Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘Project Hail Mary’

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(Amazon MGM Studios)

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:

Screening Room: ‘Fantasy Life’

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I reviewed Fantasy Life for Slant Magazine:

Writer-director Matthew Shear’s Fantasy Life is an initially familiar-feeling rom-com about urbane yet nerve-rattled characters that eventually, but just barely, transcends expectations. A law school dropout who appears constantly shell-shocked by the concussions of everyday life, Sam (Shear) is first seen getting fired from his impossibly bleak office job before having a panic attack at a bookstore. With seemingly few prospects, he takes on a job as a manny for the children of a wealthy couple, Dianne (Amanda Peet) and David (Alessandro Nivola). Sam almost immediately falls headlong for Dianne, an ex-actor suffering from different but similarly debilitating and career-stifling mental health issues…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’

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(Courtesy of Neon)

I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:

For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…

It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Ballad of a Small Player’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘The Fence’

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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.

Screening Room: ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘Is This Thing On?’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘The Woman in Cabin 10’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘Play Dirty’

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Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield in Play Dirty (Amazon MGM)

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:

Screening Room: ‘It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley’

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My review of the documentary It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley was published at Slant Magazine:

…relates Jeff Buckley’s meteoric rise and early death in the 1990s through the adoring and wounded voices of his family, friends, and bandmates. Berg leavens their wistful memories with personal and concert footage, along with Buckley’s notebook jottings, ramblingly funny and emotional voicemails, and jagged animations that are meant to simulate his manic and at times self-destructive mindset…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Eddington’

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Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal in ‘Eddington’ (A24)

My review of Eddington is at PopMatters:

A comic neo-Western with a bent for hyperreality and savage satirical viewpoint, Eddington is set in the kind of remote, raggedy New Mexico town where people are on a first-name basis, the scattered businesses look dusty and on the verge of bankruptcy, and more than two cars on the same block qualifies as a traffic jam. Like in many Westerns, the unresolved disputes of a small community are refracted through a looming showdown. Here, the confrontation is between Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), whose animus is ostensibly over masking policies being implemented as the story begins in May 2020…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Meeting with Pol Pot’

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My review of this new film from Rithy Panh ran at Slant Magazine:

In Rithy Panh’s Meeting with Pol Pot, three French journalists are invited to meet with Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978. Looking to discover the truth, they find themselves made accomplices of an elaborate public relations effort meant to hide the regime’s atrocities from the outside world. Loosely based on Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over, the film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

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(Paramount Pictures)

The newest (and maybe last?) Tom Cruise outing as Ethan Hunt is out next week.

My review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is at Eyes Wide Open:

Over the course of Final Reckoning, Hunt hurls himself into seemingly certain death so many times it’s hard not to wonder whether he even wants to survive. His eagerness to save the world is presented as a crusade with nearly religious overtones: the film’s main McGuffin is a cruciform key, Hunt is described as “the best of men in the worst of times” as well as “the chosen one,” and at one point nearly dies before being resurrected…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Warfare’

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My review of the new film Warfare just ran at PopMatters:

A tight and terrifying docudrama combat procedural, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare tracks just one engagement in the Iraq War. The firefight was unremarkable enough to have almost certainly been forgotten by anybody not there. For the soldiers and civilians involved, however, it was likely a singular moment of their lives…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Death of a Unicorn’

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My review of Death of a Unicorn is at PopMatters:

If you find yourself wondering at any point during Alex Scharfman’s Grand-Guignol fantasy satire Death of a Unicorn, “Wait, how come there are unicorns in the Canadian Rockies which nobody has seen before?” then this is not the film for you. However, if some part of you is thinking, “I hope those vile ultra-wealthy despoilers of all that good and pure get what’s coming to them,” then you are in luck. One thing this fitfully fun but often pandering splatter of a film keeps its focus tightly pinned on is the importance of comeuppance for the baddies…

Here’s the trailer: