Yet I laughed. A lot. Almost for every single one of the film’s fast-paced 83 minutes, all of which ultimately makes The Brothers Grimsby a rambunctiously uncouth satire that’s as disgusting as it is riotous. Not sure that’s a recommendation, but there it is all the same.
Alicia Vikander deserved her Academy Award for this performance, and as such The Danish Girl is worth watching for her brilliance alone. Same time, even if director Tom Hooper’s film doesn’t blossom into the type of drama it arguably should have been, it’s depth, maturity, intelligence and sensitivity as it pertains to looking at the Transgender coming out experience deserves to be applauded.
Knight of Cups is writer/director Terrence Malick at his most lyrically esoteric. If his last film, the atmospheric, if claustrophobically nondescript saga of love and woe To the Wonder was the acclaimed filmmaker’s attempt to pick away at cinematic convention, it is with this one that he abandons traditional narrative constructs entirely.
If Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn’t as incisive or as penetrating as it potentially could have been, for a major studio satirical look at the war in Afghanistan there’s still plenty of food for thought here. Ficarra and Requa get more right than they do wrong, and while Carlock’s script isn’t a warts-and-all expose it digs just deep enough to keep the average viewer with even of a modicum of intelligence satisfied.
Problem is, not only is what transpires unintentionally laughable, it also brings to mind a number of better, in some cases classic, thrillers that The Other Side of the Door has no business drawing comparisons to. On top of that, the last scene is an easy out that anyone with half-a-brain will see coming from a mile away, making it more worthy of a couple solid eye rolls than anything close to resembling a terrified shriek.
Everything is decidedly not like it seems in the slow burn B-movie Emelie, a crafty psychological thriller that reveals its cards relatively early on but then takes its time uncomfortably playing them. Unsurprisingly, Anna isn’t who she claims to be, but what she wants with the Thompson’s? Why she is in their home? That is a little harder to figure out, the answer a truly terrifying revelation that got so completely under my skin I could feel the reverberations running through my veins long after the film itself had come to an end.
Unlike the first film, [London Has Fallen] never takes itself seriously. At the same time, it amplifies the violence and the jingoism to stratospheric levels…It’s just plain nuts, walking a surreal line between being irredeemably offensive and goofily enjoyable with astonishing aplomb.
I really liked The Wave (2015), liked it a lot. While it doesn’t do anything new, Uthaug’s latest genre excursion just does what it sets out to do so gosh darn well, the lack of originality or innovation isn’t the type of problem it would have been had lesser hands been guiding the production.
If Zootopia isn’t the same sort of sensation that Tangled or Frozen were, that doesn’t make it any less wonderful. Reminiscent of Wreck-It Ralph, the film is another winner for Disney proper (i.e. non-Pixar related) and shows the studio is still a force to be reckoned with where it comes to their animated offerings.