'Cherry' Review Thread

Rotten Tomatoes: 38% (64 reviews) with 5.20 in average ratingCritics consensus: It's certainly stylish and it offers Tom Holland a welcome opportunity to branch out, but Cherry's woes stem from a story that's too formulaic to bowl anyone over.Metacritic: 45/100 (25 critics)As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.Walker's story no doubt is grounded in a very real milieu that reflects the grim existence of countless Americans returning from active duty to a country blighted by economic downturn, shrinking opportunity and substance abuse. But the only reality Cherry reflects with numbing insistence is that of co-directors getting high on their own high style.-David Rooney, The Hollywood ReporterThere are a few small pockets of air along the way, but “Cherry” has no way of getting you to care about someone who hardly seems to care about himself. Its protagonist is like a Plinko chip getting bounced from one American disaster to the next and scrambling for any kind of agency he can find as he falls towards rock bottom. At the end of the day, his only available recourse is to sit down on the side of the road and decide that he just doesn’t want to be in this movie anymore. Don’t sweat it, Cherry.-David Ehrlich, IndieWire: DThe Russo brothers, working in a style of troweled-on extravagance, inflate it into a showreel. They’re trying to think beyond Marvel and display their real-world chops, but what they demonstrate instead is that even with down-in-the-trenches material like this, they still think like fantasists. “Cherry” has the glossy inauthenticity of a bad Tony Scott movie. The Russos treat Walker’s novel as if it were a graphic novel — a layer cake of grunge that’s all frosting.-Owen Gleiberman, VarietyYou’d think a tenure on some of TV’s most post-modern comedies would, at the very least, give the Russo brothers a more pronounced self-awareness about the line separating seriousness from mere pretensions to it. “Community” couldn’t parody this movie better than it parodies itself.-A.A. Dowd, The A.V. Club: DThese moments of emotional honesty aren’t enough to give “Cherry” the resonance that these situations deserve. From its facile depiction of the role of incarceration in the rehab process — addiction is a health issue that we keep mistakenly treating as a criminal issue — to the under-writing of the characters, what should be a harrowing drama instead comes off as an anti-drug pamphlet.-Alonso Duralde, The WrapCherry is not an easy film, and I admire the Russos for trying to take on material that’s drastically different from everything else in their filmography. But Cherry is a movie that quickly gets away from them, and the result feels disrespectful to the subject matter it seeks to explore. We do need to examine the myriad of ways America has failed in the 21st century, but doing it with stylish camera tricks, changing aspect ratios, etc. has to be in service to strengthening the story, not an end in and of itself.-Matt Goldberg, Collider: D-There’s much to chew on in Cherry, and not all of it works. But a never-better performance from Tom Holland, and some bold directorial choices, make it a mostly compelling watch.-John Nugent, Empire: 3/5“Cherry” is at times almost overwhelming in its raw and real depiction of addiction and how it can destroy lives, but also chill-inducing with its promise of a possible lasting light at the end of the tunnel.-Richard Roeper, Chicago Sun Times: 3.5/4If the Russo brothers are totally interested in the opioid crisis, shouldn’t the aftermath of addiction have a foothold as the absurdist flashy war sequences or the gawking scenes of drug-taking? These stories need less Hollywood, and more clear-eyed recognition of the real people at the heart of this crisis. As for Russo brothers’ “Cherry,” it doesn’t succeed as a war film, as a heist flick, or the star vehicle it so craves to be for Holland. It’s just average at its core.-Robert Daniels, The Playlist: CAs the story pings and ricochets through the last increasingly unhinged hour of its 140-minute run time, the chaos feels like a fitting parallel, maybe, for its protagonist's state of mind. For all the frenzied action of the final scenes though, there's an airless, overwrought sense of diminishing returns; and that's a comedown we've seen too many times before.-Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly: CPLOTAn Army medic suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder becomes a serial bank robber after an addiction to drugs puts him in debt. Based on Nico Walker's semi-autobiographical novel.DIRECTORAnthony Russo & Joe RussoWRITERAngela Russo-Otstot & Jessica GoldbergMUSICHenry JackmanCINEMATOGRAPHYNewton Thomas SiegelEDITORJeff GrothRelease date:February 26, 2021 (select theaters)March 12, 2021 (Apple TV+)STARRINGTom Holland as CherryCiara Bravo as EmilyJack Reynor as Pills and CokeMichael Rispoli as TommyJeff Wahlberg as JimenezForrest Goodluck as James LightfootMichael Gandolfini as Cousin Joe via /r/movies https://ift.tt/2NYd4bS