Tom Hanks stars as the beloved Mr. Rogers in director Marielle Heller’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Review by Nick Armstrong
The film both indulges in and disproves the idea that Mr. Rogers is a saint, an otherworldly figure whose kindness knows no bounds.
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Festival Coverage by Zach Dennis, Andrew Swafford, and Jessica Carr
For eleven days in September, the Toronto International Film Festival screened over 240 feature films from around the world. Established in 1976, it has been described as the “most important film festival in the world.” Zach, Andrew and Jessica were able to attend the festival for several days and, during that span, caught 28 features from 14 different countries – 14 of those films being world premieres and 7 being North American premieres.
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Review by Zach Dennis
At its core, Joker would love to be a movie about the mental health system and the lack of attention or funding to actually help those who desperately need it. But that’s all bullshit. The movie just needed something to make it seem much more nuanced so that it could validate its lust for violence and exhalation of the misunderstood misfit.
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Constance Wu and Jennifer Lopez star in director Lorence Scafaria’s Hustlers
Review by Miranda Barnewall
What does money buy for these women? It does buy the things you might expect, but it also buys security, comfort, and opportunity. It ultimately buys power over your own life.
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Brad Pitt stars in director James Gray’s long-awaited Ad Astra
Review / Personal Essay by Logan Kenny
There’s a comfort in knowing that there have been people like me before, in fiction and in reality, desperate for something to cling onto as everything glides through the stars. James Gray’s work behind the camera and the emotional depth he gives his characters has always been remarkable, but the confidence and patience he has here is transcendent.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
It Chapter Two ultimately feels like a repeat of the first chapter. Only this time, it’s less fun.
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Retro Review by Zach Dennis
There isn’t much profound about the men of Elaine May movies – they’re all dullards. For the most part though, she has empathy for their sadness.
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Gerard Butler stars in the third film in the Fallen trilogy
Review by Logan Kenny
For something that easily could have been exploited as basic propaganda, it’s fascinating that Angel Has Fallen does the most it can within its platform to actually have an ideology.
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The cast of Bong Joon-ho’s Palme d’Or winning Parasite
Review by Lucy Palmer
Parasite is a film that plays with genre like no other and somehow remains decisively coherent from beginning to end.
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Former teen-hearthrob Zac Efron stars as Ted Bundy in director Joe Berlinger’s Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
Review by Nicholas Armstrong
The premise of casting Efron as Bundy allows him to incorporate the charms and tics that we have come to know him for, making them hypervisible and ultimately forcing us to question why we are drawn to those tics in the first place.
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Samara Weaving stars in Ready or Not by directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet
Review by Andrew Swafford
Ready or Not functions well as agitprop for working-class folks who harbor resentment for the ultra-wealthy already, but it rarely points the finger at what exactly the rich get up to that is violent in nature.
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Sosie Bacon and Hannah Murray star in director Mary Harron’s Charlie Says
Review by Logan Kenny
Charlie Says never takes the easiest route of satisfaction through violence; there is no solace for anyone in this picture.
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Review by Lydia Creech
There’s a lot of fucked-upness in the world right now, as is, and putting the film safely 50 years in the past robs the scare power these stories could have communicated.
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Starring Alice Englert, Kaitlyn Dever, Olivia Coleman, Jim Gaffigan, Walton Goggins, and Thomas Mann
A conversation between Andrew Swafford and Reid Ramsey
Them That Follow is a film about an Appalachian snake-handling church, which makes it a pretty interesting topic of conversation for us here at Cinematary – our podcast crew is primarily made up of southerners, and we recently completed a months-long podcast series about southern culture on film. Among the films in that series were Marjoe and Wise Blood, which both presented extreme forms of religious performance and asceticism – and we also watched hillbilly, which studies the on-screen representation of Appalachian people specifically. To me, these ideas intersect in the subject of snake-handling churches, which are dangerous and controversial but also loom large in the cultural imagination as a source of extreme southern backwardness.
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Dwayne Johnson stars alongside Jason Statham in director David Leitch’s Hobbs and Shaw
Review by Logan Kenny
The idea and presence of family is the constant in this franchise, and no matter how far it drifts from the original racers and the old unit, there is always that beating heart of love and admiration and the importance of having people that love you.
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Along with Tye Sheridan and Denis Lavant, Jeff Goldblum stars in director Rick Alverson’s The Mountain
Review by Andrew Swafford
The easiest thing to say definitively about Rick Alverson’s The Mountain is that it’s a film about lobotomies that makes you feel as though you’ve been lobotomized yourself.
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Review by Reid Ramsey
By the end of Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood, it’s clear that Tarantino had two clear objectives: to entertain and to humanize Sharon Tate. The result is his most moving film — maybe his only moving film.
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By Nadine Smith
A few years ago I started a personal project to chart the tastes of that nebulous social organism known as “Film Twitter,” a body of various individuals who use Twitter to, well, talk about films. Over time, I noticed that the kinds of people who hung out on this corner of the web liked certain movies and disliked other movies, and I became interested in doing some kind of aggregation of taste to see if a consensus had emerged amongst Internet cinephiles.
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Review by Courtney Anderson
All the personality of the animated The Lion King has been sucked out, and we are left with a bunch of life-like animals — and the humans voicing them — looking and sounding like they’re going through their contractually obligated motions.
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Jonathan Majors and Jimmie Fails star in director Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Review by Jessica Carr
This was the first time in 2019 that I left the theater feeling like I had just witnessed something truly masterful. This film is truly a work of poetry-in-motion.
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