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Friday, June 10, 2016
Movie Reviews: Warcraft, The Conjuring 2, Maggie's Plan, Now You See Me 2
Dheepan, Almost Holy
Posted By Scott Renshaw on June 10, 2016, 9:21 AM
A summer of sequels continues with follow-ups both scary and theoretically magical, plus a 2015 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize winner and a big-budget fantasy mess.
The video-game adaptation Warcraft offers a lot of hacking, slashing and spell-casting, occasionally interrupted by characters talking about hacking, slashing and spell-casting. Maggie's Plan concocts a romantic roundelay of contemporary New Yorkers that seems to want us to find them all charming, rather than kind of pathetic. Jacques Audiard's 2015 Cannes Film Festival winner Dheepan tells an immigrant refugee story that's wonderfully unique, until starts to seem like a set-up for an American remake. The documentary Almost Holy has a fascinating subject in a Ukrainian pastor on a mission to save kids from drugs, but erratic editing makes it too hard to stay focused on any single narrative.
Eric D. Snider finds The Conjuring 2 (pictured) covering a lot of similar ground as the scary original, and remains just as scary while doing so.
In this week's feature review, Now You See Me 2 manages to avoid at least some of the things that made the original so awful.
The video-game adaptation Warcraft offers a lot of hacking, slashing and spell-casting, occasionally interrupted by characters talking about hacking, slashing and spell-casting. Maggie's Plan concocts a romantic roundelay of contemporary New Yorkers that seems to want us to find them all charming, rather than kind of pathetic. Jacques Audiard's 2015 Cannes Film Festival winner Dheepan tells an immigrant refugee story that's wonderfully unique, until starts to seem like a set-up for an American remake. The documentary Almost Holy has a fascinating subject in a Ukrainian pastor on a mission to save kids from drugs, but erratic editing makes it too hard to stay focused on any single narrative.
Eric D. Snider finds The Conjuring 2 (pictured) covering a lot of similar ground as the scary original, and remains just as scary while doing so.
In this week's feature review, Now You See Me 2 manages to avoid at least some of the things that made the original so awful.
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