Movie Reviews

Ghostbusters: Afterlife

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Ghostbusters: Afterlife
  • IMDb: link

It’s impossible to make a Ghostbusters film funny as the original; even the original cast and crew could only muster up Ghostbusters II. Realizing this, Ghosbusters: Afterlife takes an unexpected approach of not offering a comedy but rather instead a family drama wrapped in the trappings of the Ghostbusters franchise. The choice is likely to surprise and anger some fans. Sure, there’s humor (much of it from Paul Rudd as the wacky summer school teacher), but the driving momentum behind the story isn’t for big laughs but for the family, and their new friends, coming together to save the town, and the world, from ghosts.

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King Richard

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  • Title: King Richard
  • IMDb: link

King Richard offers a different type of sports biopic with the focus not on the athlete, coach, or team, but on the father of a pair of promising young tennis players. The fairly conventional film showcases the unconventional path to tennis stardom Richard Williams (Will Smith) led his daughters Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) to while pissing off pretty much everyone in the tennis world.

Because of how early the film is set, ending on Venus’ professional debut (which doesn’t paint a flattering picture of her opponent Arantxa Sánchez Vicario played by Marcela Zacarias), and how little the Williams sisters played in junior tennis, the younger Serena draws the short straw here and we don’t get as much tennis as you may expect. What King Richard does offers is a character study of the often rigid Richard Williams and the environment that raised two tennis stars who would change the sport.

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Belfast

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  • Title: Belfast
  • IMDb: link

There’s a nostalgic feel to writer/director Kenneth Branagh‘s semi-autobiographical film about a young boy growing up in Belfast during the times of The Troubles as communities were torn apart by Protestant and Catholic sides over national rather than religious fervor. The lens which events are shown is the likable schoolboy Buddy (Jude Hill) who loves his home, neighborhood, and family despite the violence that rages around them to a point where soldiers deploy and barricades are erected.

Buddy’s family includes his mother (Caitriona Balfe), mostly absentee father (Jamie Dornan), older brother (Lewis McAskie), and grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds). Despite the tumultuous setting, much of the movie centers around Buddy’s everyday life, his crush on a girl (Olive Tennant) at school, going to the movies with his family, and getting dragged into situations by an older neighborhood girl (Lara McDonnell) he isn’t ready for.

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Eternals

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  • Title: Eternals
  • IMDb: link

Eternals is ambitious as hell. It may be the most ambitious movie Marvel has attempted since weaving together various threads into a single story in The Avengers. Sadly, it’s nowhere near as successful. With an opening crawl, monologues aplenty, and flashbacks, Eternals struggles to introduce and flesh out a dozen characters, their purpose, their backstory, and their place in the MCU.

I’ll give writer/director Chloé Zhao credit for assembling a talented and diverse cast, but with so many characters to keep track of (many of who disappear for large amounts of screentime) more than once I forgot an actor was even in the film.

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Halloween Kills

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  • Title: Halloween Kills
  • IMDb: link

2018’s Halloween offered a final confrontation between a haunted Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Meyers. Better than most of the Halloween sequels, it seemed a fitting end to the franchise offering closure to both Michael and Laruie’s stories. However, with big sequel money waiting to be made, unfortunately the story didn’t end there.

Set immediately following the events of the previous film, Halloween Kills is an unfocused hodgepodge of bad ideas which, bizarrely, comes to the exact opposite conclusion than the previous film. Michael survives the fire thanks to the first responders he gladly murders on his way to cutting a new swath of blood through Haddonfield, Illinois in a three-minute sequence that turns out to have a larger body count than the combined the murders from the original Halloween.

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