Top Ten Films of 2018

It’s a rare year when your top twenty-five films find the room to allow their usual Oscar-bait dramas to co-exist with foreign favorites, heartfelt documentaries, surreal comedies, and superhero fantasy adventures. Rarer still is a period of time such as 2018 wherein it happens two or three times over. And it’s not just about familiar faces leading the way either as the extensive list of first-time filmmakers who saw their works distributed in theaters nationwide the past twelve months goes a long way towards ensuring cinema has a bright future…

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REVIEW: Judy [2019]

What if I can’t do it again? Playwright Peter Quilter has stated that the original play (“Last Song of the Nightingale”) on which “End of the Rainbow” was modeled upon found its inspiration from an alcoholic male singer met while traveling with his partner on a cruise ship wherein the latter was also a performer. Because he changed his lead into a woman, however, everyone assumed the show was about a thinly-veiled Judy Garland. This reception led him to research the Wizard of Oz legend’s final year on earth and…

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REVIEW: Monos [2019]

The Organization is our family. A scene of kids having fun playing a game of blindfolded soccer at night turns into a day of boot camp with an unknown man (Wilson Salazar) berating them like a drill sergeant to run faster, look meaner, and stand straighter. These child soldiers are hiding high up in the Colombian mountains—passing time with automatic rifles at the ready while watching over a kidnapped woman (Julianne Nicholson‘s Doctora) held for reasons also unknown. Our assumption is political leverage because they put her in front of…

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REVIEW: Hustlers [2019]

We were like hurricanes. What’s a better hustle than declining the price tag a Hollywood studio offered for your life rights to wait until the film is a hit and then sue the production for defamation? Samantha Barbash pretty much bet on the story—I’m hypothesizing that this was her intent based solely on her characterization in Jessica Pressler‘s New York Magazine article “The Hustlers at Scores” and Lorene Scafaria‘s cinematic adaptation Hustlers—and stands to make something regardless of how often these types of cases are dismissed. She’d usually have to…

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REVIEW: Harpoon [2019]

We need to promise not to kill each other. Writer/director Rob Grant wastes zero time getting us in the right frame of mind with Brett Gelman‘s perfectly sardonic voice narrating an auspiciously violent collision of three close friends caught in a lovers’ misunderstanding. Harpoon‘s first scene provides effect—a stranded yacht in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with “SOS” duct taped to the deck—while the second supplies cause as Jonah (Munro Chambers) gets his face punched in by best friend Richard (Christopher Gray) with the latter’s long-term partner Sasha (Emily…

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REVIEW: Ad Astra [2019]

Most of us spend our entire life in hiding. In our quests for more, many of us forget that which we already have. This is true on a micro (sacrificing family for career) and macro (domination no matter the collateral damage) level. Space exploration can often become a rather direct example of this as a common reason for advancement in interstellar travel stems from our desire to find a new home to replace the one we’ve destroyed. We latch onto those things that we can only hope to achieve while…

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REVIEW: Zeroville [2019]

Your head precedes you. An autistic architecture student at a seminary in Pennsylvania watches his first ever film (A Place in the Sun) and has an experience akin to hearing the voice of God. This new world is opened to Jerome “Vikar” Isaac and he decides he needs to be a part of it. So he travels to Hollywood with the model of a church he constructed under his arm, arriving in this wonderland of magic twenty years too late. The Hollywood of 1970 simply isn’t the same one that…

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REVIEW: Low Tide [2019]

You ready to go exploring? Just because writer/director Kevin McMullin‘s debut feature Low Tide centers on a trio of locals stuck in a New Jersey banks vacation town and forced to watch rich kids come every summer to treat them like one of the attractions with which to entertain themselves doesn’t mean it’s an “us versus them” story. Alan (Keean Johnson), Smitty (Daniel Zolghadri), and Red (Alex Neustaedter) seek to make it one by breaking into empty houses while their owners are having fun on the boardwalk, but reality soon…

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NYFF19 REVIEW: Así habló el cambista [The Moneychanger] [2019]

Enjoy every penny earned and spent. Mr. Schweinsteiger (Luis Machín) ran a good game in Uruguay by helping unsavory folks launder money through him for a percentage. He was smart too, refusing to work with politicians knowing they’d eventually screw something up and drag his name down with them. Unfortunately, however, the man he willingly took under his wing as a logical successor and future son-in-law proved greedier than he was intelligent. Humberto Brause (Daniel Hendler) did what Schweinsteiger wouldn’t because the dollar signs were too attractive to be ignored…

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REVIEW: The Goldfinch [2019]

I lost something that should have been immortal. Theo Decker (Oakes Fegley) lost a lot one fateful day at The Metropolitan Museum of Art when an unexplained terrorist bombing took his mother, home, stability, and, most importantly, his childhood away. One second he’s stealing a glimpse of the young girl (Aimee Laurence‘s Pippa) beside him in front of a famed Carel Fabritius painting while his mom’s hand leaves his shoulder and the next sees him rising from the ashes of the aftermath, dead bodies everywhere. And if dealing with the…

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REVIEW: Depraved [2019]

You brought the war home with you. So much of what we do in our lives comes down to a matter of could versus should. Many of us want to prove ourselves worthy by doing something nobody has ever done before, yet the hubris of such a desire often leaves us paying a price we neglected to realize had to be paid. Even if “should” factored in, however, the end result still wouldn’t be guaranteed because good intentions aren’t enough to offset that cost. Just because the pain and suffering…

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