TRAVIS BYRAM'S MOVIE REVIEWS

On paper, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle  is a cash grab, and in actuality, it definitely still is a cash grab. But it's a keenly executed, smart, genuinely funny, well-acted cash grab. Sony is about as subtle as The Rock's muscles, or Kevin Hart's brand of comedy. They could've recast Robin Williams' role and made the already CGI animals in the original even MORE CGI except this time Kate McKinnon is a kooky babysitter or Melissa McCarthy is a pesky neighbor next door. But no one would've shown up. How do you continue a property like Jumanji without blatantly ripping off what made the 1995 version magical? Well, a lot like this. The original version was a board game, so the logical thing to do is make it a video game, but not like "Call of Duty." Instead it's a cartridge 90's game, looking depressingly like an artifact of ancient times. Introduce your four main tropes characters in a high school setting: the geek, the jock, the bimbo and th...

My film studies professor would never forgive me if I called Greta Gerwig's directorial debut Lady Bird "real" or "relatable." "'Real' as compared to what?" she would say, her face scrunched up. "Relatable as compared to who?" So as to not disrespect her good name by copping out with generalizations, I'll call Lady Bird humble, hilarious, and easily one of 2017's finest films. It's a coming-of-age movie not devoid of cliches, but also not devoid of a massive heart. Saoirse Ronan stars as the titular character, whose birth name is Christine. The deviation from the religious-sounding name is intentional: Lady Bird goes through the motions of Catholic school but she's no saint. She argues with her tough-love mother (Laurie Metcalf, who all but has the engravings of her name on the Oscar statue), romances with her theatre castmate Danny (the recently Oscar-nominated Lucas Hedges) and goofs off with her best friend Juli...

With a number of people I exchanged this scary thought: I wasn't as hyped for The Last Jedi as I was two years ago for The Force Awakens . And then they did something even scarier: they agreed with me. For Episode VII , there were many factors in its favor: there hadn't been a live-action Star Wars film in a decade, there hadn't been a good Star Wars movie since 1983 (alright, that one is my opinion), Disney had bought Lucasfilm and Daisy Ridley was an unknown for the lead. Two years ago I listed the film as my third favorite movie of the year, a bronze medal in Olympic terms. Now I wouldn't be so sure. I've watched it again since 2015, where I was in a theater full of like-minded fans hoping to be rekindled by the galaxy far, far away. It is indisputably a soft remake of A New Hope , but I suppose I was one of the sheep who liked being herded into someplace familiar. With Last Jedi ...I didn't know what to expect. I knew the characters going in now, I knew Luke...

Though Carey Mulligan receives the top credit on the film's official poster, Dee Rees's new Netflix film is truly an ensemble picture. Everyone gets a chance to shine here, and that doesn't mean one character gets his/her "Oscar moment" where they deliver a teary-eyed monologue and then we can forget about them. Like life, there truly is no main character, and Rees mines this southern WWII character study for everything that it's worth: Mudbound is a rich, tragic success. The film is nearly deceptive in its straightforwardness. We see Laura (Mulligan) meet/be courted by a man she's not particularly in love with, Henry (Jason Clarke). She'd honestly be more interested in dancing with his war-bound brother Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), a charismatic drinker. After marrying, the McAllan clan (including Henry's prejudiced father, played by Jonathan Banks) move to a farm in Mississippi after being duped. There they share the land with tenant farmer Hap (Ro...

Despite its seemingly straightforward title, Martin McDonagh's new masterpiece doesn't take place in Ebbing, Missouri. It takes place in a slightly alternative world, where everybody is just slightly meaner to one another, slightly more profane in their vocabulary, but is simultaneously slightly smarter than any dialogue you're likely to hear in a movie this year. I call it "McDonaghland," and you should buy your tickets for admission ASAP, because Three Billboards is so far my favorite movie of the year. It may not reach the heights of McDonagh's directorial debut, In Bruges , which I still hold as one of the finest scripts ever produced, but boy does Three Billboards soar. It has the simplest of premises: Mildred Hayes (Frances McDormand), unsatisfied with the police investigation of the rape and death of her daughter, buys three billboards worth of space to call out the Ebbing police force, singling out Chief William Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) by name. ...