Watched at my daughter’s school. The parents all huddled in the back and there wasn’t enough room. The kids all sat on the floor and there was popcorn flying everywhere. Inconvenience is the point. The things you’ll do to help your kid see a movie you’ve already seen together several times in a less movie-friendly environment.
Tried to explain to Ezra, her friends, and my girlfriend that this is all based on the wonderful French movie 3615 code Père Noël,…
Nobody has cultivated a filmography that speaks to modern dread quite like that of Robert Eggers. In just four films, three of them have emerged as definitive statements on horror for the last couple decades. Lavish and stylish attention to atmosphere and mood pervade Eggers’ excellent Nosferatu, proof positive that the director is an innovator and classicist at once. A profound and gothic work that conjures the classics and pays them forward for a new future of horror.
Cultivates a quiet beauty out of the kind of pain that goes unspoken. A Real Pain is about that deeply ingrained generational pain. That pain where only your family knows how you really hold it. Pain that is held way below the surface, in that everything we do, every way we operate is a projection so as not to surface it.
Jesse Eisenberg operates as a director from a place of patient understanding. The complex familial relationship between his character…
An over the hill Jack Arnold directs Fred Williamson as Stone, Private Eye. Plays like a Chandler Noir that’s maybe meant to also play as Blaxploitation, but only the bouncing Mort Garson score really holds the idea in place. Amusingly, even when it doesn’t suit the scene, like a drawn out fight scene, the score grooves and bounces like it’s just there for some dynamic exploitation flavor.
This only barely passes as a Mystery of the Week type pilot episode,…
Employs Screenlife for a tech horror movie about dating apps. Uses on-screen displays to meaningfully convey ideas, while also creating stakes and tension for the characters. It plays better than it looks and sounds, through cleverness of execution and while it feels very Work From Home Era as a piece of filmmaking, once the character goes to this Under the Skin / Get Out styled Sunken Place, it reveals it’s up to even more than the pretty good use of tech was letting on.
Rides a very fine line between fedora-wearing homage and rigid modern noir. What allows Rian Johnson to get away with it is what parts he has allowed to be adolescent and what parts are allowed to be hard-boiled.
The mixture of demure teen lingo, “who are you eating with?” with detective-speak that sounds like a mouthful of glass is what puts it over. By coyly paying off the amusing parallel between this teenage search for belonging and to be the…
‘90s vibes all the way for the first act then drops right off a cliff the rest of the movie. When it’s just popular cuts of eye-rolling trendy ‘90s music and a Superbad revision, it’s a really good time.
Then it has to go and show us what’s on its mind and it’s so fucking dumb. Goes from chill Mid-‘90s-like throwback (Jonah Hill is also a producer here), but the attractive hangout movie is totally killed off by the higher…
Loving someone is watching their childhood favorite movie on Christmas morning and realizing you’d always watch this for them. More dense and about mental health than I’d have expected. Funny and a lot but there’s also utility in it. But the real utility is loving something because it fulfills something for your partner. Would I otherwise feel agnostic about the movie? I think so, but I don’t now.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point feels like a challenge to the present status of The Christmas Movie. It is utterly surreal and yet has no irony. This is an earnest movie that is experientially About Christmas with an ensemble of characters who function as a Complex Family, and it doesn’t say something so much as it glows with vibes like an overlit Christmas tree.
And it feels like you’re hungover from too much mixed egg nog. Sometimes we’re sitting and…
When the script doesn’t work, it’s hard for anything else to work. The movie goes with the writing. Maybe the best writing is invisible but the worst writing is so out front as to be impossible to detect.
The script for Surviving Christmas is fully visible. You can feel the turns just as they’re manifested. The characters speak about plot and there’s not so much movie around it to get in the way.
What is a bad Christmas movie though?…
The literary industriousness of Colleen Hoover inaspiciously translates to the screen. The messaging about Domestic Abuse is at the foreground and there is not any background or further depth to the message. Its shot as flatly as its written, two-dimensional and selling itself on… what? What is the reason to see it? You know what will happen. Maybe there is safety in approaching such difficult messaging to get right in such a simple way, as though it lightens the load. There must be some practical reason for Colleen Hoover’s literary empire, but it feels pretty empty on the screen.