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Longing
Reviews Longing “Longing” is a remake of an award-winning Israeli film by…
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I Used to Be Funny
Reviews I Used to Be Funny On stage, comedians use their words…
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Kneecap
Reviews Kneecap The Belfast schoolchildren stand in their classroom, singing “Óró Sé…
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Prom Dates
Reviews Prom Dates “Prom Dates,” about a couple of teenage best-bud girls…
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Mystery
Medusa Deluxe
Reviews Medusa Deluxe Dazzlingly impressive from a technical perspective but frustratingly dull from a narrative one, “Medusa Deluxe” is an ambitious but uneven experience. The feature filmmaking debut from British writer/director Thomas Hardiman is high on style but short on thrills, which is unfortunate given that it’s a murder mystery set in the wild world of competitive hairdressing. One of the stylists, Mosca, has been scalped during preparations for the big show; the others sit backstage in their respective dressing rooms, worrying and gossiping with their shocked models and speculating who among them might have been the killer. It’s already…
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Horror
Immaculate
Reviews Immaculate “Immaculate” feels like both a throwback to another era of Italian horror and a timely commentary on woman’s bodily autonomy, but it can’t match the flair of the former and lacks the thematic thrust to convey anything resonant about the latter. Star Sydney Sweeney continues her “moment” after the success of “Anyone but You” and a gig hosting “Saturday Night Live” with a horror film that comes branded with the reputation of Neon, one of the most respected distributors in the industry. She does absolutely nothing wrong here, finding a potential new arrow in her professional quiver as…
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Drama
Daddio
Reviews Daddio Dialogue can lie, but faces tell the truth. Stories are told through faces. It takes enormous trust on the part of a director to allow this to happen, to let the faces do most of the heavy lifting. “Daddio”, written and directed by Christy Hall, is a film about faces, and this is pretty extraordinary considering it’s a two-character film with wall-to-wall dialogue. Dakota Johnson’s and Sean Penn’s faces fill the screen, shot in extreme close-up–just the eyes sometimes, the smiles, the thoughts happening behind the eyes. Hall’s dialogue compels you to listen, to lean in, but Johnson…
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Documentary
The Beach Boys
Reviews The Beach Boys There’s something so appropriately disheartening about a movie about The Beach Boys being too superficial. For generations, people accused the band behind hits like “God Only Knows” and “California Girls” of being too disposable, a pop candy confection compared to the denser work of bands like The Beatles or the many artists that followed them in the counter-culture wave of the ‘70s. It took time for their legacy to be cemented as a band who was always doing more than it seemed, whether it was their dense harmonies that sounded almost impossible or the way they…
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Comedy
If
Reviews If If you’re lucky enough to attend an early screening of John Krasinski’s new film, “IF,” you may be greeted with a short introduction by the writer/director, asserting that the film is expressly for all the “girl dads” out there. Having now seen it, that much is true: despite its family-friendly brief, “IF” is less for kids than for the adults of kids — the girl dads, if you will — who want something that feels a little more mature than “Minions” but doesn’t scare the kids away. Far from it; it might just bore them to tears. It’s a…
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Action
Monkey Man
Reviews Monkey Man Dev Patel pours his entire self into “Monkey Man.” Some comes over the sides and the mix might not always be right but there’s an undeniable passion here that comes through in a genre that too often feels like it came off an assembly line. The writer, producer, star, director, and guy who broke a few bones filming this one name-checked Bruce Lee, Sammo Hung, “The Raid,” Korean action, Bollywood, and much more in his intro, and “Monkey Man” often has that overstuffed quality of a filmmaker who finally got his chance to see his visions on-screen…
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Suspense
Good fences make bad neighbors
Reviews Good fences make bad neighbors Samuel L. Jackson is one scary cop in Neil LaBute’s Lakeview Terrace. Neil LaBute’s “Lakeview Terrace” is a film about a black cop who makes life hell for an interracial couple who move in next door. It will inspire strong reactions among its viewers, including outrage. It is intended to. LaBute often creates painful situations that challenge a character’s sense of decency. This time he does it within the structure of a thriller, but the questions are there all the same. For example, the neighbor, Abel Turner, is a bitter racist. He has his…
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Romance
Good Grief
Reviews Good Grief Dan Levy found such massive success in “Schitt’s Creek” that figuring out the next step for his career must have been daunting. It therefore feels uncoincidental that his feature film directorial debut is also about next steps, moving on after a major chapter has closed, whether you want to or not. Levy has a strong on-screen presence—he’s a remarkably natural, likable performer—but he struggles a bit to find his voice as a writer and director with “Good Grief,” a modest study of the impact of loss that pushes a few buttons harder than it should and fails…
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Mystery
Winter Kills
Reviews Winter Kills When William Richert’s “Winter Kills” was originally released in 1979, it proved to be so wild and audacious in how it mined our collective memories of one of the darkest, most defining moments of 20th-century American history–and presented them through a blackly comedic prism so far ahead of its time–that the few audiences that turned up could hardly believe what they were seeing. This adaptation of Richard Condon’s novel returns to theaters in a newly restored version under the aegis of Quentin Tarantino, and it has not lost an iota of its power to shock, amuse, and simultaneously perplex…
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Horror
Late Night with the Devil
Reviews Late Night with the Devil Is there any scenario in which “Late Night with the Devil” could have delivered on its promise? I’m not seeing it. Set in 1977, the movie envisions a nonexistent fourth commercial broadcast network (there were only three back then) and then imagines a competitor emerging to take down the reigning king of late night talk shows in the ’70s, Johnny Carson. The rival is Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), a local Chicago talk show host who was bumped up to the national level. This backstory and more is explained in a five-minute prologue that includes one key biographical fact I’ll skip…
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Drama
Green Border
Reviews Green Border A searing drama about a European refugee crisis that resonates with similar crises in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and yes, America’s southwestern border, Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” strikes me as the best and most important film to be released in the U.S. so far this year. That judgment is due not only to the fraught importance of the film’s subject but also to the extraordinary artistry of its making. When I first saw it at last fall’s New York Film Festival, I left the theater literally shaken – not only by the compelling story I’d just…
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Documentary
MoviePass, MovieCrash
Reviews MoviePass, MovieCrash For a few gossamer years in the 2010s, movie fans ate well—perhaps a little too well. That was, of course, courtesy of a little red debit card called MoviePass, the product of an ambitious startup that promised nirvana for any red-blooded cinephile with too much time on their hands: Pay a monthly fee, then use your debit card and an app to see one movie a day, wherever you want, any theater you want. If it seemed too good to be true, that’s because it was. After all, how could a company possibly make money off a…
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Comedy
The Garfield Movie
Reviews The Garfield Movie I cannot think of a single reason for another Garfield movie, and apparently, the people who made this couldn’t, either. It reminds me of the legendary comment about “Nancy,” which, like “Garfield,” was originally a comic strip known for the spareness of its design and the helium-weight lightness of its humor. When asked to explain “Nancy,” someone once said, “It takes less energy to read it than to skip it.” Those who have children pestering them to see “Garfield” will feel the same way about this film. It’s not awful. It may be too much to say…
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Action
The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
Reviews The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare Just when you think they’ve run out of real-life World War II stories to turn into blockbuster movies, some documents get declassified, inspiring or at least suggesting new sagas of heroism. “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare,” about a small mission of Allied fighters killing Nazis on a grand scale wherever they go, directed by Guy Ritchie from a script by Ritchie, Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson, and Arash Amel, claims as source material information that only became available after some secret history stuff was declassified in 2016. It also happens to be, according to its credits,…
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Suspense
With every move he makes another chance he takes
Reviews With every move he makes another chance he takes Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio star in “Body of Lies.” If you take a step back from the realistic locations and terse dialogue, Ridley Scott’s “Body of Lies” is a James Bond plot inserted into today’s headlines. The film wants to be persuasive in its expertise about modern spycraft, terrorism, the CIA and Middle East politics. But its hero is a lone ranger who operates in three countries, single-handedly creates a fictitious terrorist organization, and survives explosions, gunfights, and brutal torture. Oh, and he falls in love with a local…
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Romance
Sometimes I Think About Dying
Reviews Sometimes I Think About Dying Fran (Daisy Ridley) is the central character of “Sometimes I Think About Dying”. She doesn’t speak until 22 minutes in. Not one word. The first thing she says is matter-of-fact to an extreme: “I’m Fran. I like cottage cheese.” There’s no mystery behind why she says it. She’s at an office meeting where everyone is asked to introduce themselves by sharing their favorite food. We’ve seen her make a meal of cottage cheese already. Everything else about her is a mystery and remains so. There’s something refreshing about a film not feeling the pressure…
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Mystery
Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose
Reviews Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose “Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose” is a feature film based on a real story, real in the sense that for a while back in 1931, on the British Crown Dependency the Isle of Man, some people claimed that there was a mysterious creature something like a mongoose who spoke like a human. Some scientists came to investigate. This movie is less about solving that mystery than the central question we still passionately debate in today’s arguments about school curricula and fake news: How do we know what we know, and how is that…
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Horror
You’ll Never Find Me
Reviews You’ll Never Find Me “I’m afraid you knocked on the wrong door.” When Paul (Brendan Rock) says those words to the nameless woman who shows up at the door of his isolated trailer in the middle of a stormy night, the wordless uneasiness, already present in “You’ll Never Find Me,” shivers into anticipatory dread. We know what’s coming. We’ve seen it before. Only, we haven’t. “You’ll Never Find Me,” the debut feature from Australian film-makers Indianna Bell and Josiah Allen, is a unique and startling film, decidedly its own “thing,” albeit steeped in the horror tradition. The sense of…
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Drama
June Zero
Reviews June Zero There’s no shortage of films that consider the Holocaust or Israel’s founding. But it’s rare to see the two subjects intertwined so purposely as in “June Zero.” The idea to fold it all into an anthology of interconnected short films might be unique. “June Zero” is directed by an American filmmaker, Jake Paltrow (brother of actress Gwyneth and son of esteemed TV director Bruce Paltrow). It was conceived partly as a testament to his family’s (partial) Polish Jewish heritage. The screenplay, by Paltrow and Israeli writer-director Tom Shoval, is set in the early 1960s. It’s organized around the trial and eventual execution of…
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Documentary
Flipside
Reviews Flipside The personal essay film is a tricky genre, because when you get right down to it, who cares? Sure, there is a brotherhood of man and all that, but is it such that we’ll be interested enough in a brother’s struggles that we’re willing to sit with them for a while in a movie theater, not to mention shell out money for the experience? These questions represent perhaps crass generalizations that crowd out the potentially dire and potentially universal themes and narratives that a personal documentary can encompass, but you get the idea. And the idea applies with…
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Comedy
Ezra
Reviews Ezra Last month, I was a juror in the Narrative Feature category at the Florida Film Festival; one of the films, “Hellbent on Boogie,” directed by Vito Trupiano, was about an autistic teenager (Alyx Ruibal) being homeschooled by her mother and kept in isolation from her peers. The portrayal of neurodivergence has an authenticity one doesn’t see often in films like this, and Ruibal, who is on the spectrum herself, is amazing and natural in the role (extraordinary, since it is her first film). The exploration of neurodivergence in cinema has a pretty spotty history, although most of these…
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Action
Civil War
Reviews Civil War Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else.”Civil War” is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it’s already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive assumption that it’s one of three things: (1) an alternative future history of a divided United States that’s intended as a cautionary tale; (2) a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and/or lynching, but ducks political…
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Suspense
Portrait of a Nobel Prize-winner as an egomaniacal, heartless SOB
Reviews Portrait of a Nobel Prize-winner as an egomaniacal, heartless SOB Alan Rickman is not such a nice laureate in “Nobel Son.” When Alan Rickman portrays an egomaniacal, preening, heartless SOB, he seems to have found himself an autobiographical role. Since Rickman the human being is kind, genial and well-loved, he is in fact acting in “Nobel Son,” but who else could seem so utterly at home as a supercilious, snide, hurtful snake? I’m thinking maybe Richard E. Grant? The late Terry-Thomas, certainly. There really isn’t a long list. Rickman plays a brilliant chemist named Eli Michaelson, the kind of…
