I watched 21 movies/comedy specials that came out in May, and the top six movies of the month were stellar and a great time at the movies! Sadly, they basically all bombed at the box office, except for the new Planet of the Apes. There were some serious movie stars in these films as well, and they performed to that level, but these movies needed to allow them to share the screen more. Also last year around this same time, Across the Spdierverse came out, and I listened to that album for the rest of the year, and this year I Saw TV Glow came out at like the same time, and I think that will be my album of the year. So here are the best new movies in May!
1. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga: Seeing this in IMAX was a treat, and it was an easy choice as the best movie of the month. The visuals in this movie are off the charts. Somehow with each passing movie, George Miller finds a way to make the desert look even more beautiful and yellow. It is a long movie, but it moves quickly. My biggest qualm is that it is sold as an Anya Taylor-Joy film, but it takes a while for her to appear, but once she is there, the movie gets even better. If she were in it the whole time, it probably would have been another 5 star movie.
2. Evil Does Not Exist: A Japanese film that moves as slow as a snail, but it is as beautiful as a natural landscape painting. A small village outside of Tokyo is getting visited by a company that is trying to create a glamping resort in their town, but they do not take into account all of the possible environmental implications that might come along with a development. The town hall meeting, although not the climax, was expertly done, and the tension was palpable. The two corporate workers were totally thrown out to dry, and it showed the total lack of inattention that the company paid to the community that they were protecting. It was about the dangers of capitalism and greed, but it was also about the environmental impact that we all put on the land and largely ignore so that we can live our lives blissfully and ignorantly. The opening shot lasts for minutes, and it is just a camera doing a tracking shot from underneath the winter foliage of the sky. So it is just branches and bright blue sky. It is almost hypnotic, it lasted long enough for me to forget what I was there to watch. A beautiful film, but you have to be into it, if not, you might end up like the old guy that walked out after 30 minutes.
3. The Fall Guy: Despite this largely failing at the box office, and it already being available to rent on VOD, I thought this movie was a really fun time. It has two massive stars: Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, and they do an incredible job together, but similar to my complaint for Furiosa, Blunt and Gosling were so good together, but they were not together nearly enough. Gosling largely carried the movie, and he did a great job, but the movie was at its best when their chemistry was popping. There was a dog that played a large role in this movie, which I did not realize, but it was a bonus! At one point, Gosling buckles the dog in and tells the dog to engage its core before going off a massive car jump. So fun!
4. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes: Technically a part of the most recent Planet of the Apes trilogy, but it is set in its own world much further in the future. It looks great, and the opening scene had my palms sweating. Personally, I really enjoyed the first half of the movie, and found the second half a little plodding, but still good, but I heard many others say the opposite, so I do not know, but every one can agree that this movie looks amazing, and that the people do an incredible job of acting in the CGI monkey suits.
5. In a Violent Nature: I loved this, because it reminded me so much of the 80s slashers that I fell in love with in high school. It gives off Friday the 13th vibes more than anything, but it is in a total class of its own for a couple of reasons. First of all, it has not background music for most of the movie, and when it is there, it is not like a theme song like Halloween or Friday the 13th, it is just music others are listening to at the time. So there are large swaths of the movie, where the only sound is the nature that surrounds the characters. This also helps play into the crowd reaction. When something gruesome is happening, the theater is almost quiet, so I really got to hear everyone’s honest reaction. There were some brutal kills in this one, and the one that was gnarliest was when a hole was punched in a girl’s stomach, and then her head was pulled through said whole thus tying her in a knot. I had never seen anything like that before!
6. I Saw the TV Glow: This was the movie that I wanted to be number one on the list so bad. If I ranked movie trailers, this one would be five stars, it looked like it was going to be a great 90s nostalgia piece with some interesting monster designs, but sadly the monsters were largely missing. It was more of an allegory for trans-people, those who are willing to come out and be themselves, and those that never do, and they try to go on living their life without ever really showing their true selves. It was also a commentary on media consumption. There are those that make the media they consume a large part of their personality, and this can also affect the way they act, and sometimes this is a negative thing, but also the power of story telling can be really bonding when making friends with similar interests.
7. Living with Leopards: A documentary on Netflix about… Leopards. Usually if Netflix sends me an email about a new movie, I watch it, and this is one of those instances, but the story telling behind this documentary was cool. They anthropomorphized these animals, and that helped make the story more compelling. They also get incredible shots of the African wilderness, and it gives some behind the scenes into the making of a documentary like this, which was fascinating.
8. Tom Brady Roast: This was the talk of sports radio for like a week, so I had to cave and watch it. It was three hours, which is excessive, so I watched it in pieces. Largely it was very funny, and they said many things that were super vulgar, which is fine by me, but it was so nice to hear that around Tom Brady, because for the past 20 years, he had one of the most buttoned up reputations ever. Also I hated Tom Brady for so long, so it was nice to hear him get made fun of for three hours.
9. The Strangers Chapter 1: This was almost an exact retread of the original, so I probably would have enjoyed it more if I had not watched the original again in such close proximity, but there were literal line for line repeats and shot for shot scare repeats. It was a different house and different victims, but I would have preferred a worst movie, that tried to do something different than the original. Also I know these victims are not trail runners, but it would be so simple to just go deep into the woods and survive. They are making two more movies in this franchise, so hopefully they will shake it up some.
10. Turtles All the Way Down: A John Green book adaptation, and it really feels that way. I have only read one John Green book and seen one John Green movie, The Fault in Our Stars, and they have a very similar tone. They are about teens going through something hard, and he makes them numb and averse to the world, then someone comes into their lives, and it helps to soften them up some. They have this pretentious teen feel to them, but now that I am older, it feels more pseudo intellectual than actually deep.
11. Tarot: Was this a good movie? No, but it was fun. Going into it, I thought that this one was going to be a one night in a scary house movie, but it was more about what they took home with them once they had their tarot cards read from a cursed deck. At times this movie is absurd, and it goes way too far, but other times, it has some legitimate scares, and builds some solid tension. The jester in this was great.
12. MoviePass MovieCrash: A straight to streaming documentary on MAX about the rise and fall of movie pass. Their financial model was totally unsustainable at its height, but it did show that there is an interest for people to go to the movies, they are not as dead, as they are being portrayed as, the price point just has to be right. $10 for unlimited movies is a little low, but I feel like they can figure something out.
13. Ezra: The story of a dad taking his autistic son from his mother, because he feels like the mother was not fighting hard enough to keep the son away from being medicated and being put in a special school. I could probably write a whole paper on this, but I won’t. The movie does not do a terrible job of portraying a kid with Autism, but I have seen a movie just like this at least three times, they change the story a little bit, but largely the bones stay the same. An adult struggles with their kid with Autism, but there can be so much more to these stories, so can we expand this more please? Be more like The Peanut Butter Falcon, and create something totally new.
14. The Idea of You: A straight to Amazon movie starring Anne Hathaway, who I love, so I had high hopes for this movie, but it ended up feeling so hokey. I like Rom-coms, but this ended up being more Rom, and so many parts of it just felt weird. So sadly I did not love this.
15. The Courier: A Spanish Netflix movie about a guy who starts to work for a crime syndicate. He runs money from one place to the next to help his criminal organization. This has cool cars, sex, and drugs, but it does not have the tension that it wants. This guy is constantly trying to stay one step ahead of whatever police organization is over there trying to catch him, but it never makes you feel that tension.
16. Thelma the Unicorn: The Unicorn, which is really a miniature horse that gets paint spilled on it and a carrot glued to her head, is voiced by the lead singer of Alabama Shakes, so for the musical portions, they get some real soulful singing. The plot is about caring for your friends over trying to get social media clout and selling out, and they hit you over the head with it, but it is for kids, so I guess it makes it easier for the kids to get the message.
17. Unfrosted: Jerry Seinfeld made a movie about the creation of the pop tart. It is very slap stick comedy and filled with one liners. The best scene by far was the cereal funeral, and they had some big-name cameos popping in just to do some dumb stuff, but overall, there was not much here. It did make me laugh sometimes.
18. IF: I am not sure who this movie was for. It was too emotionally deep for younger kids, but it was too kid branded for preteens to want to see it. The imaginary friends look great, but it takes a while to bring them into the story after a depressing opener, and once they are in there, blocks of the movie will pass, and it will make you question what the point of the scene was.
19. Mother of the Bride: A straight to Netflix movie for Mother’s Day weekend. Kind of a rom-com, but it is more about the mom than the actual bride. Once I realized that the bride was Miranda Cosgrove from iCarly and Drake and Josh I was too distracted to really care about what was happening, but it was probably better that way, because this was pretty bland. I imagine the resort reached out to Netflix and asked them if they wanted to film a movie there, and Netflix said sure and just wrote the most basic script in a few minutes, because this lacked depth.
20. Atlas: A love letter to AI. It was weird. They almost framed it as a romance between JLo and the AI in her suit. One of the only movies you will watch that is pro AI. Do not spend two hours watching it. It is as bad as the plot synopsis on Netflix makes it sound.
21. Die Hart 2: Die Harter: The much worst version of Fall Guy. Kevin Hart has an evil stunt performer played by himself who tries to ruin his career. The acting is so bad, and the story is told awfully. It was an Amazon original, but it was so bad I could not believe that it was not a Netflix original.
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