This year’s Cannes Film Festival begins Tuesday, and as always, there is a stacked lineup involved. It is one of the premier festivals after all. The highest prize awarded, the Palme d’Or, is widely thought to be one of film’s most prestigious awards. Due to this, the winner three of the last four years was nominated later on at that year’s Academy Awards. Anatomy of a Fall and Triangle of Sadness never really had a shot at Best Picture their years, but in 2019, Parasite used the Palme d’Or to propel it to win Best Picture as the first non-English-language film. This year, there are at least 4 in competition that I have heard in the early discussion for next March. It will be interesting if any of those 4 (The Apprentice, Anora, Kinds of Kindness, or Megalopolis) wins the big prize. We won’t know who wins though until next weekend. Until then, three more movies this week. Did any of them make a mark? On to the reviews!
Up until this newest entry in the series, we have had 9 other Planet of the Apes films. We had the iconic 1968 original, followed by Beneath, Escape, Conquest, Battle, the Burton remake, and our modern trilogy of Rise, Dawn, and War. Added up, the Apes series is the longest running science fiction franchise. Now we get Kingdom, and the start of a planned new trilogy. This one is set 300 years after War, and Caesar is just a legend now. How he is used now by apes is a reason to twist his beliefs around. For example, our antagonist this time is called Proximus Caesar. That part of the story was the interesting part, and what I was there for. What kind of lost me was the human side of the story. It is very obviously setting up future installments, but after 300 years in this downtrodden world, I tend to not believe that some of things working would still work. That sounds awful vague on my part, but I’m trying to keep this spoiler free. If you really want to go into this one knowing very little, don’t watch the final trailer that is on the internet. It spoils a lot of the movie plot points. This might be the best looking entry in this series, but how the third act ended up playing out just left me felling let down a little, and not really looking forward to Uprising or whatever they call the next one in two or three years.
This was interesting but a little frustrating. My first thought was if there was more time, things could have been explained more, but after thinking a little, I realized that it was never going to be explained. This film is about a father played by Nicolas Cage and his 2 sons. They live in a post-apocalyptic world where at night alien creatures hunt humans. What we see, outside of a very brief flashback am to start the film, is their lives over the span of I think 4 days. One of the sons has a crush on a girl at a neighboring farm, and I think the film is pointing out that he is the reason things fall apart. However, thinking about the third act, I think what happens is inevitable. The creature design of the aliens is really inventive. Their movements and attacks are unique. Again, what weighs this film down for me is the lack of explaining anything at all. The aliens even change their attack pattern halfway through the film. If this was supposed to be a character driven horror film, they needed more than 90 minutes for you to care about anyone surviving.
There are romantic comedies, and there are romantic fantasies. This falls in the latter. This about a 40-year-old single mother, a 20-something singer in a boy band, and their love affair. What made me keep watching it is just waiting for the point where her daughter finds out because I knew it was going to be bad. I know I have talked about how I’m not a horror movie person, but on the other end, I’m as much not a romantic comedy person either. I get how people would like this movie. Hathaway and Galitize really do a good job selling the premise. I just never got on board with it. It’s a me issue though.
Next week, we get two wide releases that play to very different audiences. For families, we have IF, and for horror fans, the third Strangers entry. It isn’t hard to believe they will be the top two at the end of the weekend. Family movies make more than horror movies usually.
- IF
- The Strangers: Chapter 1
- Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
- Back to Black
- The Fall Guy
Monday brings the first of back to back weeks of Screen Unseens, and this first one I’m not looking forward to to be honest. Krasinki will hopefully be there later in the week. Something to watch for here on the blog on Wednesday is the first of my smaller tournament series. It starts with a battle of the top grossing films in 1987. Also, it isn’t just me picking winners anymore.
Mitten Film Nerd 
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