Endings, Beginnings (2020) - Movie Review

This is gonna be a case of ‘careful what I wish for’ for me as… to be honest, on the day I’m writing this review, I’m not exactly in the best of moods. I know that my general worries about lockdown and COVID and all that fun stuff have been seeping more and more into my writings (both here and in my write-ups for FilmInk), but between that and some personal shit that just happened to occur earlier today for me… I need something light. Something simple. Something I can turn on for some basic comfort. And in fairness, that is what I got. Unfortunately, that’s all that I got.

Destroyer (2019) - Movie Review

"(Famous actor) as you've never seen them before", goes the tacky marketing push for films like this. Not to say that this mode can’t be done well, as it has for Charlize Theron in Monster or Steve Carell in Foxcatcher or even Tilda Swinton in Suspiria. It’s just that there’s something slightly patronising about the idea that special make-up is a bigger selling point than the actor on their own merits. It’s especially weird in situations like this, as the transformative aspect of this film isn’t even as intensive as Monster or Foxcatcher.

There’s no point in this film where the audience simply forgets who they’re looking at; the make-up isn’t that good. But more to the point, the idea that this is Nicole Kidman turning a new leaf? After seeing her perform one of the greatest verbal emasculations in the history of cinema back with Secret In Their Eyes, this is the kind of shit I’ve been eagerly awaiting her to revisit. And thankfully, she doesn’t disappoint.

I, Tonya (2018) - Movie Review

 

The plot: In 1994, figure skater Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie) became embroiled in a media frenzy surrounding an attack on her rival Nancy Kerrigan (Caitlin Carver). Intercut with “documentary footage” of Tonya, her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan) and her mother LaVona (Allison Janney), the characters involved talk about what led up to that incident, from Tonya’s childhood to her achievements in figure skating, right down to just how much of that particular attack she was aware of at the time. It seems that, even for a story that has gone down into pop culture legend, there is still a lot left unsaid.

The Martian (2015) - Movie Review

To paraphrase one of the more boisterous names in space exploration: “Space: the final frontier”. However, something that is becoming clearer and clearer with every day since that phrase was first uttered is that space will always be the final frontier. Unlike our home planet, there is an infinite amount of, well, space outside of our atmosphere and it is expanding every second. The distance between points of interest (stars, planets, space fog, etc.) is occupied by a vacuum that seems to exist at the exact opposite of our ideal living conditions, and that’s if we even have a vessel that can stay in one piece during all that travel.

Is it any wonder, with all this in mind, that space travel and exploration is frequently used as the setting for dramas and thrillers? Sure, space combat will always be enticing, but the thought of how claustrophobic, hazardous and ultimately liberating leaving Earth for greener pastures can be has produced some truly amazing works of art, particularly in the realm of cinema. So, when director Ridley Scott decided to return to the cold void that yielded him a bona fide sci-fi classic with Alien (and a modest success with Prometheus), how did it turn out considering his last cinematic venture?