Because Everybody Else Has One

It don't get much better than this folks. Plot synopsis: When a number of alien spacecrafts appear all over the world, the United States government approaches brilliant linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, to try and make contact with the mysterious beings residing in the one hovering over an open space deep in the American heartland. Review: Wedged between the slow burn of his brilliant crime drama, Sicario, and the audacious sequel to one of the most acclaimed science fiction films of all time, Blade Runner 2049, Arrival solidifies Denis Villeneuve as one of the most exciting filmmakers out there right now and as one of the few who may not make a total pig's ear out of the new Blade Runner film. The basic plot of Arrival is even more stripped down than most "first contact" stories but the true brilliance of this immaculately assembled masterpiece is the way it uses the bare-bones simplicity of its fantastical premise to explore themes that are complex, profound and...

Doctor Strange is Marvel's most visually arresting movie to date but is it any more than that? Does it need to be? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about When Stephen Strange, an arrogant but brilliant neurosurgeon, has his life and career brought to a screeching halt after having his hands mangled in a bad car accident, his search for a cure brings him to the doorstep of the Ancient One, an ageless sorceress who may be the one person able to do what the most advanced medicine could not. What starts off as a desperate last resort for a man who has always lived his life with no time for anything beyond a materialistic (in both senses of the word) view of the world is soon confronted with both a reality that challenges everything he knows to be true and something that may well give him a purpose far, far greater and far more selfless than just healing his hand. What we thought Created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee in 1963, Doctor Strange wasn't ...

Bringing the classic Western to modern day America once and for all. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about A divorced father and his ex-con brother go on a small-time bank-robbing spree to save their late mother's house from being foreclosed by the bank but even as their own fractious relationship threatens to corrode their entire enterprise, a pair of Texas Rangers come ever closer to catching up with them. What we thought Essentially a modern reinvention of the western, Hell or High Water uses its simple, bare-bones plot to explore a post-recession America, where greedy banks and everyday people feed off each other and the line between victim and criminal grows ever blurrier. Far more than just a polemical screed against banks, though, it's mostly an intimate character study of its four central characters, punctuated by a simmering tension broiling beneath the surface whose ultimate eruption into brutal violence is as inevitable as ...