Ron Howard is a deeply sentimental filmmaker who loves inspirational stories - Apollo 13, Cinderella Man, and his excellent sports drama Rush, for instance - and there are few more inspirational stories in recent memory than this one. Thirteen Lives, the adaptation of the true story of the 2018 Thai cave rescue, is a perfect match of director and material. PVīaby Assassins is available to watch on Hi-Yah!, for free with a library card on Hoopla, or for digital rental or purchase on Amazon, Apple TV, and Google Play. Gamers, take note: Action director Kensuke Sonomura is a celebrated video game fight choreographer who has done extensive work on the Devil May Cry and Resident Evil series, as well as Vanquish and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It features exciting hand-to-hand combat and gunplay that works well with the comedy, with many physical punchlines. More a fish-out-of-water comedy than pure action movie, the fight choreography in Baby Assassins is nonetheless great. When they’re asked by their boss to get part-time jobs in an effort to better integrate into society, the two girls struggle to find an alternative means to conflict resolution… outside of murder. Baby AssassinsĪ rare action comedy that is equal parts funny and kick-ass, Baby Assassins is an eccentric slice-of-life story about two (extremely) teenage girls who happen to kill people for a living.Ĭhisato and Mahiro would like nothing more than to perform their killer duties and then just laze around their apartment all day. Orphan: First Kill is available to watch on Paramount Plus. Thankfully, First Kill is in on every single one of its own jokes and manages to perfectly balance its tone between silly and a gruesome, well-made slasher, along with being one of the best “rich people are weird” movies of the last few years. The original Orphan (also great) hinged on a twist revealed late in the film, but the prequel gets the reveal out of the way early in favor of letting audiences feel like they’re in on the secret and the joke that Esther, a 9-year-old, is still played by Isabelle Fuhrman, who is now 25, which the movie uses all kinds of fun tricks to hide. ![]() This setup is nearly identical to the original movie, but the prequel manages to play with those expectations in some very clever ways. Orphan: First Kill follows a 9-year-old girl named Esther who breaks out of a hospital in Estonia, then scams her way into the good graces of a rich American family in hopes of making off in the night with whatever she can. As it turns out, Orphan is a very special series and its lead character/monster, Esther, is a very special child*. ![]() Returning to a franchise a decade later to do a prequel with the same lead actor shouldn’t just be a recipe for disaster it should have been completely impossible. It’s a familiar good-versus-evil story with familiar beats, but told in a way that’s rare for American screens, and with a level of detail, energy, and verve that keeps it engaging and personal through every epic battle. ![]() The result is a rich and thrilling underdog story with Prince-Bythewood’s usual attention to character-building, relationship-building, and steeping all the big plot beats in believable human emotion. The Agojie were real - they’re the inspiration for Black Panther’s Dora Milaje - and Prince-Bythewood drew heavily from their real-life art, music, fashion, weaponry, language, culture, and fighting styles to give the film texture, though in other ways it’s as fictionalized as Braveheart, Gandhi, or any other Hollywood historical epic. Viola Davis stars in The Woman King as General Nanisca, leader of the Agojie, an all-female band of elite warriors charged with protecting the West African kingdom of Dahomey in the 1820s, as a larger and more powerful neighboring tribe begins kidnapping Dahomey citizens to sell to European slave traders. Gina Prince-Bythewood takes the next step onward from her pivot to superhero action, Netflix’s The Old Guard, and lays out a historical epic that’s rousing, thrilling, and fierce as hell.
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