By now, we all know Amazon is notorious for their two-day shipping but if your name is Woody Allen, you apparently have to wait two years for your movie to arrive. Due to be released by Amazon Studios back in 2018, Allen’s latest comedy A Rainy Day In New York was shelved after sexual assault allegations resurfaced against him amid the Me Too movement and the film finally slinks onto on demand this week. The last decade has not been particularly kind to the prolific writer-director, who followed up his critical smash, 2011’s Midnight In Paris, with a handful of releases like the middling Rainy Day that haven’t come close to matching the praise that romp received.

Allen’s tale this time revolves around Gatsby Welles (Timothée Chalamet), a college student who takes a trip from Upstate New York into the city with his girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning). On assignment to interview revered indie director Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), Ashleigh splits off with Gatsby early on with plans to reunite at a fancy cocktail bar but the fates conspire to keep them separated. Ashleigh becomes further entrenched in Pollard’s work when he wants to screen his latest film for her, while Gatsby ambles around the city and runs into Chan (Selena Gomez), the sister of one of his ex-girlfriends. The misadventures of the two continue throughout the afternoon as moody rainclouds conjure up a slew of slippery scenarios among a talented cast that also includes Jude Law and Diego Luna.

It’s been a tradition among Allen’s films for the protagonist to imbue the neurotic and nebbish qualities of Allen’s persona and A Rainy Day In New York confidently follows suit with the perpetually put-upon Gatsby. While certain actors like Larry David and Jesse Eisenberg are a natural fit, Chalamet is frankly way too cool and confident to convincingly play an anxiety-ridden handwringer and I rolled my eyes nearly every time his character stammered through ten-cent words. Fanning fares much better in her role, channeling Annie Hall-era Diane Keaton energy with nervous hiccup fits and all. She’s nothing short of supremely charming as she keeps getting pulled into mishaps that get more convoluted as the story moves along.

While Allen’s screenplay features some reliably witty one-liners and exchanges by generable likable characters, its themes of infidelity and big city living hardly break new ground in his oeuvre. The direction is similarly lazy, bouncing from subplot to subplot with only a third-act monologue by Cherry Jones serving as the film’s chief inspired moment. Alisa Lepselter’s editing juggles Gatsby’s and Ashleigh perspectives well but the tempo doesn’t always lock in where it should be during the dialogue-heavy scenes. When it’s all said and done, this is a romantic’s view of New York through the eyes of a hopelessly romantic lead character and Allen is doing his best to impart that sense of metropolitan wonder.

Like fellow recent release On The Rocks, which also wrapped well before the pandemic, this film unintentionally makes one nostalgic for a time when individuals could chat closely without the necessity of a face mask. As Chalamet and company participate in maskless walk-and-talks while name-checking artists like Charlie Parker and Akira Kurosawa, I had to turn off the voice in my head yelling “don’t they know how irresponsible they’re being?” Even the simple sight of a couple huddling close to share an umbrella during a downpour inexplicably made my eyes a bit misty. Like the old soul at the center of its story, A Rainy Day In New York is an old-fashioned, escapist romance that isn’t as inspired as it should have been but isn’t as tiresome it could have been.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies this weekend:
Premiering on Netflix is Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, a Christmas musical starring Forest Whitaker and Keegan-Michael Key about a toymaker and his granddaughter who construct a magical invention in time for the holidays.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds, a Werner Herzog documentary about meteors and comets while investigating their influence on ancient religions and other cultural and physical impacts they’ve had on Earth.
Only playing in theaters is Freaky, a slasher black comedy starring Vince Vaughn and Kathryn Newton that reimagines the Freaky Friday formula by body-swapping a high school student and a deranged serial killer.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

For decades now, filmmaker David Cronenberg has been provoking audiences with a signature brand of body horror through works like Videodrome, Crash (no, not the Best Picture winner) and A History of Violence. It’s been some time since his latest effort, 2014’s disappointing Maps to the Stars, but luckily, David’s son Brandon has seemingly followed closely in his father’s footsteps. His second feature, Possessor, is a sci-fi horror hybrid that does indeed bear the mark of predecessors like Scanners and The Fly but establishes a contemplative pace and existential disposition that deepens its mesmeric power. It’s a brutal and uncompromising vision that may not be the best entry point for newcomers to the genre but should thoroughly please those who revel in the creatively horrifying.

We meet Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough) during a normal day of her thoroughly abnormal profession: she’s an assassin, of sorts, who uses brain implant technology to transplant her consciousness into the bodies of unwitting bystanders. On the heels of another vicious job, Tasya’s handler (Jennifer Jason Leigh) fills her in on their new target: Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott), a young programmer who uses VR to unethically mine data for a powerful tech company. The head of said corporation, John Parse (Sean Bean), is the father of Colin’s girlfriend Ava (Tuppence Middleton), which makes Colin a sensible mark to take John out of the picture on behalf of Vos’s client. The normally unflappable Vos begins to falter in her approach as Colin resists the body-mind control process and their psyches begin to battle one another for dominance.

With firm control over his story and its themes, Cronenberg investigates the terrifying prospect of losing control of oneself with arresting imagery and ingenious personifications of physiological phenomena. He marries the illusory concept of invading someone else’s mind and body like a parasite with the visceral tactility of the wretched instruments that it takes to make such an infiltration possible. Early on, we see Tasya “calibrating” her brainwaves with what looks like a portable transistor radio and the machine that allows her to enter her subject’s brain is connected through what appear to be standard audio cables. In the wrong hands, these prop design choices could seem foolish and archaic but it demonstrates Cronenberg’s dedication to an inventive cyberpunk-inspired aesthetic that, ironically, moves the genre forward.

At times, Possessor resembles an arthouse take on Inception, as it also involves ousting a CEO at the behest of a client through metaphysically manipulated means, but you don’t even need to get past the opening scene to see where it diverges violently. Like his father, Conenberg has little compunction about making his viewers squeamish in the pursuit of ferociously virtuosic violence. But also like David, Brandon argues for the savagery on-screen as a vehicle to depict the dark intangibles of human nature in ways that this breed of science fiction can do better than any other genre. Behind the camera, cinematographer Karim Hussain fixates on unsettling shots like palms rippling under an air hand dryer and bathes the frame in stark blues and oranges to promote a constant sense of disorientation and unreality.

The always captivating Andrea Riseborough is outstanding as a woman whose crumbling sense of reality has left her emotionally bereft from those with whom she’s meant to be closest. In what could be another Christopher Nolan callback, one scene depicts Tasya as she’s asked to grapple various mementos from her past and explain their significance to her handler. Riseborough’s expressions are flawless in these moments, as she struggles valiantly to reorient herself while suggesting that she may not even care to do so. Christopher Abbott is also excellent in a role that calls for him to primarily act as if he’s not actually in control of his body, which I imagine is even more challenging than it seems. Disturbing yet enriching, Possessor is a shocking reflection on the fleeting nature of identity and the confounding complexities of consciousness.

Score – 4/5

New movies this weekend:
Available to rent digitally is The Informer, a crime thriller starring Joel Kinnaman and Rosamund Pike about an undercover ex-convict who becomes incarcerated again in order to infiltrate a mob at a maximum security prison.
Also available to watch on demand is The Dark And The Wicked, a horror film starring Marin Ireland and Michael Abbott Jr. about a patriarch farmer whose growing illness manifests waking nightmares for the members of his family.
Another digital release is Triggered, a mystery movie starring Reine Swart and Liesl Ahlers about nine campers who wake up with suicide bombs strapped to their chests with varying times on their countdown clocks.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When writer/director Justin Simien broke into the indie film scene with his incendiary Sundance hit Dear White People in 2014, it seemed unlikely that it would take a follow-up film 6 years to be released. Instead of moving onto wholly new material, Simien wisely chose to adapt his overstuffed movie into a Netflix series, whose three seasons account for some of the best original content the streaming giant has ever produced. As great as the Dear White People series is, the film world was sorely missing a voice as audacious and brazen as Simien’s, which makes his sophomore effort Bad Hair that much more reason to celebrate. This is an idiosyncratic horror comedy so specific in its influences that it feels like it was made to be enjoyed by maybe a few dozen people total. Fortunately, I would count myself as one of the weirdos in that hypothetically select group.

It’s 1989 Los Angeles and a personal assistant named Anna (Elle Lorraine) is looking to move up the ranks at Culture, a music television network that serves as a stand-in for the real-life BET. Her opportunity comes when the head of the station is replaced by ex-supermodel Zora (Vanessa Williams), who sees potential in Anna provided she can look the part of other on-air talent like the impossibly cool Julius (Jay Pharoah). This directive leads her to stylist Virgie (Laverne Cox) and her boutique salon, which has a reputation of transforming frizzy hair into lavish locks like those of pop superstars like the inimitable Sandra (Kelly Rowland). However, Anna gets more than she bargained for when the expensive, sewed-on weave starts to take on a mind of its own and seek revenge on those who have wronged her along the way.

Simien takes this high-concept, campy premise to present all manner of cultural commentary, from the impossibility of interracial beauty standards to the pressures of assimilation and conformity, while never losing its sense of cheeky irreverence in the process. If Spike Lee had directed his own version of Little Shop Of Horrors in the early 1990s, it may have come out something like Bad Hair, though one imagines it wouldn’t have quite the deft satirical bite that Simien once again shows off here. In terms of more recent contemporaries, it’s easy to imagine Jordan Peele having an affinity for similar material and while Bad Hair isn’t quite the instant classic that Get Out was, I would personally classify it as a bigger success than last year’s Us. While Simien isn’t yet the household name that Lee or Peele is, I hope it isn’t long before that changes.

Along with composer Kris Bowers and cinematographer Topher Osborn, Simien crafts an homage to, among many other things, throwback thrillers from revered directors like Brian De Palma and John Carpenter. The look is pitch-perfect, marrying lingering crossfades and ominous Dutch angles with a saturated gritty aesthetic that truly makes the movie look like it was shot on film in the 70s or 80s. The introduction of the killer wig and the slow reveal of its nefarious nature melds both the body horror elements of a David Cronenberg picture with the Japanese horror frights of something along the lines of Ju-On: The Grudge. By the time the haywire third act comes into focus, the film most closely resembles socially-conscious sci-fi like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Besides the exceedingly clever script penned by Simien, this stylistic melting pot is held together best by a terrific lead performance from newcomer Elle Lorraine. No matter how outlandish the storyline gets or how many genres the movie invokes, she proves that she’s game to bob and weave as necessary to keep the audience invested. She sells the “beauty is pain” principle best during the salon scene where the hair extensions are being grafted to her scalp or, as a colleague puts it, “sewing someone’s dead energy into their head.” Naturally, Simien has a deeper metaphors and symbolism attached to the concept of stealing what is someone else’s and wearing it as your own, which are best for the viewer to discover for themselves. It just came out last week but Bad Hair already seems destined for cult classic status and rightfully so.

Score – 4/5

New movies this weekend:
Available to rent digitally is The Craft: Legacy, a sequel to the 1996 supernatural horror film starring Cailee Spaeny and Gideon Adlon about a new group of high school students who form a coven of witches.
Streaming on Netflix is His House, a thriller starring Wunmi Mosaku and Sope Dirisu about a Sudanese refugee couple who struggle to adjust to their new life in an English town that has an evil lurking beneath the surface.
Coming to theaters is Come Play, a horror thriller starring Gillian Jacobs and John Gallagher Jr. about a monster who haunts a non-verbal autistic young boy along with his family and friends through various technological devices.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Originally planned for a theatrical release at the beginning of awards season, the well-intentioned but overbearing courtroom drama The Trial of the Chicago 7 arrives on Netflix this weekend with an Oscar checklist in hand. With its 1960s-set true story that has ties to current events and an Academy Award-winner screenwriter at the helm, it’s the kind of movie that’s seemingly designed in a Hollywood lab with the intention of hitting as many conventional voter criteria as possible. While writer/director Aaron Sorkin has writing credits like A Few Good Men and HBO’s The Newsroom that make him a good mark for this material, the film marks only his second time as a feature director after 2017’s Molly’s Game and he carries over some of the corny and sanctimonious tendencies from his worst writing into his new career of directing.

The titular trial is that of a band of seven anti-Vietnam War protesters, who allegedly conspired to incite violence among crowds outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Among the defendants is the altruistic Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and smirking Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen), who possess wildly conflicting personalities but are unified by a common goal of disrupting the status quo. Tasked with trying the group of activists is Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a fresh-faced prosecutor facing off against the soft-spoken but determined defense attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance). Presiding over the months-long trial is the strict Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), who hurls contempt of court charges liberally in his attempts to maintain dominance over the often rambunctious courtroom.

Sorkin and his composer Daniel Pemberton get off to a questionable start, scoring an introductory montage of the 7 with oddly upbeat music that comes across as blithe and borderline flippant given the highbrow tone it’s presumably trying to set. The cues during the dramatic courtroom scenes are appropriately exuberant but rarely rousing, pumping up the orchestral horns and strings as they cloy with self-importance. Working with editor Alan Baumgarten, Sorkin employs a snappy zig-zag narrative strategy that frames the trial sequences with flashback cuts that pertain to witness testimonies. The editing is competent and never confusing as it zips back and forth chronologically but is too spastic when it come to dialogue-heavy scenes, whipping between routine shot/reverse shot compositions at an unnecessarily hurried rate.

The remarkably qualified cast, which also includes reliable character actors like John Carroll Lynch and John Doman, seems to generally be on the same page when it comes to the characters that they are rendering. If I had to pick a standout, I’d look to Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, portraying Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale with proper conviction and compelling resilience. The simmer in his voice when he says, “they tried something peaceful; we’re going to try something else” is the stuff that Best Supporting Actor nods are made of. Another immensely talented actor, whose name I won’t mention for fear of spoiling the surprise, shows up in the third act for his own “you can’t handle the truth!” moment, even if it doesn’t land with quite the same kind of impact as its predecessor.

