TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

After cleaning up handsomely at the Golden Globes, and getting a whopping twelve nominations at the Academy Awards (with Mad Max: Fury Road coming in a close second place!), the casual moviegoer is probably becoming very intrigued with seeing Alejandro G. Innáritu's The Revenant . On paper it's maybe not such an easy sell: a man is left for dead by a greedy trapper and he has to fight is way back to exact revenge. That's it: a fairly simple plot. So is it worth your dollar? Absolutely: if you don't mind a little blood. And by a little I mean one of the most violent movies I saw in the 2015 movie year, right behind The Hateful Eight but still well in front of Kingsman . It also has some shades of Angelina Jolie's Unbroken . If you hate Leonardo DiCaprio, see this movie, because you get to watch him suffer what regular people would break under: unendurable circumstances. When he's not almost mercy killed by his men he's getting buried alive. When he's no

The Oscar nominations are coming right around the corner! After a surprising Golden Globes, where The Revenant had a near sweep of three of the night's biggest awards, really anything could happen! Interestingly enough, Revenant isn't even up for a Best Cast nomination at the SAGs. No movie since the SAG's inception in 1995 ( Braveheart ) has won without a  Best Cast ensemble. Then again, eccentric choices like The Birdcage and The Full Monty have won, so it's anyone's guess. My choices for Best Picture are equally eccentric: you have fantastical blockbusters like Fury Road and Martian  here, along with solid indies ( Carol and Brooklyn ) and movies with big stars and small-ish budgets ( Spotlight and The Big Short ). I lost my bananas last year when The Lego Movie  only got a sole nomination for "Everything is Awesome!!!" I won't be that surprised if Inside Out doesn't make it with the big dogs, but I will lose what is left of my faith in the Osca

"I've never heard someone be called the N-word as much as I have in this movie." This is a quote from a friend of mine who saw The Hateful Eight , and boy is it accurate. Quentin Tarantino, along with, you know, changing the movie landscape and all that, is a fan of gratuitousness. His first two films ( Reservoir Dogs and Pulp  Fiction ) clock in, according to Wikipedia, at 534 f-words combine, and you can guess it's not "falafel." The first Kill Bill movie has Uma Thurman chopping off dozens of samurai limbs, and Django Unchained   had...everything. The lover of everything B-cinema loves to meld genres, tropes and character archetypes together to give you an X-rated smorgasbord for movie fans and casual watchers alike. It almost seems like a burden to have that much of a crammed imagination. I've yet to see Jackie Brown and his Grindhouse collaboration with Robert Rodriguez, but otherwise I'm happy to report I've seen Tarantino's entire d

Holy smokes do I have a lot of reading to do. All of the biggest movies of 2016 are comic book films, from Valentine's Day's Deadpool , to March's Batman v. Superman and the summer's Captain America: Civil War . 2016 looks like an incredible year for the movies, but don't be afraid to get nostalgic about the year that's passed us! For someone who champions original filming, I can't believe two sequels rest in my top five list (and maybe a comic book movie is sneakily hiding somewhere in this post). Being in college ate up most of my time this year, but I was still able to watch 22 candidates for my top spot, including Mission: Impossible 5 , Kingsman , Ant-Man and Crimson Peak . All (mostly action) movies I really enjoyed but couldn't find a place for. Maybe in a weaker year. Since I'm anal about only counting movies released in 2015 that I saw from 1/1/15-12/31/15, movies I missed like Room , Anomalisa , The Hateful Eight , The Revenant and the one