Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘Master Gardener’

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After making the festival rounds, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener opens next week in limited release.

I reviewed for PopMatters:

Everything in Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener exists at roughly a forty-five-degree angle to reality. The film has one foot planted in a mostly recognizable world but the other in a dreamland of the writer/director’s invention. It makes for a schizoid presentation that delivers moments of gutsy idiosyncrasy but few characters whose problems and reactions feel connected to familiar human emotions…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Somewhere in Queens’

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Directed, co-written by, and starring Ray Romano, Somewhere in Queens is opening this Friday.

My review is at Slant:

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:

Screening Room: ‘Air’

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Against all the odds, Ben Affleck’s new movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal when he had just started his career is actually not too bad, in a Jerry Maguire kind of way.

My review is at PopMatters:

A true underdog redemption story with an unexpected kick, Air is about how shambling sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) turned around his career, transformed Nike into a globe-spanning behemoth, and revolutionized the athletic endorsement industry. Regardless of what Alex Convery’s script would like viewers to believe, none of that is actually that interesting. As written, there are many moments when Air could come across as little more than a Harvard Business Review case study put on film. As a director, Affleck knows what he has going for him here. Damon, who—much as it would be nice to see him take some Tom Ripley-like swings again—makes clear again in his role in Air his gift for bringing gravitas and depth to everyday guys…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’

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Back when he was just Ted Theodore Logan, who would have guessed that Keanu Reeves would eventually become the last true action star?

If that still seems strange to you, check out the epic epicness that is John Wick: Chapter 4, which opens March 24. My review is at PopMatters:

The air was charged at a recent screening of John Wick: Chapter 4. The thronged darkness buzzed with chatter and the occasional whoop. A man said to his friend that he was looking forward to a lot of “headshots”. When John Wick (Keanu Reeves) first shows himself in profile, delivering his patented “Yeah”—pained and elongated, the resigned sigh of the warrior monk hauled once more by box office demand into the bloody breach—cheers came in response. They had seen Wick before and now wanted to see him do his thing again, but more so. We all did…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Berlinale Film Festival

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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.

  • BlackBerry: A semi-comic docudrama about the rise and fall of everyone’s onetime favorite smartphone.
  • Inside: Willem Dafoe’s master art thief is trapped inside a rich man’s penthouse.
  • Manodrome: Jesse Eisenberg and Adrien Brody star in this unnerving dispatch from the frontlines of masculinity.
  • Teacher’s Lounge: An idealistic teacher’s best intentions go horribly awry.

Screening Room: ‘Pacifiction’

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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:

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2022

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Now that 2023 is almost upon us, it is time to start catching up on all the great movies of 2022. It’s always a good way to spend a cold January.

My year-end roundup is at Eyes Wide Open:

Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in 2022, it will have a hard time finding a theme. Think pieces on the state of Hollywood (including several penned by this critic) over the past few years often bemoaned the industry’s caution and overreliance on industrially producing sequels to safe IP. The concern grew that, post-pandemic, theaters and audiences would stick to the familiar. To a degree that did happen, with even supposed arthouse theaters showing Wakanda Forever. But as the year closes with the usual late-December crush of award contenders muscling into crowded release schedules, fears of a movie landscape dominated only by superhero flicks with quarter-billion-dollar budgets have not quite panned out…

I break down the ten best movies of the year (some of which are pictured above), and also list some honorable mentions and disappointments.

Screening Room: ‘Living’

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What would you do if you discovered you had six months to live? That’s the premise of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, respectfully adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) from Akira Kurosawa’s great Ikiru (1953).

Living opens today in limited release and expands around the country in January. My review is at PopMatters:

Living keeps the early 1950s time period, transposing Kurosawa’s story quite neatly from Tokyo to London, another capital city smothered under war trauma, social stricture, and emotional repression. Bill Nighy plays Williams, the head of a small unit of Public Works bureaucrats. His emotional register leaves as narrow a footprint as the work his people never seem to accomplish. Having buried himself in routine since the death of his wife, Williams keeps the world itself at bay by very simply never engaging…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Babylon’

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Damien Chazelle’s rollicking and ridiculous epic cautionary tale, Babylon, opens next week.

My review is at PopMatters:

Babylon has buckets of frenzy and excess at a wildly uneven three hours. That is not always a bad thing. Given the mid-to-late 1920s Hollywood setting, low-key would have been a betrayal. It’s the silent era pinnacle when entrepreneurial nobodies made quicksilver fortunes by producing gauzy cinematic fantasies with hubris, moxie, and artistry. Chazelle’s Hollywood is a playground where boozing heartthrobs like Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt) and drugged-out bombshells like Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie) put the pedal to the metal without consequence based solely on how good they look on that screen. It is also a place where a striver like Manny Torres (Diego Calva) can transform himself from gofer to director, and jazz musician Sidney Palmer (Jovan Adepo) can vault from the bandstand to stardom. As Penny Lane would say in Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous’ Penny Lane would say, “It’s all happening”…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘White Noise’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - NewLeave a comment

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:

Screening Room: ‘Love in the Time of Fentanyl’

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I reviewed the documentary Love in the Time of Fentanyl from DOC NYC for The Playlist:

Almost everything viewers need to know about the mortal consequences of the fentanyl epidemic portrayed in Colin Askey’s new Vancouver-set documentary “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” is contained in one exchange between two users. One man talks about how coming off heroin was hard but manageable, essentially Netflix and chilling in his apartment for a week—but detoxing from fentanyl? That led to the emergency room. Given that and the spread of fentanyl throughout the city’s illicit drug supply, it is easier to understand the argument for the safe-injection site which the film documents. At the same time, seeing that site as anything but a Band-Aid on a grievous wound is hard…

It should be playing later this year on PBS’s Independent Lens.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘There There’

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There There, the latest comedy from Andrew Bujalski (Computer Chess) opens later this week. I reviewed for Slant:

Writer-director Andrew Bujalski’s There There, a funny and cleverly linked series of dramedic vignettes, doesn’t try to hide the stitchwork imposed by pandemic-period production restrictions. Instead, the film leans into them, creating a schizoid atmosphere that underlies and darkens some of the more seemingly straightforward relationship skirmishes and soul-searching soliloquies that fill much of its running time…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

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The new movie from Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from his first feature, In Bruges.

Banshees opens this week. I reviewed for Eyes Wide Open:

Given what Martin McDonagh puts his characters through in his latest bloody confabulation, The Banshees of Inisherin, and how poorly they explain and understand it, putting too much stock in what they say might be unwise. At one point, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) asks his until-recently best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) the name of the song Colm has been composing on his fiddle. Told it’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Pádraic asks why. “I just like the sound of the double ‘sh’s,” Colm replies. He might even be telling the truth. Of course, this is a man who has threatened to slice off his fingers one at a time if Pádraic does not stop talking to him. So Colm’s judgment and clarity might be questionable…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘See How They Run’

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Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan head up the superb cast of the new mystery caper See How They Run, which opens next week.

My review is at Slant:

Set in London in 1953, the film busily corkscrews a whodunnit and a narrative about mismatched cops into the behind-the-scenes machinations around a planned movie adaptation of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, then only a few months into its 70-or-so-year run. After the adaptation’s potential director, the blacklisted and highly opinionated drunk Leo Kopernick (Adrien Brody), is found murdered and deposited on the theater stage, the police—pert and eager Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan), depressed and cynical Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell)—set about determining which of the cast or crew did the deed…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’

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A follow-up to his 15-part series on the history of cinema, Mark Cousins’s The Story of Film: A New Generation covers how the movies look in the 21st century (Mad Max: Fury Road to Pedro Costa essay documentaries).

It opens this Friday and is a glorious good time. My review is at Slant:

It’s hard to think of another art form, except maybe the theater, that spends as much time and effort celebrating itself as film. From the That’s Entertainment! anthology to the AFI’s “100” listicle TV specials to the creepy “We Make Movies Better” ad campaign for AMC Theaters featuring Nicole Kidman, the filmmaking industry has long seemed to suffer from an insecurity requiring constant demands from the audience to please, please like it. Fortunately, Mark Cousins’s confidently sprawling new documentary, The Story of Film: A New Generation, feels no need to bang viewers over the head with the insistence that cinema is special, damnit…

Here’s the trailer: