Category: Film Review

2010’s “Alice in Wonderland” did a fine job defining Tim Burton’s recent directorial career, offering a dour, absurdly plasticized, green-screen-addicted adventure inspired by the beloved Lewis Carroll novel. It was a feeble film, highlighting Burton’s laziness behind the camera and revealing a shelf life for his quirk. But it made a billion dollars, so any possible follow-up wasn’t going to take the apology route. “Alice Through the Looking Glass” took its time to reach screens, bucking current trends of rapid sequelizations, and it’s about time as well, becoming both a prequel and continuation of “Alice in Wonderland” as the heroine zips around the years to save Underland. Burton has been replaced by James Bobin, but “Alice Through the Looking Glass” isn’t all that different a picture. Perhaps it’s a bit brighter, less violent, and more contained, and the effort does improve on the original movie, but a dearth of joy remains, returning to a realm in serious need of a practical set and some Prozac. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2014’s “X-Men: Days of Future Past” provided an opportunity for director Bryan Singer to return to a film series he began in 2000, working to untangle a few narrative and tonal knots created by other helmers, who had their way with the franchise over the years. While the feature juggled timelines and labored to build a bridge between the Singer era and the prequel fixings of “X-Men: First Class,” it was a creative success, managing to breathe life into the ongoing narrative, saying goodbye to a few familiar actors while continuing to explore new ones. “X-Men: Apocalypse” is the first step in a new direction for the mutant superheroes, winding the clock back to the 1980s to reset the group as a burgeoning team combining efforts to take on evil. The community atmosphere is strengthened in “Apocalypse,” shifting leadership duties and dramatic emphasis to inspire even more mutant adventures. Singer’s passion for the material is evident throughout, returning to heroism for the 8th chapter, not just stroking angst. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s hard to believe that “The Nice Guys” is only Shane Black’s third directorial effort. The famed screenwriter’s influence (“Lethal Weapon,” “The Long Kiss Goodnight”) has reverberated throughout the industry for decades, but Black is only really getting started when it comes to personalized cinematic pursuits. His debut was 2005’s appealingly noir-ish comedy, “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang,” but that promise eventually found itself with a plastic grocery bag wrapped over its head for “Iron Man 3,” an enormous production that showed little patience for Black’s DNA. “The Nice Guys” returns the director to his old stomping grounds, finding a reason to revisit Los Angeles with a silly detective story that’s soaking wet with Blackisms. It’s not an especially successful film, but here’s a handy tip: if you’re not laughing within the first ten minutes, there’s no reason to hang around for the remaining 100. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2014’s “Neighbors” was a disappointment. Handed a surefire premise that encouraged sustained silliness, and the feature exhausted itself before it had a chance to truly begin, sticking to tired trends for humor, while periodic dips into bodily function business only emphasized a lack of production imagination. Bravely, “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” attempts to race the original film to the bottom. A slapdash sequel quickly churned out to cash in on a surprise box office performer, the follow-up doesn’t transform a simple plot into a franchise. Instead of innovation, “Sorority Rising” furiously rehashes original elements in a manner that makes “Die Hard 2” look like “The Godfather: Part II.” If you’ve seen “Neighbors,” you’ve already seen “Neighbors 2.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Angry Birds Movie” arrives a little late, trying to cash in on the video game’s popularity, which has been waning since 2012. The pop culture moment has passed, but the production is determined to make something exciting with the simple formula of birds and pigs going to war. There are no surprises in “The Angry Birds Movie,” though there is a curious lack of laughs when exploring this collision of combative animals, finding an interesting and varied voice cast powerless to bring the funny with unimaginative screenwriting and direction that favors chaos as a means to entertain. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After scoring a major box office success with 1988’s “Twins,” star Arnold Schwarzenegger explored comedy once again with director Ivan Reitman in 1990’s “Kindergarten Cop.” This time, the pairing pants Schwarzenegger’s action persona, challenging established brawn with the unpredictable energy and honesty of children, finding a unique way to celebrate the actor’s strengths by taking him out of his comfort zone in a broadly comic manner. It took 26 years for Universal to come up with a sequel, but they’ve gone the DTV route, replacing Schwarzenegger with Dolph Lundgren, hoping to find the same silly vibe with another screen behemoth invading a classroom filled with 5 year olds. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In the world of director Yorgos Lanthimos, up is down and down is up. He’s a helmer who embraces the surreal and the strikingly authentic, using elements of performance art to explore the human condition as it experiences unusual extremity and isolation. Lanthimos first caught attention with 2009’s “Dogtooth,” and he returns to US art-houses with another vision of codependency in “The Lobster,” which also gifts him a larger budget and name actors to guide through his peculiar world-view. “The Lobster” is meant to be a great many things, and it’s largely successful with all of them, but what really pops here is Lanthimos’s hunger for the strange and his obsession with the heart, taking the long way around peculiar character interactions to explore the meaning of companionship. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

