Stop what you’re doing and go see ‘Mandy’

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy RLJE Films.

10/10 Mandy is an unquestionable masterpiece, the kind of completely uncompromised film that almost never gets made in the modern Hollywood era. It is an absolute privilege to see on the big screen, which you must do if you can still find the opportunity.

In 1983 in the Shadow Mountains, Red Miller (Nicolas Cage) and his wife Mandy Bloom (Andrea Riseborough) live in peace. But when cult leader Jeremiah Sand (Linus Roache) becomes enamoured with Bloom after making eye contact with her on the side of the road, he raises horrifying biker demons from hell to orchestrate a home invasion and, when Mandy refuses to submit to him, burns her alive in front of her husband. Miller, who is left to die, escapes, forges history’s most acid-friendly battle axe and hunts the cult down.

So, not much happens in Mandy. But have you ever seen not much happen so stylishly?

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‘Simple Favor’ gleeful, twisted

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Lionsgate.

9/10 A Simple Favor is a fiendish delight of a film, one that was clearly fun to make and is just as fun to watch.

Stay-at-home widow Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) puts the other moms of her Connecticut suburb to shame with her handy crafts and recipes and eagerness to be involved with her son’s elementary school education. Through her son, she befriends her polar opposite as a mother – the rich Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), who curses like a sailor and starts her batches of stiff martinis in the mid-afternoon. Smothers and Nelson – and Nelson’s husband Sean Townsend (Henry Golding) – get on like a house on fire, until Nelson suddenly goes missing. Smothers must unravel the sinister mystery of her new best friend, and reveal her own mysteries in the process.

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‘The Predator’ is a two hour riff on mental illness and I’m actually a little sick to my stomach

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Is it me, or has the predator design gotten really lackluster since the first movie? Image courtesy 20th Century Fox.

1/10 The Predator is one of the most appalling things that’s ever been released in theaters.

I don’t want to give this a full review – it’s not a full movie, so why would I? It was established very publicly well before release that The Predator would instead be a mashup of re-purposed footage with almost no thought given to the final cut’s merit as a standalone show.

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‘Searching’ a great story, not right for its gimmick

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

Searching does a wonderful job of turning computers into scary things. In moments like these, Kim appears to be visibly lost amongst the windows. Image courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.

6/10 When I saw the first Unfriended, I thought it had the potential to advance film as an art from in a way that very few movies can. Four years later, Searching, which is also entirely composed of shots on various computer screens, comes careening into cinemas out of Sundance with some pedigree, an apparently serious take on the new gimmick.

Two years before Searching, David Kim (John Cho) lost his wife to cancer, and he and his daughter Margot (Michelle La) grew distant. One night, Margot leaves for her study group and never comes back, leaving her father with only three midnight missed calls and her forgotten laptop to work off of. Detective Rosemary Vick (Deborah Messing) believes Margot ran away, and Kim begins to take matters into his own hands.

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‘The Nun’ is 90 minutes of unvarnished nonsense

Posted on October 3, 2018 by reelentropy

This split promotional image is literally the only creative visual associated with this movie, and it has barely anything to do with the story. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

1/10 Imagine if The Evil Dead 2 took itself seriously. That’s The Nun. The Nun is that bad.

“The darkest chapter of The Conjuring Universe” – because aping the language of its sister Insidious series wasn’t enough, they also had to steal from the MCU – begins with the Vatican learning that a nun of the Cârța Monastery in Romania has seemingly hanged herself. To investigate, Rome sends its worst – Father Burke (Demián Bichir), a priest disgraced after an exorcism gone wrong, and Sister Irene (Taissa Farminga), a novitiate nun who is solicited because of her “familiarity with the territory.” What is meant by this is never explained.

These two obviously underqualified exorcists journey to Southern Transylvania, where they meet Maurice “Frenchie” Theriault (Jonas Bloquet), the local who first made the horrific discovery. Together, they journey to the monastery, which to their great alarm, they find completely abandoned.

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