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Cora Bora
Reviews Cora Bora “What is wrong with you?” multiple characters ask titular…
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The Good Half
Reviews The Good Half “Are you lost?,” an old lady at the…
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Longing
Reviews Longing “Longing” is a remake of an award-winning Israeli film by…
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Find Me Falling
Reviews Find Me Falling When many of us think of vacationing on…
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Documentary
Sugarcane
Reviews Sugarcane The crimes of the Catholic Church are no secret to most citizens of the Western world. Yet, as is the case with many historical recollections, the deliverance of information is often filtered through a lens of whiteness, and victims of color fall to the footnotes. For many non-Indigenous people, the lack of awareness about the forced attendance to federally-funded, Catholic-run boarding schools in North America is prevalent. “Sugarcane” demands otherwise. These segregated schools, designed to “solve the Indian problem” via indoctrination and shame, became breeding grounds for a wealth of weaponized authority that birthed long-buried, unpunished crimes. Focusing…
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Documentary
Hollywood Black
Reviews Hollywood Black The tricky part with a docuseries like “Hollywood Black,” particularly if you have a deep reservoir of knowledge about its chosen subject, is realizing that it’ll probably never be as comprehensive as you’d like. After all, the four-part series directed by Justin Simien (“Dear White People”), adapted from the same-titled book by film historian Donald Bogle, is slated to premiere on MGM+—which isn’t really a historically minded network or streamer like TCM or Criterion Channel. Recalibrating one’s expectation, in that regard, is crucial. And yet, a documentary series can’t be judged on intention alone. Simien assembles an…
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Thriller
Duchess
Reviews Duchess In the wake of Quentin Tarantino’s ascendance to his pop culture throne in the ‘90s, dozens of imitators tried to mimic his approach to filmmaking, only to fall flat on their faces. It turns out that what he does is much harder than it looks. As all of those Tarantino wannabes were to “Pulp Fiction,” Neil Marshall’s “Duchess” is to the work of Guy Ritchie, particularly “Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels,” the filmmaker’s international breakthrough. Incongruent needle drops, freeze frames with character names, overheated narration, and tough tales of interconnected criminals – “Duchess” wants SO badly to be a…
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Thriller
Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
Reviews Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In It’s hard to imagine that this summer will see a better crowd-pleaser than “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In,” a nostalgic Hong Kong action spectacular featuring the year’s most thrilling action filmmaking. Unbound by physics or any sense of psychological realism, “Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In” is also probably the best comic book adaptation you’ll see this year, featuring a murderer’s row of Hong Kong stars like Louis Koo, Aaron Kwok and Sammo Hung, and featuring the sort of intricate maximalist production design that puts most other blockbusters to shame. On its…
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Romance
Running on Empty
Reviews Running on Empty Would you like to know the day you will die? It’s a tricky thought exercise. What if you find out you’ll die at a ripe old age? That sure would make retirement investing and travel plans easier. But what if the news was grim? That you’ll die within the year – before you’ve had the chance to meet that special someone or take that dream vacation? What then? Do you live your life to its fullest or mope and fret over what’s left? What’s a man like Mortimer the mortician to do? “Running on Empty” (not…
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Science Fiction
Borderlands
Reviews Borderlands I have spent hundreds of hours in the worlds of Gearbox Software and 2K Games’ “Borderlands,” enraptured by its addictive structure, one that encourages exploration, teamwork, and a constant pursuit of new weapons to unleash on waves of enemies (I’ve written about it here and here, among many other places). While these games are undeniably repetitive – like any titles based on what they call loot farming, which means looking for better and better gear that you can call yoru own – they also exist in a massive world of truly memorable characters like Claptrap, Mad Moxxi, Tiny…
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Drama
Good One
Reviews Good One The most important things in life happen between the words. Subterranean noise is often louder than dialogue. This is a truth we all experience, but it is challenging to pull off in film, particularly if the subterranean moments are small shifts in consciousness where the character (and audience) understands that nothing will be the same again. A film camera captures thought, and yet so many films seem to distrust this, their air filled with unnecessary dialogue, either exposition or explanation. India Donaldson’s “Good One” is extraordinary in so many ways, but its most distinctive quality is how…
