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Bad Behaviour
Reviews Bad Behaviour “Never give in to hope.” Lucy (Jennifer Connelly) writes…
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Hit Man
Reviews Hit Man People like to speak about a golden era of…
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Mother, Couch
Reviews Mother, Couch From the moment Dave (Ewan McGregor) frantically walks across…
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Fly Me to the Moon
Reviews Fly Me to the Moon “Fly Me to the Moon” lurches…
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Comedy
Reverse the Curse
Reviews Reverse the Curse When it premiered at Tribeca last year, David Duchovny’s “Reverse the Curse” was titled “Bucky F*cking Dent,” which is a title that would have at least given this remarkably lifeless film a bit of personality. It’s also the title of the book, also by Duchovny, on which this maudlin film is based. It’s a story about baseball and father-son relationships that doesn’t understand either, content to use fandom and a terminal diagnosis in cheap, manipulative ways. Duchovny the director never bothers to ground his melodrama in something that feels real, missing the target on the period in…
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Amazon Prime
Cassandro
Reviews Cassandro Roger Ross Williams’ “Cassandro” pays tribute to that pioneering legacy born out of one of Mexico’s most popular exports, lucha libre. But despite its flamboyant hero, this underdog sports story feels strangely conventional. Co-written by Williams and David Teague, “Cassandro” follows the rise of Saúl Armendáriz, a lucha libre wrestler who finds success when he leaves behind traditional luchador dreams and begins fighting as an exótico, or a male wrestler who performs in drag. Saúl (Gael García Bernal) takes inspiration from a telenovela playing at a diner to create his new ringside persona Cassandro, and with the help of trainer Sabrina (Roberta…
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Action
Ultraman: Rising
Reviews Ultraman: Rising Children take center stage but aren’t the real stars of “Ultraman: Rising,” a new animated superhero fantasy about absent parents, lost kids, and other Pixar-entrenched stock types. The movie follows (but predictably differs) from “Shin Ultraman,” the most recent high-profile project featuring the 58-year-old alien hero. “Shin Ultraman” was more of a retro-modern redo of the original “Ultraman” series and its serial format. “Ultraman: Rising” aims squarely for a family-friendly mass audience, one that’s probably less concerned with the character’s previous incarnations. That’s not a major or concerning difference, though it’s sometimes frustratingly apparent given that so…
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Thriller
The Last Stop in Yuma County
Reviews The Last Stop in Yuma County “Last Stop in Yuma County” is the kind of movie where you root for the worst to happen, because every escalation of misfortune makes things more entertaining. Written and directed by Francis Galluppi, “Yuma” is a period piece that makes the most of a small budget. It’s set in the Arizona desert, roughly fifty years ago. Much of the action occurs in and around a diner and its adjacent gas station. The owner, a lumbering but sweet-souled man named Vernon (Faizon Love), tells travelers that the next station is four hours away, so it behooves them to fill…
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Suspense
She became perfect in every area except life
Reviews She became perfect in every area except life Natalie Portman. Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” is a full-bore melodrama, told with passionate intensity, gloriously and darkly absurd. It centers on a performance by Natalie Portman that is nothing short of heroic, and mirrors the conflict of good and evil in Tchaikovsky’s ballet “Swan Lake.” It is one thing to lose yourself in your art. Portman’s ballerina loses her mind. Everything about classical ballet lends itself to excess. The art form is one of grand gesture, of the illusion of triumph over reality and even the force of gravity. Yet it…
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Science Fiction
Godzilla Minus One
Reviews Godzilla Minus One Godzilla turns 70 next year, and to celebrate, his parent company Toho Studios waited until the end of this year to release the most conventional Godzilla movie in recent memory. “Godzilla Minus One” may also be the most sobering and least flamboyant Japanese-produced Godzilla movie since the original 1954 nuclear lizard disaster pic (though “Godzilla 1985” fans might disagree). Some reviews of “Godzilla Minus One” have already praised the movie as an escapist crowd-pleaser. It’s easy to see why, given the bleak but well-calibrated tone of its human-centric scenes. Set in 1946, “Godzilla Minus One” follows…
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Romance
The Beast
Reviews The Beast The launching pad for Bertrand Bonello’s new picture “The Beast” (“La Bete”) is a 1903 short story by Henry James called “The Beast in the Jungle.” Seen by some James scholars as an autobiographical expression of rue for a life of inaction, it treats the case of John Marcher, who confides in his acquaintance May Bartram that he lives in fear of an unnamable catastrophe that could upend his life, and the life of anyone close to him. She claims to get what he’s talking about. “‘You mean you feel how my obsession — poor old thing…
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Mystery
American Star
Reviews American Star “American Star” is an art house variant of the familiar story of an old hitman facing his mortality while doing what might be his last job. Filmed on the gobsmackingly gorgeous Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, it takes a soft-spoken, slowed-down contemplative approach to the material, omitting things whenever it can, rarely depicting any situation in the obvious way, and anchoring itself to a lead performance by Ian McShane that’s a great example of how to take a reactive, at times silent character and make his thoughts and emotions legible to the viewer. It’s all in the face, especially the…
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Horror
In a Violent Nature
Reviews In a Violent Nature The most fascinating thing about Chris Nash’s hyperviolent slasher experiment “In a Violent Nature” is that it’s not scary. At least, not in the way that the “Friday the 13th”-esque splatter flicks he’s clearly riffing on used to be. There are no jump scares, few bouts of high-wire tension, and no ambiguity about who the final girl will be. And yet, “Violent Nature” ends up one of the most fascinating, oddly serene horror entries of the year so far, precisely because it flips the mechanics of the slasher on their head and asks you to imagine…
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Drama
National Anthem
Reviews National Anthem In 2020, photographer Luke Gilford published National Anthem, a monograph documenting the queer community in the International Gay Rodeo Association. The photographs are arresting and beautiful. Gilford grew up in the Southwest and loved rodeos as a kid. But the culture itself – macho, often homophobic – didn’t include him. He left the rodeo culture behind, until he discovered the IGRA. Gilford said in an interview with Vogue, “It was a revelation because I was, like, wow, you can exist safely in these spaces and find community and do so many of the things that I love doing…
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Documentary
Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge
Reviews Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge “God saved me so I could give you life.” So said concentration camp survivor Liliane Halfin to her daughter, Diane Simone Michelle. Weighing in at 49 pounds after being freed from Auschwitz, Lily gave birth just 11 months later to a girl who grew up and changed the world of fashion and its associated business models forever. But for all the glitz, glamour, and struggle portrayed in “Diane von Fürstenberg: Woman in Charge,” now on Hulu, the documentary about the designer’s life elides more problematic aspects of Diane’s life and skates by on the…
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Comedy
Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person
Reviews Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person Vampires are all the rage in film and television these days. Some of them run hotels (“Interview with the Vampire”), some live polyamorously in Staten Island (“What We Do in the Shadows”), and some dance the ballet while torturing their enemies (“Abigail”). Creative depictions of modern vampires have evolved. Storytellers are more cognitive in their exploration, investigating what lies underneath the blood-sucking lifestyle and how vampires exist in the world. In keeping with this trend, Ariane Louis-Seize’s delightful “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person” drives a wooden stake of complexity through vampire mythology, offering a fresh…
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Amazon Prime
Foe
Reviews Foe Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan) are not a happy couple. The spark of their early love seems to have withered away in the harsh landscape of the near future. The year is 2065, our planet has been ruined, and people are looking to the sky as a way to survive. But to colonize space, the unholy match of government and private companies will first need an army to help build their new spaceship oasis. A stranger named Terrance (Aaron Pierre) arrives to recruit Junior, but not Hen, and given little time to enjoy their days together,…
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Action
Trigger Warning
Reviews Trigger Warning Beginning with a wonky opening chase sequence, “Trigger Warning” lacks urgency. Beginning in Syria’s Badiyat al-Sham Desert, an elite squad led by Parker (Jessica Alba) zip after potential terrorists in CGI trucks that look like Lego vehicles riding across the sand. Parker’s jeep, a jalopy on a soundstage, rocks about as she fires from its window. This isn’t a long sequence, ending anticlimactically with a garishly shot crash of a Syrian’s truck. Its purpose, other than being a banal cold open, is to bloodily dispense with Brown people while portraying Parker as a by-the-book killer—she stops a…
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Thriller
You Can’t Run Forever
