The new Steven Soderbergh film Presence is a ghost story, albeit an unconventional one. It can’t be neatly described as a horror movie or even a thriller, genre-wise fitting in most closely to a supernatural family drama. The events of the film are shown entirely from the perspective of what we come to find is a displaced spirit that seems to reside within a house built in the early 20th century. As is the case for the past dozen or so projects that Soderbergh has directed, he also serves as editor and, especially important this time around, as cinematographer as well. Regardless of what one thinks of Soderbergh — candidly, he’s one of my favorite living filmmakers — it’s difficult to deny he’s one of the hardest-working storytellers in Hollywood.

Though Presence isn’t a scary movie, it does start out like traditional horror fare. We see a real estate agent, played by Julia Fox, arrive at a newly listed house just ahead of a family interested in snatching it off the market. Soon, Rebecca (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) arrive with their two teenage children Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang) and before long, they’re all moved in. As we spend more time with the family, we see fractures in the relationship between Rebecca and Chris, while Chloe has become more reclusive after the unexpected death of her best friend. Eager to become popular at their new school district, Tyler invites swim teammate Ryan (West Mulholland) over to sneak drinks from mom’s liquor cabinet and he soon takes interest in Chloe.

Presence is the second collaboration between Soderbergh and blockbuster screenwriter David Koepp, their first being the excellent covid-era thriller Kimi and their next being Black Bag, set to release this March. Since the visual storytelling is limited to the vantage point of the titular “presence”, Koepp’s script is crucial in filling us in on what’s going on with this family and how this poltergeist fits into it. Though the dialogue can seem a bit too forced or on-the-nose at times, it nevertheless gives us what we need to attach ourselves to these characters. There are also several exchanges whose resonance doesn’t fully land until after the film’s ending; “there is an excellent man inside of you, Tyler; I would love to see him soon,” Chris chides his son after the latter mistreats his sister.

Another Soderbergh staple is working with smaller casts that are mixed with both recognizable faces and actors with more limited resumes. The latter, in this case, applies to Eddy Maday and West Mulholland, who give performances that initially read as “slack-jawed jock” but are given layers as the story progresses. The standout of the better-known actors is Chris Sullivan, playing a father at his wit’s end trying to remedy his daughter’s sadness and his son’s arrogance. I wish that Lucy Liu’s character had a bit more development — there are implications that whatever her character does for work isn’t on the up-and-up but never explicitly told what it is — but she gets a scene of walloping emotion towards the end.

Compared to other releases from the distributor Neon over the next few months, Presence is much more subtle and subdued. During the pre-roll for the movie, trailers played for upcoming titles The Monkey and Hell Of A Summer, both bombastic splatterfests that fit in better with the brand of iconoclastic product Neon tends to put out. In an effort to market Soderbergh’s latest, they’ve mimicked competitor A24’s style with off-kilter violin stabs and pull quotes that pitch it as a terrifying horror film and even “one of the scariest movies you’ll see this year”. Anyone who goes into Presence with that expectation will be disappointed but if you’re up for a quietly haunting tale about regret and redemption, then you’ll want to be present for this one.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Companion, a horror film starring Sophie Thatcher and Jack Quaid, that follows a weekend getaway among friends at a remote cabin, which unravels into chaos after one of the guests has a startling revelation about themselves.
Also playing in theaters is Dog Man, an animated superhero comedy starring Pete Davidson and Lil Rel Howery, following a faithful police dog and his human police officer owner who are injured together on the job but a life-saving surgery fuses the two of them together.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is You’re Cordially Invited, a romcom starring Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon, about two weddings that are double-booked at the same venue, causing the father of one bride and the sister of the other bride to try and preserve the wedding weekend.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Released right before the pandemic shut theaters down worldwide, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man was a smart, suspenseful and successful reimagining of the 1933 Universal Monsters classic. Five years later, Whannell has adapted a similar tack for Wolf Man, a redo of the lycanthrope-centric chiller from 1941. While updating horror properties from that era isn’t necessarily a bad plan, this latest entry proves that having the same filmmaker continue to refresh them may not be the best way forward. Originally, this project was to star Ryan Gosling, with his two-time collaborator Derek Cianfrance to direct, and while it’s difficult to know how that would’ve turned out, it’s not hard to imagine a comparatively more challenging result creatively.

Wolf Man centers around the San Francisco-based Lovell family, with Charlotte (Julia Garner) working long hours in the city as a journalist, while Blake (Christopher Abbott) serves as stay-at-home dad to their daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth). Blake gets word that his estranged father Grady (Sam Jaeger) has been officially declared dead after going missing near his home in rural Oregon and in an effort to settle his affairs, the three make the trip up north together. En route, their moving truck crashes in the woods and though everyone makes it out alive, Blake sustains a scratch from an unseen creature while in the wilderness. The Lovells make it on foot to Grady’s secluded house but as the night goes on, Blake gradually turns into something monstrous and dangerous for Charlotte and Ginger.

A prologue that depicts a younger Blake and Grady on a hunting trip in the mid-90s seems to set up Wolf Man‘s would-be thesis about parental responsibility and cycles of generational emotional damage. Unfortunately, Leigh Whannell and his co-scribe Corbett Tuck aren’t able to marry those themes to the material nearly as well as Whannell did previously in The Invisible Man. Instead, most of the movie falls into tired body horror tropes as Blake loses human trappings like fingernails and teeth, while Charlotte and Ginger look on wide-eyed and worried. Whannell throws in the occasional curveball, as when Blake’s hearing is amplified to the degree that a spider crawling on a wall comes through to him as thunderous thumping sounds, but there aren’t enough of those to keep his transformation interesting.

The majority of Wolf Man is in the hands of Abbott, Garner and Firth while they’re holed up in the farm house and while they’re all doing their best, the script gives them very little much to work with. Abbott is a talented actor but even he can’t find a way to make his character break through as his speech breaks down and the werewolf prosthetics pile on. Garner is even more underserved here, saddled with an underwritten wife role that completely squanders the commendable range she displayed in much better movies like The Assistant and The Royal Hotel. Though Abbott and Garner are portraying characters who are struggling with a strained marriage, it doesn’t help that the actors really don’t have any chemistry with one another that makes them worth rooting for.

Once Blake goes full lupine, Wolf Man crawls through familiar horror beats where mother and daughter run and hide from the scary monster that has emerged. While there are occasionally tense moments, Whannell and his cinematographer Stefan Duscio too often opt for dimly-lit scenes that don’t clearly present the characters’ struggle. There are certainly interesting ways to use lighting — or an absence of light — in horror movies, but nearly every scene in the second half of this movie made me want to crank the screen’s brightness slider to the right. It’s possible this could’ve been intentional to cover up the stodgy and stilted computer-generated effects, which don’t look nearly as convincing as the laudable makeup work. Universal will no doubt keep reviving their Classic Monster lineup but this Wolf Man would’ve been better left in its cage.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Brutalist, starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones, is a period drama about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect who survives the Holocaust and immigrates to the United States, where he struggles to achieve the American Dream until a wealthy client changes his life.
Inheritance, starring Phoebe Dynevor and Rhys Ifans, is an espionage thriller about a young woman who is drawn into an international conspiracy after discovering her father is a spy.
Flight Risk, starring Mark Wahlberg and Topher Grace, is an action film about a pilot who transports an Air Marshal and a fugitive to trial but they cross the Alaskan wilderness, tensions soar as not everyone on board is who they seem.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Filed neatly between Cruel Intentions 2 and Dumb And Dumber To in the “Unexpected Sequels” drawer, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera comes seven years after the Gerard Butler-fronted action thriller Den Of Thieves. It seems time has mellowed the now-franchise a bit, as the first entry was a much more brash and bawdy bank robbery saga, while Pantera generally plays things a bit cooler and more collected. A change of setting could be mainly responsible for the shift, the predecessor a gritty cops and robbers tale out of Los Angeles and the successor a Rififi riff centered in France’s World Diamond District. Crucially, returning players Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. get much more screen time together and mine terrific chemistry with each other. I didn’t know I needed a Den Of Thieves sequel but after seeing Pantera, I’d certainly welcome another.

As teased at the end of Den Of Thieves, Den Of Thieves 2: Pantera finds wheelman-turned-criminal mastermind Donnie Wilson (Jackson Jr.) overseas on the hunt for world-class jewelry. His latest hold-up at an Antwerp airport puts him back on the radar of “Big Nick” O’Brien (Butler), still out to find the culprits of the Federal Reserve robbery from the previous film. A trip across the pond confirms Nick’s suspicion that Donnie has indeed moved his operation to Europe but when the two meet, Nick claims he’s left the LA Sheriff’s Department behind and wants in on Donnie’s latest score. After some initial reluctance, Donnie invites Nick to join his band of “Panthers” to knock off the vault of the World Diamond Center in a heavily guarded sector of Nice, France.

An area that Den Of Thieves largely falters that the superior sequel streamlines is in the character development between the beats of planning the central heist. Donnie was very much a side character in the first movie, while Nick’s character moments were couched in cop clichés, exemplified by a lengthy scene where he drunkenly confronts his soon-to-be ex-wife about recently-served divorce papers. Pantera finds more success in having these two characters initially parlay with hesitancy but gradually find partnership in their shared experiences on opposite sides of the law. Does it really seem likely that Nick would team up with Donnie after the events of Den Of Thieves? Put frankly: not really. But Butler and Jackson Jr. make their time together electric enough that it doesn’t matter much.

Writer/director Christian Gudegast also lets us in more this time when it comes to the details of how the thieves are going to go about their mission. While dazzling, the extended robbery sequence in Den Of Thieves gets quite convoluted and it can be easy to lose track of what exactly is going according to plan and what isn’t. Pantera‘s major setpiece occurs around the hour-and-a-half mark and by that point, we’ve been treated to numerous insert shots and voiceovers relaying how the Panther crew is intending for things to go down. The break-in is either very quiet or completely silent but thanks to the groundwork established by Gudegast and terrific editing from Roberth Nordh, the heist is both easy to follow and unbearably tense at the same time.

Although it doesn’t always feel its length, Pantera almost scrapes up against the two-and-a-half hour runtime marker and could certainly have some fat trimmed to make the rest of the movie as exciting as the climactic burglary. Den Of Thieves had a similar issue at 140 minutes but the extraneous scenes there — most obviously one where Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s character shakes down his daughter’s prom date — seem much easier to pick out. Pantera certainly isn’t without the occasional macho posturing carried over from the original but on the whole, it’s a more mature and thoughtfully-constructed crime caper that ends with another cliffhanger. The Den might not have felt as cozy on the first go ’round but with Pantera, Christian Gudegast has welcomed in action aficionados the world over with open arms.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Wolf Man, a horror film starring Christopher Abbott and Julia Garner, following a family at a remote farmhouse who is attacked by an unseen animal and as the night stretches on, the father begins to transform into something unrecognizable.
Also playing only in theaters is One Of Them Days, a buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, about a young woman and her roommate who race against the clock to avoid eviction and keep their friendship intact when the former’s boyfriend takes their rent money.
Streaming on Netflix is Back In Action, an action comedy starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, revolving around a duo of former CIA spies who are pulled back into the world of espionage after their secret identities are exposed.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup