Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘Is This Thing On?’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - NewLeave a comment

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Books, Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment
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:

Screening Room: ‘Gazer’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My review of the new film Gazer is at Slant Magazine:

Located somewhere near the intersection of The Conversation and Memento, Sloan’s feature-length directorial debut marries the former’s obsession with watching to the latter’s meditations on the nature of perception. Like both films, it jolts the wandering, obsessive nature of its main characters with an interruption of violence and sews confusion throughout…

The trailer is here:

Screening Room: ‘A Complete Unknown’

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I wrote about James Mangold’s Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown as a folk anti-Western for PopMatters:

Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) arrives in New York at the start of A Complete Unknown in the back of a station wagon rather than on a horse. He might as well be a gunslinger showing up in a frontier town that needs his help. With just his bindle, guitar, and a cunning up-for-anything look, Dylan scans the Greenwich Village coffeehouse folk scene not like some rube from the sticks but rather a cool operator who knows virgin territory when he sees it…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2024

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - NewLeave a comment

My year-end movie review was published at Eyes Wide Open:

The weirdest aspect to moviegoing in 2024 was just how weird it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean COVID and streaming haven’t reshaped the industry, likely forever. But with a few standouts, things have settled into a familiar pattern. Audiences flocked to cinematic comfort fare that gave a safe return on investment. Everybody knows what they’re getting with Despicable Me 4 or Venom: The Last Dance. Nearly every movie that earned over $100 million this year was a sequel (incredibly, they’re still making Bad Boys and Planet of the Apes movies). The IP mining shows no signs of stopping. The commercial failure of the unusually subversive Joker: Folie à Deux, an acidic burn-the-bridges takedown of fan culture, suggests that derivative and repetitive will be the assumption going forward…

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: