For three years, I have received an annual movie about the Tham Luang cave rescue. First, we had the experienced first responders recreating their efforts in Cave Rescue. Then, the team behind Free Solo made a documentary about the disaster with The Rescue. And now, the story receives the “Hollywood” treatment with Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives. Despite my personal exhaustion with this story, I was excited to see how this latest adaptation measured up to…
From Awesomeness Films (You Get Me, Spontaneous, Netflix’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before series) comes Honor Society, a teen movie that’s darker than expected. Considering how annoying the film’s smug trailer was, I appreciated this unexpected edgier approach. However, the execution is imperfect and isn’t nearly as measured as it should be.
By: Jeff Ching The movie title Infrared is pronounced (infa-red), to which I bet that most people not familiar with the camera setting would pronounce it (in-fraird); or maybe it was just me? Just getting that out of the way now, as this is a title that deserves respect and to be pronounced properly.
Becoming a Queen is a very straightforward documentary that zeroes in on one person, their career, and their primary achievement. The film follows this standard structure well enough, issuing the occasional bit of history along the way, but I wish director Chris Strikes followed a less conventional format to this vibrant subject matter.
A dependable cast (which includes Ryan Gosling, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Billy Bob Thornton, and Julia Butters) is let down by weak storytelling and sloppy filmmaking in Netflix’s summer blockbuster The Gray Man.
The Bad Guys is a big screen adaptation of a popular book series for kids, perhaps to tide over the Diary of a Wimpy Kid crowd. But even as someone who was completely unfamiliar with the series, I thought its feature-length debut was great. It’s one of the coolest and most exciting films of the year.
“Do I like this movie, or do I just like the footage?” I frequently asked myself this during Fire of Love, a documentary about the relationship between volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft and their explosive expeditions.
The Nan Movie has made its way across the pond from the UK to North America like a rolling storm cloud. Sometimes though, an anticipated storm turns out to be pretty mellow and not the disaster you were expecting; a pleasant surprise, even. And sometimes, such is the case with The Nan Movie, that storm can hit you harder than you ever expected.
Directed by Marcel Sarmiento (The ABCs of Death [D Is for Dogfight], Faceless) and written by Gregory W. Jordan, The Royal is based on the true story of Willie Mays Aikens, a star hitter for the Kansas City Royals (and the Toronto Blue Jays!) who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug possession. Before his arrest, Aikens was one of the top sluggers in major league baseball, hitting a total of 110 home runs…
