The magic of Monkey Man, doesn’t come from its incredible fight scenes, or it’s brilliant choreography or it’s smart and intelligent cinematography. Instead, it comes from an obvious struggle. You can see, throughout this movie, that Dev Patel’s blood is everywhere. There’s no part of this film that doesn’t scream like something trying to rip its way up through an artist's chest, and out of their mouth.

Honestly, this movie is a blast. The action is incredible, the choreography and cinematography are on point. The characters remain believable and motivated. I just wish, when it was all done, we were in a different place. There is resolution here, and I don’t mean to take away from that, but the resolution feels like it lacks impact. Largely because despite all John does, at the end of the film, the world is more or less unchanged.

Sitting down to watch a Christmas movie called Violent Night, produced by the same folks that made John Wick, Nobody, and Atomic Blonde, you can only really expect one thing: Hand to hand combat, guns, and excellent fight choreography. Violent Night is exactly what I wanted, delivered with a few extra goodies that I had no expectation to get. The fight scenes are creative and brutal and the family storyline is actually passable and at times touching. Santa brought his slay!

Bullet Train is what happens when you blend Ocean’s Eleven and Murder on the Orient Express. If you were to then look to me for another sentence or two more I would follow that by simply saying, If you let the guy who directed John Wick and Deadpool 2 direct it. Boom. Sold. That is this movie. Its wild, irreverent, harebrained, and a great time.

As we all get ready to wrap up 2019 I wanted to share my thoughts on this year in cinema. This has been one of the greatest years for movies that I can remember, and we’ll be setting the bar very high in my first annual year in review. At the time of this writing I have been to the theater 37 times for 34 different movies.