Tag: film

Screening Room: ‘In the Grey’

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I reviewed In the Grey for Slant Magazine:

The Guy Ritchie content conveyor belt continues to turn with In the Grey, another largely disposable actioner that starts off as a breezy romp and ends up an overly dense spider’s web of almost arbitrary plot choices punctuated by automatic weapons fire. The comedically dense plot isn’t a problem until Ritchie, who wrote the script, tries to tie it all together into something that makes a bit of sense. He comes close but doesn’t quite deliver, having tossed too many balls in the air to have a remote chance of catching all of them…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’

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(Courtesy of Neon)

I reviewed the new Matt Johnson film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie for PopMatters:

For those who enjoy or get past Johnson’s clowning, Nirvanna is a deftly intricate mockumentary about friendship, celebrity, and the trap of nostalgia shot like a sci-fi nerd’s YouTube paean to Back to the Future, all wrapped inside a love letter to Toronto. Johnson and co-writer Jay McCarroll play slightly tweaked versions of themselves, much like Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan self-spoofed themselves in The Trip series…

It opens tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Ballad of a Small Player’

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

My review of the latest confection from Edward Berger (Conclave) is at Slant Magazine:

Ballad of a Small Player is a fevered, neon-drenched film about a man on the run from his crimes and himself, and it wants to simultaneously revel in the glamor of high-end gambling and critique the unending gluttony that fuels it. This isn’t an unusual tack for Berger, as his All Quiet on the Western Front has a similarly confused relationship to the industrial violence that it lasciviously depicts. But this film, adapted by Rowan Joffe from Lawrence Osborne’s 2014 novel of the same name, is all about the possible spiritual redemption of spiraling gambler Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell), and its ambivalent perspective on the greed and glitz of his world makes it difficult to invest much care in what happens to him…

Ballad of a Small Player will be available on Netflix tomorrow. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Fence’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Festivals, Film - New, Film-ForeignLeave a comment

I reviewed the new Claire Denis film The Fence at this year’s New York Film Festival for PopMatters:

It is unclear where Alboury, the character played by the great Isaach De Bankolé in Claire Denis’ scorching, powerfully mythic new film The Fence, works or lives. It is not even clear if he is a corporeal person or some apparition generated by history and the murmurings of the unquiet dead…

The Fence does not have a U.S. release date set.

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: ‘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’

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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: 2025 Sundance Film Festival

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

This year’s Sundance Film Festival just concluded. Your fearless correspondent delivered a roundup of the tensions roiling the festival at the moment, not to mention the films worth seeking out and the ones best avoided. That is available for your reading pleasure at PopMatters:

There seemed to be two questions on everyone’s mind at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. The first was the same as ever at this festival or any other: “What have you seen?” This question is often academic because there aren’t many available tickets left to get by the time it’s asked – usually by a stranger in line for another film…

I also contributed some full-length reviews to Slant Magazine:

Screening Room: ‘Anora’ Wins Best Picture from OFCS

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - AwardsLeave a comment

A good bit of film-related news here: one of my writers’ associations, the Online Film Critics Society, just named Anora the best film of the year. They also paid good attention to Dune: Part Two in technical areas, at least Challengers a couple nods, largely ignored Emilia Perez, and recognized All We Imagine as Light for best film not in the English language (a strong choice and preferable to the more predictable but less impressive I’m Still Here).

Here’s the rest of the awards:

  • Best Picture: Anora
  • Best Animated Feature: Flow
  • Best Director: Coralie Fargeat – The Substance
  • Best Actor: Ralph Fiennes – Conclave
  • Best Actress: Mikey Madison – Anora
  • Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin – A Real Pain
  • Best Supporting Actress: Margaret Qualley – The Substance
  • Best Original Screenplay: Anora
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Conclave
  • Best Editing: Challengers
  • Best Cinematography: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Original Score: Challengers
  • Best Production Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Costume Design: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Visual Effects: Dune: Part Two
  • Best Debut Feature: Vera Drew – The People’s Joker
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: All We Imagine as Light
  • Best Documentary Feature: Dahomey

Screening Room: This Year’s Weird Oscar Nominations

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - AwardsLeave a comment

I wrote about the 2025 Oscar nominations and what happened as a result of their overloading the list with too many nods to a pair of highly mediocre films (Emilia Perez, Wicked).

The article is at Eyes Wide Open:

The Oscars can be weird. We all know this. Some of us, despite remembering that strange mid-2000s stretch when Million Dollar Baby and Crash were snagging best picture statues, can even think we understand why the awards are so weird. The concept of looking at hundreds of feature films released theatrically each year to determine this one or that one is the “best” is fundamentally absurd…