A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

Director: Ava DuVernay. Cast: Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Deric McCabe, Chris Pine, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Zach Galifianakis, Michael Peña, André Holland, David Oyelowo. 109 min. Rated PG. Fantasy/Family.

Sometimes, five minutes into a movie you're thinking: this is just wrong. Idiotic dialogue, impossible coincidences, explanatory shots for self-explanatory moments (close-up of school principal's desk plaque saying ... "Principal"), all ensure this isn't an exercise in subtleties. Top that with dazzling CGI to cover up a nonsensical story, and an entirely unnecessary character traveling with our hero sister-brother duo, and you have a concoction that spells doom. The only interesting elements here are ripped off of The Neverending Story (but then the source book for Wrinkle predates Story). Maybe DuVernay should stick to documentary or documentary-style; storytelling isn't her forte.

Mo says:

Won't You Be My Neighbor? (2018)

Director: Morgan Neville. 94 min. Rated PG-13. Documentary.

Hard to believe there was a time when people like Fred Rodgers existed among us ... and had a platform - and that time was not too long ago. Hard to believe how important it was to him to protect my generation from the evils of the world, and simultaneously converse with us on the toughest subjects children could grasp. This documentary shows how before the millennials took over, there was actually a plan that went into our childhood, on what to be (and not to be) exposed to, and that Mr. Rodgers was behind that plan. Bring some napkins along.

PS: Who was the idiot who ruined the film's perfect 100% Tomatometer score?

Mo says:

The Night Eats the World (2018)

Director: Dominique Rocher. Cast: Anders Danielsen Lie, Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavant. 90 min. France. Thriller/Horror.

Opens with a simple but incredible premise: what if you, as the protagonist does, wake up some day, and realize everything you knew (people, surroundings, rules) had literally or metaphorically changed? Would you 'stay' ... or 'move'? I'd rather not spoil how the story sets the viewer up for this quandary; suffice to say it appropriately employs a famed horror element, because that is a scary question to pose. Sadly, the film doesn't carry its engaging opening through the second half, and even an ending subplot twist reminiscent of another recent film fails to save it from monotony.

Mo says:

Thelma (2017)

Director: Joachim Trier. Cast: Eili Harboe, Kaya Wilkins, Henrik Rafaelsen. 116 min. Not Rated. Norway/France/Denmark/Sweden. Horror.

Advertised as one of the obscure gems of 2017, a teenage girl with strict religious upbringing discovers she may have supernatural powers, that manifest when she's having seizures. The story is creepily well-paced, but suffers from: 1. The girl’s telekinetic abilities, sexual awakening, religious suppression, death of a loved one, ... all too heavily borrow from Carrie, and 2. Investigators in the story use strobe lights to experimentally induce a seizure in the girl with such frequency and length that if you’re not epileptic, you will be by the end of the movie. And we thought Incredibles 2 was bad.

Mo says:

Incredibles 2 (2018)

Director: Brad Bird. Cast (voices): Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Huck Milner, Catherine Keener, Bob Odenkirk, Samuel L. Jackson, Isabella Rossellini, Jonathan Banks. 118 min. Rated PG. Animation.

A good example of how over-promoting a movie can spoil the fun. The ads and trailers of this long-awaited sequel heralded two of the film's concepts: the cuteness of having a superhero baby in the family (merely expanded in some funny sequences), and a mother defined as the 'under-appreciated super-heroine', a concept which through some boring conversations that entirely fly over the kids' heads, is juxtaposed against its counterpart, the 'under-appreciated super-villainess'. Also, with some action scenes as fillers. Let's just say Pixar didn't deliver much further than the trailer.

Mo says:

The Day of the Jackal (1973)

Director: Fred Zinnemann. Cast: Edward Fox, Terence Alexander, Michael Lonsdale, Derek Jacobi, Olga Georges-Picot. 143 min. Rated PG. UK/France. Thriller.

Before the era of choppy nerve-wracking editing, before there was a John Williams to make the simplest scenes exciting, before mercenaries in movies delivered more muscle than brain-work ... there was this slow, engaging police procedural, based on Frederick Forsyth's bestseller, and directed by one of the best filmmakers of its time, about a fictional attempt on Charles De Gaulle's life. No, don't say it's an old movie. This was the foundation upon which the best spy thrillers today are made. Give yourself a chance to be mesmerized with proper film-making.

Mo says:

Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story (2017)

Director: Alexandra Dean. 88 min. Documentary.

Hedy Lamarr, the actress who ... sorry, Hedy Lamarr, the inventor whose innovations on radio wave 'frequency-hopping' for submarines during WWII laid the framework for multi-billion dollar industries such as WiFi and Bluetooth decades later - while she never received a penny. I hadn't watched any of Lamarr's films before this documentary, but saw her most famous Samson and Delilah afterwards, and realized why she'd been so wronged during her lifetime: it's extremely difficult to see past that blinding star power - let alone see a scientist. A must-see for anyone familiar with her work; movies or otherwise.

PS: Available on Netflix.

Mo says:

Unsane (2018)

Director: Steven Soderbergh. Cast: Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard, Amy Irving, Jay Pharoah, Juno Temple,  Matt Damon. 98 min. Rated R. Thriller.

Several years ago, Soderbergh said he's retiring from directing. Then he keeps directing film and TV, which is fine, but you'd think these are probably passion projects enticing enough to be pulling him out of retirement - not annoying artsy-looking psychobabble which you're not sure is about health insurance fraud, or psychotic delusions, or stalker mentality, or all the above. What you are sure, is that the movie is designed to bother the viewer, under the guise of a psychological thriller, to the very last minute. Literally the last minute.

PS: Hard to believe: the first and last time we saw Joshua Leonard, was in The Blair Witch Project as one of the lost hikers ... 20 years ago.

Mo says:

The Insult (L'insulte) (2017)

Director: Ziad Doueiri. Cast: Adel Karam, Kamel El Basha, Camille Salameh, Rita Hayek. 112 min. Rated R. France/Cyprus/Belgium/Lebanon/USA. Drama.

It's obvious why this relatively obscure film was nominated for a Foreign-Language Oscar. A refugee Palestinian construction worker hurls an insult at an extremist Christian Lebanese mechanic, and the ensuing trial mushrooms into a national crisis. Ring a bell? It all boils down to anger at why the system occasionally serves the minority (the Mexicans, African-Americans, gays, women, etc ...) over the majority (the middle class white American male), and why even a notion of a solution requires looking back into decades of smoldering animosity (the O.J. trial). You'll start contemplating how we ended up with Trump in the first place.

Mo says:

Hereditary (2018)

Director: Ari Aster. Cast: Toni Collette, Milly Shapiro, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff, Ann Dowd. 127 min. Rated R. Horror/Mystery.

Halfway into this, you think: the mental aftermaths of losing a loved one, even for an historically schizophrenic family (cleverly blurring the line between delusion and reality) may be ‘scarily’ traumatic ... but that hardly constitutes horror. Well, think again. Combined with ingenious audiovisual cues, the way the final half-hour suddenly flips the established setup on its head and delivers its unexpected and creepy ending, you’d imagine this should be taught in film school as 'horror film-making 101'. Entirely relying on viewer intelligence, Hereditary pulls it off. It had been a long time since I’d been scared in the theater.

Mo says:

MoMagic!

Adrift (2018)

Director: Baltasar Kormákur. Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin. 96 min. Rated PG-13. Biography/Adventure.

I've read this being described as "a lost-at-sea story with a tragic ending", which couldn't be a dumber description. And even though based on the trailer, I was preparing myself for a long, slow movie about how a young couple in the mid-80s did (or didn't) survive a never-ending mishap in the Pacific Ocean, and the script throws every trick in the book, including flashbacks and flash-forwards, to make this true story more interesting, ... what I wasn't prepared for was an ending twist, which instantaneously elevated my score from So-So to Mojo. Don't read anything about it - go in fresh.

Mo says:

Upgrade (2018)

Director: Leigh Whannell. Cast: Logan Marshall-Green, Harrison Gilbertson, Betty Gabriel. 95 min. Rated R. Australia. Sci-fi.

Opens as 'The Six-Million Dollar Man', or Robocop with Dock Ock's tentacles, evolves into Her and Ex Machina A.I. scares, then blasts off into the premise of one groundbreaking 1999 sci-fi - because the virtual world narcotic is less painful than the real world. As the action scenes passed by, I went from "maybe an 'upgrade' isn't too bad after all", to "... maybe an upgrade is really bad." Writer/director Whannell uses the same structure he wrote into Saw, flashing us back through the entire film for the surprise ending. We decide whether to stay awake afterward, or go to sleep.

Mo says:

MoMagic!