Midsommar (2019) - Movie Review

It’s gotten to the point where I take my extended hobby of film critique so seriously that I’ve come to regard films I'm not able to nail down from a single viewing as films that bested me. That defeated me. That managed to break my usual one-and-down reviewing format and took me a second viewing to understand the kind of genius I'm dealing with. Ari Aster's Hereditary is one of those films for me.

It is seriously one of the best horror films of all time, and one I retroactively consider to be in the top 5 for the best films of 2019. It admittedly took a certain YouTuber’s hot take for me to properly get my head around it (link here for said hot take; she explains it far better than I can), but it also turned into a rather humbling experience overall. I don’t plan on making the same mistake twice, however, so as I take a look at Ari Aster’s follow-up, I’m going to give it its full due.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) - Movie Review

 

We’re gonna be stepping into new territory with this review, as I’m not just looking at a film but an interactive film. Netflix has been toying around with this idea for a while now, even porting a version of Minecraft: Story Mode onto the service, but this is the first attempt at something for more mature audiences. Getting into the details with this one is going to be tricky, as this is the kind of feature where there exist flowcharts that detail all the different choices and paths you can take as a viewer/controller; I’ll be here all day if I tried to pin down this film’s singular narrative. So, instead, I’m basically going to treat this like any other piece of interactive fiction: How does it control, what’s the story like, and is one worth dealing with to get to the other (i.e. would this have worked better as just a standard feature)?

Detroit (2017) - Movie Review

The plot: On July 23rd, 1967, a riot starts on the streets of Detroit in response to a police raid. A state of emergency was declared by Governor Romney, allowing the National Guard and military officers to step in and provide assistance. In the midst of all this, a seemingly mundane incident at the Algiers Motel soon turns into calamity as the police forcefully try and get to the bottom of the situation. Even if it means shedding blood and tears to do so.

The Revenant (2016) - Movie Review

After how much I dug Birdman last year, I was definitely looking forward to seeing more work from director Alejandro González Iñárritu. So, in prep for this release, I checked out his other filmography… and noticed something disconcerting. While I undoubtedly consider Birdman to be the best film he’s done to date, it’s also the most unlike everything else he’s made so far. Iñárritu’s usual method of story-telling is with numerous interweaving character arcs, some of them seemingly completely disconnected from each other, to convey a specific theme. Birdman, by contrast, is so linear that it is shot and edited to look like a single continuous take (for the most part) and focuses mainly on a single character. It’s kind of like claiming to be a fan of Darren Aronofsky, but saying your favourite film of his is The Wrestler; it isn’t exactly the best representation of the man’s work as a whole. With this new information, I began to anticipate today’s release more shakily than I was expecting to. However, indicative of standard oeuvre or not, I will give this film the benefit of the doubt regardless; I’m not going to just badmouth a Leo DiCaprio film purely based on principle.