Ray Gunn — Review
Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn has been over 30 years in the making. It’s a film he’s wanted to make since before 1999’s The Iron Giant. Audiences are likely to walk in with lofty expectations because of that. Clearly, Bird is very passionate about this story. However, the film itself ultimately doesn’t feel as special as that passion suggests. Ray Gunn is a solid animated adventure, but it lacks the feeling of personal investment you might expect from a project a filmmaker has spent decades trying to bring to the big screen. What makes Ray Gunn stand out from the myriad of animated films is that it’s essentially an animated film noir, which is a genre hybrid we seldom see. However, that combination also comes with some drawbacks, because anyone who’s seen at least one classic film noir from the 1940s will be able to recognize exactly where Ray Gunn is headed.
The End of Oak Street — Review
David Robert Mitchell has one of the most eclectic filmographies of any director working today. He first emerged on the scene with 2010’s The Myth of the American Sleepover, a coming-of-age summer movie that authentically captures the awkwardness of adolescence, before following it with his breakout horror hit It Follows (2014). Then came Under the Silver Lake (2018), a neo-noir black comedy that was poorly received by critics but remains, in my opinion, the closest anyone has come to making something truly Lynchian in the last decade outside of Lynch himself. It’s fitting, then, that a moment in Mitchell’s latest film, The End of Oak Street, specifically reminded me of Twin Peaks: The Return. With only four features, Mitchell has already run the gamut of genres. His latest is a sci-fi dinosaur movie steeped in ’80s nostalgia. Whether audiences love or hate his work, one thing is certain: each of his films is unmistakably distinct.