Saturday 30 October 2021

Candyman

 A proper Candyman movie, which is to say a slightly pretentious slasher, leaning into the pretension by being set partially in the modern art world, with maybe a teensy bit of messy plotting near the end but many effective gore moments

Antlers

 A grimly effective little rural horror story. If elements are familiar, and Graeme Greene has certainly done this "explain Native American Folklore To White People" role before, Keri Russell and Jesse Plemons are a step above the average cast in this kind of thing and the undertones of residual trauma and poverty play out well

Friday 29 October 2021

Halloween Kills

 Middling, attempts to have an idea about mob justice that is kinda fumbled in the execution, takes a lot of side angles and doesn't really live up even to its immediate predecessor

Riders of Justice

 A goofy mix of revenge action, grief drama and geek comedy in a distinctly Danish way. Mickelson is our action hero aided and abetted by a trio of probability geeks on the titular biker gang responsible for his wifes death

Thursday 28 October 2021

Shang Chi and the Ten Rings

A pretty solid marvel take on Chinese cinema cliches with many grand fight sequences and a Hey There Daddy called Razorfist. Shang Chi himself is a little dull, constantly dragging the film into flashbacks that don't help to flesh out the character so much as just accumulate detail and give us the same dull character played by younger actors. Awkwafina does decent scene stealing and some of the marvel in-references drag the film down slightly (yes the events of Endgame were huge but at this point pretty much every subsequent Marvel product has references to it - time to stop looking back and start looking forward - admittedly this may not have been as much of a problem if original release schedules were followed but at this point we're two and a half years on and still bogged down in this)