Review: Red Sparrow (2018)

* 1/2
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton

Red Sparrow is a film that dares to ask: how many rape scenes is too many? If you've heard the term "male gaze" but aren't sure exactly what it means and would like to see a visual example, then this is the movie for you. Ostensibly a spy thriller, albeit of the most predictable, slow-moving, and needlessly convoluted kind, Red Sparrow is really just a perfunctory means of festishizing violence towards women, even though it seems to see itself as an empowerment narrative. It's a 140 minutes which would be reduced to about 15 if you excised all the scenes demonstrating, suggesting, or referencing sexual assault, coercion, harassment, or what the film characterizes as prostitution but which more closely resembles slavery. Hollywood: you can do better than this. You can do better with respect to films and you can do better by someone as talented as Jennifer Lawrence.

Review: mother! (2017)

* * *
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem

If you follow entertainment news sites, you've heard that mother! earned the rare "F" grade from CinemaScore. An F doesn't just mean that an audience disliked a movie, it means that the audience feels betrayed by the movie, like they've been sold a false bill of goods. On one hand, this turn of events is understandable because the marketing for mother! doesn't really give a clear idea of what it's going to be, but it being a major studio release one could be forgiven for assuming that it's going to be a little more... normal. On the other hand, it's a Darren Aronofsky movie. The closest he's ever come to "mainstream" is Black Swan and that's only mainstream insofar as it was a box office and Oscar success. Most of his movies are flat out designed to alienate. Granted, even knowing that going in, watching mother! can still feel like a bit of an endurance test. I don't think there's any way to actually discuss this movie without spoiling it a little (or a lot), so consider this a spoiler warning.

Review: Passengers (2016)

* * *
Director: Morton Tyldum
Starring: Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence

Passengers has a 31% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 41 rating on Metacritic. Is it secretly a great movie? No, but is it the terrible movie that those ratings would imply? Not nearly. Those ratings would suggest something borderline incompetent, something shoddily made with little to recommend it. But Passengers is an entertaining movie with more than enough to make it worth taking the time to watch, even if it is thematically problematic. Thinking about it afterwards, I was reminded of something I once read about Jerry Maguire (I can't remember the exact wording and couldn't find the review, so I'm stuck paraphrasing), that it's a movie that knows a great deal about sports but very little about relationships. Similarly, Passengers is a film that knows a great deal about how to spin an adventure yarn, but very little about women and relationships. It suffered for the latter, but it deserves praise for the former.

Review: Joy (2015)

* * *
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence

Although it markets itself as being a true story, David O. Russell's Joy is really more of a fable (and I'm not just saying that because the film apparently just straight up makes a bunch of stuff up, even more so it seems than most "based on a true story" films), and while it doesn't start with the words "Once upon a time," it really might as well. Grounded by an excellent performance by Jennifer Lawrence, who once again transcends Russell's habit of casting of her in roles that she's much too young for, Joy works more often than not, though it is a bit disjointed when looked at as a whole. A lot of people seem to be calling Joy a step back for Russell after the string of hits of The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle, but I have to say, as someone who liked Silver Linings but found The Fighter and American Hustle bizarrely overrated, I don't think Joy is actually any kind of step back in terms of quality. It's a fine movie, one that contains snatches of brilliance without ultimately being anything extraordinary.

Review: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)

* * *
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence

And so it ends. After four films the saga of Katniss Everdeen concludes in a fashion that is as rough around the edges and unwilling to "pretty" things up as she is. Even in triumph, Mockingjay - Part 2 is almost unrelentingly bleak, its characters more exhausted than relieved, its outlook only tentatively positive. It's a fitting end for a series with such a dark premise and which has always foregrounded the human cost of tyranny and rebellion, yet I can't help but feel like it doesn't quite have the impact that it should have. This is possibly (probably) the result of splitting the final chapter in the story into two films, leaving Part 1 feeling padded and Part 2 feeling a little bit empty. Mockingjay - Part 2 is full of action, but it doesn't have quite the same level emotional grounding that the other films have. It's a good film regardless, but the final two parts to the story are definitely the lesser pair compared to the series' first two films.

