Godzilla

The presence of two gigantic destructive monsters competitively reawakens the mighty Godzilla, perviously resting in his or her oceanic layer, content and comfortable, in its overflowing radioactive abundance.

Secrets have been kept from the people of Japan, and one man's overwhelming quest to ecolocute them, sets his son on the path to heroic indentation.

Project Monarch has known about the existence of these ancient beasts for decades and has been assiduously researching their origins, attempting to understanding what might be their purpose.

When it becomes clear that aspects of said purpose threaten the longevity of prosperous American cities, the characters hear the kitschy call.

Pinnacled to pressure.

If at one time in your life you found yourself watching every Godzilla film you could find, Gareth Edwards's Godzilla doesn't disappoint.

It's, pretty awful, intermixing enough cheesy sentimentality to settle anyone's disputes concerning the hyperactivity of microwaved plutonics.

But this is what's to be expected from a film respectfully paying homage to its amusingly light predecessors, like a refreshing glass of chilled mountain dew, stricken yet satisfying, all the way through.

Dr. Ishiro Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) impresses.

Some of the best deliveries I've heard in a blockbuster for a while.

How I looked forward to his next line with unfiltered anticipation.

The scene where the troops skydive into San Francisco is incredible.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Evidently, cause and effect temporally deducing, internal philosophical differences debating an approach, the struggle to survive polarizing its parameters, the fact remains that a choice was made, its destructive consequences perspiring an end game, a solution transporting a stabilized atrophy, back to the source, to realign its origins.

Smoothly and shockingly aspiring to First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past rivetingly integrates their two timelines, flexibly intertwining the old with the new, investing the best of both worlds with Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).

Harnessing irrepressible elasticities.

Magneto's (Michael Fassbender/Ian McKellen) might-is-right response continues to rebel against Professor X's (James McAvoy/Patrick Stewart) republic, as both are given ample contraceptives, their ideals tumultuously tested, by acts of genocidal supervillainy.

Perceived threats, prejudiced itineraries, Magneto's malignment, Professor X's stand.

Why difference has to often negatively preoccupy powers-that-be doesn't make sense.

Such attitudes can turn potentially productive community members into bitter antagonists, generations of Magnetos, time after time after time.

A cultural framework open to alternatives multiplies the conditions through which it can innovate and progress.

Infinite combinations and constructions.

Limitlessly inducing.

The film's really well done.

What a beginning.

Neighbours

The questions of how loud one can party is tempered by bourgeois infiltrations as a rowdy fraternity moves in next door to a married couple in Nicholas Stoller's Neighbours.

The fraternity is well versed in the Dionysian arts.

Their goal is to throw a brazen bash nutso enough to ensure their enshrinement on their wall of fame.

Their neighbours, the Radners, are not impressed.

Engaged in the practice of child-rearing, and hoping to maximize what they can of a good night's sleep, they utilize logic and persuasion in an attempt to famish the insatiability.

Their plan backfires however, leading them to employ alternative methods to achieve their sought after repose.

What follows is a diabolical exchange of quintessential quid pro quo, devious in its conceptual understatements, wherein the past congenitally confronts history.

Robust and adroitly wound.

This isn't a typical frat-boy romp.

Residing in its reels are unexpected lessons regarding the cultivation of one's career and the absurdity of dipsomanic progressions.

Teams frat and bourgeois are therefore divided into the successful and the stumbling, as the mayhem imbues.

Neighbours is somewhat tame in its gambits, but these tame gambits lay a reasonably ecstatic foundation, upon which multiple avenues of inquiry merge, to simultaneously question while enabling.

Embligmatic clues.

It's difficult to say who's having more fun.

Le règne de la beauté (An Eye for Beauty)

With the passing of the years, conjugal ecstasies having become strictly formal, extracurricular assignations suddenly appear enlightening, to two young architects tectonically seeking closure.

