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The Franchise Magazine

Entertainment and Magazines & Newspapers

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The Franchise Magazine is the UK’s best selling franchise publication. Printed every six weeks,...

Emma @ The Movies (1786 KP) rated Wolf (2019) in Movies

Sep 26, 2019

Wolf (2019)

2019 | Horror

3.3

(3 Ratings)

Movie Rating

The story they had behind the film. (0 more)

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A lot of the acting in Wolf feels like it was from TV, and several of the parts wouldn't have been far off comedic roles in things made for network shows. The acting isn't the only thing that smacked of TV. The music is also not something you'd expect in this sort of thing, it would be much more suited to a crime drama. Occasionally I felt like it might have been perfect for this sort of historic piece but then it would quickly slip back to crime drama and I was almost completely distracted from the film.

As an idea it's an intriguing one. The outline of the story would make a good movie, it's simple and has lots of opportunities to be really effective on screen, unfortunately I don't think this delivered on that potential.

There's quite a spread of characters but some do get overlooked. Ima has a backstory that you can glean through context and Liviana has an implied story but both are only hinted at and nothing is used. Sometimes this is forgivable but with what happens with them both at the end of the film I think it's appalling that we don't get more from them.

This was yet another film that suffers from a black hole of time. There are a couple of points where they play fast and loose ad in one particular place it looks like they filmed at different times of day not accounting for the scenes timeline.

The location itself is stunning and you can see that repeatedly in the panning shots of forest... lots of forest, oh, and a mountain range. The first time it was nice, the second time it was a little cliche, and after that I started writing abuse in my notes.

The other thing that seems to be popular in Wolf is the blurry camera work. For the most part it looks intentional as it's part of the reveal but it's not isolated to that. Some of the fight scenes look like they might have been put together quite well but in one of the biggest of those you can't tell because the action is accompanied by camerawork that looks like it was done by someone hiccuping on a pogo stick.

My other major quibble is the ending. It seems very late in the game to be adding information to the story. There was even an opportunity to introduce the point earlier in the film but that was where we ignored Ima's backstory, looks like a lot of things could have been solved by changing that scene, it seems like a huge misstep.

It's not the worst film, but it's also not the best. There were some big opportunities for improvements but none of them were taken and ultimately this feels like a waste of a good story.

Check out my full review here: http://emmaatthemovies.blogspot.com/2019/09/wolf-movie-review.html

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FOREX TRADER PRO: FX Trading Signals, Charts, News

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Forex Trader is a tool for investors, traders, and industrialists who take positions in the...

Dora and Friends HD

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Get ready to create big adventures with Dora and Friends, Nick Jr.’s newest show! It’s time to...

Suswatibasu (1701 KP) rated A Kind of Freedom: A Novel in Books

Nov 6, 2017 (Updated Nov 6, 2017)

A book rooted in hope and endurance

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton's beautiful debut novel explores four generations of a family, from the time of segregation to mass incarceration.

In A Kind of Freedom, Sexton pursues a family’s history in a downward spiral, with three alternating plot lines that echo one another along the way. It begins with the budding love of Evelyn, brought up in New Orleans and the daughter of a Creole mother and black doctor father. She is courted by Renard, a poor man who works menial jobs to get by but aspires to study medicine. Their courtship reveals the strictures of a class- and colour-driven society that suffocates ambition and distorts desire.

The second generation is about Jackie, a single mother in 1980s New Orleans who is in love with her child’s father but afraid he will succumb to his crack addiction.

Eventually, we get to know Jackie’s son, T.C., in 2010, a young man at a turning point in his life. Through T.C.'s eyes, Sexton portrays a post-Katrina New Orleans where the smell of mold still lingers and opportunities for fast cash in the streets abound, as do the chances of getting shot or arrested.

It's an unflinching portrayal, slightly detached and not overbearing in its rhetoric. It shows where links have been bruised and sometimes broken, but dwells on the endurance and not the damage. A moving read.