• Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

    Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood

    ★★★★½

    For a multitude of reasons, I picked this for my office Oscar pool. One being it seems like it’s showing up on a lot of those cringe secret ballots that have popped up. And another being that Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood. Add a prestige director into the mix, and a surefire Best Supporting Winner and you’ve got yourself a contender as far as I’m concerned. Since Irishman won’t win for dumb reasons, I’ll take this as a good consolation.

    All…

  • Widows

    Widows

    ★★★★½

    One of the things I love most about going to the movies as much as I do (this year was an aberration, back to the 70ish range next year) is that every now and again you get to see a classic become a classic in real time.

    For anyone that's wondering, I realized this was one of those movies after Daniel Kaluuya did his thing in the gymnasium.

    Widows kicks ass not just in the 18th ward, but in every…

  • Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

    Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

    ★★★★½

    “It’s called Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again, not Mamma Mia: Here We Go Once” - a wonderful person on Twitter.

    Hell yeah.

    I got a job in Manhattan a week or two ago. Tonight, I got an apartment and celebrated the only way I knew how.

    This movie is magical, triumphant, joyful, and a little gay. I love it for all of those reasons.

    If you don’t think this’ll get a spot on my end-of-the-year list, you must not know me that well.

    Lily James 2020

    Grade: 9/10

  • La La Land

    La La Land

    ★★★★½

    La La Land is a celebration. A drink held high for anyone who has the nerve to reach for the stars, even if the odds are slim at catching them.

    Right before I saw this, I had an interview in New York City with the company of my dreams. 

    La La Land couldn't have come at a better time.

    Here's to the ones who dream.

    I got the gig, btw :)

  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

    ★★★★

    EDIT: THIS ONLY COST $90 MILLION TO MAKE?!?!?!?!?

    Even though this was certified a couple months ago with the video-game, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is yet another piece of evidence that no single property has had a better year than Spider-Man in 2018.

    And Spider-Verse just might be the best of them all.

    Eye-popping visuals, pitch-perfect comedy, touching dramatic moments, the best Stan Lee cameo, and a fantastic script add up to make this a movie you need to see…

  • First Man

    First Man

    ★★★★

    bUt ThEy DiDnT sHoW hIm PlaCiNg ThE fLag.

    First Man isn't interested in jacking up America's needlessly inflated ego. It's interested in grabbing the audience by the shoulders and hammering home how goddamn impossible it was to get to the moon and how we did it anyway. The ingenuity of the human spirit is much more powerful than that of any given nationality.

    Damien Chazelle's third film isn't his best, or perhaps his most memorable, but it just might be…

  • Alien: Covenant

    Alien: Covenant

    ★★★★

    This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

    Prometheus is one of my favorite sci-fi movies of all time, and even though this movie inches closer to Alien, which I like a lot more, Covenant feels incomplete and aimless.

    I hate to say it, but the biggest problem I had with this movie was the story. They tried to give Prometheus it's due, but the attempts come off as desperate and weakly constructed.

    As I'm writing this, I'm still trying to figure out if this movie revealed David…

  • Your Name.

    Your Name.

    ★★★★

    An occasionally murky plot and random annoying music videos don't detract too much from this fresh and immersive story.

  • The Circle

    The Circle

    ★★★½

    The key to power, and the currency through which you can obtain it is information. James Ponsoldt understands this, and that thesis is why The Circle will go down as one of the year's most underappreciated movies.

    If you have a shred of critical thinking ability, this movie should scare you just as much as any horror film. What sets this apart is that there are no nuns, blind men or evil goats, there's just the fallibility of human nature,…

  • Free Fire

    Free Fire

    ★★★½

    Free Fire is a hilarious, action-packed thriller with some of the most memorable characters 2017 has had to offer.

    The only flaw is that it's held back by its premise, which probably sounded better in a pitch than in execution.

  • Impractical Jokers: The Movie

    Impractical Jokers: The Movie

    ★★★

    2020 - RANKED

    For whatever reason I’ve been watching this show since day 1. It isn’t anything close to being high-brow or insightful , a lot of bits just do not work, and truthfully once in a while there’s an episode that doesn’t make me laugh at all.

    And that’s sort of what this “movie” is. Highs and lows. The scripted bits and most of the staged stuff is meh, but there’s some magic that happens when these guys click.…

  • The Front Runner

    The Front Runner

    ★★★

    For a while there, we had it pretty nice.

    Cinemas reaction to the Trump world were mostly coincidental and just frequent enough to not get annoying. Now we've reached a point where movies have been conceived, written, shot and released well into this embarrassment of a presidency. While I'm sure people's hearts are in the right place, it's still annoying.

    There are much worse offenders than The Front Runner, but not too many have been as disappointing. In fairness to…

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