Change Your Image
![](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMjA5NDY5NzY5NF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwODQxNTMyNTE@._V1_SY100_SX100_.jpg)
nsharath009
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Bewertungen
Project Power (2020)
In a summer of no blockbusters, Project Power is a flashy if ironically under-powered diversion.
From the genetic mutation of the X-Men, to the radioactive spider-bite of Spider-Man, to the cosmic blast absorbed by the Fantastic Four, the moment superheroes receive their powers on page or screen tends to be an irrevocable, life-altering event that forever changes their very DNA. Not so in Project Power. Netflix's action-thriller offers an intriguing tweak to the superhero mythos - here, those who take a 'Power' pill are gifted supernatural abilities for just five minutes per hit and they don't know what hidden ability they hold until they take one.
Despite finding a fresh angle on one of cinema's most oversaturated genres, Project Power never fully capitalises on that potential. Like the streaming service's other summer genre exercise The Old Guard, its hooky premise is trapped in a generic plot involving a shadowy organisation led by a cabal of boring baddies.
Project Power has considerable style yet a disappointing lack of substance - but an attention-grabbing performance from Dominique Fishback and an intriguing twist on superpowers give it just enough juice.
The Old Guard (2020)
More of the same face-kicking from Charlize Theron but with international twist
There's always something exciting (and more than a little nerve-racking) about a director with a distinctive voice taking on a new film genre. Think Robert Altman doing noir with The Long Goodbye, or Terrence Malick making a war movie with The Thin Red Line. Or, more recently, Taika Waititi tackling a superhero flick with Thor: Ragnarok. So while Gina Prince-Bythewood, previously best known for the sublimely romantic Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights, might not seem like the first choice for a comic-book movie about a group of immortal superheroes who've been fighting evil for centuries, just a few minutes into The Old Guard you realize what an inspired choice she turns out to be.
And the scene that initially does it - I am not making this up - involves Charlize Theron guessing the provenance of a mysterious piece of baklava. Her character, Andy, once better known as Andromache of Scythia, has been around for about 6,000 years, having fought (and died, and come back) in hundreds and probably thousands of battles all over the world. Along the way, she has been worshipped as a god, burned as a witch, and hung out with Auguste Rodin. But right now, she sits with her small team of fellow ancient warriors (the other three have been around for merely hundreds of years) and plays a parlor game: They give her a piece of baklava; she has to use her eternity of experience to figure out where it's from. It's the kind of scene that would be an offhand moment in any other film or played for laughs. (Think the Avengers and their shawarma.) As directed by Prince-Bythewood, however, it's warm, observant, quiet - and hence immersive. For a minute or so, nothing else matters in the world other than Charlize Theron and that piece of baklava.
Adapted by Greg Rucka, who created the original 2017 comic along with illustrator Leandro Fernández, The Old Guard is filled with such human moments, both frivolous and profound - quiet reveries, declarations of love, dreams about eternity, regrets over families and loves left behind and lost forever - and in the balance of the film, they hold equal weight with the action scenes, because ultimately everything feels connected.
Everybody feels connected too. Unlike the standard superhero team, the Old Guard themselves seem less like a collection of traits and more like real people. There's a shared despair, largely unspoken, between Theron's Andy and Matthias Schoenaerts's Booker, a former Napoleonic army officer: Andy has seen so much loss in her many millennia, while Booker, relatively new to the immortality thing, is still working out his grief; somehow her numbness and his rawness land them both in the same uncomfortable place of wanting out of this life. Meanwhile, Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicolo (Luca Marinelli) are former combatants from the Crusades who are now lovers as well as brothers-in-arms, two men whose passion is fueled partly by the fact that, before they fell for each other, they killed each other over and over again. What an interesting idea that is! And how refreshing that the movie knows it and leans into it. All these characters really do feel as if they've known one another for centuries, with all the complexity - the bitterness and sacrifice and loyalty - that suggests. Into this team comes Nile (KiKi Layne), a young Marine who discovers her own immortality in Afghanistan and whose response to her strange new power is, at least at first, a combination of loneliness, confusion, and shame.
When I profiled Prince-Bythewood recently, it became clear that the quality of being present in a scene lies at the heart of all her work. What makes Love & Basketball and Beyond the Lights so special isn't just their romanticism but their patience. The director's camera diligently observes her characters without rushing them along to the next big narrative or emotional climax. That kind of intimacy obviously comes in handy when you're telling a love story, but when it's transferred to the realm of comic books and superheroes, a different kind of alchemy occurs: A supernatural action fantasy starts to feel heartbreakingly real. So even though the plot of The Old Guard isn't particularly novel - a sociopathic young pharma bro (Harry Melling) with a small private army attempts to harvest our heroes' powers - we find ourselves deeply invested in their predicament, however by-the-numbers it may look on paper.
That's not to suggest that The Old Guard doesn't also kick all sorts of ass in the ways it's supposed to. The combat has been creatively choreographed, and these men and women really do fight with the kind of speed, fluidity, and inventiveness you might expect from people who've been doing so for a long, long time, using cool weapons and cool martial-arts moves you shouldn't try at home but will probably want to. That the film never has to rely on choppy editing to cover up for bad action is an additional blessing. (It helps, of course, to have Theron, who has already proved herself an elegant cinematic bruiser with roles in Mad Max: Fury Road and Atomic Blonde.) For all the film's brooding, it goes down easy. It's enormously fun, but it won't give you the kind of candy headache so many other superhero movies do nowadays.
Speaking of which: In ordinary times, The Old Guard (which is produced by Netflix, though a theatrical release was always planned) would have opened in a crowded marketplace that had already seen titles like Wonder Woman 1984, Black Widow, a ninth Fast & Furious entry (also co-starring Theron), and The New Mutants. There are still plenty of pictures coming out, but since those big comic-book and comic-book-adjacent films have moved off the release schedule, The Old Guard now has an important corner of the market all to itself. Watching it, I don't miss those other movies with their shared universes and painstakingly built, vigilantly managed worlds. I watch The Old Guard and try to imagine a new world, one where other comic-book movies are this well made and breathtaking.
Creed II (2018)
"Creed II" is an outstanding sequel and one of the year's best films
Creed was a major surprise. Seriously. As much as I love the Rocky franchise, was there any reason to assume that what was essentially Rocky VII, just without a focus on the character we know and love, would be a success? Sure, it had an exciting young actor at the center and an up and coming filmmaker in Ryan Coogler at the helm. But still, how good could it be? Well, the answer was that it turned out to be an Oscar nominee, a Golden Globe winning film, and one of the year's best. Now, Creed II hits this week and, defying all odds, is nearly as good. This flick will also end up on a top ten list for me. It more than delivers, it flies high. What easily could have tarnished what's come before instead movingly builds on it. This is one of the ten best films of 2018, unlikely as that may seem.
The movie is a sequel to Creed, continuing the Rocky series by focusing on the late Apollo Creed's son Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan). First the number one contender for the heavyweight championship of the world, Adonis soon becomes champ. It's a wonderful night for him, his girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and his trainer, former champ Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), A challenge unlike any other is coming though, in Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu), the imposing son of former Balboa/Creed rival Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Everyone knows that Ivan killed Apollo in the ring, so Adonis feels like he has no choice but to fight him. Rocky warns him of the danger, but it's no use. Thus begins a true Rocky sequel, just told with all of the additional emotion that Creed brought to bear. Steven Caple Jr. directs a script that Stallone co-wrote with Juel Taylor (Cheo Hodari Coker and Sascha Penn also worked on drafts at one point), while supporting players include Wood Harris, Russell Hornsby, Phylicia Rashad, Andre Ward, and more. Ludwig Göransson composed the score, while cinematography is by Kramer Morgenthau.
I'm not kidding. Creed II is phenomenal. Joke that it's Rocky VIII if you must, but there's way more to it than that. The emotional stakes that both Adonis and Rocky face, not to mention both Drago men, are effective and impactful. That's a true testament to Michael B. Jordan and Sylvester Stallone for sure, though also for returning player Dolph Lundgren, plus Florian Munteanu. Tessa Thompson again is fantastic, while Phylicia Rashad lends some gravitas in her few scenes. Again though, this is about Jordan, and whether he's with Stallone or Thompson, he has electric chemistry with both. The fight scenes don't have the style that the aforementioned Ryan Coogler brought last time, but they're still among the franchise's best. Very little here will surprise you, but damn if it isn't incredibly moving to watch.
