Bad Times at the El Royale

Bad Times at the El Royale is a neo-noir thriller written and directed by Drew Goddard and stars an all star cast that includes Jeff Bridges, Dakota Johnson, Cynthia Erivo, Jon Hamm, and Chris Hemsworth. The film concerns several people who have nothing to do with each other as they stay in a hotel in the middle of the Nevada and California border in 1969, with each of them dealing with their own dark secrets. You have a concierge who works at the hotel that spies on its own occupants, an FBI agent investigating the hotel, a woman wanting to be a singer, a priest looking for something, and one woman holding her own sister hostage. What makes this so interesting is that while some of the stories are resolved in the end, a few never get any conclusions despite the many questions never answered. El Royale is very stylish and colorful, has a well written story with great dialogue, very surprising moments, and the performances by everyone makes it hard to not love each of them despite their pasts. While the movie is an ensemble piece, there are a lot of times where the focus is on Erivo's struggling singer who gives a lot of long and well done singing sequences that feel out of place at times, though she does give the most powerful performance either way. These singing moments also don't help in the fact that the film is way too long and certain things feel like padding. You don't get to know a lot of the characters' backstories, and the flashbacks we get are very vague, though they're all enough for one to understand each of them. An interesting aspect is that the film is told in chapters, each one named after the rooms or times associated with each character that the chapter is focused on. Over all: 95%

2018 top list so far:
1. Halloween 2018

2. Won't You Be My Neighbor?/BlacKkKlansman (tie)

3. Incredibles 2

4. Avengers: Infinity War

5. Mission: Impossible - Fallout

6. Solo: A Star Wars Story

7. A Quiet Place
8. Deadpool 2

9. Black Panther

10. A Star Is Born 2018

11. Ant-Man and the Wasp

12. Ready Player One

13. Bad Times at the El Royale

14. Sicario: Day of the Soldado

15. Ocean's 8

16. Isle of Dogs

17. Game Night

18. Venom

19. Thoroughbreds

20. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again

21. The Predator

22. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom