Review: Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

* * *
Director: Tim Burton
Starring: Asa Butterfield, Eva Green, Samuel L. Jackson

The pairing of Tim Burton and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children - a story about kids with special abilities who are kept hidden away from society - is so obvious it almost feels like parody to actually see it. All that's missing are Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp, replaced here by Eva Green and Samuel L. Jackson. While the film, adapted from Ransom Riggs' novel of the same name, is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to be - full of whimsical misfits, grand spectacles of costume and production design, and, requisite for all big studio pictures, an ending that invites sequels - it's also the most that I've enjoyed a Burton film since probably Corpse Bride. It may not be a masterpiece, but it's a pretty decent entertainment.

Review: The Hateful Eight (2015)

* * *
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Walton Goggins, Jennifer Jason Leigh

The Hateful Eight begins perfectly, concludes reflectively, and contains an incredibly mixed bag of elements in between. All things told, it's one of Quentin Tarantino's most thematically ambitious features, but it's also one of his least successful films and winds up feeling a draft or two shy of the Tarantino we know and (many of us) love. I'm not sure when, exactly, this western turned locked-room mystery started to lose me a little, but I definitely never felt anything like the level of exhilaration and engagement I've felt when watching Tarantino's best movies, including his two most recent efforts, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained. The thing is, if this exact movie came from a different director, I'd probably have walked away from it thinking that that filmmaker was someone to watch going forward; it's only because it's from Tarantino that I found it kind of disappointing. Not bad, just disappointing.

Review: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)

* * *
Director: Matthew Vaughn
Starring: Colin Firth, Taron Egerton, Sammuel L. Jackson

There's James Bond and there's Austin Powers and somewhere in between there's Kingsman: The Secret Service, suave as Bond but as in on the joke as Powers. If I'm being completely honest, Kingsman is a mixed bag of things that do and don't work, with violence so literally cartoonish that it becomes off-putting fairly quickly, but every time the film starts to veer off course it finds a way to pull you back in with its nonchallantly ironic humor. It helps to have a cool as a cucumber performance by Colin Firth front and center, with a so weird it works performance by Samuel L. Jackson standing beside it, as well as healthy doses of Mark Strong and Michael Caine; Kingsman has all these things and more, which is why it ends up more on the "good" side of the scale than the "bad."

Review: Jackie Brown (1997)

* * * *
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Pam Grier, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Forster, Robert De Niro

I love Jackie Brown. It became an instant favorite when I first saw it back in 1997 and has remained my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie. Despite that, it had been a couple of years since I'd actually sat down and watched it. Sometimes in a situation like that a movie ages better in your memory than it does in actuality, but in this case Jackie Brown remains as effective and perfectly pitched as was 16 years ago. Whether this is, in fact, Tarantino's best film is probably up for debate, but I think it's certainly his most mature and grounded film - which may or may not have something to do with the fact that it's the only adaptation he's directed.

Review: Django Unchained (2012)

* * * 1/2
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Kerry Washington, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L. Jackson

If there's any one thing you can say about Quentin Tarantino as a filmmaker, it's that he always seems to be having a good time making his films, and that his joy in making a film becomes the joy of the audience in watching it. I have never seen a Tarantino movie that didn't leave me thoroughly entertained and Django Unchained is no exception. Forget about the manufactured controversy surrounding its subject matter. This is a film very much worth seeing.