Netflix Recommends... X-Men: First Class (2011)

* * *
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Kevin Bacon

Because I watched The A-Team, Total Recall and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Netflix decided that I might want to watch X-Men: First Class, even though X-Men has fairly little in common with any of those movies because even when Netflix provides some reasoning behind its recommendations, it's still basically random. Until seeing this movie, I'd never actually seen any X-Men film in its entirety (I've seen almost all of X-Men except for the last 15 or so minutes) and I know pretty much nothing about the X-Men mythology except for what I can recall from the animated series which aired when I was a kid, so I'm probably not the ideal viewer for this film, but nevertheless I did like it. It's a vibrant film with a good mix of action, drama, and humor, easily accessible to someone like me while containing elements which allow it to fit in as part of the film series which preceded it (which, as I understand it, sort of eschew the concept of continuity as something pesky and unimportant anyway, so I suppose that "fitting in" wouldn't be too difficult).

Review: Serena (2014)

* * 1/2
Director: Susanne Bier
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper

I don't think that any film that has shown up at any of my local movie theaters this year has made my ears perk up quite as much as Serena. It's not so much that the film has good buzz - there only seem to be a few reviews online and they run the gamut from mixed to negative - but that there's such an air of mystery about it that watching it feels like going into uncharted territory. This is a movie that was made in early 2012 and is just emerging now (though it won't hit theaters in the US until 2015), despite starring two actors who have gone on to become two of the biggest stars working today, each of whom received Oscar nominations for both of their last two films together. Even if it was terrible, I don't understand how a movie like this could end up buried and then, essentially, abandoned - surely the curiosity factor alone could make it modestly viable as a commercial product. For the record, I do not think that Serena is a terrible film, though it's one that I would describe as "fascinating" more than "good." I went back and forth a lot when trying to decide on a rating for it because it is certainly deeply, deeply flawed in its present form but if it's a failure, at least it's an interesting one.

Review: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1

* * *
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Donald Sutherland, Josh Hutcherson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Julianne Moore, Elizabeth Banks, Woody Harrelson

There will come a time once The Hunger Games series finishes when I'll revisit all of the films and perhaps at that point I'll have a better appreciation for Mockingjay - Part 1. Right now I'm having a hard time finding an artistic justification for the series having joined the increasingly annoying trend of splitting the final story of a would-be trilogy into two films (the economic justification is, of course, obvious). Don't get me wrong, Mockingjay - Part 1 is a good movie and I liked it well enough, but there's no denying that it feels distinctly... padded. At 123 minutes it's the shortest film of the series by nearly half an hour, yet it lacks the sense of urgency of either of the predecessor films and the amount of table setting for the next film is much more obvious here than it was in either The Hunger Games or Catching Fire. If those films were representative of Katniss being the "girl on fire," Mockingjay - Part 1 is representative of Katniss being the "girl on a slow simmer."

Review: American Hustle (2013)

* * *
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, Jennifer Lawrence

I like David O. Russell. I don't think he's made a bad film (even the much maligned I Heart Huckabees has a place in my heart), but I think he's only made one truly great film (Three Kings). The rest fall on a spectrum from "good" to "really good" with American Hustle falling smack dab into the middle of "good" - mostly entertaining and fun, but ultimately all surface. To be honest, in a year with so many great films to its credit, I'm sort of baffled that this one could be anyone's pick for the year's "best." It's a fine film with many fine actors turning in fine performances, but in the end it's a trifle with only small pockets of greatness nestled within it.

Review: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)

* * * 1/2
Director: Francis Lawrence
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Woody Harrelson, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Donald Sutherland

After watching female led, would be young adult franchises like Beautiful Creatures and The Mortal Instruments crash and burn this year, it's good to be back in the company of Katniss Everdeen, one of the best and most active female characters to emerge in the past decade. Building on the momentum created by last year's The Hunger Games, Catching Fire raises the stakes, creating even more spectacular action sequences that its predecessor, even while it makes the "games" themselves secondary to the politics of revolution. Though the series has seen a change in directors from one film to the next, it hasn't missed a beat and the praise Catching Fire has received for being even better than The Hunger Games is well deserved.

Review: Silver Linings Playbook (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: David O. Russell
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro

Hollywood doesn't always have a great track record when it comes to depicting mental illness, often resorting to playing it as a "quirk" to be mined for comedy, or as something completely dark and debilitating, prime material for high drama. Rarely is mental illness depicted with any real degree of complexity and nuance - there's "crazy" and there's "movie crazy" and the latter tends to play better cinematically - and though Silver Linings Playbook is a comedy, it takes its subject matter very seriously. It offers a deft mix of comedy and drama, of plot-based and character-based story, and is highly entertaining.

Review: The Hunger Games (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Gary Ross
Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, Liam Hemsworth

It may be a story about teenagers, featuring an imperilled female protagonist and a love triangle, but The Hunger Games is about as far from Twilight as it gets. A slick dystopian action film complete with terrific performances and great production values all around, The Hunger Games is an instant classic of its genre.