Reviews

I'm uncertain how Green Room achieved the acclaim it's generated over the decade or so since its release. While the performances are solid from its young cast, there's just not enough to chew on to make this film much more than a pulpy meat grinder.

We have a scrappy punk band who establish themselves as resourceful early on, siphoning gas from cars to keep their tour bus running, and also desperate, taking on a gig at a known Nazi establishment (hardly engendering sympathy for them in the early stages.) They witness a crime and subsequently spend the next hour and a half of runtime attempting to fight their way out of captivity.

Green Room offers us nothing new here, and while it develops well and holds its tense moments, there's some predictability in the way it offs an array of characters, slasher-style, and a variety of baffling and unnecessary twists muddle what could've been a more grounded plot.

Overall worth a watch on a night you've got nothing else to do, but ultimately a forgettable installment to the genre.

Martin McDonagh has given us a lot to chew here: a tale of dying friendship, depression, conflict, mental illness, and set it against stunning Irish hinterland.

The result is an astoundingly well-performed character piece: Brendan Gleeson plays Colm, who decides to cut ties with his years-long best friend Padraic, played by Colin Farrell, who's a bit daft and can't understand why his mate won't be friends.

It's tragic, it's profound, it's an understated piece of mental health and existentialism. But in the end, while we can't avert our eyes, it's not necessarily because we don't want to, but because we can't. A great work of art, but perhaps lacking in true merit, and thus, ultimately, forgettable.

Condor's Nest promises us a trip across South America on an old-fashioned Nazi-hunting adventure and in spite of some deficiencies it delivers.

We're thrown into war-torn Europe in the film's opening scene, as the story's protagonist, Will Spalding, watches German colonel Martin Bach (Arnold Vosloo, more on that in a moment) gun down his entire platoon. Through an act of cowardice, Will alone survives.

Jump ten years later to Argentina and Will's killing runaway Nazis left and right, all in pursuit of that same Martin Bach. Enter an Israeli spy and a two-faced atomic scientist and things get complicated quick, a shaky alliance between the three culminating in a raid on a neo-Nazi fortress know as the Condor's Nest.

There's a lot of good things about this movie. It's well-paced, visually expansive, and its various arcs are compelling, if uninventive. There's even a few great things about it: its lead ensemble (Jacob Keohane, Al Pagano, Corinne Britti) is an absolute joy to watch, and Arnold Vosloo brings an incredible amount of presence to the role of the heavy. Add to that the movie's many notable character actors, from Michael Ironside to James Urbaniak, who help drive along the plot.

The bad? Well, it just wasn't terribly inventive. It's a stylized thriller that doesn't attempt to break any new ground. It could've been an 80's World War Two movie. And that's not a bad thing - in fact, I believe it's a strength - but if you're looking for something totally original you won't find it here.

I've heard Allied's an underwhelming movie, enough times from enough people that I've not bothered watching it until it came across a streaming queue on a day I had a few hours to spare, and I re-learnt the lesson not to judge a book by its cover, or a movie by its reviews, if, in the case of the latter, the reviewers simply don't appreciate the craft.

And that's Allied. Not meant for pulp consumers. Not meant for common denominators. Allied is high art. See below:

> A tight script that's more intelligent than it is explosive, allowing for slow burns punctuated by enough action bits to keep an audience paid-off for the war film they came to see;

> Brilliant performances by Brad Pitt, who delivers one of his best, if under the radar, and by Marion Cotillard, who matches him step for step;

> Stellar production value, from sweeping British airfields to a terrifying and wholly convincing scene with a burning German bomber crashing into a London suburb, one of its highlights.

All the above make it worth a watch, and topping it off is director Robert Zemeckis's masterful job of melding emotional torpidity with the ides of war. A memorable installment in an otherwise overdone genre.

Bullet Train's strength is its cast. A-listers abound, from lead to supporting on down to the one-off cameos. The performances reflect it. Brad Pitt is... well, Brad Pitt, and. Brian Tyree Henry steals the show at every turn.

The production value? Absolutely phenomenal. This is what a nine-figure budget will land you. Movies like this are the future of the box office. If you're not going to feature caped comic book heroes or the seventh installment of a longstanding franchise you're going to have to dazzle audiences, and that's exactly what Bullet Train does.

The story? Well... that's where we begin to falter. It's actually a great story, and I can only imagine the structure boards in the writing room. There's a LOT to pull off here narratively. And structurally they do. Bullet Train gives us all the twists, turns, script flips, flashbacks, surprise arcs, and any other storytelling methods conjureable to tell an entertaining story.

But the exposition... that's what kills us and is Bullet Train's grand flaw, and why it earns seven stars from me. By the adrenaline-packed third act it's apparent the writers have painted themselves into a proverbial corner and there's not much they can do to back out of it. And then, in a single scene, writer Zak Olkewicz commits the ultimate crime: assassinating the audience with a wearisome, drawn-out expository sequence explaining, in one cumbersome session, half-disguised in entertaining graphics, what the entire plot REALLY was. It's the film's cardinal sin, and ultimately reeks of laziness.

Does the film overcome that flaw? Sure, it's wildly entertaining. But from a technical standpoint it's dragged down at its most important moment by a lack of creativity behind the pen. Bullet Train never fully comes off the tracks, but it loses too much steam at its crescendo.

If a movie like Gray Man came out from an independent production house it'd be lauded as a great effort and watchable content, but it's the heavy-duty P&A that came attached with it (and not to mention its bevy of A-list superstars) that make the film an absolute embarrassment.

Simply put: how does a studio put this level of financing and resources into a film with this many stars and come out with such a stunning failure?

It's not that Gray Man is flat narratively. There's twists, turns, great CGI composites, plenty of adrenaline, and the shoot-'em-up scenes imperative to pushing a story like this one. But that's ultimately what dooms it. Gray Man does nothing original. It's a paint-by-numbers flick. And that's okay if our characters are interesting - we don't need a re-invented wheel to appreciate arcs and development in its protagonists - but from the drop there's just no emotional investment, and thus no payoff when anything happens.

Perhaps the producers would do well to scrape some of that Scrooge McDuck sized pile of cash earmarked for production into a bucket to spread around the writing room - perhaps they'd end up with a more colorful film.

An uncomfortable title revolving around exploitation of a high school student. This one just feels a little too on the nose with its abusive themes, and even though the main character (Kevin Spacey) has a redemptive arc it's not enough to overcome the indelible specter of a middle aged man trying to sleep with a seventeen-year-old.

Mina Suvari and Wes Bentley are dually compelling and may ultimately be what carry this film, which is inherently watchable, and deserves accolades for its Chris Cooper carried surprises, but ultimately can't overcome its central thrust as anything other than shameless exploitation.

Bloody, impassioned, stylistic, packed with stars who carry their weight. Can you ask for a better film?

Ten years after its release, Django may be Tarantino's greatest film. It's Christph Waltz's greatest performance and it's studded with all-time greats. Its buckets-of-blood stylization still requires a particular taste, but even that doesn't seem over the top any more.

Moreover, Tarantino's character takes the reigns of his own destiny, bucking a longstanding and oft-critiqued Hollywood trend of making its minority characters servile to the arcs of its white, western, and usually male characters, which is something to be admired.

This is a 9.

A 10 for style, a 5 for substance, half a tick off for embarrassing lack of scale with the aircraft scenes. This had a chance to be the best film of the decade due to its budget and subject material and accomplished almost nothing.

Wind River: snowy, barren, a wintry hellscape. Wide angles. Long pans in to characters and the mountains sprawling behind them. Spectacular!

But ultimately slow moving and procedural at the same time. A fairly predictable unwinding of an unoriginal plot. Jon Bernthal is a fun late addition but it doesn't make up for the lack of originality.

A six feels unfair given the strength of its performances, but an eight feels too high for its recycled storytelling, so we land here with a solid seven.

We'll miss you, Daniel, you were the best Bond and it started with Casino Royale.

Can there be any better installment in the series at instilling a sense of excitement from start to finish while infusing it with truly thoughtful internal moments for its titular character? Even its villains are human.

A truly great moment in the history of the franchise.

Moneyball is definitely the type of script that only gets made if a major actor is attached. Enter Brad Pitt, exit anyone who doesn't care about baseball or Brad Pitt.

Jonah Hill is a fun addition, and the story is digestible by people who aren't invested in sports, but altogether this is forgettable, if well performed, simply due to its subject matter. A seven for being solidly executed, if mis-aimed.

I truly cannot understand the hype surrounding this very contrived movie. Its character pieces were mostly unearned. It put style over believability. It indulged in every new-western-heist trope without giving us any variation on anything we've seen before.

Ben Foster was unlikable as an unlikable character, Chris Pine was just okay, Jeff Bridges was somehow both overused and underused, and Gil Birmingham was written in as cannon fodder for jokes.

A disappointing effort which lands six stars only because of its engaging plot.

Here I find myself reviewing yet another school shooting movie; perhaps it is unsurprising that they are all from American production companies. In any case, this one earns its stripes in all the worst ways.

A movie about a girl who stops a school shooting, or tries to, using guts, gumption, and faith. Can you get more quintessentially American, in message and tone, than that?

Its hamfisted treatment of a major political issue aside, this is a classic blunder in storytelling. Overuse of bad tropes, and silly sequences (the main character's mother appears in laughable scenes of them drinking coffee together, for instance, usually in the middle of an action scene) absolutely doom this movie. It's pulp for tasteless action junkies, red meat for political zealots, and dirty sink for anyone with taste. Wash it down the drain and move on.

K.

It takes some gravity to pull off a concept like this, and both the four actors and the producers managed to pull it off, and then some.

Two hours at a table slowly revealing the plot, teasing it out bit by bit, feeding us just fast enough to keep our interest. Jason Isaacs played masterfully with it, Martha Plimpton was wonderfully compelling. Truly an impressive build towards a final reveal which somehow maintained its even keel while driving our emotions through the roof of the church in which their drama played out.

The lack of Oscar nods for this film was very disappointing as it was a deserving contender on the strength of its performances and its overall message. Nine stars from me, at least.

What to say about this movie? It's a religious film, which automatically gives it a certain tint, but unlike most faith based indies does a decent job of skirting that and singing its own tune. Initial production elements are solid and interesting to look at.

It quickly bogs down, though. Too many unearned long takes. Too many close-ups and dramatic moments with characters we aren't invested with. Too many pointless moments emphasized and leaving us to wonder why. Despite at times decent acting, it was hard to believe the dynamic of the brothers at times, and take them seriously.

Overall a solid effort for an indie, that is to say a C+ and a reasonable chance the filmmakers grow into their next effort.

K.

Clint Eastwood should stick to talking to chairs, because it's more entertaining than what he does in this movie, which is to sit in them and be old. I have little more to say about this movie than that.

Amateur acting, amateur writing, contrived sequence with a chicken (the movie's namesake) that's supposed to give us an emotional arc and ultimately falls completely on its face.

An embarrassing effort by all involved!

The title says 90% of what I have to say here. Pattison has elevated himself to one of the top actors in the game today. Jeffrey Wright is magnificent. Even Andy Serkis is a surprising show stealer.

This flick would have gotten ten stars from me, but visually I was very put off by the lack of... light. "Lack" is an understatement. It's like the Director forgot to call "lights" before camera and action. You can barely see what's going on in some scenes when watching it in a theater. Maybe it was done as a style, but what good's that if no one can see what you're doing?

Seven of ten stars.

Watched this when it showed up on Netflix. Ronin is very solid and compelling as a lead, and her interplay with her mother is the backbone of the story; that gets a ten from me and their dynamic is the saving grace of the film. However...

It's basically any indie film done by any NYU grad as a senior year project. Spirited and far more well executed than most of those, but all in all an unimaginative treatment to an utterly mundane story. Solidly average.