Category: 2020s

Excited to be a surrogate for her two best friends, complications arise for Jasmine Batchelor when prenatal tests show anomalies in her fetus. The film relatively successfully attempts to touch upon a number of heavy subjects from abortion to surrogacy and the ethics involved with both of those. While her optimism and strong-headedness are not completely unappealing, Batchelor’s character is a bit difficult to empathize with. She makes a decision and attempts to steamroll everyone in her path forgetting that these are the people she most cares about and not bothering to really take in the multitude of consequences inherent in her decision. The rest of the characters are relegated to spending their time trying to reason with her.

For every Pirates of the Caribbean, there is also a Country Bears or The Haunted Mansion. This fits somewhere in between those two extremes. Dwayne Johnson portrays his usual character, an amiable, wisecracking something or other (here an Amazon riverboat captain, similar to those who pilot the Disneyland ride). He’s hired by Emily Blunt to take his boat to search for a mythical tree with magical flowers. The two of them have a stupidly negative amount of chemistry between them. Portraying German Prince Joachim, Jesse Plemons squanders almost every opportunity to ham it up as a villain. Sadly Paul Giamatti would likely have done an incredible job in the role, but is relegated to a lesser antagonist. Though quite heavy on the CGI, the settings are colorful and appealing, but that doesn’t offer enough to explain why a sequel is being made. 

An abused Ojibwa teen murders his romantic rival, witnessed only by his cousin whom he coerces into helping cover the crime. In the future, the boy has hidden most aspects of his earlier life, only utilizing bits when it furthers his career as a businessman. His cousin on the other hand has spent most of his life in and out of jail. After his most recent stint, he attempts to come clean to his participation in that earlier crime. It’s a suffocatingly dark tale, reflecting on cycles of abuse and the human shells that are left behind. Michael Greyeyes’s portrayal of the cold-hearted adult is haunting. He has built a new life, pulling on a mask whenever it’s needed, but is never free of his past.

This was a lot more fun than I’d thought it would be. In this teen comedy-horror hybrid, Vince Vaughn is a serial killer who magically switches bodies with a teenaged Kathryn Newton. Unfortunately there wasn’t a lot of characterization of the killer before the switch so Newton isn’t given a whole lot to mimic when she becomes the killer. At that point, she just gives pissed off vibes. As with a lot of high school films, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as to why she’s bullied at school and the movie is too lazy to bother with any type of reasoning. What saves the film is Vaughn being great in both roles. He could believably play a menacing serial killer in a serious slasher film but is also rather funny when playing a teenaged girl.    

Winston Duke is a formerly alive soul whose current job is to choose which of a handful of candidate souls will have the chance to be born. Outside of that job, he spends his time watching the lives of those souls he has chosen and occasionally hosting visits from Benedict Wong who serves as somewhat of a supervisor/mentor for Duke. It’s an ambitious and unusual take on existential topics that has kept me intrigued from the moment I read the premise. The cast, also including Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, and Bill Skarsgård, is somewhat eclectic but somehow works when thinking of all the potential souls in the universe. Beyond that, the film has a gorgeous, minimalist set and Duke’s performance is heart-wrenching and incredibly mesmerizing. Looking up his filmography, it seems I might be stuck watching Spenser Confidential just to see more of his work. 

Oklahoman oil worker Matt Damon travels to France to visit his daughter Abigail Breslin who is serving time there for murdering her college roommate. When her lawyer refuses to reopen her case, Damon decides to stay in country and investigate some new information that has been found. For a good portion of the film, it’s a fish out of water tale with Matt performing better than I’ve ever seen him as the middle-aged, blue collar American trying to find his way in French society. His accent and redneck-iness is a bit over the top at times and the film takes some incredulous twists in its latter half, but following the character’s arch and the changes he undergoes finding connections in his life where he had previously failed makes the entire film an intriguing exploration of American myths and masculine culture.