If I could go back in time I would have never watched a single trailer for A Quiet Place. If you have somehow avoided the trailers, I highly suggest you stop everything you’re doing and see this film now. Spoilers for this review: A Quiet Place earns my highest recommendation, stop reading and just go see it. Continue reading A Quiet Place – Film Review →

Best F(r)iends, Part 1 might be a carefully crafted, perfectly executed attempt to replicate the lightning-in-a-bottle that was The Room. It might also be another unintentionally hilarious trainwreck from disaster artists Greg Sestero and Tommy Wiseau. That this is only part one of a four hour epic only serves to complicate things — is Best F(r)iends the result of incredible hubris on the part of its creators, or a brilliant marketing ploy, ensuring all of Part 1’s guinea pigs return for Part 2 with additional friends in tow?

Best F(r)iends could have been so many things. I had half-expected something darkly serious, with director Justin MacGregor somehow wrangling Tommy Wiseau into a coherent performance. The only other option seemed to be that Best F(r)iends would try to be The Room 2, ultimately failing because you just can’t do something like The Room on purpose. Continue reading Best F(r)iends, Part 1 – Film Review →

It’s tough to review Ready Player One (the film) on its own merits when so much has been said about Ernest Cline and Ready Player One (the book). I never read the book, so I can’t comment on the minutiae that sets Spielberg’s adaptation apart from the original, but I do know some of the broad strokes.

Cline’s novel obsesses over 80s pop culture, while the film is a free-for-all, referencing everything from Atari games to The Iron Giant and Overwatch. Cline’s novel also gets into some messy territory, mishandling its female characters, dipping its toe into transphobia, and just generally being kind of creepy. The film, conversely, strips out most the problematic details, striving to develop its primary female character with more purpose and agency.

With these changes and streamlining, writer Zak Penn and director Steven Spielberg have crafted a crowd-pleasing, mostly inoffensive adventure (Asian stereotypes notwithstanding — this is Hollywood, after all) packed with surprisingly well-done CG action sequences. They’ve also streamlined to the point of absurdity, presenting a poorly-realized world that makes it difficult to get invested in anything that happens. Continue reading Ready Player One – Film Review →

Watching Red Sparrow felt like deja vu. Just six months ago I was in a theater watching mother!, another poorly-received, Jennifer Lawrence-led film. Just six months ago I was watching Lawrence give, perhaps, a little too much of herself to a role. Both films show her character beaten, punished, disrobed, tortured, and gas-lit by men in power. In both instances, I wouldn’t blame viewers who thought it was all a little too much. Yet, in both instances I was also pleasantly surprised. I absolutely loved mother!, and Red Sparrow was far from the train wreck I was led to believe.

The film that some had hoped would be the Black Widow film we’ll never get, or another Atomic Blonde, is in-fact, neither. Red Sparrow is a graphic, deliberate, and convoluted spy fiction tale. The Sparrows are Russian secret agents that use their bodies to manipulate men in power. They are trained to find weaknesses and exploit them, all the while ignoring their own sense of shame or pride. Continue reading Red Sparrow – Film Review →

Most people would say they go to horror movies and haunted houses for the same fundamental reason: to be scared. That said, I have to hope most people expect a bit more substance from a movie, and while Annabelle: Creation is an effective jump-scare delivery system, it doesn’t have much else to offer.

Set as an origin story for the Annabelle doll from both The Conjuring films and the previous Annabelle, Creation tells a story no one really needed to know, in a setting that couldn’t be more dull.

Set in small town America in-or-around the 1950’s, the film opens with the Mullins family — a father, mother, and daughter — living happily in their large, isolated house outside of town. The father, Samuel, is launching a new line of porcelain dolls, the first of which is completed just before a tragic car accident takes the life of their daughter.

Twelve years after the accident, Samuel and his now bedridden wife Esther take in a nun and several orphaned girls in attempt to bring some life back into their home. Of course, it’s not quite so simple, as the girls start seeing phantoms and the danger quickly escalates.

What follows is a by-the-book haunted house scenario devoid of fresh ideas. The creaky, isolated, 1950s house doesn’t leave much room for the kind of cool scares or creative kills that set one horror movie apart from another. Meanwhile, the plot treads well-worn horror territory while doing very little to surprise us with Annabelle’s origin story. The explanation for Annabelle feels like something writer Gary Dauberman was forced to come up with out of obligation — like some last minute homework thrown together on the school bus before class.

And yet, the jump scares are quite effective. I’ve often said a comedy can be about anything as long as the jokes land, and so I have to at least give some credit to Annabelle for being a horror movie with real scares. As dull as the actual plot was, as little as I cared about the moment-to-moment, as much as I felt like I’d seen it all before, I still left my seat a few times. I think that has to count for something.

That said, I don’t think jump scares count in horror the same way laughs count for comedy. Jump scares are a fleeting thrill, and without dread, psychological horrors, interesting plot, or compelling characters backing them up, I don’t think Annabelle: Creation is worth your time.

Logan Lucky hit theaters with seemingly little fanfare — but don’t let that fool you — this is a clever heist film with an excellent cast and some crowd-pleasing twists and turns.

I went into the film with no expectations, sold simply on director Steven Soderbergh and a cast that includes Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, and Daniel Craig. I was surprised to find a spiritual successor to Soderbergh’s previous Ocean’s trilogy. It bears the same all-star-cast-centered-around-a-big-score premise of those films, but transports them into a blue collar setting.

If Ocean’s took its cues from James Bond and The Italian Job, then Logan Lucky shares more DNA with Breaking Bad. The film’s central heist has many moving parts, but they revolve less around fancy suits and casinos and more on homemade bombs and NASCAR. That said, the setting and cast is refreshing, and as implausibly brilliant as everyone seems in hindsight, it’s so much fun in the moment that it hardly matters.

The last time I spent serious time writing on Red Ring Circus I spoke about the importance of sticking the landing. I come back to that here because Logan Lucky’s third act highs put such a huge smile on my face that I’m still smiling thinking about it. The film takes it’s time getting there, but the story builds and builds to a perfect crescendo.

And that’s about as much as I want to say about it. There’s a lot more detail in the character motivations, and the film is about more than just a heist, but I’d prefer that you go into it almost as blindly as I did, because there’s a surprisingly great film to be watched — don’t miss it!