B+ | Welsh townspeople pool their money to buy and raise a competitive racehorse. Directed by Euros Lyn Starring Toni Collette, Damien Lewis, and Owen Teale Review by Jon Kissel |
An old-fashioned underdog story, Dream Horse loses nothing just because it’s familiar. Sports movies like this one can only go in a few different ways, and Euros Lyn’s 2021 adaptation of a 2016 documentary about an early 21st century horse follows a predictable, if accurate, three-act structure of success followed by failure followed by success. Dream Horse gets over on the many other films like it with effective casting of character actors, an emphasis on the omnipresent class angle in its Welsh setting, and a predictably strong lead performance from Toni Collette. Lyn puts it all together in a warm and charming package that’s easy to love and impossible to hate.
0 Comments
Contact is about nothing more than humanity's place in the universe and how we see ourselves fitting into it. This breadth is fitting for writers like Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, whose earlier work in TV includes the seminal series Cosmos. Sagan, an astronomer and brilliant science communicator, died shortly before Contact's release, but Contact is an often-beautiful distillation of his worldview and his way of thinking. Directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster, Contact brings Sagan briefly back to life, asking the kinds of questions he asked through his scientifically-skeptical outlook. It's not a perfect film, but it is one made specifically for me.
One of the most influential movies of the 21st century, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight ushered in a wave of blockbuster filmmaking that’s either copying it or working in opposition to it. If a superhero movie is being made by Warner Bros or Fox in the ensuing years, it’s going to have to attempt to be a gritty/grounded film with a philosophical background on society. If Disney’s at the helm, the demands of the market force their superhero movies to leave the dark stuff to someone else and lean heavily into a jokey tone with little connection to the real world. The success of the latter strategy implies that the wrong lessons have been taken from The Dark Knight, that only this group of actors and filmmakers at this point in time could pull this off, as demonstrated by the insufficiency of The Dark Knight Rises four years later. It’s not like every facet of The Dark Knight is pulled off as successfully as some others. What does work here is some of the best of Nolan’s career and is worth emulating, but by so clearly aiming for profundity and seriousness, the film invites an interrogation it can’t hold up against. One wishes that a reckoning with the War on Terror didn’t have to be wrapped up in a superhero movie, but we live in the cultural world that Nolan helped to create.
On our master spreadsheet, a movie gets a ranking after 3 people have graded it. We’ve currently logged 4,226 movies, but only 1721 have been ranked. Six movies have received only F’s, and of those six, Batman and Robin has been given an F by eight Mediocre Movie Club members. By consensus, this is the worst movie we’ve logged in the nine years we’ve been doing this. The fourth film in a franchise that’s turned over its entire cast three times, with the exception of Michael Gough as Alfred, Batman and Robin is what it looks like when everyone has given up and surrendered whatever artistic or technical aspirations they have to greed and apathy. No one appears to be trying to make something acceptable. Joel Schumacher buries Batman and resets the superhero genre back to square one in the public’s eyes as a clownish and juvenile endeavor. That wouldn’t last longer than a few years with X-Men and a 9/11-goosed Spider-Man, but it’s not like Schumacher and Co don’t shovel as much dirt on the corpse as possible. Critically reviled movies often come in for a reevaluation years after their release, but Batman and Robin doesn’t achieve some kind of camp quality, nor is it a scrappy underdog. It was bad then, and it’s bad now.
The films of Joel and Ethan Coen have a recurring set of themes, and over their almost 40 year career, those themes have been applied across all genres. They’ve arguably made the best comedy, the best film about a musician, the best Western, the best Hollywood satire, and the best small-time crime film of recent film history, and with The Tragedy of Macbeth, Joel Coen has made the best English-speaking Shakespeare adaptation, with only Akira Kurosawa’s Ran as competition. Without his brother, Joel Coen doesn’t miss a beat in a film that reaches objective perfection in scene after scene. This is an assemblage of actors, crew members, and creative contributors without peer, all working in sync under a director at the peak of his powers. The Tragedy of Macbeth represents the end of a wildly successful partnership, as Ethan Coen has reportedly moved into theater, but there’s no diminishing of what the viewer can expect when a film has the Coen name on it. |
AuthorsJUST SOME IDIOTS GIVING SURPRISINGLY AVERAGE MOVIE REVIEWS. Categories
All
Archives
April 2023
Click to set custom HTML
|