The Sisters Brothers (2018) Dir. Jacques Audiard Charlie and Eli Sisters, aka the Sisters Brothers, are two experienced killers who work for a shady and powerful character in Portland Oregon, known simply as the Commodore. Whilst Charlie enjoys a life of crime and violence, his brother Eli is having something of an existential crisis and wants to quit. He regards the newest job they get from the Commodore as their last: to find a prospector by the name of Herman Kermit Warm, a man of German descent who supposedly stole something of value from the Commodore. Also on Warm's trail and ahead of the Sisters brothers is John Morris, an investigator and tracker whose job it is to find Warm and then hold him for the Sisters so they can eliminate him. Eventually, fate finds a way of intervening in a manner that makes all four men end up at a place they could not have envisioned before. This is a fairly fateful adaptation of Patrick De Witt's excellent book. I only very recently read it for the first time, so the plot details are all still fresh in my mind. It follows the story pretty closely and where it deviates from it, it certainly never betrays the integrity of the book. All four main actors (John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed) shine in their respective roles and it would be impossible to choose just one, but if I had to, John C. Reilly's lead performance is pitch perfect. In terms of the changes from the books, a few spoilered observations: Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler Mayfield being a woman in the movie is an interesting touch that they ultimately did not do enough with. The way that Charlie and Eli dispatch Mayfield's trappers in the movie version is more showy but lacks the stripped down elegance of the novel. The lovely Allison Tolman plays Mayfield's accountant but is only in one scene, which is a shame. One final thought: this was a box office bust, which is such a huge shame. Here we have an excellent adaptation of a very good book starring a stellar cast and it still only made a domestic gross of around 3 million dollars. There has to be room for more than just superhero movies in modern cinema, right?
Saw this in an arthouse in Chicago about 20 years ago and had the same thoughts. I didn't even think that it attained "so bad that it's good" status.
Maine (2018) Dir. Matthew Brown Bluebird, a Spanish hiker on the Appalachian trail, gets a traveling companion in the form of Lake, a young American who appears to have an attraction to her she cannot fully repricorate. Their companionship is one of ups and downs and appears perpetually threatened by Bluebirds mood swings and unwillingness to open up as well as Lake projecting his own needs and desires onto Bluebird even though she might be incapable of providing the emotional connections he requires. I mostly checked this out for Thomas Mann, a young actor I have found to be a very interesting and talented performer. His acting style is not very showy but his performances are always emotionally honest. This also applies to this film. What I hadn't expected was to discover another young performer, equally impressive, in the form of Laia Costa. This is a nice little film, kept compelling throughout by the quality of the two central performances. There are various ways you can read the story but to me it was somewhat a study of bi-polar disorder.
Halloween (2018) Dir. David Gordon Green Forty years after the events of the original film, Michael Myers is an inmate at a facility for the criminally insane who has gotten onto the radar of two British journalists who have a true crime podcast. To get content for their pod, they manage to visit Michael Myers, though their attempts to communicate with him fail in a predictable fashion. Likewise, they seek out Laurie Strode, who is living a hermits life in a secluded home and is still carrying the trauma of what happened to her four decades earlier. So much so that she is estranged from her adult daughter and teenaged granddaughter. During a prison transfer, Michael manages to escape after the bus crashes. He starts a new killing spree. Laurie sees this as her opportunity to get even with the man who ruined her life by killing him herself, an act she has been preparing for in the intervening decades. I have seen some critics describe this as the best Halloween sequel and I would probably agree. With the very significant caveat that none of the Halloween sequels are great. Thus this makes this movie the best of what is a flawed bunch. The pleasure of this film is in seeing Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode again. As well as the other familiar aspects of the movie, like the terrific soundtrack. And whilst David Gordon Green is no John Carpenter, he at least shows some glimpses of having studied Carpenter's original a bit more closely than some of his predecessors. The rest of the cast is fine, with Judy Greer (always a delight) as Laurie Strode's daughter and Virginia Gardner as a babysitter meant to pay homage to the Annie Bracket character of the original film. I get the point of the final twenty minutes, but I had some thoughts on it: Spoiler (Move your mouse to the spoiler area to reveal the content) Show Spoiler Hide Spoiler The point is obviously to turn the dynamic on its head and make Michael Myers the hunted in stead of the hunter. But in terms of the plan that Laurie Strode had four decades to prepare, it is obviously very flawed. For one thing, if I would make my entire house a huge trap for Michael Myers, I would give him zero places to hide. So a completely open floor plan with absolutely no interior walls, a single story and the absolute bare minimum in terms of furnishings.
Awwww riiiiight! I was waiting for BG to review this movie. I'm not paying money for this, but if it comes out on netflix.....
Hell Fest (2018) Dir. Gregory Plotkin Natalie, a grad student on a break, visits her former college BFF Brooke. Brooke has a Halloween night of fun planned for the two of them, which includes a visit to Hell Fest, a horror themed amusement park. Horror isn't really Natalie's thing but she agrees to go on the promise that Gavin, a boy she is kind of into, will also be there. Brooke's boyfriend and one other couple will also be joining them there. Upon their arrival at the park, tall tales are told about how a girl was once killed at a similar place and not found for days. Natalie has a hard time believing that a real killer would be prowling in such an environment, until she gets the feeling that a hooded individual is following her all through the night. A belief that is initially dismissed by her friends as paranoia until even they are forced to take notice. This is a pretty straightforward slasher that does very little that is new or original within the genre. The production values are decent. I mostly like the cast, especially the lead Amy Forsyth but I couldn't really recommend this unless you are a huge fan of slashers and have nothing else to watch.
Tomb Raider ~ R. Uthaug Oof, this was pretty bad. I enjoyed the video game reboot, but this was an uninspired version of that. It suffers most when pushing fan-service which seems like the most common trap in video game adaptions. In the video game, it is tons of fun sniping people with a bow and arrow or leaping across a chasm with a pick-axe, but in the movie it just seems ridiculously unnecessary. At no point does Alicia Vikander look as dirty and bruised as the above picture. She always looks remarkably unscathed despite impalement and a surely lethal tetanus infection.
Mary Poppins -- ((1964), which my wife saw in the theaters when it was first released. I wasn't that engaged through most of it, but the song "Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)" was pretty damn good. Also, one of the few Disney movies with an intact nuclear family.
Set It Up (2018) Dir. Claire Scanlon Harper and Charlie are two executive assistants whose respective bosses are very demanding. One night, they meet by chance in the office building they both work out off. They form something of a working friendship and on a lark, they come up with a crazy idea that might make their professional lives more easy: to set up their single bosses so that they spend less time at work and thus also give their assistants more free time. After a rocky start, their plan actually works. Or does it? A perfectly serviceable romantic comedy that isn't very original in its writing. It doesn't really matter, since the two leads (Zoey Deutch and Glen Powell) are very charming and that's all you really need to keep a rom-com watchable. This was probably overrated slightly because this type of movie has gone a bit out of vogue in the past decade or so.
Molly's Game (2017) Dir. Aaron Sorkin After Molly Bloom fails to qualify for the winter Olympics as a skier, she goes against her domineering father's wishes and instead of going to law school, she moves to California to try to make it on her own for a while. After briefly working as a cocktail waitress, she gets a job working for a guy who organizes a weekly high stakes poker game for Hollywood celebrities and non-famous wealthy men. This allows her to achieve a level of financial independence at a young age, especially after with the help of a young Hollywood actor, she starts her own game. When circumstances force her to move to NYC and organize a similar game on the East Coast, she eventually runs afoul with the law when some of the men who frequent her games turn out to be Russian mobsters. This is a very Aaron Sorkin movie, with all of the good and the bad that implies. It is also a very compelling watch, due to the quality of the performance given by Jessica Chastain. As a side-note, I can't imagine that Tobey Maguire and his publicist can be very happy with this movie. Whilst the character that Michael Cera plays is not named in the movie itself, it takes just a minute of googling to find out who "player X" is supposed to be. Molly Bloom's description of Tobey Maguire is one of a sinister sociopath (who at one point proclaims that he hates poker and only plays because he enjoys destroying people's lives), which is probably not the image a Hollywood actor wants to have out there of him.
Mary Poppins Returns (2018), a perfectly serviceable Disney musical with damn fine performances, esp. the two Emilies and Lin-Manuel Miranda, with a nice walk on from original MP veteran "Navckid Keyd." As is typical with Disney, there are jokes for adults that the kids don't get (like most of L-MM music hall rap) and other things that kids get that adults seem to miss. And in this version, Disney returns to form by offing the mother in the family before the show starts. The nods to the original were, I thought, pretty clever and interesting, though I can imagine someone being a bit cranky and thinking it was a shameless rip off.
