Since we last checked in with Netflix six months ago, there has been an undeniable shift in the steaming service's movie strategy. Up to a few months ago, Netflix's output of original movies seemed to primarily comprise of mid-budget movies that used to be the bread-and-butter of the Hollywood box office but have gotten squeezed …
After winning awards for "Best Picture" and "Best Director" for his superb 2014 drama 12 Years a Slave, Steve McQueen could've made just about any movie as his follow-up. Luckily for us he decided to make Widows, a commercial heist film that deftly balances thrills with poignancy and is highly entertaining while remaining firmly grounded in the …
As always, here is where I dump all the movies I've been catching up on in preparation for my "Best of the Year" list due somewhere around New Year's. Although it's still (relatively) early days, I think it's safe to say some of the movies below might end up on the list. Previous entries: Part …
Anybody who has ever been in a school play, community theatre production, church pageant, or other amateur stage production knows the special and sometimes weird community that develops behind-the-scenes. The hyper-specific production-related inside jokes, the heavy amount of hours spent together, and the collective wanting to get the production over the line usually end up …
Public discussions about a film's general quality tends to fall into a clear-cut binary. Either the movie elicits an enjoyable emotion like joy, excitement, inspiration, awe, or love in a viewer, and therefore gets called a "good" movie. Or the movie fails to elicit those emotions and conjures up negative emotions like boredom, anger, anxiety, …
Niceness is not something that is generally held up as an upper-tier virtue in society. Instead we just got through another nasty election season consisting of battle-lines drawn, weapons hurled, and an election night that resulted in a "choose-your-own-story" victory narrative in which the only real consensus reached was that we are an increasingly divided …
Halfway through Neil Armstrong's (Ryan Gosling) Gemini 8 mission – an experiment to see if docking two spacecrafts in orbit is possible – Armstrong runs into a slight hitch. Their spacecraft has overshot the target and can't see the second spacecraft. There is the usual burst of chatter as his pilot and mission control try …
"Maybe it's time to let the old ways die." These are the words of a Jackson Maine (Bradley Cooper) song, and it encapsulates not just the spirit of this version of A Star is Born, but of all the previous three times this story has been told. However, unlike in 1937, 1954, and 1976, this is …
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