What do you get when you cross a loosely-adapted comic book movie with a billion dollars at the box office and 11 Oscar nominations? Well, you get Joker: Folie à Deux, a sequel borne not of artistic necessity but of financial potentiality. On paper, it doesn’t seem like a lazy effort; after all, it’s a full-blown musical that spends most of its runtime either in a prison or a courtroom. But it’s clear that director and co-writer Todd Phillips is simply out of his element here. It’s no secret that Phillips borrowed heavily from two Scorsese classics (Taxi Driver and The King Of Comedy) when creating Joker. It’s ironic (or perhaps fitting) that his follow-up seems to track so closely with Scorsese’s New York, New York, a dolefully nostalgic musical so poorly received that it sent the director into a downward spiral. Don’t be surprised if we see a black-and-white boxing epic from Phillips 5 years from now.

It’s two years after the events of Joker and Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been committed to Arkham State Hospital while awaiting trial for the murders he committed. Taking up his case is attorney Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), who plans to argue that Arthur’s crimes were the result of a split personality over which he had no control. The conditions of Arkham are bleak — courtesy of thuggish prison guards like Jackie Sullivan (Brendan Gleeson) — but a bright spot appears in the form of fellow inmate Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), whom Arthur meets in music therapy. Despite the unusual circumstances, the pair fall for one another but as the media frenzy around Arthur’s hotly anticipated trial continues the swirl, will their burgeoning bond survive the madness?

To be clear: Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t bad because it’s a musical; it’s bad because it’s not a good musical. Instead of crafting original songs, Todd Phillips opts for standards like the ones Lady Gaga sang with Tony Bennett on the albums they collaborated on before his passing. Obviously the songs are in her wheelhouse and she belts them out well, but Phillips doesn’t even try to stage cogent musical numbers to feature her towering vocals. Understandably, Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t match her vocally but you could make the argument he’s singing “in character” more as Arthur, where Gaga doesn’t register as playing a character during her songs. Aside from a few cheek-to-cheek reveries, the choreography often seems haphazard and almost improvised in the rest of the sequences. The switches to song-and-dance mode often feel perfunctory and there are periods where the film seems embarrassed to admit that it’s a musical.

As underwhelming as Joker: Folie à Deux is as a musical, its ultimate undoing is that it’s a narratively inert courtroom drama as well. Putting Arthur on trial may have seemed like a satisfying narrative arc in theory but for the purposes of this sequel, it anchors its ambitions down with callbacks and reframing of events from the first film. It also puts front and center how little Todd Phillips actually understands or cares about Arthur in the first place; most of the testimony is centered around how awful his character was to people around him in Joker. Borrowing from the “God’s lonely man” mold from the aforementioned Scorsese classics, Phillips was at least able to feign empathy for his central character the first time around but here, he has no idea what to make of him and his actions. This aimlessness affects Joaquin Phoenix’s performance too, whose work here is still passable but not nearly as arresting as it was in his initial Oscar-winning role.

Aside from an opening animated sequence that feels like it’s trying too hard to throw the audience off kilter, the early stretch of Joker: Folie à Deux is its most promising. If the end of Joker positioned the titular rogue as a folk hero for the downtrodden, Folie à Deux provides a sobering counterpoint to infamy with its dispiriting prison sequences. Even though the guard characters are inconsistently written, Phillips reliably hits the prison drama beats with cinematographer Lawrence Sher, returning from Joker with camerawork that’s more claustrophobic than the predecessor but no less compelling. Frankly, someone more talented than Phillips would’ve had more success with this project but since he was never going to turn down the paycheck, why not play to the director’s strengths and make this a road movie? Phillips directed Road Trip, Due Date and three The Hangover films, so why not have Arthur and Lee hit the road like Bonnie and Clyde?

