‘Winchester’s’ sharp story cut down by dull scares

Posted on February 2, 2018 by reelentropy

Image courtesy Lionsgate.

5/10 Winchester is wonderfully written and pretty cleverly directed, but gets major points off for its technical problems.

In 1906 San Francisco, psychologist Eric Price (Jason Clarke) has been driven to despair and drug abuse by his wife’s untimely death. He’s called back to action by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, which fears for the sanity of its majority shareholder, Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren).

Winchester too is in grief for the loss of her husband and child, but more pressingly, she is literally haunted by the spirits of people killed by her company’s weapons, which represented a major step forward in firearm technology in the 1860s. For the past 23 years, she has spent her monumental inheritance constantly building and rebuilding a mansion in San Jose to house them and bring them peace. The mansion is still considered one of the most haunted locations in the U.S. Price is sent to assess Winchester’s sanity, but soon learns that he was hand-picked for his own personal connection to the mansion.

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‘The Last Key’ decent, dragged down by ‘Insidious’ hallmarks

Posted on January 23, 2018 by reelentropy

Are you the keymaster? Images courtesy Universal Pictures.

4/10 You thought I’d forgotten about Insidious, didn’t you? No, we remember. Even if no one else- What?! It opened at almost $30 million?

Guess January isn’t the dead zone it used to be.

Insidious: The Last Key sees franchise star Elise Rainier (Lin Shayne, Ava Kolker and Hana Hayes in flashbacks) return to her childhood home to investigate a paranormal disturbance. The film flashes between to her upbringing and abuse at the hands of her father Gerald (Josh Stewart), who sought to repress her psychic abilities, and the present day plight of Ted Garza (Kirk Acevedo) as she discovers an age-old evil in the house’s foundations, one that she herself released.

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‘Phantom Thread’ arrives in wide release

Posted on January 18, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy Focus Features.

9/10 Undoubtedly the coolest title of 2017, Phantom Thread, has finally arrived in theaters. Why is it called that? Why did a movie with artistic heavyweights Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis take this long to get here? Who knows.

In 1950s London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis in his “final film“) cycles through women like the changing seasons, with only his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), who he still lives with, remaining constant. On sabbatical, he meets Alma Elson (Vicky Kreips) at a remote diner and the two fall in love. Elson moves to the city with Woodcock but quickly discovers that he’s already quite in love with himself.

Phantom Thread is a charming if slightly poisonous love story taking place over a period of several years. The film is framed as Elson explaining her relationship with Woodcock to a doctor in hindsight, and it feels like a memory as you’re watching it — short, unrelated snippets play out back to back to back, with no obvious rhyme or reason. Taken together, they paint a picture of a relationship that seems much larger than its 130 minute confines.

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‘I, Tonya’ sticks landing

Posted on January 17, 2018 by reelentropy

In a stacked field behind Frances McDormand and Sally Hawkins, it’s unlikely Margot Robbie will get the recognition she deserves for I, Tonya, but she’s been not getting the recognition she deserved since her very first role in Wolf of Wall Street. Fortunately, carrying a complex, high-level movie with a performance to match is the rule for her and not the exception — they’ll be calling her name on the Oscar stage for years to come. Image courtesy Neon.

9/10 In the early 1990s, trailer trash reject Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie, McKenna Grace as a child) bullied her way through prejudice to the height of figure skating artistry. The movie about her life, I, Tonya, follows right in her footsteps, fighting through its own white trash reality show plotline to reach the plateau of 2017 movies.

In the film, Harding grows up abused by her mother, LaVona Golden (Allison Janney). Golden sees from an early age that she has a knack for figure skating and forces her to focus on it relentlessly, at the expense of any normal childhood or even schooling.

Harding eventually transitions to an abusive boyfriend and husband, Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan). Now an Olympian, Harding receives death threats during her training for the 1994 games. Gillooly tries to send a similar threat to main rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver), but the threat becomes an assault and spirals far enough out of control to end Harding’s skating career at just age 23.

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Spielberg’s ‘Post’ doesn’t live up to itself

Posted on January 9, 2018 by reelentropy

Images courtesy 20th Century Fox.

7/10 The Post is much more challenging and nuanced than expected, but it ultimately falls short of its ambitions.

In 1971, the New York Times drops a bombshell — according to a leaked study that would become known as the Pentagon Papers, the Vietnam War was not a noble effort to help the South Vietnamese stave off communism. In a conspiracy going back decades and spanning five different administrations, presidents had secretly escalated tensions and broadened the scope of action in Vietnam and systematically lied to Congress and the public about it.

After releasing three articles of their five-part series, the Nixon administration files and injunction prohibiting the Times from publishing further. Washington Post and Times-Herald editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee (Tom Hanks) is desperate to find the papers and continue stories on them with his own publication. When he does, he forces publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), who inherited the organization from her late husband and has no real business running a newspaper, in a position where she must actively defy the federal government.

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