Tag: Movies

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: ‘Father Mother Sister Brother’

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

I reviewed Father Mother Sister Brother‘s U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival for PopMatters:

If there is a lesson Jim Jarmusch is trying to impart in his latest feature, Father Mother Sister Brother (and dear Lord, let’s hope he is not), it is this: Nobody knows anybody. Even when you are related. Maybe especially when you are related…

Father Mother Sister Brother should be opening in December. Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Play Dirty’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Adaptations, Film - NewLeave a comment
Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield in Play Dirty (Amazon MGM)

I reviewed Play Dirty, which is starting on Amazon Prime tomorrow, for Slant Magazine:

Donald Westlake’s Parker character, who he wrote about in many books under his penname Richard Stark, is a clever yet nasty machine of a criminal with a preternatural drive. That alone makes for a compelling screen character. But his brutishness doesn’t gel with the more comedic style preferred by Shane Black, director and co-writer of Play Dirty, a very loose adaptation of the Parker book series that keeps Westlake’s penchant for grubby violence but grafts it uneasily onto a more noble character whom the author wouldn’t recognize…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, Film-DocumentaryLeave a comment

The new documentary from Raoul Peck (I Am Not Your Negro) just had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

I reviewed the film for The Playlist:

Everyone has their own George Orwell and tends to think everyone else gets him wrong. As such, making a sprawling quasi-biographical documentary like “Orwell: 2+2=5” is a brave effort bound to exasperate people across the political spectrum. Even so, Raoul Peck’s repeated usage of the author’s words to buttress his own hazily presented view of current events makes this a less rigorous and engaging work than anything about Orwell should be…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Eddington’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
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: ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment
(Paramount Pictures)

The newest (and maybe last?) Tom Cruise outing as Ethan Hunt is out next week.

My review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is at Eyes Wide Open:

Over the course of Final Reckoning, Hunt hurls himself into seemingly certain death so many times it’s hard not to wonder whether he even wants to survive. His eagerness to save the world is presented as a crusade with nearly religious overtones: the film’s main McGuffin is a cruciform key, Hunt is described as “the best of men in the worst of times” as well as “the chosen one,” and at one point nearly dies before being resurrected…

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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: ‘A Complete Unknown’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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…

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2024

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - Awards, Film - NewLeave a comment

My year-end movie review was published at Eyes Wide Open:

The weirdest aspect to moviegoing in 2024 was just how weird it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean COVID and streaming haven’t reshaped the industry, likely forever. But with a few standouts, things have settled into a familiar pattern. Audiences flocked to cinematic comfort fare that gave a safe return on investment. Everybody knows what they’re getting with Despicable Me 4 or Venom: The Last Dance. Nearly every movie that earned over $100 million this year was a sequel (incredibly, they’re still making Bad Boys and Planet of the Apes movies). The IP mining shows no signs of stopping. The commercial failure of the unusually subversive Joker: Folie à Deux, an acidic burn-the-bridges takedown of fan culture, suggests that derivative and repetitive will be the assumption going forward…

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2014 – ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Comics-Graphic Novels, Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

One of the best, most welcome surprises of 2014 was James Gunn’s first Guardians of the Galaxy. I revisited that as part of a 10-year retrospective at Eyes Wide Open:

There’s a lot to appreciate — and maybe even love — about the original Guardians of the Galaxy. The eager-to-please sprawl of Gen-X references, from Mom’s ’70s pop music mixtape to hero Peter Quill (Chris Pratt, surfer-dude sly) romancing the green-skinned assassin babe Gamora (Zoe Saldana) by referencing the “legend” of Footloose. Banter threaded slyly through the action instead of airdropped in by producers demanding test-screening-approved humor beats. A talking raccoon skilled in jail-breaks and bomb-making. A genocidal villain thwarted by a dance-off. The two-hour running time, practically unheard-of brevity for modern blockbusters. David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream”. Howard the Duck…