Reel Views, Review

Bugonia

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos continue their creative collaboration with Bugonia, their third project together in as many years. This time, the two-time Academy Award winner plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a powerful player in the pharmaceutical space called Auxolith. She’s the kind of well-paid boss babe who gets up at 4:30 in the morning to run on a treadmill that probably costs more than most people’s cars and has table ornaments with platitudes like “let’s kick impossible’s [butt]” inscribed on them. Her routine of power striding into the office and confusing subordinates with corporate doublespeak is interrupted by the presence of cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) at her house after work. They’re there in Jennifer Aniston masks and they’re there to abduct her.

Michelle is drugged and when she wakes up, her head is shaved, she’s chained up in a basement and is accused by Teddy of being the queen of an “Andromedan” alien species. Why Teddy and Don are so convinced Michelle isn’t actually human, and the lengths to which she will go to prove that she is, are best left for viewers to discover for themselves. Bugonia is a remake of a South Korean movie called Save The Green Planet!, though they’re both so seemingly singular that it’s hard to imagine either one has ties to anything else. Even more surprising is how closely Lanthimos and his scribe Will Tracy follow the narrative beats of the bugnuts predecessor, to the extent that seeing the original may actively ruin the experience of seeing this reimagining. Still, the pair do enough to distinguish this tonally and thematically from Jang Joon-hwan’s film to justify the refresh.

Stone gave what is likely the best performance of her career a couple years ago in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and even though her work in Bugonia likely won’t score her another Oscar, it’s another perfectly-calibrated piece of acting. The CEO character in Save The Green Planet! is actively awful and spends the majority of his captivity mocking the kidnappers. He even brags about his IQ at one point, a go-to for the intellectually insecure. By comparison, Michelle is much more sympathetic, still calloused and condescending in a way she can’t seem to help — her correction of Teddy’s pronunciation of “shibboleths” is so impulsive that it’s basically a sneeze — but nonetheless someone who doesn’t deserve what she’s being put through. As her eyes dart around the musty basement when she comes to, you can practically see her desperately attempting to recall hostage negotiation techniques she was likely taught at some point.

A way that Lanthimos and Tracy most meet our moment with Bugonia is in tapping into how much of a communication breakdown we’ve sustained by siloing ourselves off from one another. Jesse Plemons does an outstanding job as Teddy, a man who’s been done dirty enough that he’s retreated to the conspiracy-ridden internet to find meaning when the real world simply doesn’t make sense. He wants to turn the tables, to act as though he’s in control of the situation with power over someone who would have power over him in any other scenario, but he’s ultimately scared and confused. He wants to be right in his theory that Michelle is from another planet but he won’t accept her just telling him what he wants to hear either. The lack of direction makes things difficult for Don too, who’s blindly accepts just about everything that comes out of Teddy’s mouth but develops moral scruples when contradictions arise.

Bugonia is powerfully acted, sharp-tongued and, for all its peculiarities, is probably Lanthimos’ most approachable work since The Favourite — if you haven’t seen any of his movies, I’d consider this as strong a starting spot as any. Still, I wish he had done more to depart from the existing text and made this tale his own, not from a stylistic sense but from a narrative one. He carries over a police character, here played by Stavros Halkias, that could’ve just as easily been converted into a different plot device that forces Teddy and Don to scramble. Teddy’s backstory is better implied than directly shown, with black-and-white flashbacks that work too hard to spell out his motivations. There’s also a scene at a hospital that makes absolutely no sense. But as a darkly funny cat-and-mouse game set against the backdrop our divided times, Bugonia has plenty in it worth buzzing about.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Predator: Badlands, starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is a sci-fi action film following a young Yautja Predator outcast from his clan who finds an unlikely ally on his journey to find and defeat the ultimate adversary.
Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney and Ben Foster, is a sports biopic chronicling professional boxer Christy Martin’s rise to becoming America’s most well-known and successful female pugilist in the 1990s.
Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, is a historical drama involving a World War II psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Göring.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Frankenstein

There may not be a filmmaker working today who understands monsters better than Guillermo del Toro. Yes, many of his films feature otherworldly creatures, but his fascination with them implies a deeper sympathy he has for the rejected and misunderstood. A perpetual through line of his oeuvre is that the figures society reveres can often act more monstrously than the outcasts they reject. Naturally, he’s a perfect fit to adapt Frankenstein, a movie that so perfectly emulsifies the storyteller’s affinities that it’s surprising it took this late into his career to come into being. Alas, it’s alive, and even though Mary Shelley’s source material has been adapted countless times for screens big and small, this is a terrific telling of the classic tale that immediately joins the ranks as an unmissable iteration.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein begins at the North Pole in 1857, where Captain Anderson (Lars Mikkelsen) and the crew of his ship are startled by an explosion in the distance while attempting to dislodge their vessel from ice. Frantically running from the detonation is a maimed Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), who is brought aboard before a colossal Creature (Jacob Elordi) follows closely behind from the darkness. Desperate to resolve the skirmish with words instead of violence, the Captain listens to both Frankenstein and the Creature tell their composite story of how their bond initially came to be and quickly deteriorated. We discover that Frankenstein created the Creature as part of a resurrection experiment funded by the wealthy Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz), whose niece Elizabeth (Mia Goth) has captured Victor’s affection.

The most invigorating narrative decision Guillermo del Toro makes in his transformation of the 1818 novel Frankenstein is in how intentional he is about portraying the Creature as the hero and Victor Frankenstein as the villain. The depiction of Frankenstein’s Monster in the landmark 1931 Universal picture as a grunting and lumbering behemoth solidified both how the character would be portrayed and how he would be culturally perceived for decades on. What Jacob Elordi and del Toro have done with the role here is nothing less than a complete cinematic reinterpretation and long-due restitution for the misunderstood monster. Elordi’s portrayal begins with the brutish behavior to which we’ve become accustomed, but it doesn’t take long for layers of benevolence and eloquence to be revealed. It’s a physically and emotionally commanding performance that stands out as the young actor’s best so far.

The tendency for storytellers has been to represent Victor Frankenstein as a “mad scientist” type, so single-minded in his focus to give life to his creation that he ignores everything else happening in his own life. Oscar Isaac certainly portrays the titular physician in Frankenstein as an eccentric genius but also as unfailingly arrogant and fiercely cold-hearted. He’s also short-tempered and quick to choose violence over kindness, traits passed down to him by his stern father, played with palpable vileness by Charles Dance. As Victor tells his side of the story, he paints himself as the wounded protagonist and Isaac has played the part so many times that it’s easy to believe him. “I fail to see why modesty should be a virtue at all,” he blithely remarks upon his arrival at Henrich’s manor, and Isaac’s delivery signals that this guy isn’t playfully mischievous as much as outright repugnant.

As we’ve come to expect from Guillermo del Toro through the years, Frankenstein is another exquisite production from every technical angle. Recalling the set design from 2015’s Crimson Peak, Frankenstein’s laboratory is a Gothic wonderland of unfurled shadows against pockets of natural splendor. The cinematography from repeat del Toro collaborator Dan Laustsen gorgeously captures the singular beauty and tragedy of this tale; there’s a shot of a figure against the background of a sunset horizon that is so breathtaking that it demands to be received inside a darkened auditorium. Laustsen makes magic with grandiose moments like that but does similarly stellar work in smaller spaces, as with a brilliant shot of Elizabeth studying Victor’s experiment while Victor studies her, both struggling to understand what they’re observing. Frankenstein is filled with many such moments of haunting wisdom, allowing us to partake in the curiosities of its creator.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Bugonia, a dark comedy starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, following two conspiracy-obsessed young men who kidnap the high-powered CEO of a major company, convinced that she is an alien intent on destroying planet Earth.
Also coming to theaters is Stitch Head, an animated horror comedy starring Asa Butterfield and Joel Fry, which tells the story of a small creature awoken by a mad professor in a castle to protect the professor’s other creations from the nearby townspeople.
Premiering on Netflix is Ballad Of A Small Player, a psychological thriller starring Colin Farrell and Tilda Swinton, in which a high-stakes gambler laying low in Macau encounters a kindred spirit who might just hold the key to his salvation.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Black Phone 2

Released in the summer of 2022, The Black Phone wasn’t the most revolutionary horror movie in the world, but it provided a mix of gritty and supernatural scares while sporting several terrific child performances too. More pertinent to explain the existence of Black Phone 2, it made a whole lot of money at the box office. Even though the film was based on a short story whose narrative was completely told, writer/director Scott Derrickson and co-writer C. Robert Cargill have reunited to give the sinister child snatcher The Grabber an encore. Those who have seen the first movie may recall the pesky detail of that antagonist dying at the conclusion, complicating the possibility of a sequel. “Dead is just a word,” The Grabber taunts our hero over the phone in this chapter, although “braindead” is a more apt word I’d use to describe this pointless and trite follow-up.

