Here’s what’s happening in Episode #11 (download .mp3) of the Cinema Squabble Podcast. Another weekend is upon us, therefore more squabbling is in order. This week focuses on an eclectic line-up of genre flicks: Tomorrowland / Poltergeist / Slow West / Aloha / San Andreas Squabblers Sara Michelle Fetters, Matt Oakes, Brian Zitzelman and Adam […]

The new film is a revelation…All-in-all, it’s a completely different motion picture, and one definitely worth seeing.

[It’s] hard not to walk out of Aloha with a smile, the other stuff lurking inside the narrative, the way the characters interact, how they communicate, the subtle, delicate little human truths they discover along the way, much of that isn’t just terrific, it’s shockingly close to sublime.

By keeping things small, intimate even, [San Andreas] ups the emotional ante by leaps and bounds over many of the more recent entries in the genre. Better, it keeps things from spilling into silly, overwrought and absurd ultra-cheap SyFy Channel terrain; and while this is still nothing more than a glorified B-movie, it’s still rather more compelling than it honestly has any right to be.

It’s compelling stuff, fascinating, even, but it also feels a little more like an audition reel for a potential feature than it does an insightful, intimately probing documentary, and that’s an issue Russell’s investigative opus sometimes has trouble overcoming.

Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles is an engrossing, if still only surface level, examination of one of the 20th century’s most towering cinematic figures. While never digging as deep as I would have liked, the film’s nonetheless a wonderfully entertaining documentary filled with numerous delights both for diehard cineastes and the modestly curious alike.

Good Kill isn’t a direct hit, but it does speak its mind with forthright tenaciousness, Niccol searching for truths on a bloodied battlefield disinterested in revealing a single solitary one of them.

There just isn’t any reason for this new incarnation of Poltergeist to exist. All it does is run in circles trying to hit all the highpoints of the original.

As debuts go, Slow West is a stupendous one, the film an elegiac Western triumph both fans of the genre and newcomers alike will hopefully enjoy in equal measure.