A brutal and emotional performance from Joaquin Phoenix highlights this odd and nonconformist revenge flick.  You Were Never Really Here was released earlier this year in a limited nature and has found its way onto iTunes for streaming.

Lynne Ramsay wrote and directed this movie that finds itself trying very hard to keep its main hero Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) in a dreamlike stance.  Joe was a traumatized war vet who was now a hired gun, was hired by a New York senator to bring back his daughter who had been kidnapped, but Joe was slowly descending into his own damaged psyche.

To be honest, I had a hard time following this and I was dozing off in several sections, not a good sign for a revenge movie.

Joaquin Phoenix was tremendous in this role, bringing a certain gravitas to the part.  You believed how Joe was slipping away and was on the verge of suicide the entire film.  And the fact that you are never quite sure whether or not something was real.

The imagery here seems to overpower the story and, while that can be okay, I found it a bit too artsy for my taste.

An award caliber performance from a wonderful actor does not do enough to surpass the material for me.  While I appreciate the originality, I needed more.

2.5 stars

Spike Lee’s latest film tells a crazy true story from 1979 that has major relevance for the world of 2018… and he does not shy away from making his point.

This is one of those movies that is really powerful and sticks with you for awhile and it is very challenging to formulate your thoughts on it without a proper time of reflection.  Good for Spike Lee for creating something that makes people think.

Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) was the first African-American police officer on the all-white Colorado Springs Police Department and he was going to face some challenges.  However, the color of his skin quickly opened some doors for him as they needed him to go undercover at a speech by former Black Panther Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins).  After the speech, the local branch of the Klu Klux Klan felt the need to recruit new members and put an ad in the paper.  Ron saw the ad and called the number.  He was able to set up a meeting with the KKK members.

Problem is… Ron is black and the KKK was not blind.  With support of his Chief (Robert John Burke), Ron recruited fellow police officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver) to go undercover and play a white Ron Stallworth and meet with the KKK.

So while Flip was meeting with the KKK, Ron was talking with them on the phone.  In fact, Ron is able to make contact on the phone with the KKK’s Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace).  Duke enjoyed the conversations he had with Ron, not knowing that he had been talking to a black man.

Some parts of the movie worked better than others.  My least favorite parts were the romantic relationship the film tried to build between Ron and Patrice (Laura Harrier), the college’s Black Power president.  It felt like something added in that just did not work for me.

However, everything with Ron and Flip and the KKK was outstanding.  I loved everything with Ron and his fellow police officers in the CSPD.  I thought both John David Washington and Adam Driver were exceptional.  Driver was playing a man who was Jewish, but was not very Jewish so he was being faced with the anti semantic hatred for the first time.  This was opening his eyes along the way.  There was great chemistry between them and they certainly are a key component to the film working as well as it did.

I also liked how Spike Lee did not completely demonize the KKK side of the film either.  Sure there were a couple of the members were played as evil, but there were many of them who just were guys who wanted to drink beer and who had a disgusting point of view.

Though the topic is extremely serious, the film itself has a lot of great moments of humor.  Some of the phone conversations with Duke and Ron were just hilarious and many of the situations were so unbelievable that you have to laugh.  The timing of the humor was perfectly executed.

Lee does not miss a chance to be political in here.  He took a couple of subtler shots at the Trump Administration in the film, using some of the wording of Trump’s own rhetoric for dialogue for the KKK.  However, the end of the film left no doubt about the intention of the message of the film.

The ending of this film is a very dramatic and gutsy moment about which I am unsure how I feel.  The scenes were absolutely powerful and emotionally compelling for sure, and I understand why he included them.  I just worry that it might send people who have a certain idealism and who may have been swayed by the film running away from it.  It absolutely stunned the theater I was watching it in as I could hear several people sobbing while these scenes were being shown.

Another message that Lee seems to be sending is that, while there are racist police officers in the world, there are also good solid men and women who take the badge seriously.  While there are too many who rush to judgment, there is still hope that the cops can be a force of good.

Topher Grace was fantastic as David Duke, bringing a side to the KKK leader that you might not expect.

There are a ton of great performances and some really biting social commentary wrapped up into a film that has great humor and a thrilling story.  This is one of Spike Lee’s best films in years and maybe his best wide release film ever.

4.25 stars

To be perfectly honest, Slender Man lost me within the first ten minutes.  I found it pretty dull and boring at the beginning and it did not pick up much after that.

The latest horror film is based on the urban legend of Slender Man, which was another issue I had with the film.  There was a real case of young girls injuring another girl because of their belief in Slender Man so it is tough to create this fictionalized version of the film.  That does not mean that there couldn’t have been a version of this that would have worked.  Maybe if it dealt closer to the psychological aspects instead of mystical it would have been stronger.

The acting in the film was, at best, competent.  It felt like all the three to four girls were doing in the movie were checking their phones or screeching.  There was not much in way of subtlety here.

There were also way too many jump scares in the film, falling back on the old trope really hard.  The music would get loud as something was about to happen and that is a technique that really needs to be handled with more of a light touch these days when you are getting top notch quality horror movies that use only a limited amount of jump scares.

The story was needlessly confusing and difficult to follow.  The characters were underdeveloped in almost every aspect.  There was really no lead protagonist throughout the film -kind of bouncing that around.  The final act had too many unintended laughs in it to be effective.

I do like how they used the Slender Man through most of the movie, keeping him in the shadows and hiding the appearance of the creature.  That was tossed out the window in that third act though and not for the better.

These days you have to elevate your game if you want to do a horror film and Slender Man did not accomplish it.  Go watch the documentary on the real life story if you are having an interest in the Slender Man because it is a better portrayal.

1.4 stars

Whether you enjoy this movie or not I believe depends on your mindset when going in to see it.  I had very low expectations going in to see the new giant sharp movie, The Meg starring Jason Statham and I came out feeling that I had seen an entertaining B-movie with some ridiculous scenes that were plenty of fun.

If someone went into The Meg hoping to see Jaws (or heck, even The Shallows), you were going to be disappointed.

The Meg is a big and stupid movie with a lot of action and a giant shark trying to eat people.  I was surprised to find that I thought that was enough.

When a group of scientists get stuck down 11,000 feet below the water and are stranded, they had to call for the help of Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) to rescue them.  Jonas had been in this situation before and he encountered something mysteriously gigantic that led to him leaving some of the people he was there to rescue behind.  Since then he was drinking a lot and out of the water.  Since his ex-wife (Jessica McNamee) was among those trapped, Jonas decided to get back in the game.

After the rescue, the scientists realized that they unwittingly released the monstrous Megalodon, the world’s largest shark that was supposed to be extinct.  And I guess it was hungry.

I enjoyed Jason Statham here.  He was unapologetically playing that 80/90s action hero who is jumping head first into danger.  There was one point where I thought that this could have been a role Bruce Willis would have played in his hey day.

After Jonas Taylor, there were very few characters sufficiently developed.  There was the love interest (Bingbing Li) who was not just a damsel in distress.  She was okay.  So was her cute daughter (Shuya Sophia Cai).  After that, all the other character were there for comedic lines or to be eaten.  I was surprised to see Masi Oka (Hiro from the TV show Heroes) in the movie.  I actually said out loud “Hiro” when he showed up.

Is this a great movie?  Absolutely not.  It is one where you have to approach it with a grain of salt (and maybe a tub of popcorn).  I went in expecting this to be bad and I came out entertained.  It is a B-level monster movie with all the silliness that goes along with it.

3 stars

This one is quite a dog of a movie.

It is a mutt.

I did not like this one much at all.

Dog Days is a romantic comedy with a bunch of couples who all have dogs or are somehow connected with dogs. Or a comedy/Lifetime movie with dogs.  There are several different stories going on with a group of actors all centered around their relationships and their canines.

The dogs themselves are fun and cute as can be.  The cast of actors are not terrible either.

The problem with this movie is that the dialogue is absolutely atrocious.  Real people simply do not act or talk like this.  There were times that I felt like the film had been written by a sixth grader, and not a particularly talented one.  People do not sound like this.  I was trying not to laugh at the way these characters were being portrayed.  It was unbelievable how poorly this film was written.

Because of the silliness of the dialogue and the poorly developed characters, I had very little interest in any of the characters of the film.  The only storyline that I was even remotely interested in was with Finn Wolfhard as the young pizza delivery boy and Ron Cephas Jones as the old man who lost the pug that reminded him of his late wife.  I liked the relationship between these two characters, but it was sadly obvious how the arc of the old man was going to come out, especially when it was intertwined with the story of Eva Longoria and Rob Corddry.

There were a couple of times where the film tried to manipulate the emotions of the crowd with the dogs, but, to me, it came off as forcing a sad scene to try to have some emotional connection to these one-note characters.

It was also just way too long, and it felt like it.  I had a young boy in my row at the theater who couldn’t have been more bored through most of this film.  He wiggled and moved and flipped around.  The film lost him, and I wasn’t much better.

This was at its best when the camera came in to close ups of the adorable dogs.  The film could have used more dogs and less humans.

1.6 stars

I’m actually amazed that this movie was written by a man.  Writer/director Bo Burnham seems to have a such a complete grasp of a middle school girl that it is difficult to believe that this is someone who has only one chromosome in common.

As a middle school teacher, I found myself laughing at this movie in many places because there were things that were so realistic and on the nose that I had seen the exact scenes in my own middle school.  It was a impressive feat.  Many times the school setting in these movies fall more to the stereotypical movie school than the realistic setting, but this one is authentic.

Eighth Grade features the story of Kayla (Elsie Fisher), an eighth grader in the last week of school, trying to make it through the remaining days of middle school before becoming a high schooler. She has to face the self-doubt, the potential ridicule, the hormones and everything else that middle school students face daily.

Kayla has one parent, her father Mark (Josh Hamilton), a wonderful dad, who struggles to communicate with his daughter and to compete with the all-powerful and consuming phone.  Kayla posts videos online giving pointers and tidbits of wisdom that she could do well with following herself.

There were some very funny scenes in this movie and there were some extremely tense and nerve-wracking scenes in this move (especially one that takes place in the back of a car).

Elsie Fisher is tremendous here, beautifully bringing Kayla’s worries, fears and anxieties to life on the screen.  She broadcasts her entire life over social media as so many kids do these days, and I had to laugh when the script called for the line, “Nobody uses Facebook anymore” because I have literally heard that comment from middle school girls.

While the film does not really have the typical narrative structure of a movie, the subject matter is akin to that sort of atypical platform.  It is very much like a middle school kid and it fits very well.  The film follows this final week and the events that happen bring great effect to Kayla.

I must say that there is a beautiful scene around a fire between Kayla and her father which is how all parents should deal with their daughters.

Eighth Grade is a wonderful movie that has an authentic tone and feel to it and it deals with real life topics without hyperbole.  It contains several spectacular performances and makes you squirm in your seat more than once.

4.4 stars