3 Best Movies To Watch After Django Unchained (2012)

While the general world of theatrical comedies remains elusive at multiplexes everywhere, one strain of the genre keeps on chugging in theaters. The Last Vegas/Going in Style/Book Club-style comedy is still going strong. Titles focusing on a wacky trio or quartet of famous actors over 60 persist at Cinemarks everywhere. Even Book Club 2: The Next Chapter’s box office failure last year couldn't stop this subgenre. On the surface, The Fabulous Four looks like another breezy summertime entry in this domain. In many ways, including its flat third act, it totally is. Yet, some distinctive and even downright weird touches keep it from being another Wild Hogs pastiche. Back in the day, Marilyn (Bette Midler), surgeon Lou (Susan Sarandon), singer Alice (Megan Mullaly), and botanist Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph) were best friends growing up in New York City. After a few decades, though, those friendships have grown complicated. Lou and Marilyn, specifically, are no longer on speaking terms. However, that frayed dynamic is about to get “repaired” now that the latter character is getting married. While preparing for a lavish wedding in Key West, she yearns for her best friends to be her bridesmaids—all three of them. Alice and Kitty tricking Lou into traveling to Key West was only the beginning of their struggles. Once these former pals reunite, tensions clearly haven't frayed between the duo. Unresolved conflict looms over every pre-wedding celebration, even once Lou begins a flirty rapport with local DILF Ted (Bruce Greenwood). Can this quartet reunite and become “the fabulous four” again? Or will yesteryear’s turmoil capsize a once beautiful friend group? Continue Reading →

What is Horizon? It's a question that plagues the sprawling cast of characters in Kevin Costner's new Western saga, his return to feature filmmaking after staking out a healthy retirement fund (and keeping himself in the public eye of America's dads) with five seasons on Paramount's popular neo-Western soap Yellowstone. Most of them, one way or another, have been drawn West with the promise of prosperity thanks to mysterious flyers published nationwide; settlers, homesteaders, and forty-niners all rush out there to find their future and their fortune. But, as with so many tales of the frontier, down this way lies danger: Apaches, privateers, the shadows of your past following you into the unknown seeking vengeance. Horizon, it seems, is the intangible dream of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, the romantic core of this nation's history (and the brutal underbelly of violence that created it). But it's also important to ask what Horizon is for Costner, especially in the context of this first chapter: Part 1, a three-hour prologue that sets up what could be up to three chapters to come but which gives audiences little to grab onto in that lengthy time period. Much like Dune: Part One before it, it's hard to gauge a film's merits when its story is incomplete by its very nature. Comparisons to "How the West Was Won" have been made, but it also evokes the epic miniseries events of the 1970s and 1980s like Lonesome Dove and The Blue and the Grey, multi-night appointment viewing that told novelistic stories with lavish production values. "Horizon" most echoes these in its structure, a TV-etic format that seems oddly fitting for Costner's return to film after so much time in the TV landscape himself. But Part 1's greatest asset (and hurdle) comes from its opening act, the inciting incident for much of the plot's primary thrust. 1859, the San Pedro Valley; a group of settlers put down stakes and form a small tent city, complete with loving families and even a bustling dance hall. Tragically, this bliss is interrupted by a raiding party of Apaches, angry at the "white-eyes" stealing their land, a forty-minute sequence as brutal as it is terrifying. This is the Costner of Dances With Wolves, in all its power and old-fashioned attitudes: scenes full of Western grandeur, yet suffused with an exoticism of Native peoples that hasn't quite updated to the modern day. Continue Reading →

Long overshadowed by Sideways, we’re giving this understated dramedy its due for depicting Midwest with the specificity Hollywood rarely gives it. Alexander Payne’s Nebraska is as unassuming as the regular Midwestern folk it depicts. Even though this small, quiet, black-and-white comedy was flooded with nominations during the 2013 awards season it won almost none of them. Ten years on, it remains overshadowed by Payne’s more popular works like Sideways and Election. But this odd little dramedy is not only one of Payne’s finest films to date, it’s also his one true love letter to his home state of Nebraska and the Midwest itself. Elderly alcoholic Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) has fallen for a Publisher’s Clearinghouse–style scam and is convinced he’s won a million dollars. Determined to collect the cash in person, son David (Will Forte) ignores his mother and brother’s pleas and agrees to drive him all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. On the way, the pair get waylaid in Woody’s hometown of Hawthorne, giving David a glimpse of not just who his father is, but how a place and the people in it shaped him. Continue Reading →