Homophobia Creates an Inescapable Cage For The Main Characters of The Wound

Like many films exploring the perspectives of queer individuals in societies that refuse to accept who they are, The Wound is a movie all about identity. Directed by John Trengrove and shot in South Africa, The Wound is the story of Xolani (Nakhane), who is hired to serve as the guide for Kwanda (Niza Jay Ncoyini) during a sacred initiation ceremony meant to turn boys into men. The adults in these ceremonies have a very clear idea of what a proper grown man should be and these rituals help mold their children into fitting that idea, one that does not have any place for the presence of homosexuality. At first, Xolani goes through the motions of his now regular annual job of being a mentor figure for a new kid, but he soon learns that Kwanda, like himself, is gay. This, along with Xolani's secret relationship with fellow mentor Vija (Bongile Mantsai).

Too Many Generic Storytelling Turns Hinder The Interesting Titular Lead Character of Carrie Pilby

Being intellectually gifted has served Carrie Pilby (Bel Powley) well in some areas of her life, such as her academic pursuits that had her skipping grades like crazy and then going to Harvard at a young age. On the other hand, that same IQ has left her distancing herself heavily from people, meaning she's a 19-year-old with little to no social experience. Her therapist, Dr. Petrov (Nathan Lane), suggests Carrie Pilby put together a list of goals (which consist of stuff like "Going On A Date" or "Make A Friend") that she can achieve in the coming months so that she can begin to expand her horizons in meaningful ways.

Song to Song Is Out of Tune And Devoid of Substance

Here we go again...here we go again.

Yes, Terrence Malick returned to the silver screen this year with Song to Song, his fourth directorial effort in the last eight years, a stunning turnaround in terms of output considering the long gaps of time between projects in his filmography prior to 2011. Now he's just churning these things out like a madman and while his work ethic that's rivaling Ridley Scott or Takashi Miike is admirable, the quality of his recent efforts suggest he should maybe chillax, take a breather and come up with some kind of imagery or atmosphere he wants to exude before filming a movie instead of just tossing a bunch of major actors into a number of disparate locales and calling it a day.

CHiPS Will Drive You Up The Wall With Its Abysmally Unfunny Attempts At Comedy

Look, when I said I wanted Michael Pena to headline more movies, I didn't mean....like this.

There's a lot of things that one could describe as odd about CHiPS on a basic conceptual level beyond the fact that human beings funded a major feature film adaptation of the 1970's TV show CHiPS in 2017. Most notably, the screenplay for CHiPS, which has its script credited solely to Dax Shepard, who also directs and headlines the film, seems to be channeling classic action/comedy cop movies (the kind Shane Black popularized) with extended action sequences, most notably one introducing us to the films antagonists played by Vincent D'onofrio, that are played entirely straight-faced. It then moves into the kind of raunchy foul-mouthed humor you'd expect from a D-grade R-rated American comedy in 2017.

Nibble On Some Thoughtful Cannibalism With Raw

The most sublime entries in the world of horror fare tend to work best when its lead characters are well-rounded individuals whose plights already make for interesting cinema even before the blood, guts and what have you get unleashed. John Carpenter's The Thing and Halloween movie are great examples of this as are recent horror classics like Get Out, The VVitch and It Comes At Night. Hailing from France, the motion picture Raw, it turns out, is yet another example of a modern-day horror movie leaning just as heavily on characterization as it does on scares. This allows it to have an extremely thoughtful base rooted in relatable human experiences for it to build its insane, disturbing and gore-filled storyline upon.

Before I Fall Garners Some Real Substance In Its Time Loop Tale

The whole "Groundhog Dog" plot of repeating the same day over and over again didn't just float into existence with that early 1990's Bill Murray comedy but boy howdy did that movie ever popularize such a storytelling device. We've seen tons of movies or TV shows utilize this format over the past two decades and it's especially gotten a lot of mileage in recent years with projects like Edge of Tomorrow (or Live.Die.Repeat, whatever floats your boat), the upcoming horror film Happy Death Day and a Ry Russo-Young directed feature from earlier this year entitled Before I Fall, which transports this format of storytelling to a more somber atmosphere.

Table 19 Wastes A Talented Cast On An Underwhelming Script

Eloise (Anna Kendrick) didn't want to be here. Not only is this the wedding that she helped put together before being abruptly dismissed from such duties, but this wedding she's attending also puts her into direct contact with her ex-boyfriend, Teddy (Wyatt Russell), who just so happens to be the Best Man of this wedding (that's why she got let go from helping to plan the wedding). It's an experience she's not exactly elatedly anticipating but she's here and she's gonna make the best of it. At least she has plenty of people to talk to at the table, table 19 (hey, that's the title!) she's been situated at, with her table-mates being an assorted group of quirky individuals played by Lisa Kudrow, June Squibb, Craig Robinson, Stephen Merchant and Tony Revelori.

The Slipshod Boss Baby Only Show Flashes Of Creativity In Some Of Its Visuals

DreamWorks Animation used to have some real ambition as a studio, or, at least, the promise of ambition. If the radically different tones and aesthetics of their first two films (Antz and The Prince Of Egypt) suggested a studio that could create a wide variety of animated motion pictures, well, they've been inconsistent in fulfilling that promise over the course of the next two decades. For every Shrek (only the first two!), How To Train Your Dragon or Kung Fu Panda that showed real imagination and artistic promise, you also had stuff like The Road To El Dorado, Bee Movie and Trolls that had them chasing other popular animated family movies for quick and easy profits. When it comes to creating worthwhile cinema, ya win some, ya lose some in the world of DreamWorks Animation.

The Assignment Shoots Its Viewers Full Of Boredom

Sometimes seemingly boring events turn out to be lots of fun, which is always a nice surprise. But there's also a chance you're gonna get the reverse situation, wherein something that sounds at least off-the-wall and bizarre turns out to be as tedious as an extended lecture on the various types of paints available at your local Home Depot. I'm afraid to report that The Assignment is very much a clear-cut example of the latter scenario, with a film that drew (understandable) criticism when it was first announced from the LGBTQA community turning out to be such a dull film that it isn't even worth dragging it through the coals on its shortcomings in depicting (in an obviously stylized) gender-reassignment surgery, though I freely admit I say that as cis-gendered man so I should not be the defenitive word on that matter.

A Strong Jessica Chastain Performance, A Quiet Atmosphere And Some Cute Animals Are All Notable Elements Of The Zookeeper's Wife

The opening scene of The Zookeeper's Wife is so awesome and something I would have been more than happy to watch for six or seven hours or even longer. For a few minutes, we get to just see Jessica Chastain romp around the zoo she runs with her husband and it's so cool to see her interact with or feed a large number of wild animals. Seeing a gigantic hippo tranquilly eat some apples or watching a tiny camel run alongside Chastain's character riding on a bicycle is quite the entertaining sight. Bonus points for having a scene not long afterward centered on a super adorable baby elephant, even if it does involve the baby elephant in grave peril!

"Take Me Home...T2: Trainspotting....To The Place...I Beloooooong...."

The track record of long-delayed follow-ups to highly beloved pop culture properties isn't exactly littered with tons of success stories. Two notable examples of this trend came in 2013, when Arrested Development came back with a narratively ambitious new season that was OK but not quite as successful as its initial seasons while Anchorman 2 reunited Ron Burgundy with his news team for occasionally humorous but mostly just scattered antics. I'd imagine director Danny Boyle knew about this trend going into the making of T2: Trainspotting, a follow-up to the 1996 film Trainspotting, and if he did, he'd likely be happy to know that T2: Trainspotting is a massive departure from that trend in that it's a worthy follow-up to the original movie.

Personal Shopper Is A Fresh Take On Coping With Loss That Ain't Afraid Of No Ghost!

I've remarked in past reviews (namely my review of Manchester By The Sea) about how each of us grapples with the loss of loved ones in profoundly different ways. This also extends to how long each person copes with the passing of people near and dear to them. Some people can manage to filter all those emotions in a rapid manner and manage to go through the process of accepting this major quietus that has disrupted their lives, others take a much longer time to come to terms with this kind of event. No one ever fully overcomes the death of a loved one but it obviously varies in countless ways in terms of how long it can take people to return to a state of normalcy after these kinds of passings. For the protagonist of Personal Shopper, well, she may never be able to fully get over the death of a loved one that's causing her so much pain.

KNOCK KNOCK YOU ABOUT TO GET (Ghost In The) SHELL SHOCKED

There's a lot of blockbuster movies that combine thoughtfulness with high-octane action. The Matrix is a great example of this, ditto for The Dark Knight or Mad Max: Fury Road or the original Jurassic Park. The new live-action take on Ghost In The Shell appears to be striving to join the ranks of those films as beloved pieces of filmmaking that manage to contain both lots of punching and an equal amount of ideas that'll leave viewers pondering for quite a while. Unfortunately, neither the themes nor the action in Ghost In The Shell turn out to be all that interesting with both elements coming out as simply being frustratingly undercooked.

Indulging In Sentimentality And Conventionality Derails The Discovery

Death is an inevitability but just because it's guaranteed to come does not make its imminent arrival more enticing, similar to how knowing Nickelback will eventually have another album unleashed on the unwitting masses does not make that actual event more pleasing to experience. We always fear death, no matter what circumstances bring about its arrival, but in The Discovery, the prospect of death has become something people eagerly greet with open arms, to the point that there's been a swarm of suicides over the course of two years. What on Earth kind of event could account for this morbid turn of events?

The Sense Of An Ending Falls Quite Short Of Being A Riveting Page-Turner

The past is always a difficult thing to grapple with, particularly past regrets and mistakes. Lord knows I myself have spent countless nights sitting in bed thinking about all the social faux pas and other mistakes I've committed over my life and I do not think I'm the only one who's been consumed by such late-night mournful reminiscing. I'd wager very single human being has got their own personal foibles from their past that they can't help but obsess over and Tony Webster (Jim Broadbent), the lead character of the new drama The Sense Of An Ending, is far from an exception in this regard.

Get Trapped With Overly Familiar But Sometimes Chilling Thrills In Life

Jake Gyllenhaal has been on quite the roll lately. His exemplary lead turn in Nightcrawler was one of the peak moments of his entire career and even in something more middling like Southpaw Gyllenhaal managed to craft a solid performance out of a subpar script. Last years Nocturnal Animals continued his recent career choices of doing bold and daring projects by offering Gyllenhaal a chance to inhabit a tortured persona to fascinating results. So, of course, after all these challenging dramas, it's no shocker that the next big movie Jake Gyllenhaal is headlining is Life, a science-fiction horror film chock full of blood and mayhem, just like Nocturnal Animals. What I'm trying to say is that Life is the exact same movie as Nocturnal Animals.

Broken Souls Find Momentary Comfort And Longer-Lasting Pain In Persona

Sight & Sound Voyage Entry #16
Placement On Sight & Sound Top 50 Movies List: #28

Let it never be said that Ingmar Bergman does not start off his movies in a manner reminiscent of the immortal Smash Mouth lyric "...hit the ground running." The very first scene in Persona is an abstract compilation of seemingly unrelated footage playing off, some of it grisly, some of it silly, before we see a nameless character emerge from a hospital bed and approach a giant screen. Then the opening credits start up, kicking off the plot proper. Once that was all over, I kind of just had to pause for a moment and figure out what on Earth I had just watched. The fact that the film itself just casually goes about its business after that perplexing opening sequence. Okee-dokee, I guess that's the kind of motion picture I'm in for?

Normalcy Gives Way To Gruesome Bloodshed In The Belko Experiment

Horror movies have always played up the idea that those closest to you can't be trusted, that they have the potential to become monsters under certain circumstances. That's kind of the crux of the whole zombie genre, the concept of your loved ones, friends and neighbors being turned into mindless flesh-eating monsters. You can also see this idea coursing through horror movie masterpieces like The Happening, where both an airborne virus and terrible screenwriting has seemingly normal people acting strange. The Belko Experiment, a new horror film from director Greg McClean, that takes that concept of normal people going malicious and places it in the confines of a cubicle-filled office space.

Disney's Live-Action Beauty And The Beast Is Overly Derivative Of The Original Animated Classic But Is Still An Entertaining Musical Romp

This new live-action take on Beauty And The Beast is an oddball little movie. It wants to be so much like the original 1991 animated classic its remaking, yet it also wants to be a more quasi-realistic take on the source material. That sense of realism also rubs up against its desire to be a big splashy over-the-top musical in some spots. When it just goes for being a straightforward fairy tale (not unlike the tone set forth in Jean Cocteau's 1946 take on this tale as old as time), it actually works fine. When it's trying to figure out how to ground things in realism while also being overly slavishly faithful to the original movie, well, that's when problems emerge.

The Animals Are Running Mild In We Bought A Zoo

We Bought A Zoo. We Bought A Zoo. We. Bought. A. Zoo. A little over five years after its initial theatrical release, the title of this 2011 Cameron Crowe motion picture still feels like a goofy joke, to the point that the host of this year's Oscars, Jimmy Kimmel, devoted an entire segment of the ceremony to mocking the film as part of his fictitious long-standing feud with Matt Damon. Add in how Cameron Crowe's recent artistic endeavors haven't gone great (Aloha was one of the worst movies of 2015 and his Showtime drama from last year, Roadies, has already been forgotten) and it's not hard to see how We Bought A Zoo has become a punchline.