After a months-long viral marketing campaign that put forth cryptic teaser clips and coded messages inspired by Zodiac Killer-esque symbology, the unholy and unforgettable horror-thriller Longlegs has crawled into theaters in its terrifying full form. It’s both a film that wears its influences —Silence Of The Lambs and Seven are givens — on its sleeve and one that keeps reinventing itself with every hairpin turn of the central mystery. Even with the presence of genre stalwart Maika Monroe and perhaps the most predictably unpredictable performer around in Nicolas Cage, there’s little comfort in the familiar here. There are horror movies that aim to scare audiences with spooky spontaneity and knee-jerk thrills and then there are those which actively work to unnerve and unsettle us. The latest from writer-director Osgood Perkins falls in the latter category.

Monroe stars as Lee Harker, a cloistered and committed young FBI agent whose next-level intuition helps her quickly break open an elusive case that compels her boss Agent Carter (Blair Underwood) to assign her to one that’s been even more beguiling. Over the span of multiple decades, a serial killer known as Longlegs (Cage) has seemingly been involved with numerous murder–suicides in the Pacific Northwest, with only coded messages left behind as evidence. Harker makes quick work of the seemingly indecipherable notes and finds a pentagram-predicated pattern within the clues, although there still aren’t precise signs who the killer’s next victim might be. Throughout her monomania in cracking the case, Harker maintains connection with her pious mother Ruth (Alicia Witt), who worries that Lee chasing a devil-devout deviant may cause her to lose herself in the process.

At the outset, Longlegs posits itself as more of a procedural thriller before slowly morphing into art horror by its conclusion, with some unexpected but much-needed chuckles peppered in. Four films in, Perkins seems to be most interested in telling scary stories from different subgenres, his I Am The Pretty Thing That Lives In The House in the gothic ghost story tradition and Gretel & Hansel in the vein of dark fairy tale. His latest most closely resembles his 2015 outing The Blackcoat’s Daughter, a superb supernatural chiller about two students left behind a boarding school over winter break. While Longlegs is somehow even creepier than that film, it’s also Perkins’ most accomplished work so far, made of moments that exude ardent craft and nuanced precision.

Everyone in front of the camera is more than game for his vision, with Monroe as our audience surrogate into this twisted tale much in the way Jodie Foster was for Silence Of The Lambs. In films like It Follows and Watcher, she plays characters who just try to stay one step ahead of the evil forces stalking them but here, her Harker is much more capable in her ability to snuff out the nefarious forces at play. As we often see in movies about detectives whose job consumes their lives, Monroe taps into the social awkwardness that comes with someone whose head is always somewhere else. Mostly it’s underscored as a predominant personality trait among the most determined agents but sometimes it’s keenly played for laughs; when Agent Carter’s 8-year-old daughter asks Harker if she’d like to see her room, Perkins smash cuts to the agent sitting rigidly on the little girl’s bed through social obligation.

Underwood also puts forth easy-to-overlook work as Harker’s veteran superior but I imagine one of the main hooks for those drawn in by Longlegs this month will be Nicolas Cage, whose character’s full appearance has been withheld in promotional materials. Some may complain that Cage doesn’t appear in the movie more, while others may wish that he was used more sparingly but regardless, he predictably makes a meal of his deranged and haunting character. Perkins wisely gives us swift glimpses of the towering occultist figure before giving us the squirm-inducing close-ups of Cage’s face. While it’s only been out several days, Longlegs already seems to carry with it a staying power uncommon for the majority of current horror output.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Twisters, a disaster movie starring Daisy Edgar-Jones and Glen Powell following a retired tornado-chaser and meteorologist as they’re persuaded to return to Oklahoma to work with a new team and new technologies to track severe storms.
Premiering on Disney+ is Young Woman And The Sea, a sports biopic starring Daisy Ridley and Tilda Cobham-Hervey telling the true story of Gertrude Ederle, an American swimming champion who became the first woman to swim 21 miles across the English Channel.
Streaming on Netflix is Skywalkers: A Love Story, a documentary involving a daring couple that travels to Malaysia to climb a 118-story skyscraper, attempting a bold acrobatic stunt on the spire to salvage both their career and relationship.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Insofar as the covid pandemic turned everything inside out, fewer studios took a harder hit than Pixar. Onward‘s March 2020 theatrical run was abruptly cut short, their next three movies debuted on Disney+ and their theatrical return with Lightyear in summer 2022 drastically underperformed at the box office. Even Elemental‘s sleeper run last year after a weak opening weekend cast doubts on the Pixar brand as the money-making juggernaut that it’s been for almost 30 years. A sequel to one of their best films certainly seems a reasonable way to get things back on track and while I have no doubt Inside Out 2 will put Pixar in a better place financially, it’s a strong achievement artistically as well. This is the studio’s best follow-up to an original IP since Toy Story 2, one that unpredictably builds on the magic of its predecessor in exciting and enchanting ways.

