REVIEW: Child’s Play [1988]

I’ll be your friend to the end. The rough cut of Tom Holland‘s Child’s Play was around two hours and test audiences weren’t happy. Almost forty minutes were excised (and boy can you tell) before the film saw the light of day and eventually earned an insanely devoted cult following that’s seen six sequels (so far) with original screenwriter Don Mancini taking up the reigns for the last three. As such, it’s wild to think how different his initial draft was. Mancini first imagined a conceit that involved the transference…

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REVIEW: All Is True [2019]

Perhaps, to some, I was the lark. Sony Pictures Classics announced their deal to distribute Kenneth Branagh‘s latest All Is True after it had already been completed without the usual media fanfare surrounding projects with royal Oscar pedigrees such as one whose cast is rounded out by Judi Dench and Ian McKellen. You shouldn’t, however, be surprised to recognize this fact upon watching its often meticulously positioned frames of conversational exchanges with little to no camera movement. Alongside those longer elegiac shots of emotive gravitas are shorter ones devoid of…

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REVIEW: The Secret Life of Pets 2 [2019]

Was the world always this dangerous? Illumination missed the boat on The Secret Life of Pets because the way they’ve told these stories thus far make them a lot more conducive to television than cinema. If that first film’s sprawling character list devolving into wild schemes and pratfalls barely adhering to the flimsy plot beneath wasn’t enough to prove it, composing The Secret Life of Pets 2 into three very disparate subplots forced together at the climax is. Moving to a long-form narrative format would supply breathing room to focus…

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REVIEW: Leto [2018]

Laziness has kept me out of trouble many times. We only recognize it through hindsight, but Americans are spoiled by cultural freedom. Growing up in the 1980s and 1990s meant having the opportunity to listen to radio stations, records, and cassettes of music spanning multiple genres and eras. It was all at our fingertips and we didn’t have to do much to acquire it unless we lived in a conservatively oppressive household with parents who thought rock-n-roll was a gateway drug for Satanism. From new wave to grunge with blues…

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REVIEW: Always Be My Maybe [2019]

Kale can’t hold on forever. The premise is familiar. Two childhood best friends of the opposite sex lose touch after growing up only to find themselves in close proximity again almost two decades later. One became a huge success elsewhere while the other remained home and thus without much opportunity for escaping that neighborhood’s limited resources—the former falling prey to a materialistic superiority complex while the latter stayed “down to earth” on a depressive trajectory steeped in a fear of failure. Will celebrity chef Sasha Tran (Ali Wong) remember her…

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