Worth was one of my most anticipated movies of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Director Sara Colangelo returned to the festival following 2018’s The Kindergarten Teacher to tell the true story of Ken Feinberg (played by Michael Keaton), an attorney who battles against cynicism, bureaucracy and politics to help the victims of 9/11. This is a powerful, emotional, masterfully acted film and surely to be one of the best movies out…
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Scare Me is one of the most inventive Midnight movies I have seen during my years at Sundance. A wildly original and incredibly entertaining film filled with meta humor, thrills, and three terrific performances. Fred (Josh Ruben) is a struggling writer who is hiding out in a cabin in the middle of the woods to find inspiration. Fanny (Aya Cash) is a cocky, successful horror writer. The two spend the night…
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Zola plays like the younger sister of Spring Breakers. It is a gorgeously shot, wildly inventive Floridian nightmare with excellent performances. It is a movie that grabs you from minute one and even though it does slow down a bit at some times, it’s a truly hypnotic experience. Based on a legendary, 148-tweet storm from a stripper named Zola (Taylour Paige) who went on a trip to Florida with another stripper named…
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The Mole Agent is a real life spy movie with a twist. This documentary looks at Sergio, and no, Sergio isn’t some debonair young-buck who is continuously fighting evil henchmen, he’s an 83-year-old who barely knows how to work a cellphone. So how did he become a spy? He was hired by Chilean police to infiltrate a retirement home where there is suspicion of abuse and negligence. But what Sergio discovers when…
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Another year, another Sundance. This is my tenth(!) year attending the Sundance Film Festival and I get excited every single year. This is the greatest film festival when it comes to independent film. So many names have broken out of Sundance to direct Marvel movies and win Oscars. Every year we get a new crop of unique movies from up-and-coming filmmakers from around the world and this year’s crop is the most interesting in years. …
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The career of Nicholas Cage is one that could be studied for years. Starting out as a comedic actor in the 80’s in such films as Moonstruck and Raising Arizona, Cage went on to become one of Hollywood’s great leading men in the 90’s, leading anything from action films to Oscar heavyweights. Cage even won an Oscar for 1995’s Leaving Las Vegas and was nominated again in 2002 for Spike Jonez’s Adaptation. Cage has always been…
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Disturbing the Peace is a small-time movie about a small-time town. This is the kind of town that has one bank, one diner, one gas station, and the same family owns all three. It’s the kind of town that would protest the building of McDonalds because it would hurt the business of the diner, yet the town fails to realize the kind of jobs it would offer for the town that might…
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It’s been seventeen years since the last time we saw Detective Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Detective Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence). Seventeen years since we saw the two adrenalin-fueled detectives cause chaos and mayhem up and down South Beach in Miami, shooting up bad guys while cracking jokes back-and-forth at each other and getting yelled at by their quick-tempered Captain (Joe Pantoliano). Man, did I miss these guys. The Bad Boys series is a…
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We’re finally here. The 2010s are officially over (and have been for almost two weeks now) and what a decade it was. When the decade began, I was in my final semester of film school at DePaul University in Chicago. Now, ten years later, I run my own website as a movie critic. Did I see myself in this position when the decade started? Absolutely not. I still can’t believe this is something I get…
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I saw a lot of movies over the last decade and with that, I saw a lot of performances too. The amount of great performances I saw over the last ten years was ridiculous, so making this list was incredibly tough and took a number of rewatches and some deep thinking. What makes a great performance? The key factor for me when making this list was which performance had the biggest impact on me. Which…
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