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Romance
Drift
Reviews Drift Footprints in the sand lay inches away from the progressing waterline of the shore, which eventually creeps far enough to wash them from existence. These are the opening moments of Anthony Chen’s “Drift.” However, this meditative beginning becomes an omen for the film’s overall impact, which begins with intrigue and slowly but surely gets flooded away. Jacqueline (Cynthia Erivo) is in flux—houseless (and away from home), alone, and vulnerable. She’s a Liberian woman who has found herself in Greece, offering foot massages to tourists on the beach in exchange for a few euros and tucking herself away into…
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Mystery
The Nun II
Reviews The Nun II When the demon nun Valak first appeared in “The Conjuring 2,” she was a spine-tingling tease of what was to come in “The Conjuring” cinematic universe. The paradoxical existence of a demonized sister of the cloth with horrifying sunken black eyes was an exciting promise given the success of those first two films by James Wan. But Valak’s 2018 spin-off, Corin Hardy’s “The Nun,” was a massive disappointment. Its sequel, directed by Michael Chaves, now has the same fate. “The Nun II” follows Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga) five years after the first film’s events. When she befriends Debra (Storm Reid), a newbie…
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Horror
The First Omen
Reviews The First Omen “The miracle of life can be a messy business,” you hear in “The First Omen,” a stunning prequel to Richard Donner’s timeless horror classic, “The Omen” (1976), about the evildoings of a demonic orphan adopted by a pair of unsuspecting Americans in London. And just like in the recent, Sydney Sweeney-starring religious gaslighting knockout “Immaculate,” it is a messy, skin-crawling business indeed, considering the life created is no other than that of the Antichrist. “Two genre films that revel in supernatural Catholic horror? In this economy?,” you might rightfully ask. But allow this critic to assure…
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Drama
Last Summer
Reviews Last Summer With her creamy wardrobe of tasteful neutrals and dreamy mansion in the Paris suburbs, Léa Drucker’s Anne has created an impenetrable exterior for herself in “Last Summer.” At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. But Anne doesn’t know she’s the main character in a Catherine Breillat movie, and so she – and we – are up for some upheaval. The provocative French auteur is back with her first feature in more than a decade, and at nearly 76, remains as curious and clear-eyed as ever in her depiction of women’s sexuality. There’s no judgment in her portrayal of Anne’s torrid, taboo affair; her downfall will occur regardless of what we think of her. Breillat’s approach…
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Documentary
Jim Henson: Idea Man
Reviews Jim Henson: Idea Man Like many people of my approximate age, my childhood was heavily touched and influenced by the work of Jim Henson. I adored the craziness of “The Muppet Show”—which made it stand out from the comparatively bland other things being offered up as children’s entertainment at that time—and found myself relating to a number of the characters on a personal level. The eternally critical Statler & Waldorf and Fozzie Bear possessed an endless array of terrible jokes and an undisguised desire to be loved. My first flesh-and-blood celebrity crush (not counting Veronica from the Archie comics)…
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Comedy
Robot Dreams
Reviews Robot Dreams Pablo Berger’s “Robot Dreams” is a lovely fable about partnership and imagination, a movie that uses the form of animated cinema to tell a story in a way that couldn’t be possible in any other medium. Without a word of dialogue, the director of “Blancanieves” casts a spell, crafting a film that is often truly lyrical, a creative exploration of relatable emotion that transports viewers to a world where robots dream of much more than electric sheep. It’s a film that feels at times like it’s not quite substantial enough to support a feature-length runtime, but every…
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Action
Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver
Reviews Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver Will there ever be a version of “Rebel Moon—Part 2: The Scargiver” that makes the movie and its franchise seem essential? Director and co-writer Zack Snyder has already tried to whip up his fanbase by teasing “R-rated” versions of the first two entries in his ongoing “Star Wars” ripoff cycle, a lifeless homage to that other IPed-to-death sci-fi series. The well-covered struggle to release the Snyder cut of “Justice League” notably improved what was only ever a passable super-programmer. It’s also established an unfortunate precedent for how “Rebel Moon” is now being…
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