I remember reading this book as a boy and it appealed to me because it was short. Much the same way the book Henry finds in this story, you can sit and read Dahl’s story in just a half hour or less.
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The story is simple. Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a wealthy man who, upon visiting the home of an acquaintance, stumbles on a book in the library. The book contains an account by an Indian doctor (Dev Patel) of a man who claimed to be able to see without using his eyes (Ben Kingsley). Henry takes the small volume and devotes his life to learning this skill so that he may win at blackjack. When he is successful, he decides to donate his winnings to charity and make it his life’s work to win big at casinos around the world and use his earnings to set up children’s hospitals and orphanages.

Top Notch Talent
While the entire production is top of the line, the cast is where this film really hits it out of the park. Cumberbatch is perfect as the titular Henry Sugar and Kingsley makes a fantastic man who can see without his eyes. All of the actors play multiple roles and Ralph Fiennes shines as Dahl himself, setting up the story from his writing chair and looking rather like the BFG or the pictures you’ll find of the real Dahl in the back of his books.

Simple and Elegant
The actors are trusted to deliver amazing performances on sets that are often in motion around them, giving the feel of a stage play. Long takes dominate the action and the fact that the entire account is told as a short story is hilarious, yet effective. The actors continuously break the fourth wall, staring directly at the camera and giving asides of “he said” after their own just spoken lines. In just about any other film it would feel out of place, but here it somehow works.
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There is no mistake that this is a Wes Anderson film from the slightly washed out colors to the inventive approach to everything on screen. I have yet to check out the other shorts recently added to Netflix (“The Swan”, “The Rat Catcher”, and “Poison”) but will be checking those out and delivering reviews as soon as I do.
10 out of 10

I’m searching for ways that this film would be more enjoyable, and I’m sure most of the answers to that question involve copious amounts of drugs.

I received this film as a recommendation in a movie challenge I’m participating in online, and the category for the week was surrealist films, and let me tell you, Fantastic Planet definitely falls into that genre. There were times that this felt like the animated versions of picture books I remember from my youth, but dipped in a Dali painting and then rolled through a pile of the oddest rejected creature creations from Star Wars.
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The animation in the film is basic and that’s really just fine. The creations mentioned above are truly unique and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like them on film or elsewhere. I really enjoyed the visual approach, and the lack of complex animation actually contributes to being able to focus on the story.

I will be the first to admit that I generally don’t love movie musicals and films like Cyrano (affiliate link) ​are the reason why.

Cyrano (affiliate link) is a musical drama based on the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand. Peter Dinklage stars at the title character who is in love with the beautiful Roxanne (Haley Bennett). When the pair meet early in the film, Roxanne professes that she has fallen in love at first sight and asks Cyrano to arrange a meeting with the man in question, the new soldier Christian played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. Cyrano is heartbroken at Roxanne’s confession, but agrees to set the meeting.
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Christian is similarly smitten with Roxanne, but fears he cannot adequately profess his love. Cyrano works with Christian to write love letters (professing his own love) that Christian can pass off as his own writing.

For a movie musical, the music itself was not very memorable. The one exception was the heart wrenching “Wherever I Fall,” sung by the soldiers on the eve of battle as they write home to their loved ones.

In the end, despite the visual appeal of the movie, I can’t come to love it. As with most movie musicals, I think I would have loved this had I seen it as a live performance on stage where the limitations of space require more ingenuity and creativity to tell the story than on film where you can shoot in numerous locations and sound stages.

7 out of 10

Long before director James Cameron took us on the most famous ocean voyage of the 20th century, he embarked on an undersea adventure that taxed everyone involved, but still manages to hold up over 30 years later.
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The Abyss (affiliate link) features a small crew of Navy SEALs traveling to a deep sea oil drilling platform with the mission of finding a nuclear submarine that crashed nearby and retrieve the warheads before the Soviets can get to them. The team is led by Cameron regular Michael Biehn playing Lieutenant Hiram Coffey. Ed Harris is in excellent form here as the platform’s foreman, Virgil "Bud" Brigman alongside Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Dr. Lindsey Brigman, Bud’s estranged wife and designer of the special platform.

​After recently reading a book all about Cameron’s films and learning what went into making this film, I’m not at all surprised by how well the underwater photography holds up all these years later. True, there are a few instances where it’s a bit clunky and could be done better today with digital images. But the look and feel of all the underwater scenes are generally superb, owed in large part to the insistence by Cameron that most of them be shot in an enormous tank built specifically for the film.

