All posts by Brent Leuthold

Reel Views, Review

100 Nights Of Hero

As niche holiday releases go, 100 Nights Of Hero is proudly about as niche as it gets. Based on the New York Times Bestselling graphic novel The One Hundred Nights Of Hero, itself a reworking of the timeless One Thousand And One Nights folktale, the film feels like it was made exclusively for those who already find themselves enamored with the text. It has the pomp and theatricality of a costume drama mixed with the romanticism and whimsy of a lovelorn fantasy; if Emerald Fennell was told she needed to tone it down and spin up a PG-13 period piece, this might be what she’d come up with. As such, the movie comes up with a few empowering moments and poignant exchanges but at 91 minutes, it feels curiously attenuated for something that’s derived from a retelling of an epic tale. When each of your Nights is less than a minute of average, it may be a sign that you don’t have enough for a feature-length project.

Taking place in the far-off land of Migal Bavel, 100 Nights Of Hero stars Maika Monroe as Lady Cherry, the waifish bride living in an opulent castle with the uncaring Lord Jerome (Amir El-Masry) and a bevy of armed guards. The only kindness in the kingdom afforded to Cherry comes from her loyal maid Hero (Emma Corrin), who carries a flame for her highness that she hides carefully. Feeling pressure from religious followers known as the Beak Brothers and their leader Birdman (Richard E. Grant), the wedded couple is to produce an heir but Jerome stubbornly refuses the obligation. In a gentleman’s wager with his best chap Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), Jerome bets that he won’t be able to seduce Cherry, if given 100 nights of Jerome’s absence from the castle to do so. Manfred’s attempts to woo the fair lady come to a head when Hero attempts a seduction of her own in telling a seemingly endless story that keeps Cherry and Manfred waiting with bated breath.

In fashioning herself a Scheherazade, Hero weaves a convoluted and cliffhanger-ridden tale that Cherry and Manfred think they recognize as a fable of one of Jerome’s ex-wives, but Hero throws in enough specificities to differentiate it. The story involves three sisters, who have been learning to read and write in secret, which is forbidden in the patriarchal and oppressive Migal Bavel. One of the sisters is Rosa, played by Brat pop sensation Charli XCX in her film debut, who is pursued by a wealthy merchant that discovers her impropriety and endeavors to conceal it from the townspeople that would deem her a witch if they found out. Both the setting of 100 Nights Of Hero and the intentionally meandering allegory that Hero weaves within it point to the themes of female liberation and queer self-discovery that will ultimately serve as the movie’s raison d’être. It just all feels like window dressing for a room we’ve been invited into before.

Writer-director Julia Jackman lends some fun flourishes along the way, as with a droll recapping of Cherry’s hobbies of chess and falconry that would make Wes Anderson doff his beret. Similarly, a montage early on — with voiceover by Felicity Jones — details Jerome’s past doomed marriages with stained glass portraits captioned harshly, e.g. Janet The Barren and Sara The Unfaithful. But despite the nods to Migal Bavel as a place where women are either demonized and commodified, this doesn’t feel like a tangible place we can actually get lost in. Perhaps it’s a small budget or the limited scope of the story but we never truly get a sense of how this village actually runs and why things got to this place where revolution feels inevitable. It whiffs of a medieval mishmash of stately repression and rigid caste structures but the mythology here needed some fine tuning to feel less embryonic.

The direction of the acting is another aspect of 100 Nights Of Hero that felt underdeveloped, as most of the performers feel like they’re playing in separate projects. Emma Corrin and Nicholas Galitzine are both speaking in their native English tongue, which we’ve come to expect as “standard” for tales of lords and ladies, but California-born Maika Monroe isn’t even trying to deviate from her American accent. Following her brilliant breakthrough in It Follows ten years ago, she’s mostly stuck to horror projects that, frankly, don’t ask too much but when Monroe stars in elevated material like this, her blasé disposition sticks out like a sore thumb. She and Corrin have one scene that smolders but the rest never kindle into a romance that catches fire and is worth investing in.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, a horror sequel starring Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail, which reunites a security guard and his younger sister with the possessed animatronic cadre that haunts the defunct entertainment center Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
Streaming on Netflix is Jay Kelly, a dramedy starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, following a friendship between a famous movie star and his manager as they travel through Europe and reflect on their life choices, relationships, and legacies.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Oh. What. Fun., a Christmas comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Felicity Jones, involving a beleaguered matriarch who makes the Christmas magic happen every year for her family but they don’t realize the effort it takes until she goes missing.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Midwest Film Journal

Higher Ed: The Truman Show

Originally posted on Midwest Film Journal

“We’ve become bored with watching actors give us phony emotions.” So begins the metatextual and prescient dramedy The Truman Show, released 2 years before reality shows like Survivor and Big Brother would launch in the US and enrapture the public consciousness. The opening lines are spoken (un-phonily) by Ed Harris, the only performer in the cast to score an Oscar nomination, in addition to behind-the-camera nominees Peter Weir for Best Director and Andrew Niccol for Best Original Screenplay. Harris plays Christof, the “televisionary” director of a groundbreaking reality show that’s been running for 30 years, of which Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) is unwittingly the star. “While the world he inhabits is, in some respects, counterfeit, there’s nothing fake about Truman himself,” Christof continues during the film’s opening. “No scripts, no cue cards. It isn’t always Shakespeare, but it’s genuine. It’s a life.”

Though it’s actually located in a massive soundstage in LA, the town in which Truman believes he resides is the idyllic Seahaven, similar to the titular setting from Pleasantville, which was released a few months after The Truman Show in 1998. The most important “characters” in his life are his chipper wife Meryl (Laura Linney) and trusty drinking buddy Marlon (Noah Emmerich), though actors with earpieces in roles big and small populate this tiny town. They all get their marching orders from Christof, who runs the production from the Lunar Room control room with the help of assistants like Simeon (Paul Giamatti) and Chloe (Una Damon). Much like a serial from the 1950s, the sudden presence of a UFO sends Truman on an adventure, though the inciting incident in this case is actually a par can light falling from the sky. The questioning of his reality causes Christof to scramble as he works with his crew to preserve the illusion that has been maintained all of Truman’s life.

In the same way it’s difficult to imagine The Truman Show without Jim Carrey, it’s hard to see anyone else in the role of the prodigious puppet master besides Ed Harris. But when production kicked off, it was Dennis Hopper who filled the role of Christof before leaving just two days into the shoot, due to creative differences with Weir and producer Scott Rudin. Hopper never elaborated on what those “creative differences” were but it’s possible he played Christof as too sinister, given his streak of antagonist roles at that point in his career. If his Christof was more of a Lucifer-type, then the God-like approach that Harris came up with on short notice — he was cast mere days before production would’ve been halted — was just the ticket. It’s clear Christof has a god complex, difficult to combat when you literally cue when the sun rises for the star of your show, but it’s also clear that he truly cares for Truman too.

When asked by an interviewer how Truman has yet to discover his entire existence is an elaborate ruse, Christof cooly responds, “we accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented. It’s as simple as that.” But it takes a whole lot of work to keep this “world” going and the first scenes of The Truman Show where we spend significant time with Christof depict him hard at work keeping things running smoothly. At one point, he’s feeding lines to Marlon — more precisely, the actor playing Marlon — as he’s in the middle of an emotional conversation with Truman. “The last thing I would ever do to you…is lie to you,” he recites on the verge of tears as Christof looks on. The irony of the moment could come across as a bit of a laugh line but the way Harris whispers the lines into his headset suggest a mea culpa of sorts, that something in Christof regrets the years of deception visited upon his “creation”.

Moments of vulnerability can be difficult when everyone looks to you for strength and direction. After all, Christof has some 5000 cameras at his disposal and antsy network executives, like one played by the eminent Philip Baker Hall, ready to jump down his throat. In addition to his calm composure, Christof certainly has the wardrobe that communicates a forward-thinking control freak. It was design consultant Wendy Weir, the wife of director Peter Weir, who suggested the character sport a backward beret and round wire-rimmed glasses that just shout “genius”. He’s always dressed in black and, in one scene, he’s even wearing the same kind of dark turtleneck sweater that Steve Jobs made famous earlier in the decade. Harris completes the ensemble with a pensive fist to the chin, suggesting that Christof the only kind of gifted mind who could take on the task of crafting Truman’s surroundings.

