Flix At :48

This week's review focuses on the upcoming 91st annual Academy Awards honoring the best in film from 2018. Casey gives us his predictions in the main categories as well as his thoughts on films that were forgotten in the nomination process.

Flipping the script on a light-hearted romantic comedy has never felt so dismal or uninspired (much like my own personal love life). What Men Want is a remake of the 2000 comedy What Women Want when Mel Gibson (Daddy's Home Two, 2017) magically earns the power to hear all women's thoughts and even more magically becomes less of a misogynist in the process.

Gina Rodriguez (Jane the Virgin TV series) plays a Mexican-American woman living in current-day Los Angeles whose innocence transforms into determined survival. After escaping an attack of bullets in a Tijuana nightclub, she's abducted by members of the Mexican drug cartel and forced to carry out their plans of drug trafficking and murder.

Indian-American director M. Night Shyamalan (The Visit, 2015) is at it again with another psychological thriller packed with the tension of boiled linguine and the flavor of skim milk.

If Beale Street Could Talk is a moving and vivid love story of 2 young people in 1960s Harlem whose love becomes strained when the man (Stephan James, Race, 2016) is arrested and jailed for a crime he didn't commit, while the woman (gorgeous newcomer Kiki Layne) tries to work with a lawyer to prove her partner's innocence.

Vice is a biographical film that chronicles the life and career of Dick Cheney, who has often been named by historians as the most powerful Vice President in U.S. history.

I’m so lucky to have seen this film. It has the perfect balance of history, emotion, intrigue and comedy.

It’s not often I watch a movie that feels like it was made for me. Boy Erased is such a movie. Based on a memoir of the same name by Garrard Conley first published in 2016, Boy Erased tells the story of a teenage boy in a devout Baptist family who comes out as gay to his parents and is then enrolled in a conversion therapy program to cure him of his attraction to men.

When a professional, black piano player hires a white nightclub bouncer to drive him on a 2-month concert tour through the Deep South in 1962, an awkward road trip turns into a journey of sobering self-discovery.

Creed II is a sequel to the hit drama Creed from 2015 that was directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, 2018). This sequel again pairs famous boxing champion Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone, Escape Plan, 2013) with his protégé Adonis Johnson, the son of one of Rocky’s greatest rivals, Apollo Creed.