Movie Review Thelma

Thelma (2024) 

Directed by Josh Margolin 

Written by Josh Margolin 

Starring June Squibb, Richard Roundtree, Fred Hechinger, Parker Posey, Clark Gregg 

Release Date June 21st 

Published June 25th, 2024

Thelma stars June Squibb as our title character, a loving, supportive grandmother living alone in a Los Angeles suburb. Thelma lost her beloved husband of more than 60 years just two years prior to the start of this story. It's the first time in her life that she has lived alone and she's started to enjoy the independence, even at the age of 93. Her main lifeline is her grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), who visits regularly and takes her places she needs to go. He's also teaching her to use the internet, though she has little use for that. 

The plot of Thelma kicks in when Thelma receives a call from Daniel. He's been in an accident and needs her help. The call is cut off and a man claiming to be a Police Officer tells Thelma that to get Daniel out of jail and cared for safely, she must mail $10,000 dollars to a P.O Box in Van Nuys. When she can't get in touch with Daniel, she assumes that the call was real, it did sound like Daniel on the phone, so Thelma gathers up the money hidden around her home and mails it off, all while talking to her daughter, Gail (Parker Posey), and her son-in-law, Alan (Clark Gregg) who are so overcome with worry that they don't even ask about the money.

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

Movie Review Family Portrait

Family Portrait (2024) 

Directed by Lucy Kerr 

Written by Lucy Kerr, Rob Rice, Karlis Bergs

Starring Rachel Alig, Deragh Campbell, Katie Folger, Chris Galust 

Release Date June 28th, 2024 

Published June 24th, 2024 

A woman sits outside on a beautiful summer day. She has a book, the sound is ambient, a light breeze, the insects of summer making their usual music. It's a peaceful, lush image. As captured by writer-director Lucy Kerr, using a deep focus that allows for us to see past what is in the foreground, it's a gorgeous image that is slightly off center. Typically, when we are watching a movie, we expect the main action of the scene to be centered in the frame. But, with so much visual enticement, and the main character of the scene slightly off to the side and not engaging in activity that would be considered story or plot important, our eyes wander the frame. 

And what we center on is a hollowed-out tree. There is a gap that doesn't appear large enough for someone to crawl inside. The dancing sunlight between the branches and leaves however, visually indicate that the tree is hollow, and our eyes search it for visual confirmation. Then, we start to see something or someone moving inside the tree. It's confusing and a little frightening at first. You wonder, is this what we've been looking for in the scene, is there something sinister, supernatural, or dangerous in that tree? Why is whatever this is hiding in the tree? This will be revealed but first, our way of seeing the world is exposed. Do you assume something strange or dangerous? Or is it just a tree?

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

Documentary Review The Conqueror Hollywood Fallout

The Conqueror: Hollywood Fallout 

Directed by William Nunez 

Written by William Nunez 

Starring John Wayne 

Release Date October 17th, 2023 

Published July 1st, 2024 Are you familiar with an animated character by the name of Bert the Turtle? Bert was created in 1952 and would go on to become famous around the world for quite some time. Today, Bert is among the most infamous, shocking, and notable characters in the history of animation. Bert was not a foil for Bugs Bunny. Bert didn't share the screen with Mickey or Donald or Goofy. Nor was he voiced by the famed Mel Blanc. And, Bert is not famous for being funny or cute. 

If you know Bert the Turtle it's because today he's a landmark, an echo of a time when talk of potential nuclear annihilation was everywhere. On a weekly or daily basis, Americans would be reminded of the potential that a nuclear weapon could be dropped on America and that we needed to be ready for it. So as not to terrify children, the Federal Civil Defense Administration hired an animation company to create Bert the Turtle. And Bert would become inextricably linked to one of the most misguided, ludicrous and darkly comic pieces of American propaganda ever created. It's an animated short called Duck and Cover.

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

Movie Review The Babadook

The Babadook (2014)

Directed by Jennifer Kent

Written by Jennifer Kent 

Starring Essie Davis 

Release Date May 22nd, 2014 

Published June 28th, 2024 

Until a recent edition of my podcast, the I Hate Critics Movie Review Podcast, available wherever you listen to podcasts, I was not aware that The Babadook, the incredible low budget horror movie that became an underdog smash in 2014, had an connection to the LGBTQ community. Then, as we were deciding on a classic for the final week of Pride Month, my co-host, Jeff Lassiter, suggested The Babadook. And, I was puzzled. 

I wondered if writer-director Jennifer Kent was connected to the LGBTQ community or perhaps star Essie Davis. But, I have seen no indication of either speaking about their personal lives over the past 10 years. That's when Jeff explained a funny anecdote that, for reasons unexplained, Netflix had included The Babadook in a collection of Pride Month Movies. This led to members of the LGBTQ community embracing The Babadook as a pride movie in an ironic or sarcastic manner that became a genuine embrace. It became a meme in the LGBTQ horror community that the monster itself, the Babadook, of the title was queer.

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

Movie Review A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place (2018)

Directed by John Krasinski 

Written by Brian Woods, Scott Beck, John Krasinski 

Starring John Krasinski, Emily Blunt, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe 

Release Date April 16th, 2018

Published June 28th, 2024 

Legendary filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock once offered a brilliant dissection of suspense in movies. Imagine a man carrying a bomb. It's in a briefcase. No one other than the man carrying the briefcase knows that there is a bomb inside. We, the audience, know the bomb is there because we watched the man carrying the briefcase, carefully and meticulously assemble and place the bomb in the briefcase. The excitement is that a bomb is going to go off and cause death, destruction and chaos. But, suspense, is watching the man build the bomb, place it in the briefcase, walk gingerly, awkwardly and very carefully to the place where the bomb is to be placed. 

The tension continues to build as the man places the briefcase under a bench in a park filled with people. The suspense mounts when the man leaves, leaving behind the briefcase, precariously positioned beneath the bench. The tension grows to unbearable levels as the bomber tries to leave, only to be stopped by s0meone who mentions that he forgot his briefcase. The bomber is sweating and stammering, he needs to get away but he doesn't want anyone to know about the bomb. The ticking of the timer is evident to us and to the bomber, he has mere moments to get himself safely away from the explosion that is set to kill anyone close to it. What does he do?

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

Movie Review A Quiet Place Day One

A Quiet Place: Day One (2024) 

Directed by Michael Sarnoski 

Written by Michael Sarnoski 

Starring Lupita N'Yongo, Joseph Quinn, Alex Wolff, Djimon Hounsou 

Release Date June 28th, 2024 

Published July 5th, 2024 

Lupita N'Yongo stars in A Quiet Place: Day One as Sam, a woman dying from cancer. Sam is in a hospice facility where she expresses her frustration over dying in angry, expletive laden, poetry that serves as a way of pushing her nurse, Reuben (Alex Wolff), not to call on her during the support group. Reuben kicks the plot into gear by promising Sam that she can get pizza in New York City if she agrees to join the group trip to a show, somewhere in the City. 

Turns out, Reuben has arranged for the patients to attend a puppet show. To say that Sam is not amused is an understatement. She leaves mid-show, along with her emotional support cat, Frodo, and goes to get candy at a nearby store. It is while Sam is in the store that an alien invasion begins. Monsters are burning down from the sky and attacking people, seemingly at random. As this happens, it slowly becomes clear that these aliens are attacking the loudest things around them.

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

Movie Review Kinds of Kindness

Kinds of Kindness (2024) 

Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos 

Written by Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou 

Starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau

Release Date June 21st, 2024 

Published July 5th, 2024 

Kinds of Kindness is a confounding bit of absurdity. An anthology starring a recurring group of actors, led by Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone, Kinds of Kindness invites you to decide what it all means while presenting a series of seemingly non-sequitur bits of dark comedy, irony, and mild horror. All of the stories, in some way, involve a silent, stoic man known only as R.M.F whose death, attempted murder, and ambiguous fate occur as important aspects of each oddball story. 

I am trying to help myself understand just what Kinds of Kindness is all about so this review is filled with spoilers. I need to map this out if I am going to try to understand exactly what it is I saw in Kinds of Kindness. Did I like this movie? Do I have a theory of what it is about? Is the movie simply so absurd that it defies any kind of explanation? I hope that by providing a beginning to end description of these three stories something will emerge as a theme, idea, or theory. Here goes nothing.

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

Movie Review Longlegs

Longlegs (2024)

Directed by Osgood Perkins 

Written by Osgood Perkins 

Starring Maika Monroe, Nicolas Cage, Alicia Witt, Blair Underwood 

Release Date July 12th, 2024 

Published July 12th, 2024 

Longlegs stars Maika Monroe as FBI Agent Lee Harker. Relatively new to the FBI, one of Harker's first field experiences was seeing her partner murdered right in front of her. This came immediately after she had advised her partner that the man they were looking for, a dangerous serial murderer, was in a house she'd seemingly identified at random. Is she psychic? Is this a premonition? How did she manage to pick the one house out of a cookie cutter neighborhood, as the one where the killer was staying? 

Harker's premonition and her subsequent capture of the killer, brings Harker to the attention of FBI Boss, Carter, played by Blair Underwood. Carter is after an even more dangerous and unpredictable killer who has claimed the name Longlegs in his seemingly nonsensical letters to law enforcement. Longlegs has been tormenting the FBI since the late 1960's, annihilating entire families without even stepping foot inside the family home. The film is set in the early to mid-90s, for context.

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

Movie Review Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump (1994)

Directed by Robert Zemeckis 

Written by Eric Roth 

Starring Tom Hanks, Robin Wright, Gary Sinise, Sally Field 

Release Date July 6th, 1994 

Published July 12th, 1994 

I Hate Forrest Gump. I despise this movie. I cannot stand anything about Forrest Gump. I love Tom Hanks, I think he's deservedly one of our most beloved actors. He's incredibly talented. But this movie is the worst of his career. This basic bitch of a movie holds your hand and drags you to every empty emotion it is trying to evoke. Nostalgia porn is the most simplistic interpretation of Forrest Gump but it's so much worse than that. It's ugly, self-congratulatory Boomer nostalgia porn. 

Forrest Gump was born a little slow. He has an I.Q of 75. But his mama, played by Sally Field, refuses to let him be treated differently from the other kids. Mama Gump sleeps with a school principal to get Forrest into public school beginning a trend where everyone around Forrest Gump has to suffer to make his life possible. So, mama gets Forrest into school where he is bullied relentlessly.

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

Movie Review Manhunter

Manhunter (1986) 

Directed by Michael Mann

Written by Michael Mann

Starring William Peterson, Dennis Farina, Brian Cox, Kim Greist, Joan Allen 

Release Date August 15th, 1986 

Published July 16th, 2024 

The visual simplicity of the opening images of Michael Mann's Manhunter are sublime. We open on a flashlight falling upon a flight of stairs. It's pitch black other than the flashlight. This could be a home invader or an investigator at this point. Toys are strewn across the stairs in the haphazard way that young children carelessly like to play. The visual signs of life in a typical American home are all present. As the person with the flashlight climbs the stairs, it's light falling on more signifiers of life, we arrive at the top of the stairs. The flashlight pans into what appears to a be a child's room, seemingly empty. 

A few steps further and we arrive in a bedroom where we see our first evidence of people. A woman and a man are in bed and for a moment, it's not clear if they are alive or dead. The flashlight begins to hold steady on the woman who finally moves to signify that she's alive. The flashlight, now unmoving, continues to hold on the woman as it becomes clear that she's waking up. The fog of sleep still in her mind she finally begins to rise and just as she might be about to react to the sight of a stranger with a flashlight, we cut to the opening title of the film, Manhunter.

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

Movie Review Twisters

Twisters (2024) 

Directed by Lee Isaac Chung 

Written by Mark L. Smith 

Starring Glenn Powell, Daisy Edgar Jones, Anthony Ramos, Maura Tierney 

Release Date Friday, July 19th, 2024 

Published Friday July 19th, 2024 

“You don’t face your fears, you ride’em.” 

What does that mean? I’m being pedantic, I know, but this line clangs like a basketball on the rim bouncing errantly away from a score. It’s a bum note in a symphonic performance, like an out of tune instrument. How do you ride your fears without facing them? The context of the scene is Glenn Powell’s Tyler Owens explaining to Daisy Edgar Jones’ Kate that he gave up bull-riding to pursue meteorology. He had to face the bull first in order to ride it. You can’t get on a bull backwards. I’m being intentionally thick, I just hate this movie and that line specifically. 

Twisters stars Daisy Edgar Jones as Kate Carter. Kate was a grad student who, with the help of a team, had developed a way that she believed might be able to tame a tornado. Through the use of a super-polymer, she theorizes that you can suck the moisture out of a tornado, essentially strangling the tornado, rendering it less destructive. Her first test of this theory, unfortunately, goes horribly wrong. Three members of her team, including her boyfriend and her closest friend, are killed. Kate leaves the field and takes a desk job with the National Weather Service.

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

Movie Review Oddity

Oddity (2024) 

Directed by Damian Mc Carthy 

Written by Damian Mc Carthy 

Starring Gwilym Lee, Caroline Bracken 

Release Date July 19th, 2024 

Published July 19th, 2024 

Oddity stars Caroline Bracken as twin sisters, Dani and Darcy. We meet Dani first as she is cleaning up her gorgeous new home in the middle of an English countryside. Her sister, Darcy, believes the home is haunted and has Dani doing all sorts of things in an attempt to get information on the potential haunting. Indeed, there are some strange noises in the house but there is a far more sinister, real life threat coming for Dani. With her husband, Ted (Gwilym Lee), working nights, Dani is all alone in this house. 

Late one night, as Dani retrieves something from her car and heads back into the house, she’s nearly followed inside. A man knocks on the door and offers a terrifying warning: He saw someone sneak into the house while she wasn’t looking. He wants Dani to let him come inside and find the guy in order to keep her safe. The man has a crazed look in his eyes, he’s a stranger, and, since Dani’s husband works at a nearby mental hospital, she’s rightly concerned that he may be a loose mental patient.

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

Movie Review Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill (1980) 

Directed by Brian De Palma 

Written by Brian De Palma 

Starring Angie Dickinson, Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon

Release Date July 25th, 1980 

Published July 23rd, 2024 

Right off the bat, we have to talk about transphobia. Spoiler alert for this more than 40 year old movie. See it for yourself and come back if you don’t want spoilers. I do think the movie is worth seeing even as it is fairly viewed as problematic by many in the LGBTQ community. I am not a trans person and I cannot speak to how trans people feel about Dressed to Killoutside of a few essays I’ve read about this specific topic. I am writing from the perspective of a trans ally. I have trans people in my family and thus I am sensitive to how our popular culture portrays transness. But I will not try to speak on behalf of any trans people, even those I know and love. 

Dressed to Kill features a killer, played by Michael Caine, who claims to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. The conceit, according to the screenplay by director Brian De Palma, is that this woman trapped in a man’s body is like a second personality who becomes defensive when the male presenting part of them presents a masculine attraction to a woman, played by Angie Dickinson. This defensiveness is expressed by the female personality emerging, presenting as female, stalking Dickinson’s Kate character, and brutally murdering her.

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

Movie Review Deadpool and Wolverine

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) 

Directed by Shawn Levy

Written by Ryan Reynolds, Shawn Levy, Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Zeb Wells

Starring Hugh Jackman, Ryan Reynolds

Release Date July 26th, 2024 

Published July 24th, 2024 

Deadpool & Wolverine is a fourth wall shattering comic adventure in which Wade Wilson/Deadpool is suffering from an existential crisis. Sure, he’s been ported over to the Marvel Universe from the Fox-Marvel Universe, but now what? After visiting the Avengers campus and being told that he’s not the world saving type, Wade is floundering. For the time being, he’s settling into being a working stiff, selling cars alongside his buddy Peter (Rob Delaney), and being generally miserable. Wade’s lack of purpose in this new world has had a negative effect on his relationship with Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), to the point where he is back living with Blind Al (Leslie Uggams). 

Wade tries to put on a brave face but his struggle is quite obvious. Then, a purpose seems to present itself. The TVA shows up at Wade’s birthday party and kidnaps him. Taken to TVA HQ, he’s told that he’s being brought up to the superhero big leagues, they want him to help save the Marvel Universe. Unfortunately, that begins with destroying his universe and everyone in it. Matthew MacFadyen plays Mr. Paradox, who gives Wade the bad news, everyone he cares about is going to die while Deadpool moves toward immortality among The Avengers. Despite his tendency toward being an unhappy loner, Wade chooses to be a hero and try to save his universe from the TVA.

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