Score – 2/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Saturday Night, starring Gabriel LaBelle and Rachel Sennott, is a biopic based on the true story of what happened in the 90 minutes prior to the 1975 premiere of NBC’s debut of Saturday Night Live.
Piece By Piece, starring Pharrell Williams and Morgan Neville, which documents the life and musical career of producer Pharrell Williams, incorporating his faith and expressing his artistry by means of Lego.
Terrifier 3, starring David Howard Thornton and Lauren LaVera, continues the saga of the murderous Art The Clown, as survivors of his Halloween massacre struggle to rebuild their shattered lives during the holiday season.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

If the body horror subgenre has a guiding principle, it’s in the terror of our infinite consciousness being inextricably tethered to malleable mortal flesh. Most films in the category find humans attempting to circumvent their natural form and being punished in gruesome ways for their transgression. The Substance, the provocative new satire from writer/director Coralie Fargeat, abides by this thesis — “you can’t escape from yourself,” as a sinister voice on the phone warns at one point — but pushes the subgenre into thrilling new territory by taking on the beauty industry and the impossible standards society places on women. In the protagonist’s quest for physical perfection, imagery is evoked that isn’t merely ugly but downright horrifying. It’s as gnarly a parable about self-acceptance as you’re likely to see this year, or any other year, for that matter.

The opening shot of The Substance makes it clear that the star of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fading. As the cracks of her respective Hollywood Walk of Fame emblem have manifested over the years, she too finds the passage of time difficult to take when her long-running aerobic TV show is canceled on her 50th birthday. After a car accident, she learns of a mysterious serum known as “The Substance”, which promises Elisabeth a “younger and better version” of herself. Upon first injection, a new being is birthed out of Elisabeth’s spinal column, a younger counterpart who chooses the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) and shares Elisabeth’s interest in sexualized fitness routines. Sue parlays with Elisabeth’s skeezy TV producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) and she seems to be well on her way to stardom but there’s a catch: the regimen for The Substance dictates that Sue and Elisabeth switch bodies every week.

Inevitably, this protocol is abused and the equilibrium between Elisabeth and Sue is irrevocably thrown off. The temptation of staying in Sue’s body beyond the week-long timeframe proves too great and the results become dire in short order. It’s difficult to pick a favorite stretch of The Substance, easily one of 2024’s finest, but the initial fracturing of Elisabeth and Sue’s journeys provides the film’s most biting commentary. While Sue spends her week titillating viewers with her new show Pump It Up, Elisabeth desperately grasps for fulfillment through overindulging on junk food. She even accepts a date with a high school acquaintance who is, frankly, not nearly as good-looking as she is, but thanks to the humongous Sue-featuring billboard outside her window, Elisabeth spirals into debilitating insecurity. It’s a heartbreaking scene and Demi Moore pulls it off perfectly.

If The Substance was primarily just scenes where we’re asked to have sympathy for Elisabeth, Moore would already be doing the best work of her career but what puts this over the top is how much more is asked of her. At the outset, she has to sidestep the grotesque behavior of demeaning male executives who no longer see her as relevant and by the end, she steps into corporal grotesqueries that are best for viewers to experience for themselves. To an extent, I imagine Moore brought personal experience from aging in Hollywood to this role and it requires so much vulnerability and rawness to make the narrative cohere. It’s as compelling and committed a lead performance as I’ve seen all year and my hope is that Moore is in talks for Best Actress when Oscar season kicks in.

Following up her brutal debut Revenge, Coralie Fargeat demonstrates impeccable control over a story that could go terribly wrong in the hands of someone who wasn’t as passionately intelligent about the material. She’s making a movie that is, in large part, about the female form but the nudity is clinical and considered in the way that Jonathan Glazer was for 2013’s Under The Skin. The sexually-charged imagery is intentionally over-the-top and draws attention to the futility of pursuing physical perfection, as Margaret Qualley herself is performing with prosthetic enhancements. Fargeat also tips her hat to a handful of classics, with liminal spaces right out of The Shining and a pivotal music cue from Vertigo, another movie that involves female doppelgängers under intense male scrutiny. The Substance is a shot in the arm for those who have been bored by recent horror offerings.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Wild Robot, an animated sci-fi film starring Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, about an intelligent robot who is stranded on an uninhabited island after a shipwreck and subsequently bonds with the island’s animals.
Also playing only in theaters is Megalopolis, an epic science fiction movie starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito, centering around an idealist architect in a decaying city, who is granted a license by the federal government to demolish and rebuild the city as a sustainable utopia.
Streaming on Paramount+ is Apartment 7A, a psychological thriller starring Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest, involving a struggling dancer who finds herself drawn into dark forces by a peculiar couple promising her fame in 1960s New York.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Michael Keaton was one of the highlights in last year’s superhero goulash The Flash and at the tail end of this summer, he’s back reviving another character from a different 1980s Tim Burton classic after a lengthy hiatus. Fortunately, Burton has returned for directing duties as well in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a legacy sequel that could have easily been a soulless excuse to pilfer from the bio-exorcist’s bedeviled brand but instead feels like a proper successor. Following a Dumbo remake that feels like it was workshopped within an inch of its life, it seems Burton is having real fun behind the camera again and the spirit of play is infectious. Sure, the storyline is too busy and the pacing gets away from him but when it comes to Burton movies, I’ll take amiably anarchic over anemically anonymous any day of the week.

