I reviewed the new Claire Denis film The Fence at this year’s New York Film Festival for PopMatters:
It is unclear where Alboury, the character played by the great Isaach De Bankolé in Claire Denis’ scorching, powerfully mythic new film The Fence, works or lives. It is not even clear if he is a corporeal person or some apparition generated by history and the murmurings of the unquiet dead…
The Fence does not have a U.S. release date set.
I reviewed Father Mother Sister Brother‘s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival for PopMatters:
If there is a lesson Jim Jarmusch is trying to impart in his latest feature, Father Mother Sister Brother (and dear Lord, let’s hope he is not), it is this: Nobody knows anybody. Even when you are related. Maybe especially when you are related…
Father Mother Sister Brother should be opening in December. Here’s the trailer:
Bradley Cooper’s third film, Is This Thing On?, just closed out the New York Film Festival. I reviewed for Slant Magazine:
When Alex (Will Arnett), the disgruntled protagonist of Bradley Cooper’s comic drama Is This Thing On?, first stalks onto the stage of New York’s Comedy Cellar, he doesn’t have a single joke to tell. All he has is the story of his recent separation from his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). The silence echoes at first, his breathing loud and suggesting an incipient panic attack. But Alex eventually gets a few laughs with some self-deprecating comments helped along by his comedically hangdog persona. Getting a solid round of applause on leaving the stage, Alex looks like a soon-to-be gambling addict who’s just won his first jackpot…
Is This Thing On? will open later in the year. Here’s the trailer:
This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:
There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…
I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:
The new documentary Elton John: Never Too Late just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival. It should be coming relatively soon to Disney+.
My review ran at The Playlist:
The makers of “Elton John: Never Too Late” wisely didn’t try to be completists. After a half-century-plus of touring as well as recording approximately eleventy thousand albums and musicals, attempting a complete survey of Elton John’s output in one film is a fool’s errand. However, the film ends up covering enough of his career that the resulting gaps are more noticeable than they should be. Viewers will leave the movie with a good-enough appreciation of his work, but not necessarily any deeper an understanding of the man than could be gleaned from viewing “Rocketman“…
My review of the new documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics (which just screened at both Venice and Telluride film festivals), was published in The Playlist:
It might be challenging for some viewers to take activists seriously when they are speaking in tongues. But that is exactly what Petra Costa does in her edgy yet empathetic documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics.’ Overlapping somewhat with the events chronicled in 2019’s ‘The Edge of Democracy,’ her epic account of Brazil’s recent whipsawing political battles, this film takes a step back from the action to investigate how the nation’s governance devolved into a near-permanent state of crisis. A crucial and underappreciated factor, according to Costa, is the rocketing surge of a politicized strain of evangelism that aims to accelerate rather than alleviate chaos…
My review of the Sundance Film Festival hit Veni Vidi Vici ran at Slant Magazine:
There’s a striking dissonance between the serene and realistic surface of Daniel Hoesel and Julia Niemann’s Veni Vidi Vici and the way it bludgeons its points home using the exaggerated methods of social critiques common to such genre pieces as Snowpiercer or Infinity Pool. How effective this will be depends in part on the viewer. Some will appreciate this class satire’s grim portrait of a venal polo-playing billionaire class who explain away their amoral behavior with self-aggrandizing business-speak. Others may thrill to the dark comedy of a serial killer operating so in the open that he’s practically begging to be caught. Either way, the message of Hoesel’s screenplay is blunt: Everyone not at society’s pinnacle is only prey…
Veni Vidi Vici was picked up for distribution so will be getting released later this year. Check out the trailer:
The largely animated robot romance Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, had its premiere at Sundance.
I reviewed for Slant Magazine:
A high-concept vehicle about machines falling in love, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me aims to be a fable about how the detritus left behind by now-extinct humanity could serve as a misleading guide to how romance should be done. The film starts with an impressive animated opening montage showing the history of Earth in a comedically sped-up fashion; what might be a species-annihilating nuclear war is viewed from a distance as just a flicker of sparks across the planet’s surface. It’s a very grandiose presentation of what’s ultimately a thin sliver of an idea about how social media tropes impede rather than help relationships…
Jesse Eisenberg’s second movie as writer/director, A Real Pain, just premiered at Sundance. It was picked up for distribution by Searchlight, and is very worth finding once it gets released.
My review is at Slant Magazine:
There’s enough pain on display in Jesse Eisenberg’s crackling comedy A Real Pain to keep numerous therapists busy for years. It’s a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. Nevertheless, it’s also levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance…
I wrote an article for Eyes Wide Open about a very specific film festival I worked on in Chicago in the summer of 2001:
As movies editor for citysearch.com’s Chicago node, I should have been covering that thundering shift in the moviemaking landscape. But I did not truly see what was happening. I could tell 2000’s Gladiator and X-Men foretold a new kind of spectacle filmmaking: grimmer, faster, and unromantic. I could see that 1990s’ auteurism was coming to an end. I was thrilled by Memento, weirdly defensive about criticism of A.I., and nonplussed by Mulholland Drive. But that spring and summer I was also looking more to the past than the present…
The frightening new documentary Against All Enemies premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night.
My review is at The Playlist:
The MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 shared many surface similarities with the ideologically opposed mobs that fought against police in American cities over the past few years: improvised weaponry; social media fixation; an emphasis on combat tactics over strategic objectives. But there’s also a crucial exception: the January 6 mob included many U.S. military veterans. In the thundering, anxiety-inducing documentary “Against All Enemies,” Charlie Sadoff asks why it’s so easy for some veterans, who make up over ten percent of those charged with the January 6 attack, to betray their oaths and attack their government?…
Directed, co-written by, and starring Ray Romano, Somewhere in Queens is opening this Friday.
Intermittently funny and touching, but ultimately forgettable, Ray Romano’s overcooked family comedy Somewhere in Queens is about a protective couple who can’t quite let their son go. Leo (Romano) and Angie Russo (Laurie Metcalf) fret over nearly everything to do with “Sticks” (Jacob Ward), a gawky and quiet high school basketball star on the verge of graduation, but never quite get around to asking what he wants to do with his life. If there wasn’t an ABC Afterschool Special about this kind of parenting, there should have been…
Here’s the trailer:
My full writeup of the 2023 Berlinale Film Festival just went up at Eyes Wide Open.
In short, I’m a fan. Also, there’s a lot of great movies (and some mediocre ones) coming to theaters and screens near you very soon. Keep your eyes open.
Back from this year’s Berlinale Film Festival, which was packed with celebrities, retrospectives (Spielberg), buzzy premieres (Sean Penn’s Ukraine documentary for Vice), and a very strong lineup.
I wrote up a few movies for Slant, each of which should (hopefully) be hitting a theater near you in the coming year.
Albert Serra’s latest film, Pacifiction, played some festivals last year (including Cannes, where it was raved about). It is opening this week in limited release.
My review is at PopMatters:
The first images in Albert Serra’s slippery and satirical film Pacifiction are not what comes to mind for many when thinking of Tahiti. Yes, the film’s background is a limpid array of mountains drenched in a gorgeous salmon-tinted sunset. The long pan, however, reveals a more prosaic foreground: A busy port lined with stacks of shipping containers that function as a mercantile mountain range. From Serra’s perspective, Tahiti might be a paradise and should be photographed as such, but it is also a place of business…
Here’s the trailer:
Chris Barsanti 
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