Films in this category have something to offer but also have one or more flaws that detract from the experience. Still, these movies are probably better than most of the shit on Netflix.
Ava (Jessica Chastain) is an assassin who has started making things very personal at her job(s). She’s started asking her targets what bad thing they did to get themselves added to her hit list, which is a no-no in her line of work. Things get worse for Ava when faulty intel blows up one of her jobs and her employer deems her a loose end. She’s now a target herself. Clearly, Ava needs to disappear but before leaving town, she wants to try to make amends for leaving her family eight years ago without any explanation.
This film surrounds Chastain with lot of familiar faces, including John Malkovich as Ava’s handler, Geena Davis as Ava’s mother, Common as Ava’s former lover/sister’s boyfriend (super awkward), and Colin Farrell as Ava’s boss. After a troubled development, which included a director stepping down due to allegations of assault and abuse, and the movie being renamed, Ava then went straight to VOD because of COVID-19.
All in all, VOD is probably the best place for this film. It’s an interesting portrayal of an assassin’s daily life, which is not as glamorous as some films make it out to be. Ava is an addict who has no one close to her and struggles with guilt. She’s trying to reconnect with her family after walking out on them, a task made much harder when she can’t even tell them what she’s been up to since.
The character bits are solid but due to the nature of Ava’s work, this is an action movie, and the action sequences simply aren’t as good as they need to be. The game has been raised by John Wick and Ava does not measure up. This isn’t a casting problem, as Chastain appears eager and able to follow peers like Charlize Theron and Gal Gadot into action star territory. But Chastian is let down by a lack of imaginative choreography or stylish cinematography. The fight scenes just don’t pop like they need to, and the action sequences need to be stronger for this film to really shine. As it is, Ava is a decent but easily forgettable film, which in the time of COVID still makes it better than most rental options.
Grace is the mysterious new girl in school who limps along with a cane and nearly stole the school newspaper editing job right from the stranglehold position Henry’s been leveraging throughout his entire high school career. Of course he can’t resist her. She’s broken. He wants to fix her, in that grand tradition of teenage boys the world over. Haha, only kidding. Only books and movies think teenage boys lust after loner girls. In real life I’m pretty sure it’s the outgoing cheerleader types, the girls who do most of the work for them.
But then again, Henry (Austin Abrams) is not your typical leading man. Millennials redefined masculinity, and our leading men have reflected the change – think Adam Driver, Paul Dano, Domhnall Gleeson, Dev Patel, Robert Pattinson, Ezra Miller – men who have pushed back against the beer swilling, no feelings having, sexism propagating pigs Hollywood has excused for years. Millennial men ask for consent. They manscape. They try. They like your friends and meet your mother and declare their intentions on IG. Think of 21 Jump Street when Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum first meet Dave Franco’s character. Hill and Tatum are likely borderline millennials themselves, but in this movie, Franco engendered the new man: he cared. He held hands. He waited until you were ready. And now we have Henry, a Generation Z leading man – in fact, a Gen Z leading person, because Gen Z is progressive and inclusive and they know that gender’s a social construct and not tied to a binary system their grandparents were content to force themselves into. Gen Z is diverse and aware; they’re digital natives used to personalized content but not fond of labels. They’re also overwhelmed and lonely. They’re moving away from traditional notions of beauty (well, at least for men) – yesterday’s hunks were broad, buff, and weren’t content with just a 6 pack but had upgraded to an 8 pack. Gen Z’s leading men, like Tom Holland, Finn Wolfhard, and indeed Austin Abrams have leaner, rangier physiques. Even comparatively fit Noah Centineo was body-shamed on Insta for not having abs – though people were quick to come to his defense. Abrams has a mopey, droopy-haired, anemic look about him, handsome in a hurt kind of way, like Kurt Cobain if you’ll allow the reference to – ew – Generation X.
So maybe kids these days really are turned on by chicks with mobility issues and a preternatural affinity for disaffected solitude. At any rate, Henry cannot resist. He’s smitten. But Grace (Lili Reinhart) truly is the walking wounded, and she’s got more ghosts than a teenage boy, even a very sensitive, very vulnerable one, is equipped to deal with.
Even given that I am bad with titles, it still took me a minute to figure out that I’ve read this book, and fairly recently too. It’s a fairly forgettable work of YA and is equally forgettable as a film. Tragic teenage love stories are a well-worn genre and even if Gen Z’s cardigans are slim-cut and their haircuts gender neutral, their love stories still follow the tried and true emotional roller-coaster we’ve all been through. Young love is still young love. Abrams and Reinhart have as much chemistry as their hearts promised in the title. Director Richard Tanne takes the trauma of teenage heartbreak very seriously, as does everyone who’s ever had one. Maybe a little too seriously – the film is coated in apathy and despair, leaving little room for growth or agency or change. I don’t feel we get to know the characters very well, and I was disappointed Henry’s friends get such short shrift in the film compared to the novel. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the film, it just relies too heavily on all the old cliches and fails to stir up much beyond sympathy, which gets tiring after a while. Check out Chemical Hearts if you’re a fan of these actors, or are in need of a genre fix, but otherwise, this movie is missable.
Lots of kids movies like to tell us to embrace our differences but none of them quite celebrate the nerds and weirdos like Magic Camp. Magic camp is pretty much where outcast kids assemble, do weird things, and leave even stranger. But they’re also following their passions and making friends and owning their strengths.
When Theo (Nathaniel McIntyre) receives an invitation to the prestigious institute of magic, he’s kind of surprised. He used to practice magic in order to bond with this father, but since his father’s passing he’s sort of let it go. But since he didn’t apply himself, he’s pretty sure it was a last gift from his father, and he vows to make him proud.
The great thing about magic camp is that each cabin has an actual famous/working magician (and former camper) as their leader. Campers in the diamond cabin are super excited that Darkwood (Gillian Jacobs) has left her Vegas show to teach them, but the hearts cabin are a little less satisfied since David Blaine seems to have backed out last minute, leaving them with Vegas cabbie Andy (Adam Devine). Andy and Darkwood are former lovers and a former professional duo, but ever since she left him to go solo, things have been tense. Magic camp stokes a rivalry between cabins, asking them to compete for the coveted magic top hat, but between Andy and Darkwood there’s a natural animosity that breeds an intense conflict. Everyone wants to win.
I went into this kind of dreading it. You might remember my extreme dislike of Adam Devine, who smiles like the Joker but has dead serial killer eyes. His schtick is to be smug and obnoxious, so it’s hard to imagine anyone really liking him. I’m sort of also not throwing Gillian Jacobs any parades, but I’ll reserve my biggest gripe for Jeffrey Tambor who plays magician mentor and camp owner Preston. This was unfortunate casting that I assume was done well before the world found out he’s a steaming pile of shit. So I’m going to attempt to put all my casting resentments into a nice piece of tupperware, store it in the fridge, and judge this movie on the leftovers.
And you know what? It’s not bad. I mean, it’s not meant for adults. It is newly available to stream on Disney+ and apart from the famous if awful big names in the cast, it feels like it could be an offering from Disney channel. But the opening credit sequence is kind of impressive, although it sets up a better movie that you’ll wish they delivered on. The kids are great, though – they’re exactly the careful mix of ethnicities that you know isn’t really genuine, but we’ll let it go. Young audience members will no doubt like the magical flair as the kids go through an easy to predict sequence of events – you know, succeeding as a team, learning to believe in themselves, all that usual garbage. But with flavourful side dishes like card tricks, illusions, rabbits galore, and plenty of flashy stage costumes. Its plot will be blatantly transparent to anyone over 12, but it follows a tried and true formula that younger kids eat right up. And with a wholesome message to boot, it makes for an easy piece of family viewing.
1947: India and Pakiston are separating. It is a time of violence and unrest. When little Mary (Dixie Egerickx) is left alone in a big house, she remains undiscovered for quite some time. When no parents reappear to claim her, she is sent to England, to live with an uncle she’s never met. Housekeeper Mrs Medlock (Julie Walters) warns that when,or indeed if, her uncle should greet her, she’d better not stare. That’s as warm a welcome as she’s likely to get.