It’s four years after the events of The Black Phone and Finney (Mason Thames) has gained a measure of unwelcome notoriety for slaying the serial killer known as The Grabber (Ethan Hawke). After having visions that helped the police find Finney during captivity, his sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw) continues to be plagued by lucid dreams of children in peril. Her nightmares now center around a trio of kids trapped under ice at Alpine Lake Youth Camp, where Finney and Gwen’s mother served as counselor decades earlier. With her new crush Ernie (Miguel Mora), Gwen travels along with Finney to the Camp, where they meet the current supervisor Armando (Demián Bichir). It doesn’t take long after they arrive for a supposedly disconnected black phone to start ringing, opening the line for Finney and Gwen to converse across spiritual realms once again.

Where The Black Phone had a premise that tapped into the fantastical but otherwise remained grounded, Black Phone 2 chooses to lean hard into the mystical through lines of the original to justify its existence. If The Grabber was a psychopathic type along the lines of Norman Bates in that predecessor, he’s now gone full Freddy Krueger this time. The primary issue is that while the A Nightmare On Elm Street series has relatively straightforward narrative rules by which the characters are tethered, the limitations of The Grabber in the afterlife are woefully unclear. Like Freddy, his actions in characters’ dreams have violent consequences for them in real life but the scale of his powers fluctuates wildly depending on the scene. Likewise, the actual foundation of what Gwen and crew are meant to do at Alpine makes very little sense, whether you include The Grabber’s impact on the plot or not.

A positive aspect that Black Phone 2 carries over from its previous entry is uniformly strong performances from a younger cast, three of whom return here. Finney is clearly the main character in The Black Phone but he almost plays second fiddle to Gwen this time, whose paranormal abilities have more of a bearing on this storyline. Stepping into what is effectively the new lead role, Madeleine McGraw builds beautifully on her previous work with poignant and potent scenes that sell the emotion of her character. Sure, she doesn’t have as much to do when she’s screaming and running away from the bad guy but in the instances where she’s reconciling the untimely demise of Gwen and Finney’s mother and attempting to reconnect with her, McGraw shines. Mason Thames, who also led the live-action How To Train Your Dragon remake earlier this year, likewise does a great job transmuting his character’s sense of anger and cynicism after the traumatic events he endured years earlier.

Similarly to his still-best spookfest Sinister, director Scott Derrickson intersperses grainy scenes of menace shot on types of film germane to the 70s and 80s milieu of the Black Phone movies. The stylistic choice is still effective here but given that Derrickson’s used the same trick a few times before, I would’ve preferred to see more of a formal creativity in his storytelling. Beyond these interludes and the scathing snowbound setting, there just isn’t much that separates Black Phone 2 from generic hokum you’d expect from a 4th or 5th sequel in a horror franchise as opposed to the lone and likely last sequel in this series. If opportunity knocks and opportunism rings, I wish Derrickson had let the prospect of making this hollow follow-up go to voicemail.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, a music biopic starring Jeremy Allen White and Jeremy Strong, which chronicles the conception and recording of the titular singer-songwriter’s stripped-back 1982 album Nebraska.
Also coming to theaters is Regretting You, a family drama starring Allison Williams and Mckenna Grace, which centers on the strained relationship between a young mother and her teenage daughter when a death in the family forces them to navigate life’s challenges together.
Premiering on Netflix is A House Of Dynamite, a political thriller starring Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson, following the U.S. government as it navigates an official response to a single nuclear missile launched by an unidentified enemy.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Tron: Ares

