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The Color Purple December 19, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen The Color Purple is not a musical, it’s a MUSICAL. Unlike other movie musicals slated to release soon (looking at you Wonka and Mean Girls ), this one is unabashed in its traits and always threatening to leap off the screen and break out into song in the aisles. Director Blitz Bazawule opens the film with the camera swirling down from the sky, eventually careening its way to two sisters sitting on a tree. The girls make their way into town where they’re greeted by the townsfolk singing about how the Lord works in mysterious ways. It’s an uplifting, high-energy tune filled with athletic choreography and a restless spirit, a tone-setter for the rest of the set pieces. These joyous moments do not replace the darkness that is within this story. Even at a young age Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) and Netti (Halle Bailey) face incredible hardships. Celie is pregnant with her second child from her father Alfonso, the first having been “given to God” immediately after it was born. The second shares the same fate, with the cruelty of the father only growing exponentially. A wolf in sheep’s clothing comes in the form of “Mister” (Colman Domingo), who reluctantly buys Celie to be his bride after being told that Nettie is not for sale. Years go by in the blink of an eye as a grown-up Celie (Fantasia Barrino, reprising her role from Broadway) must live a secluded life raising Mister’s unruly kids from his previous marriage and is forbidden from contacting Nettie. Her first smile does not come until almost an hour into the film. By then it’s a foreign concept, something she forgot was able to exist in her life. Barrino is quite remarkable as Celie, never feeling like an imitation of Whoopi Goldberg from the 1985 Steven Spielberg film. She has the incredibly difficult job of being beaten down to utter silence while also displaying perseverance through loud musical numbers. Along with her in many of those set pieces is Danielle Brooks (also returning from Broadway) as Sofia and Taraji P. Henson as Shug Avery. Each of these women delivers a movie star performance on the grandest stage, with Brooks being the notable standout with her rendition of “Hell No!” But while the cast is all game for the balancing act of light and dark, Bazawule and screenwriter Marcus Gardley are not. A distinct tonal imbalance hangs over everything, making it all feel like it's stuck in neutral. For a movie that belts its emotions for 140 minutes on a giant screen, you ought to feel something, anything . I don’t want to cop out and say this movie just doesn’t have “it,” but there’s no better way to describe it. The words “occasionally monotonous” are not what I predicted to use to describe this beforehand. Neither would I think Gardley would sand down Alice Walker’s novel even further than the 1985 film did, with Celie and Shug’s original passion for each other being reduced to little more than a slightly sexualized friendship. Bazawule does display an admirable amount of command over the entire production. His experience with Beyoncé's Black Is King is apparent, with the music and visuals popping off the screen. It’s an interesting middle ground between a film adaptation and a recorded stage production, sometimes feeling like several visual albums awkwardly stitched together to make a cohesive narrative. Dan Laustsen’s cinematography features heavenly lights beaming through every window and Paul D. Austerberry’s sets are beautiful, yet artificial. The Color Purple has a giant heart that it loudly shares with the world, yet there always seems to be a gap in the translation. A puzzling transition here, a missed emotional beat there; it all adds up to something being a little less than the sum of its parts. Luckily, this epic journey ends on a superior number, both lyrically and visually. I walked away with a half-smile, which definitely counts for something. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

You Hurt My Feelings May 24, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen After brief stops in television (directing episodes for Mrs. Fletcher , Extrapolations , and Lucky Hank ) and the Middle Ages (penning the “The Truth according to Marguerite de Carrouges” portion of The Last Duel ), writer/director Nicole Holofcener returns to her New York roots for You Hurt My Feelings , now bowing in theaters after premiering at this past January’s Sundance Film Festival. The older we get, the more we come to realize that the childhood saying “honesty is the best policy” is not the unbreakable rule that we were led to believe. Sure, you should strive to be honest with people, especially those you care about the most. But the real world never invites simplicity, so we have to bend the truth a little to get by without as little damage as possible. What’s the worst that could happen anyway? The obviously clichéd answer to that question is that a lot of catastrophic events would happen, either physically or emotionally (see Dancer in the Dark or The Hunt ). But in all her deftness, Holofcener doesn’t reach for fire and brimstone. Instead, she puts a magnifying glass on a couple that has built a strong foundation, mining relevant truths out of their small-scale situation. The specimens are Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (Tobias Menzies). Beth is a semi-successful writer who is putting the finishing touches on her new mystery fiction novel, which acts as a slight departure from her usual non-fiction work. Don is a therapist that seems to have lost his edge. He looks and sounds so tired that even the endlessly squabbling couple that he regularly sees (real-life partners David Cross and Amber Tamblyn) takes pity on him. Beth has been using Don as a writing resource these past few months, and he’s had nothing but praise for her work. That is until the nuclear bomb goes off (metaphorically of course). Beth and her sister Sarah (Michaela Watkins) stumble upon Don and Sarah’s husband Mark at a specialized sock store (this is New York after all). They decide to sneak up on the men, but they end up getting more than they bargained for as they overhear Don telling Mark that he doesn’t think Beth’s new novel is good. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her, but he also feels the strain of letting her on with constant false encouragement. Don’s admittance puts in doubt everything else he’s said over the years, as well as Beth’s belief in her skills as an author. But it’s not like Beth is a total victim here, as the shoe is often on the other foot. She’s always saying how her son’s upcoming work will be great, and that cosmetic surgery is a good idea for Don. Holofcener could have taken the Green Book approach to her story, filling it with well-worn and clearly structured beats and ideas. But she’s smarter than that, as both she and we know this isn’t some problem that can ever really be solved. Most of us have to come to realize that a lot of our lives are comprised of filler words and feelings, with only a few times where we share our honest selves with others. And if that truth hurts, then sometimes it’s best to just keep the peace. Louis-Dreyfus and Menzies have great chemistry together. Their calmness with each other sells their long-standing marriage, as well as pushing past some of the overly simplified final few scenes. While clearly not alike in terms of style, You Hurt My Feelings reminded me of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster from 2016. Both movies take a stab at the long-standing battle between love and honesty without getting bogged down by solutions we’ve been fed all our lives. They also provide excellent counter-programming during the summer, acting as a refreshing cool down from the noise and explosions in the other rooms. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Freud's Last Session December 12, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen September 03, 1939 was an unlikely day that featured an unlikely meeting between two unlikely intellectual leaders. Dr. Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), famed psychoanalyst living out his sickly final days in London, is greeted at his door by C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode), Christian literary scholar and eventual author of the The Chronicles of Narnia . The topic at hand is the existence of God, with the Austrian a staunch denier and the Brit a firm believer. The weight of that subject is paralleled with the events of the day: Nazi Germany has just invaded Poland and the British government is declaring war. It only took twenty years for “the war to end all wars” to be usurped by an even bigger global conflict. Adapted from Mark St. Germain’s 2009 off-Broadway play of the same name, Freud’s Last Session opens up the action from within the confines of Freud’s study. Director Matthew Brown ( The Man Who Knew Infinity ) , who also co-wrote the screenplay with St. Germain, has these two titans interacting with average Londoners as the panic of Nazi bombings starts to set in. It’s in a cramped bomb shelter that inklings of Lewis’ PTSD from World War I start to bubble up to the surface. But rather than allow Goode and Hopkins to tell their own character’s backstories, Brown rashly splices in flashbacks to their youths. None of them match the energy of the central duo, nor do they communicate anything interesting, both narratively and visually. Take for instance the perfunctory scene where Freud as a child is scolded by his father to “never pray for him,” or a scene where Lewis as a child sees God through the beauty of nature. Never would I think historical figures such as these would have the same broad origin stories as superheroes. There’s also the inclusion of a subplot involving Frued’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), who would go on to become a highly respected child analyst in her own right. Sigmund’s inoperable jaw cancer causes him unbearable pain and bleeding from the mouth, which often causes him to lash out in anger. Despite the pleas of her partner Dorothy (Jodi Balfour), whom Sigmund disapproves of on the grounds of lesbianism being a symptom of a bad relationship with one’s father, Anna stays devout to her father. Fries is steadfast in her role, but she’s left on an island by Brown, only interacting with Hopkins and Goode briefly in the first act before being shunted off on a B-story. Hopkins and Goode make good (sorry, I couldn’t help myself with that pun) on the material, which is surprisingly more muted than one would expect a debate about God would be. Both of them are polite in their stances, obviously reverential of the work the other has done. The early stages take the form of a drawn out fencing match where one person takes a slight jab, analyzes the opponent’s reaction, and then retreats back. Hopkins (who played Lewis in the 1993 film Shadowlands ) is experiencing one of the highpoints of his career with roles in The Two Popes , HBO’s Westworld , The Father , and Armageddon Time . He’s exceptionally playful with his dialogue here, always prepped with an answer even when he knows he’s wrong. Goode never wavers in the face of confrontation, keeping his guard up through his charming wit and intelligence. The final, and fatal, blow to the movie comes in the postscript, which reveals that this meeting may never have happened. Its inclusion isn’t meant to be a plot twist as the play is very forward with this information and labels itself as a possible work of fiction. But in a film such as this that has lacked so much energy and memorability, it evokes the same feeling as a college professor that has given a tiring lecture and ends it by saying none of it will be on the test. It’s hard to care when you’re told you don’t have to. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Marlowe February 17, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen Marlowe is as cheap and dull as its title would suggest. Its titular character, created by Raymond Chandler in the 1920s at the height of the hardboiled detective literary craze, established many of the tropes found within the noir genre, such as seductively dangerous blondes, double entendre dialogue, and the thin line between what's is and isn't within the bounds of the law. The likes of Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum have stepped into the role, further planting this character in a different time and place than what modern audiences are used to. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that as a major sign as to what demographic this movie is aimed for, a 70-year-old Liam Neeson (in his 100th screen credit, many of which have come in this tiredly ongoing post- Taken phase of his career) stars as Marlowe. Never mind that the character is canonically in his mid-30s in almost all of his stories, including The Black-Eyed Blonde , which serves as the source material here. Neeson's Marlowe is too old for this shit, a line that is muttered almost verbatim a few times in a sort of winking fashion to the audience. It's not as unintentionally hilarious as when Marlowe's young employer proposes a little fooling around, which he declines by staring almost directly into the camera and saying, "I can't do that because you're half my age and we have a professional relationship." It's tiringly groan-worthy moments like these that make Neil Jordan's adaptation feel lost in time, as it has one foot planted in the creaky old charms of the past and the other in the present sensibilities. It might be why Jordan, speaking at the film's quiet world premiere at the San Sebastián Film Festival back in October, says his film is more of a science-fiction flick than anything else. But this is no Blade Runner , with Marlowe on a case of a missing man everyone claims to be dead, except for his lover, the beautiful Claire Cavendish, who reports having seen him walking about just a few days ago. As he digs for clues, Marlowe comes across a cavalcade of nefarious characters that want nothing less than to have someone poking around their business. Jessica Lange, clearly having the most fun in her thankless role, plays Claire's mother, a once-famous actress that may also be connected to this case. Danny Huston is the manager of the elite club where the missing person was supposedly killed, a detail that he is reluctant to share. And Alan Cumming is reaching far too down in the well of camp in his role of a sleazy nightclub owner, complete with a phony southern accent and even phonier tirades. Xavi Giménez's claustrophobic framing does as much as possible to hide the fact that Spain doubles for 1930s Los Angeles. Jordan employs some long takes to add a bit of professionalism, but the cheap sets and costumes make everything feel closer to an SNL parody than a true dive into the genre. There's also a clear lack of pacing by Jordan and co-writer William Monahan ( The Departed ), with events progressing in such a lethargic manner that any excitement has to be fully supplied by the audience, who don’t have a good chance at fighting their increasingly heavy eyelids. It's a great shame, but it seems that Neil Jordan is the newest member of the group of once-respected directors that just don't have "it" anymore. Fellow Irishman Jim Sheridan, Wim Wenders, and somewhat Werner Herzog have been steady patrons of the club, where the promise is still semi-there on paper, but the continually shoddy execution results in crushing disappointment. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

MSPIFF43 - Dispatch #1 April 22, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen The 43rd Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival (MSPIFF) is currently going on from April 11-25, with over 200 films screened. Here are some quick-bite reviews of a few of the films I have watched, with more to come soon. Green Border Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border is nothing short of ambitious, as it sees the revered Polish writer/director putting her native government through the wringer in the hopes of shining a light on the atrocities taking place on its eastern border. Split into several chapters, the majority of the film’s focus is on a Syrian migrant family as they start their journey to Sweden to start a new life with one of their distant relatives. Like thousands of other families, they are lured into Belarus under the government’s false advertisement of safe travel into the European Union. They are then harassed and extorted by border guards until being forcibly flung into Poland as part of a geopolitical war to destabilize the EU. Any hope of sympathy from the Polish forces quickly vanishes; replaced with more xenophobia, abuse, and forcible deportation back to Belarus. Holland captures the brutality of this inhumane game of tug-and-war in stark black-and-white, the endless forest along the border being perpetually shrouded in darkness. There’s always a “one step forward, two steps back” attitude towards the plight of the family, with Holland never crossing over the line of torturing her characters for the sake of a message. The themes of inhumanity extend further into the other chapters, which eventually becomes a bit of a Pulp Fiction -esque story of intersecting storylines. One of those storylines features a young group of Polish activists who circumvent the law to aid the battered migrants, although their work never seems to be more than putting a metaphorical band-aid on a gunshot wound. Although the feeling of hope rarely shines through in Holland’s material, a bit of it can be felt based on the anger it incites. It’s no surprise that for all the prizes (including the Special Jury Prize in Venice) and acclaim the film has received from Western audiences, it was heavily condemned and censored by the Polish government. Even if the film has been prevented from having its full impact at home, it at least still carries quite the universal punch abroad. (3.5/5) Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell You need to have serious guts (and a really trustworthy producer) to have your debut feature film run over three hours and feature little to none of the usual trappings audiences expect to keep them occupied in their seats. Vietnamese writer/director Phan Thien An has created a film of extraordinary uniqueness, aligning closely with the extreme slow cinema works of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Béla Tarr. The plot is simple: A man’s sister-in-law dies in a motorcycle accident and he must escort his young nephew across the country to his estranged father. But the literal plot is something that An is least concerned with, instead focusing much of his attention on the spiritual ambiguity underlining every moment of our lives. Every scene is comprised of a single take, all of them extraordinary feats of production on account of their length and complexity. Time is often at a standstill, with no one ever seeming to be in a rush or wanting to have a direct conversation. Your attitude towards this style will be determined quickly, most likely in your ability to stay awake. But even those who drift off from time to time will have their dreams permeated by images from the film. It’s part of the experience, a little piece of the film that sticks with you, something the large majority of other works fail to do. Pham received the Camera d’Or prize for best first feature film at the Cannes Film Festival last year, where he premiered as part of the Directors’ Fortnight section. I have no doubt that it will be the first of many prizes he will receive at that festival, as their relationship seems to be a match made in heaven. (4/5) Shoshana Michael Winterbottom’s story of British Mandatory Palestine (specifically Tel Aviv) circa the 1930/1940s never knows exactly what side it wants to be on. It’s a film that wants to examine the British/Arab/Jewish conflict from all angles but always feels too scared to probe a little deeper for fear of angering viewers, which becomes most noticeable when the postscript reveals sentiments that the events of the film hardly supported. Winterbottom has usually been a filmmaker who plays fast and loose (see 24 Hour Party People and Wonderland ). Here he trades that all away for a polished procedural style, complete with bland archival footage and a tacky score by the usually reliable David Holmes. At the heart of this conflict are the star-crossed lovers of British police officer Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth) and Zionist Shoshana (Irina Starshenbaum). They try to stay neutral with their feelings, but the increasing violence and tension ultimately force them to choose a side. Both of the leads are quite capable in their roles, it’s just that they end up being swallowed by the uninteresting forces around them. (2.5/5) Janet Planet Playwright Annie Baker’s feature directorial debut is a work of quiet observation, both literally and metaphorically. The nature of rural Massachusetts is the film’s soundtrack: crickets, swaying trees, and the distant verve of a car passing by on the dirt road. Inside one of the secluded houses live Janet (Julianne Nicholson) and her 11-year-old daughter Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). Throughout the summer of 1991, three people enter their lives: the reserved Wayne, former friend Regina, and pseudo-intellectual Avi. Baker captures the textures of an endless summer with ease, using a certain kind of slow cinema that’s mostly been found in cinema outside the Western hemisphere. While the argument behind the need for the theatrical experience has mostly been reserved for huge tentpoles filled with bombastic sound and visuals, Janet Planet makes just as much of a case to be seen in a dark room while barely registering over a whisper. The quiet rhythms and cinematography will surely not play as well at home, or in any multiplex with sound bleed. It’s one of those films I wished I could see alone in a screening room, just letting the vibes wash over me. Zeigler is tremendous in her first-ever performance. She and Nicholson share great chemistry, always at the heart of the film even as sometimes spins its wheels. Baker’s film could be the little indie sensation of the summer if A24 gives it the proper push it deserves. (3.5/5) More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Murder Mystery 2 March 31, 2023 By: Button Hunter Friesen When I’m watching a new movie, I always bring a small notebook and jot down observations and things I want to mention in my final written review. Usually, I fill up about a page or two with bullet points, most of them almost illegible due to me having to write them in the dark while still trying to look at the screen so as not to miss anything potentially important. But for Murder Mystery 2 , now available on Netflix, I wrote only two lines: “Happy Madison logo usually signals a movie being cheap and artificial” and “bad jet ski greenscreen.” Both of those observations were made within the first five minutes, and neither of them required much critical thinking on my part. For the next eighty minutes, I just sat in my chair and watched the movie with as much attentiveness as a student during the last class before Spring Break. There were definitely things that happened in the movie: people got killed, Sandler and Aniston did their usual married couple banter, and the mystery was resolved through some sort of twist ending. But for the life of me, I can’t recount anything else more specific than that. I was neither fully entertained nor bored, neither liking nor hating what I was watching and probably was somewhere between asleep and awake during long stretches. That’s the Netflix national anthem at this point, with 90% of their content just being the air that fills the room, with the other 10% that is worth your time ( The Irishman , The Meyerowitz Stories, Private Life ) being suffocated into relative obscurity. This is also why, in an act of full transparency, the information provided in the screener email is doing most of the heavy lifting in this next paragraph that summarizes the setup for the main plot. Nick and Audrey Spitz are now full-time detectives after solving the case in the first movie (I’ll give $100 to anyone that can remember how that movie ended). They’re about as competent as you would think, which is why they gleefully accept an invitation from The Maharajah (also from the first movie) to his wedding on a luxurious island. But the circumstances that seem too good to be true turn out to be exactly that, as the couple finds themselves framed for murder. They must now clear their name once again and unveil the real killer (or killers). I feel like I’m not properly doing my job as a critic by keeping this review so brief, but there’s really not much else to say. If you’re the type of person who wants to watch something like this, then you’re not likely to be stopped by a bad review. And if you’re someone who isn’t immediately clamoring to see this, then there won’t be any good reviews to convince you otherwise. It doesn’t matter which bucket you fall into, as no one is going to be thinking about (let alone talking about) this movie by Monday. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Legend of Ochi April 21, 2025 By: Button Hunter Friesen The Legend of Ochi screened at the 2025 Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters on April 25th. Before the (digital) film reel started spooling to unveil the story of The Legend of Ochi , first-time feature writer/director Isaiah Saxon gave a brief introduction via a video message set in what could only be assumed as one of the Romanian filming locations. Speaking in a comedically hushed tone, the filmmaker stated that he made this film for children and that their intelligence rarely gets the respect it deserves from Hollywood. Maybe it was just because I had seen A Minecraft Movie a week prior and had my brain fried from the TikTok toilet humor, or that the fact that the largely adult-oriented distributor A24 is finally breaking into the realm of children’s entertainment, but Saxon’s words really resonated with me. Here is a film for children that is explicitly meant to be engaged with on both an emotional and intellectual level, and not just be a vessel for memes and merchandise. Of course, I say all this and can immediately see that A24 has littered their online shop with Ochi swag and ironically posted about it everywhere on social media. I guess we can’t always get everything that we want… Unfortunately, it’s way more interesting to think and discuss what The Legend of Ochi represents than it is to talk about what happens between minute one and minute ninety-six. For as much as Saxon finds himself clearly inspired by the darker children’s films of yesteryear like The NeverEnding Story , Labyrinth , and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial , there’s never a moment where the weight of comparison doesn’t fully crush this lush tale. Take for instance the premise of the young girl Yuri (Helena Zengel) growing up in a remote village in the Carpathian mountains. She has a strained relationship with her father Maxim (Willem Dafoe) and has been told her whole life that the local wildlife that goes by the name of the Ochi only live to feed on the flesh of the living. All day and night Maxim marches up the mountains rabble-rousing and training the local youth to hunt down these creatures. Being that she has a general distrust towards her dad, Yuri doesn’t buy into the jingoistic fervor. And it also only takes one non-gun-related meeting with these creatures to convince her that they aren’t as dangerous as she’s been told. One of the babies got caught in a trap and has been separated from its family, a feeling that Yuri figuratively feels every day. That connection spurs them on a quest of reunification and self-discovery. In this momentary void between the television hiatus of The Mandalorian and its 2026 film continuation, the titular baby Ochi has kicked Baby Yoda / Grogu off its perch at the top of the animatronic cuteness pedestal. Fully operated by hand, this monkey-ish puppet features solid black eyes, sharp teeth and claws, and a lovely bright orange coat of fur. When seen from a distance in the dead of night, one could almost forgive Maxim for duping himself into thinking these creatures are evil. But just as it does for any living creature, the sun illuminates our best features. There’s a loveliness to seeing the Ochi move with a little bit of jerkiness, as sanding off the artificiality with visual effects would have made it seem even more fake. Saxon surrounds his humans and puppets in a world of matte paintings and sets possibly borrowed from Midsommar . He’s already been forced to stave off unfounded claims of AI usage, and I fear he’ll be forced to continue that defense as more eyes are placed upon the film. I’ll admit, the imagery within the film does have a striking resemblance to those demo reels that float around social media preaching that technology has unlocked a new age of filmmaking. Along with the fact that it was filmed in 2021 before any of this AI nonsense was a serious threat, Saxon’s argument stems from the love and sweat put into his craft, which is always visible on the screen. But that love Saxon has for his work is never felt by us, with everything feeling more like an aesthetic than a fully realized world. The emotional coldness doesn’t help to bridge that gap either, David Longstreth’s score doing all of the communicating. Because of this, I fear that Saxon’s intended adolescent audience is unlikely to discover and commit to the task that this film lays before them. It’s foolish and unfair for one film to be beset with the expectation that it’ll reinvigorate a largely stagnant subgenre, although the words from the creatives and marketers certainly have set themselves up for that. Saxon has certainly earned another go-around, so perhaps that will contain the spark that sets all of this ablaze. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Beekeeper January 10, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen ! Widget Didn’t Load Check your internet and refresh this page. If that doesn’t work, contact us. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver April 19, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen It’s ironic, but not unexpected, that the conclusion of Zack Snyder’s mega-budget blockbuster duology, the project that was supposed to bring every other studio’s franchises to its knees, has been treated by Netflix the same way it would churn out any piece of cinematic slop to its subscribers. The big game commercial spots have been replaced with tacky social media ads, the lavish red carpet premieres with unpublished fan screenings, the boastful (a better word would be “delusional”) interviews with boilerplate salesmanship, and the touting about the future of movie distribution being changed forever have altogether ceased. What was once planned to be an event film has been reduced to a footnote in the endless scroll along with nearly everything else the streamer gets its greedy hands on. That ho-hum attitude toward the release couldn’t be more opposite from the film itself, which is able to find its feet and deliver the grandiose chaos that fans have been longing for after Part 1: A Child of Fire sacrificed itself to (poorly) lay the foundation of this universe. But Snyder and his two co-writers, Shay Hatten and Kurt Johnstad, can’t trust their audiences to remember anything from what they watched just four months ago, so we’re forced to listen to Anthony Hopkins give a “previously on…” recap as the opening shot descends on the dreadnaught mothership of the Imperium. On that ship is Atticus Noble (Ed Skrein), who’s more-or-less been Frankensteined back to life after meeting his demise at the hands of Kora (Sofia Boutella) in the last movie. I know what you’re thinking. Did they at least use his resurrection as an opportunity to fix his haircut? I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but it’s still as terrible as ever. The seven samurai of the outer worlds have been assembled, and now it’s time to prepare to defend the village against everything the Imperium will throw at them. Despite being ten minutes shorter than its predecessor, The Scargiver gets much more time to breathe thanks to the incessant hopping to nondescript worlds no longer being needed. Everything takes place in the village, save for the ungodly long dinner table scene where each character goes around giving a redundantly extended flashback to their origin. I know my curiosity will get the better of me and I’ll indulge in the future Snyder Cuts of these two features, but the thought of that scene being stretched even more does send a shiver down my spine. After that and an extended trip to FarmVille, the carnage can ensue. It might be a sacrilegious act to even compare the two, but there’s no escaping the feeling that the final hour and change of this film is Snyder’s attempt at his own Battle of Helm’s Deep from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers . Waves of faceless soldiers descend upon the village, ready to be mowed down by the plucky farmers. Snyder’s usual slow motion is on full display here, with some epic moments being bound to line the racks of every screensaver website, while others flounder under the weight of the pretentiousness. And it’s still worth pointing out that Snyder once again serves as his own cinematographer, employing that ultra-shallow focus that we’ve all come to hate. Even with all those (very valid) complaints, none of this is as exhaustively mediocre as it was in A Child of Fire . Maybe it’s because of my reduced expectations or inability to fully care about what Snyder is dishing out, but there’s a lot of mindless enjoyment to be had. The explosions are forceful, the action is more competently filmed, and the objectives are clear. I dare say that I would have semi-welcomed experiencing this in the theater. The loudspeakers would have greatly helped in appreciating Junkie XL’s bombastic score, borrowing liberally from his work from Zack Snyder’s Justice League (not that I’m complaining). It’s easier to have fun with The Scargiver now that you’re not being bombarded with the tenacity of a used car salesman. I’m sure that’s not exactly the approach Netflix and Snyder had when they poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this wannabe franchise, which has four more entries planned. But that’s the reality of the situation, so it’s best we keep Snyder out of the headlines and just let the movie do the talking (or yelling for that matter). More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

I, Tonya March 7, 2018 By: Button Hunter Friesen Margot Robbie has had a pretty big climb to fame in the past few years. She kicked off her Hollywood career in 2013 with The Wolf of Wall Street , then made a splashy cameo in Adam McKay’s 2015 hit The Big Short . She then achieved A-list status in 2016 with Suicide Squad and The Legend of Tarzan . Now in 2017, she’s hitting the awards circuit with I, Tonya , in which she plays the infamous figure skater Tonya Harding. Her performance is the highlight of the film, which is a semi-autobiographical story about one of America’s most beloved and most hated athletes. The film opens with interviews from Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie), her ex-husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), and her mother LaVona Golden (Allison Janney). The interviews are taking place about a decade after the “incident” and are intended as a way for each of the characters to tell their version of what happened. In between the interviews we are treated to the story of how Tonya grew up as a redneck figure skater in Oregon. We witness her rough upbringing at the hands of her mother and how it affected her skating. After that, we see her meteoric rise to superstardom, all of which is constantly in jeopardy because of her rocky relationship with her simpleton of a husband, Jeff. And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for, the Nancy Kerrigan incident. We watch it go down, the due process immediately after, and how Tonya got caught up in a mess of stupidity. What I can say is that this film doesn’t do anything wrong, it just does everything adequately or well. The handling of the story through interviews and flashbacks does well at establishing the chaos and insanity since each character gives conflicting reports as to what actually happened. The film also uses the fourth wall to have Tonya interact with the audience and extend the autobiographical nature of the story. However, the interviews lose steam about halfway through and are left dormant until the very end. It felt weird since they were heavily used in the beginning and are made to seem like the central medium for telling the story. Director Craig Gillespie uses stylish editing and camera tricks to keep the story flowing at a quick and breezy pace. Some scenes are oversaturated with them, but overall the tricks serve their purpose well. The behind-the-scenes work does a nice job of establishing a feel for the 80s and 90s. The hairstyles and fashion are timely and will make anyone who lived in that period feel nostalgic. Last and most importantly, the performances carry this film all the way to the very end. Margot Robbie is astonishing as Tonya. She has the perfect mix of looks, personality, and skill to pull off the role. She plays Harding perfectly at every point in her career, especially at the lowest. Allison Janney is also great as Tonya’s cold and unloving mother, LaVona. Janney goes full-out in makeup and chain-smoking, giving an authentic portrayal of a mother that will never be satisfied with her children. Sebastian Stan gives a good, but not great performance as Jeff. He does his best to make Jeff his own, but unfortunately gets overshadowed by Robbie and Janney. On a positive note, Stan shows off a wide range of emotions as Jeff slowly turns from a dumb nice guy to a violent madman. I, Tonya delivers an entertaining and original way to tell a story that is well-known by almost everybody alive. While it’s a good film caught in a time of great films, Robbie and Janney give career-defining performances that make this film deserving of your time. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

Alien: Romulus August 14, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen With each passing year, the meeting scene from The Matrix Resurrections gets more and more prescient. Focus group research, marketing trends, brand imaging, and keyword association are the tools of the trade nowadays, especially when you’re working with a franchise as long in the tooth as Alien . It’s not hard to imagine what was yuppied around the 20th Century corporate office when devising the concept for Romulus , which essentially serves as a grab bag of all the recognizable (and liked) aspects of the previous movies. It had to have a Xenomorph skulking around the pitch-black corridors of a steel trap spaceship. It had to have a face hugger, which would eventually lead to someone’s chest bursting open. While people weren’t generally fans of Prometheus or Alien: Covenant , they did enjoy Michael Fassbender’s portrayal of a calculating android companion, so that also has to be an element. There also needs to be a woman in a tank top running around with a gun, and a bunch of crew members that become more expendable as the movie goes on. However enthusiastically co-writer/director Fede Álvarez goes about ticking off all these boxes on his studio-mandated to-do list, there is always the feeling that he’s bowling with the bumpers on. It’s hard to truly appreciate a strike (or, in this case, a modest spare) when the risk of rolling a gutter ball was never there to begin with. But after quite a few missteps in the nearly forty years since the original Alien and Aliens , the thought of “playing it safe” should come as no surprise. There are also no surprises in the methodology Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues employ to move our central characters into the claustrophobic spaceship housing the most terrifying life form in the universe. Five young individuals have been born and raised in a mining colony, none of them ever laying eyes on the sun. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android brother Andy (David Jonsson) have been continually denied permission to leave the planet on account of corporate greed and malfeasance. When a deserted station is found floating right above their heads by some of her fellow poverty-stricken friends, Rain reluctantly sees it as the escape opportunity she’s always been denied. From there, we discover that this station was not abandoned willingly, but taken over by force by an unknown killing machine. Production designer Naaman Marshall does an excellent job of recreating the cold interior through practical means, complete with enough tech to identify the extraterrestrial foe, but never enough to put it down for good. The leisure pacing of the initial half instantly ramps up once blood and guts start spilling, with Álvarez leaning on his visceral skills from his 2013 Evil Dead remake to make you squirm in