The staff, even sweet Martha (Isis Davis), think her a spoiled brat, and even if it’s true, she can’t help how she’s been raised, and she’s certainly not being corrected here. And she is, after all, a young orphaned girl living in a cold stranger’s house with no one and nothing that’s familiar or kind. Perhaps in 1911 (when the book was first published) it was acceptable to be both judgmental AND neglectful of small children who’ve done nothing wrong except exist, and to ignore the childhood trauma they’ve so recently survived. Our understanding and common sense today is a lot more sympathetic, but the movie is careful not to show it, staying true to its source material. Mary is therefore so lonely in this new place that she makes friends with a mangy dog named Jemima even though she’s clearly afraid of her. But in the complete absence of other children (or so she thinks), a dog will do.
Likely you know the rest. It’s a goddamn classic. Mary finds a beautiful secret garden, makes some friends, they change each other’s lives, and she wins the heart of her reclusive, anxious uncle Archibald (Colin Firth).
My sisters and I loved the 1993 version of the film and I wondered if that would be a hindrance to my enjoying this one. I can’t say for sure of course, whether I’ve managed to be unbiased or not, but I never quite felt this film justified its existence. Hopefully it allows a new generation of kids to discover the book, and perhaps the universe simply needs to reboot stories like this periodically. It’s a criminal under-use of both Colin Firth and Julie Walters, but that’s just being true to the story. Are the kids cute? Sure they are, and not bad actors either, and it’s not a bad move introducing even just a bit of colour to the cast. Hello, 21st Century.
It’s not a bad adaptation, really, I can’ t say anything negative about it. I was, however, surprised to find this particular garden to be more magic than secret – the film uses CGI pretty liberally to make that garden come alive. I didn’t remember “my” movie being like that, but when I took a quick look at the trailer, it in fact did have the early 90s version of CG, I’d just misremembered. It makes sense – if you had a magic garden, you’d be best to keep it secret. Well done, Frances Hodgson Burnett. Cheers, girl. But that’s the trouble with nostalgia, isn’t it? We confuse our memories with emotion, and it ends up infused with a warm glow it may not technically deserve. The real thing never quite matches up with the way we remember it, so new iterations don’t stand a chance.
I also felt this story deserved/needed updating if we were going to be bothered with it once again. It took me a minute but eventually realized it WAS updated – though rather trivially. Burnett published the novel in 1911; Mary was said to be living at the turn of the century. This movie moves the story forward – to 1947, for no real reason, except maybe they couldn’t procure a wheel chair that was old-timey enough? But what a waste: kids today can’t relate to estranged, wealthy, hunchbacked uncles, or hiding “crippled” children away in the attic and denying their existence, or de-colonizing “British India,” or the proper way for a child to address a servant. This movie fails to add anything new to the conversation; with at least 11 previous adaptions across all platforms, we hardly needed another.Harping on a little less about a beloved skipping rope hardly qualifies as a fresh interpretation. Heck, this isn’t even the first time Colin Firth’s been in a Secret Garden film! Maybe these incessant, unoriginal reboots need to make like Mary’s parents and die in an epidemic already. Oddly, that’s the only part of the material that still has relevance today, and I think if one thing has united we 7 billion people, it’s that we’re not terribly fond of them. Let’s find a vaccine for COVID-19 and then transition directly to finding one to inoculate against horrible retreads and a perverse lack of imagination.
Picture it: a road trip circa 1998. The car is fully stocked with ding dongs, and there’s some snack cakes in there too (ba dum tss). Friends Alexis (Alexandra Daddario), Val (Maddie Hasson), and Beverly (Amy Forsyth) are a trio of metalheads on their way to a concert. The newspaper and radio warn that satanic ritual killings now number 18 in the area but so far the biggest threat on the road seems to be from a van full of rowdy boys splashing chocolate milkshake across their windshield. It’s super awkward when they all meet up in the parking lot of the show later, but nothing a little light-hearted mutual pranking won’t fix.
