Sundance ‘24: ‘A REAL PAIN’ Interrogates The Overlap Between Individual and Family Trauma

January 21, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Sundance, Sundance 2024, Will Sharpe 2 Comments

Kieran Culkin shines in Jesse Eisenberg’s tender sophomore feature A Real Pain. A poignant meditation on loss, grief, and family history that’s part autobiographical and entirely heartfelt, Eisenberg has seemingly found his groove as a creator interested in melding melancholic human stories with relationship-driven good humor. “Anything that I’ve written that’s good is very personal,” Eisenberg shared at the premiere and with A Real Pain, he’s excavated situations and characters from his own life and translated them into a good-natured and provocative little drama with wide-reaching appeal. Read More

Sundance ‘24: Buzzy and Mind-Bending ‘IT’S WHAT’S INSIDE’ Pulls Off a Terrific Magic Trick

January 20, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Alycia Debnam-Carey, Brittany O'Grady, David Thompson, Gavin Leatherwood, Greg Jardin, Horror, It's What's Inside, James Morosini, Madison Davenport, Nina Bloomgarden, Reina Hardesty, Sundance, Sundance 2024 10 Comments

Eight former college friends reunite the evening before their friend’s wedding to play a heady game with far-reaching consequences. Such is the set-up for Greg Jardin’s utterly transfixing debut feature, a precisely-constructed explosion of creativity that smashes together the college reunion comedy, puzzle box thrillers, and a Shane Carruth-esque level of science-fiction precision. Skillfully paced to snatch your attention early on and never lose it for a moment, experiencing It’s What’s Inside is like watching a flawlessly executed magic trick for the very first time. Read More

Sundance ‘24: Tortured ‘I SAW THE TV GLOW’ Reaches Through the Screen

January 20, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Brigette Lundy-Paine, I Saw the TV Glow, Jane Schoenbrun, Justice Smith, Sundance, Sundance 2024 5 Comments

Jane Schoenbrun’s audacious followup to their attention-grabbing debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is billed as a horror feature but it takes careful time developing said horror. And delivers a wallop. A quietly remarkable film, and one that spurred a handful of walkouts during its Sundance premiere, I Saw The TV Glow is not an easily accessible film. But with just a little thought, investment, and excavation, this handsomely-mounted ethereal slowburn will be sure to worm its way deep under your skin and suck you into the screen. Read More

Sundance ‘24: ‘FREAKY TALES’ A Disjointed Tapestry of Stories, Ideas, and Tones, with Nazis

January 19, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Angus Cloud, Anna Boden, Ben Mendelsohn, Freaky Tales, Jay Ellis, Pedro Pascal, Ryan Fleck, Sundance, Sundance 2024 2 Comments

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Freaky Tales, a madcap 1987 Oakland-set anthology, is a lot. Told in four loosely threaded together chapters, this interconnected story of the intersection of corruption, subculture, and violence in Reagan-era west coast America bites off more than it can chew, becoming more of an implosive collision than a meaningful exploration of much as it stretches on. As is often the case with anthological features, each individual story only feels half-baked, the germ of a story not afforded the room to grow and develop into something more. They’re connected in only the loosest of senses, making the sloppy whole certainly less than the sum of its sometimes interesting parts. Read More

Sundance ’24: ‘HOW TO HAVE SEX’ and the Obliteration of Carefree Youth

January 18, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Enva Lewis, How to Have Sex, Lara Peake, Laura Ambler, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Molly Manning-Walker, Samuel Bottomley, Shaun Thomas, Sundance, Sundance 2024 2 Comments

When three British teenage friends, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), Skye (Lara Peake) and Em (Enva Lewis), abscond for a weekend holiday of hard partying, thumping clubs, and fast sex, they find that their freewheeling existence is more fragile than imagined. Tara, or “Taz” when she’s in full party animal mode, is the rowdy, raunchy heart and soul of the party and the film. She has yet to lose her virginity, and her mates won’t let her forget this fact. The trio embarks on their holiday with a clear goal: to explore their sexualities, particularly Tara’s. This setup is familiar for a coming-of-age romp but How to Have Sex quickly becomes something much deeper and more penetrative. Read More

