Molly's Game: A High Full House

The Top 10 Movies of 2017 (in my opinion)

I could open this list with a cynical diatribe of what a miserable year 2017 was, but I won’t. Why? Because A. I already did that last year, B. I don’t want to start the year off with a bunch of doom and gloom, and C. for all the bad stuff that went down, there was still some good stuff to help balance things out. One of those things being that, thanks to this blog, I got to see enough movies that I can make an actual top 10 list where I don’t have to scrape from a really small pool. There were some very painful cuts that I had to make, but in the end, I’m satisfied with my picks. Keep in mind that I didn’t get to see everything that I wanted to, so if you’re wondering why Good Time, The Florida Project, Loving Vincent, A Ghost Story, Mudbound, John Wick: Chapter 2, Phantom Thread, Call Me by Your Name or I, Tonya aren’t on the list, that’s why. Regardless, these are the Top 10 Movies of 2017 (in my opinion).

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - The Sequel You've All Been Waiting For

The Shape of Water: The Best Movie Ever Made (About Sex With Fish People)

My Most Anticipated Movies of 2018

Pretty self-explanatory. Let’s go!

The Disaster Artist: What A Story, Franco!

Mini Reviews pt. 2: The Big Sick, Murder on the Orient Express and More

I don’t get to see every single thing when it comes out, and even when I do see something during its initial release, I don’t always have enough to say about it that warrants a full review. To remedy this, I’ve compiled a collection of short reviews of films that, for whatever reason, I never got to the first time around. If you want to see some mini reviews from the first half of the year, you can check them out here.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: A Cathartic, Earnest Riot

Coco: Gracias, Pixar

Lady Bird: An Ode to Selfish Teenagers

My Friend Dahmer: A Portrait of the Serial Killer as a Young Man

The Killing of a Sacred Deer: The World's Most Awkward Greek Tragedy

Thor: Ragnarok - Another Marvel Knockout

Blade Runner 2049: Do Androids Dream of Better Sequels?

Kingsman: The Golden Circle – All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go

Mother!: Well, That Was... A Movie

It: Can't Sleep, Clown Will Eat Me

Death Note: or How to Take A Cool Concept and Make It Boring

Wind River: Beat the Heat with Some Bitter Cold

Logan Lucky: Never Underestimate the Country Boy

Detroit: This Is Gonna Hurt

Atomic Blonde: Stylish, Brutal, Incomprehensible

Dunkirk: Life During Wartime with Christopher Nolan

Valerian and The City of a Thousand Planets: The Perfect “Turn Off Your Brain” Movie

The Little Hours: If the Catholic League Hates It Then It Must Be Good, Right?

Spider-Man: Homecoming - Welcome Back, Spidey

My Favorite Movies of 2017 (so far)

The year is half over and, thanks to this blog, I’ve seen more movies in the past six months than I normally get to see in a year. That means I get to put together a list of my favorite movies of the year so far. Things might change drastically by the time I make my official list at the end of the year, but for the time being, here are the highlights of movie-going experience in 2017.

The Beguiled: A Pretty Picture With Missing Pieces

Baby Driver: For People Who Like Cars, Music and Fun

Mini Reviews pt. 1: Split, Beauty and the Beast and More

As much as I love watching and reviewing movies, I can’t see every single thing that’s out there. To fix this, I’ve put together a group of mini reviews of films that, for whatever reason, I didn’t see or write about the first time around. Maybe I had no interest in seeing it in theaters, maybe it wasn’t playing anywhere near me and I had to wait for the blu-ray, or I didn’t have enough to say about it to warrant a full review. Either way, this little compilation is basically my way of making up for lost time.

Rough Night: The Sisterhood of the Accidental Manslaughter

The Book of Henry: Holy Crap, Where Do I Begin?

It Comes At Night: Post-Apocalypse At Its Most Austere

Wonder Woman: It's About Time They Got Something Right

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales - It Was Either This Or Baywatch

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

Colossal: Giant Monsters and Inner Demons

Your Name. - Something Worth Remembering

T2: Trainspotting - Sometimes Nostalgia is the Deadliest Drug

WARNING: This review contains spoilers for the film Trainspotting. I mean, the movie’s been out for over twenty years, but since I can’t really talk about its sequel without also discussing the original, I thought I’d give you a head’s up anyway. We good? Good.

Ghost in the Shell: As Intangible and Hollow as it Sounds

Life: Life Finds a Way (To Kill You)

Originality is overrated. While many bemoan Hollywood’s lack of originality while awash in a sea of reboots, remakes, sequels and franchise building, they forget that everyone has to get their ideas from somewhere. Everything is a remix, nothing is original anymore, and every new idea is just the culmination of ideas from the past. Or as Pablo Picasso once put it, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” The thing that separates the inspired ideas from the uninspired ones, however, is what they do with their plunder. Life is a terrific example of this. It may not have a single original bone in its body, but it at least knows how to use its stolen ideas effectively.

Power Rangers: A Movie Stuck in Mid-Morph

When I found out that they were making a Power Rangers movie, I was a bit skeptical. I wasn’t surprised at all that it was happening, though. Since Hollywood has been mining my generation’s nostalgia for script material for years, it was only a matter of time before they got their turn. The thing that had me worried, though, was how exactly they were going to attack this subject. I was a huge Power Rangers fan back in the day, but I’ll be the first to tell you that it hasn’t aged well at all. The inconsistencies with the American footage and the Japanese Super Sentai footage are glaringly obvious in retrospect, and it’s a perfect distillation of the vapid focus testing that dominated children’s television in the 90’s. There were two ways this could’ve gone about: they could keep the goofy, cheesy aesthetic and make the experience a groan inducing nightmare for anyone above the age of 10, or they could take the grim and gritty route and risk pissing off the legions of jaded fans who’ve had their hearts broken by Michael Bay and Zack Snyder too many times. In their attempt to find a happy middle ground, this movie just ended up killing both tones with one stone.

Logan - End of an Era

There’s a certain sense of finality surrounding Logan, a sense of inevitability. That should come as no surprise as this is supposedly the last hurrah for Hugh Jackman’s incarnation of X-Men’s Wolverine. Since the timeline has been tampered with in X-Men: Days of Future’s Past, rendering parts of the early 2000’s X-Men series null and void, Hugh Jackman is starting to get too old to play what is essentially the character that made him a star, and Deadpool has made 20^th Century Fox a little less gun-shy about making R-rated superhero movies, everyone agrees that if this is going to be the end of this character, he might as well go out with a bang. I was a bit wary about the hype surrounding this movie since Wolverine’s previous solo outings have been less than stellar, (The Wolverine was okay, and the less said about X-Men Origins: Wolverine the better.) but I figured I’d see how this chapter in the X-Men saga goes if for no other reason than closure.

Get Out - When Racial Fears Get Real

Comedy and horror have an awful lot in common. Both are about defying expectations (or at least they should be), both require more skill than one would expect to pull off properly, both have a singular goal that will result in failure if not met, and the best ones give the audience something to think about between bouts of fear and/or laughter. Combining the two seems like a feat that only the maddest of mad scientists are willing to pull off, but there have been a few successful attempts like Evil Dead II, Army of Darkness, Shaun of the Dead, Scream, Cabin in the Woods, just to name a few. Get Out strikes that balance while also tackling the heavy subject of racism in a refreshing way. The directorial debut of Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, Get Out will make you laugh your ass off, shit your pants in terror, and think about whose lives really matter, sometimes all within a few minutes of each other.

