No Second Draft – ramblings about film and TV

Synopsis: After a zombie outbreak causes Las Vegas to be overrun and walled-off, ex-mercenary Scott Ward (Dave Bautista) assembles a crack team to infiltrate the zombie-infested City of Sin in order to break into a heavily guarded vault and steal the $200 million inside it. The mission, of course, does not go as planned, thanks…

Synopsis: A year in the life of Fern (Frances McDormand), a modern day nomad. Rendered houseless by the Great Recession of 2008 and the closure of the gypsum mine that sustained her entire town, she leads an itinerant life in her van, picking up odd jobs all across America and sustaining herself however she can.…

Synopsis: In the Reagan-era 80s, first-generation Korean-Americans Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Han Ye-Ri) Yi, along with their children Anne (Noel Kate Cho) and David (Alan Kim), move from California to rural Arkansas, where Jacob dreams of establishing a farm. Soon, they are joined by Monica’s free-spirited grandmother Soon-Ja (Youn Yuh-Jung) and local eccentric Paul…

[mild spoilers for Promising Young Woman. Content warning – sexual assault] Synopsis: Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a mess. A medical school dropout who gets blackout drunk at bars, she is an easy target for predators … or at least that’s what she wants you to think. In reality, Cassie is an angel of vengeance,…

Synopsis: Sixty-six years after the events of the first Wonder Woman, Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) leads a comfortable, if solitary life in Washington DC as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian. When mousy new colleague Barbara Ann Minerva (Kristen Wiig) stumbles upon a magical stone that can grant wishes, it brings her and Diana in contact…

Synopsis: Screenwriter Herman ‘Mank’ Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) is a Hollywood outcast in the 1940s, thanks to his alcoholism and unfortunate habit of speaking truth to power. When an unfortunate car crash leaves him bedridden, Mank accepts a commission from ‘boy wonder’ multi-hyphenate Orson Welles (Tom Burke) to write a screenplay for his debut film. That…

Synopsis: Allison (Aubrey Plaza) is a filmmaker who decamps to an idyllic upstate New York lake house in search of inspiration for her next movie. Slowly, sexual and psychological tension begins to mount between Allison and her hosts, unemployed musician Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and pregnant ex-dancer Blair (Sarah Gadon). Then the film hits the halfway…

Synopsis: Jagshemash! Fourteen year after great Kazakh journalist Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) create educational documentary about America, he return to the US & A to deliver his teenage daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) to Vice Premier and reknowing pussyhound Mickael Pence as bribe to put once glorious nation of Kazakhstan in the good book of…

Synopsis: A young woman (Jessie Buckley) takes a long, strange trip to an isolated farmhouse to visit her new boyfriend Jake’s (Jesse Plemons) parents … or does she? 1. Let’s get right to the meat of the issue. I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is an overlong ode to solipsism that seems to pride itself on…

Synopsis: An ex-CIA agent only known as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is roped into a secretive organisation that aims to stop a global catastrophe resulting from the ability to reverse time. 1. Uh … it’s not good. It’s not bad per se, but it’s certainly not good.  2. Fine, I’ll start over. Ahem. With Tenet, Christopher…