Don't expect Creed II to contend for Academy Award love like Creed did, but I will say that Jordan and Stallone are just as good this time out (the same goes for Thompson as well). The former is even more front and center, while the latter truly becomes a supporting character, though one with literally decades of history that both the actor and the audience is pulling from. This is an example of how amazing studio films can be when they actually care. This may have been made in part because of money, but the powers that be also made sure that everyone involved was invested. The end result is a brilliantly entertaining movie with tons of heart.
Fans of this franchise are in for a real treat, as Creed II hits all the notes you want from both a Creed sequel as well as a new Rocky installment. It's hard to imagine anyone who's a fan not falling in love with this one too. You'll literally stand up and cheer. The confidence with which the filmmakers and stars work within the expected realm of the series is really something to behold. The way this is going, I'd watch Jordan and Stallone make another half dozen of these. Together, they've truly given you reason to care about this franchise. Once you see it, you'll understand why...
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
An Overstuffed Sequel Loses Some of Its Magic
The second sequel in the fledgling spinoff follows a familiar pattern, but too many characters and too many storylines rob it of its most enduring charms
Even magic takes a little bit of planning, and in David Yates' "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald," both are in short supply. In it second outing, the cracks are starting to show in J.K. Rowling's much-hyped followup series to "Harry Potter," a franchise that is at the mercy of slapdash planning (these films are cobbled together from various pieces of "Wizarding World" material, not single novels) and the kind of higher-up decree that promised five films (five!) before the first one hit theaters. It's a lot of time to fill, and while the second film in the franchise nudges its narrative forward, it's at the expense of a bloated, unfocused screenplay.
Mostly, "The Crimes of Grindelwald" is hampered by the unwieldy meshing together of disparate plots that could service their own films (some of them surely better than others). At the center (when he's not been shunted aside by all those competing narratives), there's ostensible franchise star Eddie Redmayne as nervous magizoologist Newt Scamander. Newt's ditzy charm grounded the first film; and when he's allowed to lead this second story, it's as whimsical and good-hearted as any in the franchise.
It's all the other subplots that damage that notion, from a charisma-free Johnny Depp taking over the role of evil Wizard Gellert Grindelwald to a convoluted section all about the family tree of Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller). Portions involving a young Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law) can't reach their full potential; they're consistently cut short to zing back to yet another plotline (and that's without diving into all the subplots about Newt's brother, his ex-girlfriend, his beloved New York friends, and Credence's companion Nagini). All this convolution promises to converge during Grindelwald's coming-out party, a fear-filled rally that is as timely as it is unsettling. Before that, Yates and Rowling must bring together a motley crew of wizards and muggles both good and bad.
The Grinch (2018)
Harmless 'Grinch' plays it safe
Cheer up: "The Grinch" is a respectable, if safe, retelling of Dr. Seuss' holiday classic.
This computer animated fable - which follows the televised 1966 cartoon special and 2000's Jim Carrey-starring live action version - honors the original "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" and preserves Seuss' wonky visual style.
If this Grinch is considerably cuddlier than the green monster you remember - his edges are rounded rather than sharp, his eyes soft rather than twisted and menacing - that's just the reality of today's marketplace. Can you imagine the uproar if the Grinch was an actual, you know, Grinch?
Benedict Cumberbatch ditches his accent to voice the Christmas-hating heel, who lives in a cave by himself high above Whoville. Cumberbatch's reading is rather sanitized; if directors Yarrow Cheney and Scott Mosier didn't want a British Grinch, Cumberbatch was a curious choice.
The holiday season is fast approaching, and ol' Grinchy is forced to go into Whoville and interact with its cheery inhabitants, who are preparing for a Christmas celebration that promises to be three times larger than the average holiday blowout. The Grinch - aided by his trusty dog Max - devises a scheme to rob the residents of Whoville of all their Christmas bounty while dressed as Santa Claus, until his plan is foiled by young Cindy Lou Who (voiced by Cameron Seely), who puts a little love back in the Grinch's rotten, decrepit heart.
You know the story, and "The Grinch" wisely sticks to the basics without modernizing the details (the Grinch doesn't suddenly have an Instagram account) or greatly altering the structure. The 2000 version spent a good deal of time diving into the Grinch's backstory, making him a victim of childhood bullying; that's gone here. And since the original book runs just 69 pages, "The Grinch" doesn't stretch for material, and wraps in a concise 86 minutes.
Pharrell Williams narrates the story, but doesn't have much flavor in his phrasing; somewhere, there's a voice actor cursing the day celebrities took over the voiceover field.
Illumination Entertainment, responsible for the "Despicable Me" movies and "The Secret Life of Pets," is in charge here, and gives the film a brightly lit, visually appealing aesthetic.
"The Grinch" doesn't reinvent the story of the Grinch, nor does it top the crudely drawn charms of the original TV version. (It's tough to beat Boris Karloff's Grinch, and Cumberbatch doesn't put up much of a fight.) But by the end it opens it arms and spreads a fair amount of holiday cheer, which is obvious to even those whose hearts are two sizes too small.
Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Spider-Man: Homecoming is the Casino Royale of superhero films
There, I said it.
Played by British actor Tom Holland (The Impossible), Spidey gets a fun and completely fresh reinvention from new director Jon Watts and studio boss Kevin Feige – with a little help from Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark/ Iron Man, Jon Favreau's Happy Hogan and newcomer Jacob Batalon as Ned.
Like Daniel Craig's revision of James Bond, Holland's interpretation of Spider-Man has set the hero down an invigorating new path.
After a failed reboot with actor Andrew Garfield and director Marc Webb – 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man and 2014's The Amazing Spider- Man 2 – Sony, the studio that owns the rights to the Marvel character, wisely decided to let Marvel Studios take creative control of the wall- crawler and add him to the MCU.
Now, he gets to interact with Iron Man and the rest of the Avengers.
Following the character's introduction in an epic airport battle sequence in last year's Captain America: Civil War, Homecoming picks up with a teen aged Peter Parker back in his Queens, N.Y., neighborhood living with Aunt May (played by Marisa Tomei) left to fight street-level crime with a cool new suit (courtesy of Tony, naturally). "We'll call you," Tony tells Peter as he's dropping him back home.
Eager to prove his mettle as a full-time member of the Avengers, Peter thirsts for action, taking down bike thieves, helping the elderly with directions and tackling hoodlums like Aaron (Donald Glover). Still, he wants more.
But then he crosses paths with Michael Keaton's Adrian Toomes (a.k.a. the Vulture) and his merry band of baddies, and decides to do something about it. It's not that Tony doesn't care; it's that Tony is too busy. And Peter sees it as an express pass to becoming an Avenger.
Oh yeah, and he's still in high school dealing with crushes, girls, science class, gym and detention (the film completely skips his origin story including the spider bite and Uncle Ben).
It's not only the best Spider-Man movie – it's one of the best films in Marvel's cinematic universe.
Bridge of Spies (2015)
An unshowy Steven Spielberg does a master's job with Cold War tensions, honoring a real-life attorney's victory over fear.
A feel-good Cold War melodrama, Bridge of Spies is an absorbing true-life espionage tale very smoothly handled by old pros who know what they're doing. In its grown-up seriousness and basis in historical conflict, Steven Spielberg's first feature since Lincoln three years ago joins the list of the director's half-dozen previous "war" films, but in its honoring of an American civilian who pulled off a smooth prisoner exchange between the East and West during a very tense period, the film generates an unmistakable nostalgia for a time when global conflict seemed more clear-cut and manageable than it does now. Spielberg's fourth collaboration with Tom Hanks, which world- premiered at the New York Film Festival and opens commercially on October 16, looks to generate stout box-office returns for Disney through the autumn season. For people of Spielberg's generation, the early years of the nuclear era and the stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union represents a significant part of the fabric of childhood. With the passage of time, it's possible to tell stories of the time without furnishing them with overt propagandistic overlays, and for Westerners there is the added built-in appeal of the "we won" factor and the perception that dealing with adversaries was so much simpler then than it is now. As their focus in this impeccably rendered recreation of a moment in history, most palpably represented by the building of the Berlin Wall, Spielberg and screenwriters Matt Charman and Ethan and Joel Coen have chosen a sort-of Atticus Finch of the north, a principled, American Everyman insurance attorney unexpectedly paged to represent a high-level Soviet spy caught in New York. There is no question that Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) is guilty, but James B. Donovan (Hanks), a proper and decent family man with a professional dedication to his client and an abiding loyalty to the principles of the U.S. Constitution, has a quick and intuitive read of any legal situation and shrewdly stays at least one step ahead of the game in almost any situation.
Macbeth (2015)
Marion Cotillard and Michael Fassbender excel in Justin Kurzel's thrillingly savage interpretation of the Scottish Play.
As the shortest, sharpest and most stormily violent of William Shakespeare's tragedies, "Macbeth" may be the most readily cinematic: The swirling mists of the Highlands, tough to fabricate in a theater, practically rise off the printed page. So it's odd that, while "Romeo and Juliet" and "Hamlet" get dusted off at least once a generation by filmmakers, the Scottish Play hasn't enjoyed significant bigscreen treatment since Roman Polanski's admirable if tortured 1971 version. The wait for another may be even longer after Justin Kurzel's scarcely improvable new adaptation: Fearsomely visceral and impeccably performed, it's a brisk, bracing update, even as it remains exquisitely in period. Though the Bard's words are handled with care by an ideal ensemble, fronted by Michael Fassbender and a boldly cast Marion Cotillard, it's the Australian helmer's fervid sensory storytelling that makes this a Shakespeare pic for the ages — albeit one surely too savage for the classroom.
Everest (2015)
Baltasar Kormákur's disaster movie is a physical experience that will leave you breathless—and possibly suffering vertigo.
Everest is an unrelenting real-life disaster movie that strands you near the top of the world's tallest mountain and dares you to imagine what it must be like to be part of an expedition to the top going horribly, horribly wrong. Its screenwriters, William Nicholson and Simon Beaufoy, respectively have Gladiator and 127 Hours to their names, and Everest combines the muscular, sometimes sentimental force of the former with the sense of being party to an extreme physical endurance that made the latter so successful.
Like Gravity, another spectacle involving a conflict between humans and a hostile environment never meant for us, Everest relies heavily on awe, special effects and 3-D. Director Baltasar Kormákur's camera appears to glide just above the highest ridge of Everest, a mass of rock, snow and ice just as terrifying and mysterious as the vast blackness of outer space itself.
Based on an actual trip to the summit in 1996 that ended in tragedy, an air of doom hangs over Everest, forcing you to wonder which of its endearing ensemble cast will make it down alive. The inevitability of death makes it all the more tough to watch. Who, as mountaineering jargon has it, will finish up "gone"? Maybe John Hawkes's gentle, unassuming postman, whose trip is part-funded by school kids? Or Josh Brolin's millionaire family man from Texas? Or Jason Clarke's affable team leader? Or Jake Gyllenhaal's extreme- sports dude? He's emblematic of the mid-1990s globetrotting outsider culture, which still saw Starbucks as cool and led to an explosion of commercial outfits operating on a crowded Everest.
When we're not squirming at the sight of deathly drops or feeling whipped by the weather, we're plunged into the emotional distress of those left behind: wives played by Robin Wright and Keira Knightley, and base camp coordinator Emily Watson, who's manning a satellite phone halfway down the mountain. The film crosses into soppy territory when it forcefully begs our tears, but Kormákur creates such a convincing world—the craft of this film is astonishing—that you're willing to forgive its less delicate touches in favor of a totally compelling depiction of what it must be like to ascend to a place that's heaven one moment and hell the next.
Samurai Chanpurû (2004)
Amazing anime with wild fights and awesome story.
"Samurai Champloo" may not have the same ring to it as "Cowboy Bebop," yet it is a title that has a similar function: to illustrate a combination of multicultural pulp fiction sensibility. Where Cowboy Bebop was a past + future fusion of jazz, rock, and blues, spaghetti western, kung fu, and noir cinema genres, and a setting equating outer space to the great frontier, Samurai Champloo is a more wildly anachronistic mélange of Edo-period history and contemporary hip-hop and bohemian culture. "Champloo" itself comes from the word "chanpurū," Okinawan for "something mixed," and a source of Okinawa's pride in multicultural acceptance. Cowboy Bebop was a trend-setting marriage of anime traditions and Tarantino- inspired cultural hodgepodge — it could be said that Pulp Fiction influenced Cowboy Bebop as much as Cowboy Bebop influenced Kill Bill — and Samurai Champloo continues in this meta style, taking it even further.
Of course, Cowboy Bebop was not Shinichiro Watanabe's first foray into resonant crossover in anime: Macross Plus was a monolithic amalgamation of Top Gun's hot-headed romantic drama and sci-fi tropes including a pop-idol hologram version of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL, in turn influencing the famous cyberpunk writer William Gibson to write Idoru, a novel about a Japanese virtual idol and her marriage to a real- life rock star. Of course, all of this was before the invention of the Vocaloid, though I suppose the future imagined by Watanabe and Gibson was, in a way, not so far off.
Anyhow, now that I've finished my little history lesson — which I feel is relevant, as having such a perspective may deepen your enjoyment of Samurai Champloo as much as it did for me — let's continue on to the review. In light of all the prescient futurism found in Watanabe's other works, it's rather interesting that he decided to shift his focus to the past and present. Of course, the world's future is always in its past... and what we have here is, in a nutshell, Edo-period Japan: the remix. Baseball, tagging/graffiti, Van Gogh, zombies, and Catholicism are tossed into the "chanpurū" with a whole lot of revised Japanese pseudo-history. As such the medley of influences and tangential tale-spinning occasionally smacks of filler, but one would do well to understand that this show is simply all /about/ the filler — and this is all for the better, because Samurai Champloo is at its freshest and most hilarious when it's veering off the rails. It even has the single most entertaining recap episode I've ever seen. Even with all this episodic improv, Fuu's journey in search of a "samurai who smells like sunflowers" provides a compelling core to the story, much like a steady hip-hop beat giving structure to the mix of samples and freestyle verses. Her ronin traveling companions Mugen and Jin mingle like oil and water, and there we have the perfect cast for hilarity and drama.
Samurai Champloo is one good-looking show, with its thick linework giving an impression of manga blended with graffiti style. One episode even takes a quick trip into the psychedelic, with a sudden burst of colorful hallucination, Mind Game style — courtesy of episode key animator Masaaki Yuasa, of course. A wide variety of such notable animators were brought on board and thus the style occasionally varies slightly from episode to episode or even scene to scene, but it's always pleasing and completely in tune with the show's theme. Rural Japan has never looked so urban; almost any given scene in Samurai Champloo would be right at home spray-painted on the side of a city building or underpass.
The music, likewise, blends hip-hop, rhythm & blues, and traditional Japanese shamisen. Music often plays second fiddle to the look and quality of the animation when it comes to my enjoyment of anime, but in some cases it becomes just as important. This is one such anime, where the music contributes so greatly to the feel of it that it defines it and sets it apart from other anime — much like the soundtrack by Yoko Kanno and the Seatbelts did for Cowboy Bebop. It's also worth mentioning that rap and beatboxing sometimes enter the dialogue, and it's always amusing. Admittedly, most younger people these days are far more familiar with hip-hop than they are with the jazz, blues, and big band genres; nonetheless, in the realm of anime this feels a bit groundbreaking, especially with the theme songs featuring Japanese rap lyrics. The world is getting bigger and smaller every day.
Samurai Champloo is a show for everyone. Plenty of great sword- slashing action, clever comedy, and a good share of moments that will tug at your heartstrings — often all at once. If you enjoy anime, this is one you can't miss. show less