It’s hard to discuss Ed Harris’ work in The Truman Show without going over the film’s final scene, so apologies in advance for those who haven’t seen it. After many obstacles, including a literal firewall and a biblically strong storm at sea, Truman valiantly sails to the edge of “Seahaven” and rams his boat into the soundstage’s wall. As he makes his way up cloud-painted stairs to a disguised exit door, Christof speaks to Truman for the first time as his words echo through the gargantuan ecosphere like the voice of God. Face-to-face with his “creator”, Truman asks “was nothing real?” to which Christof asserts “You were real. That’s what made you so good to watch.” Truman is obviously the hero of The Truman Show, which makes Christof the de facto villain, but Harris plays him with such genuine care and concern that he’s hard to hate.

Reel Views, Review

Eternity

Joan is in a tricky place. To begin with: she’s dead. When she wakes up in the afterlife, she’s on a train headed for a terminal where recently departed souls choose where to spend their eternity. This cinematic version of limbo, called the Junction, is like Grand Central Station crossed with a packed convention center atop of a milquetoast 3-star hotel. New arrivals walk around disoriented by their new state of being, while Afterlife Coordinators (ACs, for short) assist them underneath an enormous “departures” board. It’s explained that the appearance of the newly deceased is dictated by the time in their lives when they were happiest, so old Joan (played by Betty Buckley) now reverts to her younger self (played by Elizabeth Olsen). Her husband of 65 years Larry (played by Barry Primus) died a week earlier and his mid-30s manifestation (played by Miles Teller) almost doesn’t recognize Joan as she passes on an escalator.

As they reunite and marvel at their mutual recaptured youth, the honeymoon phase doesn’t last long as Joan’s first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, appears. He’s been waiting for her in the liminal Junction for 67 years, tending bar and delaying eternity until he can see his “girl back home” once again. Glossy-eyed and mouth agape, Joan whispers, “I never dreamt you this clearly,” as she and Larry stare at the reanimated Luke with decidedly different emotional reactions. The awkward reunion/meeting is exacerbated by a pair of ACs (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early) who tell Joan she has a week to decide where, and with whom, she wants to spend the rest of her afterlife. Women in romcoms have been put in high pressure love triangles before but given the stakes, the one in which Joan finds herself here feels particularly nerve-racking.

Despite its existential themes, Eternity is a resolutely good-natured and utterly charming cross-generational crowd-pleaser, a cinematic cornucopia perfect for families on the hunt for Thanksgiving viewing. The risible screenplay, co-written by Pat Cunnane and director David Freyne, finds plenty of opportunities to quip about the absurdity of the setting while still taking Joan’s dilemma seriously. The hall of the Junction is packed with representatives from eternities like Beach World and Mountain World clamoring to pitch the perks of their realms to prospective clientele. As the ACs explain: once you pick your place, you’re stuck there forever, so it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. Anyone caught trying to escape from their eternity is tracked down by security and sent to “the void”, as a fugitive from Museum World, who tires from looking at paintings all the time, finds out firsthand.

Freyne’s direction doesn’t get too hung up on the fantastical details within each of these otherworldly domains and instead focuses on the romantic conundrum that ensnares the love-locked trio. Larry immediately figures he’s the obvious choice for Joan but the more time she spends making up for lost time with Luke, the more Larry justifiably becomes nervous. Because so much time has passed since Luke died, he’s keenly aware that Joan’s crystallized memory of him is a more idealized version of who he actually is. The three play off each other terrifically, especially Teller and Turner as rivals Larry and Luke, who snipe at each other both in front of Joan and behind her back. A performance detail I enjoyed was how Olsen and Teller, whose characters on Earth were in their 90s, bring an old timer timbre to their line deliveries.

As funny and sweet as the main three are, Eternity‘s secret weapons are Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as Anna and John, the ACs for Larry and Joan, respectively. In a sense, they’re akin to audience surrogates, cheerleaders for each of the beaus that Joan will potentially pick for her great beyond. As they represent “Team Larry” and “Team Luke”, they get some of the script’s snappiest lines supporting their assigned suitors; “there’s nothing more powerful than emotional blackmail,” Anna cheekily advises Larry. Even though the film has plenty of moments to make us laugh, it has just as many that make us reflect on the eternal wonder of love, and assuredly has moments that will have certain audience members grabbing for tissues. If it feels like forever since a good romantic comedy came out, don’t wait too long to see Eternity.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this week:
Opening in theaters is Zootopia 2, an animated comedy sequel starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, reuniting rabbit cop Judy Hopps with wily fox Nick Wilde as they team up to crack a new case against the mysterious pit viper Gary De’Snake.
Streaming on Netflix is Left-Handed Girl, a family drama starring Janel Tsai and Shih-Yuan Ma, following a single mother and her two daughters as they relocate to Taipei to open a night market stall, each navigating the challenges of adapting to their new environment.
Also premiering on Netflix is Jingle Bell Heist, a Christmas romcom starring Olivia Holt and Connor Swindells, involving two thieves who realize they both have designs on robbing the same department store at the height of the holiday season in London.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Predator: Badlands

After a detour on Hulu, with two entries that streamed exclusively on the platform, the Predator franchise is back on the big screen for the first time since the 2018 dud The Predator. Those direct-to-Hulu movies, Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers, and this latest theatrical release, Predator: Badlands, are all headed up by 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg, who has effectively taken over the series for 20th Century Studios. Reteaming with his Prey scribe Patrick Aison, Trachtenberg continues to delve deeper into this treacherous universe and reconsider what a Predator movie can even be. This particular chapter explores more about the Yautja extraterrestrial species, who typically act as the “Predator” villains in most of the other films but essentially serve as the main characters this time out.

On the planet Yautja Prime, we meet the brothers Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Kwei (Mike Homik) as they spar to train and prove themselves to their bloodthirsty tribe. As the runt of their clan, Dek is even most desperate to assert his dominance and ventures to the deadly planet Genna in order to win the respect of his father Njohrr (Reuben de Jong). There, he intends to hunt the “unkillable” Kalisk creature and bring it back as a trophy, as their kind is wont to do. On other planets, the Yautja may be considered “predators” but on Genna, they’re lower down on the food chain and about as vulnerable as the humans were in the original ’80s actioner that kicked things off 38 years ago. Fortunately, Dek finds help in the form of Thia (Elle Fanning), a bisected android whose knowledge of Genna and its perils can help Dek on his mission.

Reframing a Predator movie as one where the titular creature is on the run as opposed to running things lends itself to a hero’s journey and Badlands makes a proper protagonist out of Dek. Thanks to stellar motion-capture work by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, this is the most expressive and vulnerable a Yautja alien has looked in the franchise thus far. Sure, they may not be much more glamorous than how Arnold memorably described them in Predator, but Dek’s eyes adequately convey the emotions we need to relate to his struggles. There are other tweaks to the design that help too, like leaving Dek without the typical Yautja armor and giving him one tooth that’s shorter than the other three to drive home his underdog state. As his peppy sidekick, Elle Fanning sometimes lays it on a bit thick but Thia’s wide-eyed optimism generally plays well against Dek’s fierce determination.

Predator: Badlands is rated PG-13 but it certainly doesn’t skimp on the sci-fi action that we’ve come to expect from these movies; apparently the MPA goes easier on bloodletting when the blood in question is bright green. Thia isn’t exaggerating when she tells Dek that everything on the planet is designed with death in mind. Not two minutes after crash landing on Genna, branch monsters are out to kill the new visiting Yautja. With spontaneously exploding caterpillars and fields of grass so sharp that it can cut flesh just by grazing it, this is clearly a planet that woke up and chose violence. The ways that Dek and Thia battle back implement creative creature design and inventive choreography, as when Dek first tangos with the Kalisk to find that it can regenerate limbs at an alarming rate. Another terrific fight scene finds Thia’s disconnected top half and bottom half simultaneously duking it out with fellow Weyland-Yutani synthetic robots.

In attempting to expand this universe, Trachtenberg and his team have dug deeper into the mythology behind the Yautja creatures and have woven themes about how they live into Predator: Badlands. “The Yautja are prey to no one, friend to no one and predator to all,” an opening card reads, but Dek’s tale of rugged determination intentionally calls these core tenets into question. It turns out the lone wolf strategy doesn’t work so well when you’re this far away from home field advantage and, as Thia reminds Dek, the alpha wolf isn’t necessarily the strongest but the one who best protects the pack. It’s a long way from macho contras getting picked off one by one in a Central American rainforest but, perhaps improbably, Trachtenberg is 3 for 3 in telling unique stories from this initially myopic Predator world.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Wicked: For Good, a fantasy musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, continuing the tale of Oz citizens Elphaba and Glinda as they embrace their new identities of Wicked Witch Of The West and Glinda The Good.
Also playing in theaters is Rental Family, a family dramedy starring Brendan Fraser and Takehiro Hira, centering around an American actor living in Tokyo who starts working for a Japanese “rental family” service to play stand-in roles in other people’s lives.
Premiering on Netflix is Train Dreams, a period drama starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, following a logger who works to develop the railroad system across the US, causing him to spend time away from his family as he struggles with his place in a changing world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay isn’t a director who makes movies for the brittle of spirit. 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin depicts a mother reeling from unspeakable violence committed by her teenage son, while 2018’s You Were Never Really Here follows a mercenary tasked with finding the kidnapped daughter of a politician. Her latest psychological drama, Die My Love, is a similarly bruising tale of a young couple who seem to have an ideal life set out before them. We meet the pregnant Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) as they navigate around the dead leaves inside the rural house that belonged to the latter’s late uncle. It could use some fixing up and TLC to make it a proper home but they’ve decided they want to make the move, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city to raise their forthcoming bundle of joy.

Moving out to the sticks also means they’ll have help from Jackson’s mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) and her friends, all of whom make themselves frequent visitors at the residence, though not as chaotically as the
“guests” in the Jennifer Lawrence-starring mother!. Sadly, Jackson’s dad Harry (Nick Nolte) isn’t as much of a presence due to his worsening dementia that contributes to outbursts he has towards his son and his girlfriend. A different kind of crisis is brewing within Grace, who, to put it mildly, is struggling amid new motherhood. Yes, their son wakes them up in the middle of the night and, as with most new parents, Grace and Jackson both struggle with getting sleep. But the unease within Grace is something deeper, pointing to a deteriorating emotional state that threatens to unravel everything they’ve built as a family.

As with Joaquin Phoenix and Tilda Swinton in Lynne Ramsay’s two previous features, the strongest element of her films can be found in the lead performance and it’s certainly the case here with Jennifer Lawrence. Presumably drawing from her own experience as a new mom, she gives a fierce and relentless performance that feels like it’s crawled its way out of her onto the screen. An interrogation of a woman’s psyche might have caused most actresses to play things more insular but Lawrence puts everything out there, leaving no doubt about the primal instincts that are brewing within Grace. The physicality and emotional abandon of the role are impressive enough but I also appreciated the sardonic wit that she lets through as well. She’s short-tempered with pretty much everyone, from Jackson to friends at a party to the cashier at a local store. Yes, it’s sad that the lashing out points to mental health instability but Lawrence makes Grace’s moodiness quite funny nonetheless.

As good as Jennifer Lawrence is in the lead role, I wish Lynne Ramsay and her co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch crafted a fleshed-out story that rises to the level of the acting. Ramsay’s movies typically have a disorienting sense of pacing and chronology, which also applies to Die My Love, but the rhythm this time feels jarring without actually lending itself to meaningful tension in the narrative. Working for the first time with editor Toni Froschhammer, Ramsay will forgo important events that would have a bearing on the plot but then focus on smaller moments for longer than necessary. Perhaps that’s the intent — to mirror the way the protagonist is trying to ignore consequential mile markers and accentuate minutia — but as such, it’s a deterrent to the dramatic weight of the material.

Much like 2024’s Nightbitch, another tale of a mother coping with the stresses of raising a child without much help from the father, Die My Love has a great ear for the kinds of goofy songs one plays to satiate a newborn. None of the needle drops here are quite as good as “Dare To Be Stupid” from that Amy Adams vehicle last year, but the movie nevertheless throws down early with a sped-up version of Chubby Checker “The Twist” and follows through with the Raffi classic “Apples And Bananas”. In another scene, Grace replays Toni Basil’s “Mickey” an inadvisable amount of times, enough to temporarily be possessed to scale the stairs like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Unfortunately, the movie ends with a dud of a final song choice over the credits, an underwhelming cover of a thuddingly obvious selection. Die My Love is another successful venture by Lynne Ramsay to get us in the headspace of the protagonist, even if it doesn’t give us enough to do once we’re there.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Running Man, starring Glen Powell and Josh Brolin, is a dystopian action thriller re-adapting the Stephen King novel about a game show where contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are pursued by “hunters” hired to kill them.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, is a heist sequel in which the legendary Four Horsemen magicians recruit three skilled illusionists for a high-stakes diamond robbery.
Keeper, starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, is a surrealist horror film about a romantic anniversary trip to a secluded cabin that turns sinister when a dark presence reveals itself, forcing a couple to confront the property’s haunting past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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