“Men & Chicken” is the latest release from writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen, his first in over a decade. In his time away from the camera, it seems he’s built up a hearty appetite for dark material, masterminding a strange look at a dysfunctional family made up of possibly monstrous siblings. Darkly comic interests remain to keep the picture approachable, but the Danish production is pretty severe as it inspects brotherly love and philosophical reach. Thankfully, Jensen isn’t going for cheap laughs with the grotesqueries of “Men & Chicken,” instead working to find the soul of his screenplay and treat these oddballs with a degree of understanding and, if one squints hard enough, love. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Hard Sell” is the tamest take on a movie that’s kinda, sorta about prostitution. It’s not exactly “Risky Business,” but writer/director Sean Nalaboff has the opportunity to launch a bawdy teen comedy about opportunism and exploitation. Instead of raunchy entertainment, the helmer attempts something far more sincere, inspecting the emotional wounds of his damaged characters, searching for unpredictable ways to explore familiar material. “Hard Sell” isn’t as exhaustively meaningful as it would like to be, but Nalaboff has the right idea, avoiding traditional adolescent high jinks to identify vulnerabilities, prizing matters of the heart more than laughs. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

When Jodie Foster directs a movie, it should be an event. The lifelong actress certainly has the experience to create riveting, emotionally authentic cinema, and her eye for casting should be second to none, showcasing an innate awareness of performance limitations. And yet, Foster routinely churns out mediocre features that fail to reach some lofty creative goals. Her latest disappointment is “Money Monster,” which initially positions itself as a scathing indictment of provocative Wall Street business practices, but quickly transforms into a Movie of the Week, eaten alive by contrivances and a maddening refusal to take the premise seriously, exposing mental and professional illness on all sides. Foster isn't identifying financial world crimes in “Money Monster,” she's celebrating them, turning personal ruin and chilling corruption into fodder for an exceptionally tedious thriller, and one that somehow has the idea it’s doing God's work by being so stupid. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Greg McLean is best known for his work on “Wolf Creek” and its sequel, establishing him as a genre filmmaker with an appetite for violence and silent menace emerging from corporeal threats. His interests turn to the supernatural for “The Darkness,” a ghost story that’s never really about malicious spirits, showing more interest in exploring a dysfunctional family challenged by poor communication, behavioral issues, and alcoholism. There’s barely any room for frights in this dismal, uneventful chiller, but McLean isn’t going down without a fight. Packing plenty of cheap scares and loose logic in this misfire, the helmer tries to tart up “The Darkness” with expected noise, but it never comes together as imagined, failing to compete with other, better haunted house tales. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As actor Jason Bateman continues his journey into film direction, his projects grow increasingly interesting, though their execution isn’t always as inspired. In “Bad Words,” Bateman guided a vulgar comedy about a reckless spelling bee contestant that transformed into a dark domestic drama. “The Family Fang” abandons the crutch of shock value and immediately hunts down parental ills and their lasting impact on children. Written by David Lindsay-Abaire (“Rabbit Hole”), who adapts Kevin Wilson’s celebrated novel, “The Family Fang” is loaded with potential, erecting a juicy mystery to propel the story, while characters are dealt their share of dysfunction. Bateman definitely shows improvement behind the camera, but the effort isn’t always as intriguing as the helmer believes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Although the feature was in development long before the release of 2014’s “John Wick,” “I Am Wrath” can’t help but come off as a poorly designed rip-off, exploring the same elements of the stellar Keanu Reeves picture, but lacking directorial flourish, storytelling clarity, and credible performances. John Travolta steps into the retired killer role for this round of criminal extermination, but he’s truly lost here, struggling to make sense of his character and director Chuck Russell’s complete mangling of theme. “I Am Wrath” is trashy and forgettable, and it never ceases to feel like a missed opportunity to have some B-movie fun with angry men out to stomp on urban scum.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

“The Trust” is the directorial debut for Alex and Benjamin Brewer, with the siblings jumping into the industry via cliché, served up bruised and battered by dark comedy. It’s easy to spot a lack of seasoning with the helmers, who arrive with big ideas for visuals and twists, but fail to juggle the various tones they excitedly introduce. “The Trust” has initial promise and personality, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that nothing interesting is happening. Instead, the feature works through formula with dwindling enthusiasm, leaving stars Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood to come up with their own level of dramatic interest, and even they stop faking it after the first act.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

Director Ben Wheatley has built a career making tough, impenetrable semi-horror pictures that explore grim psychological abysses and shocking violence. He’s dealt with domestic meltdowns (“Down Terrace”), period torment (“A Field in England), and cult nightmares (“Kill List”), but “High-Rise” pulls Wheatley into the big time, gifted known actors and a reasonable budget to create a suspense feature that details a vicious societal breakdown in a tight, suffocating space. It’s not quite the haves vs. the have nots, but “High-Rise” definitely has a few ideas on the state of the world and the ravages of unchecked capitalism. However, for every sharp stick jab of satire, Wheatley provides needless excess, clinging tight to repetitive helming habits that ultimately drown out the material’s war cry.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

As a gritty, low-wattage crime story, “Cash Only” has a few interesting deviations from the norm. It’s not every day that one encounters a tale of survival that highlights the quick-thinking actions of an apartment landlord, and the feature explores the Albanian immigrant experience in America, identifying community interaction in Detroit. “Cash Only” is effective and periodically nail-biting, but that it works so hard to remain fresh for those burned out by the same gangster business found in dozens of movies every year is its real achievement. Screenwriter/star Nickola Shreli puts some thought into the picture, which manages to capture desperation superbly, at least until the final 20 minutes.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

Billy Burke hasn’t enjoyed the most eventful of film careers, often stuck in bland roles of little consequence, like his long stretch as Bella’s powerless father in the “Twilight” series. In an effort to help brighten job opportunities, Burke produces “Divine Access,” which, at times, seems to be created strictly to showcase Burke’s previously unseen range. With those limited creative goals in mind, the feature is enormously successful, delivering Burke’s best role to date in a production that’s comfortable offering a good chunk of its run time to the performer to do whatever he wants with it. “Divine Access” is most enjoyable keeping close to Burke, with the alternative being a somewhat silly story about fanaticism and jealousy that’s difficult to take seriously.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

Los Angeles is home to millions of wayward soul stories, but Marie “Mimi” Haist is just special enough to inspire a documentary about her life. An eccentric and feisty 88-year-old woman, she’s the subject of “Queen Mimi,” a feature tracking her daily experience as a connected homeless woman in California, with pal Yaniv Rokah picking up a camera to capture her special point of view and surprising longevity. In today’s documentary-everything marketplace, it’s difficult to understand what inspired Rokah to bring Mimi to screens, but luckily there’s just enough biographical curiosity and star power to carry the viewing experience.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

“Sundown” is on a mission to revive the Spring Break comedy of the 1980s, hitting modern audiences with cheap thrills and thinly developed characters while the film soaks up the sun and sand. Going the R-rated route, the feature at least understands the elements that made movies like “Hardbodies” semi-tolerable, but as juvenile farces go, “Sundown” is lacking in insanity. Co-writer/director Fernando Lebrija tries to work the effort into a frenzy with broad comedy and bizarre encounters, but he’s missing a crucial sense of escalation, with the picture stopping to rest between incidents, which ruins the pace of the endeavor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After the rousing success of 2014’s “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” which strived to redefine a problematic superhero in a post-“Avengers” landscape, Marvel Studios sustains the introspective atmosphere for “Captain America: Civil War,” expanding on ideas of heroism and responsibility as the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands and costumed crime-fighting becomes ubiquitous in fictional realms and at the local multiplex. Returning directors Anthony and Joe Russo know exactly how to play these characters, building on the “Winter Soldier” success through community inspection while still making time for bulldozing action sequences. Captain America remains the focal point of the movie, but his place as a symbol for freedom feeds into a larger appreciation of heightened abilities and tech, and all the confusion it creates in a paranoid world. “Civil War” teases the Big Ideas while still wholly triumphant as superhero cinema. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com