Susan Chardy stars in a story about family and some deeper things. One day she finds her uncle dead in the street, and that’s where things only begin to unravel. This story dives deep into family dynamics, cultural impacts, and the way it makes you “forget” things- or pretend that you do.

Chardy gives a nonchalant performance at first, but then opens up the world around her. Her performance was hand in hand with what the story was telling you, and she is stylishly written and dressed. The rest of the movie is shot in a way that makes Susan feels like a ghost moving through a real life space. All the actors might as well have just been your normal, everyday people. Seeing technology used in a world that felt stuck back in time was a very poignant setting for a story like this.

This can only be described as a new type of dark comedy. You’ll feel frustrated from facts and details that often feel like they’re from dreams. Then you’ll laugh at how absurd the characters’ methods can be. Many parallels are made, but they don’t show you anything they didn’t need to, almost to protect the viewer and the characters.

I can’t say this movie left a huge impact on me personally, but I can respect the strength it takes to show a story like this. It has a lot to say about abuse and communication that will weigh heavy on you if it hits close to home. Rungano Nyoni directs a film in a small community that feels so far away yet so large.

6.5/10

Novocaine is a movie with all the ingredients, with one or two being a little overused.

Nate (Jack Quaid) is your normal, everyday assistant manager at a bank, except he can’t feel pain. Just a day after he finally goes on a date with his crush (Amber Midthunder), she gets kidnapped, and he must get her back. This works as a revenge film like Upgrade, discovering your powers from within like Kick-Ass, and mixes in the mundane nature of day to day life like Office Space. 

There’s many sequences throughout that will have you squirming in your seat from the violence. Ten seconds on either side of the blood, you’ll be laughing your butt off from the sheer absurdity of some of these situations the characters find themselves in. The action is at least half impressive and shows off the creativeness they brought out from Nate’s special power, or lack thereof. There is some very clever writing and it leads to one of the best kills of the decade.

A lot of side characters get just a little too much screen time and it takes away from the main story that I couldn’t help but be invested in. Some of those characters add b-side stories that become unnecessary and ultimately unresolved. I think if they stuck with a more straightforward storyline, I could have been even more into it overall. Quaid and Midthunder are a perfect match on screen, that I wish we got a lot more of. It’s still a fun time, but doesn’t need to be seen in a theater to be enjoyed.

7/10

Welcome to the world of underwater manual labor. It’s a premise that deserves a deeper look into what dangers this job holds, oh wait… they’ve already made a documentary about this exact situation and given it the same title? 

Last Breath has trouble keeping its head above water for many reasons. To start, every character is miscast. Woody may be charming but he’s put in a role that’s mainly just sitting in a confined space having conversations with the likes of an emotionally confused Simu Liu and a subjectively bad actor in Finn Cole. Other characters on the captain’s ship, while important, felt like they were in a different movie altogether. 

Once these characters are put in the dangerous situations that set off the conflict, you’d be hoping for feelings of claustrophobia, panic, or distress. Instead I was feeling a lack of concern because the way it was placed out for the audience felt very obvious for our character’s fate. Things could have been more dramatic if any light source would have been used for the underwater scenes. 

This movie has some cool technology and “costume design” but a true story can only be so interesting. Taking a documentary about a real life situation and doing nothing exciting with your retelling makes for a boring time at the movies. 

I hope we aren’t heading towards a world where documentaries are getting remade into scripted movies.

4.5/10

An adaptation of a short story by Stephen King that becomes a horror comedy on the big screen sounds like it should be great, but a lot of those components do not mesh well. 

Your favorite Divergent star, Theo James, stars as twins set out to stop the mysterious monkey that is wreaking havoc on everyone around them. To do so, Theo is dry and mostly just a vessel to get you to exciting situations that will hopefully end in death. There’s plenty of other short lived characters that show up and have some fun, but the only important one is Lois, played by Tatiana Maslany. 

Maslany hasn’t really been seen outside of She-Hulk in awhile but she absolutely steals the show here. She’s commanding while also being withdrawn in her matter of fact dialogue, line delivery is on point and her comedic timing is exciting. Seeing her in a role like this was a delight. 

If you move past the mostly dull characters and just look at what you’re here for, it’s worth the watch. The ill-timed and amusing kills are undoubtedly a blast. There’s more blood than a Tarantino movie and the creativeness of them make it feel like it was intended to be a Rube Goldberg machine. It’s some of the most fun I’ve had in years watching people die. 

The monkey as a tool is very unoriginal, yet the design is as creepy as can be. I wish there was less time spent with uninteresting characters and more with people being dismembered. 

It’s a wild ride that is hilarious, but can’t seem to find a middle ground for everything to live in harmony. 

6/10

The Gorge is a new action, romance, sci-fi, and drama mash-up that is a pretty enjoyable surprise. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are hired guns on opposite sides of a gorge in the earth. With the terms being to stop whatever comes and don’t communicate with the person on the other side, things become complicated.

