Kafkatesque ‘MEN’ Favors Allegory, Mood Over Plot

May 17, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A24, Alex Garland, Horror, Jessie Buckley, Men, Paapa Essiedu, Rory Kinnear 1 Comment

Men? Meh.

If we feel pain, are we doomed to it? Writer-director Alex Garland’s latest film, Men, is plagued by this one idea: the cyclical, unwavering nature of pain and abuse. Jessie Buckley is Harper, a woman suffering. After a traumatic incident involving her former husband (Paapa Essiedu), Harper retreats to the English countryside to find some quiet away from the city and the life she shared with her ex. While she intends to give herself space for emotional healing, Harper instead finds an intrusive, hellish male community seemingly dead-set on breaking her down further. Events turns more weird, then utterly hellish. Read More

When Sam Raimi Lets Loose, ‘DOCTOR STRANGE IN THE MULTIVERSE OF MADNESS’ Is Pure Dark Magic. Otherwise, Meh.

May 3, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Benedict Cumberbatch, Benedict Wong, Bruce Campbell, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Elizabeth Olsen, Kevin Feige, Marvel, MCU, Rachel McAdams, Sam Raimi, Xochitl Gomez 1 Comment

Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered

The multitude of successes and failures of the larger MCU brand is put on full display with its most recent entry, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The film directed by Spider-Man and Evil Dead director Sam Raimi, more than any other Marvel effort to date, underscores issues of creative overlording (Kevin Feige, master of the box office, checking in) that has long plagued the comic book production house. The push and pull between actual directorial style and ownership of said style and the larger corporatized Marvel Brand has never been so readily apparent in the finished product, resulting in one of Marvel’s most split-identity entries to date. One that also houses some of its most daring and dazzling segments across all of its 28 films and six Disney+ TV events. Read More

‘THE NORTHMAN’, A Life of Death

April 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Björk, Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Reviews, Robert Eggers, The Northman Leave a comment

Heavy Metal 895

Robert Eggers finds the language of a movie before anything else. Drawing up the screenplay for The Witch, Eggers studied journals, diaries, and anything from the early days of American settlers that he could get his hands on. Through their particularly dated parlance, he crafted a haunting vision of religious fervor gone amuck in a haunted New England wood. For his sophomore feature, The Lighthouse, Eggers looked to the vernacular of folklore, myths, and seamen, spinning spittle-infused soliloquies about mariner curses on the 1890s high seas. His salty dialogue matched perfectly with Willem Dafoe’s wide-eyed delivery. With The Northman, Eggers pairs with Icelandic poet Sjón to find the language of the 9th century Nordic people. And their language is violence. Read More

Pointless ‘FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE SECRETS OF DUMBLEDORE’ Spends Last Shred of Goodwill on Political Allegory

April 5, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alison Sudol, Dan Fogler, David Yates, Eddie Redmayne, Ezra Miller, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore, J.K. Rowlings, Jude Law, Mads Mikkelsen, Reviews 1 Comment

Avada Kedavra Beasts Franchise!

Grindewald runs for public office, the Dumbledore family tree expands, and Magizoologist Newt Scamander dances with dungeon scorpions in the absolutely pointless, painfully-dull, franchise-killing Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Series mainstay Katherine Waterston had the good sense to sit this one out and I wish I had as well. Read More

The 10 Best Performances of 2021

March 27, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists Tagged Ann Dowd, Kristen Stewart, Renate Reinste, Riz Ahmed, Simon Rex, Troy Kotsur 1 Comment

With the Oscars set to finally wrap up the 2021 Awards season this evening, it’s worth looking past the politicking and star power of the major awards shows to what was truly the most outstanding performances of last year. Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, the Academy Awards sometimes get things right but more often than not favor history and campaigning into who walks away with the golden statue. I’m looking instead at the purity of the performance in question to name the 10 best performances of 2021. Read More

SXSW ’22: Punchy ‘BODIES BODIES BODIES’ Subverts Slasher Formula

March 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Amandla Stenberg, Bodies Bodies Bodies, Chase Sui Wonders, Halina Reijn, Lee Pace, Maria Bakalova, Peter Davidson, Rachel Sennott, SXSW, SXSW 2022 Leave a comment

Everyone’s always a suspect in any slasher movie worth its salt and that’s true up until the very last moments in Halina Reijn’s Bodies Bodies Bodies. The film, which stars a slew of established and rising talent in the form of Maria Bakalova, Lee Pace, Amandla Stenberg, Chase Sui Wonders, Peter Davidson, and a scene-stealing Rachel Sennott, cleverly subverts what we know of the genre trappings and what we – perhaps falsely? – assume to be true. Read More

SXSW ‘22: Yearning Homoerotic Thriller ‘IT IS IN US ALL’

March 14, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Antonia Campbell Hughes, Cosmo Jarvis, Movie Reviews, Reviews, Rhys Mannion, SXSW, SXSW 2022 Leave a comment

When out-of-tower Hamish (Cosmo Jarvis) gets in a head-on-collision with Irish teenagers Callum and Evan (Rhys Mannion), only the later survives. Reeling from the fallout, the unscathed Evan and banged up Hamish wind up in a complicated dance, caught somewhere between trauma bonding and flirtation in a film that’s slow to reveal its hand. Their relationship becomes bizarrely intimate but undercut with a simmering level of foreboding in actress-turned-first-time-director Antonia Campbell Hughes‘ introspective thriller It Is In Us All. Read More

SXSW ‘22: ‘LINOLEUM’, A Life from Orbit

March 13, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Colin West, Jim Gaffigan, Katelyn Nacon, Linoleum, Movie Reviews, Rhea Seehorn, Roger Hendricks Simon, SXSW 2022, Tony Shalhoub Leave a comment

Jim Gaffigan stars as astronomer and public television personality Cameron Edwin in Colin West’s science fiction-tinged festival dramedy Linoleum. A bodega-version Bill Nye, Cameron leads the failing daily children’s show ‘Above & Beyond’ which after years of existing in obscurity has been picked up by a major network. The rub? Cameron will be replaced as the show’s host by his straight-laced doppelgänger Kent Armstrong (also played by Gaffigan), a more successful, better looking version of himself whose arrival signals a series of enigmatic occurrences. Not everything is as it seems. Read More

SXSW ’22: Self-Help Influencer ‘SISSY’ Canceled in Satirical Psycho-Thriller

March 13, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Aisha Dee, Emily de Margheriti, Hannah Barlow, Kane Senes, Sissy, SXSW 2022 Leave a comment

Bullied as a child, Sissy (Aisha Dee) thought she left behind her childhood name. She‘s Cecilia now and she’s a self-help influencer. Popular on social media under the handle “Sincerely Cecilia”, the trendy twenty-something shares glossy selfie videos about mindfulness and self-love, topics she actually knows nearly nothing about. Deep down, she’s a traumatized child; projecting security, suppressing scars. Her 200k followers see Sincerely Cecilia™ but they don’t see Cecilia sincerely. They don’t know the true Sissy who lurks beneath. Read More

SXSW ’22: Mind-Blowing ‘EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE’ Is the Multiverse of Madness We Deserve

March 12, 2022 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheiner, Everything Everywhere All At Once, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, SXSW, SXSW 2022 3 Comments

Everything Everywhere All At Once truly is the multiverse of madness that we deserve. Hilarious, utterly singular, and weirdly profound, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner (aka “The Daniels”) have cooked up something wholly original with their martial-arts multiversal science-fiction story about a Chinese family that owns a laundry mat. A genius-level explosion of creativity that blends Wuxia sci-fi with the vast endlessness that is literally the spectrum of onscreen possibility, there’s is a film that borders on the insane and is never anything less than wowing. To say I had a smile plastered on my face the entire time would be to overlook that fact that everyone around me did as well. Read More