Movie Review Red One

Red One 

Directed by Jake Kasdan 

Written by Chris Morgan 

Starring Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Chris Evans, J.K Simmons, Lucy Liu, and Kiernan Shipka

Release Date November 15th, 2024 

Published November 15th, 2024 

Red One exists in the space between an eye roll and a groan. It’s an elderly screenplay that creaks with the tropes of a late 90s to early 2000s buddy comedy/action movies. It’s also a family Christmas movie so it’s forcefully benign, as such movies are when they are intended to live forever in the background of family gatherings playing on a loop on the Superstation or the USA Network. I understand if you assume that I hate Red One but I don’t. I can barely remember having experienced Red One. It’s a dim and dying memory mere hours after seeing it. 

Red One stars Dwayne The Rock Johnson as Callum Drift, head of security for E.L.F, Santa Claus’ personal security team. They’re like the secret service but for Santa. Santa is played by J.K Simmons as a mischievous sort who likes to go to a mall in the days before Christmas to speak to kids as if he weren’t the real Santa Claus. It’s on these trips to the mall where Callum has begun to lose the magic of Christmas. Watching adults argue and bicker and steal and fight over gift items has taken a toll on Callum who has decided to resign as Santa’s top guy.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Wicket Pt 1

Wicked Part 1 

Directed by John M. Chu 

Written by Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox 

Starring Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum 

Release Date November 22nd, 2024 

Published November 22nd, 2024 

I really enjoy musicals. I love movie musicals. I love the Tom Hooper adaptation of Les Miserables. All of this is mentioned to lay out my qualifications as someone who is more than merely open to loving musicals. And I was open to loving Wicked Part 1, even as I have never experienced the stage musical beyond seeing Idina Menzel sing Defying Gravity in a clip on Tik Tok. So, why don’t I love Wicked Part 1? I’m not quite sure. I don’t dislike Wicked, I recommend you see Wicked, but this article is going to be about me trying to figure out why I like but don’t love Wicked. 

Wicked stars Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba, the woman who will become the famed and reviled Wicked Witch of the West. Elphaba was born green and this has rendered her as an outcast from birth. Thus, when she arrives at Shiz University, she’s a spectacle, whether she wants to be or not. This is magnified by her first meeting with the most popular student at Shiz, Galinda (Ariana Grande), a pink and bubbly young woman who desires to become a witch under the tutelage of the university’s most well known and respected sorceress, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh).

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Queer

Queer 

Directed by Luca Guadignino 

Written by Justin Kuritzkes

Starring Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman 

Release Date November 27th, 2024 

Published December 2nd, 2024

Queer stars Daniel Craig in an adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel of the same title. Craig stars as William Lee, an independently wealthy traveler on the run from a drug bust in the states and hiding out in Mexico City. Lee has found a small collection of fellow outsiders, gay hustlers, and so on, fleeing from the prying eyes of 1950s America for the seedy underbelly of Mexico City. While Lee enjoys the nightlife of the area, he’s a romantic at heart who seems to fall in love with the wrong man at every turn. 

His newest love interest is a mysterious former serviceman, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a strikingly handsome and much younger man who may or may not be gay. Eugene gives many mixed signals about his interests in men, spending much of his time with a female sex worker but also asking around about popular gay hook up spots. Eventually, Lee’s obsession with Eugene landed them both in the same nightclub and, with a little liquid encouragement, the two fall into bed.

Find my full length review at Pride.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Hard Truths

Hard Truths 

Directed by Mike Leigh

Written by Mike Leigh 

Starring Marianne Jean Baptiste, Michele Austin

Released September 2024 

Published December 2nd, 2024 

Hard Truths is a hard watch. The film centers on a performance by Marianne Jean Baptiste, who portrays Pansy, that is often deeply unpleasant. Pansy is a miserable woman whose undiagnosed depression is expressed via deep seated anger and resentment of everyone around her. And I do mean everyone. This includes her patient and devoted husband Curtley (David Webber), their deeply morose son, Moses (Tuwaine Barrett), and Pansy’s loving and open hearted sister, Chantelle (Michele Austin). 

But I said, everyone and I meant it. Thus, when Pansy leaves her home, which is a rarity, she inflicts her vitriol on store clerks, doctors, dentists, and anyone who comes across her path. The film is oppressive in presenting Pansy’s rage as a constantly boiling cauldron splashing molten anger as it begins to overflow everywhere. Pansy is so all-consuming that the movie switches gears to bring us into the lives of Chantelle and her two lovely young daughters, Kayla (Ari Nelson) and Aleisha (Sophia Brown) as a way of allowing the audience a moment to breathe.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Nosferatu

Nosferatu 

Directed by Robert Eggers 

Written by Robert Eggers

Starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bill Skarsgard

Release December 25th, 2024 

Published December 3rd, 2024 

Robert Eggers is an exceptionally talented director. He’s a master of tone and production design. He has an unfailing eye for compelling visual storytelling. He’s also weird and willing to bring the weird in his movies, see Willem Dafoe’s entire performance in The Lighthouse. This weirdness is part of Robert Eggers’ charm for me and it’s what is missing from his new film, a remake of F.W Murnau’s seminal silent film, Nosferatu. It’s such a straightforward, everything-you-expect remake of Nosferatu that it lacks a personality of its own. 

Nosferatu stars Lily Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a newly married woman who has terrifying dreams of a man who claims that he is coming for her. While she’s troubled by her dreams, she tries to keep a brave face for her new husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Meanwhile, Thomas has received a promotion at work. He’s to travel into the Carpathian Mountains to finalize the expensive sale of a local rundown castle. An aging Count is eager to move to Wisborg and retire, of course we know that his real motivation just happens to be Thomas’s wife.

Find my full length review at Horror.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review A Different Man

A Different Man 

Directed by Aaron Schimberg 

Written by Aaron Schimberg 

Starring Sebastian Stan, Renata Reinsve, Aaron Pearson 

Release Date January 21st, 2024 

Published December 4th, 2024 

A Different Man stars Sebastian Stan as an actor named Edward Lemuel. Edward has neurofibromatosis, his face is deeply disfigured. Living in New York City and struggling to get by with what little acting work he can get, Edward meets his new neighbor, Ingrid Vold (Renate Reinsve) and is immediately smitten. She’s an aspiring playwright and the two become friendly though it appears that Ingrid only wants to be friends with Edward, a heartbreaking feeling for poor Edward. 

As he’s struggling along, Edward is also looking for treatments for his condition and an experimental procedure may be the key. Working with a shady doctor, Edward is stunned to find his condition improving and pieces of his old face are falling off to reveal a handsome new man. Not wanting Ingrid to know it’s him, Edward takes the chance to create a new identity, inventing a man named Guy Moratz and claiming to others that Edward had taken his own life.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Babygirl

Babygirl 

Directed by Halina Reijn 

Written by Halina Reijn

Starring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Antonio Banderas 

Release Date December 25th, 2024 

Published December 5th, 2024 

Babygirl is a movie about breaking through the surface to get to something real, a real emotion, a real reaction, a true desire. Beneath the glossy veneer of the life of a multi-millionaire CEO with a handsome playwright husband and two exceptionally well adjusted daughters, is a roiling cauldron of sexual frustration and the twisted, perverse desire to risk it all for the thrill of the elicit and forbidden. The forbidden in this case is a 20 something intern named Samuel with six pack abs and a manner precisely used to push past the boundaries of propriety and polite adherence to expectations. 

Nicole Kidman stars in Babygirl as Romy, the high powered CEO of a tech company that is putting many people out of work. Romy justifies this by claiming that her company is relieving people of menial work but this is just her way of justifying profiting from other people’s pain. The grease in the wheels of capitalism is the blood of those at the bottom of the economic ladder but we all politely try and pretend that’s not true. All of us, except for Samuel (Harris Dickinson) who, on his first day as an intern at Romy’s company, bluntly asks the CEO how she feels about putting so many people out of work.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review The Fire Inside

The Fire Inside 

Directed by Rachel Morrison

Written by Barry Jenkins

Starring Ryan Destiny, Bryan Tyree Henry

Release Date December 25th, 2024 

Published December 9th, 2024 

One of the great pleasures of my career as a film critic is watching great actors act. Bryan Tyree Henry is an actor that I particularly enjoy. Ever since I first saw him on Donald Glover’s Atlanta, I’ve been eager to see more of Henry’s work. Since then, he’s delivered some of my favorite character actor performances on the big screen from If Beale Street Could Talk to the criminally underseen Causeway with Jennifer Lawrence, and even his work in the less than stellar blockbuster, The Eternals. Bryan Tyree Henry makes acting look effortless. Thus, I was very excited to see his name in the credits for the new movie, The Fire Inside. 

The Fire Inside stars Ryan Destiny in the story of Olympic Gold Medal boxer Claressa ‘T-Rex’ Shields. The film follows the challenges that Shields overcame on her way to winning the gold medal in boxing at the 2012 Olympic Games. Shields was only 17 years old at the time. Bryan Tyree Henry co-stars as her trainer and father-figure, Jason Crutchfield. When things at her home with her troubled mother became chaotic, Crutchfield took Claressa in and made her part of his family. Together, they would train and prepare for the next challenge in front of them, whether it was a boxing opponent or life in Flint, Michigan.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Kraven The Hunter

Kraven the Hunter 

Directed by J.C Chandor 

Written by RIchard Wenk, Art Marcum, Matt Holloway 

Starring Aaron Taylor Johnson, Fred Hechinger, Ariana DeBose, Russell Crowe 

Released December 13th, 2024

Published December 13th, 2024 

Kraven the Hunter has me wondering if Hollywood has somehow discovered a Mel Brooks-The Producers style scheme where a flop can actually be a moneymaker. I don’t know how that would work in the film space but it’s the only way I can conceive of how movie studios can release movies as bad as Kraven the Hunter, movies that are almost guaranteed to lose money, and simply move on to the next movie without everyone involved losing their jobs. And when you consider that this is the studio behind Madame Web and Morbius, suddenly my theory becomes at least a little bit plausible. 

Kraven the Hunter is a bafflingly silly proposition. A kid named Sergey, the son of a famed gangster played by Russell Crowe, is mauled by a lion while on a safari vacation in Africa and is rescued by a mysterious potion that, mixed with the lion’s own blood, gives Sergey super-human strength, speed, agility, and instincts. The potion is a gift from a stranger named Calypso, whose grandmother, and I truly cringe to write this, is a voodoo priestess. Best not to unpack that.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review Nickel Boys

Nickel Boys 

Directed by RaMell Ross 

Written by RaMell Ross, Joslyn Barnes 

Starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger

Release Date December 13th, 2024

Published December 16th, 2024 

The experience of Nickel Boys begins quite jarringly. If you don’t know that the film is shot in first person, from the perspective of the main character, it takes a few minutes to acclimate. When the perspective then moves to a second lead character, the film once again forces you to find your bearings. Smartly, and compassionately for an often distracted modern audience, director RaMell Ross introduces the shift in perspective via showing a scene for a second time from this new perspective. It’s a simple yet incredibly smart way to apply a unique way of presenting a movie. And it is this simple and effective approach that provides the foundation for what becomes an incredible movie. 

Nickel Boys follows the lives of two young men who meet while being held at a reform school that acts more like a prison for teens. We are first introduced to Elwood ‘El’ Curtis (Ethan Herisse), a smart and politically active young man living in Florida in the early 1960s. El has a bright future ahead of him as one of his teachers has helped him secure acceptance into a historically black college. His tuition is free, all he has to do is get there and that’s where things go wrong. After accepting a ride from a well dressed man in a nice car, El is arrested when it’s revealed that the man is a car thief.

Click here for my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review The Last Showgirl

The Last Showgirl 

Directed by Gia Coppola 

Written by Kate Gersten 

Starring Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kiernan Shipka, Brenda Song, Billie Lourd

Release Date December 13th, 2024 

Published December 18th, 2024

The Last Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a Las Vegas showgirl adjusting to the end of her career. The show where Shelly has worked for the past 30 plus years is closing, soon to be replaced by some Cirque Du Soleil style show. The end of the show is devastating for Shelly as she sacrificed just about everything to be part of this show for just over three decades. She has little savings and few career opportunities due to her age and the growing lack of shows like hers in the new Las Vegas landscape. 

As this story unfolds in the foreground, a secondary story emerges as Shelly’s daughter, Hannah (Billie Lourd) arrives in town. When Hannah was very young, Shelly gave her up to focus on her career. Hannah was raised by her aunt in another state while Shelly dedicated herself entirely to her career. Now, with the show ending, and Hannah arriving to have a very hard conversation about why her mom chose her work over her daughter, Shelly is facing crises on two fronts.

Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here. 

Movie Review A Complete Unknown

A Complete Unknown 

Directed by James Mangold 

Written by James Mangold 

Starring Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbero, Boyd Holbrook

Release Date December 25th, 2024 

Published December 18th, 2024

There are many sharp elements in A Complete Unknown. Timothee Chalamet’s prickly take on Bob Dylan is one, Monica Barbero’s sharp performance as Joan Baez is another, and Elle Fanning’s keen eyed take on Dylan’s muse, Suze Rotolo, renamed Sylvie Russo in the film, is equal to her co-stars. But it is in the softer, gentler moments of A Complete Unknown where I really enjoyed the film. In particular, Scoot McNairy portrays the dying days of music icon Woody Guthrie wordlessly but with remarkable warmth and expression. Seeing Dylan gently full of awe as Guthrie urges him to play a song for him is one of my favorite moments of any film in 2024. 

That I don’t completely love A Complete Unknown has a lot to do with my lagging ability to tolerate music biopics. While A Complete Unknown does have a stronger approach than many other recent biopics, the thudding Aretha Franklin biopic, Respect, comes unfortunately to mind as an example of rote hero worship, director James Mangold nevertheless falls into many of the typical traps of the hagiography as his reverence for Dylan and his culture shifting performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival renders the director something of a fanboy rather than a clear eyed director.

Find my full length review at Beat.Media, linked here.