Drama

Wilderness – Happily Ever After

/ / Television Reviews
  • Title: Wilderness – Happily Ever After
  • IMDb: link

The purpose of the opening episode of Wilderness is to set up the justification for murder once Liv (Jenna Coleman) discovers the husband (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) she’s sacrificed for is screwing on of his coworkers (Ashley Benson). Coleman is terrific here, especially in two scenes in which she reacts to her discovery, first what she believes is a one-night affair and later when she sees a video of Will and Cara together. Crushed by the weight of the situation, Liv plans a murderous revenge in the form of an apparent accident to occur to her husband while on a trip together.

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Babylon

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Babylon
  • IMDb: link

Babylon is a hot mess. Writer/director Damien Chazelle‘s look at the excess and self-indulgence of 1920s Hollywood at the end of the silent film era is itself a bloated, self-indulgent, clusterfuck of a film that weaves through the lives of troubled star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), newly discovered Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), and behind-the-scenes up-and-comer Manny Torres (Diego Calva).

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Lady Macbeth

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Lady Macbeth
  • IMDb: link

Only loosely based on Nikolai Leskov’s novella, 2016’s Lady Macbeth is primarily notable for the lead performance of Florence Pugh as a younger wife stuck in a marriage of convivence to a disinterested older man (Paul Hilton) growing more and more isolated in rural Northumberland before beginning an affair with one of her husband’s servants (Cosmo Jarvis). The film from director William Oldroyd takes some patience as, to highlight the banality of her life, nothing happens for the first 20 minutes of the film. We don’t know who Katherine was before her marriage and whether circumstances drove her to the cruelty on display or simply allowed that cruelty to fester and eventually lash out.

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Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
  • IMDb: link

The award-winning, and often banned for its frank discussion of puberty and religion, Judy Blume 1970 young adult novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. is adapted for film by writer/director Kelly Fremon Craig. Smartly choosing to keep the film in the 70s, and avoid having to deal with modern day technology that would certainly alter the story, we are introduced to sixth-grade student Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) facing a number of challenges as she and her parents move from New York City to New Jersey and she navigates a new grade, new friends, the arrival of puberty, and struggles with the ideas of her family’s two different religions.

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Air

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Air
  • IMDb: link

I have to say, I’m really enjoying the last few years of Matt Damon‘s career. You could easily slot Air into an entertaining double-feature with either The Martian or Ford v Ferrari. Using a well-worn Hollywood trope of an underdog fighting the odds, Air stars Damon as Nike salesman Sonny Vaccaro who in the mid-1980s pushed the running shoe company into an unlikely deal by signing rookie basketball star Michael Jordan to an industry-changing contract.

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