Life goes on afterwards, routines residing in recreational parlance, sports celebrating individual merits receiving spectacular extensions, taking on constitutional communal attributes, as the seasons change.

Denys Arcand's Le règne de la beauté (An Eye for Beauty) is a mature film, shrewdly exercising the interrelationship between stability and desire, focusing primarily on a couple living North of Québec City, the incredible beauty of their surrounding landscape, and the traditions of lifelong friends and family.

Do English Canadians really seem that pretentious?

They certainly aren't eating chicken wings.

People don't shop at IKEA?

How much money do you have to have not to shop there?

The film thematically picks up where L'âge des ténèbres left off, Toronto and rural Québec functioning as counterpoints, reservedly climactic events taking place in Québec City.

There's a chilling moment when Luc Sauvageau (Éric Bruneau) meets Lindsay Walker (Melanie Merkosky) there while his wife Stéphanie (Mélanie Thierry) considers suicide back home for unrelated reasons, trickery in the foreshadow, smashing insomniatic guilt, divine connections abstractly suggested thereafter.

A sub/conscious account of individuality, critiquing while elevating bourgeois attainments, Le règne de la beauté matriculates a reasonable desire, subjugates caution, then exculpates.

La Danza de la Realidad

Alejandro Jodorowsky revisits his childhood in La Danza de la Realidad, where the imagination selectively sways and protectively converges, inconclusive conflict coordinating innocent essentials, a Stalinesque father (Brontis Jodorowsky) bringing the pain, familial embarrassment and shame aggrandizing his persecution, little Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) responding with ardour, confusing projections of the masculine violently suppressing his sense of wonder, various community members avuncularly interacting, his poetic mother (Pamela Flores), nurturing his ability to relate.

Like weirdsville on steroids, the poetic and pugilistic merge to forge one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, as he crafts his first film in over two decades, fantasy fascinatingly swathing, the concrete, cruel, and confiscated.

His mother only sings.

Communism is comedically yet fatalistically skewered.

Superpowers are enlisted to fight fascism.

Between these extremes, individuality speaks up, as the feminine attempts to nest her husband's flight from himself.

Natal helpless inquisitive comedic old-world zealous tragedy permeates the film's practical ideology, as politics and religion challenge a commitment to child-rearing, the application of a big picture cause to a singular immigrant family entices, its contradictions featuring its humanism, creativity conversed as its fulcrum.

Difficult times at points for young Alejandro.

What a survivor.

The Railway Man

Insurmountable trauma, disturbingly deconstructing any stable sense of self, recurring, regenerating, relapsing, biding its time, crocodiling in crucible, beyond sublimatic recourse, entrenched and ravenous, purloined to renew, its helpless, caustic, blight.

Eric Lomax (Colin Firth/Jeremy Irvine) survived systematic torture in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II to return to Britain a free man, yet the horrific memories have left him sealed and solitary.

Love's invigorating warmth can't help him overcome, and his desperate wife Patti (Nicole Kidman) seeks the aid of his comrades of war to find a sustainable solution.

As luck would have it, the whereabouts of one of his assaulter's accomplices have been discovered, such knowledge providing him with the potential to pursue a just cause.

Hesitant and confused, The Railway Man struggles with this burden, before submitting to the inevitable, and retributively withstanding.

It jumps between the present and the past, the length of the wartime scenes compounding Mr. Lomax's illness, suggesting that he is capable of circumventing its madness for a time, before its destabilizing will pathologically lurches.

I prefer it when filmmakers regularly intercut psychologically debilitating lesions but Jonathan Teplitzky's method speaks to Mr. Lomax's strength, and brilliance.

The Railway Man is a rational film, examining the affects of war on a highly logical mind.

It therefore lacks the emotional depth I'm used to seeing in films exploring the aftershocks of war, triumphing in its temperance, resolving through reason.

Transcendence

Transcendence is kind of a flop.

But it is fun to think about what happens in the film.

It explores the possibilities of uploading one's consciousness online and then existing cyberexistentially.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) and his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) are conducting the research.

An underground organization fears their pursuits and launches a strike with the goal of obliterating them.

They hit Mr. Caster with a poisonous bullet which will kill him if he can't find a way to put said research into action.

Which he does, uploading himself, becoming a socially conscious superbeing thereafter.

His might, strength, reach and power then alarm law enforcement agencies previously dedicated to preserving his life.

Identity becomes an issue: is this superbeing Will Caster or a different person altogether?

Law enforcement reps begin to work with the still determined underground organization to break through the impregnable infrastructure Caster has created.

He's found a way to use nanotechnology to both regenerate physical material almost immediately after its bombardment/disintegration and save the lives of terminally ill individuals. 

Whose minds he then enters and whose bodies he can then control, turning them into his loyal zombie soldiers.

Loyal zombie soldiers are his undoing; he never should have interfered with his patient's abilities to think and act freely.

He does though, and doesn't bother to share his plans to use his power to solve manifold environmental issues, an objective brought about by his love for Evelyn, who feels guilty for having worked with the resistance after discovering this fact, and its unfortunate benevolent despotism.

Transcendence suggests that unlimited secretive superpower may unite institutional and rebellious forces since they will likely both be frightened by its omnipresence, and will therefore, try to stop it.

There are a lot of great ideas in the film, and some great lines, but this one's a definite rental, that can be paused from time to time to acquire additional snacks.

Only Lovers Left Alive

Utilizing a peculiar rhetorical strategy, Jim Jarmusch romanticizes cynicism and satisfaction through naturalistic, artistic, appetitive, and historical entanglements, engendered and coded by the discussions of an aged vampire couple, a perennially rebellious scamp, and a literary legend, the men weary and woeful, the women full of life, united in their unyielding craving, for fresh, universal, blood.

Living in Tangiers, L.A., and Detroit.

Exploring the depths of sundry melodic intersections for centuries while observing disenchanting impacted awakenings have led Adam (Tom Hiddleston) to orchestrate various funeral arrangements, thereby expressing his enduring distaste, intravenously harmonizing his scrutiny.

Partner Eve (Tilda Swinton) remains more upbeat, still observing the world with an urbane reconnaissance, versatile and prim, eruditely beaming.

One's resounding disaffection materializes the novel, while the other's fascination with the unexpected, the appearance of a skunk for instance, impresses it more literally.

More could have been done with Ava's (Mia Wasikowska) character.

The script interrogates pretension by calling into question time's passing to the point where ego and redirection become facets of a limitlessly cloyed perpetuity.

Brothering a thrust.

With recourse to the enviable.

Uvanga

A single mother and her son travel from Montréal to Igloolik, Nunavut, after the passing of his father, so that young Tomas (Lukasi Forrest) can meet said father's extended family for the first time.

The midnight sun illuminates their visit as familial expansiveness and jealous grudges acquaint him with a different set of cultural codes.

He's curious and chill, open-minded and active, these factors enabling a productive immersion in the North's différence, supportively kindled by his loving relatives.

And problematized by hostile trouble makers.

Uvanga frankly blends the harsh with the heartwarming, synthesizing the fearful and the awestruck in a diverse communal intergenerational resiliency.

Tomas's father's death is a subject of controversy.

His mom's (Marianne Farley as Anna) decision to leave is questioned.

Her return instigates adversarial purges.

A curative step, for the advancement of healing.

At first, I thought the scenes were passing-by too quickly, but this technique allows Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Ivalu to densely pack their multifaceted narrative with a varied cast from different walks of life, motivations and realities resultantly receiving accentuated depth, thereby directly rebuking any claims of oversimplification.

Situating a mother's grief and a son's acculturations within a lively mosaic of piquant reach.

To-the-point easy to comprehend consistently sharp conversation.

That's not so easy to pull off.