The ending of the film feels a bit unearned by the rest of the story and the last five minutes of the film feel like Cameron just didn’t know how to end things and wrote “and they all lived happily ever after” on the last page of the script. The visuals and technology are a sight to behold even many years later, but all that doesn’t make up for a story that feels unfinished.

7 out of 10

To say I was pleasantly surprised by this film would be an understatement. There is plenty to love here and it is a promising directorial debut from The Office’s B. J. Novak.

Now, the premise of this film is a bit odd on reflection. Ben (Novak) is a journalist from New York City who gets a call from the family of Abilene, a girl he had a fling with, informing him that she is dead. Her brother asks Ben to come to West Texas for her funeral where he quickly realizes that the girl had made much more of their relationship than he had. To top it off, he decides to record a podcast about the situation, complete with interviews with the family and acquaintances, as he tries to figure out who murdered her.

​As odd as that may sound, I think that’s the whole point here. I could actually see myself listening to a podcast like the one Ben makes in the film with the help of his producer Eloise (Issa Rae), who also serves as his lifeline back to New York and the life he had before.

The film plays the “fish out of water” trope in a fresh way for the most part, dropping in humor at Ben trying to fit in while clearly not fitting in at all. The film is clearly a statement on certain aspects of our culture and veers a bit between beating you over the head with it and keeping it so hidden that it’s hard to find. It is not a perfect film, but a solid directorial debut which leaves me excited to see what Novak tackles next.

7 out of 10​

Did we really need another Jurassic Park/Jurassic World movie? Of course not. Are they going to keep making them throughout eternity because people love dinosaurs? Absolutely.

The big draw in this version of the story was always going to be the giant family reunion. We got a glimpse of Jeff Goldblum’s Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, (affiliate link) but this final film in the Trevorrow trilogy brings Laura Dern back as Dr. Ellie Sattler and Sam Neill as Dr. Alan Grant. Throw in a bit of a redemption story for Dr. Henry Wu (BD Wong) and pretty much everyone that survived Spielberg’s original 1993 (affiliate link) film is here.

​Chris Pratt returns as Owen Grady, now in a full relationship with Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard). This time around they are tasked with protecting Maisie (Isabella Sermon), a young clone that nefarious people want to get their hands on. She is predictably captured in the first 10 minutes of the film, but proves to be resourceful as the rest of the cast joins forces to rescue her.

As with most franchises like this, the film sticks with the formula that has proven to work over the last three decades. In that respect, there is nothing new, not even any really crazy new dinosaurs. But if you love the dinosaurs, and let’s face it, who doesn’t, this will surely scratch that itch better than anything else out there.

6 out of 10

While I don’t quite agree with this being up for Best Picture at the Oscars earlier this year, I do understand the appeal for certain audiences.

Set at the beginning of The Troubles in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1969, the film follows a young boy named Buddy (Jude Hill) as he navigates those troubled times with his parents (Caitríona Balfe and Jamie Dornan) and grandparents (Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds).

​This is the first part where the film lost me a bit in that I didn’t connect with the story. It’s obviously a very personal story for Branagh who is from Belfast and would have been around Buddy’s age at the time of the events depicted.

Why would anyone be interested in an hour and a half long film about dairy cows with no narration, no plot to speak of, and forces us to look at our treatment of animals for our own gain?

The simple answer is that it’s an incredibly engaging film. It tracks the life cycle of the dairy cows, starting with the birth of one calf and ending with the death of the mother who gave birth. That’s a severe oversimplification of the film. Through the film, the viewer begins to understand what the cow is thinking, existing on her level. When the newly born calf is taken from her after only a few minutes where she is allowed to clean it, one shot lingers on the mother for at least a minute or two, simply watching her bleat in frustration at losing her baby. However, she doesn’t get much time to grieve, as she is sent off to get milked before long, both literally and metaphorically going in circles throughout the course of her life.

