Hugh hits high notes with jazz hands in a red circus master’s jacket. What more could you want?
Zac Efron joins just in time to allow for a romance with Zendaya under the big top.
It’s spectacle and light with a coating of saturated prime colors and a crisp, palatable score. It all works. The pacing proves perfect as the cast of unique characters dance and sing and soar from scene to scene.
The first song covers a period of at least ten years. Heart-fueled hard belting Broadway voices preach equality for the marginalized, hope for the lonely, bravery for the penniless.
Family friendly, fast-paced and fun. I was skeptical walking in, missing Logan’s claws and envisioning Les Mis moments of sorrow, but this I recommend for the big screen as long as you prepare your soul for a classic burst-into-song musical, which it is.
We wind down the empty streets of the town of Dunkirk onto the terror-laden beaches following one young man. He’s too young. He’s unassuming. He’s fearful but bold. Waiting on a beach with 400,000 men, waiting for unpromised relief and rescue. It’s too early in the war for Churchill to relieve them. They are sitting ducks.
Christopher Nolan offers the world a masterpiece in this thrice-told tale. Capturing practical effects on film, utilizing thousands of extras, a large fleet of actual boats from the event, and the first ever hand-held IMAX camera, Nolan recreated one of the most moving true stories from World War II. 
Fortunately, audiences love a good underdog tale and will go see this plucky film that takes a few of the world’s current heaviest issues and throws them on-screen in a timeline-driven showdown that somehow maintains the snappy, light tone of a Saturday morning tv special without betraying the severity in the series of events.
The plot pacing jolts a bit across the timeline, but the 1960’s color palette in costuming and decor allows for gorgeous screen candy in symmetrical retro shots. The soundtrack time-stamps the era and remains lighthearted while the powerful, true story plays out.
The flaw in these three main characters, these Hidden Figures from history, is that they have no flaws. The tragedy of having a film with angelic protagonists is that that level of idealism is unattainable, less relatable. Audiences crave characters who remind them of themselves, offer survival tips, and can still win despite their human frailties.
Perhaps here, however, the truth of the majority voice in those tragic times in America’s history was more than enough conflict for audiences to handle. Our three heroines deal with the plague of prejudice and discrimination at every turn at work. They bow and bless while others stare and judge and ridicule. Co-workers slap signs that read “colored” on bathrooms and coffee pots and buildings. They are already treated as lower class citizens as women, but adding race tension doubles their trouble. NASA needed these talented women for their innate skills that helped the US catch up in the space race.
The antagonists, white bosses of both genders, snap and shoosh and demand and lord over all of those who they deem lesser, but they slowly learn to respect the three main figures and eventually to accept them. Kevin Costner’s character is really the only one with an arc. He says the oddly satisfying line, “At NASA, we all pee the same color.” 
People know but rarely put into practice the truth that human decency should not have to be earned or determined by color or reserved for the good, but offered because one is human.
Woody Allen offshoots from his recent run of sweet charming Paris-in-the-20s films and jumps into New York & LA in the 30s. Cafe Society, though beautiful frame-for-frame, is a diatribe, a tragic spiral into the depths of disappointment over past failures and Niche-esque psychological queries on the purposelessness of life. 
Steve Carell’s forefront character, remains abrupt and unfeeling throughout. Jesse Eisenberg is the perfect young Woody Allen replica with his despondent stammer and tragic tropes as he works to woo Kristen Stewart, still sullen post-Twilight. Blake Lively is barely there, a wisp in model pose for the few moments she walks on-screen. My favorites, Paul Schneider and Parker Posey, were sadly more like extras, mere furniture in the film, not fixtures. 
The true tragedy is, if this film had succeeded in producing even a single hopeful, likable character to root for, it would have been enough to redeem even the wooden performances of the least emotional actors in Hollywood.
I’ll say: 3/10
On a final note: did filmmakers forget to mention that Samuel L. Jackson was going to be in almost every scene and have almost ALL of the lines in the film? He is almost the main character, yet he isn’t shown in the trailer and isn’t billed early enough to notice. Suddenly, he shows up in England at the beginning of the film with his unmistakable presence as the American ambassador with a plan to stop the bad man from selling slaves. 
He follows Tarzan back to the jungle and tags along as witness to Tarzan’s violent family reunion and subsequent battles. Though I cannot remember his character’s name, the attempted comic relief of Jackson one-liners became the pervading score in his sarcastic tone-filling role.
Tarzan 2016 felt like that nice trip to the grocery store where you find a lot of great things you wanted but get home and realize you forgot the one thing you went for.
Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons partner up to prove mathematical equations in a style reminiscent of A Beautiful Mind, but in this film, the major conflict is cultural discord. The director says that the film is actually about nurturing relationships. Layers of relational potential and missed opportunities plague this true story. Here is a beautiful 
Based on the true story that few truly understand well, this film offers consistent sidebars with laymen’s tips for digesting the basic inside scoop of heady Wall Street jargon. They make it palpable using Jenga games that represent mortgage company strategies, fish soup comparisons, bubble bath exposition, and famous cameos throughout.
So, despite crass language and nudity, this is one incredible film. The brilliant script proves its worth every minute as dialogue rings true and exposition hides in plain sight below a universal and personal, visual story. Behind the truth, that in the end, being right and gaining obscene amounts of money can’t buy any of them what they really want: joy.
The team of reporters followed every lead they could. Each rabbit trail lead to new victims who called themselves survivors, and for good reason. Many of the now grown children who had been molested had killed themselves. Most had turned to drugs or another kind of stimulant, perhaps to numb themselves from the painful truth.
The three reporters Sacha Pfeiffer, Michael Rezendes,, and Matt Carroll were brilliantly played by Rachel McAdams, Mark Ruffalo, and Brian D’arcy James. In an interview with NPR, (
Their bold boss Walter “Robbie” Robinson, played brilliantly by Michael Keaton, said that he didn’t know that he ever came across as harshly as he did, and after seeing “himself” in the film, he called Sasha to apologize for ever treating her rudely. I didn’t see rudeness. I saw and empathized with the entire team as they spent a year or more of their lives buried in painful interviews and research. The topic alone would exhaust any group of reporters, but the Spotlight team sat neck-deep in it for years in order to bring truth into the light.
A few weeks ago, my class had the rare and incredible opportunity to Skype Mr. Matt Carroll. Hosted brilliantly by another teacher who used to write for the Boston Herald, she fielded questions that students posed so Matt could talk about the personal pain of writing a story like this. He spoke of the difficulty of his particular job and the excitement of finding evidence that they could finally print. He spoke of and his fear for his family and community at the time knowing one of the priests lived down the street from him. He talked about long days and months of answering phones after the story broke. He mentioned how wild it was seeing someone play him in a movie. His doppelgänger hated the mustache but conveyed the gentle intensity, sorrow and stubborn search for truth perfectly.
Carroll said that the actors had one dinner out with the Spotlight team and in that short time picked up their mannerisms, accents, quirks. They all said that watching themselves on-screen was odd since the actors were so spot on.
This difficult topic makes your blood boil, and rightfully so. You want to fight with the Spotlight team. You see the hours, days, years that they poured over old newspaper clippings, record books, information outlets, and their own notes before they ever printed a story. Journalism, it seems, is mostly about research, interviewing honest sources and getting the facts straight. Or, at least it used to be.
Splatter: on FILM 