‘JUNGLE CRUISE’ Charters a Noisy, Pun-Fueled Trip Down Familiar Waters

July 29, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Disney, Dwayne Johnson, Édgar Ramírez, Emily Blunt, Glenn Fircarra, Jaume Collet-Serra, Jesse Plemons, John Requa, Jungle Cruise, Michael Green, Out in Theaters, Paul Giamatti, Reviews 1 Comment

What to say about Jungle Cruise, Disney’s latest attempt to mine existing IP for franchise potential and big box office ducats, that isn’t already implied by its existence? For all intents and purposes, the movie is fine. An unremarkable, CGI-heavy “throwback” to the swashbuckling serials of the 1920’s, Jungle Cruise doesn’t hide its obvious aspirations to turn a Disneyland ride into another major media franchise a la Pirates of the Caribbean. The result is filmmaking as pure commerce, the beancounters at the House of Mouse barely containing their cynicism for audiences who see marquee names and a decently cut trailer and rush to cinemas (or, now, Disney+) to trade in their hard earned dollars for 127 minutes of chiseled, forgettable fantasy-adventure mediocrity. Read More

An Opportunistic Knight Quests in Superbly Crafted, Narratively Adventurous ‘THE GREEN KNIGHT’

July 28, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A24, Alicia Vikander, Andrew Croz Palermo, Barry Keoghan, Daniel Hart, Dev Patel, Erin Kellyman, Joel Edgerton, Kate Dickie, Malgosia Turzanska, Ralph Ineson, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, The Green Knight 2 Comments

David Lowery is a visual poet. Throughout his celebrated career, the Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, Pete’s Dragon, and A Ghost Story director has leaned on visual language and unconventional film grammar to connect with audiences, championing the emotional resonance of imagery over traditional narrative structure. In many ways, his films are in the same vein as American auteur Terrence Malick: thoughtful and dense, visually resplendent, whispery tone poems designated strictly for the Film Buff crowd. In that capacity, Lowery suffers Malick’s shortcomings, particularly as it pertains to resting too much within the opaque interiority of his characters and letting plotting fall by the wayside.

Cathartic Documentary ‘ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN’ Grapples with Dark Profundity

July 7, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Documentary, Morgan Neville, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain 2 Comments

I’d never watched a full episode of any of Anthony Bourdain’s various programs but I knew of and admired the man nonetheless. A New York line cook turned globe-trotting modern day philosopher, Bourdain embodied the idea that travel is a transformative business and Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain reveals a man changed – for the better, and the worse – for it. For Bourdain, a willingness to try anything once coupled with a desire to go to the furthest reaches of the globe to reveal an inner yearning and restlessness. Read More

‘THE FOREVER PURGE’ Is Redundant, Already Behind the Times

July 1, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Ana de la Reguera, Everardo Gout, Horror, James DeMonaco, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tenoch Huerta, The Forever Purge, The Purge, Will Patton Leave a comment

Subtlety has never been the aim of James DeMonaco, the writer-director of the first trilogy of Purge flicks as well as screenwriter for the remaining sequels and all-around franchise figurehead, and that’s never been more clear than in The Forever Purge. Claiming to be the final film in the franchise that spawned four sequels and two seasons of a now-cancelled USA Network series, The Forever Purge puts our turbulent American politics front and center, creating a not-too-distant vision where MAGA-inspired insurrectionists continue the “legalized violence” at the film’s center beyond the allowed 12-hour window of the purge. A new dawn brings the continuation of violence as America enters a “forever purge”, a state of bullet-ridden eternal mayhem; a nightmarish ever after of racially-motivated violence. Read More

Better Late than Never, ‘BLACK WIDOW’ Gives MCU’s Preeminent Shero a Fitting Sendoff

June 29, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Black Widow, Cate Shortland, David Harbour, Eric Pearson, Florence Pugh, Jac Schaeffe, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, MCU, Natasha Romanoff, Out in Theaters, Rachel Weisz, Ray Winstone, Reviews, Scarlett Johansson, William Hurt 1 Comment

The second to last of the original Avengers to get her own standalone bow (with Hawkeye’s very own miniseries hitting Disney+ late 2021), Black Widow has been long overdue her turn in the spotlight for some time now. If we weren’t living in an aggressively patriarchal society, it might seem strange that it took so long to get Scarlett Johansson, who has led the charts for most bankable actress alive for many years, her own feature film. But then again it seems that Hollywood suits only recently learned the lesson that the masses would turn out for superhero movies that starred people other than white men and so thus Black Widow was bankrolled into existence, 11 years after her debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Read More

A Ratchet Weekend Goes Viral in A24 Sex Work Drama ‘ZOLA’

