Here are some reviews of films coming out at the theater this week as well as others that may be in theaters or newly on home video.
Opening: DATE
Wide (United States)
A Star Is Born
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Venom
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Limited (United States)
Chasing the Blues
Jared Mobarak @ The Film Stage
- Excerpt: If you can’t buy into [Rosenmeyer and Conner’s] pratfalls and sarcastic anger, the whole can easily fall apart. Luckily they’re quick to endear themselves to us so we can look past any hiccups and let their sitcom antics sustain a brisk sub-80-minute runtime.
The Hate U Give
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: In a year that has featured “Black Panther,” “Black Klansman,” “Sorry to Bother You” and “Blindspotting,” who would have predicted that an adaptation of a YA novel would be the year’s most trenchant exploration of racial injustice in today’s America.
The Hate U Give
Aaron Neuwirth @ We Live Entertainment
- Excerpt: While some of these adaptations tend to have some important thematic issues buried within, here’s a film that builds no allusions around what it wants to accomplish.
Heavy Trip
Karl Delossantos @ Smash Cut Reviews
- Excerpt: Heavy Trip is a joyous and affectionate love letter to the outcast that is almost impossible to resist.
Heavy Trip
Brent McKnight @ The Last Thing I See
- Excerpt: Because your movie watching doesn’t contain nearly enough “symphonic post-apocalyptic reindeer-grinding Christ-abusing extreme war pagan Fennoscandian metal,” Finnish import Heavy Trip is here to rectify that glaring oversight.
Loving Pablo
Jared Mobarak @ The Film Stage
- Excerpt: Loving Pablo had the opportunity of making Virginia Vallejo its star. The filmmakers [instead use] their most intriguing component to sell a unique perspective, but waste her as a springboard towards the same old story.
2018 Films In Theaters Now In Select Areas
Ant-Man and the Wasp
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
Blaze
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The Commuter
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Crazy Rich Asians
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Deadpool 2
For member reviews of this film, follow this link
The Death of Stalin
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Eighth Grade
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The Equalizer 2
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Fahrenheit 11/9
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First Reformed
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Game Night
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Incredibles 2
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Isle of Dogs
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Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
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Lean on Pete
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Leave No Trace
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Little Women
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Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
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Mandy
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The Meg
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Mile 22
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Night School
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Ocean’s 8
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Peppermint
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The Predator
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RBG
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Searching
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Sicario: Day of the Soldado
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A Simple Favor
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Smallfoot
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Tag
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The Wife
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Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
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306 Hollywood
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: If Wes Anderson made a documentary about a deceased loved one, it might look a lot like this one.
306 Hollywood
Glenn Dunks @ The Film Experience
All About Nina
MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: Hail Mary, full of rage. Mary Elizabeth Winstead is utterly incendiary in this own-worst-enemy dramedy that gender-flips a tired genre to give angry new voice to a woman speaking her own truths.
American Dharma
- Excerpt: Morris finds himself ultimately negotiating the finer points of a deal with the proverbial Devil. Bannon is here to court the credibility afforded subjects of Morris’ Oscar winning lens, but he has little intention of inviting the filmmaker’s full scrutiny.
Apostle
Darren Mooney @ the m0vie blog
- Excerpt: Have faith.
Apostle
Scott Phillips @ The Movie Isle
Aruna & Lidahnya
Bavner Donaldo @ Cinejour [Indonesian]
Bad Times at the El Royale
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: [Godard’s] assembled a strong cast where the lesser known actors make the strongest impressions, but his screenplay leans too heavily on coincidence, multiple nefarious back stories converging in a free-for-all climax.
Bad Times at the El Royale
Aaron Neuwirth @ We Live Entertainment
- Excerpt: It’s unfortunate that Bad Times at the El Royale feels like we’re just waiting in the lobby following an exciting first hour that keeps us traveling down a lost highway, but the film is still colorful enough to warrant checking in.
Benji
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: Too bad there’s no Oscar for Best Animal Performance of the Year. Benji would win hands — er paws — down.
Burning
Scott Phillips @ Timed Edition
Chien de Gare
- Excerpt: A nitty gritty family drama set in the world of petty crime and featuring a roster of actors performing as if each one is in a different film, Chien de garde is bold, but all over the map.
Colette
- Excerpt: With a laissez-faire vivaciousness, the film tracks the unconventional marriage of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette and her husband who for more than a decade took credit for her literary genius. But even such professional slights can have their courtesies.
Colette
Allyson Johnson @ CambridgeDay
A Crooked Somebody
Jared Mobarak @ The Film Stage
- Excerpt: A Crooked Somebody develops into a resonant character study depicting the myriad ways we take advantage of others. It’s about the white lies we spin to justify actions we know aren’t quite justifiable because we assume everyone else is doing the same thing.
Estiu 1993
Paulo Peralta @ CinEuphoria [Portuguese]
The Favourite
- Excerpt: The Favourite is an exercise in droll deconstructionism, marveling in exquisite set design and costumes that rarely veer toward the anachronistic… yet still resist the urge of fawning reverence and hagiographic sentimentality that so bedevils most American productions about British monarchs and the centuries-old gentry class. Infusing passion into this potentially disaffected aesthetic is a triumvirate of tour de force performances from Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz.
First Man
- Excerpt: The result is a film that at times can be a little too happy in its own company, and one that is less passionately engrossing than Whiplash or La La Land. Yet it most definitely will engross, carrying you well beyond that first step.
First Man
- Excerpt: Neil Armstrong might have been the first man to walk on the moon, but we’ll all feel like we’ve been there after seeing First Man.
First Man
Don Shanahan @ Every Movie Has a Lesson
- Excerpt: Unlike the popular space race films that have come before it, not a millisecond of First Man feels like typical hero worship celebrating astronaut and aeronautical engineer Neil Armstrong. What is not trumpeted as heaps of grandiose praise by Academy Award-winning La La Land director Damien Chazelle is instead honed into a poignant and resolute testament of honor.
Free Solo
Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: Both a heart-stopping adventure and a riveting psychological portrait of a man driven to push himself to the edge.
Girl
Diego Salgado @ Guía del Ocio [Spanish]
Gloria Bell
- Excerpt: Gloria Bell is a rare remake that surpasses the original.
Halloween
David Crow @ Den of Geek [English (accidentally triggered this)]
- Excerpt: Halloween of 2018 does not quite have the purity and focus of the 1978 classic, but very few slasher movies do. What it does offer, however, is the best continuation of that story in the past 40 years of numerous attempts, and something fans old and new are going to devour like a particularly juicy red candy on Halloween night.
Halloween
Scott Phillips @ Timed Edition
Happy as Lazzaro
Alan Mattli @ Maximum Cinema [German]
- Excerpt: Alice Rohrwacher firmly establishes herself as a leading voice of modern Italian cinema with this richly inventive magical neorealist drama-cum-Christian parable.
Hell Fest
Alex Brannan @ CineFiles Reviews
Hell Fest
Herman Dhaliwal @ Cinema Sanctum
- Excerpt: The film is a really great time, and it captures the thrills of old school slashers without feeling like 80s pastiche. Plus, the location helps make the film a perfect start of the Halloween season.
Her Smell
Hold the Dark
Chris Barsanti @ Film Journal International
- Excerpt: This dark, pitiless story about a psychotic veteran’s bloody tear through remote Alaska wields haunting grandeur along with reductive plotting.
Hold the Dark
Herman Dhaliwal @ Cinema Sanctum
- Excerpt: The film is unapologetically bleak and ambiguous, which will turn off most viewers, but I found it incredibly engrossing from start to finish. Jeremy Saulnier continues to prove he’s one of the best out there.
Hold the Dark
Scott Phillips @ The Movie Isle
If Beale Street Could Talk
- Excerpt: Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk is a lucid cinematic tome.
If Beale Street Could Talk
Jane Fonda in Five Acts
MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: An extraordinarily intimate and perceptive new biography of the legendary actor and activist. Fonda reveals insecurities and anxieties that are achingly raw and very personal, but which many women will see themselves in.
The Kingdom
Diego Salgado @ Guía del Ocio [Spanish]
Knuckleball
The Looming Tower
- Excerpt: The Looming Tower illuminates how a small and loosely affiliated network of mostly amateur recruits successfully circumvented the most sophisticated efforts of the world’s mightiest nation to protect itself.
Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.
MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: A tremendous backgrounder, intimate and personal, on the massively popular — and massively political — hip-hop artist. Here is the source of all her anger and passion, and here is why she needs to be heard.
The Old Man and the Gun
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: If this proves to be his swan song, [Redford] couldn’t have picked a better one.
The Old Man and the Gun
- Excerpt: A deliberate echo of Redford’s early iconic work, Old Man acts as a bookend to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the George Roy Hill film that turned Redford into a movie star in 1969.
Outlaw King
- Excerpt: This Scottish war film is unlikely to compete with Braveheart in anyone’s mind, for at its best it is only so much war with rarely any poetry.
Overlord
Scott Phillips @ Timed Edition
RBG
- Excerpt: RGB is an expertly crafted and candid portrait of this unique and influential figure in American law.
Roma
- Excerpt: In a year like 2018, it is hard to think of a film that more lovingly or enthusiastically embraces the cinematic vernacular of the last hundred years to tell a story of such intimate delicacy and complementary big screen scope.
Roma
Alan Mattli @ Facing the Bitter Truth
- Excerpt: Roma is told in indelible moments and images, which demand to be seen, heard, and felt in a movie theatre.
Roma
- Excerpt: Watching Roma in a crowded theatre, I could only wonder if this was what it must have felt like to be among the audience to see ‘Bicycle Thieves’ or ‘L’Avventura’ for the first time.
Science Fair
MaryAnn Johanson @ FlickFilosopher.com
- Excerpt: Meet some of the most brilliant teenagers alive, high-school students from all over the world competing at the World Cup of genius geekery. Funny, sobering, and inspiring.
The Sisters Brothers
Laura Clifford @ Reeling Reviews
- Excerpt: What an odd film, a Western that begins with brutality and works its way towards light, a surreal take on “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” that is also a tale of brotherhood, often funny, but also tragic.
The Standoff at Sparrow Creek
Scott Phillips @ The Movie Isle
Summer ’03
Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: A charming little feel-good indie that will have you reflecting back on your own adolescence.
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Bavner Donaldo @ Cinejour [Indonesian]
The Trump Prophecy
Mike McGranaghan @ The Aisle Seat
- Excerpt: If the movie was designed to convince non-believers that Trump really is God’s selection, the paper-thin storytelling won’t do the trick.
The Wind
Scott Phillips @ Timed Edition
You Might Be the Killer
Scott Phillips @ The Movie Isle
2017 Films
All You Can Eat Buddha
Gregory J. Smalley @ 366 Weird Movies
- Excerpt: A hard-eating hero, a telepathic octopus, beaches, a reference to Buddhism, adulation, and maybe some politics: it’s a puzzle movie, but one where the pieces all seem to come from different boxes.
Brad’s Status
Bavner Donaldo @ Cinejour [Indonesian]
2016 Films
Disorder
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: An intriguing and intense thriller with Matthias Schoenaerts delivering an extraordinary portrayal of a soldier suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder while trying to protect the wife of a wealthy arms dealer.
The Duel
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: In this slow-moving Western even the horses just clomp on and on.
Imperium
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: Imperium takes us on a jaw-dropping journey through the white supremacy culture in the U.S.A. I found the movie both hard to watch and fascinating at the same time.
Into the Forest
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: Most end-of-the-world type movies emphasize explosions, earthquakes, floods or other disasters.”Into the Forest” shows a less spectacular — but even more terrifying — scenario.
The Ones Below
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: The Ones Below boasts some suspense. Yet missing facts make it too dense.
The Remains
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: In this predictable horror movie, frequent loud noises and overpowering background music come across as distracting instead of scary.
The Trust
Betty Jo Tucker @ ReelTalk Movie Reviews
- Excerpt: Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood deserve kudos for their very convincing performances as two miserable cops who believe their lives could be made better by stealing already stolen cash.