For all its self-righteousness posturing and dubious bits of supposedly true interactions, the movie left me with one chief qualm: what is Sorkin really trying to say here? Civil unrest and street riots are obviously hot topics this year but Sorkin remains frustratingly inert when it comes to having a novel perspective on the subjects. Outside of some witty exchanges and occasional bits of cheeky humor, Sorkin simply doesn’t inject enough of his voice into his surprisingly shallow screenplay. Even though the whole world is streaming, there isn’t enough of an edge to The Trial of the Chicago 7 to make it worth adding to one’s ever-expanding queue.

Score – 2.5/5

Other new movies this weekend:
Streaming on HBO Max is American Utopia, a Spike Lee-directed concert film capturing a musical Broadway performance from former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is What the Constitution Means to Me, another live recording of a Broadway performance; in this case, it’s Heidi Schreck’s play presenting multiple facets, historical perspectives and personal experiences with the U.S. Constitution
Available to rent on demand is Greenland, a disaster film starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin about a family struggles for survival in the face of a cataclysmic meteor event.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Typically, people only die once but the titular character in the stellar new Netflix documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead dies quite a few times. The octogenarian psychiatrist is the father of filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, who came up with the concept for this film around the time of her dad’s retirement from his practice due to his worsening dementia. As a way of battling the anxiety of inevitably losing her only remaining parent with pitch-black humor, she conceived of shooting staged versions of her dad dying in cartoonish and irregular ways. Whether he’s getting knocked out with a falling AC unit or fatally slapped with a 2×4 from a clueless construction worker, Dick and the stuntmen that stand in for him play out these macabre, Harold and Maude-esque fantasies both with good cheer and technical precision.

However, not all of these fantastical scenes are quite so morbid. Kirsten Johnson also stages an elaborate sequence in heaven, in which confetti appears to constantly fall in slow motion as Dick gleefully plays clarinet for jitterbugging historical figures. One transcendental shot depicts Dick slowly floating in the air along with his favorite chair and ottoman as he seems to either rest or meditate in his high-rise New York office. Jesus even makes an appearance, washing Dick’s malformed feet until they are miraculously made whole once again. Outside of these cinematic reveries, Kirsten spends the rest of her documentary sharing candid conversations between herself and her father with topics ranging from religion to chocolate cake.

This is obviously tricky and extremely personal material and half the fun of watching Dick Johnson Is Dead is marveling at director Kirsten Johnson’s ability to gracefully maneuver the tightrope of tonal management. We always get the sense that Dick is in on the “joke”, as it were; “I’ve always wanted to be in the movies!”, he assures his grandkids in the film’s opening moments. Though we never see Kirsten explicitly explain the nature of her unconventional documentary to her dad, he seems game for these silly stunts and opines, “you see a lot of weird stuff in movies that never happens.” As production assistants explain the mechanics of a device that shoots out fake blood for one of his stunts, he clarifies that he doesn’t want to use his actual blood for the pump, reminding the young assistants “I like my blood, I’ve become accustomed to it!”

Those quotes should give one an idea just how good-natured, convivial and, frankly, adorable Dick Johnson comes across throughout this wild experiment of a movie. There’s something so rewarding about watching a film so fixated with mortality and disintegration of the human body also center itself around a protagonist who has the best possible attitude and perspective on the subjects. In a country where discussions about death are still often regarded as taboo, audiences may initially blanch at this cinematic equivalent of “whistling past the graveyard” but it’s easy to be drawn in once the poignant and playful rhythm of Kirsten Johnson’s film is established.

Much like last year’s outstanding The Farewell, which also tenderly dealt with the prospect of losing our loved ones, the film furthers this cultural conversation in a similarly amiable manner. To give her movie another layer of unconventionality, Kirsten Johnson implements metatextual touches that blur the line between fiction and non-fiction, as when she uses a skywriter plane to outline a passage of time in the “narrative”. Despite its unique approach to its themes, the film is far from inaccessible and those who stumble upon it while aimlessly browsing Netflix’s seemingly infinite catalog may be pleasantly surprised by it. Dick Johnson Is Dead is a powerful reminder that nobody lives forever but thankfully, movies do.

Score – 4/5

New movies this weekend:
Streaming on Netflix is Hubie Halloween, a horror comedy starring Adam Sandler and Julie Bowen about a Salem resident who’s out to save his hometown’s Halloween from monsters.
Opening in theaters is The War with Grandpa, a family comedy starring Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman about a prank war that starts between a boy and his grandfather when they’re forced to share the same living space.
Available to watch on Hulu is Books of Blood, an anthology movie based on the Clive Barker horror book series starring Britt Robertson and Anna Friel which interweaves three terrifying stories.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup