It’s interesting to review a remake a film I have never seen the original of. On the one hand, I’m completely unable to compare it to what came before, but on the other I can look at it with a possibly more open mind than someone familiar with the older material. Obviously, I will be judging this film purely on its own merits. The film I am referring to is, of course, Sofia Coppola's new remake of The Beguiled. 
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It’s the height of the Civil War. Heroic generals and dashing soldiers wage epic battles, both sides believing their cause is just… but this is not a story about them. This is a story about women and girls, specifically the women and girls living at Martha Farnsworth’s (Nicole Kidman) Mississippi boarding school. While out foraging for mushrooms one day, Amy (Oona Laurence), one of the youngest students, stumbles upon an injured Union soldier. He tells her that his name is Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) and asks for her help. She helps him back to the school, where the women attend to his wounds. But the arrival of this man shatters the former equilibrium of the school, and McBurney’s interactions with Amy, Martha, the teacher Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and teenaged student Alicia (Elle Fanning) threaten to turn the women’s social order upside down.

In many ways this film reminds me of 2015’s The Keeping Room, which examined the often-forgotten violence inflicted upon and by women during this time period. Coppola’s work, by contrast, takes a more subtle approach, focusing on suspense and tension rather than violence. This includes both the tension inherent to violence (or the threat thereof) as well as sexual tension, and Coppola expertly uses both to ensure the audience is always waiting with baited breathe to see what happens next. In addition to being an excellent suspense film, it is also an enchanting period piece. The sets, costumes, music, and the dialect used by the actors all contribute to paint a beautiful, yet also terrible, picture of life during an era long gone by. 

The other aspect of the film that really stands out is the depth of characterization on display. This film is also a character study, but a character study of its entire cast, examining everything from McBurney’s desire to capitalize on his new-found surroundings to Edwina’s crippling self-doubts to Alicia’s budding sexuality. All of the characters’ desires and fears intricately weave in and out of each other, and we as viewers are permitted to view their interactions, and resulting consequences, much as psychologist might observe a group study. In this respect, the film also reminds me of Coppola’s classic drama Lost in Translation. The film never pushes a narrative or favors any one individual, leaving the viewer to come to their own conclusions regarding the events they witness. 

The only real complaint I have with the film is that the ending is pretty predictable, and honestly feels a little overly simple after all the tension and suspense that is built up in the film. Although I suppose this might be entirely intentional, since anything else might have broken the tone and feel of the story. But all in all, Sofia Coppola’s interpretation of a classic Civil War tale is perfect if you’re looking for something a little subdued between raucous summer blockbusters. 
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Grade: A-

​When you watch Edgar Wright’s Cornetto trilogy of Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and The World’s End, their most entertaining moments always come when the genre clichés they’re lampooning (respectively: zombie, cop and alien movies) mix with Wright’s innocently over-the-top humor, like a kid watching those kinds of movies got to jump into one and arrange it how he liked. None of those moments, however, and none of the ones in his extravagantly styled adaptation of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, would have worked without the kind of engaging and unique characters that launched Wright to British comedy stardom with his sitcom Spaced. With his new film Baby Driver, he’s succeeded in curving his comedic timing and styling into the fast-paced action genre while enhancing it with the film’s wide-reaching score, but his characters either feel undercooked (in the case of the main character and the waitress he falls for) or stuck inside the action stereotypes he dug into in Hot Fuzz, and with such a small-scale cast, the film’s best moments can’t escape their shallowness.
 
Baby (Ansel Elgort), the boy wonder driver who has been jacking cars since he could see over the dashboard, gets mixed up with a bad gang when he accidentally grabs a load of "merchandise" along with a car. To get square with Kevin Spacey's mob boss Doc, he's forced to be the getaway driver for every heist Doc sets up until his debt's paid off. Balancing the criminal side of his life with taking care of his elderly guardian and making time for his newfound love down at the diner (Lily James, whose look echoes Shelly from Twin Peaks right down to the hairstyle) is the guiding force of the film, weaved together by a pretty serious and uninteresting backstory for Baby (a car crash early in his life took his parents and most of his hearing) whose best result is allowing for the neat musical moments Wright sprinkles throughout the chases and more light-hearted scenes. If you go back to his initial version of the film’s idea in a music video he made with the Spaced cast and imagine the music extending into the ensuing escape, you should get a good idea of the film at its most enjoyable, when the tires are screeching and the gears are shifting in step with the score. Even these high points, though, still feel undercut by the superficial natures of the people in the car.
 
The key to the film’s appeal is it’s simplicity, and the scene of Baby sampling a conversation between two brutal criminals for an electronic track is a glimpse of how Wright might have extended the setup’s innocent charm to the rest of the story, but his decision to lead the characters down a more serious and complicated path leaves the premise and it’s execution at odds with each other. The idea definitely works for the music video format: we don’t have time to know who any of the robbers are or what their plan is, so we just get to see the getaway driver bop along to some music. For the film version, Wright took the opposite approach to April’s Free Fire, where the idea of a gun deal gone wrong would have been enjoyable in a 10 minute YouTube video but was stretched over an hour and a half, by scattering short, great scenes across a story that merely ties them together.
 
Grade: B-

​In times like this, I have to remind myself that I have done this to myself. Honestly, at this point, how am I supposed to blame anyone but myself for having seen this thing? No one made me go see this, no one made me be a film critic and I’m sure as fuck that there isn’t a single person whose mind will be changed about this movie after reading this review. Any person with enough forethought to read a review before going to see Transformers: The Last Knight wouldn’t, because anyone capable of thinking that much knows that this is one of the worst series of film ever created. And this movie certainly doesn’t break the mold. Buckle in, folks. Before the end, I might be apologizing to Baywatch.
 
Fun fact: Transformers: The Last Knight has more subplots than there are grains of sand on every beach on the planet Earth. Okay, maybe that’s not true. But that’s sure as shit what it feels like. I’ll try to explain what the fuck happened in this movie, but seeing as I’m sure it didn’t look cohesive in the script, I doubt it’ll look cohesive here.
 
The world is in a state of turmoil. Transformers continually fall from the sky and terrorize humans. Thus, human-kind has decided to either imprison or kill any Transformers they see, including the Autobots who have helped save their planet at least 4 times. Optimus Prime has left Earth to find what remains of Cybertron, his home planet, and finds a desolate wasteland that can only be saved by an ancient Transformer staff hidden on Earth. The staff was entrusted to Merlin (yes, really) to help King Arthur defeat the Saxon hordes. King Arthur and his round table joined forces with 12 Transformer Knights, forming a secret society meant to protect Transformers hidden on Earth. Now, Sir Edmund Burton (Anthony Hopkins) is the only remaining member of that society.
 
A fugitive from the law, Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) protects the Autobots from the task-force meant to take them down, repairing them in a junkyard. When trying to save another Transformer, he is gifted a talisman that signals the destruction of Earth by Cybertron. Thus, he and an Oxford University professor named Vivian Wembley (Laura Haddock), whose father was a member of the secret society, are called upon to save the world from total annihilation.
 
On top of that, it feels like there are about 1,000 more characters and subplots that help turn the film into the sodding, bloated mess that it is. And mess is the best way to describe nearly every aspect of this heaping pile of inane fecal waste. The plot is, as you can see, all over the place, the characters never shut up (there are an obscene number of moments where a character will say something and other character will repeat it almost word for fucking word) and the editing is a nightmare. 
 
This is up there with Taken 3 among the worst edited and shot action films I’ve ever seen. And maybe I’m spoiled by movies like The Raid: Redemption, John Wick and Kingsman: The Secret Service. But masses of CGI garbage flinging each other across the screen while insanely tight camera angles mask the fact that no choreography work was done on this film, whatsoever, is an unacceptable way of creating action sequences. Even a fairly standard car chase scene fails to overcome the camera’s obsession with flying all over the place.
 