The presentation of the film is that of cinema verité, showing us how things are with no comment. Many people will say that this is an anti-dairy farming film, or a pro-vegan/vegetarian film, but I don’t think it is meant as such. It is meant as a look into the world that all of us are connected to, but most will never see or even think of. We go to the grocery store and milk is there in a jug for us, so we don’t have to worry about the process it took to make that happen. I know I thought a bit more about where my food comes from after watching this film, and while I haven’t consciously changed any of my eating habits, I have given more thought to what is required to bring certain items to my plate.

Cow (affiliate link) is a film I would urge anyone to give a chance. It truly is a unique experience for each viewer and the story changes based on your own preconceptions about the topic.

7 out of 10

It’s not surprising that just a few years after the excellent documentary The Last Dance (affiliate link), about the rise of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls in the 1990s, that we get another excellent basketball documentary.

The Redeem Team (Netflix link) is a deep dive into the story of the 2008 Men’s US Olympic Basketball Team. While not as detailed as The Last Dance (affiliate link), it provides plenty of backstory to the events that led up to those Olympic Games in Beijing. We got to see the rise of the original Dream Team in The Last Dance (affiliate link), and this is the next logical chapter, looking at basketball when the world had caught up with the United States, and even our top talent wasn’t guaranteed a win on the world stage.

The film provides plenty of typical documentary fare with talking head interviews from the likes of LeBron James, Carmelo Anthony, and Dwayne Wade, players on the team that had fallen short in 2004 and wanted to come back to the Olympics and regain the former glory. In addition to this, however, is going further back, not only to the original dream team, but even back to a controversial Olympic gold medal game where the Soviet Union beat the United States. This historical context serves to elevate the story of US Olympic Basketball and shows that it hasn’t all been sunshine and roses.
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I would be remiss if I failed to mention the inclusion of Kobe Bryant in the film. He was an integral part of the 2008 team and was able to put his Lakers loyalties aside, facing down NBA teammate Pao Gasol in their very first game. One of the most touching scenes comes near the end of the film with the team celebrating Kobe’s birthday while at the Olympics. He can be seen with his daughters, including Gianna who was only two at the time. It was sobering to see that footage and hear the interviews with him at the time and only reminded me that he was gone too soon.

This documentary is essential viewing for any true sports fan, and should be included on the watchlist of anyone interested in great comeback stories. It is a great retelling of a relatively recent time in our sports history, and one that some people may not remember exactly the way it happened.

8 out of 10

A tour-de-force of visual stylings, The Daniels (Scheinert and Kwan) deliver the best multiversal story of the year in Everything Everywhere All at Once (affiliate link).

By now, you’ve likely heard someone raving about this film and it’s definitely one I think everyone should experience. It is just that, an experience, and you need to be open to thinking about film in new ways, something that doesn’t happen that often in film.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (affiliate link) is many things, and that’s what gives it broad appeal. It is an immigrant story, a family drama, a science fiction dimension travelling epic, and a kung fu action film all rolled into one. Michelle Yeoh as Evelyn Wang is the heart and soul of the film. She is not only the glue holding the film together, but similarly strives to hold together her family across time and space. Ke Huy Quan is similarly wonderful as Evelyn’s husband Waymond Wang. It was great to see him in a role completely different from his most famous roles as Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (affiliate link) and Data in Goonies (affiliate link) even if Waymond retains some of the goofiness of those characters from Quan’s youth.

Stephanie Hsu looks to be a star on the rise and her portrayal of Joy, Evelyn and Waymond’s 20-something daughter is spot on. The other star of the film is Jamie Lee Curtis as the IRS inspector auditing the Wang’s finances. She feels deliberately out of place in the film and is so much fun to watch as she changes characters based on which universe we see her in.

We need to talk about the rock scene. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more deep and emotional heart to heart talk between a mother and a daughter than when they are simply rocks on the edge of a cliff. Everything leading up to that moment has made the audience invested in the characters, that we absolutely believe that these two random rocks are the characters we have seen over an hour and a half. I also love the fact that the Daniels included actual footage of Michelle Yeoh as an actor on red carpets and such for the universe where Evelyn is a movie star.

Not to spoil too much, but I understand the “happy” ending that the film provides. Personally, I almost wish it would have concluded on a more somber note, but understand the decision to end it the way it did. I hope that the buzz about this film continues strongly enough as we head into Oscar season and it gets the recognition it deserves in categories like Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Original Screenplay. I doubt that any of the acting will be recognized, but think it could be a long shot for a Best Director nomination and even perhaps Best Picture.

9 out of 10