The boys can’t believe their luck, really. Bandmates as well as vanmates, Ivan (Austin Swift) and Kovacs (Logan Miller) are just a touch resentful of Mark (Keean Johnson) who will soon be leaving them to pursue fame and fortune in California. But with the drugs and the rock and roll already taken care of and the promise of sex in the air, they’re feeling generally pretty stoked. Gathered around a fire, playing the classic drinking game Never Have I Ever, none of them can yet take a shot for ‘been stalked by a murderer,’ nor would they even think to name it, but by the night’s end, things will have changed.
The film’s score features televangelist Pastor Butler (Johnny Knoxville) telling American that rock music is to blame, corrupting the youth and all. It’s clear director Marc Meyers is a fan of horror movies and his production is pretty slick. I was, however, a little disappointed by the 80s backdrop. If anyone has an excuse to really camp it up, it’s a horror movie, but this one takes such a subtle approach it comes off as inauthentic. If it hadn’t blatantly stated that it was set in 1988, I likely wouldn’t have noticed until people failed to pull out cell phones in an emergency (and even that’s not a dead giveaway since these dildos had access to a landline they also chose not to use). We Summon The Darkness is a bit of subversive send up to slasher flicks but while there’s plenty of blood, there’s absolutely no tension. I get scared by horror movies about as easily as cats get surprised by zucchinis (translation: very, very easily, if you somehow missed this trend, look it up), but this one was so easy peasy it felt more like an unfunny parody. Are you into those, perchance?
If you were hoping for a mystery based on the title, allow me to deflate your expectations: the husband is not lost. In fact, he’s the most definitively located husband you can get, ie, buried 6 feet under. His widow, Libby (Leslie Bibb), is the one who is lost. And their home too, lost to the bank thanks to him leaving them destitute. So Libby’s been rootless ever since, and has just bopped from her mother’s house to her estranged aunt’s, with her two kids in tow.
But aunt Jean (Nora Dunn!) isn’t so much welcoming house guests as exploiting free labour for her little farm. Farmhand James (Josh Duhamel) sure could use the help since he does sing to each goat individually. But don’t thinking he looks like a rugged, gruff romantic interest for our newly single Libby. He’s got his own wife to contend with, only she doesn’t have the decency to die. Oooh, yeah, okay, I heard that. It sounds a little crass. But she had a stroke and is either comatose or incapacitated, in any case hospitalized for life, and he’s her devoted caretaker even though we’ve already been given moral permission to hate and dismiss her.
This is a romantic movie with a subtle western flavour. It’s got B-list stars, a Hallmark script, and a truly Texan pace (picture a bow-legged cowboy sauntering unhurriedly in the heat, with a piece of straw hanging from his mouth, a squint in his eye, his thumb hooked behind that oversized belt buckle). Sean calls it slow and boring. A more generous soul might call it unrushed and indulgently lengthy. No matter how you separate the wheat from the chaff, writer-director Vicky Wight delivers an old-fashioned romance, the kind with little heat, chemistry, or passion, but plenty of milk glass, burlap chivalry, and rustic charm.
Nothing in this movie is going to wow you, nothing elevates the material or pushes the genre forward. It’s a very standard, safe entry into the romance genre and should please people already predisposed and win over absolutely no one.
[Confidential to Popular fans: keep your eyes peeled for a Carly Pope cameo.]
The only thing I can be sure about is that I WILL get this movie review wrong.
I’m of two very distinct minds:
What the hell???????
What THE hell!!!!!!!!!
So you see how I’m conflicted. For the first 10 minutes, you’re holding on for dear life, frankly surprised they didn’t supply a pencil and paper just to jot down notes, though the movie’s prologue moves a little too fast for accuracy and I repeatedly asked Sean to pause the movie just to see if we were understanding the same basic things.
Which are: Where Adam lives, there are twin planets with opposite gravity. If you climbed to the highest peak of your planet, you could nearly touch the outstretched hand of a person on the highest peak of theirs. But you can’t hop over because your gravity is keeping you on your planet and their gravity is keeping them on theirs.
