Writer/director Rian Johnson follows up his divisive Star Wars entry The Last Jedi with Knives Out, a venomous and vivacious modern update on the classic whodunnit genre. Indebted equally to the work of Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock, this throwback murder-mystery is packed with just the right amount of twists and turns to keep audiences guessing while still keeping things relatively plausible. Not only does the film wield the most qualified cast of any movie this year but it provides each actor and actress a role suited perfectly to their capabilities and strengths as a performer. Add in bits of scathing humor and (mostly) incisive social commentary and you have one of the year’s most purely enjoyable spectacles.

The day after his 85th birthday party, the lifeless body of prolific mystery writer Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer) is found in his labyrinthine mansion. While it initially appears to be a suicide, renown detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) suspects there’s more to the story and calls back the guests from the previous evening for interrogation. That includes an eccentric ensemble of family members: Harlan’s sardonic eldest daughter Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis), his meek youngest son Walt (Michael Shannon) and free-spirited daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette), among others. Also called for questioning is Harlan’s faithful caretaker Marta (Ana de Armas), whose perspective outside of the family may hold the key to solving the case.

The Thrombey clan, which also includes Harlan’s haughty grandson Ransom (Chris Evans) and his shifty son-in-law Richard (Don Johnson), is filled with the fiendish motives and shaky alibis that we’ve come to expect from this type of story. Kicking off with a superbly edited sequence that introduces us to each of the players, Johnson uses subjective narration and conflicting claims to keep us on our toes as we try to keep track of the constantly moving pieces. His script, which crackles with sharp-tongued dialogue that suits each character perfectly, also includes enough red herrings to throw even the most astute viewers for a loop.

The performances from the excellent ensemble cast are consistently stellar, mainly because each performer seems to be have so much darn fun with their respective roles. Coming across as Hercule Poirot by way of Colonel Sanders, Craig’s peculiar PI postulates with a ridiculous Southern drawl that recalls his madcap character in 2017’s Logan Lucky. Now in the post-Captain America phase of his career, Evans is freed up to channel a devious energy that gives the film most of its biggest laughs. Even in a more straight-laced heroine role, Ana de Armas gives her protagonist the grace and soulfulness to make her sympathetic from the start.

If there’s disappointment in Knives Out, it’s that we don’t get to spend quite enough time with each of the sharply-drawn characters, especially in the third act as the web of lies and deceit becomes untangled. The stacked cast tends to shine brightest as they’re shuffled between questioning at the outset but their presence becomes more sparse as the clues start to narrow on just a few suspects. Still, each of the actors get their licks in as they vie for screen time; even Frank Oz shows up as Harlan’s beleaguered lawyer who heads up a spirited reading of the mogul’s will. Knives Out is yet another successful attempt of genre experimentation from one of our most earnestly passionate filmmakers.

Score – 4/5

Also coming to theaters this weekend:
Queen & Slim, starring Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith, is a modern-day Bonnie & Clyde story about a couple who go on the run after a minor traffic violation leads to the shooting of a police officer.
Playing at Cinema Center this weekend only is the cult classic Dial Code Santa Claus, a French thriller that came out a year before Home Alone but shares a similar plot about a child staving off a burglar on Christmas Eve.
Coming to Netflix is the long-awaited Martin Scorsese epic The Irishman, starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, about an aging mob hitman who recalls his possible involvement with the murder of Jimmy Hoffa.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Tom Hanks dons the famous hand-knit sweaters of Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, a tender-hearted and touching tribute to the television icon and the countless people that he inspired. Rather than go the traditional biopic route of covering the subject’s entire life and career, director Marielle Heller details the profound impact that Fred Rogers had on one person’s life to symbolize his larger cultural influence. As a companion to last year’s stellar documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, this narrative feature further explores the philosophy and worldview of a man who did everything he could to heal the world and make humanity just a little bit kinder.

The film’s true story centers around Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), a hard-hearted Esquire journalist who seems to have met his match when he’s tasked with profiling the altruistic TV star Mr. Rogers (Tom Hanks). Lloyd’s wife Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson) is at first shocked by the news, then leaves him with one request as he jets off to Rogers’ hometown of Pittsburgh: “please don’t ruin my childhood.” From the moment he sets foot on the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood set, Vogel seems committed to staying emotionally unattached while interviewing his subject but as he spends more time with the soft-spoken Rogers, his cynical exterior slowly begins to erode.

When it was announced early last year that Tom Hanks would be portraying the legendary television star, the news almost seemed too good to be true. The pitch-perfect casting pays off early and often; as soon as Hanks steps onto the TV set singing the spritely theme song, there is no doubt that he is Fred Rogers. Hanks continually threads the needle between impression and caricature, channeling Rogers’ calm and soothing cadence without overplaying things. Rhys is also terrific as the peevish counterpoint to the benevolent Rogers, unveiling years of pain and personal turmoil within each conversation.

If Hanks as Rogers is the film’s headline, then the comparatively underrated aspect of A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood is the imaginative and unconventional direction by Heller. Amid the film’s emotionally poignant tale, she adds playful touches like implementing miniature sets in the style of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to draw us closer to the fantastical world created by the film’s main character. Heller also works with editor Anne McCabe to recreate the patient and thoughtful pacing of Rogers’ landmark show. A quiet scene late in the film, a meditative and magical moment that I won’t dare spoil here, is one of the most captivating of the year.

With such a divine and seemingly infallible central figure at its core, there is a concern going into the film that it may try to uncover negative aspects of Rogers’ life. Those fears are allayed quickly as Heller certainly doesn’t seem interested in throwing mud on his legacy and instead, she humanizes him while bolstering his gracious persona at the same time. Above all, the movie seems utterly sincere in its depiction of both a hurting soul and the opposing force determined to heal it. Full of warmth and wisdom, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood showcases the simple power of human connection amid increasingly turbulent times.

Score – 4/5

Also coming to theaters this weekend:
Frozen II, starring Idina Menzel and Kristen Bell, continues the journey of Elsa and Anna as they set out across an enchanted land to find the origin of Elsa’s powers in order to save their kingdom.
21 Bridges, starring Chadwick Boseman and Sienna Miller, is a police drama about an NYPD detective who puts all of New York City on lockdown in order for him and the authorities to defeat a pair of cop killers.
Playing this weekend at Cinema Center is a documentary double feature of Pollinators, which follows migratory beekeepers and their truckloads of honey bees and Fantastic Fungi, which explores the burgeoning market of fungi-based products.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Arriving ten years after the breakout zom-com hit, Zombieland: Double Tap offers many of the same aspects that made its predecessor work as well as it did. The chemistry of the talented cast is still in tact, the humor is as snarky and self-referential as ever and the violence towards the undead is at least as gory as one would expect. It’s disappointing, then, that the film still can’t help but feel like afterthought among the legions of zombie-related media that we’ve been saturated with throughout the past decade. Fittingly, this is addressed in the opening voiceover, in which we’re told “you have a lot of choices when it comes to zombie entertainment, so thank you for picking us.” While I appreciate the sentiment, I’d rather just have fewer choices.

We pick back up with survivors Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) as they take up residence at the now-abandoned White House. Their relatively idyllic family atmosphere dissipates when Wichita and Little Rock decide to hit the road, for fear of growing too emotionally attached. After a month, Wichita makes her way back but loses Little Rock to a hippie named Berkeley (Avan Jogia) along the way. Together with Madison (Zoey Deutch), Columbus’ new girlfriend that he made during Wichita’s absence, the group sets out to bring Little Rock back into the fold amid a world with increasingly resilient zombies.

A common charge rallied against sequels that are far removed in time from their predecessors is that the cast can look bored or tired on-screen, potentially due to contractual obligation. Say what you will about Zombieland: Double Tap but the performers do seem genuinely excited to be back in this universe. Even though their enthusiasm doesn’t quite save the tired material at the film’s core, it’s at least admirable that a primary cast including 3 Oscar nominees and an Oscar winner don’t feel like their phoning it in. Despite working from paper-thin characters, newcomers like Luke Wilson and Rosario Dawson add some comedic sparks on the periphery.

By and large, the film follows the well-worn sequel tradition of taking what worked in the original and amplifying it up to 11. This means that we get 3 different variations on Tallahassee’s signature line where just one callback to it would have likely sufficed. Where Eisenberg would chime in sparingly to remind us of the Rules in Zombieland, his cheeky voiceover track this time around seems to tower over most of the dialogue from other characters. The most clever bit in the film, where Columbus and Tallahassee run into alternate reality versions of themselves, was not only spoiled in the trailers but massively overstays its welcome in long form.

