Posts in 5 STARS
MOVIE REVIEW: Loving Vincent

The filmmakers promised Loving Vincent to be nothing you’ve ever seen put to film and they were not lying.  The sheer artistry is miraculous where even folded shirts look as dramatic as emoting faces.  To call the biographical drama a work of art and astonishing technical achievement would be shameless understatements.  The best part of all is the massive wellspring of creativity was thankfully applied to an engaged narrative worthy of the artistry and the legend cast by Vincent Van Gogh

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Florida Project

The crucial emotional response The Florida Project demands of its viewers is empathy.  If you can’t find that, if you turn your nose, close your eyes, and refuse to accept that this kind of American lifestyle exists, you are missing the hard truths, the teachable moments, and the larger points being presented.  onvenient Hollywood endings don’t exist in the real life Baker’s film examines.  Applaud a film that dares to push that stark reality.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Lucky

In each winsome second, Lucky continuously unearths affecting ways of making cantankerous endearing.  With grizzled resolve and humor as dry as the desert he walks in, the late Harry Dean Stanton personifies the charm culled from the crotchety put on display in John Carroll Lynch’s straight-shooting film.  Far from any Grumpy Old Men folly and possessing a hidden heart twice the size of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska, meet a lovable unlovable asshole that flourishes to galvanize unexpected wholesomeness from the prickliest of cacti.

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MOVIE REVIEW: The Big Sick

By definition, a punchline is “the words at the end of a joke or story that make it funny or surprising.”  Superb comedians dream of finding good ones they can wrap a story around and always refining their material for the right comedic effect for their audiences.  The Big Sick can confidently boast a self-evident punchline that lasts for over two hours and never runs out of the funny or the surprising.

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MOVIE REVIEW: War for the Planet of the Apes

A significant shift in attention and investment has occurred in this series.  Our hearts and allegiances swayed from rooting for the madness of our own mankind to the superior traits of humanity exhibited by Caesar and his ape brethren.  A transformation of empathy like that is downright miraculous.  War for the Planet of Apes is a full-bodied epic of glory and pain that matches and then exceeds the moving importance and heart this rebooted franchise has established in two previous knockout films.

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ADVANCE MOVIE REVIEW: Logan

With stunning brush strokes soaked in pathos and blood, "Logan" taps into a cask of comic book scotch that been reserved to reach maturity.  This is, by a country mile, not only the best film of the “X-Men” franchise, but the best of 20th Century Fox’s entire catalog of Marvel Films.  Presented as an analogy, “Logan” is to comic book films what “Unforgiven” was to westerns.

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DOCUMENTARY REVIEW: I Am Not Your Negro

The documentary “I Am Not Your Negro” from director Raoul Peck unearths “Remember This House,” an unfinished 1979 manuscript of the James Baldwin’s recollections of Medgar, Malcolm, and Martin.  This outstanding and informative film presents Baldwin’s musings alongside sobering imagery of both the turbulent history of the era and parallel occurrences of modern racial unrest that echo the same violence, inequality, anger, and sorrow.  As an Oscar nominee in a banner year for feature documentaries, “I Am Your Negro” is essential viewing.

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MOVIE REVIEW: A Monster Calls

J.A. Bayona’s film, based on the 2011 novel of the same name and adapted for the screen by the author himself, Patrick Hess, operates with a similar dichotomy and balancing act with its genre.  “Fantasy” and “genuine” are two words that do not normally mix together.  “A Monster Calls” creates an engrossing tale of allegory and myth and still roots it in a setting of stark reality filled with family and flaws.  

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MOVIE REVIEW: Fences

Movies are an offspring of plays.  What started on theater stages can now step into a wider world.  Locations can remove the boundaries and improve an immersive story, but the human performances are still what matters most.  Words have power regardless of setting.  “Fences,” directed by Denzel Washington, is one of the finest and most seamless examples of the power of performance being translated from the stage to the screen.

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MOVIE REVIEW: La La Land

In front of and behind the camera, you will find creative people that deftly understand and properly tap into the spirit and flavor of the classic genres and eras they are blending.  Breathing jazzy life into a Hollywood musical set in the present day of Priuses and iPhones, Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to “Whiplash” is a modern cinematic masterpiece.  It is the kind of film where you will remember where you were when you first saw it.  You will not find a more jubilant, romanticized, or flat-out entertaining film this year.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Jackie

Mesmerizing describes the film as a whole and its incomparable lead performance from Academy Award winner Natalie Portman playing First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in the immediate hours and days following her husband's 1963 assassination.  Far from a biopic and more of a psychological examination, Portman and Larrain sear the screen with emotion and imagery that is as captivating as it is difficult.  It is astonishing that it takes a foreign director to create the most empowering portrait of American history put to film in years.

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MOVIE REVIEW: Manchester by the Sea

There is an unmistakable layer of “people-watching” cinema brings to its artistic atmosphere and aesthetic.  An omnipresent camera grants private points-of-view, shines light on secrets, and challenges the observational skills of the audience.  Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea” introduces the wearisome life of one solitary man and proceeds to unearth the repressed sorrow and unspoken emotions that lie underneath his mundane exterior.  The most praiseworthy character-driven films have the patience to cultivate its truths with substance and the wisdom to never give you everything.  Lonergan’s near-perfect jewel is a new exemplar of such qualities and one of the finest films of 2016.

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