Soderbergh scintillates with cell phones in ‘Unsane’

Posted on April 4, 2018 by reelentropy

8/10 Steven Soderbergh’s quietly released Unsane already lost almost 100 screens from its March 23 release to its second weekend to Easter releases, and it will continue to drop out of theaters precipitously with an exciting April schedule on the horizon. That’s a sad thing, because this is one special movie.

After leaving Boston for suburban Pennsylvania after two years on the run, Swayer Valentini (Claire Foy) thinks she’s finally escaped her stalker for good, but her PTSD still prevents her from leading a happy life. She seeks help, but her therapist tricks her into committing herself as part of an insurance scam. Things go from bad to worse when Valentini discovers her stalker, David Strine (Joshua Leonard), has picked up a job at the asylum as an orderly.

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‘Uprising’ doesn’t live up to original, its own potential

Posted on April 4, 2018 by reelentropy

Striking images, like this one of the final category six kaiju, do dot the finished film. Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

4/10 Pacific Rim: Uprising is a three hour epic adventure that’s been stuffed into a 111 minute box.

Ten years after his father sacrificed himself in the Battle of the Breach, Jake Pentecost (John Boyega, who also produces) has grown up on the street in a post-war world, the privilege of his name allowing him to spend time in and out of the military instead of prison. He’s pressed into service again after being caught in an unauthorized jaeger with its maker, a talented scrapper named Amara Namani (Cailee Spaeny). Pentecost trains cadets — one of which is Namani — to be the last of the jaeger pilots before a Chinese drone program is approved to take over.

But, treachery! At the Pan-Pacific Defense Council summit in Sydney, a rogue jaeger assassinates Mako Mori (Rinko Kikuchi), another hero of the Battle of the Breach and Pentecost’s adopted sister, before she can deliver her assessment on the drone program. Aboard the Gypsy Avenger, Pentecost and copilot Nate Lambert (Scott Eastwood) follow clues to Siberia and uncover a plot to re-open the breach and begin a second phase of the Kaiju War.

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Razor-sharp script, shots race across screen in Sundance favorite

Posted on April 2, 2018 by reelentropy

Clothes obviously change throughout the film, but the dress code for Reynolds and Amanda is always constant — high collars and tiny shorts or skirts. Since they’re mostly shot from the waist or neck up, it’s always kind of a shock when their legs make it into a shot and they’re suddenly revealed to be half-naked. In a film this meticulous, there’s obviously some degree of meaning there. Images courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 With Hollywood seemingly unable to produce more than a few movies a year without obvious gaffs, Thoroughbreds is a refreshing spurt of disciplined, technically perfect filmmaking and the birth of a new star in writer/director Cory Finley.

In a wealthy Connecticut suburb, childhood friends Lily Reynolds (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Amanda (Olivia Cooke) are consumed by wealth-driven apathy. Amanda suffers from borderline personality disorder and is under investigation for brutally killing her family’s horse. Reynolds is still reeling from the death of her father years earlier, which is exacerbated by her new stepfather Mark (Paul Sparks) being a giant prick. Together, they plot to blackmail a hapless drug dealer, Tim (Anton Yelchin), into murdering him.

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All-world lead can’t elevate hum-drum ‘Tomb Raider’

Posted on March 17, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Warner Bros.

6/10 They’ve remade Tomb Raider. They’ve remade everything, so that makes sense.

Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) is living a hard-knock life in London as a courier. It’s tough to feel bad for her though since there’s a fortune waiting for her when she has her father Richard (Dominic West), who has been missing for seven years, declared dead. When she finally starts the paperwork, she discovers clues that lead her to The Devil’s Sea, where her father was searching for the tomb of Himiko, an ancient Japanese shaman-queen. There, she comes up against rival archaeologist Mathias Vogel (Walton Goggins).

Alicia Vikander is perfect and wonderful and can do no wrong, but all Tomb Raider does with her is demonstrate how little a great actor really helps these action franchises. Given one of the most talented actors in the world and one who was fiercely dedicated to the role, the movie, and her character in particular, still falls flat.

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‘A Wrinkle in Bad’

Posted on March 10, 2018 by reelentropy

There’s a lot that could be made of A Wrinkle in Time’s multi-racial casting decisions that really hasn’t been, and that’s nice. I think this is the way things should be moving forward — a clear effort toward diversity, but in a movie marketed on its own merit. Images courtesy Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

2/10 They should call this movie A Wrinkle in Bad, because it’s so bad.

A Wrinkle in Time is based on the beloved 1962 young adult novel by Madeleine L’Engle. It follows Meg Murray (Storm Reid), who is tormented at school by classmates and at home by the disappearance of her father, Alex (Chris Pine), four years prior. She and her brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), a powerful psychic, are recruited by Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who and Mrs. Which (Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling and Oprah Winfrey) to become warriors of the light in an interstellar battle against the darkness, a giant, over-the-top metaphor for both communism and Satan that is responsible for all negative thoughts.

A Wrinkle in Time fails on a basic information transfer level. I have never seen a movie where I have so often found myself wondering what I’m looking at — and I don’t mean the cool physics stuff, which is mostly ignored, I mean characters will jump to the other side of the set from shot to shot. From a basic blocking, who-is-where onstage perspective, I don’t know what’s going on in most of this movie.

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