They are twin planets but not equally prosperous; Adam’s planet is known as the “down below” and the other as the “up top,” which describes their relative wealth more than their actual cosmic positions since the other planet is always technically looming over whichever one your feet are planted on. Contact between worlds is dangerous, and forbidden. The only authorized contact is through Transworld, a big business that the Up Top uses to take cheap resources from Down Below and then sell it back to them at prices they can’t afford. A Transworld oil refinery explosion killed Adam’s parents and destroyed most of their city when he was young. He grew up in foster care and visited his Great Aunt Becky on weekends, who makes her famous flying pancakes for him using pollen sourced from pink bees which feed off flowers from both worlds. It’s a closely guarded family secret, and Aunt Becky vanishes before she can fully pass it on to Adam. He’ll spend the rest of his life trying to perfect the recipe.
When Adam (Jim Sturgess) is a kid, he meets Eden (Kirsten Dunst), a girl from the Up Top as they’re both perched on respective peaks. They’re crafty and they find ways to see each other even though it’s very much not allowed. But you know teenagers, especially star-crossed teenagers: forbidden love makes them extra horny. They have to get extra creative when it comes to makeout sessions, and you may find that it reminds you a bit of Dunst’s former life as Mary Jane Watson.
Anyway, the two are inevitably pulled apart but Adam never gives up hope that some day they will be reunited. So what we end up with is a drama / action / adventure / fantasy / sci-fi romance. Did I leave anything out? Actually, the problem is writer director Juan Solanas didn’t leave anything out. He has this rich, fecund concept, some pretty dazzling CGI, and a wonderfully bizarre and original premise, but…he fails to correctly identify the film’s core. Solanas believes it to be gravity but it’s actually weight. I know the two are related, but gravity is basically directly unobservable. It’s the magic that makes things work, but it’s weight that lends the story heft. This movie had incredible bubbles of creativity but there’s no character development and little emotional investment. Solanas went to some great trouble with his world-building, but it’s like if you took the instantly forgettable 1999 rom-com Drive Me Crazy but made it look like The Matrix. Not only is it a missed opportunity, it kind of makes you resent it for luring you in with a false promise in the first place.
The animals of the clearing are worried about drought. Collectively they have only 4 pumpkins full of water left, and the sources are drying up, but Latte, a spunky young hedgehog and an outcast from the forest community, has her own small reserve. A young squirrel named Tjum tries to seize her water for the communal coffers but in the ensuing fracas an entire pumpkin is upset, spilling a quarter or more of the clearing’s dwindling water supply. Yikes. The animals are, as always, quick to point the finger at Latte, but this time Tjum recognizes the anti-hedgehog sentiment and takes sole responsibility for the accident.
It’s nice and all but still doesn’t account for the water shortage. Luckily a crow with impeccable timing arrives to tell them all about this mythic waterstone that once rested at the top of bear mountain, allowing water to flow abundantly down to to everyone in the forest and beyond. But then the bear king stole it for himself, leaving all the other animals to go without. Latte resolves then and there to retrieve that stone, and Tjum follows after her. If the bear king doesn’t sound scary enough, they’ll have to cross a perilous forest to get to him, encountering predators like wolves and lynxes who are just as thirsty and even more desperate, not to mention a cockeyed toad whose motivations are mysterious.
Latte & the Magic Waterstone is a German animated film, and German fairy tales aren’t exactly known for their light-hearted joviality. Nobody gets their eyes pecked out (Grimm’s Cinderella) or any kind of blinding (Grimm’s Rapunzel) indeed; eyes are largely safe in this one. But there is some real sadness to contend with: a sweet little hedgehog alone in the world, a community content to shun her. But the movie doesn’t really dwell on such matters. It sticks to its simple and predictable story, an easy little adventure to find or not find a stone that may or may not exist. Dying of thirst or dying of loneliness: what’s the difference?
This movie is occasionally visually stunning and mostly just a forgettable little cartoon about a hedgehog who probably deserves better.