June 28, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged A24, Colman Domingo, Janicza Bravo, Nicholas Braun, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Riley Keough, Taylour Paige, Zola 1 Comment

If you haven’t read the hysterically unhinged 148-tweet thread that details how the eponymous Aziah “Zola” King (Taylour Paige) and “this white bitch” Stefani (Riley Keough) fell out, fear not: Zola will gladly fill in all the gory deets for you. One of the buzziest breakout splashes from 2020’s Sundance Film Festival, Zola is a kinetic social media-influenced dark comedy that adapts what was deemed “the greatest stripper saga ever tweeted” with visual style and sardonic pizzaz to spare. Exploding with personality and a flair for Gen-Z garishness (with too many tweet-notification audio drops to count), the latest great from A24 traps audience, alongside the titular Zola, in a prison-stay of a weekend as everything goes horribly wrong. Before it all went viral. Read More

There’s Somehow Even More Family And Furious Stupidity in Ridiculous ‘F9’

June 23, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Charlize Theron, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, F9, Fast & Furious, Helen Mirren, John Cena, Justin Lin, Kurt Russell, Michael Rooker, Michelle Rodriguez, Nathalie Emmanuel, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Sung Kang, Tyrese Gibson, Vin Diesel 3 Comments

It might not have been until F9: The Fast Saga that the Toretto crew finally launched into outer space but the long-running Fast & Furious franchise left Earth’s rotations a long time ago. When Fast Five reconfigured what was possible for the crew of once-car-jackers and small-time criminals by making them larger-than-life master-criminals to whom the laws of physics bent the knee in surrender, all bets were finally off. Helmer Justin Lin had reached a pinnacle of the utterly ridiculous, high-octane bombast that fueled the car-based action films and laid the template for all that would follow. Fast would never be the same. Read More

Tribeca 2021: Adrien Brody’s ‘CLEAN’ an Ugly, On the Nose Neo-Noir With Intense Dumb Guy Energy

June 21, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Adrien Brody, Chandler DuPont, Clean, Glenn Fleshler, Tribeca, Tribeca 2021 Leave a comment

In Clean, Adrien Brody is a garbage man named Clean. After a tragedy in his past that haunts him to this day, Clean has gone clean. He’s trying to redeem his past mistakes by cleaning up the streets of Utica. Taking out the trash, literally and metaphorically. Dirty cops and rancid garbage, all must go. An ugly and hilariously on the nose watch, Clean is the kind of self-serious neo-noir that amplifies its navel-gazing faux-grittiness to a point of self-parody, complete with stuffy, gravelly voiceover, written as an obvious attempt to ape Alan Moore’s oft-copied steely nihilism, with streaky, smoky nighttime cinematography that adds nothing but another layer of comical try-hardiness to the overall picture. Read More

Tribeca 2021: Endearing Werewolf Whodunnit ‘WEREWOLVES WITHIN’ Channels Edgar Wright

June 17, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Catherine Curtin, Cheyenne Jackson, George Basil, Glenn Fleshler, Harvey Guillén, Josh Ruben, Michael Chernus, Michaela Watkins, Milana Vayntrub, Misha Wolff, Sarah Burns, Werewolves Within 1 Comment

Like Clue with lycanthropy, Josh Ruben’s Werewolves Within is an ensemble-driven horror-comedy with lots of earnest charm and plenty of satisfying laughs. A hairy whodunnit about a small Vermont community terrorized by what they assume to be a werewolf, Werewolves Within is that rare effective video game adaptation, reworking Ubisoft’s multiplayer Mafia-like VR game of the same name into an endearing and tongue-in-cheek werewolf whodunnit. Read More

Tribeca 2021: ‘ULTRASOUND’ a Hypnotic Layer Cake of Mindf#ckery

June 16, 2021 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Bob Stephenson, Breeda Wool, Chelsea Lopez, Chris Gartin, Conor Stechschulte, Festival Reviews, Rainey Qualley, Reviews, Rob Schroeder, Tribeca, Tribeca 2021, Tunde Adebimpe, Ultrasound, Vincent Kartheiser Leave a comment

From the very first moments of Ultrasound, something is off. In fact, a lot of things are off. There’s the obvious fact that the movie starts with a brilliantly uncomfortably ‘car breaks down in the rain’ moment where a soaked man seeks shelter in the only house nearby, the kind of scene audiences are instinctually trained to beware in movies. But there’s little moments too. Little touches that you’ll catch where something is certainly not as it should be. A woman’s bulging pregnant belly is there in one scene and gone in the next. A fully-stocked room service tray is wildly out of place on a deserted country road. Like a Find-The-Mistake picture book (think Dr. Seuss’s ‘Wacky Wednesday’) the anachronisms and scrambled bits of reality in Ultrasound just keep stacking up. Read More