Category: Film Review

As a screenwriter, James Vanderbilt won acclaim for his work on 2007’s “Zodiac.” Vanderbilt also wrote “Darkness Falls,” “White House Down,” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” His track record leans toward moviegoing misery, and now he makes his directorial debut with “Truth,” trying to shake off his reputation as a genre man by dramatizing the brouhaha surrounding the Killian Documents Controversy and the firing of Dan Rather from the “CBS Evening News.” Ideas on journalism ethics, the inherently manipulative nature of reporting, and the uncomfortable marriage between greed and daily news are pushed aside so Vanderbilt can make a cloying, dreadfully acted melodrama, ignoring the juicy details of the event to play as broadly as possible with little to no actual thematic goals. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s no arguing the merits of “Our Brand Is Crisis,” which is a fictional take on the 2005 documentary of the same name. It’s competently acted by a wide range of talent, featuring a compelling lead turn by star Sandra Bullock as a messy, brilliant political strategist. It’s a tale of awakening, identifying politics is a poison the world doesn’t deserve. It also has farcical touches that help alleviate the inherent heaviness of the story, trying to transform culture-crashing insanity into a big screen show. And yet, “Our Brand Is Crisis” doesn’t contain much dynamism, and its reach for profundity is half-hearted at best. In director David Gordon Green’s care, the feature doesn’t add up to much, pretending to be a subversive offering of backstage exploration instead of truly becoming one. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Meadowland” is quite possibly the saddest movie of the 2015 film year. It’s not just a simple, dismissible downer, but a profound psychological breach that touches the bottom when it comes to exploring abyssal parental fears and painful self-destruction. And yet, it’s unmissable cinema. Writer Chris Rossi and director Reed Morano aren’t visiting the sunny side of the street with this picture, but their interest in primal emotions results in a fascinating exploration of a nervous breakdown, with Olivia Wilde truly tested as an actress for the first time in her career. “Meadowland” is raw and almost unbearable, but its quest to understand the stages of grief is powerfully rendered with a great degree of authenticity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Burnt” was once featured on the Black List, an insider collection of the “most liked” unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, endeavoring to shine a light on quality work that’s had difficulty making the leap to the big screen. It’s also another reminder that the Black List is most likely a self-serving sham organized by desperate agents. “Burnt” is heavy with formula and predictable beats of redemption, making a mess out of what should be a straightforward tale of a ruined chef fuming while on a path to perfection. With last year’s “Chef,” Jon Favreau captured a wonderful marriage of foodie delights, technique, and heartfelt drama. “Burnt” is a crudely illustrated flip-book of conflict with unappealing characters, dipping substantially in quality every time it leaves the kitchen. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Taxi” is both a celebration and critique of life in Iran, hosted by director Jafar Panahi, whose own complex history with censorship and imprisonment informs the picture’s sense of secrecy and thinly veiled commentary. Blurring the line between drama and realism, “Taxi” doesn’t chase a gimmick. Instead, it pursues a conversational tone that’s open to explore personalities and politics, trying to establish a human perspective to Iranian hustle, with Panahi offering a slice of life look at everyday business and the citizens trying to make their way through an oppressive culture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Paranormal Activity” was intended to be a no-budget calling card for director Oren Peli, who employed crude haunted house-style scares and an atmosphere of realism to frighten his audience. The gimmick worked for the feature, which became a massive moneymaker as well as popularizing the found footage subgenre. However, the simple possession story wasn’t built to become a franchise. “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension” is the sixth installment of the series, and possibly its last. Let’s hope the rumor is true, as the latest installment is quite possibly the worst, offering unrepentant creative bankruptcy and a shocking disregard for viewer intelligence. Once again, things go bump in the night, but this time, there's not a single reason to care about anything the brand name has to offer. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Having found success with his sequel to “G.I. Joe,” director Jon M. Chu (“Step Up 3D,” “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”) returns to the Hasbro toy vaults to revive “Jem and the Holograms,” an adaptation of the popular cartoon series that ran in the late 1980s. The show celebrated style, fantasy, music, and relationships. Chu’s take decidedly less excitable, trying to mute a flamboyant creation into a tender feature that values buzzy ideas on the unification of social media over personality. “Jem and the Holograms” has almost nothing in common with its inspiration, merely lifting names and labels as it weaves together a flaccid tale of personal corruption and female empowerment, laboring to protect positivity as it gradually loses all hope for identity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to decide what’s more horrific about the opening of “Bone Tomahawk”: that it displays a throat-slitting in close-up or introduces David Arquette in a major supporting role. Turns out, violence trumps all in this vivid production, which showcases all kinds of butchery as it explores the uneasy marriage between western and horror interests. Writer/director S. Craig Zahler makes a unique debut with this unpredictable picture, which alternates between extended conversations and aggression, with its raw, unblinking attitude toward the destruction of men sold with surprising authority for a helming debut. “Bone Tomahawk” is specialized work, requiring a special level of patience and endurance to embrace the nightmare Zahler has created. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To keep himself busy between “Fast & Furious” sequels, star Vin Diesel has been on the prowl for a franchise to call his own lately. Turning “Pitch Black” into series didn’t quite work out as planned, overestimating the appeal of the glum lead character, Riddick. Now there’s “The Last Witch Hunter,” which is Diesel’s version of a Marvel Comics movie, merging exaggerated superhero antics with a darker tone of supernatural awakening. There are witches galore here, but very little excitement, as director Breck Eisner is too infatuated with his elaborate CGI designs to realize that the screenplay (credited to three writers) is nothing more than one long spewing of exposition. Sure, Diesel’s character wields a flaming sword, but it’s a visual better suited for a feature that knows how to appropriately exploit such delicious absurdity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Rock the Kasbah” is reminiscent of the horrible 2006 comedy, “American Dreamz,” which attempted to blend jazz-hands satire with profound Middle Eastern war zone woes, ending up shrill and disastrously unfunny. “Rock the Kasbah” isn’t as broad, but it shares a fruitless determination to turn a volatile region into big screen joy, trying to overcome real-world threat without actually thinking tonality through. It’s a mess of a movie, overlong and undercooked, almost entirely reliant on star Bill Murray to crank up his cocktail-hour charms and save the day while the production slumps from one scene to the next. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The life and times of social scientist Stanley Milgram are recounted in “Experimenter,” but not in direct way. Instead of taking the bio-pic route, writer/director Michael Almereyda cherry picks concepts and domestic struggles to form a larger portrait of iciness and commitment to curiosity. The helmer also selects an artful approach to the feature that makes it feel like a stage production, though the reason for such a specific visual choice is difficult to compute. “Experimenter” is a sterile viewing experience, but not an unpleasant one, with Milgram’s insatiable need to classify human response rubbing off on the effort, which displays more verve in observational mode than it does in domestic replication. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Harrowing is a singular way to describe “Beasts of No Nation,” which takes viewers into the folds of African unrest and the birth of the child soldier. The portrait of innocence lost is almost unbearable to watch at times, as writer/director Cary Joji Fukunaga presents an unflinching look at the horrors of war and the disease of men, detailing murder, rape, insanity, and despair without pause, but not without some degree of hope. Though it samples repetition to fill out an excessive run time (137 minutes), “Beasts of No Nation” is essential work, exploring an eye-opening subject matter with clear thinking and respect for the complexities of the psychological damage done.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The low-budget action market is saturated with titles these days, and they all tend to look and sound the same. “Momentum” is the latest endeavor to play the VOD sweepstakes, and the South African production has a compelling focal point in actress Olga Kurylenko, who graduates from supporting parts in other dismal actioners to topline her own snoozy effort. Female leads are rare in these productions, but director Stephen S. Campanelli isn’t interested in shaking up the formula, submitting yet another colorless, featureless stunt extravaganza that emphasizes physical feats and convoluted plotting, trying to razzle-dazzle audiences with visuals they’ve seen countless times before. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In the 1990s, R.L. Stine’s “Goosebumps” series of YA horror novels managed to playfully terrify an entire generation of readers. There were audio books, video games, and a television series to help expand Stine’s brand, but now the big screen receives its chance to frighten audiences with “Goosebumps.” While handed a self-aware plot to ease the translation to feature-length frights, the picture mostly plays it straightforward, mixing comedy and scares while a monumental amount of CGI works to create all creatures great and small. “Goosebumps” is a mixed bag when it comes to technical achievements and storytelling, but it does offer the most enthusiastic cast of 2015, watching the actors mug their way through a cinematic adventure that needs their complete thespian attention. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Completing his stoic, dry oatmeal trilogy of noble characters (which includes “War Horse” and “Lincoln”), director Steven Spielberg finally finds some sense of tempo again with the Cold War drama, “Bridge of Spies.” Moving forward on the talky but eventful tale of a prisoner exchange negotiation, the celebrated helmer works past his interest in pained reflection, trying to summon procedural snap to what’s otherwise a tale of men discussing other men in frigid locations. While it doesn’t always welcome suspense, “Bridge of Spies” is intelligent and paced, anchored by a sensational lead performance by Tom Hanks, who once again makes magic with Spielberg in this, their fourth collaboration. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2013, writer/director Guillermo del Toro went big with “Pacific Rim,” receiving a rare opportunity to make his own mega monster movie with an appropriately gigantic budget and global scale. For his latest, “Crimson Peak,” the helmer goes relatively small, setting the majority of the picture inside a crumbling mansion populated with only a few characters. Out to create his own version of a gothic Italian chiller from the 1960s, del Toro has all the right dramatic ingredients and pure technical mastery, but the story is lacking serious threat, often caught admiring itself instead of marching forward as a proper spine-tingler. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

We’ve been here before. In 2013, Ashton Kutcher suited up in bad beards and turtlenecks to portray Apple icon Steve Jobs in a dreadful bio-pic (“Jobs”), which trafficked in wheezy melodrama and suffered a blurring of intent as it attempted to manage the man’s myth without addressing reality. “Steve Jobs” isn’t a rehash of the earlier picture, taking a more theatrical route to explore the complexity of the subject and his corrosive ways with every human on Earth. Director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin combine forces to deliver a slingshot ride around the Apple universe, emerging with more questions than answers. “Steve Jobs” doesn’t take in the enormity of a life, it merely cuts down a few biographical moments and studies the rings, working to distance itself from other artistic endeavors by disrupting a traditional timeline assessment of developing character. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Hitting a fairly obvious target for satire, “The Final Girls” pokes fun at the wonderland of gore, sex, and peer pressure that defined slasher cinema of the 1980s. However, instead of mounting another rehash/celebration, screenwriters M.A. Fortin and Joshua John Miller dream up an inventive way to explore the subgenre, blending “Scream” with “The Purple Rose of Cairo” as they take on and take down the horror formula from a comedic perspective. Director Todd Strauss-Schulson smothers the effort in excessive style, but “The Final Girls” is an unexpectedly amusing picture that has genuine fun with itself and the mechanics of B-movies. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The spooky season brings out the best in horror moviemakers, and an enduring love for the anthology film inspires “Tales of Halloween,” a holiday-specific overview of suburban terror, twists, and general dread. While on the goofy side to welcome a wider audience, the feature has its macabre appetites, showcasing fine technical achievements on a minimal budget, while setting a Halloween mood with fun-sized samplings of disaster. For genre fanatics, there’s something here for every taste, ornamented with industry cameos and supported by a few grim detours that keep the production on task as a satisfactory holiday chiller. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Victoria” is a gimmick film from director Sebastian Schipper, who, a long time ago, appeared in the German art-house hit, “Run Lola Run.” Perhaps looking for a way to update the formula, Schipper attempts to razzle-dazzle the audience with a single take, following the action through an unbroken shot that lasts a whopping 134 minutes. As a technical achievement, “Victoria” is impressive, working with loose choreography and precise planning to turn a casual night of drinking into a turbulent series of personal challenges. While it’s a neat idea, Schipper doesn’t have anything more to offer than the cinematographic stunt, taking such a long time to position characters into the heat of the moment, he forgets to add the moment. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com