Film Reviews, Interviews and Articles
The therapeutic power of art reverberates through both creator and observer. There’s something that stirs the human spirit in encountering it, especially when it comes carved straight off the bone of the soul. And no emotion strikes deeper than the sorrow born of tragedy. In Chloé Zhao’s powerhouse of a dramatic tearjerker, Hamnet, tragedy and art are married through a human tapestry of love and loss. Buckle up and bring the Kleenex. Read More
Detective Benoit Blanc is back for the third edition of Rian Johnson’s irreverently charming neo-noir Netflix mystery series, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery. This time knives (and, of course, a murder most foul) are indeed involved, but so is an unholy whodunnit that defies the logic of the material world: a locked-closet killing and an apparent resurrection used as profane misdirection when a slaying at an isolated church leaves everyone scratching their heads and praying to god for answers. The effect is another breezy, well-laid-out puzzle box from Johnson that spins its duplicitous webs, though it falls short of greatness due to an over-reliance on confessional exposition and an underdeveloped ensemble cast. Read More
Leaving the big city for a beat-up house deep in the Montana sticks, new parents Grace (Jennifer Lawrence, frequently nude) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson, less nude) are struggling to adjust. She’s a writer; he works with his hands in coveralls. Their rural life isn’t particularly fulfilling, and neither, unfortunately, is the film. From acclaimed auteur Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here), Die My Love is a meandering plunge into postpartum ennui that captures its characters’ slow unraveling but drags the audience along for the same dreary ride without much in the way of reward. Read More
Other blockbusters take note: the Predator franchise just can’t seem to miss latest. The newest entry, its sixth live-action film, Badlands, is stripped to the stark white bone, yet still taps into the pulsing artery of what makes this movies like this so fundamentally compelling: a culture of necessity. There isn’t a single ounce of fat on Predator: Badlands, which is a lean, mean, killing-machine of a tentpole movie that tells a thrilling coming-of-age story through the lens of IP and somehow enriches both in the process. Director Dan Trachtenberg, now three for three in the Predator franchise, has emerged as something of a modern-day James Cameron, only leaner, less cringy, and frankly, more consistent. He understands that the best genre films aren’t just about the spectacle. They’re about how environments shapes the character as much as the plot and use special effects and thrilling fight sequences to further that idea. Read More
A twisted morality play-cum-psychological thriller with a maybe-science-fiction bite – one that only Yorgos Lanthimos could execute at this level – Bugonia may be a remake, but it’s still infused with vivid originality and alive with possibility. The story of a radicalized gig worker and his slow-witted cousin who kidnap a powerful biochem CEO (convinced she’s an alien from the Andromeda galaxy) plays out as a tense, one-location two-hander that crackles with the high-voltage energy of Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone. It’s unnerving, darkly funny, sharply acted, and loaded with just enough satirical commentary on the tragedy of modern life to keep it gripping from its bleak opening moments to its glorious finish. Read More
Guillermo del Toro seemed destined to tackle Frankenstein eventually. The fact that he finally got around to it feels less like a surprise than a gothic inevitability, summoned with clear adoration for the source material and a meticulous eye for detail. His entire career has circled the idea of misunderstood monsters and the nobility buried within those abandoned to the fringes. But after decades spent riffing on creation myths and weaving stories of the macabre and supernatural, his version of Frankenstein, for all its sumptuous production and undeniable cinematic majesty, feels a bit, well, Frankensteined together. Read More
Black Phone 2, a snowy and sentimental spooky sequel from Scott Derrickson, is a mixed bag of horror do’s and don’ts. Set three years after the events of the first film, where kidnapped child captive Finney fought and killed a serial child murderer known as the Grabber (Ethan Hawke) by communicating with his deceased victims through a kind of supernatural apparatus, i.e., a black phone, the sequel picks up with more messages from the great beyond. Derrickson’s followup is thoughtful and meditative in places, well-acted in others, shoddily written here and there, full of stylistic choices but light on actual scares: a menagerie of successes and shortcomings stuffed into one haunted receiver. Read More
Part sweaty character study, part paranoid gambling thriller, The Ballad of a Small Player tries to burrow into the psychology of a degenerate gambler adrift in the gaudy purgatory of Macau but comes up short. What could have been an impressive vision of bad luck and worse decisions unfortunately delivers fewer thrills than a five-dollar hand of baccarat in Reno at 2PM on a Tuesday. The film has plenty of surface appeal: shimmering neon, location-shot flair, handsome production design, perfectly tailored suits that scream status and money even as they’re dressing a man on the edge of financial ruin; and there’s even a human pulse thumping beneath it all, largely thanks to a glisteningly committed, twitchy turn from Colin Farrell. But Edward Berger’s latest – following the austere All Quiet on the Western Front and the critical grand slam Conclave – is ultimately a confused, meandering, and profoundly unsatisfying drama that gambles big on a unlikable protagonist and forgettable story to come up well short of a winning hand. Read More
One of our great modern melodramatists, Derek Cianfrance, a man seemingly born to make the most depressing movie of any given year, has switched gears to deliver something surprisingly warm and crowd-pleasing with Roofman. His earlier filmography is littered with bone-rattlingly bleak, yet always deeply involving works: a relationship splintering in real time in Blue Valentine; the generational sins of a dirtbag father rippling across years in The Place Beyond the Pines; and a doomed seafaring romance in The Light Between Oceans. The Canadian filmmaker knows how to wring tears and leave audiences emotionally concussed. That’s not to say Roofman, his first feature in nearly a decade, doesn’t have its share of moral murk and dramatic heft, it’s just the first time one of his films has felt genuinely nice. Read More
A big, empty spectacle of a movie, TRON: Ares is what happens when a franchise decides that a cyberpunk aesthetic alone is enough to carry a series. As a purely audio-visual experience, it’s a serviceably neon-soaked theater seat rocker, but the blasé script never locks onto anything narratively compelling or really has any justification for this story coming back to life after a 15-year hiatus. It relies entirely on expensive-looking action set pieces and a ripping Nine Inch Nails score to distract from the gaping void at its center, and might be able to pull off just that magic trick if not for the almost total lack of emotional calibration. Despite a solid cast that includes Greta Lee, Jared Leto, Evan Peters, and, randomly, Hasan Minhaj, the film struggles to make its characters feel like anything other than algorithmic husks. The story’s lack of emotional stakes only amplifies how fundamentally unfeeling this movie manages to be. Read More