Month: February 2019

Serenity

Kevin Fentress Movie Reviews , , , , , , , ,

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All Wet

“There’s some weird stuff going on right now,” drawls Matthew McConaughey in Serenity.  He doesn’t know the half of it.  McConaughey plays Baker Dill, a fisherman on the picturesque, ambiguously-located Plymouth Island.  Baker spends his days taking lazy tourists for chartered fishing trips while obsessing over a particular tuna that has evaded him multiple times.  His first mate Duke (the always-charismatic Djimon Hounsou) worries about Baker’s deteriorating mental state, as well as the pair’s dwindling funds. Continue reading →

The Prodigy

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That Boy Ain’t Right

Let’s face it: some kids are just creepy.  If they weren’t, the bad-seed trope wouldn’t be such a workhorse of a horror premise, still bearing fruit eons after its inception.  The fear of our own offspring turning against us is disturbing on a primal, universal level, unconfined to any one culture or time period.  Speaking more generally, the perversion of innocence has always been an upsetting prospect, and what could possibly be more innocent than a child?  Truth be told, there’s not much left to do with the creepy-kid genre, but while The Prodigy doesn’t reinvent the wheel, it delivers an uncommonly solid execution of the formula. Continue reading →

Velvet Buzzsaw

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This Just Won’t Cut It

Velvet Buzzsaw is a movie I wanted to like – to love, even.  The last time Dan Gilroy and Jake Gyllenhaal teamed up we got 2014’s excellent Nightcrawler, and given the gonzo premise of their new collaboration, I thought I was in for a good time.  But the Netflix movie curse spares few; even up-and-coming directors and A-list actors cannot escape its grasp.  The streaming service’s marketing would have you believe Velvet Buzzsaw is first and foremost a horror film, but the truth is the horror is an afterthought.  So is everything else in the movie. Continue reading →

Glass

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glass

The Cracks Begin to Show

In a way, the timing of Glass couldn’t be better.  When M. Night Shyamalan made his superhero subversion Unbreakable in 2000, he couldn’t possibly have predicted the current dominion superhero movies have over the film industry.  With the advent of Glass, he’s had eighteen years of new cultural DNA to analyze for the long-gestating conclusion of his trilogy.  Sadly, Glass ends up being the worst movie of the three. Continue reading →