Everything I Got Paid to Review: May 2024
My May outings took me from one end of the quality spectrum to the other.
If you read my “About” page, you would have learned that I don’t only review movies for the love of the craft; I do this professionally as well.
I had half a mind to post all of my paid reviews as they came out, but that felt disingenuous in a way that I can’t quite articulate off the top of my head. So, instead, I will henceforth be posting monthly roundups of all the reviews I’ve done outside of The Treatment.
May was quite the month for reviews; I got to muse on a pair of top-notch blockbusters before unleashing my disdain upon a pretty abhorrent horror flick. I finished the month with a Netflix tentpole that I can only describe as excruciating.
I should also mention that I also reviewed the first half of the third season of Bridgerton, but critiquing television is, in my mind and for the most part, a very different sort of skill that I don’t really have any interest in sharpening long-term, and so I don’t really consider it to be among my personal review canon, so to speak.
‘The Fall Guy’
So far this year, Challengers is the film to beat, but The Fall Guy is the movie to beat.
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are both fantastic and hilarious, and the movie has an infectious joy towards the fun that it has, which it honors without sacrificing even an iota of its multi-pronged integrity. It’s a lightning-in-a-bottle blockbuster that I cannot recommend enough to anyone.
Read it here: https://wegotthiscovered.com/reviews/review-the-fall-guy-could-have-been-called-movie-the-movie-and-its-truly-glorious/
‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’
The Fall Guy, meet your closest competitor for “movie to beat.”
20th Century’s Planet of the Apes reboot has long been one of the best and most well-rounded genre franchises out there; Rise, Dawn, and War made bank, and they were all genuinely excellent explorations of the human condition as well.
Kingdom kicks off a brand new trilogy in a brand new era with a brand new protagonist, all while inhabiting the same canon. This kind of compartmentalization is key to maintaining a franchise’s quality, and it shows with Kingdom in a very good way. And while it’s not quite as strong of a start as Rise was, it sends Apes forward in a whole new direction, rigorously and intelligently unpacks its distinct ideas, and looks great doing it.
‘Tarot’
I won’t waste your time here. The only positive thing I have to say about this horror movie is that it gave me a case to claim hazard pay.
Read it here: https://wegotthiscovered.com/reviews/review-tarot-is-what-you-end-up-watching-when-fate-is-entirely-cruel-to-you/
‘Atlas’
Atlas was about as disappointing as a movie can get; a movie where you can so clearly and so agonizingly see the best version of itself buried underneath all the laziness, that you have half a mind to dust off the typewriter and get a head start on pitching the remake, because boy are you gonna feel guilty if you don’t.
Jokes aside, Atlas made just about every storytelling mistake under the sun, Sterling K. Brown was miscast/not utilized properly, and it was, by all observable measures, allergic to creativity.
Read it here: https://wegotthiscovered.com/reviews/review-atlas-is-the-map-you-should-follow-if-you-want-to-fumble-your-sci-fi-story/
Congratulations!