Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘Fjord’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

My review of Fjord ran at PopMatters:

The setting of Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord is so picture-perfect that by the laws of cinema, something must be terribly wrong. When a Romanian family moves to a Norwegian hamlet surrounded by an astoundingly photogenic fjord, everything looks just so. The cozy homes appointed with tasteful bric-a-brac, the sleekly modernist school, the residents’ cheeriness; the whole picture is just waiting for an Ari Aster-style revelation to detonate the contentment…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘A Talent for Murder’

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I reviewed A Talent for Murder at Slant Magazine:

Anton Corbijn’s A Talent for Murder, a fictional story that vividly captures the psychology of Patricia Highsmith (Helen Mirren), is the rare successful film about a writer. At the start, Highsmith is feeling gloomy and blocked, staring at a blank sheet of paper in her typewriter carriage. That is, until book editor Edward Ridgeway (Alden Ehrenreich) appears at her door, begging her to start writing again. From there, the film slices away at the usual biopic folderol to unveil the dark linkages between the writer and her most famous creation…

A Talent for Murder opens next Friday. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Colleen Hoover’s ‘Verity’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘It Ends’

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I reviewed the new horror film It Ends, which opens in theaters this Friday, for Slant Magazine:

Alex Ullom’s directorial debut, It Ends, is a neatly crafted, if somewhat under-imagined, inquiry into a Twilight Zone scenario, with a dash of Buddhist philosophy thrown in for good measure. Given the vogue for elaborate lore, backstories, and endlessly forking possibilities in fantastical films, from Backrooms to the MCU, Ullom shows an admirable preference for storytelling that’s tightly focused in scope and still leaves room for the unknown…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Every Christopher Nolan Film Ranked

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

So what was left to do in preparation for The Odyssey? Go through Christopher Nolan’s entire filmography and assess how they all stack up. While the ranking is definitionally from “worst” to “best,” there really isn’t a bad film in the batch, so all in all a pleasant assignment.

“Every Christopher Nolan Film Ranked” was published at PopMatters today:

 Christopher Nolan’s films pack in audiences, win awards, and leave people excitedly puzzling out their twists and meaning for years. For mainstream audiences and cinephiles, his work provides a vanishingly rare opportunity to have one’s cake and eat it, too.

With the release of Nolan’s 13th, and by most metrics biggest, film, The Odyssey, it’s a good time to review his full body of work. Here are all of Nolan’s 13 features, ranked worst to best…

Screening Room: ‘Backrooms’ is Horror Cinema’s ‘Lost’

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I wrote about the new horror hit Backrooms and a certain TV show whose promise and disappointments it resembles for PopMatters:

To  begin, aside from the required warning that spoilers follow, let us stipulate that what happened in movie theaters in the early summer of 2026 was a good thing for the art and the industry. While jumped-up Disney streaming series and feature-length stuffed toy ad The Mandalorian and Grogu (Jon Favreau) strained to find an audience, filmgoers and industry-watchers were instead transfixed by a pair of new horror films from 20-something directors. Curry Barker’s haunted-girlfriend screamer, Obsession, looks to be the launchpad for an inventive genre director with plenty of tricks up his sleeve. Although Kane Parsons’ Backrooms is one of the freshest bits of guerrilla weirdness to have taken over the multiplex in a long time, the film’s looseness and sprawl may suggest a relatively shallow fictional universe that undercuts its groundbreaking potential…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Tuner’

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I reviewed Tuner for Slant Magazine:

For his first narrative after a run of smart, propulsive documentaries, among them 2022’s Oscar-winning Navalny, Daniel Roher delivers a propulsive modern noir that might not be especially smart but has an appealing cleverness and lightness of touch. Written by Roher and Robert Ramsey, Tuner’s hook is in its high-concept story design, which is centered on Nikki (Leo Woodall), a New York piano tuner whose boss, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), is also his best friend, surrogate father figure, and unwitting reason for Nikki’s turn to crime…

It opens this weekend. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘In the Grey’

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I reviewed In the Grey for Slant Magazine:

The Guy Ritchie content conveyor belt continues to turn with In the Grey, another largely disposable actioner that starts off as a breezy romp and ends up an overly dense spider’s web of almost arbitrary plot choices punctuated by automatic weapons fire. The comedically dense plot isn’t a problem until Ritchie, who wrote the script, tries to tie it all together into something that makes a bit of sense. He comes close but doesn’t quite deliver, having tossed too many balls in the air to have a remote chance of catching all of them…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Power Ballad’

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(Lionsgate)

I reviewed Power Ballad at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival for Slant Magazine:

John Carney’s Power Ballad has most of what it needs to succeed, from a charming pair of leads to a fittingly catchy song. But like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, Rick (Paul Rudd) and Danny (Nick Jonas), the film never finds the right groove…

It opens June 5. Here’s the trailer:

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New1 Comment

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: