Category: a24

Movie Review – Remember

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Remember (2016)
Written by Benjamin August
Directed by Atom Egoyan

remember

Zev Guttman wakes to find his wife Ruth is missing. Exiting his bedroom, he finds himself in the hallway of a nursing home where a kind nurse explains that Ruth passed away months ago. Zev is slipping further into dementia and losing track of memory from both the present and the deep past. His only friend is Max, a fellow resident of the nursing home who has a secret pact with Zev. One evening Max gives Zev a letter which sets the latter man on a journey across America, looking for a man named Rudy Kulander. This man has ties to both Max and Zev and their meeting will end in bloodshed.

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Movie Review – The Witch

The Witch (2016)
Written & Directed by Robert Eggers

the witch

In the 1630s, a man named William and his family are exiled from his Puritan plantation after he is found guilty of promoting an alternative view of accepted Christianity. After traveling through the wilderness, the family settles on a remote plot of land on the edge of the woods. While playing with the baby of the family, eldest daughter Thomasin suddenly loses him to an unseen force in those woods. She’s met with suspicion by her mother and William is driven further into desperation. The crops rot on the stalk, the goat is only giving blood, and there is a malevolent air about the land. The eldest son, Caleb strikes upon a plan to venture into the woods to gather rabbits from traps so that the family can sustain themselves with some bit of food, but this journey will damn his entire family.

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Movie Review – Mojave

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Mojave (2016)
Written & Directed by William Monahan

mojave

Tom is an incredibly famous and successful Hollywood director who is drowning the sorrows of his personal life in alcohol and partying. After a particularly draining bender, he drives his jeep off into the Mojave Desert for some solace. Tom is in an accident that flips his vehicle over, and he continues on foot only to encounter a malevolent stranger who is stalking the sands. Jack is a grizzled and articulate man wandering the desert armed with a hunting rifle. Tom suspects no good can come of this and a physical struggle ensues that leaves Tom with the gun and on the run from Jack. Tom’s paranoia leads to a tragic mistake that Jack intends to use against him even after the director escapes the desert.

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Movie Review – Room

Room (2015)
Written by Emma Donoghue
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson

room a24

Jack lives in Room with his mother. Outside of Room is Outer Space and the TV Planets which Jack can see on the small television they have. Every Sunday, Old Nick delivers presents, and Jack has to sleep in Wardrobe. But then one day, Jack’s mom reveals the truth to him: that there is another side of the wall to Room, the World. She tells Jack how Old Nick stole her when she was a teenage girl and that there are a Grandma, Grandpa, and a whole world outside of Room. His mom wants to escape and needs Jack’s help, but he is scared of this new mysterious world and will need to find the strength inside him to help her get out.

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Movie Review – Mississippi Grind

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Mississippi Grind (2015)
Written & Directed by Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck

mississippi-grind

Gerry is a gambler who finds himself losing more than he wins, but he earns just enough to keep himself hooked on the game. During a Texas hold ‘em at a casino in Iowa, he meets Curtis. Curtis is a fellow gambler, though not as concerned about winning as he is with the rush of the game. The two men strike up a friendship quickly, and as Curtis is shuffling off down New Orleans, Gerry convinces him to travel down the highway, following the Mississippi and gambling as they go. The goal is to make $25,000 to buy into a high stakes private game in NOLA. However, Gerry doesn’t know when to quit and always pushes against the odds.

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Movie Review – Dark Places

Dark Places (2015)
Written & Directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner

dark places

In 1985, a brutal murder occurred in Kinnakee, Kansas. The culprit appeared to Ben Day; the victims are his mother and two of his sisters. Little sister Libby Day survives and goes on to testify that she saw Ben committing these acts. Jump to present day, Libby has squandered the last of the money she got from her book about the events and the goodwill of people who have heard her story has dried up. She is approached by Lyle, a member of the Kill Club, a group of amateurs that takes murder cases and reopens them to try to solve them. They believe Ben is innocent though he’s never appealed his life sentence. Libby is skeptical but eventually agrees to pursue their leads and uncovers the secrets of those final days of her childhood innocence.

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Movie Review – The End of the Tour

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The End of the Tour (2015)
Written by Donald Margulies
Directed by James Ponsoldt

the end of the tour

Writer/journalist David Lipsky wakes up one morning to the news that David Foster Wallace killed himself. Wallace was a novelist who published Infinite Jest in 1996 and was a book that hit with tremendous impact on the literary world. Lipsky worked at Rolling Stone in the 90s and proposed going out to Central Illinois where he would follow the author on the last stop of his book tour. Lipsky arrives and finds Wallace to be a man not exactly comfortable with the fame his book has brought him. He seems very agreeable though considerably quiet and not having too many close friends, but lots of acquaintances. Over the course of a couple of days, Lipsky gets to know Wallace and probe into places the writer might not want to go.

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Movie Review – Barely Lethal

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Barely Lethal (2015)
Written by John D’Arco
Directed by Kyle Newman

barely lethal

Agent 83 is the top student of the Prescott Academy, a black ops facility where orphaned girls are turned into skilled killers for the U.S. government. Agent 83’s class are in their late teens, and she is beginning to yearn for a domestic life that was never provided for her. A chance to escape comes during the capture of arms dealer Victoria Knox when Agent 83 is presumed dead. Using her knowledge of teen movies, she passes herself off as a Canadian exchange student for the Larson family in a small American town. 83 goes through a fish out of water period but seems finally to be integrating herself into daily life. But that’s when her rival Agent 84 shows up with plans to ruin 83’s fun.

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Movie Review – Ex Machina

I hope you are enjoying the content I publish on my blog. If you feel compelled and are financially able to, I would greatly appreciate anything you could contribute to my Patreon. I will take it as your way of saying thanks and put that money towards growing the site in a slight manner.

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Ex Machina (2015)
Written & Directed by Alex Garland

ex machina

Caleb Smith is a computer programmer for the search engine Blue Book whose life is changed when he is announced the winner of a week-long retreat with the company’s founder Nathan Bateman. The journey takes Caleb to a remote estate on a vast swath of property. Here Nathan introduces the programmer to Ava, an artificial being he has created. Nathan wants Caleb to run the Turing Test, a thought experiment where you seek to determine if an artificial consciousness is indistinguishable from an organic one. Strange power outages allow Caleb and Ava to communicate briefly without Nathan’s watchful eye. What Ava tells Caleb causes him to question the true nature of why he was brought here and his reality.

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Movie Review – Hereditary

I hope you are enjoying the content I publish on my blog. If you feel compelled and are financially able to, I would greatly appreciate anything you could contribute to my Patreon. I will take it as your way of saying thanks and put that money towards growing the site in a slight manner.a24 visions

Hereditary (2018)
Written & Directed by Ari Aster

HEREDITARY-trailer

Here is where I would typically write up a brief synopsis of the plot of the film I was reviewing before digging into the themes and performances. There would be a read more line after this paragraph where I would go into those things. However, I am going to put the plot synopsis below the “read more” line and would urge you that if you haven’t seen Hereditary to stop reading this review and do that first. Then come back and finish.

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