Tag: Movies

Screening Room: ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’

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(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’

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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’

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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

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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…

Screening Room: Best Movies of 2014 – ‘Boyhood’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - RepertoryLeave a comment
Boyhood (IFC Films)

Now that it’s been 10 years since the first Eyes Wide Open annual movie guide came out, it seemed a good time to look back on what were the most memorable movies of 2014.

My article on Richard Linklater’s achingly poignant Boyhood was published at Eyes Wide Open:

… wobbly at times but still magical in an everyday way. The film follows a quiet and daydream-prone boy, Mason (Ellar Coltrane, likable if sometimes stiff), growing up in Texas with a snarky older sister Samantha (Lorelei Linklater) and divorced parents (Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke). There’s no story, per se, it’s just his life from about age 7 to 18. Linklater’s visual scheme is straightforward and shorn of obvious flair; the often affectless dialogue even more so. But that deceptively simple framework is rich with accrued detail and insight…

More pieces on the best of 2014 to follow.

Here’s the trailer:

Screening Room: ‘Megalopolis’

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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: ‘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: ‘Coup de Chance’

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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: