The King (2019) - Movie Review

There’s something off about this movie. The latest from Aussie director David Michôd is an adaptation of the Henriad, the classic canon of Shakespearean works focusing on King Henry IV and V… and yet, it is a remarkably loose adaptation. Written by Michôd and Joel Edgerton, you’d have to strain to hear any of the original prose in here. Even considering the lengthy history of adaptations of the Bard, including Ophelia from earlier this year, this seems like a backwards move. Why would you bother adapting a work of fiction, which itself is based on historical fact, and leave behind the writing that is the main reason why Shakespeare’s work survives to the present day? Well, thankfully, there are quite a few answers to that, and all things considered, I think these guys took the right approach.

Arctic Justice (2019) - Movie Review

 

Expecting quality control from a talking animal movie nowadays is like asking for the world to start making sense: Most of us would appreciate it, but the chances of it actually happening seem to keep shrinking with each passing day. The latest effort in this undermined subgenre is yet another piece of disposable product designed to be shipped directly to the bargain bin, but this seems to be yet another new variety of bad, even compared to the films I’ve already covered on here. It’s not just bad; it is so lacking in quality control that it can’t even maintain consistency in its badness. And no, that doesn’t mean that it occasionally stumbles into competency. It just means that it goes from bad to a different kind of bad and back again.

Frozen II (2019) - Movie Review

Discussing the worldwide phenomenon that is Frozen is… difficult. Mainly because, for pretty much every single day since its initial release, it’s been damn-near impossible to escape the bloody thing. Overplay is something that can sour a film to an immense degree, and between the moichendising, the sing-a-long screenings that continue to this day, and the ubiquity of Let It Go, it is all too easy to understand why a lot of people have grown plain sick of the whole thing.

For me personally, though… no amount of overplay can kill this thing. It remains one of the single greatest things Disney has ever produced, an astounding feat of sophisticated storytelling and mesmerising animation and music that, upon first watching, it basically became the subconscious watermark that every other animated film has to measure up to for me. Whether in comparison to the media juggernaut that is Frozen’s afterlife, or just the sheer brilliance of the film itself, making a feature-length follow-up to it was going to be a Herculean task. And man oh man, I don’t think anyone was expecting this to be the end result.

21 Bridges (2019) - Movie Review

 

The son of a murdered cop, who himself is a detective in New York, gets brought in on a seemingly open-and-shut robbery case. Of course, when the robbery in question is one of the biggest drug seizures in the city’s history, and the culprits are not only still at large but have racked up a sizeable body count of police officers, things are about to get complicated. To give themselves a chance to catch them, detective Andre Davis orders that all 21 bridges connecting Manhattan to the outside world are to be blocked off, trapping the killers on the island.

Dolemite Is My Name (2019) - Movie Review

In the annals of blaxploitation, there are a number of certified classics that basically make the genre what it is remembered for to this day. We’ve even covered a few on here like Super Fly and Shaft, but there’s also Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (and yes, it is the inspiration for the title of that Simpsons episode where Willie chases a dog through some ventilation shafts), Coffy, Foxy Brown, and even more recent efforts like Black Dynamite. But for my money, especially given my own understanding of the genre as a major cornerstone of hip-hop culture, you’d be hard-pressed to find a film more influential than Rudy Ray Moore’s ode to the bad motherfucker that fucks up motherfuckers: Dolemite.

Ma (2019) - Movie Review

 

Much like with Welcome To Marwen, we’re dealing with another film that was released theatrically over here, yet I personally see no evidence of it making it to theatres. The fact that there is more than one example of that this year, also from a rather high-profile background and in the midst of Disney's ultimate transformation into Omnicorp, is a bit concerning. At any rate, with its home video release, I can finally check out the latest from The Girl On The Train director Tate Taylor… and man, did I miss out not getting to see this on the big screen.

Eli (2019) - Movie Review

I don’t like getting into spoilers in these reviews. Oh sure, if a film’s ending is particularly noteworthy (usually for how bad it is) and it bends my entire understanding of the film as it unfolds, it becomes somewhat of a necessity to delve into it in order to give my full perspective. But otherwise, much like how I don’t like even indirectly insulting people who like films that I personally don’t, I don’t like the idea of taking away the chance for someone else to experience a well-constructed twist in a work of fiction. But we’ve reached another one of those times where, for reasons I’ll get into, I have to get into this film’s conclusion in order to properly explain just how… baffling this thing is.