Movie Magazine (AKA "Run-on sentences: The blog nobody asked for")

2020: Year of the Corona.  It was the terrible year that practically killed movie theaters and threatened to annihilate cinema as we know it (and by "annihilate cinema" we mean exchanging the entire moviegoing experience for streaming subpar Netflix content at best right from the comfort of your own living room).  Major movie productions had come to a screeching halt and theatrical releases had been delayed indefinitely. It was the year that s treaming services sky-rocketed to new heights providing endless chum for zombified citizens held hostage to #QuarantineLife, and suddenly the  very notion of "cinema" and whatever the hell it ever meant had transformed overnight. Moviegoers were now considered streamers living in a black-and-white world where Netflix subscribers clamored for The Queen's Gambit  rather than Mank (and in pitting an attractive series about youthful chess players against a two-plus hour colorless movie about crusty white men yelling about old...

"Don't try to understand it. Feel it" The most Nolany Nolan movie ever made * * * * * Like a cunning ruse to outsmart any cinema snob who might dream of claiming that Inception wasn't that complex, Christopher Nolan outdoes his own filmography and delivers his most complicated film yet: a time-bending web of contradicting plots more difficult to follow than those in Donnie Darko, and a mind-boggling theatrical experience that hasn't felt this violating since Southland Tales (hey, maybe Nolan's just a Richard Kelley fan). With Tenet, there are no actual words that can surmise Nolan's latest efforts to so egregiously confuse his audience while simultaneously entertaining them. Being no stranger to the concept of time (let alone finding new ways to manipulate it), the acclaimed Memento director thrusts his audience into the middle of the action right from the adrenaline-fueled opening scene (an elaborate FBI raid during an elegant opera), and with the reveal ...

The Abortion Movie to End All Abortion Movies AKA: "Babies are bad and men are worse: The Movie!" * * * * * Perhaps the most mini-but-mighty picture of 2020, Eliza Hittman's abortion epic (two words that otherwise would never go together) is such an emotional gut punch for being something so small, that the film itself is practically an unborn fetus. There's not much to say regarding the plot of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Seventeen-year-old Autumn (newcomer Sidney Flanigan) finds out she's pregnant and travels from Pennsylvania to New York on a quest to have an abortion, because Pennsylvania abortion laws are strict AF. Autumn's equally teenaged cousin Skylar (also newcomer Talia Ryder) pals along for support, and together the two girls learn about the horrors of biased opinions on Planned Parenthood, braving the painstaking difficulties of the medical process, and they fight off a couple pervy dudes in the process. It's about as girl power as it sound...