The Duke (2022) - Movie Review

A little over a year ago, I found myself in the midst of quarantine brain and, in a desperate attempt to return things to what can charitably be called ‘normality’ as we know it around here, decided to pick out a random film that was showing at the time and just… get the hell out of the house for a bit. Said film was Blackbird, an ensemble film that, while I honestly haven’t thought much about it since publishing my initial review of it, I can at least look back on with some fondness for not totally wasting my time.

And here I am again, in need of getting myself out of a static rut I have found myself in of late, and once again deciding to essentially throw a dart at the Now Showing list as an excuse to get back to work and (more importantly) get back into a stable routine. And once again, I find myself looking at a film by Roger Michell, who also made Blackbird, and… well, let’s just say that my previous criticisms about not feeling as strongly about the material don’t apply here. Hell, if I’m being honest, there’s a lot about this that I like.

The Good Liar (2019) - Movie Review

I should really be a lot more sceptical about anything with Bill Condon’s name attached to it. And not just because he’s the director responsible for the Beauty & The Beast remake, either. Looking through the man’s entire body of work, it is remarkably all over the damn place. Working on the scripts for Chicago and The Greatest Showman, directing both halves of the finale to the Twilight Saga, and then there’s his work a few years ago with Mr.Holmes; there’s a lot of range in that sample, and it’s getting to the point where I genuinely don’t know whether anything he’s touched will be good or bad. Still, teaming back up with the writer and lead actor of Mr. Holmes gives this film some hope, so fingers crossed.

The Nutcracker And The Four Realms (2018) - Movie Review

  

After the snafu regarding the changing of directors in Bohemian Rhapsody, I thought that’d be it for this year. I thought I’d be able to get through this month without having to revisit that concept, or more specifically how too many cooks in the kitchen can turn in a mess of a meal. Then I saw this movie, and saw that possibility fully realised.

Winchester (2018) - Movie Review

The plot: Sarah Winchester (Helen Mirren), after the death of her husband, has inherited his firearms company. She has become convinced that the victims of her husband's weapons are now haunting her, building expansions to her already-illustrious estate house in order to capture them. As her fellow employers start to wonder about her sanity, they send in doctor Eric Price (Jason Clarke) to assess her mental state and whether she is fit to continue running the company. However, soon after arriving, it seems that things aren't so simple as just declaring her insane.

Collateral Beauty (2017) - Movie Review

Every couple of years, Will Smith looks at an empty place on his mantle and decides that he wants to fill that space with an Oscar. With that in mind, he goes into full-blown Oscar bait mode and stars in a vehicle meant to give him that acclaim. Unfortunately, up until this point, it hasn’t worked out for him yet. He’s gotten a couple of nominations for Best Actor, most recently in 2006 with The Pursuit Of Happiness, but he has yet to win one. Given the whole media furore over Leonardo DiCaprio’s similar position until his inevitable win for The Revenant, I don’t hold much stock in this need for this particular brand of validation, but nevertheless, he ends up bringing this side of himself to the screen every so often… with very little success, even ignoring the obvious intent behind it all.

I personally have a liking for some of his works in this style, like Seven Pounds and even last year’s Concussion, but there’s a very deliberate and manipulative air to most of them that ultimately make them fall short of their lofty ambitions. Then again, this is something that befalls an awful lot of Oscar hopefuls: They spend so much time trying to tap into some form of emotional complexity that the Academy loves so much, but they don’t spend enough taking a step back and realizing how those emotions are being presented to us and how insensitive it can get. And oh boy, nothing in recent memory embodies the term “insensitive” quite like today’s film.

Eye In The Sky (2016) - Movie Review

With modern advents in the field of military technology, officers are capable of making even more precise strikes on their enemies with an even better understanding of how much (if any) collateral damage will follow. Now, under normal circumstances, this would only serve to make their job easier and disconnect them even further from their actions through the use of UAVs. But that’s a pretty major problem when you are able to perceive so damn much: You are also looking at everything that could possibly go wrong and, when dealing with something as sensitive as the use of drones in combat, there’s an awful lot that can go wrong. One degree off from the target, one civilian standing in the wrong place at the wrong time, one regulation that isn’t followed; all of a sudden, whistle blowers have their work cut out for them. And so, we come to today’s film concerning the events surrounding a single drone attack. Considering how much modern-day military cinema loves to demonize said military, I’m sure that this will just end up going along the same path. As always, I welcome the possibility that I’m wrong.

Woman In Gold (2015) - Movie Review

Hitler was not a nice person. The acts he committed and oversaw during his lifetime mark him as one of, if not the, most despicable human in our history. His actions had a detrimental effect on millions, if not billions of people, and as a result, the ultimate extreme when it comes to explaining how bad something is is to compare them directly to Hitler and/or the Third Reich.

No, you aren’t reading the latest edition of Great Ders Of History; I only bring this up because of how often filmmakers apparently want to remind us of this fact. Not long ago, I was in a mild state of burnout because the cinemas were full of overly serious works and little else. It is now that I realise that I misappropriated that tired state to everything that was coming, when in reality I was just getting bored of films having to do with World War II; not just films set during that time, but films that have anything to do with that time period. The fact that it is the go-to setting for films fishing for Oscars doesn’t help. As much as I wasn’t too fond of A Royal Night Out, it made for a nice change of pace from the rest of the war time films that, regardless of quality, are starting to make me weary. Will today’s film help with that or just make it feel worse?