A Cure for Wellness - This Is What Disappointment Looks Like

Some movies are good, some are bad, others are just disappointing. A forgettable movie is more unforgivable than an outright terrible one because if it leaves no impact and is discarded from your memory a few hours after seeing it, then that's two hours of your life that you'll never get back. But the most frustrating kind of disappointing movie to me is the kind that has so much going for it, has the seed of a good or even great movie buried deep within it just dying to break through the soil and blossom, but is bogged down by one or two fatal flaws that hamstring the entire experience. A Cure for Wellness, unfortunately, falls strictly into that category.

The Lego Batman Movie - Everything is Still Awesome

Batman has become one of the most overexposed characters in recent memory. Whether it be in comics, movies or television, the Dark Knight has no shortage of stories written about him, but ever since Frank Miller gave him the ultra gritty makeover in 1988, and The Dark Knight permanently reshaped the cinematic landscape for better or worse in 2008, the popular consensus seems to be that Batman should only be this dark, brooding, overly serious character despite the fact that he's a billionaire who fights crime while dressed as a flying rodent and whose arch nemesis is a clown. While some of the grim elements of Batman have always kind of been there, a lot of people tend to forget that the franchise wasn't always so stuck up its own ass and had an element of self-awareness. Comparing the silver age comics and the 60's Adam West show to Batman: The Animated Series and the Nolan trilogy is almost a night and day difference. That self-conscious lampooning is what made Batman one of the best parts of The Lego Movie, a movie whose entire modus operandi was pure, unadulterated joy with meta humor coming out the wazoo. But is this incarnation of the Caped Crusader enough to carry his own movie?

The Trouble With Adaptations, or Why I'm Sick of Hearing That The Book Was Better

We've all been in this kind of situation before. You've picked up a book, you read it, you loved it, you've read it front to back, fell in love with the characters, scoured its pages for little nuances, references, or clever details you may not have picked up on the first, second, or seventeenth time. Then you get the news: that book that you love so very very much is getting its own movie. You're super excited to see this story brought to life on the big screen. You count down the days til the premiere, you show up first in line for the very first screening, you're in a room with dozens or hundreds of people who adore this work just as much as you do. The lights dim, the film begins, and two hours later... you find yourself underwhelmed. Or disappointed. Or even angry. Something didn't go right. Maybe they left something out. Or several things. Or  they changed things. Maybe the director's vision didn't exactly match yours. Maybe the adaptation was in name only. It's a conundrum that cinephile and bibliophile alike have suffered through. Either way, there's no more disappointing feeling than walking out of the theater and thinking to yourself, “The book was so much better.” And there's no more infuriating feeling than discussing it with someone else and hearing them flippantly say “Of course the book was better. The book is always better.”

Silence - Middle of the Road Scorsese is Still Pretty Damn Good

Silence is probably the most aptly titled movie to come along in a while. The latest from masterclass filmmaker Martin Scorsese is an exercise in restraint. How much can you do with so little? In this case, the movie's lack of sound and the absence of the frenzied urgency that is Scorsese's signature is both an aesthetic and thematic choice. We watch in silence, the film presents itself in silence, and its main characters suffer in silence. Based on the novel of the same name by Shuzaku Endo, this is a passion project that Scorsese has been trying to get off the ground since the late 80's, and while Marty has made a name for himself as a master of the art of excess, here he shows how much he can really do when really subdued.

The Top 5 Worst Movies of 2016 (in my opinion)

Last week I made my top 10 list of the best films of 2016, which means I have to pay the price of being a movie-goer and cover the bad stuff. However, this list will only be five long instead of ten. I try as best as I can to avoid seeing bad movies in theaters because I don't like wasting my time or money. When I choose to see a movie in the theater, it's because I see some kind of potential for it to at least be entertaining. But even then some stinkers manage to slip through the cracks, or morbid curiosity gets the best of me. So if you're wondering why infamous turds like Gods of Egypt, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and God's Not Dead 2 aren't here, it's because I knew that them sucking was going to be a foregone conclusion and I didn't want to waste my money. (Also, if you're the kind of person who needs me of all people to tell you those movies are garbage, then there's nothing I can really do for you.) Alright, enough beating around the bush, let's get this over with.