Reviews You Can’t Run Forever J.K. Simmons knows how to do sociopath. There’s something so fascinating about a performer like Simmons who can pivot from a guy who looks like your average suburban neighbor to a total lunatic with a perfectly timed malevolent smile. He’s having a blast in most of “You Can’t Run Forever,” and the fact that it was co-written and directed by his wife of almost thirty years probably made this an even more memorable shoot. Sadly, he’s the only one having fun. You certainly won’t. To be fair, “You Can’t Run Forever” does open with a…
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Suspense
Marrying into a nightmare
Reviews Marrying into a nightmare Ryan Gosling and Kirsten Dunst. “All Good Things” is based on one of those true stories like Dominick Dunne used to tell so intriguingly in Vanity Fair. Let me begin with a brief summary, based on the film because I know nothing about the reality. It involves David Marks, the son of a New York family that owned valuable 42nd Street real estate in the 1970s. The property at that time was rented to strip clubs, porno shops, massage parlors and so on. The family, wealthy and private, moved in the best circles and the…
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Science Fiction
Concrete Utopia
Reviews Concrete Utopia In big cities the world over, housing is a high-priced commodity. Construction failed to keep up with demand, and as such, even modestly sized apartments seem like a luxury. However, as the Korean sci-fi movie “Concrete Utopia” points out, even a ritzy address can’t save you from the apocalypse. After decades of housing lotteries and booming costs, everything in Seoul (and perhaps the world) comes to a devastating halt when an outsized earthquake tears the city apart. Just about everything is in ruins and countless people are dead—except for the denizens of the Hwang Gung Apartments, a…
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Romance
The Greatest Hits
Reviews The Greatest Hits If you’re a genre nostalgic who’s looking for a romantic comedy that could’ve been made in the ‘90s or early aughts, and that features all of the comforting types (including the widowed protagonist, the dreamy lost love, the sassy, truth-telling best friend, the equally hunky potential new love and his cynical yet adoring sister) “The Greatest Hits” will tick most if not all of the boxes. The problem, in the end, is that you’re probably going to be too aware of the boxes as they’re checked—and although the performances are nearly faultless, the characterizations rarely rise…
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Mystery
Monolith
Reviews Monolith Lily Sullivan, who broke through with an impressively physical performance in last year’s “Evil Dead Rise,” gives a remarkable one-woman show in Matt Vesely’s effective “Monolith,” a sci-fi thriller that somehow finds a way to make podcasting cinematic (mostly). It does so by mining what feels like that current of rising anxiety in the international consciousness for an old-fashioned slow burn of a sci-fi thriller. You know what I mean. It’s in the TikToks you stumble upon that are about purported glitches in the matrix or The Mandela Effect — a sense that something is wrong. Of course, anxiety…
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Horror
The Watchers
Reviews The Watchers When it comes to kooky, creative thrillers, Shyamalan is practically a brand. Though M. Night is the present precedent for this surname, his daughter Ishana hopes to carry the torch into the next generation, making a name for herself in a similar genre. Based on the book by A.M. Shine, “The Watchers” is Ishana Night Shyamalan’s directorial debut, a fabled narrative that seesaws between fantastical whimsy and proposed horrific terror with lots of ambition but little finesse. Mina (Dakota Fanning) is a lost soul. A twentysomething American living in Galway, she spends her days working at a…
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Drama
Sing Sing
Reviews Sing Sing If you read the synopsis of “Sing Sing,” you might mistake it for a movie you’ve seen before. It’s a drama starring Colman Domingo as one of a group men in serving time in prison whose participation in a theater arts program gives them something to look forward to and improves them as human beings. It ends on what a studio boss might call an “up note.” But it doesn’t move or feel like any other prison movie, or movie about theater students, that I’ve seen, and its commitment to the truth of its characters — and of life itself…
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Documentary
Confessions of a Good Samaritan
Reviews Confessions of a Good Samaritan Penny Lane has long been one of our most fascinating documentarians in the modern era: her early works teetered between archival (“Our Nixon”) to anthological (“Nuts!”) to anthropological (“The Pain Of Others”). You never see her face or hear her voice; it’s just her ideas and her assemblage of footage into thoughtful, empathetic essays about everyone from hucksters to victims to disgraced presidents. But it’s been exciting to see her grow as a filmmaker into a more personal, confessional mode, allowing her bright smile and searching eyes (beaming under a set of black bangs) in…
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Comedy
Kinds of Kindness