Moving on from her goth teenage phase in Beetlejuice, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) now uses her ghost-communing powers to host a talk show about haunted houses with her television producer boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). A death in the Deetz family brings Lydia, stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) back to the small town of Winter River for the funeral. All the while, Lydia is plagued with pop-up visions of Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton), who has been carrying a flame for her in the afterlife while running a call center of shrunken head pencil-pushers who help the recently deceased with their questions. Various circumstances dictate that Lydia begrudgingly utter the titular demon’s name thrice and once she does, the real world and afterlife intermingle in appropriately kooky ways.

Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, who worked with Ortega on the wildly successful Netflix series Wednesday, pack their script with enough plot threads and fun characters that in another life, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice could’ve been a Max miniseries. At feature length, it moves at a blistering pace and even though there are plenty of imaginative ideas on the page, Burton probably would’ve done well to cut out some of the excess. After a pitch-perfect introduction, Monica Bellucci wanders around the rest of the movie as an undead jilted ex-lover looking for a way into the plot but never really getting there. Willem Dafoe is another welcome presence as ghost detective Wolf Jackson, a stunt-addicted action star when he was alive, but Burton can’t really decide how to handle his character either.

Jackson’s signature catchphrase is “you gotta keep it real” and Burton seemed to retain this ethos in regards to practical effects vs. computer-generated work in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Much of the predecessor’s fun came from the demented creature design and creative use of stop-motion animation, among other peculiarities that make it one-of-a-kind. There are obviously more special effects in this sequel — after all, the entire budget for Beetlejuice‘s visual effects was $1 million — but the focus is still on tactile aspects like macabre costume design and creepy makeup as opposed to spitting everything out of a computer. There’s a musical number in the third act that kills and there’s even an extended Soul Train bit that commits fully to its goofy conceit.

What I appreciated most about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is that it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to cater to a wider audience or reinvent itself for a new generation. Just like the original was its own thing when it came out, this movie has a go-for-broke spirit that Hollywood seems to be lacking when it comes to franchise moviemaking. The returning cast also seem giddy to be returning to their characters after a long break, with Keaton especially shining once again as his uncouth undead trickster demon. Ortega is playing a little bit too deadpan as the third-generation Deetz but given that her storylines center around a neighborhood crush and trying to reunite with her deceased father, her playing things straight isn’t much of a hindrance. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice caps off a summer of surprisingly strong sequels like Inside Out 2 and Twisters that prove follow-ups don’t have to fall back on familiarity to succeed.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Speak No Evil, a psychological thriller starring James McAvoy and Mackenzie Davis, about a family who’s invited to spend a weekend in an idyllic country house, unaware that their dream vacation will soon become a nightmare.
Also playing in theaters is The Killer’s Game, an action comedy starring Dave Bautista and Sofia Boutella, involving a veteran assassin who fends off a hit he placed on himself after learning the terminal medical diagnosis he received was incorrect.
Streaming on Netflix is Uglies, a science fiction film starring Joey King and Keith Powers, set in a future post-scarcity dystopian world in which everyone is considered an “Ugly,” but then turned “Pretty” by extreme cosmetic surgery when they reach the age of 16.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

