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Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)

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The Mission: Impossible series is one of the best action franchises around today. It hasn’t always been this way, but ever since 2011’s Ghost Protocol things have been looking up for Tom Cruise’s flagship films. These last two films have been an example of both the extreme lengths to which Cruise will go as his own stuntman and the correct way to make a ridiculous action movie. At their core, of course, that is what the M:I films are: bombastic, slightly silly, and self-aware heist films with a unique ability to also tie in more realistic threats than the average “grounded” spy film. I love that these films can walk that line without feeling stressed by doing so, and this latest entry is no exception: Mission: Impossible – Fallout is one of the best action films of the past decade, a monument to fun entertainment and excellent filmmaking at the same time. I would be remiss, though, if I didn’t express that the plot and characters are just as good as the action sequences...
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Sorry to Bother You (2018)

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It’s rare when I have a cinematic experience that truly shocks me to my core because of a film being outside of the box. That shouldn’t be the case, but often the movies I prioritize seeing are made for the sake of making money and not to primarily send a message to its audience. This film, however, is something completely different. Boots Riley’s directorial debut Sorry to Bother You is a wild, wild ride that aims to be a protest of the systemic oppression of the fundamental truths of capitalism, albeit taken to extreme places. Its allegorical nature makes it bold and forward with its message, but its method of getting that message across is highly effective. What will make or break this film for somebody watching it is how they handle its extremely literal nature. Sorry to Bother You makes no efforts to hide its message; in the naming of its characters, the parts they will eventually play in the story are often revealed (the pro-union character is named Squeeze, the pro...
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Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

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I don’t see many horror films. Part of this is due to films like Hereditary that scare the living daylights out of me, as I, like many normal people, don’t often choose to scare myself. A larger portion of my aversion to the genre, perhaps, is the reputation mainstream horror films have these days. Especially when looking at Blumhouse-produced films, they are plain garbage. The characters make the worst possible decisions every time they have a choice presented to them simply to drive them into a terrible situation that will somehow kill them mercilessly with blood and gore everywhere, and often the scares used are cheap gimmickry and fake jump scares that do nothing but relieve the audience and bore them into their seats. Seeing Unfriended: Dark Web yielded almost that exact response from me. I was either laughing or scoffing at this movie for all of its eighty-eight minutes because of how ridiculously stupid its characters are. It made me furious yet enthused because Dark W...
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Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

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Having just come from Infinity War , the Marvel Cinematic Universe is reeling. The film with the largest scope and greatest stakes (along with arguably the franchise’s most menacing villain) has left all fans in a sort of mourning period. I saw that film twice in theaters, and because of its weight I felt like I needed a bit of space to process all the consequences of its insane climax. That’s part of what makes the franchise’s next entry both fitting and puzzling. Ant-Man and the Wasp takes a completely different tone than Infinity War , and that split my opinion of it. I appreciate that it does not have the large stakes and scale of most MCU films, but at the same time it also feels unimportant and almost like filler. In a similar manner to the first ­ Ant-Man film, its lightweight nature undermines its own sense of self-importance but in an even worse context for such a film because it follows a much grimmer installment. I know that that might be a strange area of criticis...
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Won't You Be My Neighbor (2018)

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I grew up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood more mornings than not. My mom probably remembers it better than I do, but from what I can recall I loved the show in my early childhood. In retrospect, Fred Rogers’s demeanor was probably a big part of that; the man was warm, compassionate, and more sophisticated than many of the other main characters of the other shows I watched alongside his. One of the questions that has sat in my mind about Rogers, though, is whether he was like the man on the show. To have that kind of demeanor in everyday life would completely shock me in the cynical, jaded world in which we live. The documentary on Rogers’s life Won’t You Be My Neighbor? answers this question of many with a resounding “yes.” This film is overwhelmingly optimistic yet not without a sense of grounded realism that Rogers himself possessed. It feels exactly like Fred Rogers the character which, it asserts quite confidently, was Fred Rogers the man. Instead of focusing ...
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Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018)

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Sicario has grown on me since I first saw it a couple years ago. It is even more timely now than it was then, casting moral ambiguity onto the War on Drugs and its fallout around the U.S.-Mexico border. With its beautiful yet bleak composition from director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer/legend Roger Deakins and excellent performances from Emily Blunt, Benicio del Toro, and Josh Brolin, that film asks a lot of questions about grey areas and, due to its construction, lets each individual audience member answer them. That’s the biggest difference between that film and its sequel, Sicario: Day of the Soldado : while in some respects it does keep pace with its predecessor, its treatment of its events’ moral standing leaves a lot to be desired. We view the actions of Alejandro Gillick (del Toro) and Matt Graver (Brolin) through the lens of Blunt’s Kate Macer, an outsider who is seeing all these grisly, gruesome acts for the first time. She bears the emotional weight of the fi...
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Incredibles 2 (2018)

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As I have become an adult, the first Incredibles movie has grown on me quite a lot. I began to realize how deep-seated its themes are and how many mature issues it tackles for an animated film; there is something special about how animated films like this can allow one’s guard to drop and communicate some heavy messages to the non-children in the room. A sequel has seemed like a pipe dream for so long that I was almost in disbelief when the announcement was made that Incredibles 2 was entering production and would be released in 2018. I think it is safe to assume that few people were nervous about this film ruining its predecessor; Pixar has done a highly serviceable job with its most beloved properties’ long-awaited sequels ( Toy Story 3 and Finding Dory being prime examples), and the return of nearly every component involved in the original eased my mind that much more. I wanted to see the return of that impeccable family dynamic that was often more enticing than the acti...
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