“There’s an opportunity,” Rory tells his American wife, “in London.” “Go fuck yourself,” she replies, leaving little doubt as to Allison’s stance on the matter. But this is the 1980s, when women still vow to obey their husbands during the marriage ceremony, and some of them even do. And like a good wife, Allison (Carrie Coon) packs up her home, her two children, Samantha (Oona Roche) and Ben (Charlie Shotwell), and even her horse, and off they go…not so much to London, that’s where the work is done, the man’s domain, but to a sprawling English country manor that Rory (Jude Law) has rented for them.
It is unclear whether Rory is indeed chasing new opportunity or fleeing old problems, but he’s commuting to his London office every day, filled with vigor and optimism working for an old boss with new prospects in his back pocket. Rory is your classic 80s businessman – a snake charmer, basically. Projecting a lifestyle well beyond his means, bluffing his way to the top, making bigger and bigger promises to plug the holes immediately behind him, never looking for enough forward, always certain of the coming boom. He over-promises and under-delivers and it’s soon clear that he lies in his personal life as much as in business. What isn’t clear is if the bad things that keep befalling his family are simply the result of karma or perhaps bad luck, or if the home they’ve moved into is casting some sort of sinister spell.
Writer-director Sean Durkin is a master of mood, and from the first strains of ominous music causing Sean to creepy-whisper the film’s title in my ear, he dresses the set to complement and exacerbate the tension within the family. The old house is dimly lit, the shadows encroaching upon the family, ready, almost, to envelope them. I reassure myself that IMDB has indeed called this a drama and not a horror, but I suppose a haunted house IS quite dramatic, and why haven’t we ruled this out yet? Actually, if the house is haunted, it’s not by ghosts but by lies – the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we tell others, the ones we’ve told by omission. Rory’s family have just moved to a new country but it’s not simply geography keeping them isolated.
The cast is good and the performances strong, with Carrie Coon the stand-out as a woman navigating the choppy waters between the freedom of independence and the comfort of reliance. Allison doesn’t know because she doesn’t want to know. She wears the fur but hides money around the house. When she is finally confronted with reality, the cracks begin to appear, and I don’t just mean in the foundation of their ridiculously large rental.
The Nest is a good film, not a great one. Rory is too despicable to like but too uninteresting to root against. We want to empathize with Allison but she feels cold, unknowable. There’s no real path to connection. Rory is a sleazy businessman, a snake charmer, but he’s ultimately failed to charm us, robbing us of what might have been an even better movie.
Sherlock Holmes (TV): Although they never teamed up in the MCU, Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) teams up with Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) is this addictive detective series.
(Chris Evans) use their powers for evil instead of good – Larson playing rock star Envy Adams, Scott’s ex-girlfriend, and Evans playing action star Lucas Lee, one of Ramona’s seven evil exes. This is a fun one to re-visit, as it is written and directed by Edgar Wright, who also wrote the screenplay to Ant-Man.
thread, but the truth is, the first half is boring enough that I don’t care about a lost thread because the whole damn sweater is garbage and a waste of good yarn. You know? Like, Sia worked hard on these songs. And the movie is slick looking, with cinematography just dripping its luridness all over the screen. But damn is it pretentious in a deflated, empty kind of way. And then the last 20 minutes or so are just concert footage, just full on Natalie Portman in a spandex body suit not quite nailing her choreography all over a stage full of unconvincing dancers. Was my jaw completely unhinged watching this or did it just feel that way? I can’t be sure. Sean tried to watch this with me, but it wouldn’t play when we rented it initially and he was gone off to work by the time I went back to it, and bully for him. I’m the one who watched it, aghast. This is Natalie Portman’s follow-up to what probably should have been an Oscar-winning performance in 
Comics decided that if any comic publisher should have a Captain Marvel, it should be them, so Marvel threw together a half-baked story about an alien named Mar-Vell to secure a trademark for the Captain Marvel name, won a lawsuit against DC and others, then gave Mar-Vell cancer and made him the only comic character in history to stay dead.
a Skrull ambush, she crash-lands on mid-90s Earth (smashing through the roof of a Blockbuster Video, as probability would dictate) and realizes that she’s been on this planet before. Teaming up with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Marvel chases after the Skrulls who came to Earth along with her (led by Ben Mendelsohn) while also trying to uncover her forgotten past.
movies that mix fantasy and historical.” Sean let out a breath. “You’re going to hate this.” He was right. I kind of knew it too. But as soon as I’d said those words, I realized they were too general. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I’m certain there are plenty of movies who get it right. I know I was thinking of 
knows that only his nephew will be able to handle it, so he rounds up all the age-appropriate young men in the kingdom and eventually Arthur (Charlie Hunnam) is revealed. And then it’s game ON. Arthur isn’t really motivated to do battle with his ruthless uncle, but a beautiful mage (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) persuades him that it must be so.
time, counting F. Scott Fitzgerald (Guy Pearce) and Ernest Hemingway (Dominic West) among his authors. They’re all jealous of each other, of course, all big egos with weighty demands on Max’s time, and skill. This movie will make you feel as though editors do not get paid nearly enough. It might also question just who is the Genius referred to in the title – is it the brilliant writer, or is the man editing his writing so that it may appear brilliant to others? Certainly Max is good at spotting talent, but also at shaping it.
pull necessary to hone a manuscript into a masterpiece. Max Perkins has an excellent track record but still prefers to hide behind an editor’s anonymity, still grapples with the fear of having “deformed” someone’s work.
ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES 