My review of Verity is at Slant Magazine:
Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s Verity is a drudge of a film that repeatedly sets the stage for juicy reveals or escalating drama only to fritter them away. It’s also longer than it has any right to be, leaving plenty of time for the average viewer to ponder why adaptations of Hoover’s works keep getting such shoddy treatment…
Verity opens this Friday, for better or worse. Here’s the trailer:
I reviewed the new Ryan Murphy FX series adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ last novel The Shards for Slant Magazine:
Set in 1981, Ryan Murphy’s adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s 2023 novel The Shards is a metafictional, richly stylized gothic horror take on teen melodrama that takes itself just seriously enough. Things start with Bret himself, played by Igby Rigney, narrating seemingly from his present-day adulthood about a “season of horror” when he was a teenager. Some of his friends survived, he says, “but none of us made it out alive” …
Here’s the trailer:
I reviewed Project Hail Mary, Amazon’s new film about Ryan Gosling saving the planet, for PopMatters:
Some may walk out of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s goofy and pop-operatic adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel Project Hail Mary trying to string together all the shards of hard science fiction-speak that just burst from the screen at them. They may be able to math all the astrophysics which the film’s scientist hero, Ryland (Ryan Gosling), has to wrangle to save Earth from microscopic alien organisms that are rapidly eating the Sun. While that would be an admirable accomplishment—Drew Goddard’s script does not stint on the science—it would also be beside the point…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the latest confection from Edward Berger (Conclave) is at Slant Magazine:
Ballad of a Small Player is a fevered, neon-drenched film about a man on the run from his crimes and himself, and it wants to simultaneously revel in the glamor of high-end gambling and critique the unending gluttony that fuels it. This isn’t an unusual tack for Berger, as his All Quiet on the Western Front has a similarly confused relationship to the industrial violence that it lasciviously depicts. But this film, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name, is all about the possible spiritual redemption of spiraling gambler Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), and its ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of his world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him…
Ballad of a Small Player will be available on Netflix tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:
I reviewed the adaptation of Ruth Ware’s mystery The Woman in Cabin 10 for Slant Magazine:
Simon Stone’s The Woman in Cabin 10 is a locked-room mystery in which Laura (Keira Knightley), an investigative reporter for The Guardian, is invited by mysterious billionaire couple Richard (Guy Pearce) and Anne (Lisa Loven Kongsli) onto their luxury yacht. The cruise to Norway, doubling as self-regarding announcement of a massive philanthropic venture and a last big party for the deathly ill Anne, has barely begun when Laura sees a woman fall overboard. Told everybody on the yacht is accounted for, Laura at first thinks that she’s being gaslit. Later, after an unseen person shoves her into a pool where she almost drowns, Laura starts to believe that she’s the next to be murdered…
Here’s the trailer:
I reviewed Play Dirty, which is starting on Amazon Prime tomorrow, for Slant Magazine:
Donald Westlake’s Parker character, who he wrote about in many books under his penname Richard Stark, is a clever yet nasty machine of a criminal with a preternatural drive. That alone makes for a compelling screen character. But his brutishness doesn’t gel with the more comedic style preferred by Shane Black, director and co-writer of Play Dirty, a very loose adaptation of the Parker book series that keeps Westlake’s penchant for grubby violence but grafts it uneasily onto a more noble character whom the author wouldn’t recognize…
Here’s the trailer:
My review of the new Apple TV series Disclaimer was just published at Slant Magazine:
Alfonso Cuarón’s potboiler Disclaimer, an adaptation of the Renee Knight’s 2015 novel of the same name, begins with famed documentarian Catherine (Cate Blanchett) being fêted at an awards ceremony. Scenes of Catherine and her husband, Roger (Sacha Baron Cohen), living a posh life in their gorgeous London rowhouse are intercut with a storyline about a pair of students, Jonathan (Louis Partridge) and Sasha (Liv Hill), having a gap-year escapade in Italy. Meanwhile, a gloomier third narrative tracks Stephen (Kevin Kline), a widowed schoolteacher who seems to have lost every reason for living except for the drive to exact vengeance on Catherine for a crime that he believes she got away with…
The seven-part series premieres October 11. Here’s the trailer:
Ethan Hawke’s biopic of Flannery O’Connor, Wildcat, is opening soon in limited release.
My review is at Slant Magazine:
The O’Connor of Wildcat is a contentious outsider who seems ill at ease in her own skin. Too country Southern and gawky for New York, and too Catholic and idiosyncratic for the hidebound, keeping-up-appearances Protestantism of her native Georgia, she seems only somewhat at peace when putting stories on the page. As played by Maya Hawke, O’Connor is perpetually agitated, her thousand-yard stare reflecting the fervid visions and theological wranglings that bang around in her mind, suggesting more a rebellious mystic than an artist…
Trailer:
My review of the new adaptation of A Gentleman in Moscow, which premieres this Friday, ran today in Slant Magazine:
Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow was published in 2016, five years before Russia’s top opposition leader (and Vladimir Putin’s fiercest foe) Alexei Navalny returned to his homeland and was immediately imprisoned. Showtime’s eight-part adaptation of Towles’s novel, about a Navalny-like political prisoner in Russia, serendipitously makes its premiere not long after Navalny died in a Russian prison camp. But the comparisons between reality and fiction largely end there. A Gentleman in Moscow is a glossy, romanticized series that mostly suggests rather than shows the horrors of a totalitarian regime…
Here’s the trailer:
Francois Ozon’s absolutely smashing new movie, The Crime is Mine, opens in late December.
My review for Slant Magazine is here:
François Ozon’s fizzy comedy The Crime Is Mine, a loose adaptation of Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil’s 1934 play Mon crime, begins with murder, poverty, and a suicide threat. But the film delivers this material with such a bubbly optimism that it wouldn’t be a surprise if the cast broke into a choreographed number from Gold Diggers of 1933…
Here’s the trailer:
American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s scathing 2001 satire Erasure, has been playing the festival circuit and picking up some well-deserved Oscar buzz along the way.
I covered its screening at the Twin Cities Film Festival for PopMatters:
In Cord Jefferson’s jaggedly funny and cannily perceptive film American Fiction, literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tries talking sense into his high-minded and low-selling novelist client Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who is frustrated at the public’s appetite for “black trauma porn”. Trying to bring Monk down to earth, Arthur argues that while white people say they want the truth, really “they just want to feel absolved”…
American Fiction opens in December.
Here’s the trailer:
My review of Errol Morris’ new documentary about master spy novelist and professional faker John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel, which premieres on Apple TV this Friday, is at PopMatters:
A run-of-the-mill con artist steals from you with a clever ruse or when you look the other way. The top-notch con artist can look you in the eye, explain he is about to deceive you, and then get away with it anyway. After watching Errol Morris’ sleekly enrapturing John le Carré documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, you cannot help but think what a clever truth-telling chap the film’s subject is, with all his talk about the fungibility of truth and the art of deception and forget he might be pinching your wallet at that moment…
Here is the trailer:
Have you ever seen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen? Whatever the answer, the new Criterion edition provides ample reason to watch it now, whether for the first or fifth time.
My article about the film, and its place in Terry Gilliam’s career, is at PopMatters:
It is not surprising that Terry Gilliam’s film career went up in flames—not just once but on multiple occasions, and not just in flames but in great roaring bonfires that consumed reams of industry trade gossip, millions of dollars, and years of people’s lives. As Monty Python’s animator of lewdly monstrous grotesqueries and generally non-verbal performer, Gilliam was hardly the troupe’s chief troublemaker (that would be Graham Chapman, busier hellraising ala Keith Moon than trying to make films). But Gillian did have an easily detectable rebel streak that signaled poor receptiveness to fussy things like schedules and budgets…
Here is the trailer:
Many have said that Don DeLillo’s White Noise is an unfilmmable novel. Well, it’s a film with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle, and even a killer LCD Soundsystem-scored dance number.
White Noise is playing now in limited release. It will be on Netflix December 30. My review is at PopMatters:
Pity the person asking what White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s messy yet fun adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel of comic catastrophe and looming portents, is about. The response may take time to compose, arrive in paragraph form, involve contemplative gazing, and include the phrase “it’s about … America.” Such an answer may drive the potential viewer towards something starring Ryan Reynolds. This is a shame…
Here’s the trailer:
The first half of the first season of Amazon’s expansion of the Tolkien universe, The Rings of Power, have streamed and as yet not a single ring in sight. This, and the heavy reliance on Galadriel (pictured) is probably a good thing.
My review is at Slant:
The pressures of trying to retain fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the Peter Jackson film trilogy while attracting new ones, though, do not visibly inform the start of the series. For the most part, The Rings of Power moves ahead with the confident, measured, contemplative speed of a hobbit taking a mid-afternoon stroll. Holding true to the idealized chivalry of Tolkien’s Nordic saga-infused tales, showrunners Patrick McKay and J.D. Payne steer clear of George R.R. Martin-style bloodbaths and soap-operatic celebrations of carnality…
Here’s the trailer:
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