True to its subtitle, 2010’s Tron: Legacy was a prototype for what we now consider the legacy sequel. Taking place 28 years after the groundbreaking original film, it follows the now-adult son of Tron‘s protagonist responding to a distress message sent by his dad from the virtual world introduced in the first movie. That makes the function of Tron: Ares, the latest in what is now a bit of an odd trilogy, within the franchise somewhat ponderous. Sure, it takes place within the same universe, and contains appearances (some longer than others) from a few familiar faces, but what exactly does it add to the series? As a spiritual successor, it certainly pulls off hallmarks of the previous two entries with another killer music score and terrific visual effects. But beyond those ephemeral pleasures, the movie never quite establishes its mission statement and reason for being.

The storyline of Tron: Ares centers around a pair of CEOs from competing tech companies racing to conjure digital concoctions into the real world. There’s Dillinger Systems head Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), who is able to laser-print out iterations of AI soldiers like Ares (Jared Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith) at the touch of a button, but the manifestations can’t last a half an hour without crumbling. Knowing this limitation, the leader of ENCOM, Eve Kim (Greta Lee), is on the hunt for the “permanence code” that will allow programmed creations to exist without an expiration. In the midst of Dillinger and Kim’s high-stakes feud, the original versions of Ares and Athena, whose consciousnesses exist in a server known as The Grid, are beginning to develop complex feelings and yearn for a deeper purpose.

While action spectacles like this typically aren’t performance-first affairs anyway, the homogeneous acting in Tron: Ares does little to expand on the threadbare plot. Ironically, Jared Leto is a great choice for a robotic program created to obey straightforward prompts, but when his character is meant to evolve emotionally, his stilted performance doesn’t follow the same trajectory. Evan Peters is almost 40 but somehow, he still carries a boyish appearance that doesn’t do him any favors in a role like this where he has to bark orders at subordinates. Leto and Peters have been pretty plug-and-play in blockbusters like this before but the presence of Greta Lee is particularly depressing. After a revelation of a performance in 2023’s Past Lives, which should’ve gotten her an Oscar nod, she’s reduced here to running away from a legion of VFX munitions and looking sexy in leather on a futuristic motorcycle.

These Light Cycles, the central piece of iconography from the Tron series, are wisely featured again in Ares and in keeping with the central theme of bringing the digital world into the real world, the film makes a concerted effort to utilize practical effects. The best parts of the movie are the chase scenes where characters on Light Cycles, previously limited to the confines of the Grid, zoom and weave through traffic on busy city highways. These vehicles are, of course, enhanced by special effects and instead of leaning into the blue aesthetic of its predecessors, director Joachim Rønning opts instead for the more urgent and sinister hue of red for this chapter. The blending of the digitized and the tangible is outstanding — I didn’t see the movie in 3D but I’d avoid it, given its tendency to dim all on-screen colors — and thanks to cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, the entire production is handsomely mounted.

If one goes into Tron: Ares expecting nothing more than a pretty light show and a way to listen to the new Nine Inch Nails record in surround sound, they won’t be disappointed. But those looking for a sci-fi actioner that actually has a compelling narrative, or even a story that makes sense, will have to look elsewhere. The movie technically has protagonists but there’s barely a rooting interest in any of them, just enough for them to have any reason to run away from the villains. This is also the kind of movie where artificial intelligence is supposedly on the cusp of superseding humankind but its incarnations make fundamental tactical errors on the regular. Aside from contributing lucrative ideas to Disney’s theme parks, it’s hard to say what else Tron as a brand has to offer the world of cinema at this point.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Black Phone 2, starring Ethan Hawke and Mason Thames, is a supernatural horror movie in which the only known survivor of the serial killer known as The Grabber must put an end to his continued reign of terror from beyond the grave.
Good Fortune, starring Aziz Ansari and Keanu Reeves, is a supernatural comedy following a well-meaning but rather inept angel who meddles in the lives of a struggling gig worker and a wealthy venture capitalist.
After The Hunt, starring Julia Roberts and Ayo Edebiri, is a psychological thriller involving a college professor who’s forced to grapple with her own secretive past after one of her colleagues is faced with a serious accusation.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

