Out in Theaters: ‘A CURE FOR WELLNESS’

February 7, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A Cure for Wellness, Dane DeHaan, Gore Verbisnki, Horror, Jason Isaacs, Justin Haythe, Mia Goth, Out in Theaters, Reviews Leave a comment

Part screeching psychological thriller, part squealing body horror (and part total insanity), Gore Verbisnki‘s A Cure for Wellness pairs David Cronenberg to Shutter Island, adding a dash of Looney Toons to cherry-top this fantastical madcap chamber piece. Weighing in at a whooping 146 minutes, the big budget horror-thriller penned by Justin Haythe shifts a deliberately-paced creeper into a balls-to-the-walls sadistic sleeper hit, cranking its bat-shit absurdity high enough to break off the dial and cackling like a madman as it does so.    Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘THE SPACE BETWEEN US’

February 3, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Leave a comment

Let’s save the hemming and hawing, The Space Between Us is terrible. No need to add much else to the sentiment, it is a bad film that you will have a bad time watching. Period. Simply dreadful from start to finish, this lazy sci-fi tinged romance clunker falsely assumes charisma-vacuum Asa Butterfield can carry a film but the Hugo star is having none of it. The London-born actor appears as bored as any audience forced to endure such a burden of a wanna-be blockbuster as this action-, drama- and excitement-bereft potboiler ambles from forgettable moment to forgettable moment, nipping in little melodramatic twists that would be comfortable on any daytime soap opera. Writing more than 100 words about the turd is almost as much a waste of time as seeing the damn thing so I’ll save everyone the trouble and advise forgetting this thing exists altogether. STX certainly did. Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘WAR ON EVERYONE’

January 31, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alexander Skarsgård, Caleb Landry Jones, John Michael McDonagh, Michael Pena, Out in Theaters, Theo James, War on Everyone 1 Comment

John Michael McDonagh stepped out from the shadows of filmmaker young brother Martin McDonagh, who’s crafted such cult modern classics as In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, in 2011 when he debuted The Guard. That film went on to mild box office success (overseas) and general critical adoration, though I’ll admit the deadpan acidic humor never quite reached me the way that it had so many others. McDonagh’s latest, and his first film set on American soil, is War On Everyone and represents a clear, though offbeat, progression of the director’s interests. Within, he declares war on traditional narrative constructs of law and lawless, cops and robbers, good and evil, giving a grand total of zero fucks along the way. Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘XXX: THE RETURN OF XANDER CAGE’

January 19, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged D.J. Caruso, Deepika Padukone, Donnie Chen, F. Scott Frazier, Kris Wu, Nina Dobrev, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Ruby Rose, Russell Carpenter, Toni Collette, Tony Jaa, Vin Diesel, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage Leave a comment

X done gave it to us. Behold, in all its knuckle-headed glory: xXx: The Return of Xander Cage, a gratuitous bukake of bullets, boobies and brain death. Frequently crass, totally illogical, unapologetically misogynistic and dumb beyond compare, xXx is breathtaking event entertainment that works for almost every single utterly retarded beat. Like a locomotive fueled purely by cocaine and the X Games, this revitalized franchise exists as if within the wet dream of a 13-year old American boy. A slick tshit-nami of dumb dumb dumb, xXx: The Return of Xander Cage is nonetheless perfectly stupid in almost every way imaginable.   Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘SPLIT’

January 18, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Horror, James McAvoy, M. Night Shyamalan, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Split 1 Comment

In 2015, M. Night Shyamalan executed the biggest twist of all. Following a slew of critical and commercial disasters, Shyamalan produced…a hit. The Visit, a found footage old people horror-comedy, connected with critics and audiences, turning its paltry 5 million dollar budget to a whopping near-100 million international haul. More importantly, it signaled the return of one of the most unique voices in the genre: the king of the twist. And Split, a thriller about an abductor with a fractured personality, proves that he’s here to stay. Read More

Out in Theaters: ’20TH CENTURY WOMEN’

January 18, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged 20th Century Women, Annette Bening, Billy Crudup, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, Mike Mills, Out in Theaters, Reviews Leave a comment

