Movies (1131)
Few active filmmakers are possessed of a style and sensibility that is specifically theirs. These filmmakers stamp their idiosyncratic signatures on their works in an undeniable manner; theirs are the movies that we watch and know instantly who made them. The Andersons – both Wes and Paul Thomas – are in that category, for instance. So too are the Coen brothers.
And Edgar Wright is definitely in that conversation.
The English auteur’s latest film is “Last Night in Soho,” a time travel horror thriller of sorts that is packed with the sort of vivid imagery and pop deep cuts in which he delights. We move back and forth between the present day and a neon-soaked ‘60s London, the color and lights serving only to deepen the shadows of a story whose details are ever-shifting.
Wright has never been one to flee from his influences; he’s unafraid to embrace and celebrate the pop culture sights, sounds and ideas that he loves. That said, “Last Night in Soho” – while undeniably and instantly identified as an Edgar Wright movie – might be the least overtly engaged in conversation with those influences. They’re there, but we’re much farther from the homage/pastiche vibe of, say, his Cornetto Trilogy.
It’s stylish. It’s creepy. And it’s very good.
In a cinematic landscape awash with IP-fueled franchise efforts, it should come as no surprise when a movie’s splashy arrival on the scene indicates more to come – sequels or sequels or whatever -quels you like. Audiences have grown accustomed to it all; we know the drill.
However, not all -quels are created equal.
For instance, who would have thought that Netflix’s “Army of the Dead,” a reasonably entertaining Zack Snyder-helmed zombie movie, would offer up a prequel revolving around one of its lesser characters and his entry into the world of high-end heists, all of it taking place as the zombie outbreak of the initial film is just beginning – an outbreak that has negligible impact on the narrative we’re currently watching.
That’s “Army of Thieves,” new on Netflix. Directed by Matthias Schweighöfer and revolving around the goofball German safecracker Schweighöfer played in “Army of the Dead,” this new film is essentially a straightforward heist film, with only the most tenuous of connections to the movie of which it is ostensibly a prequel. Seriously – you could strip out what zombie stuff there is with ease without altering the film in any meaningful way.
Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that “Army of Thieves” is actually … pretty good? Sure, it follows the general formula for heist movies, but there’s a reason for that: the formula for heist movies works. Hell, the movie itself even makes reference to some of the tropes of the genre in the midst of executing those same tropes. It’s winking and self-aware – occasionally to a fault – but it has a game, charming cast, some decent set pieces and an undeniable sense of humor.
Horror movies often expend considerable effort to strike a balance between the tropes of their genre and the desire for thematic and/or allegorical depth. The truth is that it’s a very rare horror movie that exists solely to scare, at least in a purely physical manner; most have something to say with their subtext (though that subtext can be hard to see at times).
How successfully that balance is struck is another thing entirely, with the history of horror littered with films that never found that equilibrium.
“Antlers,” the new film from director Scott Cooper, makes a good faith effort to enfold its allegorical ambition within the framework of a monster movie. While that effort never fully materializes, it does manage to get fairly close. And when you take into account the scares here – both atmospheric and visceral – you wind up with a pretty solid horror movie.
From a screenplay Cooper co-penned alongside Henry Chiasson and Nick Antocasa, it’s a story of fear and loss set in the rural Northwest, one inextricably entwined with the collision between industry nature. It’s a story of how one people’s myths are another’s cautionary tales, as well as what happens when man’s actions lead to monsters being unleashed.
Every once in a while, there is a movie experience that manages to transcend a lot of the traditional markers that define quality, however nebulously. Most films you watch, they’re relatively easy to parse – I liked it because X, I didn’t like it because Y, you know the drill. But occasionally, a film will come along that moves beyond those identifiers; your reasoning is still there, of course, but there’s also something fundamentally overwhelming about it.
“Dune” overwhelmed me.
The new film from director Denis Villeneuve – who also co-wrote the screenplay with Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts (adapted from Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel of the same name – or the first half or so anyway) is a sprawling, sand-strewn epic. It is a movie that unabashedly embraces not just the letter but the spirit of its source material, resulting in a deliberately-paced and utterly gorgeous film that captures the sheer scale of galactic intrigue while also delving into the psychological and sociological underpinnings that come when nobility takes different approaches to maintaining their humanity.
It’s a space opera, for sure, with plenty of familiar tropes of the genre at play. But the combination of Hebert’s interplay of eco-consciousness and political dynamics matched with the auteur’s eye of Villeneuve transforms “Dune” into something far more. It is a literal feast for the eyes, one of the most strikingly compelling visual blockbusters we’ve seen in years, all in service to a dense plot involving everything from galaxy-spanning empires to mind-expanding traditions to colonialism to learning what it means to lead.
Yeah – overwhelming is the right way to put it. And this is just the first part!
The relationship we as a society have with technology is a fraught one. Striking the balance between the digital and analog worlds is difficult – particularly for young people, whose relationship with tech and social media and all that those things entail is especially complex.
Complex enough that perhaps a well-meaning animated family film isn’t the best method of exploring it, perhaps?
Still, that’s what we get with “Ron’s Gone Wrong,” the new computer-animated film from 20th Century Studios. The story of a young man and his burgeoning friendship with a ubiquitous piece of technology, tech whose malfunctions and idiosyncrasies make it more capable of meaningful engagement than any amount of careful planning.
In essence, the bugs become features.
With an excellent voice cast led by Jack Dylan Grazer, Zach Galifinakis and others, “Ron’s Gone Wrong” is a pleasant enough diversion, though it never delves as deep into the issues it purports to explore as you might like. It wants to be thoughtful and entertaining, but it ultimately proves more successful at the latter than the former.
Often – perhaps too often – we are wont to romanticize the past. We look back at the events of history through rose-colored lenses that focus on the grandiose and filter out many of the more unsavory elements.
The age of chivalry, for instance. We tend to celebrate the heroic and heraldic whilst utterly ignoring the bleak realities of that time for anyone who lived outside the sphere of knights and noblemen. The crushing poverty, the endless warfare, the lack of agency for anyone outside the elite – these truths are absent from the familiar tales of derring-do.
“The Last Duel” – directed by Ridley Scott and based on the 2004 book of the same name by Eric Jager – attempts to delve deeper and address that time and place with a little more honesty. Jager’s book, which is based on a true story, is adapted for the screen by some rather notable writers: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who wrote the script alongside Nicole Holofcener.
Damon and Affleck star, as do Adam Driver and Jodie Comer, in this multi-faceted tale of what happens when a woman of this era accuses a man of rape. Told from multiple perspectives, it’s an effort to deconstruct the uneven power dynamics of the time, its historicity inviting comparisons and contrasts to present-day circumstances. The film sprawls across the screen, asking the audience to view the proceedings through the eyes of three different narrators, each of whom with their own beliefs regarding how the story played out.
‘The Velvet Underground’ a unique doc for a unique band
Written by Allen Adams
I’ll be honest with you – I’ve never really been much of a music guy. I simply don’t feel the same connection to music that so many people do. It’s not that I don’t like music, mind you. I just don’t need it in the way that true musicophiles do.
That said, I definitely dig a good music documentary. Even without that visceral, cellular-level type connection to the music, the stories behind the music – the people and places and influences that brought that music to life – remain fascinating to me.
As you might imagine, the new Todd Haynes documentary “The Velvet Underground” – currently streaming on Apple TV+ - fits the bill perfectly. To have someone like Haynes, a filmmaker with an idiosyncratic eye and an obvious adoration of music that permeates his filmography, take on one of the most influential rock bands of all time? What kind of wonderful result could we expect?
An apt one, as it turns out, a perfect marriage of documentarian and subject. Haynes proves to be just the right person to capture the frenetic bohemian energy of not just The Velvet Underground, but of their surroundings. The pieces will be familiar, but the whole into which they have been assembled is unlike any music documentary you’ve seen before. In many ways, this film is an experience – an evocative reflection of the band’s place in the cultural zeitgeist.
Even in a Hollywood landscape constructed atop a foundation of IP-driven franchises and remakes, there are few rabbit holes as deep as the one surrounding the current iteration of “Halloween.”
The John Carpenter original is one of the classics of the horror genre; its success gave birth to a lengthy list of sequels of rapidly-diminishing quality. We got a Rob Zombie effort at rebooting, resulting in a couple of movies of middling quality. And then, in 2018, we got yet another reinvention of the franchise with David Gordon Green and Danny McBride leading the way – an effort to wipe the slate clean of the confusing and convoluted lore and reenergize the franchise. It was an effort that mostly worked.
However, the sequel to THAT movie – “Halloween Kills” – doesn’t achieve the same manner of success, instead opting to lean into over-the-top gore and an added selection of legacy characters from the franchise’s early days. And while there’s some meat on that particular nostalgic bone, Green and the rest of the filmmaking team never quite figure out how to most effectively gnaw it.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s joy to be derived from the sheer splatter factor here, as well as some moments of dark levity. It’s just that this is very obviously a middle movie, and when you already know the next movie is coming, it’s hard to make any sort of real narrative progress; it occasionally feints at some greater themes, but can’t really deliver on the follow through. In the end, what you get is largely a placeholder, a movie that exists largely because you can’t get from point A to point C without a point B. It’s fine for what it is, but ultimately, it proves disposable.
‘No Time to Die’ bids Daniel Craig a Bond farewell
Written by Allen Adams
From the moment he exploded onto screens in 1962’s “Dr. No,” James Bond – 007 – has cast a suave and swaggering shadow across the cinematic landscape.
It doesn’t matter that multiple actors have played the role. It doesn’t matter that there’s little to no consistency or constancy to the timeline – some events carry forward, others are forgotten. Over the course of decades, we’ve watched assorted Bonds ply their craft. They thwart elaborate plots with even more elaborate gadget-driven schemes, saving the world and inevitably falling into bed with one or more beautiful women.
That’s it. That’s the job. Or at least, it was.
Things changed when Daniel Craig assumed the mantle. For the first time, Bond was more than an unstoppable heavily-armed lothario in a tuxedo. Craig lent a heretofore unseen gravitas to the character, creating someone who actually dealt with the consequences of his actions, both bad and good. There was no more wiping clean of the slate – Bond’s deeds had lasting impact.
“No Time to Die” is Craig’s fifth – and final – outing as James Bond, and as far as sendoffs go, well … he certainly could have done a lot worse. It is very much a Bond movie, with all of the globetrotting intrigue and wild action set pieces that label entails, but it is also a surprisingly engaging character study of a man forced to confront the inexorable passage of time. Craig’s Bond is a flawed Bond – and arguably, the best of the lot.
Cary Joji Fukunaga helms this latest installment, taking the reins from Sam Mendes, who directed the previous two Bond films; Fukunaga also shares screenplay credit with three other writers. It is jam-packed with the sorts of extended action and convoluted plotting that marks most of the franchise’s offerings. One could argue that it is overstuffed – the runtime is a gargantuan 163 minutes – but considering that it doubles as a farewell to its lead actor, I’d say that it deserves to take as much time as it likes.
I’m a big fan of actors pushing their own personal envelopes. I like it when comedic actors go the dramatic route and I like it when actors known for their dramatic chops venture into the realm of comedy. As a firm believer that a good actor is a good actor, it’s nice to see performers stretch themselves.
Take Jason Sudeikis. He made his bones as a comic performer, taking a turn as a cast member on “Saturday Night Live” and following that with a number of film comedies. But it’s his recent work as the titular character “Ted Lasso” – a comedy, yes, but one with dramatic underpinnings – that has really shown the breadth of his performance potential. The dude has what it takes.
In the new film “South of Heaven,” directed by Aharon Keshales and co-written by Keshales, Navot Paspushado and Kai Mark, Sudeikis is given the opportunity to take things in a much more extreme direction. What we have here is a bizarro Texas noir, a story populated by ex-cons and current criminals, all of it driven by one man’s singular desire to do right by the woman he loves.
While there’s plenty to like here, the film is tonally inconsistent to a distracting degree, veering wildly from dramatic intensity to romance to sitcom-adjacent banter – the sort of movie that relies on a steady stream of coincidence to keep moving forward. The performances – led by Sudeikis – are legitimately strong, but the unsteady narrative foundation undermines them. It’s a dark movie that can’t quite embrace its own darkness – at least, not until the end, when things get particularly nuts in an unexpected way.
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