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August 2016
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Monthly Archives: August 2016

Don’t Breathe (2016)

DIRECTOR: Fede Alvarez

CAST: Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto, Stephen Lang

REVIEW:

Don’t Breathe is a slight but compulsively watchable little “boxed-in” thriller (featuring characters trapped in one enclosed location for most of the runtime) that gets in, gets the job done, and gets out. It won’t go down as a thriller classic, but it’s a serviceable little refrigerator movie.

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Anthropoid (2016)

anthroDIRECTOR: Sean Ellis

CAST: Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, Charlotte Le Bon, Toby Jones

REVIEW:

WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL “SPOILERS”

Anthropoid is a spare, gritty historical thriller chronicling in unvarnished fashion the true story of the operation (code-named “Anthropoid”) to assassinate high-ranking Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.  To that end, it’s not necessarily the definitive film adaptation of the event (1975’s Operation Daybreak provides a more comprehensive overview), but it’s a tense and unromanticized docudrama illuminating one of the less famous stories from WWII.   Continue reading

Suicide Squad (2016)

squadDIRECTOR: David Ayer

CAST: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Jared Leto, Joel Kinnaman, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, Jay Hernandez, Cara Delevingne, Karen Fukuhara, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Adam Beach, Scott Eastwood, Common

REVIEW:

Suicide Squad promoted itself as a kind of darker, grittier, DC equivalent of Marvel’s offbeat Guardians of the Galaxy—complete with a ragtag band of lower-tier comic book characters and a busy soundtrack of pop hits—and while I’m not prepared to place it on equal footing, it’s at least more enjoyable than DC’s previous offering this year, the dreary, borderline incoherent Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (though that might sound like damning with faint praise).  The film has its own issues, but overall, despite being critically savaged, it’s a fairly enjoyable romp with enough cheeky humor and kinetic action to please many fans of the comic series. Continue reading

Jason Bourne (2016)

jasonDIRECTOR: Paul Greengrass

CAST: Matt Damon, Alicia Vikander, Tommy Lee Jones, Vincent Cassel, Julia Stiles

REVIEW:

WARNING: THIS REVIEW WILL REVEAL “SPOILERS”

With the total box office gross for Universal’s Bourne trilogy reaching nearly $1 billion, it was inevitable that the studio would want more, even when director Paul Greengrass and star Matt Damon were uninterested in returning, but their misfired attempt at expanding the Bourne “universe”, 2012’s The Bourne Legacy (starring Jeremy Renner as someone not named Jason Bourne), was a superfluous side tangent to nowhere.  A Matt Damon-sized hole was left in the franchise, a hole that has finally been filled, nearly a decade after he last played the part, with he and Greengrass returning to the popular action series.  Was it worth the wait (and the undoubtedly hefty paychecks involved in drawing both men back into the fold)?  Questionable.  Among long-awaited sequels to popular franchises, the simply-titled Jason Bourne is better than this summer’s unneeded sequels London Has Fallen or Independence Day: Resurgence, but it feels like a “greatest hits” cover of the original series, reheated and served for leftovers.  It doesn’t break any new ground; in fact, it rehashes various plot elements, to the extent that it comes across as an adequately engaging but ultimately superfluous sequel whose existence is unessential. Continue reading

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