The outstanding new coming-of-age tale Dìdi is one that, at the outset, draws easy comparisons to other recent films in its subgenre like mid90s, Eighth Grade and several other titles in A24’s library. But the more time spent with writer-director Sean Wang’s directorial feature, the more it reveals its own unique notes of compassion and humor to distinguish itself from its ilk. It’s difficult to know how much this period piece will play for those who weren’t teenagers in the mid-aughts but since I was born in 1989, many of the cultural footholds from the era landed effortlessly for me. Folks in my generation don’t want to hear it but 2004 was 20 years ago, which has historically been the average nostalgia cycle for pop culture fixtures to come back around. If Dìdi is trying to pander to millennials, well, all I can say is that it does so as artfully and authentically as possible.

Our story takes place in the summer of 2008, centering around the 13-year-old Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) and his Taiwanese American family living in the suburbs of the Bay Area. His father continues to work in Taiwan so that his mother Chungsing (Joan Chen) and sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) can afford to live in America. Though he feels different from the majority of his schoolmates due to his ethnicity, he’s very much a “normal” teenage boy in many ways. He has close friends but finds himself drawn to hanging out with other groups. He’s interested in girls but doesn’t know how to talk to them. He loves his family but also feels embarrassed by them as well. All of these messy contradictions swirl around in a hormonal whirlwind as Chris’s first year of high school looms in the fall.

Also living in the Wang household is Nǎi Nai (Chang Li Hua), Chris’s grandma and Chungsing’s mother-in-law, a dynamic which echoes another account of Asian immigration to the United States from 2021’s Minari. Nǎi Nai is both naive to how actually modern teens pass their time — she doesn’t understand why Chris can’t “play with crickets by the creek” like when she was little — and critical of Chungsing’s parenting. It’s a perspective that gives Dìdi a more mature reprieve from Chris’s antics and depicts the hardships that other generations go through so that their kids can have it easier. Joan Chen is particularly excellent at conveying the balance of affection (the film’s title is taken from the pet name she has for her son) and distance mothers struggle to give their rambunctious teenage offspring.

Most of the events in Dìdi are seen through Chris’s eyes and like the best films about growing up, we’re brought back to times in our lives when we felt how our protagonist feels. The emotional ups and downs, where life either feels like it couldn’t be any better or couldn’t be any worse with hardly any room in the middle, are captured expertly by Sean Wang throughout. The joy of skateboarding with your friends, the embarrassment of saying the wrong thing to a crush, the bittersweet sentiment around seeing an older sibling going off to college; we feel it all with Chris. Films like Lady Bird and The Edge Of Seventeen have done a terrific job capturing the female side of this age and conversely, parts of Dìdi feel specific to how young boys interact. They blow things up, they call each other names and even get into the occasional dust-up.

While teenage boys being violent and vulgar isn’t a phenomenon specific to 2008, the movie does a terrific job capturing the details that pertain to this specific time and place. For instance, teenagers had moved on from MySpace to Facebook at that time but were still using AOL Instant Messenger to keep in touch since Facebook Messenger hadn’t been rolled out yet. YouTube was in its infancy and was still about regular people uploading what are essentially home movies as opposed to being the massive video platform that it’s since become. Text messaging was certainly around but still novel as a form of synchronous communication, where one numerical keypad typo sent to a pretty girl could send things into a tailspin. We come back to these movies, in part, to feel young again and with Dìdi, Sean Wang has crafted a small gem of teenage angst and splendor that will undoubtedly be treasured for years to come.

