Now that I’ve seen Flower, I have even more appreciation for last year’s Lady Bird. Both are coming-of-age stories about a young woman trying to figure out her direction in life. But Lady Bird has something that Flower does not: Greta Gerwig. This film needed a writer/director with a singular voice and real life experience. Flower was written by three men that may or may not have ever spent more than ten minutes with a seventeen year-old girl. It’s a shame, really, because  Zoey Deutch does the best she can with the material she’s given as our leading lady. In the end, much like her character, Flower is confused mess. 

An old tagline for the website you’re visiting was “leave you snark at the doorstep”, and I can give you no better advice in approaching Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time. DuVernay and Disney give the classic children’s novel a modern polish, and shift the book’s heavily Christian imagery into a more, let’s say, “Oprah-esque” spirituality (it helps to have a 50-foot version of Winfrey hanging around). It’s far from a perfect film, but something does not have to be perfect to be beautiful, which, in case you're not paying attention, is the message the movie is offering you.

If you have ever stood in front of a painting hoping you could step into that world, you now can. The world’s first fully oil - painted movie, Loving Vincent (Van Gogh) allows us to inhabit this world in his chosen medium. Through flashbacks, Van Gogh's contemporaries and painted subjects come to terms with their personal responsibility in his life and somewhat mysterious death.  Van Gogh’s life was passionate but distorted both emotionally and by his perception of light and color.  At the end, we can ask ourselves if would we have treated Vincent any differently. 

Writer/director Cory Finley's impressive debut strikes me as an exploitation film in search of a soul. But that's a good thing. His script and direction perfectly mimic the sociopathic tendencies of his lead characters, who are portrayed precisely by Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke, respectively. Anton Yelchin also joins in on the fun in full scene-stealing mode, as he did so often. Thoroughbreds is being compared to other films, but Finley's style doesn't strike me as derivative; especially when it comes to his pitch-black sense of humor and his wonderful use of short-sided cinematography. For better or worse, this 28-year old playwright could be our next Martin McDonagh. 

It pains me to imagine how many great sci-fi movies we'd have from writer/director Alex Garland if he escaped Danny Boyle's grasp sooner. Ex Machina set the standard, but Annihilation is a much more ambitious beast. The film's genetic makeup is all kinds of screwy. It's H.R. Giger fused with Joseph Conrad. For each intellectually stimulating sequence, there’s a terrifying one closely on its heels. It’s a thrilling ride that hits a few bumps towards the end, but Garland deserves massive praise for bringing this much audacity to the mainstream. It’s hard-nosed, adult Science Fiction with a capital "S".