Two years after Inside Out, our protagonist Riley (now voiced by Kensington Tallman) is officially a teenager, which spells trouble for the five anthropomorphized emotions in her head. Joy (Amy Poehler), Sadness (Phyllis Smith), Fear (now voiced by Tony Hale), Disgust (now voiced by Liza Lapira) and Anger (Lewis Black) seem to have a good system down, until a “Puberty Alarm” on the mind console blares out the night before Riley heads to hockey camp. Suddenly, new emotions pop up in headquarters and start taking over, the most quarrelsome being Anxiety (Maya Hawke). Less bothersome but still impactful are others newcomers Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser). Anxious to take over, Anxiety banishes the original five from the control room, who spend most of the film working their way back to balance out Riley’s emotional state.

As much as Inside Out was a coming-of-age story about the value of the basic emotions in the human experience, Inside Out 2 examines the more complicated feelings that crop up as we get older. Anxiety, then, is something of a perfect antagonist this time around, as it’s not simply happy or sad as it’s ceaselessly energetic. Maya Hawke does a terrific job at capturing the manic and infectious timbre that approximates the sounds anxiety would make if it could be personified. Amy Poehler is excellent again as Joy, who tries to align her goals with Anxiety but demonstrates that the paths to get there are drastically different. Of course, the ideal would be to have a balance of all these emotions but the teenage years are all about things being thrown out of whack and the bustling power struggle between Joy and Anxiety is a superb cipher for this stage of life.

Just as Inside Out 2 makes room for more complex emotions and thornier narrative implications, it also deepens the original’s adroitness for visualizing psychological concepts. Building on the lessons learned from that chapter, Joy creates a “Sense Of Self” section of Riley’s head, where the multi-colored memory orbs introduced in Inside Out float on a translucent lake where elegant strands spring out of the water. When plucked, these strings echo affirmations like “I’m a good person” and analogize one’s self-esteem. After Anxiety takes the wheel, these threads turn jagged and contain thoughts like “if I make the hockey team, I won’t be alone.” Now, a more simple animated movie would have these be purely negative thoughts that obviously need to go but “if I’m good at hockey, I’ll have friends” isn’t a bad sentiment on its own. The issue is how Anxiety applies these thoughts to Riley’s psyche, beautifully capturing how logical fallacies, thought loops and cognitive biases can crop up in our brains.

Building upon the incredible “abstract thought” section of Inside Out, the sequel implements different animation styles for several new characters that pop up during Joy and company’s journey back to headquarters. 2D remnants from a TV show Riley watched when she was younger, Bloofy and Pouchy (voiced by Ron Funches and James Austin Johnson, respectively), toss out questions to a non-existent audience in the back of Riley’s mind. There’s also the Final Fantasy-influenced Lance Slashblade and ominous Deep Dark Secret, who incidentally looks like the Paul Walter Hauser-voiced character from this year’s Orion And The Dark. There’s also a frantic setpiece involving a house-of-cards cubicle farm of Projections that sneaks in clever references to both 1984 and the “distracted boyfriend” meme. As much as I love Inside Out, I didn’t expect to enjoy a sequel to it quite this much but Inside Out 2 is a fully-realized successor that delights and surprises with its imagination and ingenuity.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Bikeriders, a crime drama starring Jodie Comer and Austin Butler which tells the true story of the Chicago outlaw motorcycle club known as the Vandals MC as their club evolves over the course of the 1960s.
Also coming to theaters is The Exorcism, a supernatural horror film starring Russell Crowe and Sam Worthington about a troubled actor who begins to exhibit a disruptive — and possibly demonic — behavior while shooting a supernatural horror film.
Streaming on Netflix is Trigger Warning, an action thriller starring Jessica Alba and Anthony Michael Hall following a skilled Special Forces commando who takes ownership of her father’s bar after he suddenly dies and soon finds herself at odds with a violent gang running rampant in her hometown.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Years ago, GEICO had an ad spoofing the stupidity of horror movie protagonists where a group of teens on the run from a killer opt to hide behind a wall of hanging chainsaws over hopping in a running car. Following their decision, we get a close-up of the killer standing right behind them, who lifts up his mask to reveal how befuddled and somehow disappointed he is by their idiocy. The new Canadian slasher film In A Violent Nature hinges on a hook left hanging by the ad: what if we spent a whole horror movie following the deranged murderer instead of the clueless campers? There have been so many Friday The 13th sequels, it’s a wonder they hadn’t tried it before but now that it’s finally here, I only wish that it had come sooner; it’s the best movie of its subgenre since last year’s Thanksgiving.

