Movie Reviews | The Last Movie Guy

The Fabelmans (2022)

Posted on September 30 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Steven Spielberg is synonymous with cinema. In Olympus, a place awaits him to share with the great filmmakers who preceded him and who, like him, were a must for moviegoers. Even for a filmmaker of his caliber, the work he undertakes in The Fabelmans (2022) is challenging. For a man who changed the industry with a shark and some musical notes, who made the world fall in love with an alien, who took us on the most amazing adventures with his Indiana Jones, who saved thousands of Jews from extermination Nazi, who saved Private Ryan and who has shown for more than 5 decades that his thing is to make movies, this is still his most difficult move.

Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf (1975)

Posted on August 12 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Paint your village and you will paint the whole world.
Leo Tolstoy

Leonardo Favio knew that very well. It is as if it were impregnated in his DNA, because he did nothing more than shout to the world the trifles, the details, the most intimate of his “village”. With Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf the Argentine director’s bet was quite risky. Now he was not talking about the oppressed children’s victims of a political and social system like in Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965), nor about the legendary gaucho of Juan Moreira (1973), now he turns to a character that comes from the Guarani mythology. And we say risky because it is not one of those classic figures from Greek or Norse mythology, it is a figure that has limited relevance within a less widespread culture.

Cabaret (1972)

Posted on July 19 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Bob Fosse’s musical Cabaret is included in multiple lists of the best movies of all time. The film holds the record for the most Oscars for a film that does not win the Best Picture award. At the 1973 ceremony the movie won 8 statuettes, including Best Actress for Liza Minnelli and Best Director for Fosse.

Loosely adapted from the Broadway musical of the same name, the film takes more from the novel “The Berlin Stories” and the play “I am a Camera”. Both the novel and the play were in turn the source for the musical. The main difference is that Fosse only took a couple of musical numbers from the original work for the film. John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote new compositions that brought the celluloid version of Cabaret to life.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Posted on June 10 by Hugo Pagan Soto

I wish it was 1986 too. At least someone else would have to worry about the bills. Before getting to Top Gun: Maverick (2022) we must get into the DeLorean and travel to 1986. Tony Scott (1944-2012) gave the cinema great movies, films that transcended the screen and became entrenched in popular culture, Top Gun (1986) is the perfect example. It’s impossible to imagine the eighties and nineties without Maverick, Ice Man and the F-14s taking to the skies to the tune of Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone. Or maybe listening to Berlin’s Take My Breath Away and not imagining Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis doing their thing. Beyond its value as a cinematographic work, Scott’s film stands out thanks to its ability to connect with the audience and permeate it until it becomes a currency of regular use in society.

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Posted on May 27, 2022 by Hugo Pagan Soto

Each movie is a universe. If we are lucky, those stories that are told in frames that follow each other with narrative coherence will lead us to discover a unique world into which we enter hopelessly thanks to the power of the script. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) is a perfect example of this. Like Dorothy when swept away by the tornado, we realize that we are no longer in Kansas when the script by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert disfigures reality and introduces us to the premise of the parallel universes through which its protagonist Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) must travel. Although Marvel and Disney have made the concept of the multiverse fashionable, here this element has a justification that goes beyond mere entertainment. Conceptually, these parallel universes are channels those directors use to separate the emotional layers of their central characters.