Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘Dahomey’

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My review of Mati Diop’s new documentary Dahomey ran at PopMatters:

Looking back at the 19th century, when European powers rampaged across Africa and cut apart kingdoms to plunder resources and kidnap millions for the slave trade, it would be understandable to argue that stolen artifacts were not top of mind for those being colonized. To its credit, Mati Diop’s lovely yet fractious documentary Dahomey does not try to make that argument. What she does attempt is a deeper story about the loss that lingers from colonial conquest and the uncertainty about how to move forward…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Look Into My Eyes’

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My review of the documentary Look Into My Eyes ran at PopMatters:

It shouldn’t be a shock that many of the New York psychics profiled by Lana Wilson in her fascinating and, at times, maddening documentary Look Into My Eyes are actors, writers, or artists. At the very least, they are fascinated by invented worlds. Mediums and other people who have claimed to communicate with the spirits of the dead have historically relied on a bit of theater. Thus, the seances are conducted with heavy drapes, dark shadows, and guttering candles rather than in a fluorescent-lit WeWork space…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Megalopolis’

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My review of the long awaited Megalopolis ran at PopMatters:

About an hour and a half into Francis Ford Coppola’s sometimes jaw-dropping and frequently interminable Megalopolis, the sometimes astounding and frequently inscrutable filmmaker finally delivers a scene that seems worthy of the film he seems to believe he is making. During a tense meal with his political rival and future father-in-law Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), visionary city planner Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) makes a passionate argument for the need to create a better world, only to have Cicero sharply retort about how every utopia carries with it a potential dystopia. For good measure, Cicero’s daughter and Cesar’s love Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) jumps in to make her father’s point with some deftly delivered Marcus Aurelius quotes.

For about a minute, Megalopolis crackles to life with the clarity it has been missing. But soon, the moment is past, and Coppola is back to jumbling together messily overproduced spectacle moments, which add up to far less than the sum of their portentous bits…

Megalopolis opens this weekend. If you’re going, it’s worth springing for the IMAX.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Elton John: Never Too Late’

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Elton John and John Lennon backstage at Madison Square Garden, 1974. (Sam Emerson)

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“…

Screening Room: ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’

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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…

Screening Room: ‘Between the Temples’

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Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane in Between the Temples (Sony Pictures Classics)

The new comedy Between the Temples opens later this week in limited release. Find it if you can.

My review is at PopMatters:

There is an honesty to Nathan Silver’s Between the Temples which belies the stylistic flourishes and alt-comedy sensibility. Moment after moment provides grist for some great epiphany or cute punchline that never quite comes. That is not to say it”s a comedy without laughs; “Can we have a shotgun bat mitzvah?” feels like a contender for one of the year’s best snort-funny lines. No film where a rabbi (TV Funhouse and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog creator Robert Smigel) putts golf balls into a shofar can be accused of taking itself too seriously…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘War Game’

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I reviewed the new documentary War Game for Slant:

Much of the criticism thrown at Alex Garland’s Civil War centered on it presenting the titular conflict without really explaining its origins. Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss’s documentary War Game goes the other way by showing in very specific ways not how a modern-day American civil war might be fought but how one might start…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Made in England’

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My review of the new documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger ran in Slant:

Given the sense of wonder and promotion of emotion over reason that courses through Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s work, it’s appropriate that David Hinton’s Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger starts with a recollection of a defining childhood moment. The film’s narrator and one of its executive producers, Martin Scorsese describes himself as an asthmatic child confined indoors and thunderstruck by these old films he was seeing on television. Giddy with the memory of being a young boy accidentally coming across fantastical mindblowers like The Thief of Baghdad, Scorsese says there was simply “no better initiation” into what he calls “the mysteries of Michael Powell”…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Wildcat’

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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:

Screening Room: ‘Coup de Chance’

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Woody Allen is still making movies. And judging by his latest, he hasn’t lost a step. Coup de Chance opens next week in limited release and then should be on digital pretty soon.

My review is at Slant Magazine:

Woody Allen’s Coup de Chance starts appropriately with a random encounter and finishes with an out-of-nowhere intervention. But what lies in between those moments of chance is tightly scripted and purposeful, with barely a scene or line out of place. The film is at once among Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World’

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The new film from Radu Jude (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn) is opening in limited release this Friday. Do what you have to do, but find it. Nothing else like it in theaters right now.

My review is at PopMatters:

As the title of Radu Jude’s new film suggests, things end not with a bang but a whimper. In the case of Romania, the country whose legacy of corruption and exploitation has been a favored topic of Jude and other Romanian New Wave filmmakers, it is presented as collapsing with an undignified slide into lethargy, misdirected rage, and social media clowning. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World is an absurdist and occasionally hilarious comedy. It also leaves you with the sensation of witnessing a slow-motion catastrophe where the worst has yet to happen…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Love Lies Bleeding’

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Something of a festival sensation, the new 1980s’-set bloody desert noir Love Lies Bleeding is rolling out now in limited release.

My review is at PopMatters:

The story, by Rose Glass and Veronika Tofilska (a director on the television series His Dark Materials), takes the durable Jim Thompson stranger-comes-to-small-town noir template, re-centers it around a same-sex female couple, and blows out the visuals in the trademark queasy glossy style of the film’s distributor, A24. Lou (Kristen Stewart) plays the frustrated manager of a gym in a flyspeck Nevada town who is just grinding through the days when Jackie (Katy O’Brian) blows in. A dead-broke aspiring bodybuilder hitchhiking cross-country to a championship contest in Las Vegas, Jackie is a different kind of fatale than we have seen, but no more untrustworthy…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Sundance Review of ‘Veni Vidi Vici’

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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:

Screening Room: Is Anybody Watching Movies in 2023?

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I published a piece that’s somewhere between a year-end movie wrap-up, best-of listing, and a look at the state of play around moviegoing. It’s at Eyes Wide Open:

In 2019, people bought about 1.2 billion movie tickets. By the time 2023 is done, a little over 800 million tickets will have been sold. That’s an improvement over the COVID years. But it’s still about a third less — and that’s with the gloriously bizarro phenomenon that was Barbenheimer. What is happening?…

Screening Room: ‘The Crime is Mine’

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The Crime is Mine (Music Box Films)

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: