Category: Film – New

Screening Room: ‘The Taste of Things’

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Delectable, delicious, all the adjectives that spring to mind with the great food films, The Taste of Things opens later this year in limited release.

My review is at Slant Magazine:

Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is almost halfway done before it even hints that there’s something going on within its fin-de-siècle setting besides the creation and consumption of beautiful meals. The film’s first half hour is in fact just that, with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a veteran cook in the manor home of Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the epicure for whom she’s been working for over 20 years, making an extravagant, multi-course meal for him and his friends. The men eat the food, then compliment Eugénie on her cooking…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘American Fiction’

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

American Fiction, an adaptation of Percival Everett’s scathing 2001 satire Erasure, has been playing the festival circuit and picking up some well-deserved Oscar buzz along the way.

I covered its screening at the Twin Cities Film Festival for PopMatters:

In Cord Jefferson’s jaggedly funny and cannily perceptive film American Fiction, literary agent Arthur (John Ortiz) tries talking sense into his high-minded and low-selling novelist client Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), who is frustrated at the public’s appetite for “black trauma porn”. Trying to bring Monk down to earth, Arthur argues that while white people say they want the truth, really “they just want to feel absolved”…

American Fiction opens in December.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Pain Hustlers’

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My review of the new movie Pain Hustlers is at Slant:

David Yates’s Pain Hustlers puffs itself up as a dynamic epic about the American dream but ends up glorifying some truly grotesque characters. Wells Tower’s script pulls loosely from Evan Hughes’s book about how executives at pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics were convicted in 2019 of conspiring to bribe doctors to overprescribe the fentanyl spray Subsys. The story has every ingredient for gripping melodrama: greed, timeliness, money, drugs, death, betrayal, and an Icarus-like fall. Thomas Jennings’s Frontline episode “Opioids, Inc.” and the second part of Alex Gibney’s The Crime of the Century have already turned the sordid tale into powerful, infuriating nonfiction. But in the course of fictionalizing the Insys story, Yates and Tower lose sight of what made it compelling to begin with…

If you want the better nonfiction take I mentioned, The Crime of the Century is on HBO. If not, Pain Hustlers is on Netflix right now.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Pigeon Tunnel’

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

My review of Errol Morris’ new documentary about master spy novelist and professional faker John le Carré, The Pigeon Tunnel, which premieres on Apple TV this Friday, is at PopMatters:

A run-of-the-mill con artist steals from you with a clever ruse or when you look the other way. The top-notch con artist can look you in the eye, explain he is about to deceive you, and then get away with it anyway. After watching Errol Morris’ sleekly enrapturing John le Carré documentary The Pigeon Tunnel, you cannot help but think what a clever truth-telling chap the film’s subject is, with all his talk about the fungibility of truth and the art of deception and forget he might be pinching your wallet at that moment…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Burial’

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My review of The Burial, which opens tomorrow, is at Slant:

There’s a story of thrillingly righteous indignation sitting at the core of Maggie Betts’s The Burial. This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs. The high points are delivered primarily by Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones, who make a good effort to fill in the gaps left by the spotty screenplay…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘El Conde’ Dilutes the Horror of Pinochet

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The new movie from Pablo Larrain (Ema, Spencer) has a decidedly different take on the horrors perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet during his reign of power in Chile.

My review is at PopMatters:

El Conde, an alternately ambitious and maddening attempt to reckon with one of the 20th century’s ugliest villains, does not take Pinochet at face value. Larraín and his frequent co-writer Guillermo Calderon do not dwell on the free market capitalist, career army officer, and power-mad dictator known by the world. Instead, they imagine Pinochet as a 250-year-old French vampire who nearly gets staked to death in the revolution. A reactionary from the jump, he wanders the world as a mercenary helping to put down revolutions in Russia and Haiti before ending up in South America under a new identity…

El Conde is on Netflix now. The trailer is here.

Screening Room: ‘Radical Wolfe’

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My review of the new documentary Radical Wolfe ran at The Playlist:

You wouldn’t want a documentary about Tom Wolfe to mimic his style. That could be challenging (just imagine all the on-screen exclamation marks!!!!!!!, idioSYNcratic CAPITALIZATION, and onomatopoeic spelling) not to mention possibly embarrassing. But it would have been gratifying to see Richard Dewey’s ‘Radical Wolfe’ show a dash of its subject’s moxie, damn-the-torpedoes bravery, and cynicism-stung wit…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Lesson’

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My review of the surprisingly good (for being in many ways so unsurprising in its twists and mysteries) The Lesson is at Slant:

Every moment in The Lesson’s early going seemingly exists to illustrate pulp novelist Jim Thompson’s famous saying: “There is only one plot—things are not what they seem.” We see eminent novelist J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant) languidly remarking to an interviewer that “average writers attempt originality…the great writers steal.” Then up-and-coming writer Liam Sommers (Daryl McCormack) is seen studying videos of J.M. with a mysterious intensity before he then shows up at J.M.’s luxurious home to tutor the man’s son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan). Throughout, the close-ups of the algae-covered pond behind the home make it seem as if a better name for the film would have been What Lies Beneath…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The League’

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I reviewed The League, the new documentary from Sam Pollard (MLK/FBI) for Slant:

The story of the Negro baseball leagues has the hallmarks of a feel-good story: determination, inventiveness, and relentless optimism in the face of unyielding hatred. But while Sam Pollard’s mostly straightforward and celebratory documentary The League doesn’t skimp on those elements, he also introduces knottier emotions that allow the film, which is executive produced by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, to escape two-dimensionality…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Asteroid City’

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Wes Anderson’s newest movie, Asteroid City, opens this Friday. It is everything you would expect. Depending on your perspective, that could be a very good or very bad thing.

My review is at Slant:

A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling. Still, the filmmaker’s gift for wringing laughs out of absurdity played straight is matched by few. That much is clear from the moment he drops an assortment of characters into the remote, alien-obsessed desert town of Asteroid City, whose attributes—from its proximity to an atomic testing facility to the stiff-necked soldiers milling about—provide numerous opportunities for funny weirdness…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Against All Enemies’

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The frightening new documentary Against All Enemies premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last night.

My review is at The Playlist:

The MAGA mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 shared many surface similarities with the ideologically opposed mobs that fought against police in American cities over the past few years: improvised weaponry; social media fixation; an emphasis on combat tactics over strategic objectives. But there’s also a crucial exception: the January 6 mob included many U.S. military veterans. In the thundering, anxiety-inducing documentary “Against All Enemies,” Charlie Sadoff asks why it’s so easy for some veterans, who make up over ten percent of those charged with the January 6 attack, to betray their oaths and attack their government?…

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: