Listen HERE as we recount the best of the 352 movies we saw in 2017!
Tag Archives: film
So Many Movies Happened
Hey! What did you guys do last year? Did you watch some great TV shows, binge some fabulous whatnot from Netflix? Maybe have a life? Not us! No, sir, we watched 352 movies. And you know what? It was awesome!
Here it is – MaddWolf’s year in movies.
- Camera Person
- Anomalisa
- Sing Street
- Weiner
- Bright Lights
- Live by Night
- Gozu
- The Autopsy of Jane Doe
- Patriot’s Day
- Silence
- Detour
- Trespass Against Us
- Split
- Don’t Knock Twice
- xXx: The Return of Xander Cage
- Founder
- A Dog’s Purpose
- Soul Survivors
- Comedian
- Resident Evil: Extinction
- Reckoning
- The Abominable Dr. Phibes
- Salesman
- Neruda
- Saving Banksy
- Rings
- The Space Between Us
- Hidden Figures
- La La Land
- House of Wax
- Monster squad
- Hell or High Water
- John Wick 2
- Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts
- Oscar-nominated Live Shorts
- The Red Turtle
- The Last Horror Movie
- Sorcerer
- I Am Not Your Negro
- Theater of Blood
- Masque of the Red Death
- Love, Dance
- The Fall of the House of Usher
- Fist Fight
- Great Wall
- The Cure for Wellness
- Last Man on Earth
- House on Haunted Hill
- Dark Night
- The Girl with All the Gifts
- Get Out
- Collide
- A United Kingdom
- Socially Relevant Shorts
- Wolverine
- The Shack
- Logan
- Kong: Skull Island
- Stitches
- The Ottoman Lieutenant
- Staying Vertical
- The Lure
- Kedi
- My Scientology Movie
- Beauty and the Beast
- The Arcadian
- The Belko Experiment
- The Street Where We Live
- Hollow Child
- Two Trains Runnin’
- Capture, Kill, Release
- Trainspotting 2
- Power Rangers
- Chips
- Devil’s Candy
- Blackcoat’s Daughter
- I Am the Pretty Thing that Lives in the House
- Boss Baby
- Dutchman
- Ghost in the Shell (anime)
- The Unwilling
- Ghost in the Shell (live action)
- Raw
- Endor
- A Closer Walk with Thee
- Phobia
- Frantz
- Queen of the Desert
- Gifted
- Aftermath
- Going in Style
- Prevenge
- The Void
- Demons Don’t Knock
- Mission Control
- Rupture
- F8 of the Furious
- We Are What We Are
- Free Fire
- Personal Shopper
- The Devils
- Born in China
- Hounds of Love
- Colossal
- Eraserhead
- Three Dead Trick or Treaters
- Dry Blood
- Three Dead Trick or Treaters
- You’re Next
- Graduation
- Below Her Mouth
- The Transfiguration
- Sleight
- The Circle
- Guardians of the Galaxy 2
- Norman
- The Dinner
- Titticut Follies
- The Haunt
- Murder Made Easy
- King Arthur
- Antichrist
- Snatched
- The Wall
- Hounds of Love
- David Lynch: The Art Life
- Lovers
- Everything, Everything
- Bay Watch
- Alien: Covenant
- Chuck
- The Survivalist
- Pirates of the Caribbean 5
- Berlin Syndrome
- Violet
- Wakefield
- Wonder Woman
- Mulholland Drive
- It Comes at Night
- The Mummy
- Cousin Rachel
- Megan Leavy
- The 9th Configuration
- Lunacy
- Stonehearst Asylum
- Things Fall Apart
- House Sitters
- Hell of a Night
- Cars 3
- 47 Meters Down
- They Look Like People
- Free to Ride
- The Bad Batch
- All Eyez on Me
- Glass Coffin
- Rough Night
- The Beguiled (1971)
- Memory of a Murder
- Among the Living
- Transformers: The Last Knight
- War for the Planet of the Apes
- Baby Driver
- The Beguiled (2017)
- Beatriz at Dinner
- Okja
- Happy Hunting
- Found Footage 3D
- Despicable Me 3
- Spiderman: Homecoming
- The House
- Romeo’s Distress
- Two Pigeons
- Samurai Rauni
- Unnuyayuk
- The Hero
- American Valhalla
- The Big Sick
- Tony
- Killing Ground
- Easter Sunday
- After Image
- I Saw the Devil
- Wish Upon
- Maudie
- It Stains the Sands Red
- Dunkirk
- Defiant Ones
- Dawson City
- Girls Trip
- A Ghost Story
- First Kill
- Valerian
- Little Hours
- Gracefield Incident
- The Code
- Atomic Blonde
- Landline
- The Emoji Movie
- Creature from the Black Lagoon
- Down Terrace
- Goon 2: Last of the Enforcers
- An Inconvenient Sequel
- Detroit
- Dark Tower
- Kidnap
- Detroit
- Midnight Son
- Ice Cream Truck
- Big Lebowski
- Annabelle: Creation
- The Reflecting Skin
- A Ghost Story
- The Glass Castle
- Nut Job 2
- Good Time
- The Ghoul
- Hitman’s Bodyguard
- Whose Streets?
- Dave Made a Maze
- Wind River
- Logan Lucky
- 2001
- Nosferatu the Vampyre
- Bushwick
- Thale
- Dance of the Dead
- Lemon
- Leap!
- Ingrid Goes West
- Patti Cake$
- Logan Lucky
- The Trip to Spain
- The Oath
- Texas Chainsaw Massacre
- Salem’s Lot
- Beside Bowie
- Charismata
- Megan is Missing
- It
- Crown Heights
- Home Again
- Mothman of Point Pleasant
- Twins of Evil
- Devil Rides Out
- Brides of Dracula
- Columbus
- Dracula: Prince of Darkness
- Vampire Lovers
- Red Christmas
- Menashe
- Frankenstein Created Woman
- Ginger Snaps
- mother!
- The Spawning
- Loon
- The Muse
- Hostile
- Torment
- She Was So Pretty 2
- Nightmare
- Woodshock
- Battle of the Sexes
- Super Dark Times
- Nothing Bad Can Happen
- American Made
- Rabies
- Feed
- Blade Runner
- Gerald’s Game
- Blade Runner 2049
- Dead Alive
- Le Accelerator
- The Mountain Between Us
- New Nightmare
- Rock, Paper, Dead
- Flesh of the Void
- Tragedy Girls
- Greasy Strangler
- Marshall
- Happy Death Day
- The Foreigner
- Professor Martsen and the Wonder Women
- Hellions
- Brawl in Cellblock 99
- Spielberg
- Blade Runner 2049
- Capture, Kill, Release
- Jungle
- Only The Brave
- Mark Felt
- Snowman
- Same Kind of Different as Me
- The Florida Project
- Suburbicon
- Thor: Ragnarok
- Bad Mom’s Christmas
- Wonderstruck
- Blade of the Immortal
- Killing of a Sacred Deer
- Jigsaw
- Goodbye Christopher Robin
- LBJ
- Thor: Ragnarok
- El Topo
- Daddy’s Home 2
- Murder on the Orient Express
- Big Bad Wolves
- Mayhem
- Poor Alice
- Hex
- The Square
- Lady Bird
- Justice League
- Wonder
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
- Strange Frequency
- Deadtime Stories
- From a Whisper to a Scream
- Creepshow
- The Man Who Invented Christmas
- Who Is Lydia Loveless?
- The Disaster Artist
- Coco
- Roman J. Israel, Esq.
- The Post
- Bombshell: The Hedy Lamar Story
- Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
- Lady Bird
- BPM
- Sweet Virginia
- Downsizing
- Last Flag Flying
- Thelma
- The Big Sick
- I, Tonya
- Wonder Wheel
- War for the Planet of the Apes
- Shape of Water
- Star Wars: The Last Jedi
- Jane
- Frailty
- Ferdinand
- Call Me By Your Name
- Loving Vincent
- Darkest Hour
- Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
- Pitch Perfect 3
- All the Money in the World
- The Greatest Showman
- Molly’s Game
- Mudbound
- Mom and Dad
Big Top PT
The Greatest Showman
by Hope Madden
In so many ways, The Greatest Showman is a wildly inappropriate vision of the life of PT Barnum—a politician, spokesman for temperance, abolitionist and, above all things, an outsized promoter and self-promoter. He’d been all these things for decades before he dipped his toe into the circus industry, but what fun is that story?
Let’s rewrite. We need romance, lessons, heartwarming children and resolvable, tidy drama. Barnum as a tot, working dirty-faced and split-shoed besides his father, tailoring for Dickensian clients and wages. But he has dreams. Big dreams.
Yes, the film simplifies the actual story of Barnum’s life to its barest lessons-to-be-learned minimum. The oversimplification spills into the core conflict (of many) in the man’s actual history: his presentation and monetization of “human curiosities.”
But maybe that’s where this movie is closest to the truth. It is selling you an enjoyable time, spinning your head with breathless setpieces, color, glamour, surprise, happiness. Sleight of hand. And at the same time selling the tale that, no matter how Barnum may have used these people for his own profit, this is really a story of empowerment.
“Some critics might have even called this show a celebration of humanity,” says Barnum’s harshest critic, New York Herald writer James Gordon Bennett.
As genuinely if superficially enjoyable as The Greatest Showman is, there is something unseemly in embracing so tidy a view.
Still, Hugh Jackman—maybe the most charismatic performer in modern film—is in great voice in yet another big, big musical. His earnest likeability and exuberance convince you to disregard your instincts on this film just as surely as his Barnum uses the same tactics to lure uncertain outcasts out of the shadows and onto the stage.
Michelle Williams fares less well as Barnum’s wife Charity, saddled as she is with the bottomless devotion and forgiveness that is the mark of the underwritten spouse character. Rebecca Ferguson mines for emotional clarity in a small role and a magnetic Keala Settle is a natural fit for the heart and soul of Barnum’s “curiosities.”
Director Michael Gracey, working from a script by Jenny Bicks and Bill Condon, crafts a Moulin Rouge-esque vision that transports you, which is appropriate when tackling the life of PT Barnum.
It also works to convince you that all this—the spotlight, the manipulation, the exploitation, the laughter and the admiration—was the best possible thing for Barnum’s performers.
Barnum might have liked that spin, too, but maybe that’s the problem.
The Pitch is Back
Pitch Perfect 3
by Hope Madden
Did anyone think to themselves this Christmas season, I wonder what those acapella singers from Pitch Perfect are doing now?
Me, either. And yet, Pitch Perfect 3 hits theaters this weekend.
The Bellas have mostly graduated from college by now, dealing with careers, the daily grind and wishing they were still singing in an all-girl, no-instrument band. So they take their talents to the USO to compete with a country group, a rock band and a hip hop duo to land the opening slot for DJ Khaled.
I know that almost sounds like a plot, and there is this side bit about an international criminal and a kidnapping, but honest to God, this is the most disposable, pointless movie of the season. (Full disclosure—I haven’t seen Father Figures yet.)
Director Trish Sie can’t find a pace or visual style to suit the project, which only emphasizes the weakness in any shadow of a storyline.
Anna Kendrick and Rebel Wilson, along with most of the Bellas, return to vocal action. There’s nothing fresh or appealing about the music, but if that’s your bag, there you go.
Wilson’s Fat Amy still says amusingly inappropriate things, as do the always welcome John Michael Higgins (“We’ll stick to you like mom jeans to a camel toe,”) and Elizabeth Banks. Why are the announcers of the college acapella championships involved in a USO gig?
Writers Key Cannon and Mike White realize this makes little sense, so they devise a knowingly ludicrous excuse for it. In fact, it’s this self-referential tendency that provides the film’s only clever laughs.
Well, “laugh” is a strong word, but there are passably enjoyable moments. The rest of it is mainly insufferable: catty, meandering and needless.
Fightin’ Words
Darkest Hour
by Hope Madden
Back in the day—before the mustachioed Commissioner Gordon or the bewitching Sirius Black—back in the way back of the 80s and 90s, Gary Oldman was known for disappearing into real-life characters. Whether it was his Sid Vicious or Lee Harvey Oswald or Ludwig Van Beethoven, Oldman could cease to be, leaving nothing behind but the most amazing reimagining of true life.
So the fact that he’s magnificent in Darkest Hour should come as no surprise.
Besides his physical transformation, thanks to what may be the single greatest achievement in fat suits in all of moviedom, Oldman convinces by capturing the spirit of Winston Churchill.
In retrospect we know Churchill’s fighting spirit was desperately necessary— his nation was facing unfathomable odds and dealing with an establishment’s inclination toward surrender. But it’s Oldman’s performance that makes us understand why so very few were able to trust not just Churchill’s vision, but Churchill.
With the aid of an excellent turn by Kristin Scott Thomas as Churchill’s wife Clementine, Oldman makes the Prime Minister knowable: driven, insecure, passionate, drunk, uncertain, romantic and somehow lovable. The performance is effortlessly layered and authentic and honestly the best work the veteran actor has done in decades.
