Every trailer for a Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby) directed movie over the last decade-plus has made the film look like it would be a guaranteed Best Picture nominee. Whether that proves to be fruition (American Sniper, Flags of Our Father) or not even close (The 15:17 to Paris, Hereafter) doesn’t affect how great the trailers are. Over the last 15 years, Eastwood-directed movies have earned hundreds of millions more combined than they would have otherwise received had they not had terrific trailers. This is true of 2018’s The Mule. After seeing the trailer for The Mule for the first time in early October of 2018, the film instantly vaulted to my most anticipated movie of the year. When it wasn’t screened very much before its opening, I got a little worried. Then I saw the mixed reviews start to come in. At the time of this writing, The Mule has a 62% critics square and a 74% audience score, a little lower than I anticipated based on the trailer but right around what I expected them to be after seeing the film.
Category Archives: Suspense
Overlord (2018)
Any great movie year needs a variety of different types of movies:
- You have to have massive heavyweights during Oscar season.
- You need to exclude a handful of movies from contention simply because there isn’t enough room. These would be movies that, during a normal, might not just be considered for a nomination but might win some. These are movies that, when you look at your Top 10 list at the end of the year and don’t see that film’s title, make you scratch your head until you see the list of titles there instead, and then you say to yourself, “Okay, that makes sense.”
- A great movie year needs to have at least one memorable comedy and one memorable horror.
Widows (2018)
After watching Widows, 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 theater opening weekend. I’ve heard about Widows for months and saw the trailer the day before I saw the movie. And I still haven’t seen the whole trailer. I only needed to watch the first half of it to know that it was a movie I wanted to see immediately. McQueen, 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 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.
A Simple Favor (2018)
Capitalizing on the same success as 2014’s incredibly meticulous Gone Girl and 2016’s cluttered and underwhelming Girl on a Train comes Paul Feig’s (Bridesmaids, The Heat) adaptation of A Simple Favor, an adaptation of a 2017 novel by the same name. Unfortunately, this movie feels like a lousy knockoff with two Hollywood A-listers made hastily with a less-than-believable story by a director who was clearly over his head with this genre. This movie was preposterous in its concept and was only topped in absurdity by its cursory character development and inability to define a genre clearly. It leaves us asking as many questions about the movie’s style as it does its other elements.
Red Sparrow (2018)
There is much to unpack with Francis Lawrence’s (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, I Am Legend) ambitious spy thriller Red Sparrow, a 2018 early summer release that mainly flew under the radar domestically ($46 million) but excelled internationally ($150 million). Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) is, as of 2018, probably the actress who can command the most money per movie. If not number one, she’s pretty darn close. But that doesn’t mean that every movie she does will earn her an Oscar nomination or gross $100 million. And she’s not that choosy. Since bursting onto the scene with 2010’s Winter’s Bone, the first of her four Oscar nominations and one of the best breakout performances in the last 25 years, Lawrence has starred in more than 15 movies before the release of Red Sparrow. And while she can excel at portraying various characters, a Russian spy will not go down as one of her Top 10 performances of all time. It’s not that she was as bad as Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballet dancer who is, more or less, forced into the life of being an undercover operative after a terrible leg injury ruins her dancing career and leaves her needing money to pay for her mother’s medical expenses.