundance 2020, Wendy Leave a comment

Benh Zeitlin joined a very exclusive club of first-time filmmakers in their 20’s to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director when his debut Beasts of the Southern Wild broke out. In the years since earning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Oscar nod to boot, Zeitlin withdrew from the spotlight, whittling away to rebrand the Peter Pan story with his signature Zeitlinisms. Retelling the James Matthew Barrie fantasy with all the semi-grounded, semi-gritty magical realism that propelled Beasts, Zeitlin paints himself into a bit of a corner, refusing to grow up as a director. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Humanist Spy Thriller ’IRONBARK’ Is On a Mission to Move You

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Abel Korzeniowski, Angus Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ironbark, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Reviews, Sean Bobbit, Sundance 2020, Tom O'Connor Leave a 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 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

SUNDANCE 2020: Rebecca Hall Is Next Level Good in the Scariest Ghost Story in Years: ‘THE NIGHT HOUSE’

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Ben Collins, David Bruckner, Evan Jonigkeit, Horror, Luke Piotrowski, Rebecca Hall, Reviews, Sundance 2020 2 Comments

On darkness, Nietszche offered, “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” The Night House, an expertly-crafted, terrifying ghost story with a towering lead performance from Rebecca Hall, takes this sentiment to heart. Hall is Beth, a widow hoping to understand her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) shocking suicide, diving into the dark recesses of his cell phone and discovering more than she bargained for. Glimpsing the abyss beyond, Beth confronts a terrifying, mutually exclusive truth: either ghosts exist or there truly is nothing waiting for us beyond this mortal coil. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Giggly Horror-Comedy ‘SCARE ME’ Finds New Ways to Tell Old Stories

January 25, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Aya Cash, Chris Redd, Josh Ruben, Rebecca Drysdale, Reviews, Scare Me, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

A startlingly original and stripped-down madcap horror-comedy about the terrors of the creative process, Scare Me manages to find a fresh entry point to a well-trodden subgenere by asking, simply: what do we want from horror? What is the draw of scaring ourselves – be it with Joe Hill novels, Ari Aster movies, or Ryan Murphy TV shows – and how is any good horror story crafted? These are the ideas that interest Scare Me, a horror-comedy in the tradition of oral storytelling. The film, which leans more towards comedy than horror, follows two writers and new acquaintances in Fred and Fanny, both eloping from society to far-flung snowy cabins to hack out the next horror story sure to terrify the world. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘COME AWAY’ Scrambles Its Fantasy Fiction, Fails to Appeal to Both Adults and Kids

January 24, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Angelina Jolie, Brenda Chapman, Come Away, David Oyelowo, Jordan A. Nash, Keira Chansa, Marissa Kate Goodhill, Reece Yates, Reviews Leave a comment

Escapism is at its best when it allows audiences to step away from the troubles of their lives. To make away to a magical land where fairy dust extends the power of flight, kids stay kids forever and crocodiles do away with malevolent hook-handed nemeses. Come Away is no such escapism. Scrambling up the mythology of Sir James Matthew Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the film geared predominantly towards children attempts to tell a magical realism-inspired, wait for it, meditation on grief and losing a child…intended for children. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Well-Intentioned Slam Poetry Misfire ‘SUMMERTIME’ Has Zero Commercial Appeal

January 24, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Carlos López Estrada, Reviews, Summertime, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

With Blindspotting, new director Carlos López Estrada emerged onto the scene with a distinct and fiery voice, delivering a knockout primal scream of a film that laced the power of spoken word into a poignant and brilliantly-acted Oakland gentrification satire. In his sophomore feature Summertime, Estrada has bungled almost everything that worked so well in his first outing, delivering an amateurish variety show that leans much too heavily on disparate young voices within Los Angeles slam poetry community coalescing into a Crash-like ensemble of random interconnectivity. Read More

‘THE GENTLEMEN’ Review

January 24, 2020 by Pedro Schwarzenegger Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Guy Ritchie, Matthew McConaughey, Out in Theaters, Reviews, The Gentlemen Leave a comment

THE PLOT: Bear with me while I untangle the plot into a more manageable narrative. A California kid (McConaughey) with a penchant for dealing weed and a nasty temper rises through the UK underworld to become the greatest dope peddler the British Isles have ever given immigration status to. But when he goes to sell his, rather substantial, operation to a diffident American billionaire (Strong) other parties want in. Namely a brigade of bloodthirsty Chinese nationals who won’t take no for an answer. Read More

Trippy ‘COLOR OUT OF SPACE’ Makes Technicolor The Bad Guy

January 20, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Brendan Meyer, H.P. Lovecraft, Horror, Joely Richardson, Julian Hilliard, Madeleine Arthur, Nicholas Cage, Richard Stanley 1 Comment

H.P. Lovecraft has cast a long shadow over cinematic horror and the industry at large. With an entire subgenre dedicated to the unknown cosmic horrors that the late sci-fi author gained notoriety depicting, the fears of Lovecraftian horror are found in those things beyond human perception. Though Lovecraftian horror can be difficult to translate to film, since the phenomena described in his writing is often beyond human comprehension, that has not stopped filmmakers since the 1960s from borrowing from Lovecraft’s bread and butter: alien entities driving people crazy. Read More

‘UNDERWATER’ is Peak Incoherent January Hollywood Flotsam

January 9, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Cozad, Brian Duffield, John Gallagher Jr. Jessica Henwick, Kristen Stewart, Out in Theaters, Reviews, T.J. Miller, Underwater, Vincent Cassel, William Eubank Leave a comment

The first month of every year may start with resolutions about self-improvement, working out more, sleeping more, eating better and the like, and yet the new offerings at the movie cineplexes are more reliably junky than any other time of year. Underwater is peak January movie; a bungled poof of a plot, shoddy direction, feckless characters, unimpressive production work. It’s movie empty carbs, devoid of any nutritional value or artistic takeaway. The kind of movie you can throw in the pile with the other countless shameless impressions of Alien (alongside 2017’s super lame Life) that fundamentally misunderstands what makes that movie oh-so-great. Read More

‘STAR WARS: THE RISE OF SKYWALKER’ Blindly Resurrects the Past To Finish The Saga

December 18, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Carrie Fisher, Chris Terrio, Daisy Ridley, Harrison Ford, J.J. Abrams, John Boyega, Mark Hamill, Oscar Isaac, Star Wars, Star Wars IX, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Leave a comment

If the central tenet of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi was to kill the past to make way for the future, The Rise of Skywalker is all about bringing the dead back to life. After the divisive middle entry to this new Disney-helmed trilogy, The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams was tasked with the Herculean feat of pleasing both the fans and detractors of The Last Jedi and with The Rise of Skywalker decides to just lean into resurrecting and regurgitating the past as much as possible, much like he did his first time out. The most obvious example of this comes in the form of our old pal Sheev, the Senator-turned-Supreme-Chancellor-turned-Emperor, whose appearance was teased to fans from the very first trailer, and his handling is a microcosm of the film’s issues writ large. Read More