And then there’s the most depressing part of the film. The cast. And I’m not talking about the film’s lead, Mark Wahlberg, an actor so incapable of feeling natural in a role that the closest he’s ever gotten to a good performance is playing a parody of himself in The Departed. I’m not even talking about the racist stereotype characters that have peppered Michael Bay movies since the beginning (in these films, specific Transformers seem to hit stereotypes that would have been insensitive in 1920’s vaudeville acts). I’m talking about the number of talented actors whose appearances/voices in this movie will make you question reality. See how long you can look at this list without gagging at the thought that these talented people took part in this detritus-ridden trash.
 
John Goodman, Ken Watanabe, Jim Carter, Steve Buscemi, Tony Hale, John Turturro, Stanley Tucci, Jerrod Carmichael, Frank Welker (the man who has been the voice of Fred in every Scooby Doo product since the original show), and Anthony Hopkins.
 
Imagine hearing that all of them were going to be in a movie together. Then imagine the smack in the fucking face when you realize it’s Transformers: The Last Knight. I don't know what dirt the studio has on all of these people, but it must be pretty damn good. But watching performers of this caliber deliver the absurd exposition and juvenile jokes that this movie excretes made me physically pained. 
 
And there’s so much more shit I could go into. Like how Optimus Prime’s loyalty changes at the drop of a hat. How about the fact that the movie claims George Washington, Frederick Roosevelt and William Shakespeare all knew Transformers were real? Or the scene where we find out Bumblebee fought Nazis with the Allied troops in World War II? Or when Yeager finds a watch in Sir Burton’s house which Burton claimed KILLED HITLER?!? 
 
Transformers: The Last Knight is a relentless assault on the senses, a war against rationality, quality, intelligence and coherence. I don’t understand why people keep throwing money at Michael Bay and allowing him to do projects like this one. I cannot comprehend how anyone in their right mind could have enjoyed even a single aspect of this film. It’s a loud waste of time. 
 
I’m sorry Baywatch. I thought it couldn’t get worse. It did.
 
Grade: F

​I get a huge kick out of movies like this. It’s one of my favorite parts of being a film critic/enthusiast and one of the main reasons why I am trying to ween myself off of reading reviews or seeing trailers before I set foot in a theater. I knew absolutely nothing about The Book of Henry before I saw it, literally not even having the faintest idea what the film was about. Sometimes, this can be a disastrous move that ends with seeing something not worthwhile. And with The Book of Henry, it kind of is that. But in what I found to be an extremely entertaining way. 
 
The trouble is, I want people to have the same experience I did seeing this movie. But I also want people to read this review. So I am going to try writing about the film without going into much detail about what happens. Let’s just say that the film involves the life of an extremely intelligent and mature 11-year old named Henry (Jaeden Lieberher), his waitress single-mother Susan (Naomi Watts) and younger brother Peter (Jacob Tremblay). And I know that’s not a lot of information to go on. But you're just going to have to believe me that seeing this movie is not only hilariously worth it, but likely better if you know very little about what happens. 
 
What I can tell you is that the ridiculous events of this movie are built around really good performances by the three lead actors, all of whom do an incredible job given the film’s turbulent and almost insane plot. Good child actors are hard to come by, so it’s a nice surprise when both Lieberher and Tremblay make decent work of their dialogue. Lieberher’s Henry is especially interesting to watch on screen, a young genius who is significantly more in control and adult than his mother and most of the grown-ups around him. His scenes are easily the best in the film. A scene where Henry bursts into the principal’s office and picks a fight akin to the kind you’d expect between a cop and their chief is especially fun to watch. 
 
But about halfway through the film, The Book of Henry pretty much completely changes genres. Again, I am not going to go into any detail as to why the movie changes so radically, but I can say that it does this more like a trainwreck than I possibly could have possibly imagined. The movie shifts from a drama to a thriller like a car crash you can’t look away from. And it’s honestly hilarious. Again, I kind of feel like it is better to see this unfold in front of you on screen, but let’s just say the movie’s third act is the kind of insanity I was not expecting out of a movie like this.
 
The Book of Henry dips so deeply into the ‘So Bad It’s Good’ category that I thought it might drown. The first half has some legitimately good dramatic sequences, but the film falls faster than gravity tells us should be physically possible once the movie starts trying to do a bunch of crazy shit at once. As I write this, I am starting to see reviews pour in that are bashing the fuck out of this film. And yeah, I can see where people would think this is an unwatchable mess. But I think it is an extremely watchable mess. Sure, I laughed when I wasn’t supposed to. And sure, things that happen in the middle of the movie seem engineered to manipulating you into caring about the third act, trying to distract you from its lunacy. But the fact that I got some value out of it makes me feel like this movie is being punished a bit more it deserves. Is it good? No. But is it entertaining? Hell yes.
 
Grade: C+ 

​I am now convinced that Marvel and Disney have done massive, irreversible damage to the modern blockbuster. The MCU is a landmark method of creating a string of separate, yet somewhat related, films which culminate in seeing individual characters from their own films come together in an epic adventure on-screen. However, the success of the MCU seems to have other studios thinking that emulating that formula is the key to creating box-office giants, forgetting that the main reason the MCU work was that its foundation (in this case we will ignore the fact that The Incredible Hulk came first and say that Iron Man was the film that kicked things off) was a solid movie with interesting characters.
 
Enter The Mummy, Universal’s attempt to kickstart their own “Dark Universe” (DU), made up of all the classic Universal monsters. Yes, you read that right. Universal wants to place characters like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and The Mummy in the same shared universe. So how does this first film do at laying down the foundation for the rest of the cinematic universe? Not particularly well.
 
Tom Cruise plays Nick Morton, a member of the U.S. army who finds and sells ancient artifacts on the black market. Morton stumbles upon what appears to be an Egyptian tomb in the middle of Iraq, using a map he stole from scientist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis). Halsey is working for Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe), a scientist and genius determined to find and destroy sources of evil in the world. However, evil becomes a more challenging foe than any of them could have expected when the tomb releases Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a mummified princess with the power to imbue someone with the powers of an ancient and evil god.  
 
The Mummy feels eerily similar to watching someone play a mediocre Tomb Raider or Uncharted video game. The characters aren’t particularly interesting, expository dialogue comes at you in huge and clunky waves and action set-pieces happen so rapidly and back-to-back that it's hard to keep track of what is actually happening in them. And non-stop action wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem if these scenes had been shot with any clarity. But the camerawork and choreography in the action set pieces are shoddily put together, resulting in a product more confusing than it is thrilling. 
 
The dullness of the characters certainly doesn’t help either. Even Tom Cruise, whose charm usually bursts through otherwise sluggish scripts, flounders under the film’s overall dreary nature. The only solace comes when the film occasionally embracing the horror roots of the original 1932 Mummy film, creating some genuinely interesting and horrific horror imagery. There is a sequence involving Tom Cruise being attacked by rats that actually made me squirm. Add to that a couple of actually really nice shots (a flashback sequence involving Ahmanet training in the Egyptian desert comes to mind), and the film shifts from being extremely boring to fairly boring with occasional relief.
 
I’m not going to lie, The Mummy was less bad than I expected. It was more of an innocuous bad than an offensive bad, the kind of movie that leaves little impact on both the positive and negative spectrum. It exists. Maybe other movies in the DU will have more of an impact and create a fun cinematic universe, but this isn’t a great start.
 
Grade: C

Every once in a while, a new creator breaks into the film industry and takes the community by storm. Sometimes it’s a highly-skilled writer, a director with a unique style, or an actor who becomes a darling of the fans. Other times it’s a whole company, such as Pixar (though their luster has dimmed slightly in recent years) or our subject today, A24. Since being founded in 2012, this modest independent distribution company has released hit after hit, including Ex Machina, Spring Breakers, Locke, Under the Skin, Room, The Witch, Green Room, The Lobster, Swiss Army Man, and last year’s Best Picture winner Moonlight. Having started this year strong with Free Fire, they have now followed it up with an excellent little horror film called It Comes at Night. 
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While sleeping late one night, Paul (Joel Edgerton) is woken by a man attempting to break into his family’s house. After being subdued and checked for infection, the man says his name is Will (Cristopher Abbot) and that he thought the house was abandoned and was hoping to find supplies for his family inside. Will pleads with Paul to help his family, and reluctantly Paul agrees. He and his wife Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) take in Will’s family, and slowly get to know one another as they live together. But the threat of infection from the outside world looms always over them, and when push comes to shove, can they trust anyone but family?

