Category Archives: 2018

2018, Based on a True Story, Don’t Worry, Drama, Gus Van Sant, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot (2018)

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What a year for Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line, Her) is set to have. With four movies set for release in 2018, Phoenix is an early favorite for a Best Actor Academy Award for the critically acclaimed and still under-appreciated You Were Never Really Here. Say what you want about that movie if you’ve seen it, but you can’t knock on his amazingly even performance. And the highly anticipated The Sisters Brothers (fall release) is also receiving some early Oscar buzz. As good as he was in You Were Never Really Here and as good as he probably will be in The Sisters Brothers, his performance of the year will be as John Callahan, the quadriplegic cartoon artist in the biopic Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot, a movie that many moviegoers will forget because of its title, but not because of its story or the performances of its lead. I admit that I was skeptical of the title and the trailer because you never really know if a Phoenix movie will be great or terrible these days. But I have trust in director Gus Van Sant (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester). If nothing else, I knew the movie was not going to be f***ing suck (Alex Ovechkin Stanley Cup quote…my team’s average is a combined one win a decade, so I’m going to milk the Washington Capitals championship for a long, long time). And the movie certainly didn’t suck. In fact, people often ask me if I watch movies through the eyes of a fan or of a critic. And more often than not, it goes back and forth, but I feel like I’m always analyzing the movie. However, when a movie is great, the critic’s lens gets taken off, and I’m in it for the ride as much as the persons sitting on my left and right. And that was the case with this movie. I was just really invested in the story and the characters. It reminded me a lot of The End of the Tour, a movie which, admittedly, I enjoyed slightly more than Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot. But it had that same sort of vibe with me.

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2018, Ben Foster, Debra Granik, Drama, Leave No Trace, Mental Illness, Thomasin McKenzie

Leave No Trace (2018)

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When you are the director who helped the likes of Jennifer Lawrence into stardom, actors will be drawn to you. But that doesn’t mean you have to capitalize on this and chug out movie after movie. Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, Down to the Bone) certainly did not do this. Winter’s Bone, which launched Lawrence into the public eye with her first of, as of 2017, four Academy Award nominations, was released in 2010, but this is Granik’s first non-documentary film since then. And, for critics, it was worth the wait. At the time of this review, her new film Leave No Trace has a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And, just as a recap, Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregate of critics’ reviews. So a 100% rating doesn’t mean that a critic thinks it’s a four-star movie. It just means she gives it a favorable review. And I’ll be the first to say that if I was a Rotten Tomatoes critic, I’m uncertain if that aggregate rating would still be 100%. Ultimately, I do fall on the side of giving this film a favorable review, but it is far from a great movie. Based on the trailer, I thought I was going to love Leave No Trace. However, I found it to be not just slow but boring. And I wanted to understand one of the two lead characters much more. There was a desire during the middle of the movie where I wanted to learn more. Unfortunately, it never quite quenched that thirst.
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2018, Action, Benicio Del Toro, Catherine Keener, Crime, Drama, Isabela Moner, Jake Picking, Jeffrey Donovan, Josh Brolin, Matthew Modine, Shea Whigham, Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Stefano Sollima, Top 10 Movie of 2018

Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

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Sicario: Day of the Soldado, not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit Sicario that you have to know exactly what happened in the first one to appreciate the second as it is its standalone movie. The only thing you really need to know to go into the 2018 movie fresh is that (spoiler), the drug war in Mexico has escalated to the point where the United States government is forced to use questionable tactics that force some of its operatives to question the morality of what they are doing and that the US is aided mystifying man with a unique set of skills but a checkered past named Alejandro (Benicio Del Toro – The Hunted, Traffic) whose family is killed after an order by a Mexican Cartel Kingpin named Carlos Reyes. That’s it. This man’s men kill Alejandro’s family, and he wants revenge. If you accidentally read that brief spoiler, shame on you for going at least three years without yet seeing the phenomenal Sicario. And just because I gave a brief spoiler definitely doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out if you have not already.
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2018, Adrift, Adventure, Baltasar Kormákur, Based on a True Story, Disaster, Drama, Romance, Sam Claflin, Shailene Woodley, Suspense, Top 10 Movie of 2018

Adrift (2018)

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Meticulously crafted and tenderly executed, Baltasar Kormákur’s (Everest,  2 Guns) Adrift is a journey not to be best on the largest screen you can find at your nearby cinemas. Lost at sea is one of my favorite genres of movies. This movie stands on its own against such classics as The Perfect Storm, Dead Calm,  Life of Pi, Lifeboat, All is Lost, The Deep, and even academy award-nominated pictures like Cast Away and Life of Pi in the sense that it is based on a true story and that the true story is real in the sense that we know exactly what happened because, spoiler, the survivor lives to tell the story. While such stories as Titanic, The Perfect Storm, Open Water, and The Heart of the Sea are based on true stories and are fantastic movies, there is so much fiction added to these stories because we don’t have full accounts of what actually did happen because there either wasn’t someone left at the end to give the proper details or there were so many fictional elements added to the anecdotes that the plot from which the movie was based on has been entirely changed. That is not the case with Adrift, and that is what makes this movie so great. It isn’t “based on” or “inspired by” a true story. It IS a true story, and, ultimately, that’s what we want in the end.
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2018, Anne-Marie Duff, Billy Howle, Dominic Cooke, Drama, Emily Watson, On Chesil Beach, Romance, Saoirse Ronan

On Chesil Beach (2018)

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Based on Ian McEwan’s (Atonement) novella by the same name, director Dominic Cooke proves that just because you have flint and tinder doesn’t always mean that you can make fire with his memorable and poignant, yet sometimes underwhelming and often slow On Chesil Beach. Not only did Cooke have McEwan’s novel to work with, but the author wrote the screenplay himself. Now I’m not a huge fan of comparing the book to the movie in my reviews (most of the time, as in the case of this one, it’s because I haven’t read the book), but I have read a couple of reviews that say that the movie did not do the book justice, that the final scenes of the movie weren’t even in the book, and that even what McEwan’s main novel points were changed or not flushed out. But since I actually liked the movie ass did most critics and other moviegoers (68% and 94% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes), I’m willing to forget the omissions specifically mentioned in the unfavorable reviews on both Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper’s websites. Nevertheless, I felt a very relatable component of this 1962 English set movie to 2018. The relatable component could be applicable in many specific situations in physically romantic relationships between two people.
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