Review: "It Comes at Night"

by Chris Feil

After last year’s Krisha, Trey Edward Shults returns to the horror of family dynamics with post-apocalyptic nightmare It Comes At Night. This time he’s equipped with higher production value and more familiar faces than that astute micro-budgeted debut, though Night is just as personal. His resulting sophomore feature is part Greek tragedy, part vague social polemic, and one of the most terrifying films in several years.

Set in a remote, wooded mini-mansion, a family has made their home a fortress from some unspecified apocalypse. The elderly father of Sarah (Carmen Ejogo) has fallen “sick”, leaving her husband Paul (Joel Edgerton) and son Travis (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) to dispatch of him for their own safety. The desperate invasion of another family (led by Christopher Abbott and Riley Keough) tests both the reclusive family’s empathy and rigorously protected lifestyle. Meanwhile, Travis is having increasingly vivid visions of the encroaching malignant threat that test his (and our) sense of reality.

Click to read more ...

Review: "Wonder Woman"

by Chris Feil

The absurdly long wait for Wonder Woman to arrive on the big screen is officially over with the arrival of Patty Jenkins’s stellar adaptation. Gal Gadot may have been the all-too-brief bright spot of last year’s Batman v Superman, but in her own story she emerges as a hero for the ages.

While this is yet another superhero origin story, Wonder Woman’s conviction keeps its more common beats alive. Gadot’s Diana is raised to be a warrior among the Amazons, with a strong sense of true justice, under the watchful eye of her mother Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) and trainer Antiope (Robin Wright). On the otherwordly arrival of earthly spy pilot Steve Trainor (Chris Pine), Diana sets out for a righteous battle with destiny on the World War I front.

Click to read more ...

I Was Tricked Into Seeing "Baywatch"

by Sean Donovan

Of the men currently dominating American movie box offices, few are more men than Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. And by this I don’t mean to praise or value anything specific in their incarnations of masculinity, rather I mean that when one watches Dwayne Johnson or Zac Efron, it’s as if they are working at every fraction of a second to scream in reminder to you “I AM A MAN! I HAVE MUSCLES! I AM STRONG! I EAT MEAT! I PROVIDE FOR MY WIFE AND CHILDREN!” It’s a function of the danger men in real life often pose that masculinity isn’t something we can easily mock or laugh at.

Not so with Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron (and to a lesser extent Chris Hemsworth). Masculinity is rarely sillier than in a Dwayne Johnson movie, the actor’s mind-boggling physique dominating every frame, each new performance somehow more muscled and over-the-top than before. Johnson’s instagram is a running tribute to the inflated absurdity of his sweat-drenched lifestyle. Efron, though not as fully the author of his own image as Dwayne Johnson, has found his greatest performances in Neighbors and its equally great sequel, where he plays up an arrogant frat-boy shtick, with peeks to the insecurities underneath, to absolute comic gold. Both allow us to look at hyper-masculinity as something laughable and campy, a cathartic moment we rarely get elsewhere.

Click to read more ...

Review: "Alien: Covenant"

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

If the famed director Ridley Scott were in art school, his professor would be yanking the paintbrush out of his hand — “it’s perfect, stop adding brush strokes!” His wife probably has to pull spices from his hands as he cooks. If you’ve been playing along with this Hollywood giant’s career you know that he can never leave well enough alone. I’ve lost count of how many “versions” there now are of his early sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) and, after years of threats, that film will have a sequel this October, Blade Runner 2049, though Scott opted to pass the directorial reigns over to Denis Villeneuve (Arrival).

Having exhausted returning to that particular sci-fi well, Ridley has moved back even earlier in his career to the film that made him famous, Alien (1979). He’s now directed two prequels to it (Prometheus and now Alien: Covenant) and more films are promised. (Perhaps the controversial ending of 1991’s Thelma & Louise is the only thing that’s kept that film, the third member of his holy trinity of masterworks, free of his tinkering!).

So how’s the new film?

Click to read more ...

Review: "Everything, Everything"

by Chris Feil

It’s not summer without at least once piece of romantic counter-programming, and for the most part Everything, Everything is a cut above the last few years’ offerings. There is a surprising amount of imagination in this tale of teenage love, and more genuine feeling. Its sappier side is kept at a softer level throughout, more concerned with showing the intricacies of blossoming young love than pulling your emotional strings. The film is more organic and modest in its emotional beats, until it turns its back on its own strengths.

Newly eighteen Maddy (The Hunger Games’s Amandla Stenberg) has been homebound her whole life, suffering from SCID, a genetical disorder that makes her essentially allergic to the world at large...

Click to read more ...