JoeMama's Movie Reviews

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple Starring Ralph Fiennes, Jack O'Connell, Alfie Williams, Erin Kellyman Directed by Nia DaCosta There hasn't really been a franchise as disjointed as the "28" franchise, and that's to its strength. Just like a snowflake, no two movies are the same, and that helps in the unpredictability of it. You never know where each film will take you, and spanning twenty-eight years of a Rage virus can result in different outcomes. How do those infected with the Rage virus act years after being infected? Do they entirely lose their humanity? How do they survive in the wilds, and how many are there? "28 Days Later" and "28 Weeks Later" seem to show multitudes of infected, who run wild through the streets of England biting, infecting, and killing anyone they come across, like a massive killer wave. "28 Years Later" shows a different take: there's very few infected we see, and a whole community has sprung up that bri...

Primate Starring Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant Directed by Johannes Roberts January is notorious in cinema for having movies that studios want to dump with little fanfare because hardly anyone goes to the movies after a busy holiday season and the chilling cold, but there's times where a movie comes in January that blows everyone away. A movie so good, so innovative, so unique and so fascinating that people can't help but talk about it for months to come. "Primate"...isn't one of them. However, it's more fun that I was expecting, and blew away my low expectations - but that's not saying much. Lucy (Johnny Sequovah) returns to her Hawaiian home to visit her father, successful writer Adam (Troy Kotsur) and younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and brings along some friends including her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant). She also wants to visit the other member of her family - Ben, a chimpanzee, who's been with the family fo...

Hamnet Starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn Directed by Chloe Zhao Chloe Zhao is one of cinema's most powerful directors when she's given the right material, and even does amicable work when they're not so pleasing. "Songs My Brothers Taught Me" and "The Rider" helped emerge her as a director who excels at making characters come to life in vivid reality when it's confined to a few people, and uses the landscape to create a natural feel. She continued this with "Nomadland" which earned her an Oscar for Best Director (along with Best Picture and Best Actress for Frances McDormand) that crafted McDormand's character as a believable, relatable character set against the idyllic backdrop of the American Southwest. Then she directed the MCU film "Eternals" and tried to bring her style to a big-budget spectacle, and sadly it missed the mark because she had to introduce ten new Marvel characters to an audience ...

Anaconda Starring Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn, Thandiwe Newton Directed by Tom Gormican In 1997, "Anaconda" hit theaters and had a respectable box office of over $136 million worldwide, and spawned numerous film and made-for-TV sequels, but no one really thought there'd be another on the big screen - until now. However, unlike many other movies that remake or redo the original, "Anaconda" does something different: it centers on four friends who want to remake the classic movie themselves, on a tight shoe-string budget, and also find the passion they once had for movies. It's a rousing tale filled with laugh-out-loud hilarity, and it helps that the source material isn't an obsessed-about IP that'd have fans of the original complaining. It's fun, light, has a great cast, and while it doesn't reinvent the wheel, it provides a decent ride. For his birthday, Doug McCallister (Jack Black) is surprised by his childhood friend Griff Griffen (Pa...

Song Sung Blue Starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson, Michael Imperioli, Ella Anderson Directed by Craig Brewer I feel like a broken record (get it?) when I talk about musical biopics, because I've done so twice already this year with "A Better Man" and "Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere." No other genre either hits it out of the park or fumbles as badly as the musical biopic, as it either leans too heavily on the melodrama of a hero's rise to fame with the usual suspects (drugs, alcohol, promiscuity) or glosses over pretty much everything and focuses on the music with some dramatic parts sprinkled between. Very few times do they hit that sweet center where it perfectly balances music and life, without the generic pitfalls that so many musicians seem to go through. "Song Sung Blue" is one such film - a biopic about a Wisconsin Neil Diamond interpreter band that was a statewide hit even if no one else outside the state knew of them. Mike Sardina (Hu...