Ready to call it a career, Frank James (Sam Shepard – Out of the Furnace, The Right Stuff) promises his brother Jesse (Brad Pitt – Legends of the Fall, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) one last train heist with the notorious James Gang. Then, Frank will drift off into the sunset and live out the rest of his life quietly. But what will happen to Jesse? Well, he will be assassinated by the coward Robert Ford. The film’s title gives the plot away unless somehow we are talking about the assassination metaphorically. We are not. So what keeps director Andrew Dominik’s (Blonde, Killing Them Softly) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford such an alluring watch for its nearly three-hour runtime?
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No Country for Old Men is the most well-received and critically acclaimed adaptation of a Cormac McCarthy (my favorite author) novel. There have been six. The Road is, by far, my favorite McCarthy novel and a movie masterpiece. The others are the slightly underrated All the Pretty Horses, the disappointing box office flop The Counselor, the virtually unseen Child of God, and The Sunset Limited, a film I still need to see. No Country for Old Men is the only McCarthy-adapted film to receive an Oscar, earning eight nominations and four wins, including the first nomination and win in Best Achievement in Directing for Hollywood darlings Joel and Ethan Coen.
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Braven is basically On Deady Ground/Above the Law/Under Siege/Out for Justice or any Steven Seagal masterpiece of the early 1990s meets one of the best movies of all time (Young Guns) meets one meets the best Christmas movie of all time (Home Alone). And I don’t know if that sentence is a ringing endorsement or enough to get you to stop reading right now. In all honesty, it’s both. Lin Oeding’s feature-length debut, Braven, is far from a perfect movie. It is very, very flawed. But it is also highly entertaining. If Die Hard is your thing, then the Jason Momoa-led (Aquaman, Justice League) Braven will also be your thing. I can’t say you’ll love or remember much from it 24 hours later, but you will enjoy it, especially if you turn your mind off. Also, if he wants it, Momoa can be the new Segal, though he’s already proven he has more acting range than the former ever showed.
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Movies I Watch That Inspire Me to Critique!