‘THE BEEKEEPER’ Makes John Wick Look Like Walt Whitman

January 11, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Bobby Naderi, David Ayer, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Jeremy Irons, Josh Hutcherson, Kurt Wimmer, Reviews, The Beekeeper 6 Comments

Just because a movie actively acknowledges how dumb it is doesn’t make it any less so. This is the case with The Beekeeper, a low-rent John Wick knockoff that almost plays like a spoof. There’s plenty of quick-cut bloody action, a truly mind-boggling amount of references to bees and bee hive politics, and some of the worst dialogue this side of an Expendables movie. Pretty much everyone involved in the project seems to be in on the joke, hamming up the lowbrow camp when not administering decent, if unmemorable, action shoot ‘em ups, but that doesn’t make its consumption any less grueling. Read More

Move Over ‘MEAN GIRLS’, There’s a New High School Musical in Town

January 9, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Angourie Rice, Arturo Perez Jr, Auliʻi Cravalho, Avantika, Jaquel Spivey, Jeff Richmond, Mean Girls, Nell Benjamin, Reneé Rapp, Reviews, Samantha Jayne, Tim Meadows, Tina Fey 3 Comments

A new movie adaptation of the Broadway smash musical version of the original 2004 hit movie, which in turn was adapted from Rosalind Wiseman‘s 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes, 2024’s Mean Girls is a redux with pizzaz. Updating the impressively not-dated Lindsay Lohan/Rachel McAdams early-aughts teen comedy classic to the modern era while adding in a number of catchy tunes, the musical from co-directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. is an accomplishment in IP recycling that doesn’t feel, well, recycled. In fact, the whole thing is pretty fetch. Read More

Shallow, Campy ‘NIGHT SWIM’ Mostly Treads Water

January 4, 2024 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Amélie Hoeferle, Bryce McGuire, Charlie Sarroff, Horror, Night Swim, Reviews, Wyatt Russell 4 Comments

A former Major League Baseball player moves his family to a house with a haunted pool in the campy Jan-horror release, Night Swim. Six months after receiving a career-ending MS diagnosis, Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell), his wife Eve (Kerry Condon), and their two high school aged children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), struggle to accept the reality that life as they once knew it is over. Put off by the idea of moving to an assisted living community, Waller finds himself drawn to a house with a shady past (an instance of its evil detailed in the mildly effective cold open) and a mysterious pool. He soon discovers that its waters, drawn from a nearby natural spring, have healing qualities. But not all who wade into its wet quarters fare so well. Read More

The Ten Best Performances of 2023

December 29, 2023 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, Andrew Scott, Barry Keoghan, Emma Stone, Jeffrey Wright, Margaret Qualley, Mark Ruffalo, Molly Gordon, Paul Giamatti, Poor Things, Rosamund Pike, Saltburn, Theater Camp 2 Comments

It has already begun: the long march towards coronating a new quartet of actors whose performances are deemed the finest of 2023. And while the Oscars, Globes, and flurry of other guild awards tend to recognize the same handful of actors over and over again, here at Silver Screen Riot, we have our own version of who offered the best performances of 2023. So now that we’ve already gotten our way through the Ten Best TV Shows of 2023, and the Ten Best Movies of 2023, it’s time to move onto the Ten Best Performances of 2023.

Though it should go without saying, by “best”, I mean entirely my favorites so no need to send over an Excel sheet proving me why my preferences are wrong. From a year teeming with standout performances, several noteworthy ones made the greatest impact, though I could probably double this list and be more happy with it. But time is finite (mine and yours) and so here they are: Read More

The Ten Best Movies of 2023

December 22, 2023 by Matt Oakes Posted in Lists, Most Popular Tagged Barbie, Best of, Bottoms, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Lists, Past Lives, Poor Things, Saltburn, Talk to Me, The Holdovers, The Zone of Interest, Theater Camp, Top Ten 3 Comments

End-of-year lists are a rite of passage, a time to select the best of the best from all we’ve seen. And then anguish over what we’ve chosen. Like its small-screen counterparts, 2023 proved to be an unusual year in film. Countless delays due to widespread industry strikes shifted many potential blockbusters to 2024 and beyond, while numerous big-budget films flopped. In many ways, 2023 was a sea change year, signaling that past successes may not guarantee future wins. Disney Studios, for instance, experienced more flops than hits, and only two movies ended up scraping past the billion-dollar mark at the box office. Read More