“TEN YEARS, MAN! TEN YEA... TEN YEARS! Ten years. TEN! TEN YEEEEAARS! TEN YEARS!” – Paul Spericki (Jeremy Piven) upon seeing his high school classmate, Martin Blank (John Cusack), for the first time in, well, ten years in Grosse Pointe Blank.
Viewing entries tagged
movies
Writer and civic advocate Pete Davis, alongside his director and producer sister, Rebecca, have made in their documentary an extraordinarily convincing case for why it feels like American society is in the throes of complete disintegration. This is Pete Davis’s first film. It’s also Rebecca Davis’s feature directing and writing debut, after spending a decade as a producer for NBC News and as the supervising producer for the second season of the Netflix/Vox collaboration Explained.
If ever there were a movie that exemplifies the recent viral social media phenomenon known as “Man or Bear,” in which women are asked if they would prefer to be alone in the woods with a man or a bear, it’s Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, Woman of the Hour. If you’re unfamiliar, an overwhelming majority of women, when given the opportunity, would take their chances hanging out with a grizzly rather than risk possible violence at the hands of an unknown man. Stranger danger, indeed.
Kendrick, with the help of Ian McDonald’s focused screenplay, imagines the world in a way that I would assume looks very familiar to many, if not most, women. It’s a world in which women are subject to men’s relentless quest to get sex out of them. Female utility begins and ends with their bodies, and if a woman insists on using her own agency to upset the status quo, she risks incurring the anger, or worse, of a man.
David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat. Cronenberg, the body-horror director who has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood,” has been namechecked by French director Fargeat – along with David Lynch, John Carpenter, and Michael Haneke – as influencing her work. With her latest picture, the giddily gory The Substance, Fargeat makes a convincing case that she’s ready to join, as a peer, the ranks of those she admires. Her film is as nasty as any Cronenberg, as bonkers as any Lynch, and is so horrifically hilarious that I often found myself laughing as I was wincing and looking away from the screen. The Substance is also a razor-sharp feminist satire about youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society.
Legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola spent forty years trying to get Megalopolis, his sprawling, sci-fi epic fable about the Roman and American empires, made. Now 85, it might turn out to be the director’s last film. He waited about a decade too long for his examination of how and why empires crumble to be relevant. Maybe if he had made and released Megalopolis before Donald Trump’s infamous ride down that golden escalator, I would have praised his maximalist primal scream about our current cultural and political moment as visionary and prescient. Instead, what Megalopolis has on offer feels like a thin imitation of our nightmarish reality.
Unlike Luca Guadagnino’s last effort, the unforgettable cannibal romance road trip movie Bones and All, his new film, Challengers, has very little in the way of graphic violence. The closest it comes is a wrenching scene depicting a torn ACL during a tennis match. Still, the emotional and psychological stakes underpinning this tale of elite athletes, insatiable ambition, and a fraught love triangle proves again how deft Guadagnino is at foregrounding human connection – and the messy emotions that come with it – no matter the broader subject matter of the movie.
The Bikeriders is, on the whole, enchanted by its subjects’ nihilism. Nichols’s deep curiosity about human behavior and his non-judgmental, empathetic artistic style makes his film about small-scale fascism an engrossing portrait of our endless capacity for love and hate.
Alien: Romulus is a nepo movie. Like nepo baby – the original term I’m borrowing and adapting for this new cinematic designation – I’m using nepo movie to describe offspring that coasts into success (of the kind which those without the famous pedigree could only dream) on the sterling reputation of famous progenitors. We’ve had movies like this before, as we had children of the rich and famous using their connections to jump start a career before the invention of the term nepo baby.
What made this oh-so-clever turn of phrase spring into my mind was Romulus mimicking the best, most memorable elements from both mom and dad in its pursuit to build its own legacy. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez wrote the screenplay for this seventh installment in the iconic sci-fi/horror franchise with his longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. His movie plays like a best-hits mashup of both Ridley Scott’s genre defining Alien and James Cameron’s sci-fi/horror-by-way-of-war-movie follow up Aliens, with a splash of Prometheus added in for good measure.
There’s a very distinct difference between a movie shrouding itself in tantalizing mystery, so that the audience can fill in the blanks using their own imagination, and a movie being so opaque about its plot machinations that it’s indistinguishable from shoddy storytelling. German writer/director Tilman Singer’s second feature, Cuckoo, strives for the former, but, because of its confusing and nonsensical plot, lands squarely in the domain of the latter.
The theme of Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) 2024 – movies are all around us – fit with my experience of the fest. The opening night celebration launched with an endearing short film, shot by the OCFF crew, in which an escaped Wes Anderson character extols the virtues of seeing movies everywhere we look. (Full disclosure: Chris Gardner, the actor who portrays the quirky “filmthropoligist” in the short, is my across-the-street neighbor and runs PR for the fest.)
During the short, Dr. Ovie McClintock makes the classic director’s frame by putting his two thumbs and forefingers together to form a widescreen rectangle. In his world, inanimate objects on the street around the Texas Theatre create the "wild, undomesticated, feral cinema" all around us. He drolly asks a parking meter about its motivation, encourages a few newspaper vending machines on their outstanding performances, and tells us that even the giant cow sitting atop the local Charco Broiler Steak House is in on the magic. “That’s not a cow,” McClintock breathlessly intones, “that’s a character!”
As the movie year rolls on, I’m excited to announce another first in my film festival adventures. It’s taken me almost ten years, but I’m finally covering my local neighborhood movie celebration as a critic. Taking place primarily at the legendary Texas Theatre, the Oak Cliff Film Festival (OCFF) is celebrating its 13th annual installment from June 20 through June 23, including dozens of screenings loaded with intriguing new titles, repertory screenings of cinema classics, multiple shorts blocks (including shorts from local Texas students), live shows, filmmaker workshops, and more.
Dead fish are the most potent symbols within Godzilla Minus One to signify director Takashi Yamazaki’s successful attempt to reestablish the nuclear anxieties central to the original film in the franchise. Each time the colossal monster surfaces from the deep in Yamazaki’s movie, Godzilla is preceded by a collection of floating dead fish killed by his own poisonous radiation. In the wake of Oppenheimer – Christopher Nolan’s epic examination of humanity unlocking the horrific destructive power of the atom – and the recent threats of Russian madman Vladimir Putin to use nuclear weapons in his deranged pursuit of empire, a return to the original preoccupation of the 70-year-old kaiju franchise is sadly apropos.
After attending two Dallas International Film Festivals, I’ve discovered that one of the pleasures of a smaller fest is in connecting with the other movie lovers around me. One can certainly do the same at a gargantuan event like South By Southwest, but there’s a distinct difference. At SXSW, you might connect with a few people as you’re standing in line for a screening, or while in the theater before the show starts. Because of the thousands and thousands in attendance, however, there’s a good chance you might never see the same person twice over the course of the fest. That’s not the case at DIFF.
When trying to set my lineup in the DIFF ticketing system, I learned that my press badge wasn’t authorized to reserve tickets, as is the case for other film festivals like Fantastic Fest and SXSW. After a few email exchanges, I was informed that paying customers were the priority, and that I would need to queue up in the waitlist line for any movie I wanted to see. But, as is often the case in my charmed life, a magnanimous benefactor swooped in and gifted me a regular badge so that I can bypass the waitlist line, making my odds of getting into each screening much better. Many thanks are owed to my Dickensian guardian angel who did me a solid. I am eternally grateful.
After a few weeks spent recharging my battery in the wake of covering SXSW 2024, I’m locked and loaded for the 18th annual Dallas International Film Festival (DIFF), which will be held April 25-May 2 at several theaters around town. DIFF 2024 will feature screenings of over 100 titles, many of which will be world premieres. The festival will also be host to a panel discussion about the future of cinematic exhibition and dozens of opportunities to hear filmmakers speak about their movies at post-screening Q&As.
A fitting subtitle for director Lance Oppenheim’s Spermworld would be Dispatches from the End of the World. That’s less to do with anyone we meet in the documentary and more an indictment of the entire system. The film explores the unregulated wild west of online sperm donation mainly from the perspective of a few of the men offering up their genetic material.
Their clients are people who want to become parents but who, for myriad reasons, can’t go about it either in the conventional way or even by using established medical options like sperm banks or IVF. The latter options, as you might have guessed, since everything in our society revolves around money, are often prohibitively expensive.
The key sequence in the procedural courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall is indicative of director Justine Triet’s masterful storytelling for what it doesn’t show us. The man who suffers the fatal titular fall, Samuel, made a surreptitious audio recording of a vicious argument between he and his wife, Sandra, that ultimately turns physically violent.
As the jury hears this altercation, Triet allows us to see what they can’t. She stages the heated exchange as a flashback, but only the portion where words are used as weapons. Before the first slap is doled out, Triet cuts back to the courtroom. We experience the physical violence between Samuel and Sandra as the jury does, who can only hear the wordless scuffle with no way of knowing who is doing what to whom.
How many masterpieces can one person produce? We may never know, but iconic filmmaker – and elder statesman of cinema – Martin Scorsese seems determined to find out before he’s finished behind the camera. After the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, Goodfellas, and at least five other pictures that deserve consideration as masterpieces, Scorsese has done it again.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a sprawling, ambitious, deeply moving mashup of the director’s beloved gangster genre and his first Western, which wrestles with American sins that a not-insignificant portion of our population would like to bury and ignore forever.
Director Emma Seligman has made the next great teen sex comedy by parodying all the ones that have come before it. At the same time, Bottoms also wickedly satirizes David Fincher’s Fight Club. It’s unapologetically queer, giddily violent, and subversively hilarious. With her two stars, Rachel Sennott – who helped write the screenplay with Seligman – and Ayo Edebiri, the trio have crafted the kind of comedy that makes you laugh out loud at least once every scene by wielding a gonzo and cutting sense of humor.