J.T. Kolness ~ Film, Television, Awards Discussion and Reviews

Unbelievably Good Action Saves Unbelievably Inconsistent Third Wick "Chapter" By J.T. Kolness 2014's John Wick was one of the most gleefully good surprises of its year, offering us a shockingly emotional and terrifically badass action thriller and blessing us with a new iconic character for Keanu Reeves to play after the actor had been swinging and missing for years since his last big role in the sci-fi classic The Matrix . Director Chad Stahelski proved to be a brilliant stager of beautifully shot action scenes layered with a crisp sense of humor. Stahelksi upped his game with the uniquely different John Wick Chapter 2 , which switched things up and eyed its focus primarily on crafting some of the most jaw-droppingly choreographed sequenecs of action in modern cinema (rather than the more lowkey approach of the first) and while the film had less emotional resonance and staying power, it still managed to drop our jaws further and clench our fists tighter. John W...

An Infectiously Entertaining Return to Bricksburg By J.T. Kolness There are few cinematic surprises as genuine as 2014's The Lego Movie . The fact that it was good was a miracle, the fact that it was one of the best films of its year was astounding, but now here we are, five years later, and that film is now considered the Toy Story of its generation. Shepherded by writer-directors Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (the kings of turning bad ideas into genuinely great films), The Lego Movie inspired filmgoers young and old to dream and build big and love bigger. Oozing with nonstop hilarity, eye-popping visuals, and a crisp and wild pace, the film was a sugar-coated candy shop of earnest positivity and that care and attention was carried over into The Lego Batman Movie (to mostly successful results) and The Lego Ninjago Movie (to less than successful results), both released three years later in 2017. Two years later, Lord & Miller return to write the sequel, directe...

"Buzzsaw" Fails to Cut Deep by J.T. Kolness Dan Gilroy has worked in the business for decades. So far back, he was tapped to pen the final rewrite of the infamously never-made Superman Lives . After spending over a year of his life dedicated to that project, only for it to be cancelled, Gilroy built up frustration and finally resonance to move on to other things. During that time, he conceived the ideas that would eventually lead him to making his third directorial feature, Velvet Buzzsaw . Partially inspired by his complicated time working in the film business, you would imagine Gilroy, who delivered us a modern classic with his directorial debut Nightcrawler , would have displayed a little more effort in the writing department. Sure, nuggets of ideas remain in the final product of Velvet Buzzsaw , but the results of this long-conceived thriller feel ultimately half-baked. Set in the ritzy world of art criticism, the film is about a variety of people working in the...

No, "They Shall Not" By J.T. Kolness No one could ever really guess in the early stages of Peter Jackson's career that he would wind up being one of the most technologically pioneering filmmakers of this new millenium, but here we are. Delivering monumental epics with his Lord of the Rings trilogy as well as King Kong , and continuing to push the medium with the visual effects company WETA, for better or for worse (given your opinion on the high-frame-rate Hobbit films or The Lovely Bones ), Jackson seems to refuse to be a slouch in the director's chair. In certain screenings of They Shall Not Grow Old , Jackson delivers a forward to the audience, explaining the inception of the film in which the Imperial War Museum granted Jackson their use of World War I footage archives and told him to do whatever he wanted with it. There was never really a concrete idea, just a massive catalog of footage that was left for Jackson to assemble, and he being as bold as he is...

"Cold" Is Correct by J.T. Kolness Pawel Pawlikowski is quite a visionary director, managing to craft a unique framing style with his last film, the Oscar-winning Ida (2014) and now Cold War. His unique use of muted black-and-white filtered, 4:3 aspect ratio framing and sticking the subject toward the lower half of the screen beautifully captures a sense of loneliness and quiet fragility for its central characters as the rest of the scenery around them seems to loom about a sense of emptiness. His characters search for a sense of belonging. Why am I here? Where do I fit in? How do we fit in together? The soft lighting he uses glosses a blanket of sensitivity over the stories he chooses to tell. It's very easy to grasp that Pawlikowski loves the films he's making and wants you to love them too. Ida was a very easy film to warm to. Cold War proves otherwise. Joanna Kulig and Tomasz Kot are our two star-crossed lovers in a story set in post-war Poland where Kulig...