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Movie Review: October (2018)

Watch October on Prime Buy the DVD at Amazon

October is a difficult film to watch, but not for the reasons one might expect. watch october 2018 of a young woman?s life forever changed by injury is merely the backdrop for a too familiar story of an undeserving male character?s redemption.

Varun Dhawan stars as Dan, a hotel management trainee with no likeable qualities. He?s a snob who?d rather delegate work than do it himself, especially tasks he deems beneath him, like cleaning rooms and doing laundry. He?s a know-it-all who loves telling more experienced people how to do their jobs. He?s lazy, yet competitive enough to resent fellow trainees who are smarter and more capable than he is.

Among the trainees, the chief recipient of Dan?s bad attitude is Shiuli (Banita Sandhu). Whether his being a jerk to her indicates some kind of stunted elementary school-type crush or if it?s just his standard jerkiness is unclear. Shortly into the film, Shiuli slips from a third floor balcony at a New Year?s Eve party, rendering her comatose and permanently paralyzed.

Dan wasn?t at the party, so he only learns days after the accident that Shiuli?s last words before she fell were, ?Where is Dan?? This sparks an obsession, leading Dan to spend all of his time at the hospital in the hopes that Shiuli will wake and tell him why she asked about him.

That sounds like the setup for horror movie, yet we know it can?t be, because thanostv fits the mold of a common type of Bollywood hero: the boorish man-child who must finally become an adult. The arc for this character type is so familiar ? in the course of falling in love with a good woman, he learns to care for someone other than himself ? that director Shoojit Sircar and writer Juhi Chaturvedi treat the hero?s emotional growth as the inevitable consequence of his devotion.

But Dan doesn?t change in October. He ends the movie as much of an obnoxious know-it-all as he is at the start, correcting Shiulu?s mother Vidya (Gitanjali Rao) on how to properly care for her daughter and wanting praise for his contributions (which include hovering over a workman building a ramp for a wheelchair).

Dan?s dedication to Shiuli?s recovery stems from his wanting an answer from her. He uses his obsession as a measure of moral superiority, criticizing her friends for not spending every free moment at the hospital. He can?t understand that they have other obligations ? to the rest of their friends and families, and even to themselves ? that they must tend to as well.

That?s because Dan?s misanthropy and willingness to ignore his own family leave him with no other relationships beside the one he invents with Shiuli, and he?s willing to sacrifice everything to maintain it. He skips work, stops paying rent to his roommate, and borrows money from everyone with no way to pay it back. He?s mean to hospital staff and other visitors.

But because Dan is the protagonist, his single-mindedness is depicted as positive. The little he does for Shiuli mitigates the rest of his awful behavior. On the rare occasions that he is punished, he fails upward. The movie is determined to maintain Dan?s hero status, in spite of his actions.

All of this is driven by a one-sided devotion. From all indications, Shiuli wasn?t interested in Dan romantically before her accident, and they were barely more than acquaintances. Does she like him hanging around her at all times? If not, she?s physically unable to tell him to leave. Would she want him involved in the minutiae of her healthcare, monitoring things as intimate as the amount of urine in her catheter bag?

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Sircar said that he and Chaturvedi drew on their own experiences caring for seriously ill parents when creating October. Yet the amount of influence Dan has over Shiuli?s care feels unrealistic. Certainly Vidya knows her daughter better than Dan, thus making her a better judge of Shiuli?s wishes ? especially since Dan is neither the one being subjected to extraordinary medical interventions nor the one footing the bill for them. Vidya?s ready assent to Dan?s will reinforces how little agency female characters have in October.

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Life of the Party and Melissa McCarthy take a too-safe trip back to school

Life of the Party could really have used some of the broad and edgy humour of the latter performer?s minor 1986 comedy classic Back to School. Both films share a similar story ? a parent and child attending the same university and the fallout that ensues.

But director Ben Falcone, who co-wrote the screenplay along with McCarthy, seems to shy from going full-on Animal House wacky and outrageous. There?s a sense throughout of anticlimactic scenes, empty air and missed opportunities. The result is tepid, tittering laughter rather than gut-busting hilarity.

McCarthy plays Deanna, a loving mom who learns, moments after dropping daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon) off for senior year, that her simpering rat of a husband has another woman on the side and wants a divorce. Deanna impulsively decides to finish the archeology degree she set aside 20 years earlier to put family first.

The usual hijinks of U.S. college life ensue, but it?s all pretty tame stuff. Deanna gets along well with her daughter?s friends, meets a much younger man who desperately wants more than sex among the library stacks and duels back and forth with her husband, who maintains a tight grip on the family purse strings.

There?s clearly an effort here and there to mix it up, with quirky characters like Leonor (Heidi Gardner), Deanna?s goth-y, agoraphobic roommate and Helen (Gillian Jacobs), an oddball friend of Maddie?s who spent eight years in a coma. Saturday Night Live alum Maya Rudolph is rather a scream as Deanna?s outspoken best friend, Christine.

But Deanna is all about sunshine and positive reinforcement when the role could have used some tartness to balance out the sweet. Also, bad girl Jennifer (Debby Ryan) just isn?t much of a challenge. How karmically apt it would have been for hubby Dan (Matt Walsh) and ice queen mistress Marcie (Modern Family?s thanostv ) to get some major comeuppance, but they get off light ? way too light.

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Mila Kunis and Kate McKinnon Spy Hard ? Variety

Has there ever been an action comedy where the action steamrolled the comedy the way it does in ?The Spy Who Dumped Me?? The example that leaps to mind is ?Beverly Hills Cop II,? and that was a disaster of misplaced ?80s bullet-spray machismo, a betrayal of the mouthy spark Eddie Murphy brought to the original. ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? is no debacle, but it?s an over-the-top and weirdly combustible entertainment, a movie that can?t seem to decide whether it wants to be a light comedy caper or a top-heavy exercise in B-movie mega-violence.

Audrey (Mila Kunis), a Los Angeles organic-market cashier with lank brown hair and an attitude to match, and Morgan (Kate McKinnon), her righteous feminist BFF, wind up in the middle of a high ballistic espionage caper after it turns out that Audrey?s absentee boyfriend, Drew (Justin Theroux), is a cutthroat operative working for the CIA. Before the story gets rolling, we see him in action, busting through walls and dispatching continental goons and leaping out a window onto a truck in a single take worthy of Tom Cruise at his most stunt-happy. This could almost be the prelude to a Jason Statham movie, and the audience thinks, ?Okay, they must be trying to get us in the mood.?

Once Drew is shot to death in front of Audrey, she and Morgan attempt to carry out his mission by taking the package he was carrying and flying off to Vienna to deliver it to his contact at a caf�. We still think the movie is setting us up for a romp: the female version of a Will Ferrell buddy farce, or maybe a cousin to law-enforcement comedies like ?Spy? or ?The Heat.? Not that ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? needed to follow those formulas ? it has every right to be its own thing.

But what a thing! The laugh lines arrive on cue, yet most of the time they don?t fully register as comedy (more like filler), because the picture is so bent on being an extravaganza of straight-faced mayhem. That Vienna caf�, for instance, explodes into a bloody free-for-all (machine guns, daggers, crashing bodies), and the key sign of what we?re in for occurs at the brutal payoff, when a man gets his head plunged into a pot of fondue ? and it is not, repeat not, a joke. It?s just a cool way of killing someone. (It would actually have been funnier if Jason Statham had done it.)

?The Spy Who Dumped Me? has knife fights and car chases, double crosses and betrayals, a Euro-trotting structure that takes our heroines from Vienna to Paris to Prague to Berlin, a suavely good-looking agent (Sam Heughan) who may or may not be on their side, a Russian assassin (Ivanna Sakhno) who?s like an android gymnast with invisible eyebrows, a Cirque du Soleil climax that features Morgan on a trapeze, and more jibber-jabber than you can stand about a flash drive that contains Information That Will Save Countless Lives. There are a dozen gun blasts for every laugh, yet taken on its own terms the movie is far from incompetent ? if mid-period ?Die Hard? is your standard. It?s difficult to have much investment in anything we?re seeing, but at least one dimension of ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? is fully alive, and that?s Kate McKinnon?s twinkle-of-killer-attitude performance. There are moments she salvages the movie.

The proverbial danger for any ?Saturday Night Live? performer who tries to make it on the big screen is that they?ll come off as too sketchy and lightweight, too mired in overly familiar late-night personality tics. Yet McKinnon, in ?The Spy Who Dumped Me,? breaks out of the warmed-over ?SNL?-shtick ghetto. She plays Morgan as a post-#MeToo renegade, and there?s nothing harmless or cute about her comic attack. With her fiercely popping eyes and hungry grin and bone-dry sarcastic delivery, McKinnon is like Bette Davis channeling Fran Lebowitz. When she?s introduced to Wendy (Gillian Anderson), a major domo of MI6, she says, ?You?re the boss, and you have not sacrificed one ounce of femininity.? McKinnon knows how to play a line like that so that it cuts in two directions at once: She means it, but she?s also sending up her own look at this! bitches can truly have it all boosterism. https://www.thanostv.org/movie/the-spy-who-dumped-me-2018 is a tonic that stings.

Brandishing an attitude like that, and with the right vehicle, Kate McKinnon could rule in the movies. But ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? isn?t that vehicle. It?s a new sort of sister-power action concoction, and the director and co-writer, Susanna Fogel, shows an undeniable audacity in refusing to make the comedy too goofy-girly-coy. Yet ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? is so freighted with heavy-duty generic set pieces that it never establishes the kind of free-air zone in which the laughs could take wing.

At one point, our heroines land in an apartment that they think is a safe haven, but their host, played by the always delectable Fred Melamed, turns out to be an enemy spy. Yet he?s an absurdly debonair one. When he gazes at Morgan with a raised eyebrow and asks, ?Are you a lover of Balzac?,? she replies, ?Less and less, with every experience.? I would have traded the entire overbuilt thriller-package apparatus of ?The Spy Who Dumped Me? for half a dozen jokes that insanely old-school corny-funny.

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?Wish Upon? Review: ?Heathers? Meets ?Final Destination,? Badly

The pitch for ?Wish Upon? has plenty of potential: A high concept horror movie that basically aims to be ?Heathers? meets ?Final Destination? with a dash of ?The Monkey?s Paw.? Unpopular teenager Clare (Joey King) comes across an ancient Chinese box with the ability to grant eight wishes, which she leverages to make her family wealthy and improve the quality of her life bit by bit, not realizing that every wish comes with a tradeoff ? someone close to her must die. And so they do, again and again, as the gears in the box turn slowly and an eerie song plays, so by the time Clare learns her lesson, it?s obviously too late. Unfortunately, by the time ?Wish Upon? gets around to establishing this grim premise, it?s already too late to turn it into anything remotely exciting on its own terms.

Accept the sheer absurdity of the conceit and it?s almost a fun, stupid ride for some of the time, as pure derivative campiness in a bottle has an inherent appeal, but the ingredients don?t gel beyond that. However, director John R. Leonetti (?Annabelle?), working from Barbara Marshall?s screenplay, does a competent job of establishing Clare?s somber world. After a prologue in which her mother commits suicide during Clare?s childhood, the movie flashes forward to her beleaguered teen life: She hangs with fellow outcasts Meredith (Sydney Park) and June (Shannon Purser) while distancing herself from her scrappy father (Ryan Phillippe), who spends his days scavenging through garbage cans looking for loot.

At school, she glares at the popular kids across the locker room hallway and winds up in a messy fistfight. Seething with rage, she comes to home find that her dad has rescued a music box from a nearby; on a whim, Clare dreams of retribution against her bully in gross physical terms that naturally come true. The next day, she sighs, and literally says, ?OK, box, you have my attention.? Then she makes another dumb wish, to entrance the high school hunk of her dreams, and promptly acquires a nutty stalker. The blunt momentum of the movie?s plot starts to sag, with tin-eared dialogue making it obvious that the the story can?t possibly offer up much more than variations on one ridiculous idea again and again.

Things get worse from there. As bodies pile up from her extended network, Clare slowly realizes that she?s messing the very foundations of her reality. In the meantime, she enlists good-natured classmate Ryan (Ki Hong Li) to help her translate the scrawling on the box, not realizing or not caring that he obviously has real feelings for her. But stupid Clare keeps making her ridiculous wishes: Her life gets lavish, her dad gets cool, and everybody loves her, but she?s still isolated by her ongoing drive for something more. It?s admittedly entertaining to watch her keep going back to the box even as chaos enshrouds her existence, but ?Wish Upon? offers no credible reason for this reckless behavior once the character realizes the tradeoff. Every wish gets someone close to her killed, and her transition into a giggly, power-hungry psychopath is like someone?s idea of a scary story that never made it through the writing process.

Still, gore fiends will delight in a few innovative kill scenes that draw from the macabre Rube Goldberg-style approach that made the ?Final Destination? movies such twisted delights. One slow-building death involving a garbage disposal is downright Hitchcockian in the way it builds expectations around a single grisly possibility then veers in a more shocking direction.

Leonetti aims to please, but this PG-13 genre effort tames its violence to noticeable effect, in an obvious bid to make a horror movie for teens who can relate to Clare?s plight. (Of course, young horror fans have found crafty ways to see R-rated slasher movies for decade, so why interfere with tradition?) The notion of a desperate teen keen on improving her surroundings almost holds water, but ?Wish Upon? neuters its characters: While King (? ThanosTV ?) imbues Clare with an impressive degree of fragility, she basically has two modes ? whiny, terrified and angry ? while her friends are one-note concoctions. That includes wide-eyed Purser, aka Barb from ?Stranger Things,? whose more distinctive style hints at unseen depths that suggest she might have been better suited for the lead role.

Then again, she deserves better than this. ?Wish Upon? careens toward a blunt finale in which every good deed must be punished, as Clare?s attempt to set things right naturally only makes things worse. That?s a reliable formula for effective horror, but ?Wish Upon? falls back on it in such obvious, knee-jerk fashion that it could have tacked on a shrug emoji in its credits. Fortunately, you don?t need to wish for better versions of the movie experience ?Wish Upon? calls to mind; they exist, and deserve repeat viewings far more than ?Wish Upon? deserves one.

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Support The Girls (2018) Movie Review from Eye for Film

Writer-director Andrew Bujalski?s (Funny Ha Ha, Computer Chess), new comedy drama Support the Girls wears its sexual politics and critique of the modern day American phenomenon of "sports bars with curves" (think the American Hooters chain) lightly. He doesn't just focusing in ruthlessly on the more obvious effects of demanding young female employees wear Daisy Dukes and dance around on the bar top to announce the latest sports event on the cable (to leering, drunkly aggressive male customers, with a repartee of endlessly obnoxious cat calls). Instead, we are pointed more towards a layered, empathetic and often quite funny observation of how a team of mismatched women might negotiate one of the more ruthless examples of modern service industry and form bonds inside and out of it to help get by.

The bar in question, a Texas "breastaurant" called Double Whammies, whose owner bizarrely has insisted on it emphasising a family-friendly vibe along with the titillation, serves as much as a microcosm as it does a particular workplace, though the particular and peculiar atmosphere is richly drawn; from the huge trucks and even huger men driving them who pull in once the clock hits five, to the depressingly identikit beige-coloured stores that line the strip mall the bar is based in. This is not a place, we sense, where the female staff can get much better work elsewhere. In fact, right up the highway a similar bar called Mancave with much the same concept is opening up.

