Tag: Tessa Thompson

AHFW’s Top 5 Sundance 2021 Films

Jeff Mitchell

Even though the Sundance Film Festival is a big deal and only a 90-minute flight away from Phoenix, I sadly never attended.  After growing up in Upstate NY, shoveling our 60-yard driveway hundreds of times and trudging through blizzards, ice storms, and 3-foot snowdrifts as a paperboy for five years, I tend to shy away from snowy, cold weather whenever possible.  (Living in and embracing one of the hottest cities in the country is reasonably reliable proof, don’t you think?) This year, however, I enrolled in Sundance 2021, and through…

‘Annihilation’ horrifically demolishes old boundaries

Jeff Mitchell

“Annihilation” – Nobody. Nobody comes back. Nobody comes back after entering The Shimmer. Actually one person does come back, and now, Lena (Natalie Portman), a doctor – who also spent seven years in the United States Army – feels compelled to enter it.  In doing so, she takes movie audiences on a sometimes beautiful, but mostly a deeply unsettling, nightmarish journey in writer/director Alex Garland’s (“Ex Machina” (2014)) visionary science fiction stunner. The Shimmer is a bizarre phenomenon, a growing permeable force field, created by a meteor that landed near an…

Looking back at ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ director Taika Waititi’s movie catalog

Jeff Mitchell

On Friday, Nov. 3, “Thor: Ragnarok” invades theatres, and this latest installment in the Marvel Universe delivers spectacular thrills and oodles and oodles of laughs. (3.5/4 stars)  In fact, one could easily label it as a comedy, instead of an action-adventure, comic book film without an ounce of grief from anyone.   Credit the actors, including Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Mark Ruffalo, and Jeff Goldblum.   Tessa Thompson and Cate Blanchett hop on the comedy train as well, and the film’s overall tone matches its director Taika Waititi. Waititi is no stranger…