Gaspar Noe‘s Climax is split into two movies, both running about 45 minutes, both relying on risky, over-the-top camerawork and both heavily relying on an EDM soundtrack.
Read moreWWE-Produced “Fighting With My Family" Has a Smackdown of Cliches [Review]
Here is a shamelessly formulaic product brought to you by WWE studios and meant to benefit the wrestling company by promoting its brand while also telling the chase-your-dreams true story of its real-life superstar wrestler Paige. Cue in the familiar sports-movie clichés, because “Fighting With My Family” uses plenty of them.
The film’s been written and directed by Stephen Merchant (this guy really loves to use montages) and is almost, but not quite, saved by an adorably persistent performance courtesy of Florence Pugh (dynamite in “Lady Macbeth”) as Saraya-Jade Bevis aka Paige. Pugh plays it straight, with no over-the-top theatrics, but instead, a wide-eyed kid-like optimism which captures the look, sound and feel of a WWE female champion that is completely out of her league with the company’s brand of feminine “divas.”
Julia “Sweet Saraya” (Lena Headey) and Patrick “Rowdy Ricky Knight” (Nick Frost) play her parents, and her older brother, Zak “Zodiac” is played by Jack Lowden, but whenever the film turns towards their own London working-class plight, where they manage their own low-rent wrestling league, the film falters in keeping our attention. It’s the grueling boot camp of the farm league, which the WWE has invited Saraya-Jade to, that is the crux of Merchant’s Cinderella-story.
The fact that Merchenat decides to periodically check back in with Zak on the home front, killing time by training young wrestlers, does a disservice to the momentum being built by Pugh’s tale and feels like filler rather than a narrative necessity. There’s a two-scene cameo by The Rock, playing himself, and a decently-delivered payoff when Paige finally makes her big Raw debut, but the film is so overstuffed with clichés that the journey feels, in more ways than one, like an insufferable smackdown to our IQs. [C]
“Paddleton" Is a Slight But Loving Ode to Male Friendship [Review]
The fact that Alex Lehmann’s “Paddleton'‘ concerns two friends, one of which has just been told he’s dying of cancer, could make you run scared from the sob-fest that is about to happen, but “Paddleton” isn’t a “Love Story” or a “Terms of Endearment,” rather it’s a film that is incredibly light on its feet with humor and heartbreak and which sidesteps whatever cliches can be found in this kind of gooey territory. Despite some narrative straining, the payoff is beautifully rendered.
Read moreAsghar Farhadi's “Everybody Knows" is a Crushing Disappointment [Review]
Asghar Farhadi has built a career out of making masterful family dramas. With "About Elly," "A Separation," "The Past," and "The Salesman," the Iranian-born writer-director has put his name on the shortlist of world-class directors. I can count these rare and incisively talented filmmakers in less than two hands. So it pains me to be the bearer of bad news that the 46-year-old filmmaker's latest film, the Spanish-language drama "Everybody Knows," is not a bad movie, in fact it's half-decent, but that we've come to expect much more from him. Sometimes, expectations really do dictate how you feel about a film. This is the perfect example, as Farhadi's latest is a whodunit about a missing daughter and her mother, who painstakingly tries to put the clues together to find her.
Read more“High Flying Bird" is messy, slight and overstuffed with ideas but its ambitions are undeniably exciting [Review]
Ray Burke (Andre Holland) is a top-notch New York sports agent that seems to have hit the big time by getting the rights to represent a basketball phenom named Erick Scott (Melvin Gregg), only problem is that there’s a lockout and it’s preventing Scott and many other rookies from getting their first NBA paychecks, leaving them unsure of their future. Enter Burke, an ingenious on-the-spot groundbreaker, who decides to push the envelope a bit by trying to bring the players association and owners together with well-constructed set-ups and .. well just watch the movie.
Read more“Leaving Neverland" Feels More Like an Opportunistic Hit-Piece Rather Than a Documentary [Review]
I can “review” HBO’s upcoming “Leaving Neverland” or just give an opinionated schema of Michael Jackson and his history of sexual abuse allegations towards underaged teenage boys. I’ll try to do both.
Read more“Russian Doll" Is Wry, Inventive and Acerbically Original Television
“Russia Doll” is a new spin on the time-loop story which was popularized by “Groundhog Day” more than 25 years ago. That film’s concept caught on to the point where there is now a film, every year or so, which uses the gimmick. It all has to do with the notion of "If I had that to do over, I'd do it differently.” Most recently, and most successfully, was a jump towards sci-fi in which “Edge of Tomorrow” and “Source Code” used it in ways that brought a sense of newness to the gimmick, nevertheless, it’s a concept that still has many rolling their eyes whenever used, check out the less-than-successful YA flick ‘Before I Fall.”
Read more“Velvet Buzzsaw" Is a Pathetic Horror-Satire of the L.A. Art World [Review]
I had totally forgotten that Dan Gilory’s “Velvet Buzzsaw” was released on Netflix until I scrolled through the streaming giant’s service this past week. I had seen it at its world premiere on January 27th at the Sundance Film Festival.
Read more“Holiday" Is an Immensely Impressive Debut [Review]
The trophy girlfriend of a small-time drug lord is caught up in a web of luxury and violence in the port city of Bodrum on the Turkish Riviera. The terrible things men do to women and that women allow men to do to them. Don’t mistake this provocative powerhouse for anything but the announcement of a new cinematic talent. Isabella Eklof’s “Holiday” is bound to provoke polarizing reactions. It’s a tough watch, a film that means to get under your skin and that it does. featuring one of the most graphic rape sequences ever committed to screen, the film is subtle on plot, never providing any definitive answers, but renders a damn-near damning finale. It’s not for the faint of heart, but in the era of #MeToo this is a film that deserves to exist, asking us questions about masculine and feminine roles in society, all done in uber-realist, near claustrophobic, fashion. [B+]
‘The Image Book’: Jean-Luc Godard’s Offers Another Radicalist, Experimental Assault
It’s been a long time since making traditional or even vaguely conventional “movies” has interested legendary French New-Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard. If anything, the director’s movies over the last 20 or so years have been experiential audio/visual collages more interested in pictures, sounds, cuts, and de-saturation; a maddening barrage of dadaist statements. Even with all that being said, his latest, “The Image Book,” playing in competition at Cannes, should be considered as radical a Godard-ian statement as any.
Read more‘Glass’ is an Unfortunate Sequel to Better, More Intricate Films [Review]
I can't say I didn't enjoy some moments of M Night Shyamalan's "Glass," the writer-director's follow-up to the surprisingly revealed trilogy which began with 2000's "Unbreakable," then was reshuffled for triple-ordered purposes with 2017's "Split" and now "Glass."
Read moreMads Mikkelsen Can’t Save The Survivor Minimalism Of ‘Arctic’ [Cannes Review]
When a director decides to tackle a genre that has been dealt with many times before, comparisons to far superior films are inevitable. And so, a film like Joe Penna's "Arctic" will no doubt run the risk of being compared to its spiritual predecessors Danny Boyle's "127 Hours," J.C. Chandor's "All is Lost" and Joe Carnahan's "The Grey." That in itself already weakens it, but like all great art, if imitation can transcend or even equal its inspirations then all the better for it.
Read more‘Fyre’ builds on one cringe-inducing WTF moment after another [Review]
The term "clusterfuck" was invented for use when events such as the misbegotten Fyre Festival happen. Fyre was a music fest that was the brainchild of Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule. It was driven by a nifty marketing campaign which promoted musical nirvana on a a deserted island (once owned by Pablo Escobar) in the Bahamas. McFarland would overcharge thousands of music fans to what the ads deemed to be the “most exclusive music festival on the planet.”
Read more‘The Wild Pear Tree’: Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Latest [Review]
Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan already won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festivalback in 2014 with his talky epic "Winter Sleep," a shocking win if you ask me since that film is considered one of his weaker entries. Me? I'll always love "Once Upon A Time In Anatolia" a meditative but thoroughly gripping murder-mystery that very much feels like the more minimalist and, almost, equally brilliant counterpart to David Fincher's "Zodiac."
