Director:
Christopher Nolan
Armed with only one word, Tenet, and fighting for the survival of the entire world, a Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
In a twilight world of international espionage, an unnamed CIA operative, known as The Protagonist, is recruited by a mysterious organization called Tenet to participate in a global assignment that unfolds beyond real time. The mission: prevent Andrei Sator, a renegade Russian oligarch with precognition abilities, from starting World War III. The Protagonist will soon master the art of "time inversion" as a way of countering the threat that is to come.
Why is Tenet worth watching: Tenet is an exhilarating and mind-boggling movie to watch. It's about a secret agent who embarks on a dangerous, time-bending mission to prevent the start of World War III.
This movie .......I don't know how to describe how I feel about it. I watched it yesterday and being honest I feel like I have a better understanding of the movie now than while I was watching it in time. And that's not a bad thing! Most of Christopher Nolan's films make me feel this way. This movie is very complex in a good way. There are so many layers and seeing them all unfold and intertwine during the movie was really interesting.
I love the complexity of the characters too. Each new face you see on the screen, you pay close attention to. With, that being said, each character is well developed even the antagonist, Andrie Sator (Kenneth Branagh). My major pet peeve is when the quote on quote bad guy is just that ...a bad guy. Kenneth Branagh did a good job making me intrigued by the backstory of his character and trying to figure out his thinking. I also liked watching the scenes between his character and Kat (Elizabeth Debicki). You could always feel the tension between the two, and you believed whatever emotions they were acting out. It made you feel uncomfortable for Kat to be around Andrie, but that is the point. I think the arc that they gave Kat toward the end was great.
I also loved the dynamic between Neil (Robert Patterson) and "The Protagonist" (John David Washington). They just clicked. You could see the blooming of friendship on-screen. I loved it.
Now the action scenes in this movie are going to be talked about and analyzed for a long time. I think these scenes were what I enjoyed the most out of the whole movie. This movie changes the way you perceive and think about motion. The fights could be viewed in so many ways, and each would convey something totally different.
And the cinematography. Not only was this a cool concept, but it was an aesthetically pleasing movie to look at. Every angle felt intentional, and it was so cool to see the way Christopher Nolan portrayed time going backwards on screen. Christopher Nolan's mind is beautiful.
I think everyone should watch this movie sometime. If you like movies that have many layers and easter eggs, this is the movie for you. You won't stop thinking about this movie for days. Everything is connected; a never-ending loop.
3. Extraction
Release date: April 24
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Rudhraksh Jaiswal, Randeep Hooda, Golshifteh Farahani
Director: Sam Hargrave
Why it’s worth watching: Tossing aside Thor's massive hammer and trimming his gnarly Avengers: Endgame beard, Chris Hemsworth picks up an assault rifle and gets to work in Extraction, a new Netflix shoot-em-up that re-teams the Australian actor with his former Marvel filmmaking buddies Joe and Anthony Russo, who produced the project. (Joe wrote the bullet-ridden screenplay, which is based on the 2014 graphic novel Ciudad.) While Hemsworth's gun-toting commando protagonist Tyler Rake -- yes, that's his name -- lacks comic-book superpowers and Norse god strength, he can take a beating and keep fighting, a quality that serves him well as he rescues and protects the child of an Indian drug kingpin. At one point in the film's big show-stopping chase sequence, which stunt-coordinator-turned-director Sam Hargrave presents as one long take, Rake gets slammed by a speeding car. His solution? Locate a bigger vehicle, preferably a large truck, and hit the bad guy back. That type of strategic thinking should give you a sense of Rake's tactical prowess and of the movie's blunt-force approach to action filmmaking. There's a dreary, perfunctory quality to the storytelling, especially as it marches toward its bloody finale, but Extraction has enough big fight scenes to make it required viewing in a year without a new John Wick movie to look forward to.
4. Time to hunt
Cast: Lee Je-hoon, Ahn Jae-hong, Choi Woo-shik, Park Jung-min
Director: Yoon Sung-hyun (Bleak Night)
Why it’s worth watching: Unrelenting in its pursuit of scenarios where guys point big guns at each other in sparsely lit empty hallways, Time to Hunt is a South Korean thriller that knows exactly what stylistic register it's playing in. A group of four friends, including Parasite and Train to Busan break-out Choi Woo-shik, knock over a gambling house, stealing a hefty bag of money and a set of even more valuable hard-drives, and then find themselves targeted by a ruthless contract killer (Park Hae-soo) who moves like the T-1000 and shoots like a henchmen in a Michael Mann movie. There are dystopian elements to the world -- protests play out in the streets, the police wage a tech-savvy war on citizens, automatic rifles are readily available to all potential buyers -- but they all serve the simmering tension and elevate the pounding set-pieces instead of feeling like unnecessary allegorical padding. Unlike Netflix's recent futuristic actin slog The Last Days of American Crime, which tripped over its own convoluted premise and failed to spark genuine suspense, Time to Hunt uses its elongated runtime to build sequences in a meticulous, considerate way that should appeal to viewers who have seen Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice too many times to count.
5. Alone
Release date: September 20
Cast: Jules Willcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald
Director: John Hyams (Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning)
Why it’s worth watching: There's a shot in Alone, a stripped-down and ultra-tense kidnapping thriller, where the gangly villain slowly cuts a small block of cheese with a sharp blade as a terrified woman watches from a nearby hiding space. He slices the food with a sense of proportion and purpose. It's the type of human moment that a more twist-obsessed, plot-driven film might speed by. But director John Hyams, who brought a touch of the surreal to the VOD schlock-verse of the Universal Soldier series, let's it play out with the exact right amount of tension and uneasiness. Especially in its opening stretch, Alone livens up a by-the-numbers set-up -- captivity narrative with woodsy survival trappings -- by paying attention to the smallest details.
6. Birds of prey
Release date: February 7
Cast: Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Rosie Perez
Director: Cathy Yan (Dead Pigs)
Why it’s worth watching: Birds of Prey, the recently retitled Suicide Squad spin-off starring Margot Robbie's joyfully defiant Harley Quinn, didn't exactly light up the box office in the same way last year's Oscar-nominated Joker movie did, but it's a lot more fun. That's mostly thanks to the tightly choreographed, inventively staged fight scenes, which director Cathy Yan films in a way that channels both the hand-to-hand combat of John Wick and the more baroque tendencies of the Joel Schumacher Batman era. (A multi-character throw-down in a funhouse towards the end is particularly well executed and a car chase involving a pair of roller-blades finds a new spin on a scene you've seen a million times.) If the convoluted flashback structure occasional grates and some of the jokes fall flat, the action more than makes up for it, which is pretty rare for a big studio superhero release these days.
7. Lost Bullet
Cast: Alban Lenoir, Nicolas Duvauchelle, Ramzy Bedia, Stéfi Celma
Director: Guillaume Pierret
Why it’s worth watching: Alban Lenoir, the star and co-writer of this proudly sturdy French thriller, has a rugged-yet-droll Statham-like quality, that rogue-like charisma that never reads as desperation. He plays Lino, a hapless thief who turns into an unlikely car mechanic for the police, and he spends most of the movie attempting to clear his name for a murder he didn't commit. (Tracking down the lost bullet of the title is easier said than done.) The best scene in the movie, a police station beatdown where Lino escapes from an interrogation room and fends off a number of officers with all available objects, occurs relatively early on, but Lenoir keeps you engaged as the plot plays itself out. Each head-denting, eyebrow-singing stunt gives him another opportunity to keep his cool. It's exactly the type of brisk, clever movie that tends to get buried in Netflix's algorithmic shuffle.
8. The Old Guard
Release date: July 10
Cast: Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Marwan Kenzari
Director: Gina Prince-Bythewood (Beyond the Lights)
Why it’s worth watching: After battling her way through an apocalyptic desert wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, punching her way through Berlin in Atomic Blonde, and tangling in the sky with the Fast and Furious crew, Charlize Theron gets her own superhero franchise with this curious adaptation of Greg Rucka's comic series focussed on a rag-tag group un-killable mercenaries. While the broad strokes of the plot combine Highlander immortality schtick with a military rescue commando narrative, director Gina Prince-Bythewood brings a startling emotional directness and a winning earnestness to the material. The shooting of the fights can be a bit by-the-numbers, with Theron delivering head-shots and axe-throws on cue, but the relationships between the characters are more fully developed and lived-in than many similar would-be streaming blockbusters. Even if the requisite sequel-tease at the end is frustrating, it's not exactly unwelcome.
9. Debt Collectors
Release date: May 29
Cast: Scott Adkins, Louis Mandylor, Vladimir Kulich, Marina Sirtis
Director: Jesse V. Johnson (Triple Threat)
Why it’s worth watching: A sequel to 2018's Walter Hill-like throwback The Debt Collector, which found the reliably bruising Scott Adkins playing a reluctant mob bagman named French, this buddy action comedy occasionally fails to pay up. Much of the banter between French and his boxing-loving partner Sue (Louis Mandylor) falls flat; the storyline is numbingly episodic; the shoot-out at the end is too chaotic and choppy. So, why is it on this list? Well, prolific DTV-collaborators Adkins and Johnson, who crafted last year's great Avengement and a number of other titles, are worth keeping up with even when they're slightly off their game. In addition to a winning barroom brawl in the opening and a satisfying foot chase where a henchman reveals he has aspirations of being a stuntman, the movie also boasts a knock-down slugfest that serves as a not-so-subtle They Live tribute. Those scenes, along with the camaraderie between Adkins and Mandylor, make Debt Collectors a satisfying enough hang for anyone who already enjoyed the original.
10. Bloodshot
Release date: March 13
Cast: Vin Diesel, Eiza González, Guy Pearce, Lamorne Morris
Director: David S.F. Wilson
Why it’s worth watching: With F9, the next chapter in the NOS-powered Fast and Furious saga, pushed to 2021 because of the outbreak of the coronavirus, Vin Diesel fans will have to make due with Bloodshot, a frenzied adaptation of a popular Valiant Comics title first published in the '90s. Like many non-Fast thrillers from Diesel, the results are a mixed bag, emphasizing the star's muscular frame, gravely voice, and no-nonsense attitude while failing to fully activate his oddball charisma. He plays Ray Garrison, a gun-toting Marine who gets brutally murdered by some shady assassins and brought back to life by an even shadier bio-tech corporation headed up by Guy Pearce's smarmy, sweater-wearing Dr. Emil Harting. Outfitted with a combination of Deadpool-like regeneration abilities and Limitless-like mental gifts, Garrison becomes a vengeance-driven hired gun for the company, but he soon discovers that his boss might be tinkering with his memories to get the desired results. Despite some ultra-choppy, borderline incomprehensible action sequences, Bloodshot has a handful of clever science-fiction concepts, charming supporting performances, and Groundhog Day-ish twists that elevate it above many of Diesel's lackluster non-Fast blockbuster attempts.
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