The ever-excellent Regina Hall really anchors Bujalski?s dive into this deep-fried workplace, though not all the cast members come up to her level (with the exception of Haley Lu Richardson, who is great as the super-perky Maci). Hall plays floor manager Lisa, the den mother of the joint and the longest-serving employee. Constantly on the move with clipboard and cellphone juggled in one hand and the other hand always on the shoulder of a worried employee at the same time, she is the ultimate compassionate, crisis-managing boss who you immediately sense is the only person there who can fulfil the ?no drama? demand of the oleaginous, uptight, and casually sexist owner Cubby (James Le Gros).

https://www.thanostv.org/movie/support-the-girls-2018 of the film are a showcase of what a whirling dervish this woman has to be for each day on the job: getting an incompetent burglar removed from an air vent, firing the chef who is the burglar?s cousin and therefore is the likely suspect who tipped him off about the layout of the safe room, at the same time as trying to organise a sexy carwash to raise cash for the legal defence of an employee who ran down her abusive boyfriend while trying to hide the unauthorised fundraiser from Cubby. She also has to deal with an influx of new employees, one of whom - Jenelle (Dylan Gelula) - is more than willing to sleaze it up to get those extra tips, in violation of the rules and attitude Lisa expects to be adhered to.

Hall makes you feel the constant battle between exhaustion, frustration, and compassion, not least when the drama fails to end outside the Double Whammies doors (she has a depressed husband to deal with). Some problems Lisa can?t solve but must just grit her teeth through, such as her boss?s casual racism in terms of the staff?s ethnic balance (no more than one black woman per shift). By sticking the camera close to Hall for most of the runtime, we see the ebb and flow of the service industry up close and the negotiations in terms of time, emotional energy and physical labour a leader has to make. We also see how the weird, hypocritical rationalisations of the place can seep into you if you aren?t careful. Its messy, but invisible women like Lisa make it work. Think of that next time you order a burger and fries.

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Insidious: The Last Key Review

Adam Robitel?s Insidious: The Last Key is a familiar jaunt into The Further as series staple Lin Shaye gives this spooky franchise its best performance, despite each installment growing weaker and weaker as an exploration into the paranormal and an opportunity to scare audiences with fresh new horror. The Last Key may present franchise fatigue, much like the previous installment, but it does offer up a few new twists and turns as it shifts its focus away from others and onto Shaye as we dig deeper into her past.

Elise Rainier (Lin Shaye) and her team of paranormal investigators have helped many people rid themselves of demons and the paranormal. They do this by entering the homes and personal lives of those directly effected by whatever is haunting them. They haven?t however, returned to Elise?s past as she is now confronted with the haunting of her former home, where she grew up as a child.

Insidious: The Last Key does become an exercise of familiar spooks and scares as it yet again revisits the darkly lit and foggy setting of The Further. It doesn?t venture into new territories in that regard, again throwing out plot and logic to reach its mostly predictable conclusion.

But something it does get right is the exploration of Elise?s past, through flashbacks. It does this by showing us her relationship with her father (played with cold and confused restraint by Josh Stewart). https://www.thanostv.org/movie/insidious-the-last-key-2018 is the part of the film that almost forgets about the hauntings and paranormal and instead focuses on her struggle with acknowledging her special gift growing up.

It creates a distance between herself and her family and her past altogether. Director Adam Robitel and writer Leigh Whannell flesh out the script with enough backstory and interest to keep The Last Key from immediately tripping on its own feet.

This keeps the film going for a lot longer than it rightfully should, but eventually The Last Key becomes a stale and soggy piece of modern day horror filmmaking. The ending is remarkably stupid, ridding the film?s credibility with its giant swoops of nonsensical franchise logic that magically gets rid of the bad guys.

The Insidious franchise is one that relies on heavy atmosphere and consistent scares, yet they almost always throw all of that away on a ?big? ending. Director James Wan had the craft to close 1 and 2 on a high note, while the third one suffered and now the fourth installment almost stalls completely.

There?s still enough gas in the tank to keep this franchise going, if it continues to adapt and change for its audiences and for the greater good of storytelling. The Last Key teases at the fact that we might be done with prequels for a while, which opens up the possibility to explore the first two films without simply grabbing as much cash as possible.

I was totally invested with about 3/4ths of The Last Key, until it started venturing into The Further and until it reached its pathetic book-end finish. That is when the scares started to fall and the mystery stopped contributing to the plot in a meaningful way.

The creature design is still scary and the occasional jumps register, but most of the horror elements of Insidious: The Last Key are ones that fans are going to spot a mile away.

I truly hope the successful box office means going back to the drawing board and coming up with something that can keep this franchise going to better tell a larger story or to consistently deliver new, genuine scares.

I don?t want to keep seeing the same old tricks falling out of the bag, only covered in more cobwebs and prequel backstory.

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?See You Up There? Review (Au revoir l�-haut) ? Variety

?See You Up There? defies easy categorization. Imagine ?War Horse? as directed by Tim Burton, or ? https://www.thanostv.org/movie/see-you-up-there-2017 on the Fourth of July? starring a seriocomic Robin Williams. It is 1919, at the tail end and immediately following World War I, and the French are quick to honor their fallen soldiers, erecting monuments in their honor, yet scandalously unwilling to support the veterans who return home from the front in this genre-defying tightrope act of a movie, which tied festival favorite ?BPM? for 13 C�sar nominations in France?s equivalent of the Oscars last year. (Through a curious coincidence, both films feature Argentina-born newcomer Nahuel P�rez Biscayart.)

Crime novelist Pierre Lemaitre was hardly the most obvious candidate to write one of the most celebrated World War I stories in recent French literature, any more than comedy actor-director Albert Dupontel (?Bernie?) was the person anyone might expect to adapt it to the big screen. And yet, Lemaitre?s efforts earned him the Goncourt Prize (his book, ?Au revoir l�-haut,? was published in English as ?The Great Swindle?), while Dupontel?s film version of the ambitious Victor Hugo-like tome accomplishes precisely what modern cinema seems to be lacking when old-timers complain that ?they don?t make ?em like they used to.?

Epic in scope, quixotic in tone, and stunning (if ultimately overreaching) in execution, ?See You Up There? opens with a sweeping shot across acres of devastated battlefield. Pockmarked by mortar blasts and lacerated with barbed wire, this hellish no-man?s-land seems hardly worth fighting for, and yet, glory hound Lt. Pradelle (Laurent Lafitte, tapping into some of that same looks-can-be-deceiving duplicity he brought to ?Elle?) is determined to claim one last victory before war?s end, sending two of his troops out into the fray and shooting them in the back to galvanize his demoralized men into action.

Since ?Saving Private Ryan,? many a filmmaker has tried to outdo Spielberg in capturing the sheer intensity of wartime action scenes; here, it?s not the staging but the circumstances that make the battle so horrifying: When a bomb goes off nearby, Albert Maillard (Dupontel) tumbles into a ditch, where he is buried beneath a cloud of dirt and forced to suck air from the lungs of a dead horse until he is pulled to safety by Edouard P�ricourt (P�rez Biscayart), who is blasted away moments later, losing his lower jaw in the process.

These scenes are not especially graphic, adhering instead to a classical kind of theatricality, but they go a long way to establish audiences? sympathies for two characters who, when the war is over, will find themselves marginalized by the very people they fought to protect. While it?s shameful to witness how Albert and Edouard?s peacetime existence depends on their running a series of small-time scams (stealing morphine from fellow veterans, selling mementos to patriotic suckers), what choice do they have?

