Mark McPherson's Blog, page 12

“A Complete Unknown” Review

What helps James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown not feel like a standard musical bio-pic is that it never tries to be all-encompassing. In a year with such sprawling musician biographies about Pharrell Williams and Robbie Williams, this picture of Bob Dylan feels more introspective for being so contained. It doesn’t try to pack his entire life into a 2-hour box but instead explores the road to his controversial performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. In this sense, the film isn’t so much a...

“The Brutalist” Review

There’s something so grand about Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist that the notion kept crossing my mind that it must’ve been plucked from something else. It’s an ambitious and intricate film with such masterful construction that surely it was based on a true story or adapted from a novel. Maybe the towering structure that dominates the narrative is a real place. But none of this came from a real person, real building, or acclaimed book. The Brutalist is a true original of filmmaking that taps into ...

“Sonic The Hedgehog 3” Review

I suppose I should’ve felt something when this film references the classic blow-in-the-cartridge technique and two Millenials declare that the 1990s were the best decade. I grew up in that era and Sonic the Hedgehog was my favorite game. However, with how deep this film franchise has been reaching into the Sega vault, it has left the 1990s by introducing a new character with a built-in backstory from the 2000s. By this era, I had dropped off from Sonic as the video games descended into a mess o...

“Mufasa: The Lion King” Review

Mufasa is spoken of in this prequel film as the fastest lion around. That much is true of this film, never slowing down to take a single breath in its breakneck approach to lineage and love triangles. But the rattling of dialogue and speedy editing leaves no room for chemistry, making the politics of the animal kingdom come off as dry as a Shakespeare production speedrunning its lines.

The story is told in Princess Bride style, with the wise mandrill Rafiki () regaling Simba’s daugh...

“Babygirl” Review

If last year’s erotic thriller Fair Play was a battle of the sexes in the shifting dynamic in the workplace, Babygirl is the fallout of that war where the women won. The genre of workplace affairs where men held more power has shifted to that of women. The good news is that type of film doesn’t present itself as a gender inversion of this familiar type of story. The bad news is that it only dabbles in the drama rather than plunges headfirst into the wilder world of desire, both business and sex...

“Maria” (2024) Review

The best part of Pablo Larraín’s films about 20th-century women is that he digs more into the psychological horror than the historical decadence of his subjects. His past films of Jackie and Spencer could have easily gotten lost in the stately allure, but they never relent into peeling back the extra layer of anxiety and existential dread. Maria is in the same camp for delivering the greater drama on famed opera singer Maria Callas in her twilight. While this isn’t a highlight of Larraín’s unof...

“The End” (2024) Review

Director Joshua Oppenheimer had crafted two of the most important documentaries of the 2010s, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, both films centering on the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s. So, it’s rather surprising that his next film is the apocalyptic musical, The End. If his past films were all about finding the inhumanity of this world, this offbeat narrative is perhaps trying to reestablish a human connection as the world decays. That grand ambition of revealing human nature via...

“Queer” (2024) Review

Queer feels like the ultimate challenge for director Luca Guadagnino. He tries to adapt the William S. Burroughs novel in a way that explores something left unsaid about the author’s novella that was unpublished for years. Even when the book was published, Burroughs still felt detached from the queer community, and it’s an angle that Guadagnino seems interested in exploring. Doing so requires searching around far outside the director’s comfort zone, taking this historical drama into some darkly...

“Nightbitch” Review

Nightbitch is a film that kinda/sort of wants to be a creature feature. It wants to dabble in its weirdness of a mom turning into a dog as much as explore the messy thoughts and feelings that come with motherhood. While the movie does tap into something both visceral and relatable, all of it comes off as little more than a scream into the void followed by a sigh of realization. Still, the screaming is cathartic enough to appreciate the volume.

Amy Adams plays an unnamed mother who has pushed...

“Small Things like These” Review

Evil not only triumphs when good men do nothing but when there are enough distractions for it to fester. What better time for that inhumanity to silently grow than Christmas. It is a time when communities and the media stress thinking of others while hurrying for events, presents, and Christmas dinners. If you’re already struggling, there’s little time to consider biting back against the oppressors. This is very much the case for Small Things Like These, its 1980s small-town Irish setting, and ...