No Sleep October: Cobweb

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

In hindsight, Cobweb never stood a chance. Released on July 21, 2023, the same day as a couple other movies called Barbie and Oppenheimer, its box office numbers were so dismal that they weren’t even reported, amid the combined Barbenheimer domestic take of $244 million that opening weekend. Lionsgate likely should’ve known better than to release a movie of any kind amid a cultural phenomenon like Barbenheimer, but they absolutely should’ve known better than to release a horror movie in the middle of summer as opposed to October. Not only is Samuel Bodin’s directorial debut a horror movie set during Halloween but it’s one so steeped in spooky season that the central family literally has a pumpkin patch in their backyard. Even though it got demolished at the box office worse than Tommy Doyle’s pumpkin in Halloween, Cobweb remains creepy crawly fun worth spinning up on streaming.

The film stars C’mon C’mon breakout Woody Norman as Peter, a shy and sensitive third-grader who lives under the overly-vigilant eye of his mom Carol (played by Lizzy Caplan) and dad Mark (played by Antony Starr). His school life suffers due to class bully Brian (Luke Busey) and his home life suffers from the stifling control of his parents. Thankfully, he gets some respite in the form of substitute teacher Miss Devine (Cleopatra Coleman), who recognizes his troubled inner life and shows him more attention. One night, Peter begins to hear scratching on the other side of his bedroom walls and, along with it, a voice claiming to belong to a sequestered sister of whom he was never made aware. As more nights pass, their conversations grow more in-depth and the voice pushes Peter to stand up both to his parents and the bully at school.

An early intertitle indicates Cobweb begins one week before Halloween, although there are so many visual clues to this throughout the movie that it may not even be necessary to say. If a moonlit shot of the abundance of pumpkins in Peter’s family’s backyard isn’t enough, a creaking swing in the forefront dancing amid the autumn breeze should help drive things home. There are several jack-o-lantern carvings and costumed kiddos abound, in addition to spooky accoutrements like a ridiculously oversized witch hat that Miss Devine sports in class on day. Italian electronic composer Drum & Lace has fun setting the tone on the sonic side of things, staccato strings and hollow marimbas leaving plenty of space in between the notes for tension to creep in.

The melancholy music also stages Cobweb as less of a conventional frightfest and more of a dark fairytale from the perspective of a troubled child trying to make sense of his world. We spend the majority of the movie inside Peter’s home but the production design intentionally makes the rooms appear larger than they actually would be. Numerous establishing shots give us a sense of the ramshackle house’s size but when we go inside, the interiors are impossibly large compared to what we’ve seen from the outside. The effect created is that we’re seeing these spaces through the eyes of Peter, with wide shots casting gargantuan silhouettes and shadows atop the eldritch wallpaper. When we’re small, the rooms in which we spend the most time feel massive but as we grow up, they get smaller and smaller. The visual personification of this concept lends itself to beautifully haunting set design.

The trio of main actors in Cobweb also do a fantastic job making this off-kilter world make its own kind of sense. Lizzy Caplan may still be better known for her presence in comedies like Mean Girls and The Interview but she’s also honed her creep chops on TV in series like Castle Rock and Fatal Attraction. It’s perfect prep for her role here as an overbearing mother who can just barely pass for normal in public but doesn’t bother to conceal her crazy around Peter and Mark. She stresses all the wrong words in her sentences and her emotional reactions to almost every situation are difficult to predict. Even more disconcerting is Antony Starr, effortlessly channeling the psychopathy of his Homelander character from The Boys to this officious father role. “Not everything’s as sweet as it seems,” he warns Peter as they prep cinnamon-scented rat poison for pest control.

Lest one get the sense that Cobweb is too much of a slow burn, it has more than its fair share of jump scares and nightmare scenes before we get to the satisfyingly gnarly conclusion. Up until that point, only a few swear words keep the movie from a PG-13 rating but Samuel Bodin goes hard in the proverbial red paint when it comes to the gore and lethality on display during the final extended setpiece. It’s a welcome contrast in tone to the more chilling and staid tenor that envelops everything preceding it. In that way, it calls to mind the darkly fantastical work of Guillermo del Toro, specifically Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. Cobweb isn’t quite as strong as either of those chillers but at 88 minutes, it’s easy to get wrapped up in its dark delights as the seasons change.

Reel Views, Review

The Smashing Machine

Dwayne Johnson steps into a different kind of fighting ring in The Smashing Machine, a biopic covering the life and career of early UFC champion and MMA pioneer Mark Kerr. Johnson’s career in the WWE as one of the best-known professional wrestlers of all time inevitably invites comparisons to the real-life fighter he’s portraying and he certainly looks the part. Even compared to his typical action movie physique, Johnson has clearly put on even more muscle than he normally sports to convey Kerr’s domineering stature. He’s not an actor known for particularly nuanced performances and, perhaps by default, this is some of his best work, juxtaposing Kerr’s brutality in the ring with a soft-spokeness and vulnerability outside it. The film is strong showcase for his talents but never quite establishes itself as anything more than that.

The Smashing Machine tracks 3 years of Kerr’s MMA career, beginning in 1997 with Vale Tudo (literally Portuguese for “Everything Goes”) fighting in Brazil. His ruthless combat style draws the attention of UFC tournament winner Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), who invites him to compete in several bouts for the organization. Looking for an opportunity to make more money, Kerr goes to Japan with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) to fight for Pride Fighting Championships instead. The bloodthirsty battles there cause him to increase his dependency on opioids to numb the constant pain in which he finds himself. After a nearly lethal overdose, Kerr has to reconcile his dream of being a mixed martial arts legend with the massive toll that it’s taken on his personal life.

The Smashing Machine is the solo directing and writing film debut of Benny Safdie, half of the filmmaking duo responsible for anxiety-inducing crime thrillers like Good Time and Uncut Gems. This movie could take half of the urgency of those films and still be captivating but even outside the comparison, the storytelling here is stodgy and sedate. There’s even less of an excuse for that to be the case, given how much is adapted from a 2002 documentary of the same name covering the same stretch of time in Kerr’s career. It would be one thing to use the doc as a jumping-off point to further develop a dramatization but there are numerous scenes literally taken verbatim from the existing material. That the HBO Documentary Film is a bit tricky to track down — it isn’t currently available on any major streaming platform, including HBO Max — may be enough reason to include so much of it word-for-word in this fictionalized version, but the approach nevertheless feels unimaginative.

The augmentations that Benny Safdie applies to The Smashing Machine from its source material — the complete title of the documentary is The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr — primarily focus on the relationship between Kerr and his girlfriend Dawn. Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt certainly do what they can in front of the camera to bolster what’s on the page but both are ultimately hindered by underwritten roles. It’s curious that Safdie would choose to expand Dawn’s presence in his telling of the story if he didn’t have much compelling or original to say about her as a character. Another angle that could have potentially yielded more fruitful results is amplifying the depiction of Mark Coleman’s personal and professional relationship with Kerr. Ryan Bader is an MMA competitor in real life and even with limited screen time, he gives a naturalistic and, at times, magnetic performance.

Admittedly, I went into The Smashing Machine dreading what I figured would be little more than Dwayne Johnson prepping his Oscar reel. No matter this film’s critical or commercial reception, I expect him to campaign hard in the coming months for the Academy Award he seems to covet desperately. Save a few interesting choices here and there, he’s played things extremely safe when it comes to role selection since hitting the silver screen for the first time almost 25 years ago. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so cynical about his attempt to branch out here and engage with more fulfilling character work. Whether the choice was made mainly for accolade purposes or not, Johnson assuredly does some of the best acting of his career in The Smashing Machine. The movie around him isn’t as rock solid in its execution but it’s a suitable fill-in until the superior documentary surfaces again.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Tron: Ares, a sci-fi action movie starring Jared Leto and Greta Lee, following a highly sophisticated program who is sent from the digital world into the real world on a dangerous mission, marking humankind’s first encounter with A.I. beings.
Also coming to theaters is Roofman, a crime dramedy starring Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, telling the true story of a charismatic criminal who hides on the roof of a toy store and adopts a new identity while on the run from the police.
Premiering on Netflix is The Woman In Cabin 10, a psychological thriller starring Keira Knightley and Guy Pearce, about a journalist covering the maiden voyage of a luxury cruise ship who is convinced she has witnessed a passenger be thrown overboard.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Eleanor The Great

