Uncut Gems (2019)

December 23, 2019 by Mike Hicks in Film Review

The Safdie brothers take these seemingly uninteresting stories and film them “guerilla style” on the streets of New York, giving them an atmosphere of heightened intensity. What is happening through most of the film, when broken down, wouldn’t even be worthy of the exposition heavy dialogue scenes of an action movie. But the way they are filmed and edited with the heavy booming drone of the electronic sound track creates a sense of urgency that makes the audience feel like they are witnessing this action-packed chase be unveiled right before their eyes.

Doctor Sleep (2019)

November 08, 2019 by Mike Hicks in Film Review

This film succeeds in many aspects. The ensemble cast are all great and there are no real week spots. The scenes that were flashbacks to 1980 when the events of its predecessor took place, it was refreshing that they used actors made-up to look, sound and act like Jack Nicholson’s Jack Torrence (Henry Thomas) and Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrence (Alex Essoe) rather than falling into the, frankly, boring trend of using CGI to recreate them. It made for a less distracting experience.

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

October 18, 2019 by Mike Hicks in Film Review

At the dawn the 1930s, I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to show a realistic depiction of war. With the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as The Hays Code) having been adopted by most motion picture studios in 1930, this film came out at the very beginning of the controversial code’s inaugural year. That, on top of the general distaste for anything anti-war within the first 50 years of the 20th century, it is safe to assume that many elements of this film were digested with much scrutiny. But that is part of what makes this film so phenomenal.