Mike Mills’ 3rd feature film takes him to the tail end of the groovy seventies where a pubescent boy is raised by a freewheeling mother and two other women whose help she enlists. Though nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Comedy, 20th Century Women is a loose-lipped drama first and foremost; an exploration of youth and young manhood through the lens of budding feminism. That it hedges in a good lick of ha ha’s only sweetens the experience. Read More

50 Most Anticipated Films of 2017

January 12, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged Adam McKay’s Dick Cheney Biopic, Alien: Covenant, American Made, Annihilation, Baby Driver, Battle of the Sexes, Blade Runner 2049, Brawl in Cell 99, Coco, Darkest Hour, Downsizing, Dunkirk, First Man, Free Fire, Get Out, God Particle, It Comes at Night, Kathryn Bigelow Detroit Riots Movie, Kong: Skull Island, Logan, Logan Lucky, Missouri, Molly’s Game, Mother, Mute, Okja, Paul Thomas Anderson/Daniel-Day Lewis Fashion Drama, Raw, Star Wars VIII, T2: Trainspotting, The Bad Batch, The Beguiled, The Circle, The Death of Stalin, The Discovery, The Florida Project, The Glass Castle, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, The Mercy, The Meyerowitz Stories, The Mummy, The Shape of Water, The Snowman, Thor: Ragnarok, Three Billboards Outside Of Ebbing, Under the Silver Lake, War for the Planet of the Apes, War Machine, Wilson, Wind River, You Were Never Really Here 1 Comment

My god does putting this thing together every year take a little bit of my soul. The product of countless hours of hunting, refining, ordering, researching, writing all so you can look at the pretty pictures as your zooming from one title to the next. A labor of love this must be. This year, more than those before, making this list was exhausting (and exhaustive) because it required so much cutting down. The initial rundown included 92 films and you better believe I wasn’t about to write up more than 50. Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘PATRIOT’S DAY’

January 11, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alex Wolff, Atticus Ross, J.K. Simmon, Jimmy O. Yang, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Monaghan, Out in Theaters, Patriot’s Day, Peter Berg, Reviews, Theme Melikidze, Trent Reznor Leave a comment

Michael Bay catches a lot of flack for his bombastic tendencies behind the camera. The portmanteau Bayhem refers to the distinctly American director’s excessive inclinations behind the camera; his impulsive need to aggrandize nothingness through dynamic camera movement and, of course, ‘splosions. It makes for busy filmmaking the equivalent of a massively oversized pair of fake breasts bouncing up and down in front of your face, whacking you in the nose with each rise and fall. There’s so much happening at any given moment and from one scene to the next that there is little to no contrast. Just a constant thwacking of the noggin. Everything is turned up to 11 so that even the legitimately intense moments are overshadowed by other elevated humdrum. Read More

‘MOONLIGHT’ Takes Gold in 2016 Seattle Film Critics Society Awards

January 5, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Seattle, WA – Barry Jenkins’ groundbreaking drama Moonlight was the big winner with Seattle’s film critics community, winning 6 Seattle Film Awards including Best Picture. In addition to winning the biggest prize as selected by the Seattle Film Critics Society, Jenkins was named Best Director and his screenplay, co-written with Tarell Alvin McCraney, earned Best Screenplay honors. The film’s cast took home the Best Ensemble Cast prize, with Mahershala Ali winning Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Juan, a father-figure of sorts to the film’s lead character Chiron, a young African-American male coming to terms with his sexual orientation. Elsewhere, the film nabbed a prize for Best Editing, turning 10 nominations into 6 wins. Read More

Out in Theaters: ‘SILENCE’

January 5, 2017 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Adam Driver, Andrew Garfield, Issei Ogata, Jay Cocks, Martin Scorsese, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rodrigo Prieto, Shin'ya Tsukamoto, Silence Leave a comment

I guess it follows that a movie titled Silence should lack a score. Marty’s latest meditation on faith (arguably his third after 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ and 1997’s Dalai Lama humdrum biopic Kundun) opens instead with the sound of crickets, a telling forecast of the level of excitement soon to be unleashed. It’s not that Silence lacks artistry, there’s no shortage of stunning shots (but it’s no accident that those that standout most are the various Christians gettin’ tortured scenes), but there’s so much dead air, so much *ahem* silence, that getting from one beat to the next feels like an endless crusade towards but a mirage. Accented only by crickets and cicadas. Read More