Reviews in Short: September 2018

Baby Driver

 

I can picture young Tom Cruise and young Steven Spielberg teaming up to make a film like this 30 years ago. The result might have been a popcorn classic. Unfortunately, young Ansel Elgort as getaway driver “Baby” lacks Cruise’s charisma, and filmmaker Edgar Wright seems primarily interested in action scenes.

The action scenes are pretty good – especially Wright’s clever use of a synchronized soundtrack.  But there is also a lot of mundane exposition filling the gaps between chases. Baby Driver is an agreeable ride for a couple hours. But it ain’t no popcorn classic. Release: 2017 Grade: B

 

**

 

Hereditary

 

Hereditary reminds me of 2014’s The Babadook: Both films are creepy, absorbing family dramas … but it’s a stretch to hail either as a modern horror classic. In Hereditary, Toni Collette plays a cursed mother who is besieged – to put it mildly – by mental illness and violent tragedy in her small, tight-knit family. All of this doom and gloom is detailed in a superb first hour. But, as in Babadook, the “horror” that dominates the second hour is simply not that original, nor that scary. Release: 2018 Grade: B

 

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