Miles and Anya’s chemistry works best when they aren’t in the same place, but it’s hard not to acknowledge they look great together. Anya is a sassy bad ass while Miles plays less of a jagoff than he usually does. Their characters get to have fun outside of the tedious and lonely tasks their situation puts them in and the tension builds as their connection grows. Even without a half hour of a dialogue, I was still entertained. There’s a loneliness aspect to each character that makes you want to care for what happens to them almost immediately .

The landscape and towers for the setting of this film are beautiful, which adds to the mystery of what might lay beneath as they explore their territory. The weapons used are awesome, the action is shot in an exciting way and the romance aspect works. This plays out more like a video game than a movie, but that was not a problem. It feels wholly original even if quite a few aspects reminded me of half a dozen other films.

If I have to be picky, they show a little too much of “what’s inside” which highlights how awful those things looked. There’s some poor design elements that ruin the surprise and said surprise is a little underplayed because of how poorly explained it was.

Outside of that, I thought this movie was mostly a good time. There’s some nice music cues in a cheesy romance/action flick where Anya is a joy.

8/10

Anthony Mackie finally gets his chance to be at the front of an MCU film, as Captain America, with wings.

I’m at a point where it’s either been too long since I’ve seen some of these characters, or their importance is no longer a factor. If you haven’t caught up on the dozen Disney+ series, you might not know who any of these people are. Even if they weren’t in something before, introducing a bunch of new “important” characters into the fold this late in the game is a problem Marvel cannot seem to get away from.

Brave New World is smaller in scale in many ways, which makes it stick out in a franchise that has constantly been building towards something. They are going backwards with this one unfortunately and characters are brought back just for the sake of showing that they still exist in canon, but are gone in a snap with poor excuses again and again.

There were multiple times I either said “ew” or “yuck” quietly to myself while watching. Character designs are disgusting and off-putting, while costumes are straight up ugly. For lack of a better word, the music sucks and tries to bring tension to scenes by swelling while watching a character walk down a hallway after having a pointless conversation. The villain is lame and a retread of what Zemo was doing in Civil War.

Mackie still has the charisma and abilities to play a character like this, but doesn’t bring the full umph Chris Evans did. Danny Ramirez wasn’t funny enough to strictly be the comic relief when hundreds of others have done more in that realm for this universe. Also, what was with the 4’7” Black Widow cosplayer?

Harrison Ford replaces William Hurt (RIP) as Thunderbolt Ross. Now president, he has the power and responsibility to bring the world together. Getting a much older Ford to play this role was a weird choice. He almost gets more screen time than Cap and it’s just so he can have one hundred conversations about a treaty. If I ever hear the words “treaty” or “buyer” ever again, I’m going to scream.

An aerial battle scene might have been the only thing worth actually writing home about. The action is subpar, the writing is basic, and nothing really feels heavy or like it will matter come the next movie. Captain America 4 should have stayed in the Tv realm, or not existed at all.

3/10

A John Wick copycat set on Valentine’s Day quite possibly just for the open release date. 

Ke Huy Quan finally gets a chance to shine as the lead in a movie, but his mannerisms still feel like they’re meant for a side role. Just like Nobody, Quan isn’t supposed to look the part of a hired killer. The charm of that quickly wears off as his eccentric side overtakes the seriousness of what the film is pretending it wants to be. 

Too many other characters are filling up screen time in an already compact feature. There’s somehow one hundred conversations about backstories that don’t clear anything up by the end and leave you even more lost about relationships. Movies like John Wick work because we get tons of innovative action without needing an over-explanation of things that won’t matter. This gives us the complete opposite of that. 

The action is gory almost to a fault while feeling over choreographed. If it’s supposed to be a more serious world, most of the injuries would have been a lot more deadly. It feels cartoonish at points; humans look like rubber, and way too many props are used- not in a fun way. One particular scene does somehow utilize the violence, action, and humor in a great way, but a surprise hybrid star might be the only reason for that. 

As far as other characters go, we are all over the place. Lio Tipton is back in our lives in a big way. They’re sarcastically real in a not so real world and the best part of the movie. Marshawn Lynch is still trying the acting thing as a mercenary of sorts, which might be the perfect role for him as he wasn’t as bad as expected.The worst part of this has to be Ariana DeBose though. Currently on a streak of I.S.S., Argyle, Kraven the Hunter, and now this, she continues to act like the hottest actor in the world ever since West Side Story.

Putting stunt coordinators behind the camera continues to show it does not work. There’s too much focus on showing what you can do with a few harnesses and blood capsules instead of putting any real likeable characters or new stories on screen.

4.2/10

Companion fails to deliver anything of excitement or surprise. Going in with the knowledge of what is really going on makes all the little hints at it, down right bad. Characters were all ones we’ve seen before and situations that were apparently meant to be shocking, were pretty tame. Nothing fully takes off and that was truly a let down.

You’d think a movie with Barbarian slapped all over the promotional materials would have a little more to it than a big surprise that was spoiled in the final trailer.There’s some cool uses of technology and Harvey Guillen was funny, but it needed more of both. If you like a “good for her” movie, this might be your thing, but it takes a lot of rambling over nothing to get us to the point.

5.6/10