Guy Ritchie's The Covenant (2023) - Movie Review

I haven’t been fair to Guy Ritchie. Hell, if we’re being honest, I haven’t been that fair to his ex Madonna either, given how I blamed her for Ritchie’s downturn after Snatch; that shit isn’t cool. And neither is how I’ve been framing Guy Ritchie’s films for as long as I’ve been looking at them on here. Having grown up with Snatch, I had a concrete idea in my mind that that is what Guy Ritchie was good at, viewing pretty much everything else that came after it as him trying to diversify into new areas and stepping out of his reach. While I still stand by some of that criticism of him making films that don’t fit his strengths (e.g. the Aladdin remake), thinking that he absolutely must keep making snarky Brit-hard comedic crime dramas for the rest of his career just isn’t reasonable. And it’s only with his latest that I finally got around to understanding that about the guy.

Synchronic (2021) - Movie Review

Normally, when picking a movie to review, it usually involves some light Googling and finding names that I either recognise directly or recognise any of the work associated with them. This is why I tend to pick out specific members of the cast and crew whenever I do these write-ups. However, this film is a bit different to that as, aside from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s names being attached to last year’s excellent She Dies Tomorrow, I have no real experience with their own bodies of work. Nor was I all that aware of this film was even about, doing my best to let the initial trailer and as few plot details as possible in the process of finding somewhere to watch it stand on their own. I don’t normally allow myself the opportunity to go into a film blind, but I have to admit, this is one hell of a film to go into knowing as little as possible.

Kin (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: While searching an abandoned building for scrap metal, Elijah (Myles Truitt) finds a weapon that is clearly not of this earth. As the original owners of the weapon set out to retrieve, his adoptive older brother Jimmy (Jack Reynor) is on the run from gangster Taylor (James Franco) and he and Elijah hit the road to get away from them all.

A Better Tomorrow (2018) - Movie Review

 

The plot: Brothers Kai (Kai Wang) and Chao (Tianyu Ma) are on opposite sides of the law: Kai is a smuggler working for crime lord Ha Ge (Suet Lam) alongside his partner Mark (Darren Wang), while Chao is an up-and-coming officer in the Hong Kong narcotics division. However, as they discover how distant they have become from each other, Kai decides to reform his criminal ways and maybe regain the trust of his brother. In order to do the right thing by his family, he may have to cut ties with his former employers… permanently.