Film Reviews

A genre mash-up of 28 Days Later, The Raid, and Office Space, Mayhem is a non-stop gnarly ride of tortuous blood-soaked fights driven by rage — and it is unbelievably awesome.

Evan Katz tackles very heady material in this pulpy noir and although it entertains (to a certain extent) and is stacked with a phenomenal roster of actors, the film tends to become over-involved and twisted within itself.

From beginning to end this is Charlize Theron’s shining moment as an action star. She’s like James Bond, but a lot cooler. Instead of shaken martinis, she guzzles down vodka on eyes and instead of nifty gadgets, she beats guys with everyday items like hoses, hotplates and house keys.

The Light of the Moon is a whirlwind of emotions, but one that never treats its subject of sexual assault with anything but sincere honesty and compassion. It’s an important watch, especially for women, and continues to make the case for more female creators in this space.

Between the Cornetto trilogy and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, writer-director Edgar Wright has never had a bad film in his career — and he’s continuing that streak with his latest project, Baby Driver.

The latest film from the team of Joe Swanberg and Jake Johnson, Win It All, is a perfectly fine film — good, even, in some regards — but it’s also a safe film.

The new film from Eshom and Ian Nelms, Small Town Crime, feels like it comes exactly out of ’70s Hollywood. Unfortunately, rather than doing anything interesting with the noir crime genre, it simply plays into the same, tired tropes

Somewhere in Terrence Malick’s new film Song to Song there’s a beautiful, poignant, heartbreaking story about women but unfortunately, it’s hard to find in the midst of everything else.

Jordan Vogt-Roberts-directed Kong: Skull Island shoots down all preconceived notions of a “reimagining” and delivers a wildly entertaining adventure that is equal parts action-packed, silly, and fantastically bonkers.

Although a visual marvel, this opulent live-action interpretation of the Disney classic doesn’t capture the magic of the original animated feature. Despite a handful of drawbacks, there is a deeper meaning that can get eclipsed by the ornate fanciness and the movie does a good job of putting it front and center.

Jeffrey Blitz’s dramedy captures the all-to-familiar feeling of “the wedding we don’t want to attend” and the pitiful feeling of being an outcast. The film manages to fish out repressed those “I don’t fit in!” feelings from everyone but is too scattered with multiple half-baked storylines. Its heart is in the right place,but falls a tad bit short in being the charming and cool indie dramedy it wants to be.

Watching Get Out was like watching an episode of The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror in that it gave us a story that felt fictitious enough to entertain, but real enough to freak us out. Peele cleverly uses the horror genre to craft a film that is a delightfully demented mashup of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

James Mangold’s Logan finally gives Jackman an opportunity to spread his claws and partake in all the graphic dismemberment that Wolverine fans deserve and that’s pretty much what diehard fans have been craving for the past decade and a half.

Fist Fight delivers everything you expect to the point where it is predictable and unimaginative — but you watch it anyway because it has some talented, funny people in it. It feels like the kind of comedy that Hollywood made because they felt like this is exactly what the audiences wanted.

The quartet of films helmed by an all-female crew including Roxanne Benjamin, Jovanka Vuckovic, Karyn Kusama, and musician-turned-director Annie Clark (a.k.a. St. Vincent) deliver four very different kind of scares that, although not pee-in-your-pants terrifying, keep in tradition of the horror anthologies before it.

Fifty Shades Darker is the latest serving of the bland relationship adventures of the overwhelmingly basic Anastasia Steele and her painfully dull billionaire beau Christian Grey. As expected, the movie is terrible on all fronts — not “so bad that it’s good” terrible, but “I wish this franchise never existed” terrible.

After being known primarily for the box office spectacle that is the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it’s refreshing to see Verbinski take a nihilistic and Gothic turn with A Cure For Wellness, but there are too many ideas here and how they are sorted makes the movie a wonderfully art directed mess.

If you didn’t get enough brutal bone-crushing action and inimitable gunfight choreography in the first John Wick, then John Wick: Chapter 2 will quench that thirst for more violent bloodlust and good ol’ fashioned stone-faced Keanu Reeves acting.

Animated spin-offs tend to work very well and The Lego Batman Movie is no exception. Keeping in spirit with its predecessor, director Chris McKay balances mature wit and child-like silliness to tell a surprisingly heartfelt superhero tale.

After 12 years, you would think that the world would be ready for another Ring movie. More than that, you would think that would be enough time to develop a juicy story that could build on top of such an iconic franchise — but don’t hold your breath. The world would have been fine without this excruciatingly boring sequel.

The sci-fi romance has the making of a sweet, old-fashioned Disney tale, but lacks another layer of magic and charm to make it a fully effective, well-rounded movie. It has its moments, but it will eventually blend into the late January/early February movie dumping ground.

Director-writer Matt Ruskin, along with standout performances by Lakeith Stanfield and Nnamdi Asomugha, brings the the gripping and heartbreaking story of a wrongfully accused man in prison and the country’s fractured justice system into the spotlight.

The endearing, yet scathingly funny family dramedy reunites the Obvious Child director Gillian Robespierre with star Jenny Slate for story about sisterhood and family dysfunction set to the backdrop of Discmans, dial-up modems, and bodysuits.

One would think that a film titled The Polka King would be celebratory and bouncy like the music and the Maya Forbes-directed biopic about Jan “King of Pennsylvania Polka” Lewan definitely has a lot of that. Even so, the true story of the rise and fall of Lewan is quite tragic, but Jack Black drapes it in so much charismatic Polka charm that you hardly even notice.

Director Craig Johnson serves up some major inappropriateness through the vessel that is the great Woody Harrelson, but above all, the indie comedy manages to balance heart and horrible with comedic charm.

From pioneering rap artists to moms letting loose, this year’s Sundance is filled with projects starring, written, and/or directed by some of the industry’s up-and-coming female talent — but some of the films are more worth your time than others.

Golden Globe-nominated writer Taylor Sheridan (and possibly Oscar-nominated by the time you read this) also sits in the director’s chair as he tells murder mystery set in a snowy Native American reservation in Wyoming. The writer’s signature intensity is ever present and feels too safe — which only leaves room for Sheridan’s directing chops to grow.

Although a major bullet point in the story, director Dee Rees thoughtfully, yet firmly controls the divisive nature of the story and avoids the same rhetoric of predictable racist tropes often seen in films of this ilk to tell a story about the American Dream that is as devastating as it is hopeful.

Written by Kumail Nanjiani & Emily V. Gordon and directed by Michael Showalter, the indie rom-com has become the talk of Sundance — and with good reason. Based on the real-life relationship of Nanjiani and Gordon, the film is infected with laughs but at the same time, it will deliver a gut punch of intense emotions that will tear your soul apart — in a good way, of course.

There is a specific “I knew about her before you did” pleasure Jessica Williams fans get when people discover just how funny she is — and with her starring role in The Incredible Jessica James, her funny will spread across the country like wildfire making her the comedic movie star she deserves to be.