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Showing posts from October, 2022

She Said - Movie Review

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She Said - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 I feel like before I begin this review I must make a few things clear. Harvey Weinstein is a scumbag who deserves to be locked up and the key thrown into the ocean, along with any other men that use their power to prey on others. But my feelings on that type of men is completely separate from my efforts as a film critic to dissect a movie and critique it on how it works as a piece of art and entertainment. With that disclaimer aside, in just a couple weeks the new film She Said will drop into theatres, a movie about the journalists that helped to break open the case and reported the accusations against Harvey Weinstein that eventually and thankfully got him thrown in jail. While the lead performances from Kazan and Mulligan that play the journalists are perfectly serviceable, the movie just isn’t quite as good, especially when compared to other recent movies like Spotlight or Collective. Of course not only

Corsage - Movie Review

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Corsage - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 General Audience Score - 6 The royal family, patriarchy and monarchy of various countries has been the source of great fascination and obsession for countless generations. Since the invention of film and TV, this medium has provided a vehicle for countless stories of kings and queens from every corner of the globe and their myriads of exploits. This year we get a foreign language film in spoken German, as well as several others, called Corsage, which will be the Austrian submission to the Oscars for Best International Feature Film. It covers some months in the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, played by the delightful Vicky Krieps, and is very much in the same vein as the myriad of other films and TV shows like The Crown and Elizabeth. While the film is enjoyable and interesting, it is also a bit long and the events in the life of the Empress are really not much different from the host of other shows you can cue up at a moment. Plenty of the

Close - Movie Review

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Close - Movie Review Critics Score - 9 General Audience Score - 8 When it comes to films in a foreign language, there are so many excellent ones each year, it’s really a shame the Academy Awards only chooses five for nominations of Best International Feature. There are incredible films from artists and filmmakers the world over, of those there are only a handful that even get their films submitted for awards consideration. But this year Belgium is submitting Close for Best International Film, a movie about two young boys of around twelve years old that are, well, just about as close as platonic friends can be. I will stay as vague as possible in this review to avoid spoilers. With that being said, this film is unbelievably sad, I cried at least four different times during the hour and a forty-five minute run, more than any film I’ve seen in years. I will put in a warning that this film may be triggering for some people, especially parents, so if you’re easily shaken I’d suggest reading

White Noise - Movie Review

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White Noise - Movie Review Critics Score - 8 of 10 General Audience Score - 7 of 10 Every so often a film comes along that leaves you dumbfounded, not because of it’s subject matter or controversy surrounding it, but simply because of how bat-shit crazy it is. Everything, Everywhere All At Once from earlier this year was a film like that, highly original and inventive in most of it’s filmmaking aspects. But coming up on the Christmas season, Netflix will get another film that’s wildly original called White Noise, the latest film from Noah Baumback, the director of Marriage Story and Frances Ha. To say this film is creative is a huge understatement. White Noise is a dark comedy at it’s roots, although humor being subjective, this brand of laughs will not be for everyone. I found myself as perplexed as I was amused by what Baumback had put on the screen. While the film ultimately did work for me, as I found myself chuckling throughout, but most of the time that I wasn’t actually laughing

Broker - Movie Review

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Broker - Movie Review Critics Score - 8 of 10 General Audience Score - 7 of 10 Since virtually the birth of cinema, artists the world over have sought to expand our minds and share differing points of view on the most delicate, sensitive and even heinous topics. Human trafficking is one of those kinds of topics, something we can pretty much all agree is a fairly despicable and in most cases illegal activity, but there’s always another take on the matter. Broker is a new film that works at humanizing aspects of human trafficking, it comes to us from writer/director Hirokazu Koreeda, the same man that brought us Shoplifters, a Best Foreign Language Film nominee from 2019. While there are flat out immoral avenues of smuggling humans, there are also ways of transferring human beings, via adoption agencies and orphanages, that serve a perfectly normal and useful place in human society. With Broker, Koreeda threads the needle and stitches a patch right in the middle of these two concepts, an

The Greatest Beer Run Ever - Movie Review

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The Greatest Beer Run Ever - Movie Review Critics Score - 7 of 10 General Audience Score - 8 of 10 The depiction of war in film is a fascinating and delicate subject, with takes on it as diverse on the spectrum as they can possibly be. From the humorous side, films like Mash and Good Morning, Vietnam to the more harrowing and sobering Saving Private Ryan and Come And See. The way these films are received by any audience depends on numerous factors, age, nationality, religious affiliation, as well as things like proximity to and familiarity with violence and war, including war crimes. The latest film from Director Peter Farrelly, the same man to bring us film’s like There’s Something About Mary and Dumb & Dumber, has brought us The Greatest Beer Run Ever, currently available to stream on Apple+. The new film starring Zac Efron covers the true events surrounding John Donohue as he delivers beer to his friends fighting in the Vietnam War. This movie comes at a precarious time in histo