6 Best Movies To Watch After The Dirty Dozen (1967)
Irena's Vow
This year's TIFF featured three tales of lost souls forging their own paths -- some of them bloodier than others. Tales of transformation are the order of the day at this year's TIFF, signposted by a trio of European films acutely concerned with the struggles women and AFAB people undertake to thrive -- or, in many cases, just survive. Take Héléna Klotz's spellbinding second feature, Spirit of Ecstasy, an icy but enthralling coming-of-age story centered around Jeanne Francoeur (Claire Pommet, best known under her French pop star alias Pomme) a non-binary child of a French gendarme who struggles to break through the glass ceiling of the French wealth management firm they work at as a quantitative analyst. Jeanne cuts a mysterious figure, with their black bob, turquoise suit that acts like armor ("the new proletarian uniform"), the bindings that cut into their skin and make them bleed. At all times, Klotz paints Jeanne as a figure constantly struggling to break free of their environment, whose abusive upbringing in the French gendarmerie barracks pushes them inexorably towards a cutthroat, ambitious business environment ready to chew them up and spit them out at a moment's notice. Continue Reading →
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
One of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One's earliest pieces of marketing was a trailer-by-way-of-behind-the-scenes featurette. In that clip, Tom Cruise, strapped to a motorcycle, rockets off the edge of a cliff in the Swiss Alps. He lets the bike drop away before popping his parachute and sailing into the horizon. It's one of the most death-defying sequences ever captured on film and, as we now know, it's one Cruise himself did again and again and again. The sequence, even devoid of context, sums up exactly what director Chris McQuarrie and Cruise (the two are also co-producers) hoped to achieve in Dead Reckoning: grade A movie spectacle. Continue Reading →
Sisu
Jalmari Helander's WWII action flick glues Inglourious Basterds to Mad Max Fury Road, and it's a fist-pumping blast. (This review is part of our 2022 Toronto International Film Festival coverage.) Inglourious Basterds' Lt. Aldo Raine would be pretty proud of Jalmari Helander's gonzo spaghetti-Western-meets-WWII actioner Sisu; like he, the film is interested in "one thing, and one thing only... killin' Nazis." And so it goes with the TIFF 2022 Midnight Madness pick, a roaring rampage of revenge that commits to its stylized schtick -- even if that means it feels a little thin. Continue Reading →
Dune
When I first heard the announcement of a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus Dune, I think I might have groaned and said, “God, not again.” Even with the cult followings that Lynch’s now-disowned 1984 version and SyFy’s plodding 2000 miniseries have amassed, there has yet to be a version that had the kind of mass appeal that gets butts in seats. Continue Reading →
The Suicide Squad
In the last decade, there have been numerous shitty attempts to replicate the success of the Marvel Studios formula, but Suicide Squad (2016) may be the worst of the worst. Writer/director David Ayer’s dark and gritty tone clashed with the pop music-heavy trailers, marketing that included songs already used by – and meant to remind viewers of – Guardians of the Galaxy. In the end, the studio hired that same trailer company to re-cut the movie, which was released into theaters as an incomprehensible mess. Noticeably missing a “2” in its title, The Suicide Squad is essentially a 200 million dollar do-over. It’s the movie Warner Brothers should’ve made five years ago. Continue Reading →
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
Just a few days after he passed, it was clear that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film. Back in 2012, Lionsgate made the financial decision to milk a fourth movie out of the Hunger Games trilogy, keeping their cash cow going until November 2015. While Catching Fire made for a worthwhile outing in its own right, the back half of the series does its best to annihilate any goodwill it’d accumulated. Continue Reading →