The View From The Mountain

Warning, there are spoilers in this review. Please wait until you have seen The Last Jedi before you read this. I went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi feeling pretty confident that it would be good. This latest chapter in the (hopefully) neverending Star Wars saga was directed by Rian Johnson, who also did the superb Looper and The Brothers Bloom --the latter being one of my favorite films, and not just because Rachel Weisz co-stars in it. I was hoping Johnson could deliver a new Star Wars film with this sequel that would be more satisfying by simply not being another stealth remake--like what the last third of The Force Awakens turned into (don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed that film, though). But, having now seen it, I can say that The Last Jedi was far more than satisfying. It was magnificent. The great thing about The Last Jedi is that Rian Johnson takes whatever preconceptions the viewer has and flips them right over. Just when you think a character or a scene is

Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olson are probably best known for their roles in the Marvel superhero movies as Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch, respectively. But they team up again in Wind River to play more down to earth characters in an earnest drama that’s set in the wintry mid-west--and it turns out to be a riveting thriller, as well. Renner plays Corey Lambert, a veteran tracker with the Fish and Wildlife Service. Whenever a wolf, a bear, or any kind of predator gets too close for comfort with human society, it’s Corey’s job to track it down and kill it. This is what he’s doing in the mountainous, snowy terrain of Wyoming when he comes across the body of a young Native American woman. When he calls the authorities, they call in Jane Banner (Olsen), a rookie FBI agent who’s normally stationed in Las Vegas. The victim turns out to be a teenager whom Corey knows, a girl named Natalie who was the best friend of his deceased daughter. The autopsy shows that Natalie had been sexually assaulte

Twenty years after the release of his The Fifth Element , director Luc Besson regales us with another imaginative science fiction film. But where The Fifth Element was from his own fertile imagination, Valerian and the City Of A Thousand Planets is based on a French comic book series that’s been running for half a century, now, making it older than Star Wars , and almost as old as Star Trek . Valerian was a big bomb when it was released this past August--but unlike most big-budget tent pole films that underperform at the box office, Valerian didn’t deserve to be ignored by audiences. Starring Dane DeHaan and Carla Delevingne as a pair of interstellar space agents, Valerian is visual eye candy in the best sense of the word. Opening on the beaches of an alien planet, with a fully realized alien civilization lounging by the ocean until a cataclysmic event ruins their day, the viewer is immersed in this imaginative science fiction universe that’s just as vividly created as the Star W