Category: 2020s

This film is about a red puppy, adopted by a girl named Emily Elizabeth, that grows into an enormous red dog. Those are the only similarities it has with the book or televisions series. Like Tom and Jerry before it, the setting is inexplicably changed to New York City. Emily Elizabeth’s English-accented single mom has to go on a work trip, so she leaves her with her bad American-accented uncle, whose life choices have him living in a box truck. Over the course of a single day, they adopt Clifford, get evicted from their large two-bedroom apartment, and draw the attention of a bad guy who wants to solve world hunger. This is the type of movie that has a humanitarian as the bad guy. It also has CGI dog riding scenes that make the Quidditch scenes in the first Harry Potter film look seamless. 

This movie offers a potential vision of what happened to Encyclopedia Brown when he got older. Adam Brody is the titular character, an Encyclopedia Brown-esque detective who now as an adult is still working the same types of cases and struggling with a self-image reliant on past successes as a child prodigy. Hired by teenager Sophie Nélisse to find her boyfriend’s murderer, he’s almost out of his league in handling the case that also gets twisted with both his first big success and his biggest failure. As someone who devoured ‘you can solve it’ mysteries as a kid, this was really up my alley. The writing is incredible, touching on many features of the genre while bringing the story to a modern world. The tone shifts seamlessly between comedy and dark drama with Brody embodying the character with aplomb.    

If someone isn’t a Wes Anderson fan, I imagine they’d hate this film with a passion. I am a fan and I loved it. It has extreme levels of everything that makes up his best works: bright colors, quirky characters, ambiguous time setting, subtle references that don’t overwhelm. The editor of The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, Bill Murray, dies suddenly and the staff, which includes many Anderson regulars, works to publish one final edition. Four of the articles that are included in this edition comprise the vignettes that make up the majority of the film. I adored all of them on their own, though the first one is a bit shorter and simpler than the others. Those three twist and turn down, back and forth in their narrative but still manage to deliver a thorough narrative. There’s so much to see that I’ll need to watch it a number of times to absorb it all. It’s rather fitting with its French setting that it is reminiscent of a Tati film both implicitly and explicitly while still being uniquely Wes.

Many years after Ghostbusters 2, Egon Spengler had abandoned his family, dying alone on his farm in Oklahoma. His daughter Carrie Coon travels to the town with her two kids Finn Wolfhard and Mckenna Grace to put his affairs in order when they discover the truth of his past and what brought him to the middle of Oklahoma in the first place. It’s not an awful movie by any means, but it feels like less a part of the franchise than the abomination from 2016. There’s very little humor and way too much overreliance on CGI effects that don’t look much better than what was offered 20 years ago. There’s a lot of fan service in the film, but it all gets a bit muddied as to how it fits into the universe. Some people remember the original ghostbusters; while others have never heard of them and don’t believe ghosts exist. The new cast mostly consists of inconsequential additions, except for Grace. Her portrayal comes across believably as a descendent of Spengler and also as someone who gets ghostbusting. I’m sure the old cast weren’t interested in portraying much more than gratified cameos, but it could have been a blast seeing her just join as a member of the quartet. I’m torn on the ethics of casting dead people in films, but even if I were totally okay with it, there is too much ‘Harold Ramis’ in this film.  

In an inactive mine in central Oregon, Scott Haze and his partner are cooking meth when a creature kills the partner and possesses Haze and his young son who was waiting in a truck outside the mine. Fast forward three weeks, his older son’s teacher Keri Russell notices his change in behavior and begins to suspect there is abuse in the household, projecting her own childhood experiences onto the family. The film really struggles with finding a basic premise. Along with physical abuse, themes on environmental destruction, eastern Native lore, and poverty are all thrown in to the mix without any real commentary being made on any of them. The acting is pretty solid and the visual effects are uniquely creepy, which somewhat make up for the slapdash plot.    

In an Idaho church meeting room, two couples come together to converse about a shared tragedy. It’s easy to do a search to find out more details on the plot and there are probably only a dozen or so options that fit, but I loved going into this blind. Everyone involved with getting this meeting set up obviously know what it’s about. It’s an intriguing exercise watching their reactions and small conversations as the story unwinds. The film is indeed a master class in acting between the four main participants. Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs as a married couple have so many instances of natural nonverbal communication that it’s entirely believable that they are in an actual relationship. Ann Dowd as the other female in the quartet is incredible as always, her face a constant visage of resigned pain. Reed Birney is more restrained in his role, but also perfect as a more removed perspective from the events. They kept me mesmerized throughout.