Reviews Kinds of Kindness After the comparatively “normal” visions of “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos is back in provocateur mode. Working more in the vein of his earlier, more surreal flicks like “The Lobster,” “Dogtooth” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” the filmmaker’s latest reunites him with Efthimis Filippou, the co-writer of those movies, to deliver a study on the many facets of control: How we claim to fight against but often return to it, and how often it limits our ability to live satisfying lives. “Kinds of Kindness” overflows with ideas, giving the project the feel of three…
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Amazon Prime
The Burial
Reviews The Burial After seeing hundreds of films a year, it’s easy to forget that sometimes the surest and sometimes best pleasure comes from simple comfort food. Director Maggie Betts’ “The Burial,” a throwback ’90s inspirational courtroom drama pitched to extreme comedy, comes as simple and sweet as a summer Southern breeze when flashy personal injury lawyer Willie E. Gary (Jamie Foxx) arrives in Mississippi to defend the mild-mannered Jeremiah O’Keefe (Tommy Lee Jones) against a multi-billion dollar corporation. “The Burial” has several wonky components, like thin characters, an oddly framed rivalry, and an anti-climactic ending. And yet, Betts’ crowd-pleasing…
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Action
Thelma
Reviews Thelma When you hear the premise of Josh Margolin’s feature debut, “Thelma,” you may think you know what the movie will be. Clearly modeled on his own family (the dedication at the close of the film is “for Thelma,” which suggests he didn’t even change the heroine’s name from that of his real-life grandmother), “Thelma” is a young filmmaker’s touching and funny tribute to the olds. The film immediately establishes the uniquely strong bond between 93-year-old Thelma (June Squibb) and her Gen Z grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger), an affable slacker. Squibb and Hechinger beautifully play this opening sequence, creating a…
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Thriller
Eric
Reviews Eric It takes either a staggering lead performance or a great plot twist to truly prove that there’s something special to a new miniseries. Netflix’s “Eric” is thankfully one that has both of these aspects tethered to it, for better and sometimes for worse. The series begins with Vincent Anderson (Benedict Cumberbatch), a mad genius-like puppeteer, filming an episode of his hit “Sesame Street”-esque show. On the sidelines, his son Edgar (Ivan Howe) watches with rapt attention, even though he’s seen the show being filmed a million times. At first glance, it appears that father and son are close,…
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Suspense
His chauffeur chases ambulances
Reviews His chauffeur chases ambulances Marisa Tomei and Matthew McConaghey. I like movies about smart guys who are wise asses, and think their way out of tangles with criminals. I like courtroom scenes. I like big old cars. I like “The Lincoln Lawyer” because it involves all three, and because it matches Matthew McConaughey with a first-rate supporting cast, while so many thrillers these days are about a lone hero surrounded by special effects. People have words they actually say in this movie. After “Battle: Los Angeles,” that is a great relief. Let’s start with the big old car. It’s…
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Science Fiction
Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire
Reviews Rebel Moon – Part One: A Child of Fire The end is just “the start of something,” according to one of the action-figure-deep heroes of “Rebel Moon—Part One: Child of Fire,” the lumbering first half of Zack Snyder’s planned two-part “Star Wars” knockoff. After 133 minutes (give or take seven for credits), Snyder’s latest gang of misfits are finally ready to fight space Nazis. It’s Akira Kurosawa in space again, only this time everything’s rendered with storyboard perfection and a frustrating emphasis on sheer visual scale, despite a general lack of eye-catching details. Snyder (“Army of the Dead”) and…
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Romance
Challengers
Reviews Challengers Luca Guadagnino directs “Challengers,” a time-shifting drama about a love triangle between tennis pros, as if he’s a top-seeded player so ruthlessly focused on winning Wimbledon that he’d run over his grandmother if she got between him and the stadium. Every shot is a serve, every montage a volley. There’s even part of one match done from the point-of-view of a ball being smacked to-and-fro at high speed. It’s extravagantly goofy. But it’s also hilarious and wonderful, because it’s an objective correlative for how far the film will go to entertain you. Zendaya stars as Tashi, a former…
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Mystery
Golden Years
Reviews Golden Years Cinema is replete with examples of stories about old couples getting their groove back in their later years. Old age is, after all, a kind of new adolescence, as kids grow old, careers become less important, and your dwindling remaining years gives you more license to throw caution to the wind. That is, if you’ve got enough social and financial capital to pull it off — which is why a lot of these kinds of films (from “Book Club” to “Something’s Gotta Give”) tend to feature upper-middle-class seniors luxuriating in the exotic destinations and well-furnished homes that…
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