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Drama
It Ends With Us
Reviews It Ends With Us “What would you say if your daughter told you her boyfriend pushed her down the stairs but it’s okay because really it was just an accident?” Questions like this are at the heart of “It Ends with Us,” based on the bestselling novel of the same name by Colleen Hoover. This is a message picture about what it takes to break the vicious cycle of domestic violence. It is not subtle. After the emotional turmoil of her estranged father’s funeral in Maine, our heroine, the impeccably fashionable Lily Bloom (Blake Lively, the best clotheshorse movie…
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Mystery
Detained
Reviews Detained Once you get over the fact that there won’t be much resembling logical human behavior in “Detained,” the film that follows undeniably provides its own simple pleasures in the Goofy Escapism department. Heavily inspired by “The Usual Suspects,” right down to the inclusion of a mysterious villain who might be in the room with us, “Detained” has so many twists and turns that it’s difficult to be overly critical of one before the next one has had a chance to rattle expectations. Yes, this is an undeniably dumb movie about dumb people. But there’s something charming about its…
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Comedy
Kneecap
Reviews Kneecap The Belfast schoolchildren stand in their classroom, singing “Óró Sé do bheatha abhaile,” a traditional Irish song, in the Irish language required in their school. They drone the lyrics, looking bored out of their minds. Two boys in the back, sharing earbuds, are pretending to sing along but are actually listening to another kind of music, hip hop, by an exciting new local trio called Kneecap. Kneecap rap in the Irish language. It isn’t something you hear every day. This brings up one of the many interesting points made in Rich Peppiatt’s “Kneecap,” a funny, exhilarating film about…
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Science Fiction
Rebel Moon – Director’s Cuts
Reviews Rebel Moon – Director’s Cuts Your investment in Zack Snyder’s creative vision will likely determine how badly you need to see the R-rated director’s cut of “Rebel Moon,” Snyder’s grim Netflix space opera adventure. This new director’s cut adds 120 minutes of footage, including a numbing wealth of computer-animated gore and a bit more sex. Some of this new material adjusts without significantly enhancing Snyder’s stab at a “Star Wars”-style sci-fi pastiche and an over-extended update of “Seven Samurai” that mainly takes place on the storyboard-perfect farm planet of Veldt. Some new scenes add more information about the characters’…
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Romance
Peak Season
Reviews Peak Season Co-directors Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner reunite (after their COVID-set breakup comedy “The End of Us”) for their sophomore feature, “Peak Season.” Engaged couple Amy (Claudia Restrepo) and Max (Ben Coleman) jet off from NYC to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a breath of fresh air as they finalize details for their upcoming wedding. And while towering mountains and sprawling landscapes are the perfect backdrop for romance, it isn’t the betrothed who experience it. Max is an inattentive, self-absorbed workaholic. While “Peak Season” tells us they’re in love, the fact of their engagement is the only evidence we’re…
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Mystery
Coup!
Reviews Coup! This movie opens with views of a manual typewriter, and indignant words being spelled out letter by letter. The time and place of this new movie co-directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, who also wrote the screenplay, becomes clear. It’s the United States in 1918, and the Spanish Flu is making its way to its shores. We soon see some vintage (fictional) headlines, including “Wear a mask or go to jail.” Oh dear. Is this period film aspiring to be a parable of Our Own Time? Kinda sorta not really. Although the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically…
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Mystery
The Instigators
Reviews The Instigators I didn’t think Doug Liman could deliver a worse film than “Road House,” the plastic, overwrought remake of the 1980s cult classic. With “The Instigators,” his second film of the year, he manages to make Matt Damon, in a re-teaming from their Bourne days, so void of any charm that the director makes this among the actor’s least crowd-pleasing offerings. This Apple TV+ heist flick is underwritten, dreary, tedious, inert, and without any stakes. I almost hesitate to write too much about it because this soulless dreck feels so unworthy of adding blemishes to the white page. …
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Horror
Doctor Jekyll
Reviews Doctor Jekyll The name Hammer used to command a certain level of respect in the annals of horror cinema – from the late 1950s to the early ’70s, you could pin the label to some of the campiest, schlockiest, most entertaining creature features around, from camp retellings of Universal monsters to sci-fi Quatermass mysteries. But the Hammer Films of this year’s “Doctor Jekyll” is hardly the same company William Hinds and James Carreras built; the opening titles proudly plaster “A John Gore Company” below its production logo. Indeed, for as much as “Doctor Jekyll” rides high on its compelling…
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Drama
Sebastian
Reviews Sebastian Max (Ruaridh Mollica) is like many young writers I met in my 20s. Ambitious, smart, rather dashing when talking about an art he’s passionate about, which in his case, is literature and the work of enfant terrible writer Bret Easton Ellis. Max is a touch cocky for a freelancer, he’s known to accidentally alienate friends and colleagues with harsh words, and thinks he knows better than his editors. However, unlike most reasonable writers, he’ll stop at nothing to find inspiration, even if it puts him in danger. On his quest for the bestselling debut novel, Max takes on…
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Comedy
Harold and the Purple Crayon
Reviews Harold and the Purple Crayon As someone who venerates Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s 1955 hymn to the power of imagination (I gift every love one’s new baby with a copy of the book with a purple crayon taped inside), the idea of a film adaptation has always filled me with a certain sense of trepidation. This is due to the somewhat uneven track record of past attempts to bring the great works of children’s literature to the screen. Sure, a film like Spike Jonze’s take on Maurice Sendak’s beloved “Where the Wild Things Are” captured the delicate…
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Thriller
Trap
Reviews Trap Pop music really can change your life. That’s part of the setup of M. Night Shyamalan’s near-miss of a thriller “Trap,” a movie that feels less like the Night Brand than a lot of his twisty ventures, a pared-down version of what he does that needed a round or two more of fleshing out its best ideas and amplifying its visual language. Night is at his best when he has a team of craftspeople to help elevate his best ideas in films like “The Sixth Sense,” “Old” (a movie that has grown on me), and “The Village,” but…
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Documentary
War Game
Reviews War Game Every day, people from all over the world come to Washington, DC, to look at the historic sights. As the documentary “War Game” begins, we see a man looking through his windshield at the Capitol building and then taking pictures of the Washington Monument. He’s not a tourist sharing local icons with his friends on Instagram; he calmly talks to a passenger in his car about wanting US troops to “gun down patriotic Americans” and starting a fire at the Pentagon. It is chilling. And then, when we find out who he really is and what he’s…
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Action
Hundreds of Beavers
Reviews Hundreds of Beavers “Hundreds of Beavers,” a boldly bizarre, nearly silent slapstick comedy about a 19th-century trapper doing battle with nature, exceeds expectations in every way, including the promise of its title. By my count there are thousands of beavers in this movie. Thousands! And oh, my goodness, they are nasty buggers. The BADL (Beaver Anti-Defamation League) will be out in force once they get word of this motion picture, which depicts an army of beavers building a dam into a bad guy lair to rival the volcano fortress in “You Only Live Twice” and the title structure of…
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Suspense
Murder by Numbers
Reviews Murder by Numbers Richard and Justin, the high school killers in “Murder by Numbers,” may not have heard of Leopold and Loeb, or seen Hitchcock’s “Rope,” or studied any of the other fictional versions (“Compulsion,” “Swoon”) of the infamous murder pact between two brainy and amoral young men. But they’re channeling it. “Murder by Numbers” crosses Leopold/Loeb with a police procedural and adds an interesting touch: Instead of toying with the audience, it toys with the characters. We have information they desperately desire, and we watch them dueling in misdirection. The movie stars Sandra Bullock as Cassie Mayweather, a…
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Suspense
Enough
Reviews Enough “Enough” is a nasty item masquerading as a feminist revenge picture. It’s a step or two above “I Spit On Your Grave,” but uses the same structure, in which a man victimizes a woman for the first half of the film, and then the woman turns the tables in an extended sequence of graphic violence. It’s surprising to see a director like Michael Apted and an actress like Jennifer Lopez associated with such tacky material. It is possible to imagine this story being told in a good film, but that would involve a different screenplay. Nicholas Kazan’s script…
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Suspense
Insomnia
Reviews Insomnia Robin Williams and Al Pacino in “Insomnia.” He looks exhausted when he gets off the plane. Troubles are preying on him. An investigation by internal affairs in Los Angeles may end his police career. And now here he is in–where the hell is this?–Nightmute, Alaska, land of the midnight sun, investigating a brutal murder. The fuels driving Detective Will Dormer are fear and exhaustion. They get worse. Al Pacino plays the veteran cop, looking like a man who has lost all hope. His partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan) is younger, more resilient and may be prepared to tell…
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Suspense
K-19: The Widowmaker
Reviews K-19: The Widowmaker Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson in “K-19: The Widowmaker.” Movies involving submarines have the logic of chess: The longer the game goes, the fewer the possible remaining moves. “K-19: The Widowmaker” joins a tradition that includes “Das Boot” and “The Hunt for Red October” and goes all the way back to “Run Silent, Run Deep.” The variables are always oxygen, water pressure and the enemy. Can the men breathe, will the sub implode, will depth charges destroy it? The submarine K-19 is not technically at war, so there are no depth charges, but the story involves…
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Suspense
Blood Work
Reviews Blood Work Clint Eastwood’s “Blood Work” opens with an FBI agent of retirement age chasing a killer and collapsing of a heart attack. Two years later, we meet him living on a boat in a marina, with another person’s heart in his chest. A woman asks him to investigate the murder of her sister. He says he is finished with police work. Then she shows him her sister’s photograph, and softly adds a personal reason why he might want to help. Unlike some action stars who want to remain supermen forever, Eastwood has paid attention to his years, and…
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Suspense
One Hour Photo
Reviews One Hour Photo “One Hour Photo” tells the story of Seymour “Sy” Parrish, who works behind the photo counter of one of those vast suburban retail barns. He has a bland, anonymous face, and a cheerful voice that almost conceals his desperation and loneliness. He takes your film, develops it, and has your photos ready in an hour. Sometimes he even gives you 5-by-7s when all you ordered were 4-by-6s. His favorite customers are the Yorkins–Nina, Will and cute young Jake. They’ve been steady customers for years. When they bring in their film, he makes an extra set of…
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Suspense
Red Dragon
Reviews Red Dragon “Red Dragon” opens with the pleasure of seeing Hannibal Lecter as he was before leaving civilian life. The camera floats above a symphony orchestra and down into the audience, and we spot Lecter almost at once, regarding with displeasure an inferior musician. Interesting, how the director forces our attention just as a magician forces a card: We notice Lecter because he is located in a strong point of the screen, because his face is lighted to make him pop out from the drabness on either side, and because he is looking directly at the camera. I felt,…
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Documentary
You Can Call Me Bill
Reviews You Can Call Me Bill “I’m afraid of being alone,” intones William Shatner in the opening minutes of “You Can Call Me Bill.” It’s a sentiment that, as he tells it, has pervaded every moment of his life both on and off camera. As Captain Kirk, he barrels out into the universe to satisfy his curiosity about what’s out there. In real life, he battles loneliness and the ever-encroaching specter of oblivion here on Earth. And in front of Alexandre O. Phillippe, cinema’s most dogged chronicler of eccentric movie minds (“Lynch/Oz,” “Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist”),…
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Suspense
Abandon
Reviews Abandon “Abandon” is a moody, effective thriller for about 80 percent of the way, and then our hands close on air. If you walk out before the ending, you’ll think it’s better than it is. Or maybe I’m being unfair: Maybe a rational ending with a reasonable explanation would have seemed boring. Maybe this is the ending the movie needed, but it seems so arbitrary as it materializes out of thin air. Or maybe I’m still being unfair. Maybe it doesn’t come from thin air. Students of Ebert’s Bigger Little Movie Glossary will be familiar with the Law of…
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Documentary
The Truth vs. Alex Jones
Reviews The Truth vs. Alex Jones One of the most disturbing moments in a documentary filled with disturbing moments comes when it’s revealed at the height of the defamation suit against the loathsome Alex Jones that over one in five people didn’t, at the time, believe that there had been a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It can be tempting to write Jones off as a blowhard idiot who’s just trying to profit off the stupidity of his listeners, but that number reveals the impact of his ignominious reach. And it’s not hard to extrapolate that kind of poisonous…
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