By: Nick Ferwerda Academy Award nominee Rooney Mara (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) and Academy Award winner Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea) play M and C, a couple who lives in an old fashion country home that holds a lot of history. After C is killed in a car accident nearby, M is left with the haunting image of her love and debates moving despite adoring the house. C returns to the house as a ghost…
Summer blockbusters are sneaking up on us, and I’m really hoping Nick Hamm’s modest film The Journey doesn’t get lost in the seasonal shuffle.
Marion Cotillard is a talented actress whose career has seen a steady increase in forgettable dramas over the years. For every The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night, there’s a Rust and Bone and an It’s Only the End of the World (though, I confess, I like the latter film, but it is unquestionably Dolan’s weakest film). Nicole Garcia’s From the Land of the Moon, which was in competition at Cannes last year, is yet another…
By: Jessica Goddard Bong Joon-ho’s Okja is not only packed with insight, imagination, and action, but mesmerizing visual effects. While this movie bounces around tonally, it’s consistently engaging and gripping. There are moments of camp and farce and exaggeration (cough cough – Jake Gyllenhaal – cough) but they are fun and mostly harmless. The premise is well-conceived, and the frequent use of subtitles under Korean dialogue is never fatiguing.
Shimmer Lake is Coen Brothers-lite, yet it aspires to be a film worthy enough to stand beside those famous quirky noirs from the Academy-Award winners. That would require Oren Uziel’s movie to be outrageous, which it isn’t. An unfortunate discovery considering the leads are terrific comedic actors.
By: Jessica Goddard The Hero is a fine movie, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Sam Elliott stars as the lonely, burnt-out actor Lee Hayden, who deals with his pancreatic cancer diagnosis by avoiding it completely. He spends his days smoking pot with his dealer (Nick Offerman) and standing at the ocean shoreline, brooding. His relationship with his daughter (Krysten Ritter) is awful because he was “always away”, and his life is completely devoid of romantic love…
Well, here I am swimming upstream – having seen Universal’s The Mummy and actually liking it. How do you defend a movie that’s hard to save due to the outpouring of negativity against it? Hey, I was there to defend last year’s heavily panned Suicide Squad. I can give The Mummy a shot.
By: Jessica Goddard Directed by Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Changing Lanes), My Cousin Rachel is a mysterious, ambiguous, and appropriately moody adaption of the 1951 Daphne du Maurier novel of the same name.
