Grant Minnick's Movie Reviews

“Damn ye!  Let Neptune strike ye dead, Winslow!” - Thomas Wake The Lighthouse is a film that is part psychological horror, part thriller, and part dark comedy.  It is directed by Robert Eggers, director of the 2016 horror film The Witch .  The film stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as two lighthouse keepers during the late nineteenth century who start showing signs of insanity after a storm causes the pair to become stranded at the lighthouse. The Lighthouse was a film that I had been anticipating greatly, and I have to say, it didn’t give me what I was expecting to see.  Is that a bad thing?  In this case, not in the slightest.  It’s a film that can be very hard to follow at times, but because of its nature, I didn’t find myself caring about that at all.  I was perfectly open to going wherever the film decided to take me, even if I didn’t fully understand what was going on at the moment.   The Lighthouse is a film that does...

“Yeah, I know who this is.  At this point, who doesn’t?” - Old Joe WARNING: If you haven’t seen the T.V. show Breaking Bad , I will be getting into spoilers of the show.  Not to worry though, I won’t be discussing spoilers of El Camino .  If you’ve seen the T.V. show, you’re okay to read this review, but if you have not, I strongly suggest watching the show before reading this review.  You have been warned! El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie is a sequel to the award winning T.V. series Breaking Bad .  It is directed by Vince Gilligan, and stars Aaron Paul as Jesse Pinkman.  The story follows Jesse immediately after he escapes from Jack, Todd, Kenny, and the rest of the white supremacist gang that held him captive, and forced him to cook meth for them.  Now, because of his involvement with Albuquerque's own (now deceased) crystal meth kingpin, Walter White, also known as Heisenberg, the police are after Jesse.  Throughout the entire two hour ...

“Save your breath, kids!  You can’t run from redemption!” - Ross Humboldt In The Tall Grass is a new Netflix original film based on a novella by Stephen King and his son Joe Hill.  The film is directed by Vincenzo Natali, and stars Patrick Wilson, Harrison Gilbertson, Laysla De Oliveira, and Avery Whitted.  The story follows multiple people that wander into a field of grass after they hear cries for help on the inside.  Once each person arrives in the field, they discover that the grass shifts and moves your position all around without you even knowing, making it next to impossible to escape.  This movie has a lot going for it.  However, many continuity errors arise, making the story incredibly hard to follow at times.  I’ll talk more about that later, but for now, let’s talk about the good stuff.   First off, the production value is insane.  The sound design is incredible, and the audio shifts around to add to the effect of th...

“When you bring me out, can you introduce me as Joker?” - Arthur Fleck a.k.a. Joker Joker is a new film directed by Todd Phillips, and stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck, a man who doesn’t remember ever having a happy day in his life.  He has mental illnesses that make his life very difficult.  He doesn’t have any real friends.  He has an awful job.  People are always making fun of him and beating him up in the streets.  His mother is sick.  And now, the office belonging to the psychiatrist that he sees is closing down, meaning he has nobody to talk to about his problems, and no way of getting his medications.  As time goes on, we see him slowly begin to lose his mind, and become the villain that everyone knows and loves: the Joker.     I went into my local theater’s midnight premiere of Joker feeling very excited about the fact that I was about to finally see a film that tackled the Joker’s origin story in full detail,...

“Murder is sin.  Murder is damnation.  But murder is also work.” - Wilfred James 1922 is a 2017 Netflix original film based on a short story by Stephen King.  It is written and directed by Zak Hilditch, and stars Thomas Jane, Molly Parker, and Dylan Schmid.  The story is set in the year 1922, and follows Wilfred James (Jane), a hard-working farmer with an extremely antagonistic and demanding wife named Arlette (Parker), and a teenage son named Henry (Schmid).  When Arlette wants to sell the farmland given to her by her late father, Wilfred states that he would rather not pursue that course of action.  But when Arlette announces she wants a divorce, and is going to take Henry with her to Omaha, Wilfred decides that one way or another, he is going to keep his son, and the farm.  He points out to Henry that Arlette is always making judgmental and hurtful comments to both of them, and enlists Henry to help him kill her.  For the entire rest of t...

“He’s going to laugh at you, they’re all going to laugh at you!” - Margaret White Carrie is a 1976 horror film based on the first novel by Stephen King.  The movie is directed by Brian DePalma, and stars Sissy Spacek in the titular role of Carrie White, a shy, and extremely introverted high school senior with telekinetic powers.  She is incessantly bullied not only at school, but also by her fanatically religious mother, so when everything finally becomes too much for poor Carrie to take, things go downhill very quickly. For roughly the first half hour of Carrie , I was asking myself many questions.  “What are the filmmakers trying to communicate here?”  “ Why was this choice made?”  “How does this scene relate at all to the film?”  “Why is everything so tonally inconsistent?”  “In what direction is this film going?”  Nothing was making sense to me, and everything seemed unintentionally funny.  This continued to go on for the whole ...