REVIEW: The Score [2022]

Why’s it always someone else’s pain that makes you happy? As Troy (Will Poulter) muses on the car ride out-of-town to meet with “professional criminals” (he and Johnny Flynn‘s Mike realize they’re amateurs at best, still trying to move their way up) and exchange twenty grand for unspecified goods, “score” is one of those words with multiple meanings. Film score. Settling scores. Scoring on the soccer field. Scoring in bed. While it’s as much a monologue to explain writer/director Malachi Smyth‘s decision to title his film The Score as it…

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REVIEW: The Dig [2021]

I had my feeling. When Simon Stone‘s The Dig begins with Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) towing his bicycle across the water in a boat towards Sutton Hoo, it’s natural to align our expectations with an archeological adventure. Because he’s labeled “difficult” by the museum that more or less told Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) her desire to excavate the mounds present on her land isn’t worth their effort with war looming, the two prove themselves to be a perfect pair of underestimated and ignored figures on the cusp of finding something…

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REVIEW: Emma. [2020]

I have not yet been proved wrong. There have been countless adaptations of Jane Austen‘s Emma. and yet Autumn de Wilde‘s version (from a script by Eleanor Catton) is still able to feel fresh regardless. It might help that the director admits Clueless is her favorite of them because that viewpoint allowed its modern sensibilities to shine through the period aesthetic. The wit is sharp and quick, the production design is impeccable, and the characters are given life with the sort of off-the-cuff expressions today’s youth cannot stop themselves from…

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REVIEW: Beast [2018]

I just wanted to go dancing. Everything is and isn’t as it seems with Michael Pearce‘s genre-fluid romantic thriller Beast. What starts with the template of rich girl falling for local bad boy against mom’s wishes turns to a case of serial murder with assumptions made every second that confirm what we believe is real just as they throw everything out the window. Nightmares point fingers inward, physical evidence out. Love becomes a weapon for hope and understanding as well as a mask for impending horror moving closer to home…

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