Khalil Barnett
About Khalil Barnett
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CREED II: If There’s Poetry In Boxing…
SOUTHPAW, written by Kurt Sutter of the successful, long-running show Sons of Anarchy, came out in July of 2015. Ryan Coogler’s CREED, co-written with Aaron Covington, released four months later of the same year. Before seeing either of them, I expected to enjoy Creed but like Southpaw better, aesthetically. I have always been a huge fan of the Rocky series, but I was more recently a fan of Sons, so there, admittedly, was bias filled in my assumption that went beyond my reaction to their inaugural trailers. I was wrong, it turned out. Southpaw, though I loved it and still do, was, well, written by a television writer and felt like it. This is not to say it was bad by any measure, but the emotional beats bordered a bit much on the grandiose. And while this is great for a show with the breathing room of a serial, as a device it was constricted by the tight conventions of cinema and in the movie registered as ..depressing.
Timo Tjahjanto’s THE NIGHT COMES FOR US: A Story Of Frenetic Poetry
Orson Welles said of friendship that, through it, we get to create the illusion that we are not alone. He said of women that through them men become civilized. I wonder what he would have thought of The Night Comes For Us, a film that illustrates friendship (both its value and fragility) through a harsh, deconstructive lens, and presents a young girl as the catalyst for its protagonist’s quest to civilize himself, that is, to regain his civility after a career of criminality and murder.
Review: More Than The Hype It Lives Up To, LOGAN Is A Superhero Movie With Tact And Soul
You don’t usually go into a superhero movie expecting an emotionally taxing experience, but all of the promotional marketing for Logan warned us leading up to its release to expect exactly that. In Logan, James Mangold’s follow up to his notable though flawed 2013 outing The Wolverine, we’re shown a senile Professor Charles Xavier devoid of dignity and his usual poise. We’re treated to an alcoholic, time-battered Wolverine. And we’re told a story based on a comic that stands out for its bleakness. But that’s the thing, many comic book fans don’t love them for their stories, they love them for their spectacle.
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