Movie Reviews

After the Hunt

  • Title: After the Hunt
  • IMDb: link

I don’t understand the point of After the Hunt, and, after seeing it, I’m not sure anyone involved in making it knows either. Set at Yale, we get a he said/she said script from the perspective of neither character involved in an alleged assult that happens off-camera.

Instead, our main character is a mostly self-absorbed professor (Julia Roberts) who is the mentor of the a potentially untrustworthy woman (Ayo Edebiri) who we see steal from the professor early on claiming she was sexually assaulted, and at the same time the best friend of notably flirtatious man (Andrew Garfield) who suggests the young woman made up the entire story for attention and to deflect from her largely plagiarized work.

A bit frozen by events, and honestly more concerned about her own illegal drug use and getting tenure, Roberts’ character is given plenty of reason to question what might have happened (although, honestly, I’m not sure she cares).

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Tron: Ares

  • Title: Tron: Ares
  • IMDb: link

Tron: Ares is the movie Tron: Legacy should have been. Largely ignoring the events of Legacy, the new film give us corporate espionage while also playing on the real-life debate of greed and fear of the proper use of Artificial Intelligence. On one side we have Eve Kim (Greta Lee), stepping in as the head of ENCOM following Sam Flynn‘s departure. On the other side we have Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters). Both are pursuing the breakthrough to manifest physical objects and programs into the real world for longer than 29-minutes (at which they become unstable and dissolve into dust).

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Kiss of the Spider Woman

  • Title: Kiss of the Spider Woman
  • IMDb: link

The 1985 film with William Hurt and Raul Julia was a more straightfoward adaptation of the original novel. 40 years later, director Bill Condon is a bit more ambitious in adapting the 90s Broadway musical with Diego Luna as political prisoner Valentin Arregui and Tonatiuh as his new cellmate Luis Molina, a gay window dresser arrested for public indecency.

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A House of Dynamite

  • Title: A House of Dynamite
  • IMDb: link

Opening in theaters for a limited run before hitting Netflix in two weeks, director Kathryn Bigelow‘s A House of Dynamite is an intriguing film exercise of replaying the same 20-30 minutes after a nuclear missile is launched on the United States from enemies unknown. Focusing on a large ensemble of actors, perspective shifts and the timeline resets to show us the same events from other characters’ point of view.

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Roofman

  • Title: Roofman
  • IMDb: link

Based on true events, Channing Tatum stars as former soldier turned thief Jeffrey Manchester who robbed over 40 McDonald’s before being sent to prison only to escape and hide out for months inside a Toys”R”Us. Fairly early on in the film someone describes Manchester as both a genius in seeing and understanding the world and a complete idiot in terms of lacking basic common sense, and the theme of Roofman is exploring that idea.

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