Tag: film

Screening Room: ‘Look Into My Eyes’

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

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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: ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics’

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

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
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’

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

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: ‘The Accountant 2’ Anybody?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Upcoming, streamingLeave a comment

After 2016’s extremely baffling action flick The Accountant found new life on Netflix and has a sequel on the way, I took a look back at the original.

An updated version of my first review is at Eyes Wide Open:

Back in April, the most popular film on Netflix was The Accountant. Subscribers were not clicking on new work like Zack Snyder’s damn-the-budget Star Wars fanfic Rebel Moon or Adam Sandler’s Spaceman. Instead, they wanted a 2016 thriller best remembered for all the popcorn it unintentionally caused audience members to spit out in baffled laughter…

Screening Room: ‘Wildcat’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment

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’

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

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: ‘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 ‘A Real Pain’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

Jesse Eisenberg’s second movie as writer/director, A Real Pain, just premiered at Sundance. It was picked up for distribution by Searchlight, and is very worth finding once it gets released.

My review is at Slant Magazine:

There’s enough pain on display in Jesse Eisenberg’s crackling comedy A Real Pain to keep numerous therapists busy for years. It’s a cavalcade of angst and agony, from the familial to the historical, with an occasionally quite bleak assessment of the human condition. Nevertheless, it’s also levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance…

Screening Room: ‘Saltburn’ Didn’t Deserve an Oscar — It’s Still Great

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - AwardsLeave a comment

I wrote about the Oscar nominations and the divisive movie Saltburn for Eyes Wide Open:

Many great movies are made every year. They just keep coming. Some are hilarious, others make you cry, and very occasionally they might spark a new thought. They do not all require prizes. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn did something nearly every other 2024 movie could not: Start an argument…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: 2023 Online Film Critics Society Awards

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - AwardsLeave a comment

The Online Film Critics Society, which very kindly counts myself as one of their members, just announced out annual film awards for 2023. In another possible precursor to the Academy Awards, it’s Oppenheimer by a wide margin, with Barbie and The Holdovers getting multiple (very deserved) awards as well.

It’s a strong list, no real slouches there:

  • Best Picture: Oppenheimer
  • Best Animated Feature: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
  • Best Director: Christopher Nolan – Oppenheimer
  • Best Actor: Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers
  • Best Actress: Lily Gladstone – Killers of the Flower Moon
  • Best Supporting Actor: Robert Downey Jr. – Oppenheimer
  • Best Supporting Actress: Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers
  • Best Original Screenplay: The Holdovers
  • Best Adapted Screenplay: Oppenheimer
  • Best Film Editing: Oppenheimer
  • Best Cinematography: Oppenheimer
  • Best Original Score: Oppenheimer
  • Best Production Design: Barbie
  • Best Costume Design: Barbie
  • Best Visual Effects: Oppenheimer
  • Best Debut Feature: Celine Song – Past Lives
  • Best Film Not in the English Language: Anatomy of a Fall
  • Best Documentary Feature: 20 Days in Mariupol

Screening Room: Is Anybody Watching Movies in 2023?

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - New, Film-Foreign, UncategorizedLeave a comment
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: ‘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: