Monthly Archives: July 2026

Reel Views, Review

Her Private Hell

Premiering at the Cannes Film Festival two months ago, Nicolas Winding Refn’s Her Private Hell represents the Danish filmmaker’s return to the big screen after a ten-year detour developing streaming series for Amazon Prime and Netflix. Fortunately or unfortunately, he picks up right where he left off. His latest cinematic provocation plays like a woozy mashup of his Muay Thai saga Only God Forgives from 2013 and haute couture horror vision The Neon Demon from 2016. While those two movies weren’t the masterpieces Refn likely thinks they are, they at least had coherent storylines and tangible motivations to rise above their pretentious trappings. Even though it runs shy of two hours, Her Private Hell will test the patience of many going into the theater unacquainted with Refn’s lugubrious pacing and laconic characters.

The film opens on an impossibly foggy cityscape, settling at the street level of the neon-spined Tower Hotel, as the young actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher) enters its decadent lobby. There she meets Hunter (Kristine Froseth), a showbiz hopeful who says she lost her luggage upon arriving to the mist-muddled metropolis. Elle takes her in and introduces Hunter to Dominique (Havana Rose Liu), the seductive stepmom who’s slithered her way into the heart of Elle’s dad Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott). Elsewhere in the dystopian cityscape is the soigné soldier Private K (Charles Melton), traveling storefronts and pounding the pavement to look for his recently missing daughter. Tenuously uniting their stories is the presence of a serial killer known as “Leatherman”, a shadowy figure who’s been dispatching young women in gratuitously violent fashion ever since the supernatural haze engulfed their town.

While Refn’s works are far from narratively complex, Her Private Hell is his most intentionally bifurcated, split unevenly between psychosexual giallo fairytale and Yakuza revenge thriller. If he had committed to one of those two disparate genre fascinations, it’s possible the film could’ve worked, as the two distinct partitions have glimmers of hope in scenes that work on their own terms. A Rear Window-esque sequence, where Elle and Hunter watch helplessly from across the street as Leatherman claims a victim in her hotel room, tracks the same bead of tension Brian De Palma learned studying Alfred Hitchcock. Further cementing the connection is ravishing corresponding music from longtime De Palma collaborator Pino Donaggio, who delivers a riveting Bernard Herrmann-inspired score that’s one of the year’s finest.

The moments we spent with Private K, as he makes his way pursuing leads through the criminal underworld, tend to get redundant but happen upon their own moments of brilliance. Her Private Hell‘s best scene is a bravura fight setpiece that starts with K in an antique store surrounded by henchmen, gradually working its way out through an alley and finishing on the city streets. But when it comes time to intertwine Elle and K’s stories in a meaningful way, Refn comes up woefully short. The screenplay from Refn and co-writer Esti Giordani can’t justify why these characters would even meet in the first place, much less dedicate so much time to K without developing his character. The tense relationship between Elle and Dominique is the closest thing the movie has in terms of emotional connection, but their scenes of histrionic conflict don’t bring out the best in the performances by Sophie Thatcher and Havana Rose Liu.

In addition to Refn’s obsession with garish lighting — fittingly, this film is being distributed by NEON — and tight leather, Her Private Hell is also preoccupied with the mommy issues and bruised masculinity that Refn has more productively investigated before. More specifically, he returns to psychoanalytical symbolism regarding hands, foreshadowed by a glass sculpture in establishing shots of the city and paid off during the gauzy climax. 15 years after the release of his breathtaking breakout Drive, that thriller’s stylishly stellar interplay of film noir and car-centric action now registers as more of a happy accident than an announcement of Nicolas Winding Refn as a top-tier talent. At this point, it barely feels like he’s making movies for anyone besides himself, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he has difficulty finding funding for whatever private hells he comes up with in the future.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Premiering in theaters is Spider-Man: Brand New Day, a superhero sequel starring Tom Holland and Zendaya, which picks up after the events of No Way Home where the world has forgotten Peter Parker exists, finding him anonymously protecting New York City as the hero Spider-Man.
Also playing in theaters is I Want Your Sex, a comedic erotic thriller starring Olivia Wilde and Cooper Hoffman, which follows a naïve young man who becomes the new assistant and muse for a renowned and provocative artist.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is The Devil’s Mouth, a survival thriller starring Kathryn Newton and Lana Condor, concerning a group of college friends’ Thailand adventure that turns deadly when they become trapped in submerged caves with a dangerous predator.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

The Odyssey

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” So reads the chilling opening text of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s masterful biopic surrounding the father of the atomic bomb. In his latest theatrical excursion, Nolan gets even more literal with myth deconstruction by adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, the ancient text that launched a thousand hero’s journeys. Despite being one of the few modern directors who can claim to be a household name, Nolan confesses he didn’t quite feel he had the “blank check” he wanted for his monomyth but when his first outing with Universal Pictures scored 7 Oscars, the ask became more realistic. As a result, The Odyssey is the auteur’s grandest spectacle, one that feels both state-of-the-art and a work that could endure as long as the epic poem that inspired it.

Following his victory in the Trojan War, Ithaca’s king Odysseus (Matt Damon) parts with Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) and Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) as he sets course for he and his men to go home. On their way, they encounter numerous grueling obstacles, including a skirmish with Poseidon’s one-eyed son Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) and a battle with the giant Laestrygonians of Aeaea. The years-long trek creates a power struggle in Ithaca, as Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is pursued by slimy suitors like Antinous (Robert Pattinson) in the king’s absence. Desperate to find his father and aid him in his voyage home, Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland) works with faithful farmer Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) to get Odysseus back to an Ithaca that becomes more dangerous to his return with each passing day.

Characteristic of almost every Christopher Nolan movie that’s come before it, The Odyssey is told in a non-linear fashion, weaving in glimpses of past and future that give the narrative both context and resonance. While I’m sure brushing up on Greek mythology before seeing the film wouldn’t hurt, you don’t need to call up your high school English teacher for a refresher on Homer’s tale before walking into the theater. The screenplay uses vernacular that may sound a touch too modern in a few places but, on the whole, does an outstanding job setting the table and defining the stakes. In juggling myriad characters, both human and magical, Nolan never loses the thread of how all of the story elements weave into a timeless tapestry about honor and justice. He also imbues his take on the legend with somber reflections on the nature of memory and the toll of combat on the warrior’s psyche.

Even by Nolan standards, the ensemble cast of The Odyssey, which also includes Charlize Theron and Zendaya in mystical roles, is especially sprawling and full to the gunwales with talent. Every actor makes the most of their, in some cases, minutes-long appearance but the commanding performance at the center of this fantastical adventure remains the film’s finest. As ubiquitous a movie star as Matt Damon is now, his work here is so electrifying and layered that it reminds us why his stature in Hollywood has remained so strong for the past 30 years. Though this Odysseus calls back to defining characters from Damon’s filmography, be they the amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne or his abandoned voyager The Martian, the stalwart actor plays notes of regret and yearning that you feel in your chest.

A question lingering over The Odyssey prior to its release is how Nolan, infamous for his insistence on practical effects over CGI, would translate the fantasy portions of Homer’s text to the screen. While monsters like Charybdis and Scylla are computer-generated, the majority of the events are captured in the most tangible terms possible. The sequence involving Odysseus’s men trapped in a cave with a Cyclops is terrifying in no small part due to the practicality and “realism” of the creature design and sound design. Another arduous affair on Aeaea seamlessly blurs the line between the origin of the visual effects for the movie’s most horrifyingly effective setpiece. Every piece of Ruth De Jong’s world-class production design makes this universe feel impossibly expansive, one that audiences will undoubtedly be rewarded for revisiting multiple times on the largest screen possible. The word “epic” gets thrown around plenty these days but if The Odyssey doesn’t warrant the superlative, nothing else does.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Her Private Hell, a sci-fi thriller starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, following a troubled young woman who searches for her father after a mysterious mist engulfs their futuristic city and unleashes a deadly, elusive entity.
Also playing only in theaters is Hadestown: The Musical, a live stage recording of the Broadway production that retells the Greek mythology legends of Orpheus & Eurydice and Hades & Persephone.
Premiering on Apple TV is The Dink, a sports comedy starring Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller, telling the tale of an aging tennis pro who must go against his instincts and play pickleball to save a local club.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass

It’s been too long since we last saw a theatrical release from comedic dynamo David Wain. Since the 2014 romcom-spoofing They Came Together, the writer/director has worked with Netflix to create a Doug Kenney biopic, two Wet Hot American Summer spin-off shows and the hospital drama send-up series Medical Police. Now he’s back to the cineplex with the abundantly silly Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass and while it’s not the strongest effort in Wain’s canon, it features enough moments of absurd comedy that concisely epitomize his singular brand of humor. Existing somewhere between the high-concept yuks of Role Models and the go-for-broke sketch pacing of The Ten, Wain’s latest work doesn’t feel as structurally sound as his output from the aughts but delivers its fair share of laughs from his most impressive cast yet.

We meet bubbly hairdresser Gail Daughtry (played by Zoey Deutch) two weeks before she’s set to marry her fiancé Tom (Michael Cassidy) in their quaint suburban town of Willowbrook, Kansas. Inspired by a conversation with her friend and Bluebird Salon co-worker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley), Gail asks Tom about a “celebrity sex pass”, effectively a get-out-of-jail-free card for one consequence-free hookup with someone famous. Gobsmacked by how quickly Tom is able to cash in on his pick, Gail travels with Otto to Los Angeles for a stylist convention so she can bed her choice before her wedding day. After an accidental briefcase swap upon her arrival in the LAX terminal, Gail unwittingly puts herself in the crosshairs of Ludovica (Sabrina Impacciatore), a criminal mastermind looking to disrupt the global economy with confidential intel.

Joining Gail on her now-perilous journey to make things even with her fiancé are an aspiring movie agent, played by Ben Wang, and a paparazzo looking for redemption, played by the film’s co-writer and Wain regular Ken Marino. Fans of Reno 911! will also be happy to see alums like Thomas Lennon and Kerri Kenney-Silver, who both collaborated with Wain previously in The Ten, pop up as memorably goofy characters. There are a few blink-and-you’ll-miss-them cameos from even bigger stars going back to the Wet Hot American Summer days. Though the film hinges on the presence of a couple well-known actors playing themselves — given that one of them is the target for the titular tryst — Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass doesn’t do all that much to either play into or subvert their existing personas. Had the film been able to conceal Gail’s choice from its marketing or selected a celebrity not already known for comedy chops, it could’ve made for a fun surprise.

All of the performers commit fully to the movie’s screwy version of Hollywood and as the doe-eyed lead on an outlandish adventure, Zoey Deutch holds the center beautifully. Her ability to tap into Gail’s “aw shucks” naiveté, while being able to switch into bloodthirsty or lascivious gears on a dime, evinces Deutch’s comic versatility. She has a similar kind of magnetic effervescence that Kristen Bell had in her breakout role for Forgetting Sarah Marshall back in 2008. Deutch has fine foils in Sabrina Impacciatore’s Italian villainess and her pair of henchmen, played by Wain mainstays Joe Lo Truglio and Mather Zickel. As the hapless Sergio and Niccolo, they spend an embarrassing amount of screen time searching the dark web for leads, when much more obvious clues are readily available.

As with his previous endeavors, Wain makes a meal of whatever dramatically familiar beat or trope strikes his fancy in any given moment, pulverizing it beyond recognition with an exaggerated repetition that’s become his trademark. But at a macro level, whatever genre he seems to be poking fun at this time never feels fully realized. I gather the closest type of film he seems to be satirizing is one in the romantic self-discovery category à la Eat, Pray, Love but the movie doesn’t feel specific enough in its parody to land on that front. There are also numerous The Wizard Of Oz allusions — I take “Gail Daughtry” to be a play on Dorothy Gale — but the inverted parallels to that classic tale never fully materialize into meaningful pastiche. Even though Gail Daughtry And The Celebrity Sex Pass isn’t as conceptually well-realized as Wain’s other outings, there are still plenty of hilarious gags sprinkled throughout to give it a pass.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Odyssey, an epic fantasy starring Matt Damon and Tom Holland, adapting Homer’s ancient Greek tale about the king of Ithaca’s long and perilous journey home, in which he encounters several mythical beings, after the Trojan War.
Streaming on Hulu is They Fight, a coming-of-age sports drama starring André Holland and Wendell Pierce, following a reformed ex-con who finds redemption by coaching a motley crew of teenage boxers at a local youth facility in Washington, D.C.
Premiering on Disney+ is Descendants: Wicked Wonderland, a fantasy sequel starring Kylie Cantrall and Malia Baker, continuing the adventures of the daughters of the Queen Of Hearts and of Cinderella as they play host to the Kingdom Cup Games.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup