Category: Film – New

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:

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’

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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’

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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: