Category: Travis
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Review: ‘Ghostbusters: Afterlife’
Jason Reitman Dials Up A Worthy Sequel That Leans Hard On Nostalgia While Forging New Ground
I’ll be honest; Ghostbusters: Afterlife hasn’t interested me all that much. As a kid I roared with glee at the cool Ecto-1, played Peter Venkman (because he was the coolest) with my friends when we would reenact scenes from the classic movie, and even thought its sequel was better than the ravaging it got from critics. But…
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Review: ‘tick, tick…BOOM!’
Lin-Manuel Miranda And Andrew Garfield’s Nostalgic, Messy Celebration Of Jonathan Larson Is Perfect Fan Service For Broadway Lovers
The last year has been particularly tough for the theatre community. As Broadway has been dark due to COVID, it’s made especially difficult for performers a career path that is famously tough to navigate. How many movies are there about struggling stage actors and playwrights? Many of them owe something to Jonathan Larson’s tick, tick…BOOM!, the revered Rent creator’s…
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Review: ‘The Souvenir Part II’
Joanna Hogg’s Beautiful, Understated Look At Grief And The Creative Process Will Leave You Wanting More
I quite loved Joanna Hogg’s insightful, wrenching semi-autobiographical The Souvenir, in which her cinematic younger self, played wonderfully by Honor Swinton Byrne, copes with her filmmaking aspirations and the emotional toll of loving someone with a secret double life. While Hogg had always conceived of this story as a two-parter, it never felt to me like…
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Review: ‘Belfast’
Kenneth Branagh’s Joyous, Modest Slice-Of-Life Drama Will Leave You Buzzing
*NOTE: This review was previously part of our Middleburg Film Festival coverage. Belfast opens in theaters on November 12th.* This has been another year of deeply personal awards season dramas at Middleburg. A couple of years removed from Roma, this year we’ve got Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God and Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast. Of the bunch, it’s Branagh who…
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Review: ‘Red Notice’
Dwayne Johnson, Ryan Reynolds, And Gal Gadot Give Their Fans What They Want In Netflix’s Glossy, Watchable Action-Caper
Let’s be honest; if you’re watching Netflix’s Red Notice it’s for one thing. Well, three things: Dwayne Johnson, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. You can’t argue with the potential in uniting these three mega-stars for one snazzy, high-spirited comedy caper. They’ll probably all end up in a superhero movie together someday…actually, that’s very possible with Johnson and…
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Review: ‘Eternals’
Marvel’s Most Ambitious Film Is Also Sure To Be Its Most Divisive
Despite being the undisputed juggernaut of the Hollywood landscape, the Marvel Cinematic Universe spent years being criticized for its homogenous, generic superhero movies. That has changed somewhat lately, but not entirely. No matter what the story, or how large its scope, like say Avengers: Endgame, it is constrained by the needs of the genre. And then…
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Review: ‘Finch’
Tom Hanks Road Trips With A Dog And An Annoying Robot In A Pleasing Sci-Fi Drama That Doesn’t Aspire To Much
From crossing the Old West in last year’s great News of the World, to traveling the West in Miguel Sapochnik’s sci-fi film Finch, Tom Hanks is telling stories and imparting life lessons across time and space. And you know what? He’ll never not be compelling and the kind of fatherly presence that keeps us receptive…
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Review: ‘Spencer’
Kristen Stewart Makes For A Luminous Princess Diana In A Film That Fails Her
*NOTE: This review was originally part of our Middleburg Film Festival coverage. Spencer opens in theaters on November 5th.* Right from the beginning of Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s latest white bird in a blizzard drama, Spencer, we know this isn’t remotely a fact-based account. Described as a “fable based on a true tragedy”, the film doesn’t…
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Review: ‘Ida Red’
Melissa Leo, Josh Hartnett, And Frank Grillo Are A Close-Knit Crime Family Looking For A Way Out
Ida Red is quite the cracking little crime thriller, the latest from Tulsa, Oklahoma’s own writer/director John Swab. In Swab’s second film of the year following the drug industry drama Body Brokers, a tangled family dynamic of lowlifes and criminals take orders from the titular family matriarch (Melissa Leo) even though she’s been locked up for fifteen…
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Review: ‘The Harder They Fall’
Jonathan Majors, Regina King, Idris Elba, & More Shoot ’em Up In A Stylish, Violent Black Western
“While the events of this story are fictional…These. People. Existed.” The words boom like a bass drum in the opening crawl of Jeymes Samuel’s stylish, hyper-violent Black Western fantasy The Harder They Fall. A fantasy, but with frontier icons from all across the 19th-century, some well-known, some not so much, in a superhero-esque mashup featuring…