Movie Reviews

Here are my reviews of Prisoners of the Ghostland, First Date, and Land from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.         PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND Though he’s an Oscar-winning actor, it feels like Nicolas Cage is more known for the amount of roles he takes and the insanity he brings to his movies.  Though one of our great actors of the 90’s and early 2000’s, Cage has spent the last decade starring in movies that allow him…

Along with all the feature films I watched throughout the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, I was also able to watch a number of shorts.  Though I wasn’t able to watch an entire shorts program curated by the programmers, these eight shorts were a diverse group of genres, styles, and topics.     THE AFFECTED The Affected looks at how a social protest affects every person on an airplane.  Set to take off with a refugee…

Here are my reviews for a trio of documentaries that premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival: Cusp, Misha and the Wolves, and Captains of Zaatari.   CUSP Cusp is a piece of Texas American in its purest, rawest form.  The film looks at a trio of high school teenage friends, Brittany, Autumn, and Aaloni, during a fever dream summer.  Throughout this summer, we watch as these free-spirited girls go through the struggles of girlhood while living in…

Here are my reviews for Eight for Silver, R#J, and Jockey from the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.     Eight for Silver Within the first five minutes of Sean Ellis’ Eight for Silver we see body parts being amputated and bullets being graphically removed from a body all to the backdrop of World War I.  This immediately sets the tone for what we are about to witness for the next nearly two hours: a film that is brutal, violent,…

Here are my review of Strawberry Mansion, Mass, and A Glitch in the Matrix, which played at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.         STRAWBERRY MANSION   It seems like there is always somebody saying that films are not original anymore.  That movies are only franchises, remakes, or based on previous material.  These people would be wrong, and it is a movie like Strawberry Mansion that proves just how original films still are.  This is a colorful,…

Here are my reviews for How It Ends and On the Count of Three, which had their premieres at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.       HOW IT ENDS   How It Ends is one of the more unique end-of-the-world movies I have ever seen.  It’s a quirky, weird, often hilarious odyssey through Los Angeles filled with celebrity cameos and a sweet story. On the last day on Earth, Liza (Zoe Lister-Jones) goes on a journey through…

Here are my reviews for the films CODA, Flee, and Censor, which debuted at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.       CODA   The 2021 Sundance Film Festival kicked off in the best way possible.  Sian Heder’s CODA is an absolute delight of a movie.  A funny, sweet, beautiful family story with a huge heart and great performances. The film follows Rubi Rossi (Emilia Jones) a hearing child in a deaf family.  Because Rubi is the only in the…

      The Little Things is as basic as cop thrillers get.  The IMDb plot description is “two cops track down a serial killer” and that’s very accurate because that is really all that happens.  Though it tries to add layers to its characters and story, the film never reaches its full potential and instead ends up being a mildly captivating, overlong thriller with solid performances. In The Little Things, Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel…

        La Casa begins with a series of archival news footage looking at a haunted house in a town in Chile.  The footage gives us a history of the house and the family that lived there, who were trying to start a family and when they were unable to conceive a child, they resorted to black magic for help, though when the child was finally born it was born deformed.  This caused madness…

        Outside the Wire is a futuristic, militarized version of 2001’s Training Day.  A movie that looks at a rookie on the job who follows along his too-good-at-his-job leader while questioning some of his methods in getting the job done.  This is a movie we’ve all seen before, but the thrilling action and a captivating lead performance keep this one relatively interesting. Set in 2036, drone pilot Lieutenant Thomas Harpa (Damson Idris) is…