Tag: Movies

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…

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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’

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

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’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

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:

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: ‘The Taste of Things’

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

Delectable, delicious, all the adjectives that spring to mind with the great food films, The Taste of Things opens later this year in limited release.

My review is at Slant Magazine:

Tran Anh Hung’s The Taste of Things is almost halfway done before it even hints that there’s something going on within its fin-de-siècle setting besides the creation and consumption of beautiful meals. The film’s first half hour is in fact just that, with Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a veteran cook in the manor home of Dodin (Benoît Magimel), the epicure for whom she’s been working for over 20 years, making an extravagant, multi-course meal for him and his friends. The men eat the food, then compliment Eugénie on her cooking…

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: