Tag: Movies

Screening Room: ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Back when he was just Ted Theodore Logan, who would have guessed that Keanu Reeves would eventually become the last true action star?

If that still seems strange to you, check out the epic epicness that is John Wick: Chapter 4, which opens March 24. My review is at PopMatters:

The air was charged at a recent screening of John Wick: Chapter 4. The thronged darkness buzzed with chatter and the occasional whoop. A man said to his friend that he was looking forward to a lot of “headshots”. When John Wick (Keanu Reeves) first shows himself in profile, delivering his patented “Yeah”—pained and elongated, the resigned sigh of the warrior monk hauled once more by box office demand into the bloody breach—cheers came in response. They had seen Wick before and now wanted to see him do his thing again, but more so. We all did…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Pacifiction’

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

Albert Serra’s latest film, Pacifiction, played some festivals last year (including Cannes, where it was raved about). It is opening this week in limited release.

My review is at PopMatters:

The first images in Albert Serra’s slippery and satirical film Pacifiction are not what comes to mind for many when thinking of Tahiti. Yes, the film’s background is a limpid array of mountains drenched in a gorgeous salmon-tinted sunset. The long pan, however, reveals a more prosaic foreground: A busy port lined with stacks of shipping containers that function as a mercantile mountain range. From Serra’s perspective, Tahiti might be a paradise and should be photographed as such, but it is also a place of business…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Rio Bravo’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - RepertoryLeave a comment

Is Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo pretty much a perfect Western? I wrote about it at Eyes Wide Open:

In 1958, after decades of directing hits like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and To Have and Have Not, Howard Hawks was in bad shape. Nursing the wounds incurred by his ill-judged directing of the epic flop Land of the Pharaohs (1955), he had exiled himself from Hollywood to Europe. Casting about for a project to bring him back into the game, he seized on a smart new Western script by Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, who had also penned The Big Sleep for Hawks. Loaded with the witty dialogue he was known for and enough material for two or three lesser movies, it seemed like an easy bet…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2022

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

Now that 2023 is almost upon us, it is time to start catching up on all the great movies of 2022. It’s always a good way to spend a cold January.

My year-end roundup is at Eyes Wide Open:

Assuming the future still contains books, when one is written about what moviegoing was like in 2022, it will have a hard time finding a theme. Think pieces on the state of Hollywood (including several penned by this critic) over the past few years often bemoaned the industry’s caution and overreliance on industrially producing sequels to safe IP. The concern grew that, post-pandemic, theaters and audiences would stick to the familiar. To a degree that did happen, with even supposed arthouse theaters showing Wakanda Forever. But as the year closes with the usual late-December crush of award contenders muscling into crowded release schedules, fears of a movie landscape dominated only by superhero flicks with quarter-billion-dollar budgets have not quite panned out…

I break down the ten best movies of the year (some of which are pictured above), and also list some honorable mentions and disappointments.

Screening Room: ‘Living’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

What would you do if you discovered you had six months to live? That’s the premise of Oliver Hermanus’ Living, respectfully adapted by Kazuo Ishiguro (The Remains of the Day) from Akira Kurosawa’s great Ikiru (1953).

Living opens today in limited release and expands around the country in January. My review is at PopMatters:

Living keeps the early 1950s time period, transposing Kurosawa’s story quite neatly from Tokyo to London, another capital city smothered under war trauma, social stricture, and emotional repression. Bill Nighy plays Williams, the head of a small unit of Public Works bureaucrats. His emotional register leaves as narrow a footprint as the work his people never seem to accomplish. Having buried himself in routine since the death of his wife, Williams keeps the world itself at bay by very simply never engaging…

Here’s the trailer:

Writer’s Desk: Don’t Be Boring

On By chrisbarsantiIn Books, WritingLeave a comment

Steven Spielberg’s latest, The Fabelmans, is an autobiographical piece about growing up in a fractured family as a frustrated dreamer with no idea of how to do what he cannot stop thinking about: making movies.

At one point, the Spielberg stand-in, Sam Fabelman, is interviewing for a television directing gig when the man he is talking with asks whether he wants to meet John Ford. Sam gulps and agrees.

When the grizzled director finally appears, he grumbles at Sam and directs his attention to two Western paintings on the wall. Ford asks Sam what he sees. Frustrated at Sam’s fumbling responses, Ford tells him what he was trying to point out: Where the painter placed the horizon.

Ford’s lesson?

When the horizon’s at the bottom, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s at the top, it’s interesting. When the horizon’s in the middle, it’s boring as shit. Now, good luck to you. And get the fuck out of my office.

Whether you are making a movie, writing a book, or painting a painting, keep the audience off balance. Lean into the unexpected. Make them look closer. Make them look harder.

And don’t be boring as shit.

Screening Room: ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

The new movie from Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin, reunites Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson from his first feature, In Bruges.

Banshees opens this week. I reviewed for Eyes Wide Open:

Given what Martin McDonagh puts his characters through in his latest bloody confabulation, The Banshees of Inisherin, and how poorly they explain and understand it, putting too much stock in what they say might be unwise. At one point, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) asks his until-recently best friend Colm (Brendan Gleeson) the name of the song Colm has been composing on his fiddle. Told it’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Pádraic asks why. “I just like the sound of the double ‘sh’s,” Colm replies. He might even be telling the truth. Of course, this is a man who has threatened to slice off his fingers one at a time if Pádraic does not stop talking to him. So Colm’s judgment and clarity might be questionable…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Nope’

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Jordan Peele’s Nope opens this week. It’s like Get Out and Us … only not.

My review is at Slant:

In writer-director Jordan Peele’s chilling Nope, a struggling, Black-operated ranch that supplies horses for Hollywood productions faces an additional threat in the form of an extraterrestrial being that likes to suck animals and people up into the clouds. The Haywood ranch is a family-run operation, with OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) doing most of the work with a glum diligence while his upbeat sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), handles the people-interfacing duties. Though the siblings are hardly on the best of terms, when it comes time to face down the alien presence, they unsurprisingly rediscover a familial bond…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Gray Man’

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

Netflix’s next big bet to produce $200 million blockbusters to stream on the small screen is the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man, an assassin-versus-assassin thriller with Chris Evans and Ryan Gosling that shows a sharp drop-off in quality and imagination from the Russos’ MCU movies.

The Gray Man streams on Netflix tomorrow. My review is at Slant:

If all you knew about the C.I.A. was what you saw in Anthony and Joe Russo’s The Gray Man, you would think it was solely devoted to assassination. The entire plot of the film revolves around the psychopathic Lloyd Hansen (Chris Evans) trying to take out his former colleague, Court Gentry (Ryan Gosling), a.k.a Sierra Six, after the latter uncovers unsavory secrets about the agency, which wants to eliminate every trace of Sierra, a poorly considered program that turns convicted murderers into government-sanctioned killers. If this sounds like the plot of every Jason Bourne film, that’s because it basically is…

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Hold Your Fire’

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

Prior to 1973, there was not a lot of nuance in how the police handled hostage situations. At some point they would lose patience and storm in. As Attica and other tragedies showed, hostages frequently did not survive. The new documentary Hold Your Fire describes a little-remembered siege in Brooklyn from 1973 where the art of hostage negotiation might have been invented.

Hold Your Fire opens in limited release this Friday. My review is at Slant:

With little preamble, Hold Your Fire drops us into the heat of the robbery, then flicks through the resulting drama. Talking-head interviews with Schlossberg, police officers, and some of the robbers and their hostages are interspersed with archival images and video footage captured by news outlets. The footage—of the rattling volleys of gunfire, the rumbling arrival of a police armored personnel carrier, and crowds pressing against barricades and cheering for the robbers—lends a wartime aesthetic of sorts to an urban crime narrative. Through it all, Jonathan Sanford’s squealing jazz-inflected score underlines the chaos of the situation…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘The Outfit’

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In Graham Moore’s new Hitchcockian thriller The Outfit, a shy-seeming tailor is wrapped up in a tense game of wits with a passel of paranoid gangsters.

The Outfit opens in limited release this Friday. My review is at Slant:

On the surface, the film’s story couldn’t be more different than that of Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game, for which Moore won an Oscar for his script, though both films share a love of nattily attired Englishmen puzzling out problems in life-or-death situations. The Englishman in this case is the suit store’s owner, Savile Row-trained tailor Leonard (Mark Rylance). He makes his living not just by crafting bespoke suits but looking the other way when members of the Boyle crime family show up to use the message drop box in the backroom. Leonard drinks his tea, cuts his cloth, and avoids thinking about the elephant in the room…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Master’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Regina Hall stars in Master, a new horror film from Mariama Diallo that adds topical layers to its frights and scares.

Master will be released this Friday on Amazon Prime. My review is at PopMatters:

Diallos’ film, which bolts together race-conscious academic satire and haunted-house narrative, is set at the fictional Ancaster College. A Northeast school “nearly as old as the country”, it is a picture-perfect expanse of brick and ivy complete with hallowed traditions, an Ivy League-adjacent reputation, vanishingly few students or faculty of color, and centuries of ugly undercurrents that never seem to go away. New student Jasmine (Zoe Renee) has barely arrived on campus when she discovers that her dorm room is the one the other students whisper about: Decades earlier, the school’s first black student had killed herself there…

Here is the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘America, We Have a Batman Problem’

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

How many Batman movies is too many? It seems like we are finding out.

My article, ‘America, We Have a Batman Problem’ is at Eyes Wide Open:

Batman’s appeal to artists and audiences is understandable. His immense wealth, traumatized childhood, and schizophrenic relationship with the villains he hunts provides a buffet of dramatic possibilities. Batman’s need (trauma) and ability (wealth) to act is as bottomless as his inability to avoid questioning his actions. Still, isn’t it time to give the man a rest?

Screening Room: Sundance Film Festival, 2022 Edition

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

Once again, the Sundance Film Festival (still showing movies virtually) is spreading cheer in an otherwise gloomy month by giving us a glimpse of what is coming our way in the coming year, cinematically. I covered a few of the movies at this year’s festival for Slant here:

  • When You Finish Saving the World (pictured): Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut is a satire with Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard as monumentally clueless narcissists.
  • We Need to Talk About Cosby: W. Kamau Bell’s four-part docuseries digs into the comedic genius and criminal villainy of Bill Cosby and the toxic tangling of the two.
  • Sharp Stick: The latest comedy from Lena Dunham is about a young woman determined to lose her virginity by starting an affair with her older, married employer.
  • Call Jane: Phyllis Nagy’s drama stars Elizabeth Banks as a late-Sixties Chicago housewife who inadvertently becomes part of an underground abortion operation run by activist Sigourney Weaver.
  • 892: A true-life hostage drama starring John Boyega as an Iraq War veteran who threatens to set off a bomb in a bank if his demands against the VA are not met.