Excerpt: In terms of what’s universal, though, I think many of us struggle with “What is home?” and “How do I balance my loyalty to where I come from and my background with my own desires and dreams to strike out as an individual?” That balancing in your life between individual responsibility and community responsibility is universal.
Excerpt: Army Of The Dead succeeds as a whole because it’s a very thrilling, enjoyable, and pulpy action-horror picture that is as unabashedly weird and idiosyncratic as it is operatic and indulgent.
Excerpt: takes off like a rocket which may make its soft landing inevitable. The story resolves neatly…but the cast and filmmakers have clearly given this their all and the musical’s big, vibrant beating heart is a testament to them all.
Excerpt: It very much plays like an elaborate and expanded Broadway production, which maintains the narrative’s spirit while taking advantage of the big screen format to convey it on an even larger scale.
Excerpt: “In the Heights,” based on what will always be known as the play Lin-Manuel Miranda did before “Hamilton,” has been gently streamlined and updated into a joyous post-pandemic welcome back into the world after a year postponement due to the coronavirus. It is touching, ebullient, timely and timeless with an irresistible cast of young performers filled with screen chemistry.
Excerpt: Add rousing music; a great, effusive atmosphere of cultural vitality; and stunning cinematography and it’s impossible not to get swept up by [its] joyous celebration of life.
Excerpt: …one would expect that more Hayek would be a good thing. While that is indeed true, screenwriter Tom O’Connor hasn’t stepped up at all on the action plot which features so many extreme CGI explosions they become boring in their repetitiveness.
Excerpt: Strong, understated performances, vivid stylistics, and a frenetic enthusiasm elevate a plot that, on a nuts and bolts level, could have been a fairly standard outlaw-on-the-verge-of-retirement story. Akilla’s Escape doesn’t rewrite the formula, but uses the framework to deliver a slick crime tale with a unique point of view and enough intriguing thematic concerns to make it worth checking out.
Excerpt: Those looking for narrative threads to be tied up neatly won’t find that here as “Censor” spins into literal nightmare territory in its climax, leaving us in a state as suspended as its heroine’s fractured reality.
Excerpt: [Burstyn’s] best scenes with a Bee are with Loretta Devine’s Sally, whose uproarious bit on ‘underboob sweat’ is the film’s funniest. But these elements are like a life raft on the Titanic.
Excerpt: The strength of the film is with its leads, the award winning veteran and screen newcomer connecting so believably from such opposing romantic ideologies we come away from the film with hope for humanity.
Excerpt: This economical German fantasy-romance pales in the shadow of more successful genre combinations, relying on muggy romance and hazy mythology to charge an otherwise straight and narrow tale of love at first sight.
Excerpt: While not every aspect of Romero’s amusement park allegory for society works as well as others, the 52 minute film succeeds in its mission with flying colors.
Excerpt: The good folks over at Shudder are giving audiences everywhere a chance to finally watch The Amusement Park, Romero’s haunting depiction of the horrors and humiliations that befall the elderly when society deems them excess to requirements. And while The Amusement Park might not feature as much graphic violence and gore as some of Romero’s other movies, that doesn’t make it any less terrifying.
Excerpt: When you think you’re going to get a straightforward educational video but you hire George Romero for the project and wind up instead with a hellish nightmare. That’s exactly how The Amusement Park came into existence.
Excerpt: One can easily see all of Romero’s style on display, which includes his ability to make the best of limited means and his ways of making the familiar feel surreal.
Excerpt: The mismatch between message and messenger is precisely what makes ‘The Amusement Park’ fresh and fascinating. Making its point efficiently in under an hour, anyone with an interest in George Romero, experimental horror, or obscure cinematic oddities will want to put this ambitious little curiosity on their bucket list.