In 1989, a man named Dennis, his identity shrouded in shadows, his voice distorted, gave an explosive interview claiming he worked on UFOs in a government lab called s-4.
We have since come to know his true identity, Bob Lazar, and to refer to that particular place in northern Las Vegas as Area 51. Bob claims his work there involved the reverse-engineering an alien propulsion system, technology that even 30 years later still cannot be replicated by humans.
Do you believe Bob Lazar? Lazar doesn’t care. He came forward because he felt his fellow Americans deserved to know what the government was hiding from them, but he never wanted to be in the spotlight and he certainly didn’t expect to be the face of UFOlogy for the next three decades. His testimony is both the most controversial and also the most important contribution to the UFO narrative of all time. But life hasn’t exactly rewarded him for his whistleblowing, if you consider what he did to be whistleblowing. He’s either an American hero or a traitor or a nutbar.
The UFO that he claims to have seen supposedly ran on an antimatter reactor fueled by element 115, which generated a gravity wave which allowed for movement but also camouflage by bending light around it. At the time element 115 had not yet been artificially created (it was in 2003 and officially named moscovium, but no stable isotopes of moscovium have ever been synthesized, all of them radioactive and decaying in fractions of a second). Lazar claimed to have seen documents referring to little green aliens as having contacted humans on Earth for the past ten thousand years.
Is Lazar a total kook or just a lousy secret keeper? That’s what this documentary seems intent on establishing: not whether UFOs exist and have visited this planet, but whether Lazar is a nice, honest man. Very little new information is offered and Lazar basically gets the stage to himself. This film by Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell is unlikely to sway people’s opinion one way or another, but Corbell’s stance is pretty clear since he glosses over Lazar’s 1990 arrest for aiding and abetting a prostitution ring. This was reduced to felony pandering (the procuring of a person to be used for prostitution, including inducing, encouraging, or forcing someone to engage in prostitution), to which he pleaded guilty. He was also charged in 2006 for shipping restricted chemicals across state lines, pleading guilty to three criminal counts of aiding and abetting the introduction into interstate commerce banned hazardous substances. Possibly these charges are a result of the government keeping tabs on his whereabouts, and possibly Lazar’s just not as nice as he likes to pretend. Either way, even Lazar himself admits he has no way of proving that what he says is true. So it all comes down to you.
Do you believe in aliens?
In UFOs?
That the American government is hiding aliens or UFOs or both in Area 51?
Zoe and Owen are enthusiastic circus goers when they meet as children, and the circus is the background of their courtship growing up. But when Owen (John Krasinski) is ready to settle down with Zoe (Emily Blunt), he heeds her father’s advice, leaving the circus behind in favour of the family dog biscuit business. It’s not his passion, not even close, but it pays the bills and seems befitting of a family man. It takes a tragedy – the untimely death of Owen’s eccentric, long-lost uncle Buffalo Bob, who bequeaths to him his circus.Unfortunately, the circus is not at its best. With aging performers, absentee animals, and a ledger in the red, it’s definitely past its prime.
Do you want the good news first, or the bad news?
The good news is that Owen finds Buffalo Bob’s recipe for success, one that’ll guarantee amazing animal acts and paying butts in the seats. But he also remembers that he has not one but two long-lost uncles. Uncle Horatio (Ian McKellan) owns the largest chain of circuses in the world, and there’s no way in hell he’s going to let his dweeby nephew Owen threaten his empire.
Animal Crackers has an all-star voice cast, which is the entire list of things it has going for it. The script is clumsy, the story unremarkable, the songs subpar. It’s not going to knock the clown socks off anyone. But since we’re experiencing a movie drought due a certain global pandemic who shall remain nameless, this might just about fit the bill for a family film night. Hand out the Cracker Jack, or dare I suggest – animal crackers? – and I can promise you that young kids won’t hate it. Neither will you, of course. It’s completely harmless and completely forgettable. But it’s new and it’s available for streaming on Netflix, so step right up, put on your red nose, and prepare to be whelmed.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 