your seat. Bones crunch loudly as limbs become unattached, and creaks and groans occupy every corner of the ship as the aliens lurk around waiting for the perfect moment to strike. The thought of this original being planned for a Hulu release is almost as sickening, as no home could compare to the sensory-deprived fear you get from the cinema. For both good and bad reasons, “for the fans” would be the correct way to define the energy that Álvarez instills within every moment. Homages, callbacks, and blatant winks occupy much of the foreground and background, creating an unavoidable stench of desperation as the studio hopes your Pavlovian responses kick in at the sight of franchise favorites. A certain famous phrase is reintroduced for climactic effect, although the context of the moment instills more groans than cheers. The young cast hold their own against the decades-old trapping they’re up against. Spaeny has become one of the most dependable young actresses working today, with her work in Civil War marking quite the impressive double bill this year. While androids don’t figuratively possess a soul, Jonsson brilliantly finds the compassion necessary for Andy. He is, without a doubt, the highlight of the film, fully living up to the robotic work that Ian Holm and Michael Fassbender previously did within the franchise. Romulus doesn’t have the benefit of being ambitious, which is why it can count itself lucky for executing well on its surface-level objectives. Ridley Scott’s last two ventures into this universe may have been better for its overall health, but this provides the much-needed steroid for it to continue at all. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen

The Book of Clarence January 8, 2024 By: Button Hunter Friesen Writer/director Jeymes Samuel is more interested in making The Book of Clarence into a good time than a good film, which makes it just good enough to be a good use of your time and money (this sentence was brought to you by the word “good”). The British multi-hyphenate’s sophomore feature contains much of the same DNA as his Netflix-backed debut, The Harder They Fall , featuring an all-black cast in a genre that has largely ignored that demographic. This time the setting has shifted from the American West to Jerusalem circa AD33. Things open with a drag race on sandy streets, a chariot race to be exact. The titular character (LaKeith Stanfield) and his friend Elijah (RJ Cyler) have wagered a lot of money and horses against Mary Magdalene (Teyana Taylor). We’re only two minutes in and Samuel has made two references to Ben-Hur , the first being the Roman font title credits and sweeping music. But these references aren’t just plucked for their 1:1 value, they’re used to produce a remix of a classic tale that has repeatedly been told in a similar fashion for nearly a century. The camera whips and zooms around during the race, sometimes opting for POV shots as the local Gypsies sabotage the event by throwing rocks and spears. The race is lost, which puts Clarence and Elijah in a pay-up-or-be-crucified situation with Jedidiah (Eric Kofi-Abrefa), who lent them the funds to wager. Clarence is a lot like Howard Ratner from Uncut Gems : someone who thinks of himself as smarter than those chasing him, yet he always seems destined to be caught. It doesn’t help that he has a more upstanding twin brother named Thomas (also Stanfield) who has recently become one of the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. To Clarence, the allure of religion isn’t the purity of faith or promise of something larger than yourself, it’s the status it grants you. People flock to Jesus and his apostles like their movie stars, requesting miracles and attention. To pay off his debt, Clarence decides to recreate Jesus’ “tricks,” such as healing the blind, raising the dead, and preaching the gospel. He becomes the first “religion for profit” pastor, beating Kenneth Copeland at his own game two thousand years earlier. While taking shots at uber-wealthy people of faith, Samuel also instills a dash of rogue politicians, with Clarence making “Knowledge is stronger than belief!” his campaign slogan. But it’s not just Clarence that deserves scorn, it’s the people who eat up his words and acts despite them being obviously hollow. A little more time spent on this aspect would have been appreciated, as well as the mixture of comedy and drama. This is a case of style over substance, and the MCU disease where every dramatic situation needs to be undercut by a whacky joke. In the case of Samuel, the style is just as much the substance as the actual substance. He pulls out every trick in his directorial arsenal to make this the “wickedly dope time” he wants you to have. Split screens, a bevy of iris shots, augmented colors, and a Jay-Z soundtrack keep things flowing at a decent pace throughout the nearly 140-minute runtime. There’s also the enormously entertaining cast featuring so many people who would have never been given a chance to star in a film like this despite the cultural makeup of that time and place. Cyler, David Oyelowo, and Omar Sy supply the laughs, with cameos by Alfre Woodard and Benedict Cumberbatch being the film’s most laugh-out-loud moments. With January primarily being a time when studios dump their slop and serious awards titles slowly expand in hopes of Oscar gold, it’s nice to see a film like The Book of Clarence offer a decent alternative. Its messiness is more of a feature than a bug, and there’s more than enough on its mind and on the screen to keep it from falling victim to the cinematic hell that is this month. More Reviews Wicked: For Good November 19, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Rental Family September 7, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Jay Kelly November 20, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Train Dreams November 21, 2025 By: Hunter Friesen Hunter Friesen