Angry Birds Movie 2, Review: And angry birdwatchers 2
To even begin getting lightly entertained, you will have to sit through the first twenty minutes of Angry Birds Movie 2, which are a cacophonic assault on your senses. During this testing time, you are served a machine-gun fire recap and a kind of general introduction to the birds and pigs that are going to play out a tale of spurned birdy love and its calamitous consequences. Proceedings do get more and more tolerable, and offer a modicum...
by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
Apologies for that misleading and crass headline, but it worked, right? BOOKSMART is actually Olivia Wilde’s directorial film debut from Annapurna that opens on Memorial Day, May 27. And it’s as wild as you would suppose it would be, in a good way. “From the beginning, my take on the story was that high school has extremely high stakes,” notes director Olivia Wilde. “When you’re in it, high school feels like lif...
Downsizing, review: Mini We
Once in a while, a movie comes along that renews our faith in creative writing and the ability of cinema to rise above its own decadence. Maybe it took a dozen ‘shrink’, ‘little’ and ‘antman’ films, from 1957 to 2015, to inspire the writers of Downsizing, the title itself a pun, but the resulting effort has a fresh new feel about it. After setting up a very interesting premise and some smooth as silk spellbinding VFX, the film th...
Colossal, Review by Siraj Syed: Loss all
Colossal loses big on two counts: It appears to have several allegorical, illusionary hidden agendas, and it goes about framing them in minimalistic, over-simplified montage. There is always a grave risk in making a socio-political commentary using metaphors like video games and giant monsters/robots, and the risk involves alienating (pun intended) both classes of audiences—the superhero aficionados, and the intelligentsia film-goers. Colossal no...
Race, Review: Giving racists a run for their money
How long does it take for an Olympic champion to run 100 metres? Less than 10 seconds. Jesse Owens (1913-1980) was the first American in the history of Olympic track and field to win four gold medals in a single Olympiad. Back in 1936, the attention span of viewers must have been considerably longer than in this age of nano-second technology. Therefore, to make a 2h 14m film on events that occurred 80 years ago, to attract dwindling audiences...
