A sprawling, ambitious, indulgent, and assuredly unnerving follow-up to his terrifying critical and commercial success Hereditary, Ari Aster’s sun and blood drenched Midsommar is yet another example of a filmmaker throwing everything they can into their second feature because their first major success has allowed them a lot of leeway to go a bit crazy and over-the-top.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, the latest and most ambitious experiment in Charlie Brooker’s techno-skeptical anthology series, is engaging, thrilling, and emotionally defined enough to warrant losing the better part of a day trying to figure out its intricacies.
A staggeringly boring misfire, the period piece thriller The Little Stranger is so lifeless and frustratingly stiff that it could make the Masterpiece Theatre crowd both impatient and sleepy at the same time.
Oscar winning filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow has proven herself to be a master of suspense, with most of her films centering around characters trying desperately by any means necessary to survive another day. Her latest collaboration with The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal, the historical period drama Detroit, is no exception. Built around a sustained sequence of unease, tension, and violence both psychological and physical that will stand as one of her finest filmmaking moments, Bigelow’s look back rioting and racial injustice in Detroit during the summer of 1967 will haunt the memories of viewers for a long time.
This is a busy week for Blu-ray and DVD releases as five major releases arrive on store shelves, including: Martin Scorsese’s intense Taxi Driver celebrates its 35th anniversary; Disney debuts the original Tron and Tron: Legacy on Blu-ray; Narnia comes to life once more in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; plus a look at the IMAX movie, Hubble.
Opening this weekend in theatres: Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie star in the action-comedy, The Tourist; and we take a fresh trip through C.S. Lewis’ fantastic world in The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
