I should’ve known from the opening sequence that I was tiptoeing around manure. Watching Vince Vaughn destroy a car with his fists was a dead giveaway. The dry conversation with Jennifer Carpenter felt like an exercise in Acting 101. But the sheer audacity to create one-note characters, flat dialogue, and laughable violence is appalling, given the fact that the movie rates so high. Whatever the critics are smoking, someone tell them I’d like a toke. Nevertheless, I chuckled my ass off for most of the 132 minute run time. So bad, so bad. If you want to laugh at something that’s not comedy, give this a shot. 

Over the course of a nearly five-decade career in film, Steven Spielberg has utilized many tricks to help draw an audience into his stories. The problem with The Post is that it features all of those tricks at once, resulting in an atonal mish-mash. Every scene is either a tracking shot or a dramatic push-in that screams “WE’RE GETTING MERYL ANOTHER OSCAR AND THERE’S NOT A DAMN THING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT”, which renders a relevant story inert.

Also features pandering asides to the Trump era and the women’s movement that might as well be catnip to Academy voters.

As with The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, Golden Globe-nominee The Breadwinner boasts simplistically breathtaking animation. But its true beauty lies in the heart of its story. After her father is arrested, a young girl named Parvana cuts her hair, disguising herself as a boy, to save her family from starvation. Equally moving and at times heartbreaking—a scene where Parvana’s mother is beaten for being outdoors during the day brought tears to my eyes—The Breadwinner reminds us of the importance of family and standing up for what is morally right in the face of adversity.

Unconcerned with genre, Hostiles instead grapples with the enormity of Western Expansion. Scott Cooper’s methodical character study finds Captain Joseph Blocker (Christian Bale) tasked with returning a cancer-ridden Cheyenne Chief (Wes Studi) back to his people’s valley in Montana. Along the way, his escort rescues Rosalie Quaid (Rosamund Pike), whose family was massacred. Although beautifully lensed and expertly acted, Hostiles’ second act meanders and features a contrived final confrontation. Yet, the sum of its parts proves the Western’s heart still beats, even as it goes out in a good way as Blocker wishes for Yellow Hawk as he nears death. 

IFC Midnight’s Devil’s Gate earns the title of First Bad Horror Film of 2018. The film follows an FBI agent (Amanda Schull) and deputy sheriff (Shawn Ashmore) as they investigate the disappearance of a mother and son. Things get weird from there. Aside from a strong booby trap kill within the first ten minutes and passable creature effects, a weak script full of religious and extraterrestrial clichés that don’t gel, stilted acting, and God-awful color timing—seriously, skins tones look like Hellboy for half the movie—bring down this junkship of a film with no chance to phone home.

Phantom Thread, at its heart, is about control—the lengths we will go to grasp it and who we choose to yield it to. Luckily, control is what Paul Thomas Anderson does best. Don’t let the first half of this movie, which pretends to be about a fashion designer (Daniel Day-Lewis, brilliant for, supposedly, the last time here) who takes in a young waitress turned model (Vicky Krieps, brilliant for the first time here), fool you—Anderson is spinning a fiendish yarn, with surprises so dark they make 2017’s other provocateurs, Darren Aronofsky and Yorgos Lanthimos, look like rank amateurs.

The Greatest Showman has all the razzle dazzle you’d expect, but was as fake as the original circus P.T. Barnum put together. The film was too short to tackle the complexities of the Barnum story, using catchy tunes to distract from the fact that there was no real story. While the song with Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman was the duet we never knew we needed, the music was not enough to carry the film and the fact that they abandoned character development and plot. Even at the height of conflict, the film failed to be ‘the greatest show’.