When you are the director who helped the likes of Jennifer Lawrence into stardom, you’ll garner lots of attention. But that doesn’t mean you must capitalize on this and chug out movie after movie. Debra Granik (
Winter’s Bone, Down to the Bone) 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 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 would love
Leave No Trace. However, I found it to be more than just slow. It was boring. And I wanted to understand one of the two lead characters much more. There was a desire during the middle of the movie for me to learn more. Unfortunately, it never quite quenched that thirst.
Continue reading Leave No Trace (2018) →
As my friend Tom would say, directing a Mission Impossible movie is like a doorknob. Everyone gets a turn. This is so true, but not really in a good way. While this franchise undoubtedly improves with each new installment, this wasn’t always the case. My biggest problem with the first four movies of the franchise was how different they were from one another. I have never watched a sequel that was so inherently different in directing, storytelling, cinematography, sound, and everything else from the original than Mission Impossible 2 was from Mission Impossible. John Woo’s Hong Kong-style martial arts action flick was so far completely different from the Brian DePalma intelligent, well-crafted, big-budget adaptation of the brilliant spy television series that ran for seven years in the late 1960s that it felt like the two movies weren’t even related. I don’t necessarily oppose changing a director (though I don’t love it), but I oppose changing styles. Plenty of franchises have had different directors that have made that work (most notably the James Bond franchise, which is similar to Mission Impossible), but many more haven’t.
What a year for Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line, 
Sicario: Day of the Soldado is not so much a sequel to 2015’s megahit