By contrast, the dastardly Pradelle lives a comfortable existence, charming Edouard?s father, Marcel (the great Niels Arestrup), and wooing his sister Madeleine (�milie Dequenne) while organizing an elaborate scheme of his own (he plans to get rich burying the country?s dead, even if it means hacking up their bodies and stuffing the mix-and-match pieces into undersized coffins). Clearly, Lemaitre looks cynically upon the myriad ways dishonest men took advantage of a country struggling to deal with the staggering trauma of the Great War, exposing not only the con men and crooks but also the hypocritical bureaucrats on whom they preyed. The novel?s complicated narrative probably would have been better suited to a limited series than to a feature, and yet Dupontel (working with the author on the script) does an admirable job of distilling its plot and, more importantly, a revisionist and far more nuanced view of the upbeat Roaring Twenties period for which Paris is famous.

Allowing the world to believe he?s dead, the artistically minded Edouard remains holed up in a loft, where he creates elaborate papier-m�ch� masks (an improvement on the primitive plastic surgery the doctors offer him) and befriends a little blond girl (H�lo�se Balster) who helpfully translates the monstrous noises that emanate from his badly deformed face. In this young sidekick?s eyes, Edouard takes on aspects of classic fairy-tale characters, and indeed, the film seems to welcome a certain surrealistic quality as it swings from reverential solemnity to absurdist comedy, sometimes in the same scene.

Whereas blue-eyed, fragile-looking P�rez Biscayart plays a tragic figure, the more forlorn Dupontel may as well be channeling Charlie Chaplin in a lead performance that, in its nonverbal expressiveness, rivals Jean Dujardin?s Oscar-winning turn in ?The Artist.? Though his character does speak, Dupontel?s eyes say more than his dialogue ever could, and some scenes are plainly constructed with silent-movie poetry in mind ? as when he spies his former fianc�e while working as a lowly elevator operator or, later, when he calls on a new love interest in an outrageous canary-yellow suit ? while others are classic black-comedy gags (smash-cutting from one of Edouard?s nightmares to a meat grinder).

Since his cult directing debut with 1996?s ?Bernie,? in which he played an adult orphan with severely broken social skills (in one scene, he unexpectedly bites the head off a bird), Dupontel has challenged conventional ideas of comedy and drama while rejecting reductive notions of good and bad morality. That sensibility suits Lemaitre?s source material, although few would have thought he had the vision to pull off such an expansive production ? one with intricate period detail, huge sets, and considerable logistical demands (from visual effects to all those terrific masks). The result is simultaneously grand and eccentric, and though it sometimes struggles to sustain its identity amid such a strange mix of tones, the film holds together via DP Vincent Mathias? dramatic widescreen lensing and a splendid, understated score from Christophe Julien.

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Cinopsis

On ne va pas s?�tendre sur ce cinqui�me opus de la franchise. Si le premier TAXI avait le m�rite de la nouveaut�, avec ce petit c�t� franchouillard faisant du second degr� sur l?amour des bagnoles made in USA, et aussi celui d? Cinopsis conna�tre Marion Cotillard dans ses premi�res oeuvres, ce TAXI 5 frise le palmar�s en terme de m�diocrit�!

Entre le vomi, le scato et le mauvais go�t pur et simple (sans doute un hommage aux com�dies am�ricaines qui aiment en abuser), TAXI 5 nous offre aussi des dialogues indigents, des gags foireux en veux-tu en voil�, des r�flexions machistes en pleine crise Weinstein (la comparaison des filles et des bagnoles a fait long feu) et un sc�nario inexistant. M�me les sc�nes d?action sont quelconques.

Que demander de plus � Frank Gastambide (LA SURFACE DE REPARATION) qui est derri�re la cam�ra, devant aussi et surtout au sc�nario? Cinopsis , comme il n?y en a pas, ce dernier point se discute. Cinopsis chose � faire serait d?�viter de perdre son argent en salle mais l?on sait qu?h�las, ce TAXI 5 risque en plus de faire des entr�es.

Et si l?on en croit le m�chant italien du film qui jette � Sylvain Marot un ?on se reverra? � la fin du film, on risque m�me d?avoir un Taxi 6.