While audiences will have the chance to take a break from big action blockbusters this week, there is no shortage of options when it comes to new releases. Comedy, history, horror and sports are all covered in the films hitting the big screen. Get ready for Blockers, Chappaquiddick, A Quiet Place and The Miracle Season.
Just remember, I'm not reviewing these movies, but rather predicting where they'll end up on the Tomatometer. Let's take a look at This Rotten Week has to offer.
On its surface, Blockers looks incredibly stupid, and I'm honestly very lucky that a lot of reviews of the film are already online. There's no way without a significant head start that I would have put up the prediction anywhere in this range. Comedies like this typically have a massive critical uphill climb because raunchiness and hijinks don't appeal to all professional cinephiles. This looks like one of the rare exceptions.
This is Kay Cannon's first directorial work after penning all three Pitch Perfect movies (79%, 65%, 31% respectively). Critics are celebrating the story within the comedy as a female empowerment film for the teenagers as parents bumble their way through a landscape they simply don't understand. Blockers having an 89% through nearly fifty reviews is rarified air for this type of movie, and suggests a feature that offers laughs and heart in equal measure. Those make for the best kinds of comedies.
Chappaquiddick tells the tale of the fateful evening in 1969 when the car driven by Senator Ted Kennedy (played by Jason Clarke) flipped over a bridge in the titular town, killing the woman in the passenger seat, Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara). This film details the time leading up to the accident and fallout within the Kennedy clan after the incident.
Directed by John Curran, Chappaquiddick has received positive press thus far, sitting at 69% on the Tomatometer through 16 reviews. Critics are nearly universal in their praise for Jason Clarke as Kennedy, with the only negatives coming from some frustration with the methodical nature of the script. Curran's other work includes smaller films like Tracks (83%), Stone (51%), The Painted Veil (74%) and We Don't Live Here Anymore (65%). His latest will likely fall in line with those films, earning a fresh rating without really topping the charts.
The eerie silence even in the two-minute long trailer for A Quiet Place is almost unmanageable from a tension standpoint. I can't even imagine what it's like sitting on the edge of sound for an entire film. The film imagines a near future world where a family, living in exile are kept to a life without sound, hiding from monsters who hunt them if they make a peep.
Written by, directed and starring Jon Krasinski (and co-starring his real-life wife Emily Blunt), A Quiet Place is sitting in a vaunted position at 100% through 35 reviews. Just like Blockers is the rare comedy scoring well with critics, this one is the same but for the horror genre. It appears to be a great movie, that will scare the pants off you. I doubt it sticks with the perfect record, but critics are praising just about every aspect of the film from the script, performances, tension, message and more.
While The Miracle Season is based on a true story, it very much seems like this movie was imagined specifically to get audiences to get a little dusty around the old eyeballs. The movie tells the notable tale of the Iowa West City High School volleyball team who lost their best player to an untimely death and went on to win the state title in her memory.
It's hard to imagine critics really dislike The Miracle Season considering the story and inspirational aspect of the the film. But at the same time it looks rather canned and melodramatic, working really hard to pull on the inspirational and emotional heartstrings. For that I think it ends up solidly in the middle. I doubt any critic blasts it, but I also suspect high praise is hard to come by.
We had a very solid week last time out, with all three predictions falling within the range of their Tomatometer score. It's back-patting time as the sweep isn't all that common an occurrence. Ready Player One (Predicted: 82% Actual: 76%) finished well in the fresh range, with most critics commenting on just how much fun the whole experience was on the big screen. This much-anticipated adaptation of the popular book left fans happy and the only real knocks (that I could tell from the reviews) were possibly a misunderstanding of the source material.
Meanwhile, Acrimony (Predicted: 15% Actual: 24%) was just another Tyler Perry film that finished in the lower quarter of the Tomatometer. This guy's films are among the most predictable in the whole world of cinema simply because they almost all fall within this range. Critics hate them. Critics were left mostly confused about the point of the movie. Almost to a review, they hated the story, characters, plot and acting. A few positive reviews trickled in which made my prediction look a little low. But overall, as predicted, this was a bad film.
And finally, God's Not Dead 3 (Predicted: 7% Actual: 15%) has the distinction of being the best-reviewed film in this franchise (tied with the original). So I guess when they are having the God's Not Dead meetups and reunions these folks can look down at the second being film as being twice as bad as the other ones. But everywhere else they are looking up at the rest of the critical world because these films are just downright bad.
Next time around we've got Rampage, Borg vs. McEnroe, Sgt Stubby: An American Hero and Truth or Dare. It's gonna be a Rotten Week!
