After watching Widows, the best movie of 2018 that has been released before Thanksgiving) I can very confidently say that if you team up director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) and writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, HBO’s Sharp Objects), I’m going to have my butt in a theatre opening weekend. I’ve heard about Widows for months now but never actually saw the trailer until the day before I saw the movie. And I still haven’t seen the whole trailer. I needly only watch the first half of it to know that it was a movie that I wanted to see and that it was a movie I wanted to see right away. With all due respect to A Star Is Born, I think that its parade walk to 2018’s Best Picture just hit a major roadblock in McQueen’s masterpiece of a movie. The man who was narrowly beaten out for Best Director (Alfonso Cuarón – Gravity) hardly seemed upset when half an hour later, his 12 Years a Slave won topped Gravity (and others) for the Best Picture of 2013. He’s been off the grid for the last five years (save for a few shorts), but he is back with a movie that might be better than any of his previous three masterpieces (12 Years a Slave, Shame, Hunger Strike). The only thing missing is an appearance by Michael Fassbender, but you won’t even notice. Not only has McQueen delivered the best movie of 2018 (so far), but he’s brought the best ensemble of the year, one that will likely garner awards for a couple of people and a surefire one for the film’s protagonist Veronica (Viola Davis – Fences, The Help). And while some might think I’m crazy to suggest that her performance in Widows is better than her performances in Fences, The Help, or Doubt, I would counter that she led a star-studded cast in this movie. In contrast, while she was fantastic in her other three films, she wasn’t the center character. AND, I am still upset that she was put up for Best Supporting Actress in 2016 Fences, an award that she won) because that was a leading performance and would have won Best Lead Actress. She was not anymore a supporting character than Denzel Washington was. But I digress…
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Category Archives: Liam Neeson
Non-Stop (2014)
Liam Neeson (Schindler’s List, Taken) continues his one great movie, one terrible movie, one great movie, one terrible movie streak with the intense Non-Stop, perhaps the second most exciting airplane movie ever made (and no, I’m not ranking it behind Snakes on a Plane). I think Air Force One set the standard back in 1997, but Non-Stop is precisely that…nonstop. It’ll keep you glued to the screen for its 1 hour 47 minute running time. Is this movie plausible? Absolutely not. Does that deter from the experience? Only if you’ll let it. Are the coincidences totally out of control? Of course, they are. But if you want to be entertained with an action-oriented whodunit, you could do much worse. I wish I had seen this movie on the big screen. So far, 2014 has been terrible for film, but Non-Stop is the best movie of the year’s first half.
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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Christopher Nolan’s (Inception, The Prestige) last chapter in his Batman franchise is the exciting but imperfect The Dark Knight Rises. This is an excellent movie and successfully concludes the best trilogy I’ve ever seen. However, if you go in with the idea that it will be better than The Dark Knight, you will be disappointed. With Hedge Ledger’s to die for performance as the Joker, The Dark Knight is as close to a perfect movie as you will get. It holds a place on my Top 10 Movies of All-Time list. The Dark Knight Rises is very ambitious, a little too ambitious. At 2 hours and 45 minutes, you’d think they have plenty of time to tell its story and conclude the franchise, but there is so much to the story, and rushing its development and racing to its conclusion would not have resulted in a successful movie. This is one of those movies where a review such as mine won’t persuade you to see it or not see it. You most likely have it in your head that you will either see this movie or not. So why do I write it? Because I committed myself to reviewing every film that will be on my Top 10 list at the end of the year. I am very, very confident there will not be ten other movies released in 2012 that will be better than The Dark Knight Rises.
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The Grey (2012)
Hit or miss actor Liam Neeson (Taken, Unknown) strikes gold with Joe Carnahan’s (Narc, Smokin’ Aces) The Grey. This riveting survival adventure movie follows a group of oil riggers after their plane crashes in the remote northern Alaska wilderness. Ottway (Neeson) is a marksman for the company. His job is to shoot any wolf that comes near the workstation. He’s a depressed man, and his narration at the start of the film makes it seem like everybody who works at this isolated post is there because there is nothing better for them anywhere else. The bars are lively when the men aren’t at work. The small men work side by side with each other daily at this monotonous job but do not know each other at all. At least, that’s how Ottway sees it or perceives it to be.
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