This movie avoids the dreaded normal 80's taint and holds up after 30 years. 

It's an easy A. 

Please listen below for audio review for a brief discussion on the movie, the pretentiousness of music people and natural talent in regards to being great or near-great. (Example: Michael Jordan is great. Lebron James is near-great.)

Or just comment and tell me I'm an idiot. 

At the heart of Sicario is a complicated question: What is victory in the face of an unwinnable war?  Is it the small wins that serve as a beacon of hope to spread from this epicenter?  Or is it in the very understanding that the war cannot be won, but a more favorable outcome can be achieved?  This serves as the central conflict between the idealistic FBI agent Kate and the ever-pragmatic CIA agent Matt and is the driving force behind the action of Sicario.

Much of the first act is spent setting up this world, giving the audience an understanding of the dire straits border towns are in.  The proxy for the viewer is Kate, an FBI agent in the kidnap rescue division.  Opening with a tactical mission for her team immediately gives us the impression that Kate is no pushover when she makes it into Juarez, which is where our story begins in earnest.  Right from the opening aerial shot over serene El Paso & dilapidated Juarez, we know we’re dealing with two different worlds here.  The sounds of Juarez as the task force drives through are littered with gunfire.  Multiple bodies, decapitated, hang from a bridge.  Yet, we see the townspeople go about their business in the meantime.  This is commonplace, and that jarring juxtaposition of people playing games while the bullets fly is just another day in Juarez, or any other border town that has become a nexus for drug trafficking.  That point is further driven home by the shootout on the bridge, which “won’t even make the papers in El Paso.”  Kate and the viewer now know this is the war we are dealing with.

Flame and Citron is a story about a pair of members of the Danish resistance group Holger Danske during World War II.  Flame and Citron are assassins who calmly carry out their missions with little information in regards to their targets only knowing they are Danish informers or collaborators with the Nazi occupation of Denmark.  They purposely do not target German officials despite their desire to do so for fear it will increase the chances of retaliation.  The build up here is a little slow but the noir-ish style of the film directed by Ole Christian Madsen, and the performances of Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen as Flame and Citron respectively engage you through the slower setup and lead into scene after scene of excellence as events begin to unfold. 

When I initially watched Hush, it was late at night, outside, and on my laptop with some quality earbuds in.  A friend (and sporadic podcast listener!), suggested it, so she and I actually watched it together over the Showgoers extension.  It was actually a pretty nice environment to watch a horror thriller.  The thing is, expectations for scary movies these days are quite low.  It seems like the genre leans more toward cheap jump scares, torture, and gore more than looking to induce any real element of fear.  Hush, being a home invasion movie, really could have gone either way.  While there are a few things to pick on, overall it absolutely worked for me. ​