I wonders whether it has escaped notice that Molly Bloom is a character in James Joyce's novel, Ulysses.
No, it's actually mentioned in the movie itself after a dude makes an awkward pass at her on the assumption that she is also Irish.
I watched this one the other night and I cant remember when I last watched such a boring movie. Storytelling like you can expect it from your local IRS agent. The in-capsule scenes seemed realistic and adequate though. I really hope that real life events were not that boring and Armstrong's wife was not that annoying.
Vice: The Untold Story That Changed History (2018) . . . Some damn funny satire, but also horror on the level of The Exorcist. Here, a demon known as the Unitary Executive Theory takes possession of men's souls and leads to mass destruction based on lies, deception, and lust for absolute power. The demon imposes moral blindness on its victims in order to lay waste to entire nations in the name of security.
Bad Times at El Royale (2018) Dir. Drew Goddard An eclectic group of people descend upon a hotel situated right on the border of Nevada and California, the "El Royale". They consist of a priest, a nightclub singer, a traveling salesman and a hippie girl. As a rainstorm descends upon the place, it is slowly revealed that neither the people nor the place are what they appeared to be at first glance, revelations that eventually spill over into violence. This is an ensemble film that I enjoyed primarily for the ensemble, the writing, less so. I realize that this has been a common theme in some of my recent reviews. Jeff Bridges is predictably good, Cynthia Erivo was a revelation to me, Jon Hamm is always fun to watch when he is just on the cusp of chewing scenery and Dakota Johnson is turning out to become a very interesting actress who was probably done a disservice by getting her big break with the "Fifty Shades" franchise. There is also something brilliant about casting Chris Hemsworth as a Charles Manson-like figure, a role that he is quite perfect for. The resolution of the plot was a bit too deus ex machina for my liking, as if the writer-director had a lot of fun putting these types together in a crazy situation but then didn't have a clue how to end his story.
First Reformed (2017) Dir. Paul Schrader Reverend Stoller leads a small congregation at what is essentially a historical church, a position he has earned mostly as a favor from the larger congregation it is attached to. He is a man disillusioned with himself, what he perceives to be his failings as a man but also with his beliefs and his role as a man of God. After a church service, he is approached by a young pregnant woman who asks him to counsel her troubled husband. The man in question is an eco-activist recently released from prison who despairs at the state of the world, specifically our environment, what catastrophic climate change will end up doing to the social structure of the world. He has trouble marrying his grim view of the future with the realities of bringing a child into such a world. For Stoller, this seems to act as a catalyst for his own angst and issues. A very interesting film with a terrific Ethan Hawke in the lead role, in what might be his best ever performance. The only reason I did not get around to watching this earlier was because Paul Schrader's previous movie was such a total failure on all fronts. I only changed my mind about giving this a chance after seeing so many critics put this on their end of year lists. In terms of comparisons to other films, the scenes between Stoller and Mary reminded me of Jean-Pierre Melville's "Léon Morin, prêtre" and Nicolas Boukhrief's "La Confession", both adaptations of the same novel. But it is perhaps closest in tone and world view to Paul Schrader's most famous work as a writer, "Taxi Driver". There is a way of watching this film that could be the answer to the question, "What if Travis Bickle had been a Reverend?". Not sure if I would say this is the best film I have seen this year, but it is certainly one of the best. I'm also very happy that the now 72-year old Paul Schrader had another truly great film in him to wash away some of the recent disappointments.
The ABC Murders (2018) Dir. Alex Gabassi Hercule Poirot, now retired and his reputation somewhat tarnished when his past as a former police officer in his native Belgium is called into question, is forced to dust off his little gray cells when a serial killer starts to correspond directly with the detective. Signing his correspondence simply with A.B.C., the man in question taunts Poirot, as well as hinting at the fact that he has intimate knowledge of his past, which leads Hercule to believe that the killer is a former acquaintance of his. Unfortunately for Poirot, thanks to his reputation being in tatters and with the retirement of Inspector Japp, he has no real direct lines of communication with Scotland Yard any more and his attempts to cultivate a relationship with Japp's successor are rebuffed. This is a fresh take on both Hercule Poirot and "The ABC Murders". I liked Malkovich's portrayal as the famous detective, though I'm not sure if it will be everyone's cup of tea. I do think it is consistent with the overall tone of this adaptation, which is a bit lacking in the dry humor of the David Suchet made for TV movie series. The supporting cast is rather great, with Rupert Grint as the Japp successor, Inspecter Crome, Eamon Farren as Cust and Anya Chalotra as Lily Marbury. The latter is a relative unknown at this point, but she has been cast as one of the leads in the Netflix "The Witcher" adaptation and she has the kind of camera presence that makes me believe she is set to become a huge star, in the same way that Emilia Clarke used "Game of Thrones" as a springboard to fame.
So, "A Quiet Place" . . . I couldn't help but think the whole time that between my allergies and gas, I would have been hunted every second of every day.
Niet Schieten (2018) Dir. Stijn Coninx Nine year old David Van De Steen witnesses his family's annihilation as his father, mother and older sister are killed during one of the hold-ups by the so called "Bende Van Nijvel". What follows is a story about his grandfather, how he became the traumatized young boy's new father figure and how he started a Sisyphian struggle against the corruption and/or incompetence of Belgian police forces and judiciary in terms of their continued failure to convict even a single person for the string of hyper-violent robberies that left 28 people dead and 40 people injured. Based on David Van De Steen's autobiography, this is primarily an homage to his grandfather and it is less interested in the details of the case than the human cost of the unsolved crimes that are still a shared trauma for the Belgian people old enough to remember the terror of those days. A powerful piece of cinema, primarily thanks to Jan Decleir's terrific performance in the lead role. The righteous anger that pulsates through almost every line he utters and every facial expression he makes is incredible.
A Cure for Wellness (2016) Dir. Gore Verbinski A young executive who wants to prove himself to the partners of the financial powerhouse he is working for gets a second chance after he ********s up on a merger. To make up for his failure and prove his worth after all, he is to fetch a missing member of the board who has been recuperating at an exclusive spa-slash-wellness-center in the Swiss Alps and whose presence is needed to finalize another merger. When the young man arrives there, he finds a castle atop a mountain, with most of the patients wealthy and older, not counting one young woman who appears to be the personal protégé of the head physician. After having some trouble seeing the man he is there to retrieve, the individual in question initially refuses to leave. On his way over to a nearby town, the young man and his driver are in an accident and when he wakes up in the aftermath, he too is now a patient at the institute. During his stay, he finds out that no one ever truly leaves and whilst the patients seem content enough in their stay, none of them truly seem to improve health-wise. On the contrary, several of them get ever more sickly. This was an uneven experience, but ultimately a worthwhile one. I thought the climax was a bit too cookie cutter for a movie that had chosen to be disorienting and confusing up until that point. That does not change the fact that this is a mostly clever horror-thriller with some mystery elements. I do think that there is probably a superior edit of this film that clocks off at around two hours instead of 146 minutes. It's well-acted, with Jason Isaacs realizing he has to go big with a character like his antagonist. Dane DeHaan is a good audience stand-in. Mia Goth is required to be Mia Goth, so this is an example of central casting that works quite well for the film in question. This is actually a quite good outing by Gore Verbinski after his mostly disappointing "Pirates of the Caribbean" sequels, which were definitely an exercise in diminishing returns.
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2016) Dir. Burr Steers In a Regency era Britain overrun by a zombie infection, Elizabeth Bennett is still appalled by the prospect of being married off to a man she does not love and loathes the notion of having to forgo carrying a blade after her nuptials - as her father has insisted upon the self-defense training of all his daughters in such dangerous times. She grows especially annoyed by Mr. Darcy, a man who has devoted his life to zombie hunting but who also cannot help to get on her nerves whenever they find themselves in each other's company. This is high-grade nonsense in the vein of "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" that I quite enjoyed. It has in common with the Honest Abe pastiche that it is all played rather straight. The broad strokes of the Jane Austen novel are followed, only with more zombies and brain-eating. Has a very good cast for such silliness, including a very charming lead in Lily James as well as great supporting players like Charles Dance, Bella Heathcote, Sally Phillips, Jack Huston, Sam Riley and Lena Headey.