Flash Film Reviews

By Maria Sofia Bassit Gomez. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle is a 2017 American fantasy adventure and comedy film directed by Jake Kasdan, co-written by Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg and Jeff Pinkner. The budget of between  90-150 million USD  rolled the heavy sum of  962 million USD  in the box office. The main cast consist of Dwayne Johnson as Spencer, Kevin Hart as Fridge, Jack Black as Bethany, Karen Gillan as Martha, Rhys Darby as Nigel, Bobby Cannavale as Van Pelt. Warning: This review contains spoilers of the movie. Proceed at your own risk. The almost 2 hour long movie is about 4 high school teenagers of polar opposite social statuses finding an old video game console which magically draws them in. The video game is called Jumanji, which sets them to the adult avatars they chose. Each given 3 lives, the players overcome obstacles to escape the digital world. In the game, they meet Alan Parrish, the player who was caught in the game for 20 years ...

  By Lara Culcu. Warning: Contains major spoilers. Seriously. Don't ruin it for yourself. Last warning. Fight Club is a cult classic that is as controversial as it is thought-provoking. It has too many layers to understand fully on the first watch, except if you were really paying attention. Notorious for attracting a fanbase of men who completely misunderstand the point of the film, it makes the exact opposite point of what it seems to be about on the surface. It follows the unnamed Narrator (Edward Norton), who suffers from insomnia and is discontent with his life. He attends various support groups for illnesses such as testicular cancer and tuberculosis to get some catharsis through sharing his alleged pain with the people there. It is here that he eventually meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), who turns out to be an imposter like him.  She is introduced in a slow push in shot depicting her in sunglasses, smoking a cigarette - an iconic shot that is extraordinarily effectiv...

By Maria Sofia Bassit Gomez. Edward Scissorhands: Heart-Project for Burton’s Piggy Bank. Edward Scissorhands is a 1990 American fantasy romance movie directed by horror fanatic Tim Burton. The 20 million USD budget movie only made 80 million USD making it one of the least successful Tim Burton made. Nonetheless, the movie was ranked 7,9/10 on IMDB, 74% on Metacritic and a rare 90% in Rotten Tomatoes. The main cast consists of Johnny Depp as Edward Scissorhands, Winona Ryder as Kim Boggs, Dianne Wiest as Peg Boggs, Anthony Michael Hall as Jim, Alan Arkin as Bill and Kathy Baker as Joyce. Warning: This review contains spoilers about the movie. Proceed at your own risk. The 1h45 min movie is centered around the oddly misshapen yet soft-hearted Edward, whose master and inventor died brutally, leaving his creation unfinished. Poor Edward, scissor handed, remains hidden in the obscure chateau of his master until the soft touch of suburban saleswoman Peg Boggs open Edward to her h...

By Maria Sofia Bassit Gomez. Cruella: The Redemption of 101 Dalmatians. Cruella is a 2021 American crime comedy film based on the villain Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians, directed by Craig Gillespie. The main cast includes Emma Stone as Estelle/Cruella, Emma Thompson as The Baroness, Joel Fry as Jasper, Paul Walter Hauser as Horace, Emily Beecham as Catherine the Maid, and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Anita Darling. The movie budget remains uncertain. However, in its first two weeks, Cruella made 129 million USD worldwide. Warning: This review contains spoilers about the movie. Proceed at your own risk. The 2h 14 min movie has a 74% Rotten Tomatoes review and 7.4/10 on IMDb. The movie attracted positive attention upon its debut. The movie is the prequel of 101 Dalmatians, centered around the Villainess Cruella De Vil and her origin story. The movie depicts the fur-loving dog-killing Fashion designer to be a modestly chaotic yet ambitious woman who is avenging her foster mother...

  By Maria Sofia Bassit Gomez. Wrath of Man, the grandson of The Godfather. Wrath of man is a 2021 action thriller directed by Guy Ritchie with co-writer Ivan Atkinson, inspired by the 2004 French film “Cash Truck” by Nicolas Boukhrief. In its first year, the movie rolled up an astonishing 125.7 million USD worldwide in the box office with the low budget of 40 million USD . The main cast are Jason Statham as Patrick “H”, Holt McCallany as Haiden “Bullet” Blaire. Jeffrey Donovan as Jackson, Darrell D’Silva Babs Olusanmokun Cameron Jack as Hargreaves’ henchmen, Eli Brown as Dougie, Niamh Algar as Dana Curtis and celebrity singer Post Malone as one of the robbers. Warning: This review contain spoilers about the movie. Proceed at your own risk. The 2h film take place in Los Angeles, where divorced father Harry, or H, lives with his son Dougie. H recently joined Fortico Security, an armored truck company, after saving his mentor Bullet from an arranged kidnapping. His astonishi...

By Lara Culcu. Warning. Contains Spoilers.  The first glimpse we get of Colonel Frank Slade is of a brash, angry man who has turned away from his well-meaning family towards alcohol to deal with his blindness, inflicted by his own stupid mistake. However, as the film goes on, we start to get a deeper insight into his personality. He is funny, romantic, and though he doesn’t seem to show it at first, he cares about his caretaker, Charlie.   This brings us to our main character. Charlie Simms is a prep school student at Baird School, attending the school on a scholarship. Needing money over the weekend, he agrees to be the colonel's caretaker. Just before taking the job, he witnesses his friends pull a prank on the headmaster, who knows that Charlie witnessed it and bribes him with a letter of recommendation to Harvard in an attempt to convince him to divulge the names of the perpetrators.  Played by Chris O'Donnell, Charlie has a charming innocence around him, a naïve op...

By Maria Sofia Bassit Gomez.   Willy Wonka: The worlds’ best chocolate factory belongs to a neurodivergent cynical man child. Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory is an iconic musical fantasy movie directed by Tim Burton and written by John August, based on the British novel of the same title written by Roald Dahl in 1964. The 2005 movie is an adaptation of the 1971 classic Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. With a budget of 150 million USA, the movie made an astronomical success of 475 million USD worldwide. The main cast is composed of Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka, Freddie Highmore as Charlie Bucket, AnnaSophia Robb as Violette, Julia Winter as Veruca Salt, Philip Wiegratz as Augustus, Deep Roy as the Oompa Loompa, David Kelly as Charlie’s grandfather and Jordan Fry as Mike Teavee.   Warning: This review contain spoilers about the movie. Proceed at your own risk.   The 1h55 min movie is about an unfortunate family in England. Charlie Bucket, the younge...

By Lara Culcu. Some people expect action movies to be much more than they are intended to be.  They complain about the lack of character depth, characters with similar personalities, plot holes - but, in my opinion, these people are barking up the wrong tree.  What do we expect from action movies? A fast-paced script. Explosions. 'Tough guys'. Ideally, robots.  Pacific Rim provides all of this, and more.  Let's set the scene. We're in the future, and humans are at war with the Kaiju, an alien race that emerged from a portal at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. To fight back, humans built enormous robots, Jaegers, who are co-piloted by two people who share a mental link. A nice detail is that the name of the aliens comes from the Japanese word Kaijū , which means 'monster/strange creature', while the name of the robots comes from the German Jäger ; Hunter. Not very subtle, but it doesn't need to be. Our protagonist, Raleigh Becket (Charlie Hunnam), is a coast...

By Lara Culcu. Warning: Contains Major Spoilers.  Inglourious Basterds is a tour de force.  It might have been the masterpiece of a lesser director's filmography. However, it stands out as yet another one of Quentin Tarantino's gems, who rarely misses. In this film, he is both director and screenwriter, and fulfills both roles magnificently. It follows a large cast of characters - from SS General 'The Jew Hunter' Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) to the victim of one of Landa's raids, Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) to the eponymous Basterds.  There are a number of entwining plotlines. The Nazis are attempting to defeat the allies, but more importantly, they are planning a night out at the cinema to show a movie made in honor of sniper Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). This cinema happens to be Shosanna's, who is planning on burning it down. The Basterds are trying to get into this cinema to kill the Nazis.  Every character has its place - remove one, and the plot w...