Credit a crisp screenplay by Anthony McCarten for providing context by way of illuminating points of view, each one deftly animated by an understated ensemble delivering nuanced performances. Ben Mendelsohn’s King George and Stephen Dillane’s Viscount Halifax, in particular, quietly but assuredly manifest the uneasy but shifting perspective of a nation on the brink of possible annihilation.
Joe Wright’s direction sometimes feels fanciful given the seriousness of the story, but he works mightily with his poetic camera to enliven what could otherwise have been a claustrophobic chamber piece.
Instead, he’s crafted a fine bookend to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Darkest Hour glimpses the backroom politics that led to the ingenious and breathless rescue of England’s armed forces the summer of 1940. It lacks the gut-punch or cinematic mastery of Nolan’s film, but it does boast one hell of a performance.
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of December 18
Get excited, people. What may turn out to be the best film of 2017 is available this week on DVD, as is undoubtedly the most polarizing and discussed flick of the year, mother! Get you some!
Click the film title for the full review.
Dunkirk
(DVD)
mother!
(DVD)
The Lego Ninjago Movie
The Screening Room: STAAAR WARS! (ALMOST) NOTHING BUT STAAR WARS!
Action packed week in The Screening Room. We run down the spoiler-free pros and cons of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, The Shape of Water, Wonder Wheel and Ferdinand and have a look at what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen HERE.
Seeing Red
Ferdinand
by Hope Madden
I’m thrilled to announce that Ferdinand, the new animated feature from Carlos Saldanha (Ice Age, Rio), did not ruin my childhood.
Whew!
The story of a peaceful if enormous bull who’d far rather sniff flowers than fight matadors was my favorite book as a little kid, but to stretch these 32 or so sentences into a 90-minute feature-length film, there would have to be padding.
I worried about the padding.
Credit a team of six screenwriters for finding—for the most part—organic ways to develop the story. We meet Ferdinand as a young bull being raised with a handful of other bulls specifically to fight in the ring. Then we follow him on his adventure to freedom from the ring and back into the sights of the matador.
That doesn’t mean the film never feels padded. It definitely does. But a slew of vocal talents including John Cena, Bobby Cannavale and Kate McKinnon helps to keep the film afloat.
Rarely laugh-out-loud funny, a bit bloated and a tad dark at times, Ferdinand still manages to entertain. It looks good, bears a social conscience and remains more or less true to the simple “be who you are” core that made Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s picture book so lovely.
Swimming in Romance
The Shape of Water
by Hope Madden
In its own way, The Creature from the Black Lagoon is a tragic romance. But what if it weren’t? Tragic, I mean. What if beauty loved the beast?
It seems like a trend this year.
An unforgettable Sally Hawkins—an actor who has never hit a false note in her long and underappreciated career—gets her chance to lead a big, big show. She plays Elisa, a mute woman on the janitorial team for a research institute in Cold War era Baltimore.
Enter one night a malevolent man (Michael Shannon), and a mysterious container. Color Elisa intrigued.
Writer/director Guillermo del Toro is an overt romantic. So many of his films—Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, Crimson Peak—swim in romance, but he’s never made as dreamily romantic or hypnotically sensual a film as The Shape of Water. And he hasn’t made a film this glorious since his 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth.
Del Toro favorite Doug Jones—Pan’s Pale Man and Hellboy’s Abe Sapien—gets back into a big, impressive suit, this time to play Amphibian Man. His presence is once again the perfect combination of the enigmatic and the familiar.
The supporting cast—Shannon, Octavia Spencer, Richard Jenkins and Michael Stuhlbarg—are among the strongest character actors Hollywood has to offer and del Toro ensures that they have material worthy of their talent. Each character is afforded not only his or her own personality but peculiarity, which is what makes us all both human and unique—important themes in keeping with the story. With Hawkins and Jones, they populate a darkly whimsical, stylish and retro world.
Characteristic of del Toro’s work, Shape of Water looks amazing. Its color scheme of appropriate greens and blues also creates the impossible truth of sameness within otherness, or the familiar with the alien.
The aesthetic is echoed in Alexandre Desplat’s otherworldly score and mirrored by Dan Laustsen’s dancing camera.
The end result is a beautiful ode to outsiders, love and doing what you must.
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of December 11
Some exceptional films coming home this week, so if you like true life, brutally devastating historical dramas, this is your week! No, seriously, watch them.
Detroit
Viceroy’s House
The Trip to Spain
Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Home Again