Read more‘Cold Case Hammarskjöld’ Is An Astonishing Murder Mystery Investigation Doc [Sundance Review]
It’s a cliché, but “more than you bargained for” documentaries are typically the best ones. Those films that feature a filmmaker on an odyssey quest for one piece of truth, but discovers something richer and more profound along the journey. Such is the case with what Mads Brügger‘s astonishing “Cold Case Hammarskjöld,” about an investigation into a mysterious murder that strikes a vein and the blood of discovery comes gushing. What begins as a look into a plane crash, and the consequent death of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld in the early 1960s, quickly turns into something much more transfixing: the confirmation of a conspiracy theory that has existed for more than five decades.
‘Midnight Family' is A Thriller About Mexican Ambulances That Happens to Be Non-Fiction [Sundance Review]
Despite a population of close to 9 million, Mexico City’s government operates only 45 emergency ambulances. This shortage crisis has resulted in private paramedics becoming first responders to the critically injured. One of them is the Ochoas family, zigzagging through high-speed ambulance rides to care for the critically injured. Despite being unregistered, they are the underground lifeline for many. At first, you don’t know if what you’re watching is fiction or non-fiction. The masterful cinema vérité camerawork in Luke Lorentzen’s “Midnight Family” has a knack for sucking us into after-hours Mexico City and the fractured health care system at its disposal. From local competition to police bribes to patient’s unwillingness to pay their bills, the Ochoas have to navigate through all of that to make ends meet, then there’s the ethically questionable practice of making money off dying poor patients. This 81-minute masterpiece will change the way you look at documentaries forever; its style reads like an action movie, its themes like a socio-political drama, and, yet, it still is very much a work of non-fiction, with a camera always exactly positioned to capture a society on the brink of moral collapse. [A]
“Late Night" Tackles Feminism In Commercially Friendly Ways [Sundance Review]
The idea that we can modernize familiar narrative tropes is something that Hollywood always strives in achieving. After all, why change a formula that has been working so well, and making money, on audiences since the beginning of time when you could just freshen it up for contemporary audiences, whose sensibilities, let’s be frank haven’t changed all that much. Please keep in mind that in the millions of years the homosapien has lived on this planet, their DNA has barely changed, nor has their way of responding to triggers which prompt the usual emotional reactions.
Read more‘Last Black Man In San Francisco' Can't Overcome Its Thin Drama, Even With Impressive Visual Style [Review]
Aesthetics and substance are two entirely different things in cinema. You could have a film that is bracingly inventive in its visual approach but falls flat in the narrative drama. Ditto the reverse, a visually flat film with a well-realized narrative. The latter is usually worth a recommendation, but the former can be problematic, even when you have a film as visually accomplished as Joe Talbot’s “The Last Black Man in San Francisco.”
Read moreMads Mikkelsen Can’t Save The Survivor Minimalism Of ‘Arctic’
When a director decides to venture into a well-worn genre, comparisons to far superior films are inevitable. And so, a film like Joe Penna‘s feature-length directorial debut, “Arctic,” a survival drama, will no doubt run the risk of being compared to its spiritual predecessors: Danny Boyle‘s “127 Hours,” J.C. Chandor‘s “All is Lost” and Joe Carnahan‘s “The Grey.” The correlation potentially weakens the film, but like all great art, if imitation can transcend or even equal its inspirations, then all the better.
Read more‘Luce’: Julias Onah’s Powerfully Constructed Psychodrama Of Race & Social Politics Is Brilliantly Tense [Sundance Review]
In two short years, America, has turned race, privilege, and class into incendiary topics while amplifying intolerance, and Julias Onah‘s powerfully constructed “Luce,” mixes all these socio-political subjects into a provocative Molotov cocktail that shatters, burns and leaves no easy answers.
Following “Air,” this is Affleck’s latest stint behind the camera. He has cast himself in the lead role, alongside Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun, and Gillian Anderson (“The X-Files”).