Movie Reviews
Get the latest movie reviews from our in-house critics, Shirrel Rhoades and Ian Brockway. You’ll also find reviews from film festivals and advance screening movies. Do you have what it takes to be a Guest movie reviewer? Send us your review to info@TropicCinema.com for approval and maybe you’ll earn a spot! Want to make sure you never miss a review? Follow the Tropic on Facebook for daily updates!
Tropic Sprockets: Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Like the last image in a horror film, the most unnerving and terrible aspect of Matt Tyrnauer’s excellent film is that Roy Cohn lives on in death and his public poison still holds, making our country petty, polarizing, and for many, a stubborn shade of orange.
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Tropic Sprockets: Monos
Although the film does echo other survivalist stories from Joseph Conrad to William Golding, a picture is all that is necessary. The magnetism of “Monos” in its depiction of children in a great bestial maze of blood and fire is surprisingly scary, meditative and human.
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Front Row at the Movies: Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Tracing Cohn’s history from brash young lawyer to McCarthy’s evil crony to his mesmeric influence on Donald Trump, Tyrnauer describes his film as “the Rosetta Stone, the decoder ring of how we got to now.”
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Front Row at the Movies: Monos
American actress Julianne Nicholson joins former Disney child actor Moises Arias and a cast of Colombian unknowns. Director Alejandro Landes put them through a boot camp so they would bond. They slept in tents in the jungle and ate rations. “Every day was a beast,” observes Landes. “The lines between paradise and hell are very thin.”
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Front Row at the Movies: Official Secrets
This film tells about another real-life whistleblower, a British woman named Katherine Gun who spilled the beans in 2003 about an American-British plot to bug the phones and emails of key UN Security Council members.
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Tropic Sprockets: Joker
Phoenix’s Joker is a genuine anti-hero, full of the knowledge of Kafka and Camus. Skinny to the point of bone on bone with a saturnine face, this is the pop art version of The Hunger Artist.
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Tropic Sprockets: Judy
“Judy” portrays Garland as a great engine who is compelled at any cost to act and entertain. The film re-creates the legend from all sides: her brash theatricality, her self-deprecation and her great pining, like a vampire’s hunger to be a good and ever-present mother.
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Front Row at the Movies: Joker
Rather than studying the performances of previous Joker actors, star Joaquin Phoenix read a book on political assassins to get a sense of how killers think. He lost 52 pounds for the role and developed a laugh based on videos of insane people. The actor got so wound up in his role as a deranged psychopath that he sometimes had to walk off the set to compose himself.
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Front Row at the Movies: Judy
Directed by Rupert Goold, the film follows an aging Judy Garland as she arrives in London for a run of sell-out concerts at the Talk of the Town nightclub. The film follows her life through romance, addiction and battles with her management.
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Tropic Sprockets: Official Secrets
Despite the obvious conventions: dark rooms, swearing editors, askance looks and a sonorous musical score at key moments, Knightley gives an excellent performance which elevates the drama of anguished intrigue and diplomatic secrecy.
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