Much like last year’s Ouija: Origin of Evil was a prequel that proved to be a monumentally massive improvement over its anemic low budget horror predecessor Ouija, Annabelle: Creation somehow, some way bucks the odds and proves to be a superior motion picture to its woeful 2014 precursor Annabelle.
There’s little room for the characters to breathe, their collective journeys never evolving in ways that feel authentic or genuine. Jeannette’s transitions happen because the story requires them to, not because they feel organic to her own personal story, diluting the inherent power of her resilient perseverance to achieve by a substantial margin.
Landline gets what makes people tick, doesn’t shy from reveling in the good, bad and ugly as well as all the gradations hiding in the various grey areas. It’s very good, and as such ends up being a movie I can’t help but hope finds its audience.
For these young women, Step is life, but it is also something to strive for, to believe in and to use as a means to make the leap into the unknown, hopefully to even greater achievements. For the viewer, Step is a wonder, and for the life of me I now can’t imagine a world where this documentary does not exist.
There’s no cohesion, no rationale why one event that transpires leads to the one directly following it. It’s a big, monstrous waste of time, energy, resources and talent, The Dark Tower a forgettable misfire that does injustice to King’s source material and sadly belongs in the bargain bin collecting dust.
Bigelow brings Detroit home, showing how this historical scar on the American Dream deserves to be far more than an abhorrent footnote. Make no mistake, there might not be a more important motion picture released this year.
But when An Inconvenient Sequel works it does so magnificently, especially when it calls back to the more controversial aspects of its predecessor and shows in no uncertain terms just how quickly some of those dire predictions are coming to pass.
As a B-grade exploitation thriller made in the style of ‘80s grindhouse mainstays, Kidnap gets the job done. Prieto doesn’t hide that his movie is basically the second part of an old school drive-in theatre double-bill, and as such he doesn’t shirk on the elements that would hopefully get viewers to stay awake well after midnight if they were giving it a look.
But it is a ten minute, seemingly one-take chase-fight-shoot-escape-fight again set piece beginning inside a high-rise stairwell and culminating in a speeding car that is the true show-stopper, and without a doubt it is one of the best sequences of its type I’ve frankly ever seen.