A crafty businessman with a death wish concocts a shady scheme in Anderson’s new work that seems to have diminishing returns, though backed by strong performances from Benicio del Toro, Mia Threapleton and Michael Cera.
This terrific Iraq War picture is as anti-war as it gets, adopting a pure, minimalist aesthetic but operating with a maximalist Oscar-worthy sound design, as several soldiers holed up in enemy territory await support and rescue.
Cruise remains committed as ever as Hollywood’s death-defying action star par excellence, but this is such a slog and bogged down by the need to justify the knotty, plotty ideas of the earlier movie.
Things go dreadfully south during a wild night in a Louisiana juke joint in Coogler’s most original work yet, marked by patient setups, foreshadowing, and playful blending of genres in this fervent, intoxicating music-horror.
Tightly structured, verbose and eschewing high-stakes action, Soderbergh’s deceptively genial chess game of a spy thriller conflates the professional and the personal as one half of a married couple working for the same intelligence agency is suspected of being treasonous.
Bong’s latest may lack a distinct thematic through-train and the plot occasionally wobbles along, but its mix of sardonic wit and fun sci-fi action should please most audiences as an expendable man is sent on suicidal scouting missions and ‘reprinted’ back again.
Eternality Tan 