Oscar-nominated director Todd Haynes (Carol, 2015) has crafted an intelligent, astute, real-life film about fighting for justice against enormous odds. A corporate lawyer (a reserved Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight, 2015) who defends large industrial companies starts investigating a small lawsuit from rural West Virginia in 1998 centered on dead farm animals and contaminated water. Searching through endless piles of paper (literally), the lawyer begins to discover repeated cover-ups of chemical pollution by the ubiquitous and mega-rich DuPont company and tries to bring their actions to justice.

Knives Out is a darkly comic murder mystery with a plot that is twisty and witty with a touch of some classic genre motifs. When an imperious wealthy patriarch (Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World, 2017) dies in his rapaciously decorative mansion, it's not quite ruled out as a suicide. So all the family members are possible suspects...bringing suspicions and judgments into the light.

It's films like this that remind me why going to the movie theater is special and memorable. Based on the 2004 historical fiction novel Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, this film starts out zany and spirited following a 10-year-old boy named Jojo eagerly attending a training camp to join the Nazi army in 1940s Germany. Watching the world through the overzealous eyes of a child gives the film an elevated sense of comedy and innocence which then begin to transform when Jojo discovers his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in their home.

It's an awfully tall order to create a sequel to the iconic horror film, The Shining (1980), but first a little history.

Although this film was first screened in 2017, it has been refined and re-edited since then by its director to create this new director's cut. And it has finally gained wider distribution to now be shown throughout Utah. And in this case, good things come to those who wait. Historical dramas like The Current War: Director's Cut are often revered because they offer immersive portraits of history, and The Current War: Director's Cut does that wonderfully. But it also gives viewers a glimpse into the minds of some amazing people who created the foundations of modern life.

I know the official title of this sequel is Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, but I think a more appropriate title could be Maleficent: Everything but the Kitchen Sink. This film has so many sub-plots, so many characters to keep track of, and so many powers to explain within the realm of magical creatures, I was exhausted trying to keep track of everything.

You know you've either seen a great film or a terrible film when you're at a loss for words upon leaving the theater. While not a brilliant entry in the canon of horror comedies, Zombieland: Double Tap is not a tragic piece of garbage either.

What's up, everyone?! My name is Will Smith, and I can still do it all. I can even play two characters at once! That's the main message I came away with after watching this technological action thriller.

Oscar-nominated actor Joaquin Phoenix (The Sisters Brothers, 2018) gives his naturally idiosyncratic edge to the title role in this film offering a psychologically twisted and disarming origin story of Batman's greatest arch enemy. Phoenix plays an ordinary man working as a party clown with an unusual sense of humor and zero friends in a dirty, graffiti-covered, 1970s Gotham city. The continuous violence, loneliness, and aloof neglect surrounding him gradually push him into an eternal carnival ride of madness that is shaky, dangerous, revolutionary, and bloody.

It's films like this that make me grateful for unique international voices who offer independent and genuine stories outside U.S. borders. Asian American writer-director Lulu Wang (Posthumous, 2014) entered this film in Sundance where it gained wider distribution and opened in limited release in July this year.