Movie Reviews
What’s new to theatres and streaming this weekend: Aug 5-7
Prey is a better-than-average Predator film, Bullet Practice is an amusing mess and Easter Sunday is lazy
Prey
(Dan Trachtenberg)
The premise to Prey, a Predator prequel, is fairly interesting. The film goes again in time to the early-18th century, when Comanche individuals are already preventing European colonizers however now should wrestle with one other murderous invader. The film intently flips among the “savage” imagery and figuring out stereotypes in John McTiernan’s authentic, which solid Indigenous actor Sonny Landham in a supporting function as a soldier utilized for monitoring.
This time Amber Midthunder leads, enjoying a younger girl who takes on the intergalactic hunter along with her personal searching and monitoring expertise. The film is being celebrated for incorporating the Comanche language and getting cultural particulars proper, with Midthunder giving a muscular efficiency. However she will be able to’t wrestle Prey away from the franchise, which makes the Comanche folks and their customs really feel like decorative props in a better-than-average Predator film reasonably than absolutely fashioned characters who personal their narrative. 99 minutes. Some subtitles. Now streaming on Disney+. NNN
Bullet Practice
(David Leitch)
Bullet Practice is precisely the film you’d count on from the director of Deadpool 2 giving us his tackle a Tarantino-style motion pastiche. It’s vibrant and chaotic with loads of nods to higher and extra real Westerns, yakuza flicks and motion motion pictures that manage themselves alongside linear areas like The Raid. It virtually works as a result of the stacked solid together with Brad Pitt and Bryan Tyree Henry lean into their comedic chops whereas enjoying assassins speaking and pummelling one another to a pulp. The film deserves additional props for making Aaron Taylor-Johnson – who has all the time felt like lifeless weight in motion pictures like Kick-Ass and Godzilla – an interesting on-screen presence who really holds our curiosity up till the Bullet Practice goes off the CGI rails. 126 minutes. Now enjoying in theatres all over the place. NNN
Easter Sunday
(Jay Chandrashekar)
True Lies star Tia Carrere performs a petty however adoring tita (aunty) in Easter Sunday. That’s a savvy little bit of casting within the film starring and produced by comedian Jo Koy. He’s paying loving homage to the Filipino actor who got here earlier than him, resurrecting her big-screen profession in a job the place she will be able to lean into her personal tradition and never be restricted by a white male gaze that always exoticized her.
That’s the very best factor about Easter Sunday, which is in any other case a lazy, aimless and irritating comedy the place Koy merely performs a model of himself. The film, sloppily directed by Tremendous Trooper’s Chandrashekar, recycles gags from Koy’s wonderful stand-up that revolve round his overbearing mom (Lydia Gaston) and eccentric prolonged household, but it surely makes little effort to adapt them into an involving or coherent narrative. Easter Sunday is happy to simply be the type of haunt film that Adam Sandler so typically will get to make, after which it pats itself on the again for merely present. 99 minutes. Now enjoying in theatres all over the place. NN
Additionally opening theatrically this week
I Love My Dad
James Morosini, Patton Oswalt; directed by Morosini.
Additionally new to streaming
Luck
Simon Pegg, Eva Noblezada, Jane Fonda, Lil Rey Howery; directed Peggy Holmes
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