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Menampilkan postingan dari Juli, 2019

Review: Crawl

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This horror thriller snuck into cinemas without much fanfare, and threatens to leave much the same way. That’d be a real shame; at a time when talking loud and saying nothing seems to be the way to go when it comes to thrillers, this manages to be one of the more effective thrill-rides of the year largely thanks to twists that feel earned and scary scenarios that (largely) make sense. (also people get chomped on a lot) When her father (Barry Pepper) won’t answer his phone as a hurricane bears down on his Florida home, university swim team struggler Haley (Kaya Scodelario) drives down to check out what’s up. Turns out, quite a bit: the streets are flooded, there’s no sign of dad in the old family home but a radio’s playing down in the rapidly flooding basement, and you know what else is down there? Alligators.  At barely 90 minutes and with pretty much all the action taking place in a grand total of one real location (the house - even when you think you're out, it pulls you back in)...

Review: Apollo 11

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In case you've been living under a (moon) rock lately, it’s now fifty years since the first moon landing. Surely this should be a dark period of grim introspection as we look back on decades wasted and opportunities lost? Ha ha, of course not: it's time to celebrate the fact that 50 years ago we could put a man on the moon using basically a garbage can, some fireworks and a pocket calculator while today we can't even [insert common complaint here]. But if you can only see one movie about the first men on the moon, this is the one to see; put together entirely from archival footage (including sequences shot on 70mm film that have never before been seen) and with period voice-over from news broadcasts and voice recordings from Mission Control, this goes step-by-step through the mission from the hours leading up to the launch through the journey to the moon and the recovery afterwards.  While the trajectory of the story is never in doubt, this is still a rem...

Review: Booksmart

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Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) are high school outcasts and that suits them just fine. They’ve worked hard, looked like pretentious nerds to their peers, and now they’re about to reap the rewards by getting into fancy universities where presumably they can finally let their hair down and finally be themselves surrounded by actual peers instead of bonehead losers. Then Molly discovers that their hard-partying classmates are about to reap those exact same rewards (they're not even losers!). Turns out the duo have been doing high school all wrong; now Molly only has tonight to drag Amy out and cram in all the partying they missed. The good news is there’s a big party happening. The bad news? They don’t know where it is.  The “one crazy night” genre is well worn (remember Project X ?). And by "well worn" I mean "totally played out" - seriously, it's been the basic template for so many teen movies this century when reviewers compare this solely ...

Review: Spider-Man: Far From Home

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The only real problem with Tom Holland’s first solo film as Spider-Man was that there wasn’t enough of Peter Parker hanging out with his classmates being a regular teen. So what does Spider-Man: Far From Home do? Cut back even further on that stuff – though for a while there it doesn’t look like it, as Holland’s Parker and his classmates first deal with the Thanos-caused five years of being dead (which everyone is calling “The Blip”), then head off to Europe for a class trip. Obviously all of Parker’s close buddies (and Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May) have also spent the last five years dead so they can remain age-appropriate, but there is a decent joke about one former dweeb who’s now grown into a stud (and yet still comes with them on the class trip). Will Parker finally make it work with MJ (Zendaya)? Will the rest of his class learn anything? Probably not, as their first stop (Venice) is promptly attacked by a giant elemental being that only a mysterious as-yet unnamed superhero (Jake Gy...