What’s It About

A criminal plans to fake his death for insurance money while framing his wife’s lover. His wife plots to kill him for real and take it all. Both race to outmanoeuvre each other in a deadly battle of wits.

What’s It About

A team of doctors embarks on a local mission in the Amazon rainforest, but it soon becomes clear that not everybody or everything is happy to see them. Their sudden appearance draws the attention of an animal predator, the Boiúna.

What’s It About

It follows a group of childhood friends who reunite when their old group leader, an undercover CIA agent played by John Cena, returns. They get pulled into a wild, global chase to stop a world disaster and save the day.

What’s It About

Friends on a late-night food run become trapped on an infinite highway with otherworldly terrors lurking beyond. Confined in their Jeep Cherokee, they must decide whether to accept their fate or attempt escape.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Four friends climb into a Jeep Cherokee for one last drive together before life sends them in different directions. That is how It Ends begins, and it is also how the movie traps you right along with them. Written and directed by Alexander Ullom in his first feature film, It Ends turns a simple night drive into a long, slow study of what happens when time stops moving forward.  Tyler (Mitchell Cole), James (Phinehas Yoon), Day (Akira Jackson), and Fisher (Noah Toth) grew up together, and this drive is supposed to be a small goodbye before their paths split for good. They pass the time asking each other silly hypothetical questions, teasing one another the way old friends do. Then Tyler misses a turn. When he steps out of the car to check the road, a swarm of screaming strangers rushes out of the trees. The group gets away, barely, but the turn they needed is gone, and the road just keeps stretching out ahead of them. The car never runs low on gas. Nobody gets hungry or tired. And every time someone steps outside for longer than ninety seconds, the mob comes running again.  A setup like that could have gone in a hundred cheap directions, but Ullom skips the easy scares. There is no single monster hunting this group, and there is barely any blood on screen. The R rating comes only from language. Instead, the fear grows out of the situation itself: four people stuck together with no answers, no way out, and no idea how long any of this will last. That kind of stuff sticks with you longer than a jump scare ever could.  What really holds the movie together is how much weight it gives its four leads. This is not the kind of horror movie where characters exist just to be picked off one at a time. Each person in that car gets a real inner life, and the four young actors carry that job well. Yoon plays James as someone who needs the world to make sense, a guy convinced that if he thinks hard enough, he can crack the code of this impossible road. Watching that belief slowly work against him is some of the strongest acting in the film. Jackson gives Day a quiet heaviness that comes into focus bit by bit, hinting at a hard chapter of her life that the road now forces back to the surface. Toth brings a sense of humor to Fisher, adding a touch of lightness in the worst moments for the group, while Cole portrays Tyler as a frustrated person who took a different road than his peers but still thinks he didn’t choose wisely. Luckily, none of the characters are reduced to stereotypes as they have arguments, jokes, and breakdowns, and what’s more important, the director trusts his actors enough to let everything play out in full detail.   As days passed and blended into one another in the car, It Ends becomes not just a typical chase film but a thoughtful character study. The friends find little things to do, starting from screaming and chatting and finishing with sitting together in peace. When things start to change, like those strange people running at them, the group grabs onto it as a possible sign that escape is close. This new style of bare minimum horror has been showing up a lot lately, in movies like Backrooms and games like Exit 8, where the real threat is not a creature but a space that refuses to end. It Ends is like that, but but different because it cares more about the people trapped inside the loop than the loop itself. This movie raises some genuine questions and never seems to hurry to answer them. So, what do you owe your fellow company when things are going nowhere? Is it better to keep looking for a way out of it, or is it better to get used to living in this situation? By depriving his characters and the audience of food, sleep, and any grasp on time, Ullom makes them face these questions without any escape.  Visually, cinematographers Jazleana Jones and Evan Draper make smart use of a tight, limited space. Sunlight makes the woods outside the car look inviting, almost like a normal afternoon drive, which makes it even more unsettling once you remember that stepping too far from that Jeep could get somebody killed. Over time, the inside of the car starts to look lived-in too, covered in inside jokes and scattered belongings, turning the vehicle into something between a shelter and a prison. Small choices like these do a lot of work in keeping a story that takes place almost entirely inside one Jeep from ever feeling flat or still.  Of course, It Ends has its rough patches. When the shock of the first act wears off, the story becomes tedious as it stretches itself thin, and the middle section starts to feel like an overlong episode of a show that already made its point twenty minutes earlier. The wandering hordes attacking the friends never feel like a real threat past the first couple of scares, which drains tension from later scenes that need it most. Ullom also leans on a habit of switching aspect ratios throughout the film, and rather than adding meaning, it mostly just calls attention to itself and pulls you out of the moment. A little more menace from the world outside the car would have gone a long way toward keeping the pressure on through the back half.  Despite its issues, It’s sure to have a huge following, making it one of this year’s most interesting debuts in the horror genre. It doesn’t use cheap tricks to scare the audience but instead creates a sense of tension throughout the film and delivers on that through the actors’ performances, who do not allow the concept to overshadow their characters. It’s not as good as either Obsession or Backrooms, but it will surely stay in your mind long after the credits roll, since that’s what a film based on unanswered questions should do.

OUR RATING – AN UNANSWERED 5.5

What’s It About

In Jumanji: Open World, the premise flips: instead of humans getting sucked into the video game, the game breaks out of its console and leaks into the real world. The iconic avatars (played by Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, and Karen Gillan) materialize in reality, stuck in a glitchy “demo mode,” forcing Spencer, his friends, and family to step up and dive back into the game to stop the two realities from merging completely.

What’s It About

When a U.S. Navy pilot on a top-secret mission during the Cold War gets trapped behind enemy lines, his only chance at survival is to form an alliance with an eccentric ex-KGB agent.

What’s It About

In 2006, To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen sets out to make television history.

What’s It About

Bane blows up Arkham Asylum, releasing the entire rogue’s gallery into Gotham City. Refusing to sleep, Batman pushes himself to absolute physical and mental exhaustion, trying to round up every escaped criminal. A weakened Bruce Wayne faces the unstoppable mastermind Bane, leading up to the historic breaking of the Bat.

What’s It About

Stuck on the naughty list after forgetting the true meaning of Christmas, Santa tries to save a local mall from a ruthless gangster and his squad of goons.

WHAT’S IT ABOUT

Performer Rudy Ray Moore develops an outrageous character named Dolemite, who becomes an underground sensation and star of a kung-fu, anti-establishment film that could make or break Moore.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

Rudy Ray Moore spent years chasing a spotlight that Hollywood refused to hand him. Dolemite Is My Name tells the story of how he finally built that spotlight with his own hands, and it might be the best decision Eddie Murphy has made in his career. This 2019 Netflix biopic, directed by Craig Brewer and written by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, does more than just retell a funny true story. It shows what happens when a Black performer stops waiting for someone else to write him a real part and decides to write one for himself. That idea sits at the center of everything good about this movie. Moore, played by Murphy, works a dead-end job at a record store in the early 1970s. He is middle-aged, broke, and watching younger comedians grab the stage time he wants for himself. Every door in the entertainment business stays shut to him, not because he lacks talent, but because nobody in charge sees him as worth the risk. So he stops asking. He records his own comedy albums, sells them out of his car trunk, and eventually funds his own kung-fu blaxploitation movie with money he scrapes together from friends and family. The film he makes, also called Dolemite, is rough around the edges. Some of it barely holds together. None of that matters, because it is his, made his way, for an audience Hollywood had been ignoring for years. That is the real story critics keep circling back to. Several reviews point out that Moore’s rise was not a fluke or a lucky break. It was pure self-determination, a Black entertainer building an audience out of nothing because the mainstream industry would not open a door for him. Watching Murphy play that hunger feels personal, since Murphy’s own career has swung between huge hits and long stretches where Hollywood did not know what to do with him either. He is not just performing Rudy Ray Moore. He is channeling every performer who ever got told there was no room for their kind of story. Murphy steals the show, and it’s probably his best work in years. The critics have made some serious noise about this being his best performance, and they aren’t wrong. In this role, Murphy is boisterous and spectacular on the stage, but also quiet and somewhat terrified on the inside, especially in the scenes where he worries that the trick might be played against him instead of for him. This is what makes the character compelling. This is not just Murphy doing a celebrity imitation, which he has done a lot in the past decades. This is him creating a character that gives him a chance to be funny and fragile at the same time, something that many of his movie roles have failed to do. Murphy doesn’t carry the weight of this film on his shoulders alone, though. Da’Vine Joy Randolph portrays Lady Reed, a woman that Moore finds on tour and goes on to be given a real part in his film, instead of just a background role. Many reviewers pointed her out as a scene stealer, and she definitely deserves this praise. Wesley Snipes plays a washed-up actor who becomes a reluctant director, and makes sure to steal his scenes without giving any effort.  Keegan-Michael Key, Mike Epps, Craig Robinson and Tituss Burgess complete Moore’s odd band of amateur filmmakers, and bring at least one special moment into the story. In fact, this is what defines the film that makes use of its black cast as nothing more than a touch of color and that which gives its cast importance in the plot. It’s important to keep in mind what blaxploitation meant back then. During that period, white critics rejected these films as cheap and bad movies, but black moviegoers really loved them since they saw people on the screen speaking, dressing, and acting in ways similar to the way people did in their neighborhoods. Rudy Ray Moore understood this better than any Hollywood executive did. His records and films were based on a style of rhyming and unapologetic comedy that made him famous. Rappers have been claiming that he was one of the first people to implement many styles of rap for decades, and the movie emphasizes this connection. The look of the movie helps sell all of it. Costume designer Ruth E. Carter, who later won an Oscar for Black Panther, dresses this world in loud, glowing 1970s style that never feels like a costume party. It feels lived in, which matters for a story about people fighting to be taken seriously while dressed like the flashiest people in the room. In the end, Dolemite Is My Name ends up where it’s supposed to end up. The film is about a Black man who was sick and tired of everyone saying his story was a lame one; he decided to tell it himself, regardless of how little money he had or how unpolished the final product was. But that isn’t merely enjoyable movie-watching. It’s also a reminder of what the representation means only if it’s accompanied with context – when a person gets to tell their own story instead of being reduced to an extra in someone else’s. Rudy Ray Moore knew that a few decades before Hollywood understood it, and Eddie Murphy delivers a great performance in the role of Rudy.

OUR RATING – A NON-HOLLYWOOD 8