Few movies explore this experience as succinctly and genuinely as A Real Pain. Through a script that masterfully balances chaotic discomfort and quietude, A Real Pain makes for one of the best film experiences of the year.
All tagged Movie Review
"Heretic" Review: Inventive Horror Brilliantly Investigates Religion
Heretic is a supremely smart, hilarious, and disturbing movie that masterfully balances emotion, logic, and skepticism to craft a story that is sure to inspire broader, deeper conversations about faith and its relationship with control among its audience.
Trust Your Spirit: What Makes Kiki's Delivery Service a Timeless Classic
The theme of trusting your spirit to understand how you want to live your life is an idea that transcends age, gender, nationality, and walk of life. We all have a lot to learn from our spirit, but doing so isn’t an inherently easy thing to do. This is precisely what makes Kiki’s Delivery Service a timeless classic.
"Exhibiting Forgiveness" Review: Exceptional Emotional Examination of Trauma, Hatred, and Forgiving without Forgetting
Exhibiting Forgiveness is an emotional adventure that smartly and gracefully investigates how the broken relationships of the past can inform the new relationships we build in the future. This film excellently reveals information to its audience in a way that humanizes the very real pain experienced and brought about by its characters in honest, profound way.
"Look Back" Review: A Bittersweet Masterpiece about the Shifting Natures of Friendship and Artistry
Look Back is a tender, heartfelt exploration of how much can change in what feels like a short amount of time. So many aspects of our lives shift throughout time. Look Back is an excellent, bittersweet exploration of these shifts and how they inform the person we become.
"The Wild Robot" Review: A Simple, yet Heartful Adventure about Parenthood and Belonging
Beyond providing a fun adventure with stellar and stylish animation, The Wild Robot concerns itself with providing believable characters that overcome believable obstacles that much of its audience, regardless of age, will connect with.
"Strange Darling" Review: A Modern Classic Thriller that Brilliantly Deceives its Audience
Through intelligent framing and using the audiences familiarity with the film’s genre against them, Strange Darling subverts and weaponizes audience expectations, making them just as much of a victim as the many characters who get bested in the film.
"The Art of Self-Defense" Review: A Profound Dissection of Masculinity and Cyclical Violence
Through its dark humor and brilliantly realized characters, The Art of Self-Defense manages to say a lot about violence and masculinity without every coming across as full of itself or preachy. Self-Defense is a film that very much understands what it is and the kind of story it’s trying to tell, and doesn’t attempt to be anything that it isn’t. What results is a film that is tightly focused, funny, and intelligent.
Why "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" Was the Best Animated Film of 2018
What makes Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse so special to me is that a begets its audience to rethink what animation is capable of. This film could have easily adopted a live-action counterpart, or used a more traditional CG art style - but it didn’t. Why was this? Why, in this instance, did Sony choose to take a riskier and more stylistic approach when a safer, more often-used presentation would have been easier (and likely more profitable)? The answer to that…is passion.
"Widows" and the Decay of Love | Movie Review
Widows - while certainly having some excellently realized commentary on modern western culture and the increasing spread of apathy - doesn’t manage to do much you haven’t seen before in a heist film […] It’s certainly flawed, but it’s clear that this film was a product of smart and lovingly-crafted writing and direction, which alone makes it worth a watch.