The Steep Price of Legacy in ‘THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT’

March 13, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Alexander Skarsgård, Jesse Eisenberg, Kim Nguyen, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Salma Hayek, The Hummingbird Project Leave a comment

Commerce is a wheel beneath which much is crushed. And once that wheel is in motion, there is no stopping it. Not for epistemological discourse. Not for environmental factors. Not even for late-stage stomach cancer. In Kim Nguyen’s unorthodox The Hummingbird Project, there simply ain’t no mountain high enough, no river wide enough to keep the Zaleski cousins from installing a direct line of high-speed fiber cable from New York City to Kansas. The wheels of commerce roll on and they intend to be its primary highway. Read More

Julianne Moore Discovers Inner Strength in A24’s Humanist Romance ‘GLORIA BELL’

March 6, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged A24, Brad Garret, Chile, Gloria, Gloria Bell, John Turturro, Julianne Moore, Michael Cera, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rita Wilson, Sean Astin., Sebastián Lelio Leave a comment

Come for Julianne Moore’s effortlessly jubilant performance, stay for the complicated middle-aged tryst in Sebastián Lelio’s Gloria Bell. A remake of the director’s own 2013 Spanish-language film Gloria, Chile’s submission for Best Foreign Language film at the 2014 Academy Awards, the film is distributed by indie giant A24 and carries the mark of quality that is commonly associated with their auteur brand, though it would be hard to mistake the competent, if hard to swoon for, drama for one of the distribution company’s finest outputs. Read More

Gaspar Noé Hosts World’s Worst Acid Dance Party in ‘CLIMAX’

March 3, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Claude-Emmanuelle Gajan-Maull, Climax, Gaspar Noé, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Romain Guillermic, Sofia Boutella, Thea Carla Schott Leave a comment

Climax is a movie only Gaspar Noé could – and would – make. The French provocateur has long embedded hallucinatory imagery into his pictures – his 2009 feature Enter the Void is a literal out-of-body experience adopting the POV of a slain drug dealer – but takes his flirtation with on-screen drug use to new levels with his latest experimental feature, which follows an acid-dosed troop of dancers over the events of an increasingly unhinged night. The journey is a dark and delirious jaw-dropping mindfuck for sure, but one of horrifying technical marksmanship that is sure to burrow under your skin and peck at one’s brain. Like blood in the carpet, these psychological stains won’t wash out easily. Read More

‘HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON: THE HIDDEN WORLD’ Doesn’t Manage to Fly Higher

February 20, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged America Ferrera, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Dean DeBlois, Gerard Butler, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Justin Rupple, Kristen Wiig, Out in Theaters, Reviews Leave a comment

If looks could kill, How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World would engulf audiences in a deathly conflagration of dragon fire. The animated second sequel looks absolutely brilliant on the big screen, roaring to life in luscious detail. From the crystal-clear scale of its big set pieces to the minutia of the movement of sand and water, Dreamwork’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World splashes every penny of its 129 million dollar budget up on the screen for audiences to behold. If only they could have dumped equally as much energy and effort into the story mechanics, which are far and away the weakest of the three HTTYD films. Read More

All’s Quiet on the Front in Brutally Hard-Fought Survival Saga ‘ARCTIC’

February 10, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Arctic, Joe Penna, Joseph Trapanese, Mads Mikkelsen, Maria Thelma Smáradóttir, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Tómas Örn Tómasson Leave a comment

A marooned man’s survival in the Arctic gets much more complicated when a helicopter crashes attempting to rescue him. He decides to save the lone survivor, taking her life into his hands and, in doing so, igniting anew his purpose to live. The measured survivalist story Arctic is as cold and quiet as the frigid tundra for which it is named, its protagonist Overgård (played with silent ferocity of will by the ever-reliable Mads Mikkelsen) is a man of few words but powerful convictions, convictions which bleed through the veteran actor’s pores, adding soul and pathos to this testament of the human spirit in times of great adversity. Read More

Exploitative Metal Thriller ‘LORDS OF CHAOS’ Pushes Sacrilegious Buttons

February 4, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Emory Cohen, Jonas Åkerlund, Lords of Chaos, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rory Culkin Leave a comment

Ye of purer form, be warned! There’s a moment early on in Jonas Åkerlund’s Norwegian black metal exploitation film Lords of Chaos that’ll determine your ability to stick around for the rest of the two-hour true crime feature. 22-year old singer “Dead” takes a kitchen knife and vertically slashes both his wrists. He then takes the knife to his own throat. Blood pouring from the self-inflicted wounds, “Dead” puts a gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Making permanent good on his extreme namesake. Read More

Generic ’MISS BALA’ An Anti-Feminist Female-Led Actioner

January 31, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Anthony Mackie, Catherine Hardwicke, Cristina Rodlo, Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, Gina Rodriguez, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Miss Bala, Out in Theaters, Reviews Leave a comment

It’s hard to consider Miss Bala with anything but startling disappointment. A Hollywood actioner led by a young Latina starlet, retooling a Mexican critical darling for American audiences, in a coming out party for Gina Rodriguez. If all these were working in harmony, this could have worked out very, very well. In the hands of Catherine Hardwicke, it does not. Like, at all. The Twilight director shaves Miss Bala down to the most generic premise and skates around the very thing that could have made it a powerful feminist action film – empowering the woman at the center of the film, tinkering with the best-laid plans of mice and men that seek to dominate her. Instead, Rodriguez’s Gloria is passive eye candy, consistently strong-armed (physically and mentally) by the men around her, and only taking agency at the very last moment possible. Read More

Stylish, Surreal ‘PIERCING’ A Tempestuous Cat and Mouse Murder Game

January 30, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Christopher Abbott, Horror, Mia Wasikowska, Nicolas Pesce, Out in Theaters, Piercing, Reviews, Ryū Murakami Leave a comment

A husband and father’s scheme to kill a prostitute goes wrong when she stabs herself first in Nicolas Pesce’s devilish Piercing. Pesce’s bloody adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s short Japanese novel of the same name is deeply sardonic in nature, a clever two-person play on that age-old “desperate man kills sex worker” trope that flips the script in deliciously dark manner. Picture American Psycho for millennials, with less business card panic attacks and more feminist subversion, and you’ll be somewhere in the right ballpark. Read More

Discombobulated ‘Serenity’ Nears ‘The Room’ Levels of Unintentional Hilarity

January 24, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Most Popular, Out in Theaters Tagged Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Matthew McConaughey, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Serenity, Steven Knight Leave a comment

There are bad movies and there are bad movies, the distinction being that the one is purely torturous to watch whereas the other has the alchemic ability to actually bring us great pleasure. To transmute movie-making stool into movie-watching gold. It’s observed in the difference between Michael Bay’s Transformers movies and XXX: The Return of Xander Cage; the line in the sand dividing Yoga Hosers and The Snowman. They’re all bad but some are bad enough to double back and turn sour to sweet. Read More

Well-Meaning ‘THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING’ A Mostly Meh Modern Reimagining of Arthurian Lore

January 22, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Out in Theaters Tagged Angus Imrie, Dean Chaumoo, Denise Gough, Joe Cornish, Louis Serkis, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Rhianna Dorris, The Kid Who Would Be King, Tom Taylor Leave a comment

Joe Cornish huffed and puffed and blew down the gates of Hollywood in summer 2011 with his critically-acclaimed inner-city alien invasion flick Attack the Block, blowing back the hair of sci-fi fans the world over in the process. In the intervening eight years, Cornish hasn’t had much on his platter, his solitary IMDB credit one of a small army of writers on Marvel’s Ant-Man (prior to that, he earned marks co-writing Tintin). After a long holiday away from the director’s chair, Cornish’s latest The Kid Who Would be King slashes into theaters in the midst of January’s dumping ground and despite being a somewhat imaginative PG-take on King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table plopped in 21st century London, this fails to feel like the brainchild of someone who’s been methodically tinkering away at a passion project in the many-year interim and seems more like a desperate last minute plea to not be forgotten to the annals of directorial history. In short, it’s just not that special. Read More