In his newest film, Imperium, the increasingly adventurous Daniel Radcliffe plays an FBI agent who goes undercover to infiltrate a white nationalist group that might also be a terrorist cell. The playwright Tracy Letts (August, Osage County) and Toni Collette co-star.
Imperium is playing now in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International.
Here’s the trailer:
For years, the last arcade in New York was a gritty little spot called the Chinatown Fair. There, night after night, gamers gathered to compete, play, gossip, and boast until the early hours. Then it closed.
The Lost Arcade has been playing the festival circuit. It opens at the Metrograph in New York this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
Everything about the videogame palaces in The Lost Arcade makes them look like oases. Shot mostly at night, because that’s when the gamers come out, the arcades blaze into the darkness with their teenage-Vegas cacophony of strobing lights, electronic bleeps, and the hoots and hollers of victors and vanquished. Clearly, these are not just places to drop some quarters and kill a half-hour on the latest Street Fighter; they are clubhouses, homes away from home…
Here’s the trailer:
In 1991, Richard Linklater helped blow open the American indie filmmaking scene with Slacker, his rambling odyssey of drifters and dreamers on the edge in Austin, Texas. Since then, he’s made everything from high school party films (Dazed and Confused) to modern romances (the Before trilogy).
Richard Linklater – Dream is Destiny opens this week in limited release. My review is at Film Journal International:
It almost seems wrong to use the word auteur when talking about Richard Linklater, especially after seeing this friendly and appreciative survey of his life’s work. As unique and idiosyncratic as Linklater’s body of work is, there remains a modesty to it that carries over into the person who appears onscreen. Unlike in many documentaries about great directors or other artists, co-directors Louis Black and Karen Bernstein hardly stand back in awe from their subject, they sidle right up next to the unassuming artist and simply ask him how he does it. “It’s a lot of hard work,” says the director of Slacker, Boyhood, and other touchstones of the American independent film movement. “And people don’t want to hear that”…
Here is the trailer:
In Brady Corbet’s debut film, an American diplomat in France at the end of World War I and his wife watch their son turn from spoiled brat into something far more sinister.
The Childhood of a Leader is playing now in limited release; check it out. My review is at PopMatters:
What if the greatest conflagration in modern human history was sparked not by grander forces but by the whims of one or more determined psychopaths? That’s the nerve-rattling, if hard-to-swallow, idea advanced by The Childhood of a Leader. The directorial debut of actor Brady Corbet, this tricky, frequently overpowering film is set in 1919, just after the end of the First World War. The weight of history couldn’t be any heavier…
Here’s the trailer:
The BFG, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic about the big friendly giant with the great ears and knack for catching dreams, opens this week.
My review is at PopMatters.
By the time you’ve read this, Finding Dory, the probably inevitable sequel to Finding Nemo, will have raked in millions. And for once, a preordained blockbuster sort of, kind of deserves to be one.
My review of Finding Dory is at PopMatters:
Finding Dory at least exceeds expectations, if not the original. As with any children’s sequel, particularly in the corporate-synergistic era when every popular animated property can’t just sit there like an exhibit on a shelf. Those characters need to earn their keep by delivering to the firm’s bottom line. It’s a relief to be able to report that they do so with much the same spirit of wonderment, easy humor, and teary-eyed sentiment that characterized the films that made Pixar the heir to the Disney mantle before it was acquired in 2006…
Brian De Palma isn’t the kind of director who usually gets his own appreciative documentary. For one, he’s still alive and making films. For another, those films are usually twisted psychodramas just barely this side of exploitation thrillers.
Directed by filmmakers Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow, De Palma opens this week. My review is at Film Journal International:
Baumbach and Paltrow’s approach is simple: Put a camera on De Palma as he walks us through his oeuvre, inserting strategic clips from his work or cinematic references as needed. There’s a brief dash through his autobiographical particulars before getting to the heart of the matter. Afterward the structure is chronological, bracketed by his little-seen college work from the 1960s (Wotan’s Wake) to the smaller independently financed films made since his self-imposed exile in Paris (Redacted, Femme Fatale). In between is one of cinema’s most unique and unlikely careers, swerving from psychological thrillers to horror, camp, gangster and war epics, and back again to psychological thrillers. It’s more than enough for De Palma to discuss…
Here’s the trailer:
A rock star on vacation in the Mediterranean with her boyfriend get up to mischief with her old flame and his blonde young tart of a daughter in the newest film from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love).
A Bigger Splash is playing now in limited release and will probably expand throughout the summer. My review is at PopMatters:
Ralph Fiennes takes A Bigger Splash hostage in much the same way that the late Philip Seymour Hoffman once did, taking over from the likes of Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts and even filmmaker Luca Guadagnino. All appear perfectly happy to play along. It’s a game that works beautifully until Fiennes’ motor starts to sputter, and the film’s fragile dramatic structure becomes all too apparent…
Here’s the trailer:
Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s novel High-Rise is opening this week in limited release and is already available on VOD. My review is at PopMatters:
Setting High-Rise in 1975, Ben Wheatley takes full advantage of what we remember from that time, the macramé, matted hairdos, condo living, and marital infidelity. But more important, the movie—based on J.G. Ballard’s bloody skewer of a 1975 novel and now available on VOD in the US—underlines the era’s capacity for antisocial mischief. Without today’s surveillance culture and social media, it’s easier for viewers to swallow the story’s basic conceit, that the inhabitants of a brand new luxury high-rise can, in mere months, whip up a self-contained, brutally violent maelstrom without anybody on the outside being any the wiser…
Here’s the trailer:
The newest musical from John Carney (Once) is an ’80s-set romance set in (of course) Dublin. Sing Street is playing now. My review is at PopMatters:
When first glimpsed in John Carney’s newest musical confection, ruddy-cheeked teenager Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) looks like the kind of kid who’s set to be chewed up and spit out by the music industry, not to mention life itself. The setting for Sing Street is Dublin, circa 1985, where the black-robed authority of the Church still rules all and the ferry to England carries more dreamers and strivers to London each day.
As the meager middle class trappings of Conor’s life are stripped away, he’s left facing a future without much in the way of armor, or security. It’s the kind of situation that pop songs were made to cure…
Here’s the trailer:
With Martin McDonagh’s killer new play Hangmen having sold out on the West End—and now available in some theaters via National Theatre Live digital broadcast—it seems a good time to look back at his debut film, 2008’s hitman comedy In Bruges.
“Assassins on Vacation” is at Eyes Wide Open:
The Bruges Chamber of Commerce was probably delighted with at least part of Martin McDonagh’s 2008 debut film In Bruges, as it delivers a ravishing viewpoint on this gorgeous Belgian town that appears to have been dropped into the 21st century from a fairy-tale version of the Middle Ages … Local boosters were certainly less taken, though, with most of what happens in this dark-as-night comedy, in which a pair of hitmen hiding out in the town spend their time arguing over whether or not the town is, in fact, “a shithole.” Later on, the guns come out, large quantities of blood are spilled, and a story that had been weaving a fairy-tale ambiance turns into a wholly different kind of fairy tale — one that doesn’t cater to tourists…
Here’s the trailer:
By the time the July 4th weekend comes along, the primary season will be over and the media electoral circus will be gearing up for the conventions. In other words, it’ll be the perfect time for The Purge: Election Night.
My article on the Purge films and the current election cycle ran at Little White Lies:
What we’ve seen over the past year on the scorched-earth plains of American electioneering resembles less a return to the grand old days of two-fisted retail politics than another entry in the subversively political Purge series, set in a near-future America where every year all laws are suspended for a 12-hour-long spree of supposedly cathartic violence called “The Purge”…
Here’s the trailer:
In the newest Terrence Malick indie, Christian Bale is a screenwriter undergoing a romantically attractive existential crisis amidst the Hollywood demimonde.
Knight of Cups is playing now. My review is at PopMatters:
Like the deck of tarot cards that provides its narrative spine, Knight of Cups is shuffled up and dealt out with a witchy randomness. Making a mockery of Syd Field’s rules of screenwriting (where’s the inciting incident?), the film offers stories of sprawling entropy. Whether that’s enough to sustain an entire movie will be decided by the viewer’s appetite for moony maundering in gorgeous settings…
The trailer is here:
Questions:
Right now, there is only a definite answer to the last question, and that of course is yes.
Eyes Wide Open 2015:
The Best (and Worst) Movies of the Year
Available now in paperback and ebook
In the latest star-packed teeth-gritter from John Hillcoat (Lawless, The Road), a gang of crooks and bad cops plot a heist that involves murdering a copy. Things go badly.
Triple 9 opens today. My review is at PopMatters:
Gruesomely violent and often idiotic, Triple 9 demonstrates the latest stage of decline for once promising director John Hillcoat. His previous films display a potent gothic sensibility: The Proposition and The Road, both explore the dark limits of human behavior, but even in showing extreme violence, they never acknowledge the complexities of loss. The focus of 2012’s Lawless is less clear, as a rote bootleggers’ story is enlivened only by the contrast between Guy Pearce’s flamboyant campiness and Tom Hardy’s rock-like stoicism.
With Triple 9, it’s hard to spy even a glimmer of Hillcoat’s earlier inclination. Just about any director could have shot this film…
Here’s the trailer:
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