First Watch

“Kong: Skull Island”: One Silly Film Without a Clear Tone

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Kong:  Skull Island is an unbalanced amalgamation of B-Movie schlock and hyper-budget  blockbuster special effects (est. $185M).  It teems with A-List stars searching vainly for a place to die so they don’t have to embarrass themselves any longer.  The plot makes some sense, but the specific beats that move it from scene to scene are … Read more

“Logan” Leverages Stellar Performances and Engaging Action To Deliver an Outstanding Wolverine Send-Off

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Logan, James Mangold’s conclusion to the Wolverine franchise, dispenses with a safe approach to the comic book genre in favor of careful characterization, genuine emotion, and tactful storytelling.  It is an unabashed hard-R action movie bursting with violence, gore, and harsh language.  But, Mangold and company employ the R-rating towards more than blood and F-bombs … Read more

Jordan Peele’s Horror Masterpiece “Get Out” Expertly Satirizes Suburban Racists

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Writer-director Jordan Peele’s Get Out is a potent and poignant allegory about modern race relations in suburban America.  It is constructed on the skeleton of a slow-burn horror-thriller, with some awkward comedy thrown in for good measure.  Satirical to its very core, Get Out ridicules the WASP-y “post-racism” of the middle-upper class, and suggests that despite protestations to the contrary, this racism is just as nefarious as blatant hatred.  Through a deft use of genre tropes, Peele develops this allegory to its full potency, and the audience reaps the rewards.  As the pieces fall into place, we are eating out of Peele’s hand at every turn and there is only one conclusion:  Get Out is a masterpiece, harshly satiric and thoroughly creepy.

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Park Chan-wook’s “The Handmaiden” Expresses Powerful Sexuality with Startling Style

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Weird, exciting, and vibrant, Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden is an erotic tour through a world of subjugation, trickery, and betrayal framed by a bizarre love triangle.  The story was inspired by the novel Fingersmith by Welsh writer Sarah Waters, with Park and his co-writer Chung Seo-kyung adjusting the setting from Victorian England to Japanese-occupied Korea during the 1930s.  The structure of the film is cyclical, re-telling the story three times from different viewpoints and revealing new truths with each telling.  There’s an unreliability to the narrative, as truth and facade alternate with each new perspective.  But ultimately, The Handmaiden has an fervent romanticism about it, as the heart of the story is about love, sexual exploration, and self-discovery – all with a tinge of deviancy.

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“The Founder” Allows the Spectator To Interpret the Life and Success of Ray Kroc

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It is practically impossible to create a biopic without passing judgment on some axis, but director John Lee Hancock comes pretty close to presenting an unbiased view of McDonald’s “founder” Ray Kroc in The Founder.  The film details the story of Kroc discovering the original McDonald’s restaurant, the brainchild of brothers Mac and Dick, and expanding the McDonald’s empire through an aggressive franchise model.  As McDonald’s restaurants pop up everywhere, Mac and Dick lose control of the endeavor, and Kroc eventually muscles the two away from the business.

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“Silence” and the Personal Perdurability of Faith

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Silence is vintage Martin Scorsese.  The master’s techniques are evident in practically every frame, and his return to a religious subject matter is both fascinating and complex.  Nearly three decades ago, The Last Temptation of Christ showed that Scorsese was capable of delivering a nuanced treatise on spirituality, and he has done the same with Silence.  These topics are seldom tackled by Scorsese, so we should count ourselves lucky when the director is inspired by a story such as Silence, which has been in pre-production in some form for the last 25 years or so.

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“Hidden Figures” Chips Away at Bigotry with Intelligence

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There are specific and powerful images throughout Hidden Figures, but none exemplify the central theme of Theodore Melfi’s film more than two shots of a piece of chalk held by the main character.  This pregnant extension of Katherine Goble’s (Taraji P. Henson) brilliant mind is both an invitation for her to prove herself as a black woman in a world of white men, but an implicit challenge by those same men that she could never be their equal.  Though they are not connected dramatically, her struggles and successes are thematically connected with the successes of her peers, so that each separate woman’s respective strides become reverberations of the others, until the resulting din screams a single poignant truth:  the quality and content of a person’s mind is not determined by race, gender, or anything else so superficial.

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Fantastic Catharsis in J. A. Bayona’s Phenomenal “A Monster Calls”

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In J.A. Bayona’s A Monster Calls, the director mixes the hyper-reality of the agonizing struggles of a young boy named Conor O’Malley with a vibrant fantasy world involving a titanic tree monster.  Like in Bayona’s previous feature El Orfanato (The Orphanage), reality and fantasy are blended together in fascinating ways, until it is not quite clear precisely what we are looking at.  Though certainly a daunting task, Bayona and his performers manage to tell an engaging coming-of-age story about grief, coping, and the power of storytelling.

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“Split” Showcases Strong Acting Talent and Intriguing Camerawork in Shayamalan’s Best Film Since “Unbreakable”

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Night Shyamalan’s latest thriller Split will not make audiences forget about the director’s most embarrassing missteps, but the film evokes The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable more than The Happening and After Earth. The film follow the abduction of three teenage girls by a man with dissociative identity disorder (DID). Known to us as “Kevin”, the man harbors 23 distinct personalities, and as some of them begin to run things, we’re confronted with a powerful force living inside Kevin – a 24th personality known only as “The Beast”.  The film is commendable for its uses of classic camera techniques to disorient the audience and ratchet up the more realistic aspects of the film, while downplaying the more fantastic and silly elements.  Aided by two spectacular performances (and a collection of other strong ones), Split is easily the best film Shyamalan has made in over a decade – and may be second only to The Sixth Sense.

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Though a Product of the Stage, “Fences” Excels on the Strength of Davis and Washington

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In Fences, the titanic talents of Denzel Washington and Viola Davis are once again on full display.  The two reprise their roles from the 2010 revival of August Wilson’s play of the same name, for which each earned a Tony Award.  The film certainly feels like a play, as the performances are very stylized towards the stage.  Washington directs the film as well, making it his third feature, and first in nearly ten years.  Though peppered with discussions of race relations in the 1950s, the core of the story focuses on the relationships between members of the Maxson family.  Within this context, Fences explores the importance of responsibility, the strength and danger of a domineering personality, and the conflict between settling for something and seeking out your own desires in life.  It is a small film, but packs quite a punch throughout.

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