​Dear friends, hello. I have some startling news.

The shape of it feels so fragile in my mind, I’d as soon whisper these words into a piece of paper, burn it, and let the ashes drift from my upturned palm into the slate winter sky. But as I strike each key in an attempt to make this fledgling hope something real, I’m ready to swallow hard, square myself, and speak my truth: Game Night is good.

Like, good good. Not better than it needs to be, not just a catch-it-on-HBO-someday—it’s actually good and funny. And charming! And even a bit thrilling. With a great cast to lift a tight, well-conceived script, this picture traverses the gap from February cinema graveyard to sleeper gold. It isn’t something poetic or profound, but Game Night is a hearty, self-actualized, and easy to like studio comedy. 

So many comedies now opt for a rambling style as popularized by the Apatowites. Actors will have a framework for a scene. Directors will flip on the camera. Then everyone riffs and bebops until they stumble into some passable jokes. Game Night is a welcome antidote with a well-constructed script at its core. Riddled with sharp jokes, adroit physical comedy, and plenty of trap doors, it’s the tightest straight ahead comedy in recent memory.

Where the writing is solid, the superb lineup is allowed to play to what they do best. You’ll see a lot of familiar faces playing to type: Jason Bateman as beleaguered guy, Billy Magnussen as beautiful dumdum, Sharon Hogan as the caustic wit, and Jesse “Da Gawd” Plemmons out there just Plemmin’. But instead of having to do all the heavy lifting with these personas, the characters are firmly grounded in a self-assured narrative. The funny feels easy.

Where this seems like the space for an obligatory plot explainer, each point revealed would leach an equal amount of joy out of the film. Though the overall premise is pretty familiar, nice idiots unknowingly in over their heads. I’ll leave it at that, but for those of you with a dedicated crew of hardcore Settlers, Game Night will serve as a gentle reminder to reset the boundaries of your competitiveness and credulity alike. 

With all of the above in mind, the best part of the movie? It’s funny. It made me laugh. There was even a guffaw or two. Nasty without being cruel, dark without being bleak, provocative without bullying, buttons are pushed and lines are crossed—but never into a despicable space. Decent people are poached in the squid ink broth as opposed to the darkness coming from within. There’s some overly sweet notes, but it’s a movie about a bunch of thirty-something couples having a game night. As I’m describing my actual life, I can confirm: that shit is corny sometimes. With a core cast of six actors plus a handful of tasteful cameos, that’s lots of jokes, and they dutifully keep the film’s engine fired. 

Among some of the more unexpected surprises in this surprise laden picture, it’s visually coherent. There is a style and aesthetic and couple of meaty set pieces. Also, one of our talented directors is none other than John Francis Daley (Google him, you’ll recognize that mug)! Another bonus, each of the main three couples is given a dynamic to sort out. A pretty scant expectation, but to give multiple characters a pronounced interpersonal thread and offer some reasonable satisfaction? Nobody was gonna be mad if they didn’t do that, but damned if the effort wasn’t there. 

And that’s the story of Game Night; small, concerted efforts. Little stitches to make it tighter, make it smarter, make it twistier, and, one by one, they yield a satisfying comedy with teeth and brains. We’ll see if this scrappy comedy can land a box office haymaker and pave the way for more of its kind. Though, for now, the joy is in watching the film, which is smart, funny, quality work with a great cast and a great script. And if that last sentence reads like the boilerplate checklist of what should go into any film, maybe buy a ticket for Game Night, because it feels a lot more like a joyful aberration than what has become the accepted norm.  

—Monte Monreal

I’m not sure how William Goldman get’s to officially claim this quote, but if there is one notion at the crux of Alex Garland’s Annihilation it would be this old chestnut, “Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.” 

The idea permeates our troubled film from internal narrative crisis all the way to the bizarre–potentially watershed—drama of Annihilation’s distribution. This identity crisis, the not knowing, works against Alex Garland’s newest, and all sympathies to my dude. Is Annihilation bad? Eh, it’s like a "Yes, but..." or "No, if…" thing—though this I can confirm: it’s a hot goddamn mess. That’s not entirely a negative, but to get there, first we have to talk about Stalker.

Annihilation’s similarities to Stalker are, you know, it’s a thing. Sure, for some of the immediate reasons—both are loose adaptations, both feature a mysterious zone triggered by an extraterrestrial event, both center around a journey into said zone and its effect on the passengers—but this is something more: a feeling, a tone, an atmosphere of deliberate disorientation. I recognize it’s unfair to outright compare the two. Stalker is not the paragon of originality. Garland poured soul and creativity in this project. But there isn’t enough distance between the two to avoid the conversation. Furthermore, what makes the comparison so jarring is Tarkovsky hacks his way through those tricky elements and emerges with a masterpiece. Garland’s Annihilation, well, it’s a dog’s breakfast. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a Blade Runner type sitch, but more on that later.

One thing is clear, Alex Garland is ambitious. Riding the wave from his stellar debut Ex Machina, Garland was rightly given the helm to a massive project with lofty expectations. But part of Ex Machina’s success, it’s a claustrophobic, dread soaked film with three characters. Annihilation is scaled up to a large cast with an entire world to build. There are few questions as to whether Garland possess the skill to handle a production of any size, but this movie is undermined by so much minutiae. I didn’t like the visual tone (can we please, please kill off the lens flare), I thought Area X looked built not grown, there is no meat on the bone for our actors, and perhaps the biggest disappointment, they story is shambolic.   

At best, I could talk myself into Annihilation as a meditation on not knowing–those words again—but uncertainty is a volatile element with which to tussle. I’m very much on board with no finite answers, but it never felt like this film knew what questions it was raising. That’s like god-level discombobulation, and if that was truly the thrust, why bother? Why spell out realizations about Area X? Why the very deliberate climactic sequence? Why the breadcrumb trail of videos peppered throughout the film? Why?

Unfortunately, within what story we are offered, the answers to the above questions mills out to something kinda, er...kinda dumb. Instead, if this is all meant to worship at the feet of enormous ambiguity, let’s go there. Fumigate me with existential dread. Pillory me with intrigue. Inoculate me from any and all understanding. But don’t tip your cards with an empty hand, and if you insist, at least play it with some clear-eyed bravura.

There is enough grace and intelligence here to save Annihilation from Interstellar-level fatuity, but I can’t help but wonder if Paramount Studios just did my guy dirty. Garland already proved what he can accomplish when left to his vision, but movies have an enormous surface area. When the money lenders at the top lose faith, the shit truly rolls downhill. Off screen battles are generally pretty boring, but the power struggle here signals something much more severe. 

Paramount so wholly doubted Annihilation, they sold the international distribution rights. That is not only unheard of, it’s utterly mind bending, and portends terrible things. This movie will only be released in theaters in America and China (not even Garland’s UK home) and everyone else will get it via Netflix. That’s really bad. Bad for Garland, bad for filmgoers, bad for already gun shy studios, and bad for auteurs; the William Goldman dictum mutated to hideous new proportions.

So did some of the offscreen chicanery seep into the film? Maybe. The word seems to be Garland got his final cut, but I can’t help but wonder if once the fighting began, things both micro and macro just begin to unravel. There is an interesting film peeking out in places, so maybe, if we’re lucky, this is like a Blade Runner type sitch. There are seven different versions of Blade Runner. The original U.S. theatrical release is my least favorite, and it’s largely due to studio intervention. Some 20 years later, Ridley Scott released Blade Runner: The Final Cut, and for my money, it’s the superior version. Will we someday get a 19 hour, frenzied work print of Annihilation that is pure bliss? We can only hope so, but who knows?

The studio doesn’t know. The characters meandering through Area X certainly don’t know. Audiences around the world may never get the chance to know. And me, I don’t know a damn thing. Because nobody knows anything, not really. Where that can work to our surprise, in this case, it’s the not knowing that sinks Annihilation.  ​

​—Monte Monreal

As we kick off the holiday season in one of the most explosive years in modern American politics, it seems like the perfect time for good progressives to gather together and be uplifted by a story about a passionate crusader for civil justice. But if you walk into Roman J. Israel, Esq. expecting the Battle Hymn of The Resistance, you might come out disappointed.
 
The film touches on inequality in the justice system and some other topical themes, but it veers away from those discussions without really exploring them in much depth. Instead, we follow the title character as he stumbles and mumbles through three weeks of internal conflict, acting as both plaintiff and defendant in his own personal trial of the century. The film is more enjoyable if you look at it as a character study rather than a structured narrative, and Denzel Washington’s strong performance saves a film that might otherwise might be pretty tough to get through.
 
Washington plays Roman, a rumpled legal savant whose noble ideals and bold fashion choices are rooted in a bygone era. He’s worked behind the scenes at the same tiny defense firm for four decades, but abruptly must strike out on his own after the lead attorney suffers a heart attack, leaving him jobless. Thus begins a meandering odyssey in which Roman improbably finds himself fending off job offers from a high-powered defense attorney (Colin Farrell) and kindling a tepid friendship with a kindhearted community organizer (Carmen Ejogo). His ensuing journey dances around the question of whether an old-school approach to grassroots activism can still hack it in a time when civil rights have been derisively rebranded as “identity politics.”
 
Roman is idealistic, principled and persistent, at least on his best days, but his crippling awkwardness all but obscures these strengths. This is where Washington’s talent as a physical actor really shines through: Roman walks with a clumsy gait that progresses into an even clumsier run, and the combined effect of his bad posture and nervous tics make him look uncomfortable and out of place pretty much wherever he goes.
 
It’s not long before Roman is tempted by the allure of the corner office, and despite believing that he’s in it for all the right reasons, he struggles to resist the flirtations of wealth and power and criminal intrigue.
 
“I’m tired of doing the impossible for the ungrateful,” he says, defensively revealing a core frustration of being a committed advocate: putting in an immense amount of thankless work, often with little in the way of tangible payoff.
 
It’s not a bad message, but it gets muddled by an uneven tone. Is this a legal drama about an underdog who crusades against injustice, breaks all the rules, and wins cases that ought to be sure losers? A dark comedy about a bumbling but endearing do-gooder and his quest to find love? A crime thriller about a regular guy who somehow gets mixed up in the criminal underworld? The film somewhat erratically skips around between each of these storylines, never really committing to one coherent thread.
 
In one sense it’s good that the film defies categorization—for long stretches we get to see Roman just being himself, for better or worse, without knowing where the story will take him. However, the uneven tone does make it harder to swallow some pretty lazy plot shortcuts.
 
This meandering approach worked much better in writer/director Dan Gilroy’s terrific 2014 thriller Nightcrawler, which also happens to focus on a character who just kind of floats through life, taking advantage of whatever opportunities happen to fall into his lap. But while Jake Gyllenhaal’s antihero in that film is essentially an unhinged bottom-feeder, Roman acknowledges his moral quandaries and does his best to navigate a justice system that isn’t built for noble causes.
 
But at the end of the day, neither Roman J. Israel, Esq. nor its title character really know what they want to be.
 
— Rob Heidrick

Surrounded by such easily accessible excesses in our lives, it can be tough to know when to tap out—when to say “enough.” “Maybe it was a bad idea to marathon Stranger Things until 3 a.m.” “Perhaps spending my morning reading plot synopses for every film in the Saw series out of morbid curiosity wasn’t the best use of time.” “Why’d I have that third taco?” Etc.

When you’re drinking from the firehose, you end up feeling hosed—and can find your thirst replaced with a sense of drowning.
​
That’s where I’ve found myself with superhero movies. Like others who grew up squandering their allowances on Toy Biz X-Men figures and Kenner Batman toys, when Iron Man came and rocket-blasted my adult-sized Superman socks off, I was thrilled with the prospect of a decades-long run of shared comic-book universe films following the colorfully costumed do-gooders of my youth. But then I realized for every Iron Man, there must be an Iron Man 2; for every Guardians of the Galaxy, I’d have to power my way through an Age of Ultron.

The biannual conveyor belt never stops, and after a years-long force-fed binge of superhero schlock, I had become numb to any sense of joy I once derived from seeing the heroes of my childhood comics and cards come to life on the big screen by the time the third Iron Man landed around in 2013.

Enter stage right, Thor: Ragnarok.

I wasn’t. No. I have become wary even of critical acclaim after too many just-OK films got labeled must-sees. “Dude... Logan,” you may have heard. “It’s actually good. Like, it might get a Best Picture nomination—and it should!” (It won’t, and it shouldn’t.) “Captain America: Civil War has a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes,” you may have read. (What? No. Why?) Heck, even the The Dark Knight, the would-be Citizen Kane of comic-book movies, only seems like such a beaut' because it’s surrounded by its plain-looking entourage of superhero film friends.

“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”

“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”

“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”

“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?

“Yep…”

“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”

“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”

​“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”

“Oh yeah. That was good.”

“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”

“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”

“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”

“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”

​“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

​“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …

“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”

“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”

“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”

“It doesn’t hold up well.”

