To those who still hold any degree of skepticism for Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book—Disney’s live-action adaptation of the Rudyard Kiplingclassic—I say just sing along to “Forget about your worries and your strife…” That’s a guaranteed earworm from this really good film. Complete with splendid sound design and flabbergasting CGI
Category: Reviews
10 Cloverfield Lane
Solving jigsaw puzzles begin by picking a piece out of a scattered mess. Each individual piece is conformed to a different shape, each edge retrofitted for another. Making sense of the mind-bender lies both in the making and unmaking of it. Such is the case of Dan Trachtenberg’s feature film
The Divergent Series: Allegiant
Sequel after sequel, it is a struggle to pledge my allegiance to this franchise that once had the potential but has now consistently gone downhill. For the obvious reason of milking the Divergent franchise, Allegiant is unnecessarily split into two parts. There is no shame in that, really, but what
Hele Sa Hiwagang Hapis
Hele sa Hiwagang Hapis (Eng. title: Lullaby for the Sorrowful Mystery) is eight hours long. Everybody knows it, the producers made sure of that. This focus on runtime, daresay superfluous for a Lav Diaz film, is unfortunate because it misrepresents what Hele actually is – an epic of magic realism that overlays
London Has Fallen
London Has Fallen is a classic example of a no-one-asked-for sequel trying to ride on the coattails of its predecessor’s box-office success. The film, a follow-up to the 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen, features a heavier sense of gravity due to it escalating the conflict to a city-wide scale and also
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
WARNING: Mild spoilers follow, but I won’t give away any major plot points (none that the trailers haven’t already given away that is). As a kid, one of the earliest memories I have is that of me and my mother plopping in front of the TV 7pm Friday nights to catch Batman:
Always Be My Maybe
Director Dan Villegas (English Only Please, The Breakup Playlist, and most recently Walang Forever) continues his magical streak of directing hit romantic comedies for the masses – this time starring Gerald Anderson and Arci Muñoz. In Always Be My Maybe, not only do we feel the sweetness that a budding
Zoolander 2
Blue Steel. Ferrari. Le Tigre. Toward the end of 2001’s Zoolander, the megalomaniacal Mugatu accuses the really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking male model of recycling the same look over and over again. Fifteen years later, the same could be said again about Zoolander — both the character and the movie.
Kung Fu Panda 3
The lovable panda, Po Ping (voiced by Jack Black) comes back to the big screen as the Dragon Warrior in the third installment of Dreamworks’ well-loved franchise. As in any franchise, it has been primed that in its succeeding sequels the stakes must be higher, especially in displaying the heroics
The Finest Hours
The Finest Hours depicts events that are dubbed as “the most daring rescue mission in U.S. coast guard history.” I took this with a grain of salt as mereover-exaggeration, a marketing tactic. And yet upon seeing the film, and absorbing this new-found insight of how grave the dangers coast guards
Emelie
The image of a listless suburban street opens Michael Thelin’s Emelie in such a blisteringly icy note. From an obscured point-of-view, we see a truly American terror unfold: a young woman kindly directing a stranger to the post office gets drugged and hustled inside a car. That it shatters the
Spotlight
This could very well be one of the biggest (in both size and star power) all-ace ensembles of 2015 and, with the direction, narrative and talent involved, Spotlight did not fail our expectations. Spotlight, which premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, is a thriller-like, human interest drama that highlights the true
The Revenant
The four-way battle of man vs. man vs. nature vs. himself has never been construed in the way The Revenant does in this Oscar-nominated epic survival film. Once again, Alejandro González Iñárritu blesses us with a masterclass visual poetry as he cements his spot into one of the world’s visionary
Gods of Egypt
Amid the huge #OscarsSoWhite controversy of The 88th Academy Awards, timing could not have been any worse for the release of Gods of Egypt – an Egyptian fantasy film heavily studded with a Caucasian cast. Such “Hollywood whitewashing”, which encourages critics and viewers to sharpen their knives, has been discussed
Joy
From the looks of it, Director David O. Russell plans to make an anthology of movies with his Lawrence-Cooper-De Niro squad after all. We’ve previously seen him working with the trio in Silver Linings Playbook (2012) and American Hustle (2013). 2015 marks their third collaboration in Joy. Who can accuse him
The 5th Wave
With the conclusion of profitable franchises such as Twilight and The Hunger Games, and with Divergent and The Maze Runner series following suit, Hollywood is undoubtedly scrambling to find the next big young adult franchise. Picking up late in the race, Sony has finally decided to jump onto the saturated genre and take this journey
Tandem
The best way to describe Tandem is that it is like the love child of Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive and Erik Matti’s On The Job. In a way, it takes the the 80’s sensibilities of the former and blends it with a plot involving the corruption and the political machinations of those in
Deadpool
Amidst a cliché plot, Deadpool works best when it breaks the fourth wall and pokes fun at not only its own studio and its past mistakes, but also at the whole trend of superhero franchises in general. The movie may not exceed expectations per se, but it does meet them with its combination of
13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
Hollywood biographical war pictures are used as devices to mark significant events of terrorism, a form through which we comprehend accounts of reality and glimpse on the American psyche. Over the last few years we have Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Lone Survivor (2013), and American Sniper (2014), to name only
Lakbay2Love
Recent calamities that wreaked havoc to the Philippines have inspired many a movie in the indie scene. Just last year alone, there were Brillante Ma. Mendoza’s Taklub, Pepe Diokno’s Above the Clouds, and Chuck Gutierrez’s Iisa. By setting these films in typhoon-stricken areas, the directors were able to use disaster
The Danish Girl
2015 is a triumphant year for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. The legalization of same-sex marriage in several countries, including the United States of America, is a showcase of the world’s newly founded open-mindedness. It’s a big leap in pursuit of equality, a battle that has been going on for years now. Some, however,
Everything About Her
Women” and “power” rarely form a sentence that doesn’t draw prejudice. Yet, in Joyce Bernal’s latest Everything About Her, these two words become the foundation of a rather unconventional statement. The film opens with a montage of Vilma Santos’ magnate delivering a speech that’s stereotypical of women in power—irascible, frigid,
The Boy
It is curious how the creepy-doll-story has become a sub-genre of horror films. We have Chucky from Child’s Play, Billy from Dead Silence, or the more recent (but disdainful) Annabelle, to only name a few. Either from the frozen smile or the piercing stare, the fear from these inanimate marionettes has sparked
Macbeth
Macbeth, the timeless play by William Shakespeare, is retold once more in film, this time in the hands of director Justin Kurzel. The “laws” of cinema establish that such classic pieces get new adaptations every five years or so, inevitably subjecting these rehashes to the “make-or-break” category. The film opens
Criminal Activities
There’s enough pomp, violence, and foul-mouthed thugs in Jackie Earle Healey’s Criminal Activities to do some classic Tarantino good. The film however views like a mere Pulp Fiction pastiche, doggedly dropping f-bombs and delivering obnoxiously acerbic lectures to its in the throes protagonists. But irreverence is what’s most characteristic about