Still, the movie does have some well-earned laughs here and there. There’s a pre-credit bit that I found clever and unexpected and the post-credit scene will delight those who were holding their breath for a callback cameo by a particular comedic icon. It’s everything in the middle that’s quite hit-or-miss, especially since the jokes are attached to a storyline that is transparent and completely surprise-free. As far as belated sequels go, you could certainly do much worse than Zombieland: Double Tap but that still doesn’t mean that it does enough on its own to justify its existence.

Score – 2.5/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Countdown, starring Elizabeth Lail and Peter Facinelli, is a new horror film about a young nurse who downloads an app that claims to predict exactly when a person is going to die.
Black and Blue, starring Naomie Harris and Tyrese Gibson, tells the story of a rookie police officer captures the murder of a drug dealer on her body cam, only to find out that it was committed by fellow policemen.
The Lighthouse, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson, follows two lighthouse keepers as they are faced with loneliness, friendship and their worst fears in 1890s New England.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

It’s two Will Smiths for the price of one in Ang Lee’s Gemini Man, a clunky and dated would-be action thriller with a tired premise and even more exhausting execution. Pushing the current film trend of digitally “de-aging” actors to its breaking point, Lee continues his trajectory of foisting cutting-edge technology upon stories that don’t merit the slick upgrades in the first place. He’s proven with films like The Ice Storm and Brokeback Mountain that he doesn’t need 4K resolution or high frame rate presentation to tell a great story. It all starts with a well-crafted screenplay and all the high-tech bells and whistles can’t disguise the terrible dialogue and exposition on the page.

Smith stars as Henry Brogan, an esteemed assassin on his way to retirement after 25 years of service for the DIA. His final hit, carried out against a terrorist traveling on a bullet train, is called into question when one of Brogan’s inside contacts informs him that the man was actually a civilian biochemist. Shortly after, Brogan discovers he’s being surveilled by a fellow agent named Dani (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and after DIA soldiers descend upon their location, the two make a run for it. The man behind the mission to take out Brogan is Clay Varris (Clive Owen), the leader of a black ops unit who used Brogan’s DNA to create a copy of him and has sent the clone to take him out.

To create the idea of a younger-looking Will Smith, Lee uses a combination of motion capture from Smith’s performance along with the increasingly prevalent de-aging effect to composite a new character. As far as we’ve come with technology, the results of this experiment still aren’t entirely convincing. In most of the action scenes, especially the characters’ first bike-bound confrontation in Colombia, Junior (the name for Brogan’s clone) often moves with a weightless artificiality that rarely feels credible. Most of Junior’s scenes are shot either at night or in dimly-lit rooms, for reasons that become devastatingly obvious when a scene late in the film set in broad daylight reveals just how dismal the de-aging effect can look.

No amount of cosmetic retouching can hide the fact that this script, which has allegedly been kicked around Hollywood since the late ‘90s, is simply abysmal from start to finish. The dialogue, which includes yikes-inducing lines like “it’s not gun time, it’s coffee time” and “I’m finding myself avoiding mirrors recently”, is wall-to-wall tin-eared. It’s the kind of shoddy screenplay that sets up a character’s bee allergy so blatantly from the onset that we have to assume a payoff is coming later on, though “payoff” is perhaps much too generous.

Smith does what he can to pack maximum gravitas into his mirthless mercenary but it’s ultimately the same kind of stilted dramatic performance we’ve seen from him on multiple occasions. Like his work in recent clunkers like Collateral Beauty and Bright, he loads the characters from his dramatic work with an irrevocable joylessness so as to garner respect from audiences and fellow actors alike. I was no fan of the Aladdin remake from earlier this year but it was at least good to watch Smith have fun — and, heaven forbid, smile — on screen again. Gemini Man should serve as a reminder that it’s best for some movie ideas to stay buried.

Score – 1.5/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, starring Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning, once again follows the Sleeping Beauty antagonist as her goddaughter Princess Aurora is proposed to by Prince Phillip, sparking a war between humans and fairies.
Zombieland: Double Tap, starring Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg, brings back the band of misfit zombie fighters as they meet new survivors of the apocalypse while squaring off against an evolved threat.
As part of Fright Night, Cinema Center will be screening 1989’s Pet Sematary. Local artists will be in attendance to re-create iconic movie posters for sale. Those who dress up in zombie garb will receive a $10 ticket & a complimentary small popcorn.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup