Category: Film Review

Director Derek Wayne Johnson is a fan of the iconic 1976 feature, “Rocky.” Sharing that love seems to be an obsession in recent years, creating “John G. Avildsen: King of the Underdogs,” which celebrated the career of the “Rocky” helmer. Last year, Johnson constructed the documentary short, “40 Years of Rocky: The Birth of the Classic,” which showcased rare behind-the-scenes moments from the 1976 shoot. Running out of topics when it comes to all things Rocky Balboa, Johnson finally turns his attention to Stallone. Well, Frank Stallone. It’s a bit a stretch to give the singer/actor his own documentary, but Johnson isn’t easily defeated, piecing together “Stallone: Frank, That Is,” which is more of a loving tribute to the career resiliency of the subject than a gritty examination of a life lived in the shadow of his brother, Sylvester. The idea is to present Frank as more than just a famous last name, and while Johnson doesn’t cut too deep with the effort, he does present an appreciation for a man who’s been hustling his entire life. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Some Kind of Heaven” is a documentary that often plays like a scripted film. It’s the feature-length directorial debut for Lance Oppenheimer, a South Florida native endeavoring to explore the weirdness of The Villages, a Sunshine State retirement community that’s experienced a population explosion over the last three decades. With its various activities, community interaction, and promise of Floridian paradise, The Villages is a ripe topic for screen exploration, with Oppenheimer achieving access to the strange personalities who populate the place. He also takes a chance on storytelling, presenting an unusual balance of mockery and sensitivity with “Some Kind of Heaven,” which remains focused on the unusual lives it’s capturing, but also becomes a Christopher Guest movie at times, with the helmer occasionally unsure how to approach off-beat personalities living in a plastic wonderland. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Alex McAulay goes small scale with “Don’t Tell a Soul,” which partially takes place in the woods, where a nervous teenager converses with a security guard he accidentally led into an open well during a foot pursuit. It’s a premise that’s built for low-budget filmmaking, giving the viewing experience over to heated exchanges and surging emotion due to dwindling energy. It’s a static feature, but it’s not sluggish, with the helmer working on ways to open up the psychological scope of the picture without spending precious cash on the production. “Don’t Tell a Soul” eventually gives in to the demands of thriller cinema, but for the first two acts, McAulay offers enough reasons to stick around, carefully developing his characters while adding necessary strangeness to the central survival plot. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s a place one can go to experience the ultimate music escape. It’s called Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, and ever since its debut in 1997, it’s been the subject of playful mockery. There’s something about the idea of amateur musicians paying a small fortune to play with successful rock stars for a few days that leaves itself open for jokes, with commercials, media commentary, and even “The Simpsons” poking fun at the event. “Rock Camp” is a documentary that hopes to illuminate the process for outsiders, with directors Renee Barron and Douglas Blush permitted access to the experience, allowed to detail the rehearsals and camaraderie of the Camp as it heads to Las Vegas. There’s a bit of a promotional vibe to “Rock Camp,” which is inevitable with this type of escapism, but the helmers do a fine job getting to the heart of Rock and Roll Fantasy Camp, capturing the joy of performance as the campers make time with the rock gods and work on their own contributions to the event. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Flinch” is a crime story that’s built with parts from other crime stories. Writer/director Cameron Van Hoy primarily lifts from the work of Michael Mann and Nicolas Winding Refn, attempting to shape a kissing cousin to the 2011 film “Drive” with this hot neon, deep synth take on the psychological struggles of a small-time crook with a growing heart. Derivativeness is a problem in “Flinch,” as much of the movie is routine, with Van Hoy having a difficult time trying to make his tormented characters more interesting than they actually are. Style helps the feature, which depicts underworld happenings in Los Angeles, but there’s little more to the effort, which loses forward momentum the more it relies on recycling to fill the run time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s difficult to tell why “Horizon Line” was pushed into production, but I’m sure a feature like 2016’s “The Shallows” and its tremendous success helped the cause. While the new film doesn’t have a shark threat, it does detail a situation of tropical island survival that largely takes place inside an airplane, focusing on immediate crises and longstanding pains of the heart. It’s meant to be close-quarters panic with battered and overwhelmed characters, but “Horizon Line” isn’t the pulse-pounder once expects it to be. Director Mikael Marcimain delivers straightforward entertainment, bringing a mild amount of tension to the skies, but the screenplay (by Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken, “10 Cloverfield Lane”) doesn’t have much of an imagination for this type of disaster movie, dealing with banal relationship issues while halfhearted performances can’t sell the urgency of the moment. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Shadow in the Cloud” has a difficult time deciding what kind of film it wants to be. The screenplay by Max Landis and Roseanne Liang (who also directs) is all over the place in terms of story and tone, with one side of the picture a study of the female military experience in World War II, while the other side is a monster mash highlighting a battle between panicky U.S. flight officers and giant bats hungry to feast on the innards of a massive B-17 bomber. While “Shadow of the Cloud” strains to be accepted a B-movie fun, Landis and Liang don’t have a viable game plan for big thrills, often resorting to cheap elements of suspense just to fill a 70-minute-long endeavor. The effort feels like a short stretched thin to meet feature-length requirements, and it’s awfully strange to watch Liang bend over backwards to transform the production into a celebration of womanly power in WWII while offering a completely fictional tale of survival. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Simon West is the latest filmmaker to realize his career isn’t working out so well in Hollywood (his recent output includes duds such as “Stratton,” “Gun Shy,” and “Wild Card”), making a move to China to help boost his employability, bringing some western technique to eastern audiences (Renny Harlin made a similar relocation a few years ago). West’s debut endeavor for China is “Skyfire,” which pits scientists and businesspeople against a raging island volcano, revisiting a natural disaster scenario that overwhelmed multiplexes a few decades ago with the release of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano.” West isn’t one to put his stamp on anything, and he goes through the motions on “Skyfire,” which hopes to dazzle audiences with grand spectacle and massive amounts of property damage, but offers little else worth paying attention to. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The screen needs new action heroes. Liam Neeson is clinging on to his standing as a senior brawler, still churning out thrillers where he’s bashed and bruised while on the hunt for justice. There really isn’t much more than that out there, leaving an open space for different types of good guys. While late to the party, actor Gary Dourdan (who achieved fame with his years on “C.S.I.”) offers steely stares and muscle flexing with “Redemption Day,” which presents him as a haunted military man out to rescue his kidnapped wife in the wilds of Algeria. The ingredients are there for old-fashioned escapism, but co-writer/director Hicham Hajji (making his helming debut) doesn’t necessarily want brawny chaos. He’s looking for political commentary, transforming “Redemption Day” into a series of conversations sold at half-speed, weirdly skipping excitement at almost every turn. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s always a positive thing to see performers taking control of their careers, pushing themselves to do something that represents their interests. Actresses Meagan Good and Tamara Bass elect to make such a move behind the camera, making their feature-length directorial debut with “If Not Now, When?” Intentions are pure, with the pair trying to secure something of a remake of “Waiting to Exhale,” giving them ample opportunity to act and provide material that explores the trials of women struggling to maintain their strength during turbulent relationships and personal issues. That it’s not a more inventive character study is incredibly disappointing, with Good and Bass playing an easy game of melodrama to get through the story, while the low-budget reality of the production tends to diminish its screen power. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Minari” initially presents itself as a story of farming and immigration, but writer/director Lee Isaac Chung (“Abigail Harm”) uses such broad topics to get in deep with a Korean family undertaking a massive life change, looking for hope in the middle of rural Arkansas. Chung explores marriage, maturity, family, and childhood, finding his way into the corners of the story, locating rich textures of behavior to study. “Minari” has a lot of heart and a lot of misery, with the production making sure to keep viewers on edge as decent people experience the lows of labor and trust. Chung makes a sensitive picture, and he brings in an excellent cast to realize his screenplay, with the actors mastering the art of subtle reaction to big swings of fate, keeping the feature relatable as Chung finds different ways to punish his characters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Actress Regina King has been dabbling in direction for seven years now, making television shows and movies, honing her skills after decades spent in front of the camera (winning an Academy Award in 2019). She transitions to the big screen for “One Night in Miami,” in charge of material originally created for the stage, with playwright Kemp Powers adapting his own work. The challenge presented here is one of timing and intensity, as most of the story takes place inside a single hotel room, focusing on four icons of black power in the 1960s as they handle their friendships, work out their differences, and make plans for the future. King provides an assured effort with “One Night in Miami,” capturing the energy inside the room and the heaviness of what’s to come, giving Kemp’s offering cinematic life. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Herself” is the first feature from director Phyllida Lloyd in nine years. She scored with 2011’s “The Iron Lady” and guided one the biggest hits of 2008 in “Mamma Mia,” but there’s been little sign of her over the years. Instead of maintaining career momentum, Lloyd returns with the smallness of “Herself,” which explores the personal hell of one woman trying to escape the horrors of domestic abuse while playing a dangerous game of hope with the secret construction of a home just for her family. Co-scripted by star Clare Dunne, the movie is an actor’s showcase, serving up hardships for the talent to examine with intensity, and Lloyd’s job is to keep the whole thing approachable despite some grim detours in legal and emotional challenges. Imagine Ken Loach on antidepressants, and that’s somewhere near the viewing experience of “Herself,” a noble but slightly formulaic film. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While marketing materials push the idea that “We Can Be Heroes” is a sequel to 2005’s “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl,” it’s not the continuation most fans are hoping for. In fact, Sharkboy doesn’t have any lines and isn’t played by original actor Taylor Lautner, and while Taylor Dooley returns to the role of Lavagirl, she’s in the feature for roughly five minutes. What “We Can Be Heroes” really becomes is an opportunity for writer/director Robert Rodriguez to return to his childlike filmmaking POV after years away from family entertainment, putting him in charge of a CGI-intensive riff on “The Avengers,” only starring a group of pre-teen superheroes. Unlike “The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl,” the new movie is actually entertaining, with Rodriguez unsteady when it comes to portioning out action sequences, but he’s much less infantile this time around, returning to his “Spy Kids” (just the first picture) roots with a lively wish-fulfillment fantasy for young viewers. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The superhero Wonder Woman received her first big screen vehicle in 2017, with director Patty Jenkins delivering a satisfying but bottom-heavy endeavor, and one that transformed the character into a cinematic titan, ready to be explored in sequels. Three years later, and “Wonder Woman 1984” has arrived to scratch the itch for more things Diana Prince, with Jenkins returning to helm a second solo adventure for the truth-seeking warrior. As with most follow-ups to major hits, the producers are a little terrified to do anything different, and they fall for a common comic book movie trap by offering two villains for the protagonist to battle over a whopping 150-minute-long run time. Wonder Woman isn’t really the focus of “Wonder Woman 1984,” which is a shame, but Jenkins gets a chance to create a few incredible action sequences while the screenplay figures out how to juggle three major subplots. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While Pixar Animation productions tend to earn high praise with almost every release, it’s the work of director Pete Doctor that’s been the consistent standout for the company. The driving force behind “Inside Out,” “Up,” and “Monsters, Inc.,” Docter has repeatedly pushed Pixar into different creative directions, generating exciting, hilarious, and profoundly emotional movies along the way. His latest is “Soul,” which at first glance might appear to be an “Inside Out” riff, returning to the world of human beings and their struggling inner lives. While the features share some similarities in tone and theme, “Soul” aims for the bigger picture, with Docter and his team crafting a film about the gift of life and how the joys of existence are often drowned out by the drive to find purpose. Once again, the helmer has found a way to explore daily existence with animated buoyancy, and while the endeavor takes a strange detour at the midway point, Docter remains attentive to his message of appreciation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After turning a profit with their low-budget offering from 2019, “The Intruder,” director Deon Taylor and screenwriter David Loughery have teamed up again for other generic offering in “Fatale.” These guys don’t enjoy pushing themselves when it comes to a creative approach to thriller cinema, and while “The Intruder” didn’t do anything with its crazy-stalker-on-the-loose premise, “Fatale” does even less with its take on “Fatal Attraction” formula. A growing sense of unease never arrives in the picture, examining one adulterer’s fight to keep his one-night stand from ruining his life, with Loughery coming up short on ideas for suspense sequences and troubling confrontations. Taylor is basically asleep behind the camera, giving the endeavor a Lifetime Movie vibe with flat performances and no particular sense of style. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com