Tag: film

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:

Screening Room: ‘Pain Hustlers’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, streamingLeave a comment

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 Burial’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Foreign, streamingLeave a comment

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’

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

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: ‘After Hours’

On By chrisbarsantiIn DVD - Film, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

I reviewed the new Criterion Collection release of Martin Scorsese’s low-budget 1985 nightmare comedy After Hours for PopMatters:

Now available in an extras-packed Criterion edition, Martin Scorsese’s somewhat forgotten entry in the One Crazy Night genre, After Hours (1985), has most of its hallmarks but gives the loopiness a spin that’s both eerie and carnivalesque…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: The Starring Chicago Film Festival

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - FestivalsLeave a comment

I wrote an article for Eyes Wide Open about a very specific film festival I worked on in Chicago in the summer of 2001:

As movies editor for citysearch.com’s Chicago node, I should have been covering that thundering shift in the moviemaking landscape. But I did not truly see what was happening. I could tell 2000’s Gladiator and X-Men foretold a new kind of spectacle filmmaking: grimmer, faster, and unromantic. I could see that 1990s’ auteurism was coming to an end. I was thrilled by Memento, weirdly defensive about criticism of A.I., and nonplussed by Mulholland Drive. But that spring and summer I was also looking more to the past than the present…

Screening Room: ‘Asteroid City’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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’

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

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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: