Month: December 2015

Movie Review: STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS – JJ Abrams directs a Star Wars highlight reel, but the new characters are pretty great.

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TFA

Just back from the worldwide cultural phenomenon that is Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the true new Star Wars movie for anyone that – like me – loathed the inept prequels. I’ve mentioned numerous times over the last couple of weeks on FB and in the real world that I’m not a Star Wars fan, and I’m really, honestly not. The Empire Strikes Back was the last one I enjoyed. Return of the Jedi was very poor, and the prequels were truly bad movies. So I go in to this one first and foremost as a fan of J J Abrams, a director I admire greatly, even if he’s worked on mediocre to just plain bad movies in the past. To me, he’s Spielberg’s natural successor in the world of genre blockbusters, and he was the perfect choice for this new wave of Star Wars movies.

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Movie Review: SICARIO – Denis Villeneuve cements his growing reputation with a gritty, intense thriller.

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Sicario

To be honest, I never had a lot of interest in seeing Sicario in its theatrical run, but I didn’t ignore the good press either. If I’d put two and two together earlier in the year that Denis Villeneuve was the director, I would have saw it theatrically, because his short resume contains really good work. I only know Taylor Sheridan’s name from acting gigs, so that wasn’t a draw for me. Turns out, he’s not a bad writer at all.

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Movie Review: CRIMSON PEAK – Del Toro’s Gothic tale unconvincingly lightweight, overly reliant on CGI.

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Crimson Peak

I always approach Guillermo Del Toro’s movies with some hesitation. In my opinion he’s made two absolutely terrific movies in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, but he’s also made mediocre fare like Mimic and Hellboy, and flat out garbage like Pacific Rim and Hellboy 2. The trailers for Crimson Peak didn’t exactly set my heart fluttering either. A lot of greenscreen CGI work in a haunted house movie is an almost guarantee of bullshit, and then there’s Tom Hiddleston (Only Lovers Left Alive, High Rise).
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