Taking the concept of a certain modern masterpiece and focusing more on class and gender than racial politics, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut “Blink Twice” means to illustrate the complicated web (wealthy) men weave to realize their simplest whims. Absolutes are always touchy, but the charismatic ensemble, crisp editing style and very intentional soundtrack and sound design let us know Kravitz means business both thematically and in terms of entertainment value.
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Most appealing about “Blink Twice” is Kravitz's clear obsession with image coordination and consistency, which allows the film an aura of cohesion that works with the themes of solidarity and women choosing to support rather than compete. Still, Kravitz (who also co-wrote the script) doesn't allow the elegance of her imagery to detract from the ugliness of her character's actions and the ideas they are used to signify. Kravitz says all men want/desire is for pretty women to indulge and praise them - even for our smallest wins - and while I won't necessarily argue the point, what she's really exploring and eventually dissecting is the power dynamic women have been conditioned to sustain with men and of course, naturally, how to break that dynamic.

Despite a not-so-subtle "burn it all down" act of symbolism in the final moments and the fact this will likely benefit from a second viewing, “Blink Twice” is far too contemplative and considered in its tone and compositions to be dismissed as little more than a #MeToo companion piece. A shot where Channing Tatum is framed in the background standing over a desk as Naomi Ackie cowers underneath in the foreground hits like a truck while a dinner table sequence in which so much is said, understood, and conveyed without a single line of dialogue being spoken crystalizes the core ideas of the film so well it almost didn't need the surrounding paragraphs of the movie to emphasize its point. Adding some Chaka never hurts, either.

As for specifics on the aforementioned charismatic ensemble, both the casting and performance of Geena Davis are a genuine highlight. Simon Rex has one job and makes the most of it. I wish there'd been more for Haley Joel Osment to do, but Adria Arjona continues to cement her star power and Baby Hawke No. 2 has some solid line readings, "What do you mean? We’re such nice guys!" There is an insert shot of Christian Slater that is just ... the best, while C-Tates remains one of the GOATs in a role that requires him to use his charming, comforting image in order to accomplish the most abusive and exploitative actions. It worked for me.

Have you seen those videos of Cracker Barrel updating its classic look to more of the modern farmhouse style? And while watching it you can feel the soul that was once there being sucked from the establishment? That's kind of what watching this new version of “The Crow” feels like.

​In the 1994 film, Eric Draven was a rock musician, but he's barely a DJ in this new film.

Remember that movie “I, Frankenstein”?? Yeah, me neither, but Letterboxd tells me I saw it. I imagine my relationship to this movie will largely be the same.

Anywho. Brought to you by the guy who cheated on his wife with Kristen Stewart in 2012, this retelling of the story based on the 1989 comic book series by James O'Barr broadens the context and fills in details where the original film remained vague and, thus, more mysterious. Rupert Sanders’ film lacks the style - and frankly, the insanity - that allowed Alex Proyas’ film its distinctive flavor. The fleshing out and over-rationalizing of Draven’s myth does the opposite of what’s intended, making the character and his plight predictable and bland rather than enigmatic and epic.

The most epic thing in this version is the Enya needle drop. And I like Bill Skarsgård well enough, but my man tried to pull a Christian Bale here, and it didn’t work out. His final act and the climactic action sequence are generally pretty punk rock. Still, FKA twigs' Shelly going back to her friend’s apartment knowing the baddies are on her scent, those same bad guys not thoroughly disposing of a body they didn't want to be found ... there's just a lot of dumb decisions all the way around.

“The Instigators” is a buddy comedy with robbers instead of cops, but when the buddy chemistry is so effortless that the comedy grows organically from Matt Damon and Casey Affleck's camaraderie, the way it does, all Affleck's script and Doug Liman's direction had to do was be sturdy enough to support all the seasoning these two defining factors were adding to it — and they do, bountifully so.
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Having never been to Boston but I have to imagine “The Instigators” does a damn good job of making both Bostonians proud as well as making those not from the area get a real sense of what the city and its people are like. For example, the Massachusetts State Police picking fights with officers from Vermont after a failed car chase because neither could pin down the fugitives is some real "in the spirit of" shit.

These details are included in everything from the smallest character interactions to large-scale set pieces. They are so consistent and feel so precise that they are ultimately what separates the film from everything else in the otherwise (over)crowded genre.

It does bum me out a little bit that this is what we got instead of the final chapter in the ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Covenant’ trilogy but I am not a big enough fan of the franchise in general for the ‘Force Awakens’ effect that writer/director Fede Álvarez implements in “Alien: Romulus” to bother me all that much. Álvarez balances homage and fan service well, but includes as much that it's evident he's trying to appease multiple crowds (including the *cough* shareholders *cough*). Yet, it simultaneously feels like he's genuinely making the ‘Alien’ movie he always wanted to make - especially given the final half-hour or so, which is batshit.
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The film is a grand visual scale (mostly) with well-executed tension and creative action sequences more than enough to make it one of the more memorable theater experiences of the summer, even if that's all this will largely amount to despite Ridley Scott's most recent films in the series dealing with committing genocide against an entire species to create the "ultimate, perfect life form" ... but ya know, it's all about purpose and intent and to say Álvarez didn't have as much would be false.

Remember when 2012's “John Carter” was released and caught a lot of heat for feeling derivative despite being the subject of stories published some three decades before ‘Star Wars’ even existed? The IP may have come first, but it was not the cultural representative for those types of stories; thus, it came off a tad recycled, if not necessarily reductive, as one could feel the effort and creativity Andrew Stanton had poured into the project. Having no familiarity with the “Borderlands” property, I wasn't sure what to expect, but where “John Carter” made up for its familiar journey in other ways, director Eli Roth's adaptation of this video game series offers no reason either in the writing or execution to suggest viewers should invest their time or emotions in it.
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Having enjoyed much of Roth's output over the years and considering the caliber of the cast involved, I expected a little more than what was ultimately delivered but it would be unfair to call this mess completely incompetent. This hollow shell of genre stereotypes might be a prime example of the emblematic difference in what regular movie-goers and critics want from their theater experiences. Even still, those casual movie-goers will have forgotten much of “Borderlands” by the time they reach their car afterward. The difference between forgettable and offensive and why “Borderlands” straddles this line is not because of its silly gimmicks - lots of movies have those - but because we never buy into the half-assed world-building or characterizations making the silliness feel stupid.

My “Borderlands” hot take is that Cate Blanchett is only good with the right material and is not good here. Honestly, I don't know if there is a good performance in this, except maybe Jamie Lee Curtis, who gets most of the exposition dumps (and I guess Florian Munteanu by default) ...maybe. It's hard to interpret what’s meant to be sincere and what’s being played for comedy in each performance, but I would like to know if Gina Gershon might have been better in the Blanchett role. It also looks like a late-era Robert Rodriguez movie, which is to say, total shit.

It will take *at least* another watch to somewhat understand what they were going for with “Cuckoo.” I’m unclear if writer/director Tilman Singer has children of his own or if he was the subject of a traumatizing childhood himself, but this idea of transplanting these breeding behavioral patterns from animals like the bird “Cuckoo” takes its name from and applying them to human beings is both fascinating and genuinely disturbing. Layers upon layers of meaning could be divulged from Singer's film, I'm sure, but given the title, premise, and several specific dialogue exchanges, it would seem evident Tilman is either wrestling with the thought of having kids himself or has realized the insanity of doing to children what adults did to him (or potentially someone he knows, I guess).
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“Cuckoo” is one large exercise in symbolism that the viewer is sure to get lost in the longer the film runs, and consequently, I found myself more appreciating what it was trying to accomplish than enjoying it. The value is not hard to see as the vision is as specific as the architecture featured, and the prime antagonist of the piece offers a few legitimate scares when in cahoots with the film's sound design, yet nothing about the film resonated enough to create a personal investment in or connection to the material. The ideas on evolution and the machinations that go into speeding up this process can certainly be adapted to a larger scale, but Singer's script seems to narrowly examine the tradeoffs in nature vs. nurture, the pros and cons each theory presents, as well as the ramifications of both the benefits and consequences that are born from such experiments to reach this hypothetical state of higher existence. On many occasions, though, such granularity can cause those on the front lines to miss the bigger picture, so even if each new generation that is bred is seemingly more powerful than the last, we still have to step back and consider the greater mosaic being painted – if we’ve been stuck in this loop before - and maybe even more importantly, the factors fueling such actions.

Director: Justin Baldoni 
Starring: Blake Lively, Justin Baldoni & Jenny Slate 
Rated: PG-13 (domestic violence, sexual content & language)
Runtime: 2 hours & 10 minutes 

​I unashamedly love this kind of elevated Hallmark/Lifetime/Airport paperback romance genre, and if we’re being honest, “It Ends With Us” has it all. You get an incredibly charming meet-cute between an entirely fictional neurosurgeon who looks like a Greek God (played by the director whose movie reminds us he is extremely attractive multiple times throughout) and a boho-chic flower shop owner who looks like Blake Lively. This is followed by the “hard to get” act that occurs after the ridiculous coincidence of the girl who happened to come bounding into our heroine’s flower shop (Jenny Slate) because she is so bored and her husband so rich that she finds local businesses in which to gift free labor is also the sister of said neurosurgeon who our heroine hasn’t seen since their initial meeting many months before.

What are the stakes you might ask? You mean besides waiting to see if these two can help one another navigate their past traumas in order to sustain a successful relationship? Well, as the opening scene suggests, Mrs. Reynolds has a few unresolved issues with her now deceased father but we're also given glimpses into her teenage years (Isabela Ferrer doing a spot-on Lively impression) that feature a first foray into love with a character earnestly named Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar in the present, Alex Neustaedter in the flashbacks). Atlas has a troubled home life, which leads to him being homeless, after which Lively's Lily Bloom (the movie at least uses this name as solid material during the meet-cute) reaches out and shows compassion, both ultimately learning they need one another -just in different ways - at that awkward stage in their lives. Naturally, once Lily has met and fallen in love with neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (director Justin Baldoni), she then crosses paths with Atlas for the first time in many years, making way for the conflict of a love triangle before the film delves into what it's about.

As someone who's never read or was even familiar with the type of books Colleen Hoover writes, I went into this not knowing what to expect, but as soon as they showed Lively driving back home to Plethora, Maine, in a classic car during the fall, I knew I was in trouble. Credit to Baldoni (the director and actor) for taking the wild twists of fate in this book, which allows the story to play out in the fashion it does and adds some genuine weight to them. The initial meeting between Lily and Ryle feels both organic while being cute, and that moment when Lily realizes she is seeing Atlas in front of her for the first time in probably 15 years is chilling. I felt it, so I know fans of the book did. The rhythm and pacing of people continuously talking and relationships growing more complex is more complicated than it appears, the gradual reveal of Ryle's character compliments the more significant themes of the film, and Jenny Slate just killin' it gives everything one could want from these types of tropes and take them to another level that reveal a semblance of validity.

God, I'm such a basic bitch.

On Saturday night, I texted my wife, Aprille, and said: “I’m watching a Polish film from the late ‘50s. Bet you can’t guess who recommended it.”

She immediately knew it was our old buddy Will, who has spent most of the last decade-plus living in Poland and has really immersed himself in the country's culture.

The film is “Ashes and Diamonds,” or “Popiół i Diament” in its native language. Directed by Andrzej Wajda, it completed his war film trilogy, which included 1954’s “A Generation” and 1956’s “Kanal,” which I haven’t seen.

“Ashes and Diamonds” was my first foray into Wajda’s filmography and the world of Polish film. 

“Ashes and Diamonds,” currently streaming on Max in the U.S., takes place in 1945 on the final day of World War II for the Poles. The film begins with two anti-communist underground fighters, Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) and Andrzej (Adam Pawlikowski), setting up the assassination of a local secretary of the Polish Workers’ Party, with communism the next threat to Poland following the defeat of the Nazis.

Maciek and Andrzej, unfortunately, kill the wrong men, setting up a scenario where Maciek must try to assassinate the right man at a hotel on the night of a banquet for a local politician.  

Maciek’s feelings for his duty versus his future lead to doubts about whether to see through his mission or desert and build a new life. This feeling is aided by his immediate attraction to the hotel’s barmaid Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), and I’m sure further by the realization he’s killed innocent men (though to be sure, that’s never explicitly stated).

Being a fan of many American film classics from this same era, I couldn’t help but see how much more mature “Ashes and Diamonds” was compared to its American counterparts, both things like language, sexual mores (the immediate hookup), and its stark realities, undoubtedly coming from the hardships the Polish people had lived through less than two decades prior and hadn’t entirely escaped. It was amazing that this film was even released, given Poland’s politics at the time it was made and released. It could’ve been buried forever, or at least for decades.  

The film's performances are all top-notch, but Cybulski is obviously the film's star. At the time, he was considered the James Dean of Polish actors. Though, I will say he reminded me more of a Peter Fonda/”Easy Rider” era performer (which would, of course, come after – maybe Fonda was inspired by Cybulski?) It’s the kind of performance where you know Cybulski knows he’s hot shit, but it doesn’t impact it negatively.

One of the things I wanted from this exercise of asking friends to recommend movies I likely hadn’t seen was to expand my viewing habits, and the number of international films I've seen over the last two years has been one of the best examples of this. “Ashes and Diamonds marks the fifth international film I’ve seen since beginning this project last year, and Will has been a big help with that.