Before you all get your panties in a bunch, I will be seeing Spider-Man: No Way Home in the next couple of days. It just didn’t make the cut this weekend. But, the films that did make the cut were all pretty dang good, and two of them were supporting independent film!
C’mon C’mon – Due to some personal circumstances, I wasn’t able to catch this indie darling last weekend, as it finally made it’s way to a theater near me. This past weekend I finally sat down and watched this black and white family drama. Johnny gets a call from his estranged sister, Viv, asking if he’ll watch her son Jesse while she helps her ex-husband dealing with mental illness. Johnny seemingly has never spent any time with his nephew before, but their bond is instant and they go through every possible emotion before the film is over. Were I a more sensitive individual, I probably would have cried a few times. Very heart-warming film that I recommend watching before Belfast, honestly.
Nightmare Alley – After falling in love with The Shape of Water just like the Academy, I have been eagerly awaiting Guillermo del Toro’s next directorial effort. At a glance, a film starring Bradley Cooper, Toni Colette, Rooney Mara, Cate Blanchett, and Willem Dafoe seems like a no-brainer, but it was the rest of the cast that popped up that really sold it! Really though, it was Cooper’s film and everybody else was just featured in it. It was a fairly compelling crime thriller taking place at a traveling circus and all their tricks. Cooper plays Stan, a pretty rotten person, as far as I can tell, who’s whole life is basically one big con. You have to know it’s not going to work out well for him in the end, but the few twists saved for the last thirty minutes or so were delightful!
The Unforgiveable – Even though Sandra Bullock starred in this dramatic thriller, the name just didn’t really leave me feeling all that inspired to watch the film. But I did anyways, and I’m glad I did! Similar to Nightmare Alley, there were some twists at the end that really left me surprised! Bullock plays Ruth, a woman who’s spent the last twenty years in prison for killing a cop. As she starts re-entering the world, she picks up two jobs, kind of gets a boyfriend, and has bits of awful flashbacks to the events that led to her incarceration. Of course, we have to wait until the end to see the whole thing, but the main objective of the film is Ruth trying to see her sister again. A sister, I might add, that doesn’t know she exists! The trauma of that event twenty years ago has left those memories suppressed to her. As this film went on, I was really eager to see how everything was going to play out. Part of me thought it wasn’t going to be a happy ending, but it was happy enough. Highly recommend!