Movie Reviews

      Illumination Animation makes animated movies for children.  That might sound obvious, but it really isn’t.  Studios like Pixar and Laika are known for making animated movies that are wonderfully animated, full of action and excitement, yet also have deep themes that resonate with kids and adults.  Just think of this years Incredibles 2, which is rich in themes about gender roles and parenting, yet is also as entertaining as anything in 2018. But…

        The Girl in the Spider’s Web is the fourth book in the Millennium book series, which follows the adventures of anti-social computer hacker Lisbeth Salander and writer Mikael Blomqvist.  The first three books were written by Stieg Larsson and then taken over by David Lagercrantz, who wrote Spider’s Web. However, in American cinema, it is only the second film of this series, following David Fincher’s grungy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo back in 2011. …

        Before Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody came out, I would tell people that the movie was guaranteed to get a two-star rating.  The reasoning behind it was that even if the movie was bad, the music and the performances alone would warrant it an okay rating.  Queen is one of the greatest bands of all-time, and the movie surely couldn’t be that bad. I was wrong.  Not even the legendary music of Queen can save Bohemian Rhapsody. …

There seemed to be a lot of hype around David Gordon Green’s Halloween and I don’t understand why.  It wasn’t like this was the first movie where Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) came back and fought Mike Myers or the first sequel in the franchise.  I don’t remember anyone getting this excited for Rob Zombie’s remake, nor the sequel.  Was it because people were excited for another David Gordon Green project?  Or maybe a Danny McBride co-written…

        Jonah Hill is an actor who has worked with some of the best directors in the game today, such as Scorsese, Tarantino, Miller, Van Sant, and the Coen Brothers.  As an actor, working with these directors is probably a dream, especially if an actor has aspirations of becoming a director.  It is essentially the best directing class you could ask for.  So the idea of Hill directing a movie sounded intriguing….

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             How do we suppress pain?  That is the question that is asked in Jumpman, Ivan I. Tverdovskiy’s drama that played in competition at the 2018 Chicago International Film Festival. Denis (Denis Vlasenko) has lived his entire life in an…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             A lot of people have a negative connotation of film festival movies.  A lot of people think that a lot of them are dense, or have a heavy subject matter, or are too vague and ambiguous.  This is…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.         On paper, a documentary about the history of Chicago advertising sounds rough.  Half the people who read that first sentence probably fell asleep while reading it.  But Ky Dickens latest documentary is a fascinating, compelling documentary and a small love-letter…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.           No, this isn’t a Lion King origin story.  Rafiki, which means “friend” in Swahili, is a forbidden love story about tomboy Kena (Samantha Mugatsia) who falls in love with Ziki (Shelia Munyiva), though not without problems.  Besides the fact that both of…

*NOTE: This review is going to be a CAPSULE review, which means it’ll be a tight, quick critique of the film as opposed to the more in-depth reviews I usually do.             Joël Karekezi’s film The Mercy of the Jungle tells the story of Sergeant Xavier (Marc Zinga) and Private Faustin (Stéphane Bak), two men who get separated from their troop and must travel long distances to join them.  However,…