Come To Daddy (2020) - Movie Review

Time for another ride on the Elijah Wood fucked-up indie train, although we’re not dealing with a Spectrevision production this time around. Instead, we’re looking at the feature-length directorial debut of Ant Timpson, a New Zealand film producer better known for spearheading the horror anthology series The ABCs Of Death, as well as his profoundly graphic production logo at the front of previous review subject The Greasy Strangler. And with the writer of Greasy Strangler, Toby Harvard, in tow, chances are this is going to be something uniquely bizarre.

Bad Samaritan (2020) - Movie Review

Remember Geostorm? Unless you’re an obsessive like myself who writes about nearly every new movie they watch, probably not. Well, get ready for the whiplash because this is what director Dean Devlin made after that infamous attempt to beat Roland Emmerich at his own game. And the result could not be more different from his previous. He’s gone from world-spanning disaster spectacle to an thriller with elements of home invasion cinema that has more in common with the works of Thomas Harris than anything to do with making us fear man-made climate change.

The Fanatic (2020) - Movie Review

Well, ain’t this a nice pick for April, otherwise known as Autism Acceptance Month? A film about an obsessed superfan that pretty much everyone who has seen and written about it has pinned down as being on the autism spectrum. And yeah, this technically came out last year, but it only made it over here fairly recently and, after the utter trainwreck of Gotti, I’ll admit that I’m aiming at low-hanging fruit with Travolta’s latest. I also definitely get the problems with Travolta passing like this, but quite frankly, that’s not even close to the worst of it.

Uncut Gems (2020) - Movie Review

What irony that a film all about a compulsive gambler would find me actually cashing in on one of my bets. A couple of years ago, between Adam Sandler’s work on Sandy Wexler and The Meyerowitz Stories, I saw a major shift in his place as an actor. The kind that not only gave hope for bigger and better things to come, but also gave the impression that the man could be on the verge as a serious breakthrough, big enough to possibly warrant some re-evaluation of someone most audiences wrote off years ago. Meyerowitz may have shown that that shift wasn’t a fluke, but this film outright confirms that rejuvenation.

The Platform (2020) - Movie Review

Much like with the sudden public resurgence Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion has experienced, this feature’s moment of trending recently makes a depressing level of sense.  An ostensibly straight-forward Spanish feature that uses architecture to portray class divide; what separates those higher from those lower, using food as the primary political symbol, similar to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. This has been a world of dietary inequality long before everything went into lockdown, but now that we’re in the midst of fearful hoarding of food to last out the potential months this shit could carry on for, it reaches a particular level of poignancy in the current climate.

The Current War (2020) - Movie Review

When it comes to dramatising historical events, there is always the fear that said history on its own could end up being more interesting than a given attempt to tell it. This film, however, may be a rare case of that in duplicate, as the story behind the production not only has a chance of overshadowing the production itself, for the last few years, it actually did. This film has been stuck in release limbo since November 2017, being shelved because of the involvement of Harvey Weinstein in the production and initial distribution deal. That’s the heavily simplified version of the story, because every facet of the thing could easily take up this whole article on their own, but it ultimately leads to a single question: Was this film worth holding onto for this long?

Bloodshot (2020) - Movie Review

I don’t usually make predictions about what the film industry is going to look like in however-many years’ time, namely because it’s tricky enough judging what’s right in front of me, let alone what could possibly be next. However, this one feels like a decent bet: Filmgoers should make themselves familiar with Blur Studio, because they’re where the next wave of prospective big-timers are going to come from.