Half the time I was amused by how Ritchie can keep the most convoluted plots with an extraneous number of screwball characters interesting, but the other half of the time I’m fiddling with the keys in my pocket pretending I have some sort of fast forward button.
Read MoreThe violence is a lot gorier than I had remembered from the previous two films, but even with a different director at the helm – long-time collaborators Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah – the DNA remains much of the same.
Read MoreRobert always makes fun of me for saying “this year hasn’t been great for movies,” but he’s right, every year there are always a bunch of films worth watching. So, I’ll gladly eat my words and spit out a few as well. Here are my most anticipated films for 2020.
Read MoreIf it isn’t already apparent, I love these movies. I recognize their flaws, and I’m okay with them. I expect them to function on a basic story level, but none more so than the original movie, with its Joseph Campbell formula, where Lucas draped his rich world-building. For me, The Rise of Skywalker is decidedly middle-tier Star Wars. It’s not nearly as frustrating as many clickbait-y headlines, thirsty for the partisan rage that kept pundits in the black when The Last Jedi came out, will attempt to argue.
Read MoreIt turns out that observing how time withers men who believe they’re impervious to everything, especially the law, is an essential add-on to Scorsese’s body of work. Appropriately, it’s a movie about the ravages of time that would have been impossible to make without the hundreds of years of collective experience of the cast and crew.
Read MoreIf Walk the Line was panned for being a solid but profoundly clichéd film, then Ford v Ferrari should be similarly panned. There's nothing to really dislike about this decent film, but if you're looking for some deeper philosophy on how close racing is to death, why egos get so huge, Italians vs. Americans, old vs. new, risky vs. safe, etc. etc. then Mangold's not very interested in discussing it.
Read MoreEven if you’re not the superstitious type, Eggers is able to make you believe that a violent encounter between Winslow and a one-eyed seagull is like Winslow signing his death warrant.
Read MoreSo you take a comedy about the polarization of politics and the spread of nationalist rhetoric and set it in the context of the Second World War. These are issues that were relevant then and are still so today, but by viewing it in a different context, it gives us some breathing room.
Read MoreBut this constant beatdown of Jim is where the film keeps losing me. Self-destruction can be easy to depict, but it's also easy to lose sympathy for the character if the events that lead to his self-destruction are self-inflicted.
Read MoreThe real gem is Nina, both her performance and transformation. She yearns to escape and return to Belgrade. She's juggling a difficult time at school, no thanks to constant teasing about her mother's sexual promiscuity and mental breakdown. She's tough and impatient and longing for something bigger and better, counting the days until she can purchase a ticket out of town from selling stolen cell phones.
Read MoreIt is an absolute visual treat with its encaustic paintings, a centuries-old method that Ushev had learned from his grandfather, using heated beeswax to create a kind of thick liquid that offers a layered effect with depth and shadow.
Read MoreWhile a film like Noah Baumbach’s upcoming Marriage Story made a point about how adults can yell at each other ad nauseum until both are exhausted, Young-joo and Dae-won's quiet struggles are certainly more indicative of a more subdued unfulfillment.
Read MoreMessy psychology aside, Joker behaves in the Batman film universe very much like The Killing Joke does for comics: it doesn’t need to connect to any other stories or characters, and captures just one possible timeline for how the Joker came to be, much like the several different threads that Heath Ledger’s Joker references in The Dark Knight.
Read MoreFor the second straight year, following Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a Korean film is going to dominate top-10 lists, including yours truly. It is the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and just the second to win by unanimous vote since Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It would be remiss to say that Korean cinema is on the rise -- if anything, it has already arrived and Parasite is just the new high water mark.
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