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.
Continue reading Widows (2018) →
Though it is not one of the ten BEST movies of 2018 (it is just on the outside looking in), there is a place for a movie like John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place because of its originality, creepiness, and ability to keep you on the edge of your seat for its fast-flying 90 minutes. In a time when Hollywood struggles with original storylines, we find a first-time director and still novice movie star in Krasinski (NBC’s The Office, Promised Land) delivering a downright knockout punch in his debut effort. I love gritty movies. I love movies that are rich in their characters. I love movies where the tone doesn’t change from opening credits to ending credits. A Quiet Place had all of this and more, and thus, it has found a spot in my Top Ten Movies of the Year for 2018 over other movies that might have been less flawed but were also far less original.
Lucas Hedges (
The race for the five Best Actor nominations might be the Academy Awards’ toughest race. Bradley Cooper (
As is the case with many biopics (since being hosed over by what I believed to be a movie based entirely on a true story in Remember the Titans), I like to read about what parts of the movie were factual and which were fictional to tell a better story. A good biopic often becomes great when you learn that what you saw on screen happened in real life. A good movie that bases its claim on being a true story or inspired by actual events but one that you later find out has been predominantly fictionalized loses much of its original appeal. And, honestly, there is no devastating dagger to a movie that I love when I learn that what I thought was a true story is not nearly as much as I thought.