Gerard Butler stars in the third film in the Fallen trilogy
Review by Logan Kenny
For something that easily could have been exploited as basic propaganda, it’s fascinating that Angel Has Fallen does the most it can within its platform to actually have an ideology.
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The cast of Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winning Parasite
Review by Lucy Palmer
Parasite is a film that plays with genre like no other and somehow remains decisively coherent from beginning to end.
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Former teen-hearthrob Zac Efron stars as Ted Bundy in director Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
Review by Nicholas Armstrong
The premise of casting Efron as Bundy allows him to incorporate the charms and tics that we have come to know him for, making them hypervisible and ultimately forcing us to question why we are drawn to those tics in the first place.
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Samara Weaving stars in Ready or Not by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet
Review by Andrew Swafford
Ready or Not functions well as agitprop for working-class folks who harbor resentment for the ultra-wealthy already, but it rarely points the finger at what exactly the rich get up to that is violent in nature.
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Sosie Bacon and Hannah Murray star in director Mary Harron’s Charlie Says
Review by Logan Kenny
Charlie Says never takes the easiest route of satisfaction through violence; there is no solace for anyone in this picture.
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Review by Lydia Creech
There’s a lot of fucked-upness in the world right now, as is, and putting the film safely 50 years in the past robs the scare power these stories could have communicated.
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Starring Alice Englert, Kaitlyn Dever, Olivia Coleman, Jim Gaffigan, Walton Goggins, and Thomas Mann
A conversation between Andrew Swafford and Reid Ramsey
Them That Follow is a film about an Appalachian snake-handling church, which makes it a pretty interesting topic of conversation for us here at Cinematary – our podcast crew is primarily made up of southerners, and we recently completed a months-long podcast series about southern culture on film. Among the films in that series were Marjoe and Wise Blood, which both presented extreme forms of religious performance and asceticism – and we also watched hillbilly, which studies the on-screen representation of Appalachian people specifically. To me, these ideas intersect in the subject of snake-handling churches, which are dangerous and controversial but also loom large in the cultural imagination as a source of extreme southern backwardness.
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Along with Tye Sheridan and Denis Lavant, Jeff Goldblum stars in director Rick Alverson’s The Mountain
Review by Andrew Swafford
The easiest thing to say definitively about Rick Alverson’s The Mountain is that it’s a film about lobotomies that makes you feel as though you’ve been lobotomized yourself.
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Review by Reid Ramsey
By the end of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, it’s clear that Tarantino had two clear objectives: to entertain and to humanize Sharon Tate. The result is his most moving film — maybe his only moving film.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
All the personality of the animated The Lion King has been sucked out, and we are left with a bunch of life-like animals — and the humans voicing them — looking and sounding like they’re going through their contractually obligated motions.
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Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails star in director Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Review by Jessica Carr
This was the first time in 2019 that I left the theater feeling like I had just witnessed something truly masterful. This film is truly a work of poetry-in-motion.
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Florence Pugh stars in director Ari Aster’s Midsommar
Review by Michael O’Malley
Instead of turning off the horror to make room for comedy, Midsommar has comedy and horror coexist in the same space.
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Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Holland star in director Jon Watts’s Spider Man: Far From Home
Review by Courtney Anderson
Far from Home turns out to be a fun, but slightly uneven and familiar journey.
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Review by Zach Dennis
Wild Nights with Emily never outright makes the assertion that Dickinson’s supposed lesbian relationship was the stone-chiseled truth. While it presents evidence to the claim, the bigger exploration it poses to the audience is our outright acceptance to what we perceive as historical text.
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Review by Etan Weisfogel
You don’t listen to a King Crimson record for the lyrics—it’s about how the music sounds. Our Time, for all its flaws, sings like few films in recent memory.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
One of my favorite things about this movie is that no matter how complicated the time-travel missions or the technology that made them possible became, the movie never lost focus of reality.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
I don’t even know where to start with The Perfection. It’s been a day or two, and I’m still gobsmacked by what I witnessed. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am. I don’t know where I am. Please send help.
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Keanu Reeves reprises his role as John Wick in the action franchise’s third entry
Review by Logan Kenny
Parabellum is less assured and seamless as its direct predecessor and lacks the simplistic emotional throughline of the original entry, favouring a messier, shaggier approach which doesn’t always hit flawlessly. However, the faults aren’t what stick with me days after finishing it, and they likely aren’t what I’ll think of months from now. Mostly, I’ll be thinking of Keanu.
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This is an essay about a boy and his Pikachu.
Review by Andrew Swafford
Throughout the marketing campaign leading up to the release of Detective Pikachu, I found myself bracing for the trainwreck that I imagined might be made of my beloved franchise. Now having seen the movie, I’m neither wholly mad nor impressed, but am rather left with a tangled thread of thoughts and associations ultimately leading me to the realization that it doesn’t matter what I think about this movie.
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Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever star in director Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart
Review by Paige Taylor
I’m not joking when I tell you I am positively vibrating with giddy emotion over this movie. The experience of watching it was a fucking thrill. Once the laughter started, the room slowly transformed into sheer amusement-induced delirium and that energy sustained itself for the rest of the runtime. When I left I felt like I was getting back on the school bus after spending a field trip secretly drinking with all my friends.
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