Movie Reviews and Previews Regina Hall and Morris Chestnut in When the Bough Breaks If ever a movie needed to be rated R, it’s When the Bough Breaks, the evil-surrogate “thriller” from Screen Gems, the latest in what has become their annual fall tradition of releasing a bad genre movie aimed at black audiences (see also: The Perfect Guy, No Good Deed). I By Sarah • Sep 26, 2016 11:54 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Mediocre Bastards It’s fall, which means it’s time for trailers for award bait films, holiday-season tent poles, and the utter dreck that gets buried out back during January. This post is about a road-comedy movie starring Owen Wilson and Ed Helms—guess which category it falls into? The movie is By Sarah • Sep 23, 2016 02:48 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Scarlett Johansson unplugs from the Matrix I know Ghost in the Shell comes from a super famous manga comic from the 1980s, but the teasers just released for the movie make it look like a knock-off Matrix. The teasers, which you can watch below in one video, are just a few seconds each and reveal distinct By Sarah • Sep 23, 2016 01:36 pm
Amazingness Hillary Between Two Ferns I don’t think I’ve gotten quite enough people yelling at me about politics and the election, so let’s talk about Hillary Clinton’s appearance on Between Two Ferns. Yesterday the twentieth episode of Between Two Ferns came out and it features Hillary Clinton doing some #MillennialOutreach by By Sarah • Sep 23, 2016 11:59 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt in The Magnificent Seven Antoine Fuqua’s remake of the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven—itself a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film Seven Samurai—was the opening film at TIFF. I missed the press screening, so I had to wait a couple days to see it, and during that time everyone kept By Sarah • Sep 23, 2016 10:35 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Tom Hanks in Sully In 2009 airline pilot Captain Chesley Sullenberger successfully landed a passenger jet on the Hudson River, saving the lives of everyone on board. It was a truly amazing feat, and “Sully” became an overnight hero. The predictable media wave followed—interviews, book deal, and, now, a feature film directed by By Sarah • Sep 22, 2016 04:32 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Jared Leto to ruin Andy Warhol next This week in “Of Course, Of F*cking COURSE” news, it’s been reported that obnoxious dickhead actor Jared Leto will portray Andy Warhol in a biopic of the artist titled simply Warhol. Leto will not be pissing out this performance as he did all his previous performances, since being By Sarah • Sep 22, 2016 01:43 pm
Scarlett Johansson Joss Whedon’s celebrity friends want you to vote Joss Whedon founded a Super PAC (America’s campaigning rules are Byzantine and insane) called Save The Day and announced it today with a PSA filled with his celebrity friends. There are the Avengers, repped by RDJ, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo, Clark Gregg, Don Cheadle, and Cobie Smulders; and comedy By Sarah • Sep 21, 2016 03:21 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews America’s Sweethearts to the rescue As 2016 continues its quest to destroy everything we love, let your feelings over #JolieSplitt (h/t Dianna) be soothed by Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, America’s Sweethearts, coming to save you, literally, in the first trailer for their movie Passengers. The never-ending cycle of franchise movie advertising has By Sarah • Sep 20, 2016 04:31 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Pass on Blair Witch Director Adam Wingard and writer Simon Barrett have made two of my favorite genre films of the last several years, You’re Next and The Guest. These guys are really good at remixing genre standards into something fresh and a little weird. So when it came out earlier in the By Sarah • Sep 16, 2016 12:00 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: Brimstone Though it’s not mentioned in the article about male directors tackling rape narratives that I linked to in the Una review, the last film I saw at TIFF is another instance of a man directing a female protagonist in a rape narrative, and that is Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhoven’ By Sarah • Sep 15, 2016 12:44 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Rooney Mara in Una While standing in line for Una, the film adaptation of David Harrower’s play Blackbird, earlier this week, one of the PR reps for the film told me she had already noticed an audience divide forming around it—men almost uniformly hated it, but women were moved by it. Then, By Sarah • Sep 15, 2016 10:16 am
Movie Reviews and Previews Nick Cannon loves himself in The King of the Dancehall Nick Cannon turned up with this allegedly true story about Tarzan Brixton, a Brooklyn transplant who mastered the art of dancing in Kingston, Jamaica and became a dancehall champion in what is basically Step Up 2 Jamaican Streets. The King of the Dancehall is laughably bad, but it’s the By Sarah • Sep 14, 2016 01:06 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Manchester by the Sea deserves the hype Manchester by the Sea is Kenneth Lonergan’s third film, and his strongest result yet. The story centers on Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a custodian in Boston who learns of his brother’s death and goes home to the fishing village of Manchester by the Sea to settle his brother’ By Sarah • Sep 14, 2016 10:31 am
Movie Reviews and Previews TIFF Review: A United Kingdom There’s a common problem with biopics and historical dramas of trying to do too much. It’s what makes a biopic feel overstuffed and shallow at the same time—there’s a lot of information being imparted, but the constant stream of exposition means less time devoted to story By Sarah • Sep 13, 2016 05:33 pm
Movie Reviews and Previews Amy Adams makes Arrival Space movies are making a comeback, thanks to audiences who only turn out for widescreen spectacles (same reason Westerns are coming back), and in Arrival we get one of the better recent space movies, even though technically, it doesn’t take place in space. Directed by Denis Villeneuve, and adapted By Sarah • Sep 13, 2016 12:21 pm
