REVIEW: The Immaculate Room [2022]

What if he’s watching? On its surface, The Immaculate Room is a contest. A game. If you and your romantic partner can spend fifty days in a stark white room with nothing but a bed, minimalist couch-like ottoman, and bathroom that only allows one contestant at a time, you go home with five million dollars. It seems easy because it is … if you’re only looking at the surface. Peel back the layers of its conceit, however, and you see the potential for participants to go stir crazy with nothing…

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REVIEW: Orphan: First Kill [2022]

Nothing is ever just one thing. Screenwriters Alex Mace and David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick gave their character Leena Klammer, aka Esther Albright, a complete back story at the end of Jaume Collet-Serra‘s Orphan. A victim of a rare hormone disorder known as hypopituitarism, causing proportional dwarfism, had made it so her thirty-three-year-old woman looked as though she was only nine. The condition obviously prevented her from being seen as a mature adult and so she used it to her manipulative advantage. What began as thieving, however, eventually escalated to murder once…

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REVIEW: Get Away If You Can [2022]

The eternal trip to nowhere. Some people deserve a second chance. Few deserve a third. Especially when we’re talking about having a modicum of human decency for the person you say you love. Yet that’s exactly what we’re asked to give TJ (Terrence Martin). From what we can glean via disjointed flashbacks leading up to a sailing adventure to Easter Island meant to reignite their marriage, he’s had one purely selfless and enjoyable period in his life: meeting Domi (Dominique Braun). As soon as he brought her into his chauvinistically…

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REVIEW: Spin Me Round [2022]

You seem so open-minded. The last thing Amber (Alison Brie) expected when coming into work as manager of Bakersfield, CA’s popular Tuscan Grove, an Olive Garden-esque shingle of minimum wage employees squeezing microwaved alfredo sauce onto linguine, was an all-expenses paid “retreat” to Italy. It’s what she got, though, courtesy of her location’s owner (Lil Rel Howery‘s Paul) submitting her name to the exclusive managerial team building week annually held by TG’s charismatic CEO and face of the franchise, Nick Martucci (Alessandro Nivola). Having just broken up with a toxic…

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REVIEW: Summering [2022]

This is our body. It used to be that going to see the dead body was the adventure. Now we have a need to figure out why the body is dead. There’s probably something in this contrast that speaks to the evolutionary shift in technology, adolescent maturity, and genre envelope-pushing that occurred between Stand By Me in 1986 and Summering in 2022, but the latter isn’t necessarily interested in the differences as much as it is in pretending differences don’t exist. The world has changed while our children’s comprehension of…

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REVIEW: Rogue Agent [2022]

Everyone has a story they want to be told. I’m surprised the studio gives up the game in its marketing materials since Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson‘s Rogue Agent is built in such a way that allows the ruse to stand as truth until a midway point revelation. It’s a case where not watching a trailer probably augmented my enjoyment of the piece because I genuinely didn’t know where things were going or who to believe. Was Robert Freegard (James Norton) really an MI5 agent who fell in love and…

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REVIEW: Thor: Love and Thunder [2022]

Team kids-in-a-cage. Korg (Taika Waititi as narrator/sidekick/co-writer/director) isn’t wrong when describing Thor: Love and Thunder as a love story for the ages. What else would a heartfelt tale of blood and justice centering a romance between a man and his hammer be called? Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Mjolnir were inseparable until the former’s older sister maliciously broke the latter into pieces (don’t worry, he got payback). He’s had to live without his baby for years now, desperately trying to fill its void with an axe (Stormbreaker) despite still lamenting what…

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REVIEW: Fall [2022]

If you’re scared of dying, don’t be afraid to live. It’s been a year since Dan Connor (Mason Gooding) fell to his death while rock climbing with his wife Becky (Grace Caroline Currey) and her best friend Hunter (Virginia Gardner). The latter was free-climbing and mocking the other two for being slow as they detached and reattached their ropes with every maneuver to create a semblance of safety. Rather than be ironic that Dan is the one who dies, however, the choice is purely driven by narrative and suspense. Whereas…

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REVIEW: 비상선언 [Bisang seoneon] [Emergency Declaration] [2022]

We’ve become his guinea pigs. As described at the start of Jae-rim Han disaster film in the sky, everything is supposed to stop the moment a pilot initiates a Bisang seoneon [Emergency Declaration]. It alone lets everyone involved know that the plane is in real danger of crashing. Other aircraft are instantly diverted into circling patterns, the nearest runaway is cleared for landing, and it becomes all-hands-on-deck to ensure the safety of passengers and crew on-board. And the general populace condones those measures because they don’t know when they might…

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REVIEW: Memory Box [2022]

We eat with the dead and ghosts. Christmas Eve was supposed to be a nice quiet evening for three generations of women: Alex (Paloma Vauthier), her mother Maia (Rim Turki), and her grandmother Téta (Clémence Sabbagh). Like has been happening so often, however, the youngest found herself home alone. Mom was working. Téta had yet to arrive. Alex was left wondering what her father and his new family were doing while conversing with friends via a group chat on her phone. And then a package arrives from Lebanon with a…

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REVIEW: Claydream [2022]

Let’s get rolling. There’s intent in a brief snippet from an archival interview with Travis Knight where he’s asked about getting the animation bug at Laika (of which he’s co-owner with his father Phil Knight while also serving as President and CEO). His answer is, “No. I started at another studio.” It’s not a lie. He began his career at Will Vinton Studios after Phil became a minority shareholder. It’s also not the whole truth considering Laika is Will Vinton Studios, or, at least, what Will Vinton Studios became after…

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