“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”

“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”

“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”

“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”

“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”

“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”

“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”

“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”

“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”

“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”

“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”

“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”

“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
​
“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”

There is a seductive quality to being a teenage superhero. An age when you are aware of injustice, yet can do little to stop it; capable of great optimism but familiar with despair—adolescence has become an enduring trope for good reason. As a mutant pubescent do-gooder, you’re in parts unbound from one, but much more susceptible to the other. Though one essential notion of being a teenager superhero remains the same, an ethos Spider-Man: Homecoming embraces, it could be so much fun.
 
Where I’m no arbiter of such things, is this the Spider-Man we’ve always wanted? It’s a gale of fresh air by any summer movie standard, not just the unwieldy design of superhero pictures. Refusing to take itself seriously in a way Deadpool never grasped, Homecoming is a joyful mixture of gold standard hero creation and genre antidote. And that's the word: joy. An unbridled joy, equally endearing and relentless.
 
The other immediate quality of Homecoming, it uses its brain. Jon Watts and company find a clever way to nudge every expected element of Spider-Man. With each subtle shift in perspective, fresh blood trickles through the reboot weary franchise. From the opening sequence, a series of Peter Parker’s frenetic smartphone videos, the film establishes itself as something rambunctious. No origin story, bougie Aunt Mae (Marissa Tomei), a riff on Spidey’s city dependence, it’s built on solid beats. Perhaps not always unfamiliar, but like an exceptional pop song, the mix is beautiful. Concepts are balanced, relationships make sense, and above all, the film has a good heart.
 
To that end, the stakes make sense. Peter Parker, as embodied by Tom Holland, attends Midtown Tech. A high school science academy and diversity cavalcade of hyper-intellectual youths, *handclaps* this is the future liberals want! It’s the weeks leading up to homecoming, and Peter has Spidey problems intermingled with teenager problems, but nothing is the end of the world.
 
Homecoming plays as much the teen movie—Hughesian in a way, but never a pastiche—as it does a superhero film. Academic Decathlons, ATM robbers, crushes, super weapons, they all coexist, each one’s priority as fluid as any concern of a high schooler. And in a cinematic universe where apocalypses are a dime a dozen, Spider-Man’s tangle with arms dealers feels just as pertinent. Where the scale may sound puny, the connections pulling our characters into the central conflict are personal. Saving an entire Eastern European capital, a’ la Avengers: Age of Ultron makes for grandiose cinema, but a tightly woven story with visceral heroes and villains offers something far more human.
 
And the humans in Spider-Man: Homecoming are rad. With a battery of high-caliber talent to deploy, the film manages to give something substantial to each player. Donald Glover and Hannibal Buress, with four scenes between them, are as effective as co-star Zendaya’s angsty Michelle. We get Martin Starr out there reminding us that protest is patriotic. Even a disembodied voice emerges as a memorable sidekick. And, somehow, the requisite appearances of other Marvel characters are largely tasteful. One such instance is punctured with, for my money, the best joke in the picture. Though, with all the warm pork bone broth goodness this picture pours down your gullet, I couldn’t help but feel the nag of one loose thread. I know, I know, it's always a loose thread with me, but the presence of Bokeem Woodbine as one of our Spidey foils cemented the connection.
 
It’s a moment from FX’s serialized Fargo where ambitious criminal Mike Milligan (as played by Woodbine) ascends in the organized crime world. An enlightened man of the 1970’s, Mike has a higher purpose, justification for each bloody handprint left up the ladder. Yet it’s Morning in America, and the multinational is the new kingpin. The enforcer’s reward is a small office outfitted with a word processor. He’s instructed to ditch his oxblood western suit, cut his afro, and learn to golf. Always golf. And on the dawn of Spider-Man: Homecoming—our Sony, Disney orgy of corporate interest—I can’t help but feel Marvel, a once weird, bankrupt, scrappy, visionary, has traded it all in to be just another corporate stooge.
 
This is not some phony righteousness on my behalf. Hell, if they existed, I would depression-lunch-rage-eat loads of McDoubleCrunchwraps, but some hellish union between McDonald's and Taco Bell does not a positive make. I’m not a fan of Hollywood’s current climate—especially Sony “lending” Spider-Man to Marvel, an echo of bad studio system politics—but the onus is to evaluate what happens between the margins, and Homecoming is a joyful place. So, for the sake of my beloved, beleaguered editor, there ends the need to grind this, my favored axe.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is good, but consolidation of creative enterprise under the penumbra of one megacorporation, well, that’s bad. Should the latter be wielded against the former? No, but they are inextricable.  

—By Monte Monreal