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...

I just watched The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 1  yesterday, and I have to say it is the polar opposite of Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman or (The Virtue of Ignorance) . Despite the pretentiously long name (just pick one or the other!) Birdman  is the movie with the Hollywood cast that's very Broadway, very independent, and very...alive. Of course, anyone who has seen it knows that Michael Keaton's Riggan berates a critic, saying that he takes risks being an actor, but what does she have to lose? This in effect makes this movie critic proof...but Inarritu and his brilliant cast need not worry, this movie is fantastic, and will surely pick up a trophy or two come Oscar time. Mid-life crises, putting on troubled plays, family dysfunction are all themes here that have been explored to death in other movies, but Birdman has a way of taking them, flipping them on their head and analyzing them in a way that feels fresh and electric. The closest thing I can say it is co...