It Comes at Night reminds me a lot of last year’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Like that film, It Comes at Night is a modest, quiet horror film which combines a vaguely apocalyptic setting, psychological horror, and lots of claustrophobia. The tension and fear of this movie comes not from monsters or serial killers, and even the mysterious disease is more of a plot device than anything else. Rather, the terror of this film comes from being trapped in a confined space with people you don’t know, and don’t trust. It’s an excellent depiction of the psychology of individuals in stressful, catastrophic situations, and how self-destructive behavior frequently results. And just like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the film makes sure to always keep the viewer guessing until the very end, never quite revealing all of its secrets.

A small film like this heavily relies on its characters, and all of the actors perform admirably. Edgerton provides the anchor of the film, while Ejogo provides an excellent foil in terms of personality, and the two possess good on-screen chemistry. Abbot also acts as a sort-of-foil and sort-of-antagonist once the trust between the two families starts to unravel. And the mostly-unknown Harrison Jr. gives a surprisingly strong role, matching the more veteran performers punch-for-punch. The cinematography is also great, expertly capitalizing on the tight, indoor spaces of the house to enhance the feeling of claustrophobia and isolation in order to increase tension. 

Although it won’t satisfy those horror fans anxious for blood, guts, and lots of screaming, It Comes at Night is a perfect film who prefer more subtle horror. Focusing on trust and paranoia, it is the first psychological horror film of the year. If you’re up for a (quiet) scare this weekend, than you can’t go wrong with A24’s most recent gem.

Grade: A

The World War II-era drama has long been a popular topic for film. One of the greatest wars of all time, in which the sides seemed to be physically embodying good and evil, has the grandiose nature that is almost inherently filmic. Great films like Saving Private Ryan and Grave of the Fireflies show both the grand and horrifically human sides of the epic conflict. It is one of the most interesting and captivating pieces of modern history, and films that display its nature on-screen are almost always captivating, to some degree. Unfortunately, in the case of Churchill, the grand nature of the historic war is made a bit too small and detached to be listed among the great films of the time.

Churchill follows one of the most recognizable prime ministers in the history of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill (Brain Cox), in the few days before the Allied forces invade the western front of the war. With D-Day fast approaching, Churchill begins to question the validity of the invasion, claiming that it is too risky and may very well cause the deaths of thousands of Allied soldiers and French civilians. Churchill airs these concerns to the generals of the Allied forces, including U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower (John Slattery), to no avail. Thus, Churchill must struggle to deal with his own mental and physical ailments while the overbearing stress of an invasion that could change the course of the war looms overhead.

Churchill represents a type of low-budget biopic that has to focus very specifically on its script and characters in order to achieve greatness. The scale is lowered because of the tightness of the film’s budget, so attention to detail in terms of the quality of the script and acting is paramount. Unfortunately for the film, the story flounders as it tries to grasp the breadth of the story with some type of intimacy. While the performances are not bad and the script occasionally achieves a moment of capturing the horrors of Winston Churchill’s stress and strain, it feels overdramatic and cheap for the majority of the film. I feel less so like I am watching a movie meant for the theaters and more like a historic reenactment on the History channel with some over-zealous actors trying to add their own flair.

Brian Cox’s performance as the titular character is perplexing in how often it waivers from good to over-the-top and campy. I can tell that he is trying to bring a grand nature to the troubled leader, but his performance mostly comes off as overwhelmingly goofy. This is no more apparent than in a scene where he kneels at his bedside, praying that a storm will come to further delay the invasion plan. This scene should feel like an intimate dive into the mind of the character, but is written and performed more like a war speech that a thoughtful, private moment. 