Scarlett Johansson sits in the director’s chair for the first time with Eleanor The Great, a saccharine melodrama whose heart is in the right place but whose brain is nowhere to be found. It’s a film that hinges on the sort of contrivance that could play fine in a 20th century romantic comedy but makes absolutely no sense in 2025 here on planet Earth. Working from an overwrought script by Tory Kamen, Johansson doesn’t do herself any favors by choosing a story with weighty themes and heavy subject material for her first time out as a storyteller. It’s commendable that she’s able to establish and mostly maintain a palatable tone with which to tell this tale and she manages to land a few hard-earned poignant moments along the way. The opening 5 minutes and closing 5 minutes are especially powerful but there’s too much in between that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

June Squibb is terrific as the titular nonagenarian, living the dream on the shores of sunny Florida with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). During their weekly trip to the grocery store, Bessie faints and passes away soon afterwards, leaving Eleanor devastated. She decides to head back to New York City 40 years after leaving, staying with her divorced daughter Jess (Jessica Hecht) and her son Max (Will Price) in their apartment. Unsure what to do with her free time in Manhattan, Eleanor finds herself at the local Jewish Community Center, intending to attend a singing class but inadvertently stumbling into a counseling group for Holocaust survivors. Having heard many firsthand accounts from her recently departed best friend when she was alive, Eleanor tells Bessie’s harrowing story of survival as if it were her own.

Touched by Eleanor’s words, NYU student Nina (Erin Kellyman) approaches Eleanor after the group session and asks if she can be the subject of an article she’s working on for her journalism class. Reticent to dig deeper into her lie but desperate for friendship, Eleanor agrees to be interviewed and subsequently spends a substantial amount of time around Nina. Despite their 70-year age gap, the two have more in common than it would seem, most notably that Nina also recently lost someone close to her: her mother. Nina is doing her best to work through the grief, while her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a prominent news anchor, buries himself in his work and can’t even bring himself to say his late wife’s name. Can Eleanor help them process their loss while finding her own closure in the process?

Eleanor The Great gets off to a strong start, with a well-realized portrayal of two inseparable friends with a lifelong bond who play off each other beautifully. While Bessie is straight-laced and unassuming, Eleanor isn’t above the occasional white lie to keep things interesting. When Bessie is waiting for treatment in a hospital bed, Eleanor fibs to the nurse about her family owning the hospital to push along some speedy service. “You’re interesting enough, you don’t have to lie about who you are,” Bessie chastises with a sentiment that foreshadows the moral quandary upon which the movie is built. But after Eleanor tells one mistruth too many and ends up on Nina’s radar, it simply makes zero sense that a 20-year-old journalism student wouldn’t do a quick Google search to vet her source. When Roger inevitably gets drawn into Eleanor’s orbit, she technically ups her duped journalist count to 2.

Of course Eleanor is eventually found out and so we’re meant to slog through a third act packed with sappy monologues and untangling of misunderstandings. Through it all, Eleanor The Great ends on a final scene that doesn’t quite get the bad taste out of one’s mouth but at least brings home the movie’s message about connection and transference. Scarlett Johansson reportedly worked closely with the USC Shoah Foundation in order to impart sensitivity toward real Holocaust survivors who could understandably be put off by Eleanor’s deception. While Johansson’s intentions seem pure and Squibb does an outstanding job with a tricky protagonist, the film can’t overcome foundational lapses of logic that needed to be ironed out of the script earlier in production.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Smashing Machine, a sports biopic starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, telling the true story of former wrestler and mixed martial artist heavyweight champion Mark Kerr.
Also playing in theaters is Bone Lake, a horror thriller starring Maddie Hasson and Alex Roe, in which a couple’s vacation at a secluded estate is upended when they’re forced to share the mansion with a mysterious couple.
Premiering on Netflix is Steve, a drama starring Cillian Murphy and Tracey Ullman, following the headteacher in charge of a school for boys with societal and behavioral difficulties who faces his own demons while battling for the reform college’s survival.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

One Battle After Another

One Battle After Another, the latest masterpiece from one of the finest filmmakers working today, is a testament to what can be achieved when a major studio puts their money where their mouth is and backs the best. Wielding a budget roughly 4 to 5 times the amount he typically gets for his projects, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson applies the passion and thoughtfulness of his comparatively modest productions to this prodigious IMAX spectacle. It’s a one-of-a-kind epic: larger-than-life while never losing sense of scale, breathlessly-paced but detail-fixated, funny without being frivolous, eerily timely while already feeling timeless. Most importantly, it’s an action movie that isn’t just about car chases and explosions — don’t worry, it has those and they’re outstanding — but also about the exhilaration behind finally taking justified action.

Working within a revolutionary group known as the French 75, explosions expert Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) enraptures the posse’s leader Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) with his spitfire charm and dedication to the cause. Things seem to be heading toward domestic bliss after the birth of their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) but along with French 75 cohort Deandra (Regina Hall), Perfidia pushes through with a bank heist that goes sideways in a hurry. Pressured by Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who’s been on the French 75’s tail for years, Perfidia trades intel for reduced prison time and forces Pat and Willa to go on the run. 16 years later, Pat’s assumed a new identity as Bob Ferguson while he raises his daughter solo and evades Lockjaw’s troops as they try to snuff out each member of the French 75. When Willa goes missing, Bob frantically recruits her karate teacher Sergio (Benicio del Toro) to locate her whereabouts.

This is Paul Thomas Anderson’s second time adapting counterculture novelist Thomas Pynchon, the first resulting in the neo-noir stoner comedy Inherent Vice and One Battle After Another being a loose adaptation of his 1990 book Vineland. The protagonists of the two films ostensibly overlap in certain regards, both being affable burnouts who get in way over their heads, but their respective narratives push them in much different directions. Where Inherent Vice‘s Doc is trapped in a shaggy dog story, Bob Ferguson’s tale is one marked by galvanized purpose and the hope for redemption. At times, it seems there is no obstacle too small to trip Bob up in his conquest to find his imperiled Willa but the failures only makes the victories that much more sweet. Leonardo DiCaprio’s made comedic poetry out of pathetic protagonists before with The Wolf Of Wall Street and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but this may be his finest work in that category yet.

On the other side of the moral coin, Sean Penn is unforgettable as the often buffoonish but nonetheless formidable colonel dead set on the French 75’s demise. Fitted with a janky gait and anxious oral posturing that would make Roger Stone seethe, he’d come across as a cartoonishly overplayed villain if the real-life inspirations for his character weren’t so similar. After a revelation of a performance in 2023’s A Thousand And One, Teyana Taylor is an absolute force here as a firebrand insurgent who can’t concede to the path of convenience and compliance. In her film debut, Chase Infiniti does a terrific job in balancing a teenager’s desire to distance themselves from their parents with their need for guidance during tremendously scary circumstances. Even in limited roles, James Raterman and D. W. Moffett make the most of their interrogation scenes and sell the menace behind Lockjaw’s relentless operation.

Reteaming with his Licorice Pizza cinematographer Michael Bauman and editor Andy Jurgensen, Paul Thomas Anderson makes every inch of screen and every minute of runtime count. As he did with Boogie Nights, Anderson imbues One Battle After Another with a Scorsese-like sweep that makes every moment feel major. There’s undeniably a grandeur to the proceedings that Anderson hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to attempt until this point in his career. You’ve seen him do sprawling character studies and you’ve seen him do psychological chamber pieces but you’ve never seen anything like the bravura car chase sequence he pulls off late in the film. Warner Bros. has bet big on storytellers this year, evidenced by superb releases from Ryan Coogler and James Gunn over the past several months, and they’ve saved the best for last.

Score – 5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Eleanor The Great, a drama starring June Squibb and Erin Kellyman, telling the story of a 94-year-old Floridian woman who, after a devastating loss, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a 19-year-old student while visiting New York City.
Only coming to theaters is The Strangers: Chapter 2, a horror sequel starring Madelaine Petsch and Gabriel Basso, wherein a couple’s vehicle breaks down on the final day of their cross country road trip, forcing them to take refuge in a remote Airbnb.
Premiering on Apple TV+ is All Of You, a sci-fi romance starring Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots, about two best friends who harbor an unspoken love for one another, even after a test matches one of them up with their supposed soulmate.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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