Category: Film

Ultraviolent world-building and bone-crushing dominate this animated fantasy film.

Two young women from different eras form a psychic bond in Edgar Wright’s sumptuous and surprising horror movie.

This “Army of the Dead” prequel leans in, deliberately, to every last heist movie cliché.

The writer and director Evan Jackson Leong sets a crime tale in New York City’s Chinatown.

Trailblazer Ruth E. Carter is at it again. With her fifth Oscar nomination for costume design on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Carter is now the most-nominated Black woman in Oscar

Reviewed by Ramona Prioleau

Released in 1974, The Longest Yard is a prison movie and a sports movie that stars mega-star Burt Reynolds. The film follows Paul “Wrecking” Crewe, a former NFL football star who is serving time in prison for stealing his ex-girlfriend’s sports car. While locked up, Crewe is forced by the warden of the correctional facility to organize a football team made of inmates. Rudolph Hazen, the warden, manages his own semi-professional team of prison guards, and he pressures Crewe to throw the game in the other teams favor. Crewe and the other inmates, however, see the game as an opportunity to get payback for the brutality they have been through while in prison.

The film is captivating, but it only works as well as it does because Reynolds is an absolute genius casting choice. The actor brings his usual suave demeanor to the role, yes, but there’s something to Reynolds’ performance in The Longest Yard that is more intense and deep than most any of the sex symbol’s other performances. Crewe is troubled and torn; throughout the film he never really knows what the best decision for himself or his friends actually is. The rules of the game are constantly changing, but Reynolds captures this brilliantly in his performance. The tone of the film is constantly shifting, as is the demeanor of its main character, but there’s few actors who could have pulled off this rather disorienting role in the manner that Reynolds does.

The other characters, many of them played by former professional football stars, also feature surprisingly strong performances, especially for non-actors. Their real, almost amateurish style, alongside a number of the film’s other production choices, gives the entire movie a very raw and gritty feeling. It’s a major strength of the film, as is the movie’s social and political commentary. The film is not shy in its deliberate references to Richard Nixon, and the film’s nuggets of social critique are what elevates it from a somewhat off-the-wall sports action film to something with real meaning and longevity. Tracy Wynn’s and Albert S. Ruddy’s story is sometimes scathing in its messaging, and it brings the film to new heights.

One need only to look at the 2005 remake of the film starring Adam Sandler to see how important this aspect is. Where the original film is sincere, this one is pure spectacle. While the original film has something definite and concrete to say, the 2005 remake is vapid and empty. All of the rustic, rough-around-the-edges charm of the original film is completely sanitized for the remake. Sandler is a horrific casting choice for the film, and even Reynolds himself, who stars now as the inmates old mentor, seems to be phoning it in. The catastrophic failure that is the remake of The Longest Yard only emphasizes the power, effectiveness, and impact of the original film. M

April 2024

Reviewed by Ramona Prioleau

Released in 2014 and starring Keanu Reeves, John Wick is one of the best action films of the last decade. The film tells the story of an ex-hitman (Reeves) who comes out of retirement after a group of gangsters kill his dog, a gift from his recently deceased spouse.

While achieving revenge for a pet may at first sound like a fairly contrived plot device, it is a surprisingly powerful motivation for Wick’s character. There are a number of moments where the film allows Reeves—in what has to be his best performance since The Matrix—to display complex emotions like unchecked despair or uncontrollable anger. What seems like a throwaway story beat at first actually opens the door into an engaging exploration of Wick’s psyche and history, a challenge that Reeves rises to in tremendous fashion.

Furthermore, having the film’s events be kicked off by such a “mundane”  event allows the action, not the plot, to take center stage. This is a very good thing. Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, the co-directors of the film, are two veterean stuntmen directing for the first time, and their expertise is evident from the very beginning. The film is heavy and punchy, and the action is unlike anything else on the market. The style and rhythm of the film’s numerous fight sequences are fresh, tight and satisfying, and it’s clear that this film could only have been made by artists who have a deep understanding of their field. There are a number of long takes in John Wick, minutes-long sequences that are complexly and meticulously choreographed. They stand out starkly when compared to the over-edited action scenes seen nearly everywhere else today. Reeves also very clearly does many of his own stunts, which adds yet another dimension to his already incredible performance.

One of the other most engaging parts of John Wick is that it is not merely a shoot-em-up action flick. Though Wick’s revenge takes center stage, there is actually quite a bit of worldbuilding to be found in this film. Learning about the criminal underworld that Wick comes from is genuinely as interesting as watching him hit headshot after headshot. It’s the kind of franchise-prepping that isn’t overt or heavy handed. While the potential for the eventual sequels is apparent, the film never postures or winks at the fact that we should expect more. Instead, it lays out a world full of intrigue, rife with possibilities. These world-building segments a;sp allow for the film to settle into a steady yet quick-moving pace that doesn’t merely jump from set-piece to set-piece.

It’s not all that dramatic to suggest that John Wick has changed the action genre for good and for the better. By placing stunts at the center—not CGI, not huge set pieces, not heavy handed plots, but fine, well-crafted stunts—John Wick is able to deliver all the best parts of an action movie and so much more.M

February 2024

Reviewed by Ramona Prioleau

Released in 2012, Zero Dark Thirty is director Kathryn Bigelow’s follow up to 2009’s The Hurt Locker. Another war film, Zero Dark Thirty follows the years-long hunt for Osama Bin Laden, starting at the September 11th terrorist attacks and spanning an entire decade until his eventual assassination in 2011. The film, while heavily dramatized, is based on real events, and its telling of the hunt for Bin Laden is detail-oriented and meticulous from the start. There’s action and suspense in spades, but the best parts of the film are the sequences that involve the quieter, intelligent search for evidence.

It’s always fascinating when a film where the ending is already known ends up being this suspenseful. Bigelow and her writing partner Mark Boal have stitched together a film that, even with a longer runtime, moves sharply and quickly. At the center of all this is Jessica Chastain, who plays Maya, a CIA agent whose entire career has been dedicated to finding Bin Laden. We know little more about her than that—she was recruited out of high school and had been searching for the terrorist leader ever since. However, Chastain’s performance was rather remarkable. Maya is cold, intelligent and calculating, and Chastain’s subtle and exact performance brings a much-needed level-headedness to the whirlwind investigation at the film’s heart.

In a manner similar to The Hurt Locker, director Kathryn Bigelow toes a careful line here between semi-documentary and spectacle, between a critique of war and an outright celebration of it. In the end, it’s not quite as effective as The Hurt Locker, but it’s easy to imagine that, in the hands of another director, Zero Dark Thirty could’ve gone turned into a scathing portrait of war or, conversely, a voyeuristic parade of it. Instead, it falls somewhere in the middle. The dramatization of it all is hard not to get wrapped up in, but going into the film expecting an exact historical record is not advised. Even so, were a male action director at the helm of this film instead of Bigelow, it’s likely that the machismo would’ve won outright. Instead though, the film is full of nuance, even if it is a bit unevenly distributed.

Bigelow is not stranger to ambiguity through, and, in the end, Zero Dark Thirty may be her hardest work to read yet. Controversial torture scenes are just the tip of the iceburg, and, like she did in The Hurt Locker, Bigelow doesn’t give us any straight answers. Her films are captivating and immensely watchable, but what they have to say about war in general and about Americans at war specifically is never quite explicit. It’s left for the viewer to decide.M

May 2022