Score – 4.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Alien: Romulus, a sci-fi sequel starring Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson, involving a group of young space colonists who, while scavenging a derelict space station, come face to face with the most terrifying life form in space.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Jackpot!, an action comedy starring Awkwafina and John Cena, is set in the near future where a “Grand Lottery” has been newly established in California where the “winner” can be killed for a multi-billion dollar prize.
Premiering on Netflix is Daughters, an award-winning documentary centering around four young girls who prepare for a special Daddy Daughter Dance with their incarcerated fathers as part of a unique fatherhood program in a Washington, D.C. jail.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

After an excellent turn in last year’s phenomenal Oppenheimer, Josh Hartnett returns to the screen with more compelling work in Trap, a ludicrous thriller that’s lucky to have him at its center. The surprisingly unclever cat-and-mouse saga comes courtesy of inescapable auteur M. Night Shyamalan, whose bleak Knock At The Cabin last year sported a similarly strong lead performance by Dave Bautista. By comparison, this latest effort is unmistakably pulpier and not tied down by Knock‘s apocalyptic glumness but also doesn’t seem to be tied to any kind of reality that resembles our own. Suspension of disbelief can be crucial to making certain convoluted movies work but Trap is playing in a different arena altogether. If it were competing in the Contrivance Olympics, it would easily win a gold medal.

Hartnett stars as Cooper Adams, a seemingly earnest father to teenage Riley (Ariel Donoghue) who scores big points by winning tickets to a sold out concert fronted by pop megastar Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). As he and his daughter make their way to the floor seats, Cooper becomes curious about the increased police presence inside the venue and when buying a T-shirt for Riley, a merch vendor fills him in. It turns out the show was actually planned by the FBI so they could nab a notorious serial killer known as The Butcher, who is expected to be somewhere in the audience. It’s at this point we learn that Cooper himself is actually The Butcher, a fact that is obviously kept from Riley and everyone else in his life. We see the majority of the preceding events through his eyes, as he desperately tries to evade security while trying to find a way out of the arena without arousing suspicion.

At least at the outset, Trap inadvertently mirrors In A Violent Nature, another recent film that follows the perspective of a serial killer, albeit with different motivations for each of the twisted protagonists. But the horrifying beauty of that movie lies in its simplicity in terms of narrative structure and visual storytelling. Shyamalan’s is obviously the more commercially friendly of the two, and arguably has an even more tantalizing elevator pitch than Nature, but as has become an issue in Shyamalan’s more recent work, it can’t pay off its setup in an equally satisfying way. All of the promotional material for Trap lets us in on what would seem to be the movie’s biggest twist, which naturally causes the audience to ask “okay, so what else is there?” The answer, sadly, is not much else.

Trap is at its best when we’re in lockstep with Cooper’s thinking and we’re forced to empathize with the manic plight of a killer. Naturally, this is where Hartnett shines the most too, vacillating between cold-blooded psychopathy and dorky dad energy around his daughter and a clingy parent who keeps engaging with him. Shyamalan has a way of not only writing but directing an uncanny way of speaking that can ring hollow in his more serious efforts but here, Hartnett indulges this idiosyncratic delivery style and makes a meal of it. It works because Cooper himself is putting on a show for everyone in his life, which Shyamalan extenuates with close-ups that depict Cooper desperately trying to bury anxiety with a chipper veneer.

But there’s only so much that Hartnett can do and Trap simply doesn’t have enough tricks up its sleeve to make Cooper’s attempted exile worthwhile. Without giving too much away, the film shift’s narrative subjectivity away from Cooper around the hour mark and suffice it to say that the quality of acting from the rest of the ensemble isn’t at Hartnett’s level. I don’t inherently have an issue with Shyamalan casting his daughter Saleka as a pop star who comes off like an amalgam of Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo but let’s say her musical ability outstrips her acting talents and leave it at that. M. Night’s other daughter Ishana made her directorial debut earlier this year with The Watchers, which certainly had its issues but showcased a promise of growth. With Trap, M. Night Shyamalan reminds us that he may be imprisoned in his own mindset of enticing storytelling that can’t stick the landing.

Score – 2/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming only to theaters is Borderlands, an action comedy starring Cate Blanchett and Kevin Hart, adapting the popular video game for the big screen with a ragtag team of misfits on a mission to save a missing girl who holds the key to unimaginable power.
Also playing in theaters is It Ends With Us, a romantic drama starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni, involving a young woman who begins a relationship with a charming neurosurgeon, who soon reveals a darker side that reminds her of her own parents’ fraught relationship.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Instigators, a heist comedy starring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, centering around a botched robbery that causes two thieves to go on the run, dragging along one of their therapists in the process.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup