There is so much that just completely knocks you flat with We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, an incisive and stirring look at what it means to grow up in near complete isolation with the internet as your primary conduit to the world.
Year: 2021
Nicolas Cage just wants his Pig back; Portland has other ideas.
With his feature film debut about one man’s love for his prized pig, writer-director Michael Sarnoski has harnessed Nicolas Cage’s latent intensity and made what might be my favorite film I’ve seen so far this year.
Morgan Neville celebrates the complicated life of Anthony Bourdain in Roadrunner
With Roadrunner, kind-hearted documentarian Morgan Neville virtually reunites many of Bourdain’s dearest friends and collaborators to contemplate his life and legacy while working through their still-raw grief on film. Whether the documentary’s subject would have approved of the project (probably not) is perhaps beside the point.
The SunBreak at North Bend Film Festival!
Something strange is once again happening in North Bend, and Jenn and Chase are diving in.
Space Jam: A New Legacy is an utter catastrophe of pop culture cannibalism
A film that only succeeds in dunking on itself over and over again, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a woefully misguided marketing ploy masquerading as a movie.
Love Type D was less charming and more distressing
I had really high hopes for this quirky British comedy about a woman, Frankie (Maeve Dermody), who is sick and tired of being dumped. We meet her as she’s left by her “perfect man” via his little brother Wilbur (yes, he broke up with her by proxy) and through some awkward interactions with this little messenger (Rory Stroud) , she finds out there maybe a gene that consistently makes you the dumpee at the end of a relationship rather than the dumper. For the rest of the film she tries to fix this defect.
Dachra Treads Familiar Ground with Fearsome Panache
Scores of film buffs in the west know and love Tunisia, whether they realize it or not. The North African country’s enjoyed a rep as a popular location for outside movie productions for decades. Its arid but picturesque deserts provided suitably exotic backdrops for scores of international hits, including Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars series, The English Patient, and many more.
Marvel’s long-awaited return to cinemas finally puts Black Widow in the spotlight
Despite having appeared in six Marvel Cinematic Universe features and having ascended to the leader of the Avengers by its Endgame audiences never really got to know Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Whereas other core team members like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and even multiple Hulks were the subject of multiple standalone stories to flesh out their backstories, the history and motivations of reformed Russian spy Natasha Romanoff was always left to a series of offhand allusions to a vaguely dark, cryptically complicated past. Alas, it took a tragic sacrifice (and then a pandemic delay) to give her the spotlight she deserved, albeit in flashback form to fill in the long-missing pieces.
Roundtable: Best of 2021 (So Far)
Josh, Morgen, and Chase highlight a few of our favorite movies from 2021.
No Sudden Move scratches the seedy underbelly of 50’s Detroit till it purrs
What could possibly go wrong? Two low-level crooks, both near strangers to each other, are asked to “babysit” a man’s family while he retrieves some documents for their employer. Well… everything; everything can go wrong, and did, in this maze-like crime drama about the mob, murders, lies, and corruption. A couple of infamous criminals, Curt Goynes (Don Cheadle) and Ronald Russo (Benicio Del Toro), in 1950’s Detroit fall deeper and deeper into a scandal as they uncover the layers of a well-hidden secret. Attempting to use it to their advantage and up their payout, both try to double-cross their employer, the other players, and each other to come out on top. Based on a true story surrounding the automotive industry at Detroit’s height of success, No Sudden Move proves what a scuzzy industry it really was (and let’s be honest… still is).