And that’s how the whole film feels, cheaply grand. It lacks the production value to be a grand war epic, and also lacks the subtle and creative writing to make it an intimate film about a war hero. What we ended up getting here is a film that doesn’t understand what it is, and that works to the films detriment throughout its run-time. While the movie isn’t necessarily bad in a lot of aspects, it is quite unremarkable in almost every way.

Grade: C-

Up until this point, the DC Extended Universe (or DCEU, I guess) has not had a particularly good track record. Standing at 0/3, I was pretty much losing hope that they would ever make an even passably good film. Man of Steel had its moments of quality, thanks mostly to an excellent Hans Zimmer score, but fell due to its boring characters and cringey story. Batman v. Superman and Suicide Squad were both absolute messes, with little to nothing in the way of redeeming qualities. Thus, the bar for Wonder Woman was set quite low. All the movie had to do was be passable and it would be the best film of the DCEU. And passable it is, if still not pretty flawed.
 
Wonder Woman, the first stand-alone superhero film to feature a female lead, follows the titular character, an Amazonian woman named Diana (Gal Gadot). Diana was born and raised on Themyscira, an island of only Amazonian women, who have isolated themselves from the world of men and constantly train to fight Ares, God of War. They believe that one day, Ares will rise from the ashes of his defeat at the hands of Zeus and try to destroy the world, and must be ready for the fight to come. But when American pilot and spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) crash lands in Themyscira and tells them about the Great War that is raging all across the world, Diana becomes convinced this is the return of Ares, corrupting men into destroying each other. Thus, Diana and Steve must travel to the front lines of the First World War to stop the Germans from unleashing a devastating gas-based weapon that could end mankind.
 
A comparison I began making when the first trailer for Wonder Woman came out was that it looked similar to Captain America: The First Avenger. Perhaps that was just because both movies take place during wars of the early 20th century, and the leads are both idealistic symbols who bear the colors of the United States flag. But the movies feel eerily similar, as Wonder Woman bears all of the positive and negative qualities of the average Marvel film. It has interesting and likable characters and a good sense of humor, but suffers from a less-than-captivating story and underwhelming villain. 
 
On the positive end, it is nice to finally have a movie in the DCEU with characters that aren’t soulless. Gadot and Pine play their characters with an energy and charisma that has been completely absent from the previous films in the franchise, playing off each other wonderfully. And once Diana finally dons her classic costume and starts kicking ass, it’s hard to resist being invested. Though the camera work in the action segments suffers from some of the issues that many action films have (such as too many close-ups to mask the lack of creative choreography and an over-reliance on slow-motion) these scenes have an infectious energy. This energy likely comes from Gadot’s performance, which is the film’s crowning achievement. She is Wonder Woman and she owns the role wonderfully. 
 
But the problem arises with the rest of the film built around these compelling characters. The story seems to drag along at times as the same basic pattern emerges. Diana thinks she is fighting Ares, Steve uses this to his advantage to get her to help fight the war, Diana does something amazing that shocks people/gives them hope. The entire film feels like going through the standard motions that have been set for a superhero origin movie in the modern superhero era. There are no strokes of originality here, just standard superhero fare. Top it off with a villain which neatly fits the Marvel formula of dullery and you’ve got an underwhelming experience that will likely not stand the test of time.
 
I wanted to love this movie. I wanted DC to give me something to compete with Marvel and Fox’s superhero line-up that could potentially shake up the superhero slog. While Fox is willing to push the envelope and take risks with movies like Deadpool and Logan, it seems like DC’s new strategy is to emulate Marvel movies to a tee. And that’s not a great idea when you consider that the Marvel formula is starting to feel stale and repetitive. Wonder Woman may scratch an itch you have to see a beloved character on-screen, or to at least see a watchable movie in the DCEU, but it still doesn’t hold a candle to a lot of other superhero fare.
 
Grade: B-