We open on a static shot of a locket hanging on a beam in a deep woods abandoned shed, where voices talk out of frame and a hand belonging to Troy (Liam Leone) reaches out to nab the jewelry. Little does he know, that necklace is all that was keeping the decades-old corpse of Johnny (Ry Barrett) buried in the ground and moments after Troy departs with his buddies, the zombified Johnny wriggles free from his earthy prison. We stick with him as he wanders through the forests of Ontario, silently watching over a campfire where the group of friends swap scary stories. They eventually bring up the White Pine Slaughter, an urban legend where an unseen force allegedly got brutal revenge on a group of loggers who covered up the murder of the “mentally hindered” Johnny when he was just a boy. Unfortunately for them, the revenge isn’t quite over yet.

After this bit of exposition, In A Violent Nature doesn’t bother to explain much more along the lines of character motivation as, in one sense, we’ve seen this movie before. Once Johnny claims his first victim, the survival instincts of the remaining campers reliably kick in and they attempt to take actions that won’t instantly doom them. By keeping the perspective on the zombified killer as he lumbers through nature, it could be said that Johnny is the closest thing the film has to a true protagonist. We aren’t exactly rooting for him to kill everyone in this group…but aren’t we? He’s modeled very similarly to Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked face of the Friday The 13th series who drowned as a boy at Camp Crystal Lake due to the negligence of the staff. If Jason can be seen as the “hero” of that franchise, then it’s not difficult to view Johnny in the same way here.

Though In A Violent Nature has long takes and a slower pace, don’t let that fool you into thinking that the movie takes itself too seriously. Some of the kills here are the most gloriously over-the-top that I’ve seen in a slasher, including a cliffside slaughtering that is so immoderate that it’s difficult not to chuckle. That’s not to say that this is a horror comedy but it certainly knows where it came from and leans into the camp of its predecessors. In his debut, writer/director Chris Nash has clearly done his homework, thought about what we’ve already seen before in these films and then commits to how to give us a new perspective. Plot-wise, this movie is hardly reinventing the wheel but in terms of direction, it’s pretty much one-of-a-kind.

Another way that In A Violent Nature carves out its own path is in its audio presentation, which forgoes a musical score for the eerie sounds of the deep forest and the detailed sound design during the slayings. It’s another way that the movie is a subtractive exercise, taking away the conventions upon which audiences typically rely to heighten the overall experience. In a brief sequence that is reminiscent of The Blair Witch Project, one of the characters is running fast enough that her white shirt is barely visible and her screams are barely audible over the ominous symphony of cicada chirps. It sets up a denouement that is more tense and unnerving than the brutality that precedes it, capping off In A Violent Nature as appointment viewing for horror fans.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Bad Boys: Ride Or Die, a buddy cop action comedy starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence reuniting a pair of Miami PD’s finest as they investigate corruption in the department but subsequently find themselves on the run.
Also playing in theaters is The Watchers, a supernatural horror film starring Dakota Fanning and Georgina Campbell following a young artist who gets stranded in the forest and becomes trapped alongside three strangers, who are stalked by mysterious creatures each night.
Premiering on Netflix is Hit Man, a romantic action comedy starring Glen Powell and Adria Arjona involving a professor moonlighting as a hit man for his city police department who finds himself attracted to a woman who enlists his services.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When I first saw that Challengers, the latest from Italian auteur Luca Guadagnino, was being presented in IMAX, I admit to being thrown off balance a bit. After all, this is the director whose previous work was an unassuming indie about star-crossed cannibals on a cross-country journey through the States. But as it turns out, Guadagnino’s releases are perhaps better suited to a more pronounced presentation than most of the blockbusters that the studios decide can make a few extra bucks per ticket by leveling up. With releases like I Am Love and Call Me By Your Name, he’s established himself as one of the most sensuous filmmakers working today, whose work isn’t meant to simply be seen but to be felt with all the senses.

Challengers chiefly centers around the complicated relationship between three characters over a 13 year period. We begin in 2006, where high school tennis players Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) have made it to the boys’ junior doubles championship match at the US Open. While at the tournament, they sit slack-jawed in the stands as much-touted phenom Tashi (Zendaya) continues to make a name for herself on the court. Art and Patrick are both instantly taken with her and inelegantly try to make passes at Tashi, with Patrick taking the first set as the initial winner of her affections. But as Art and Tashi move onto college ball at Stanford while Patrick goes pro, a palpable love triangle forms when Tashi suffers a career-ending injury and Art is there to pick up the pieces in Patrick’s absence.

Anyone who has watched a tennis match live is familiar with the back-and-forth head motion that one needs to participate in to keep up with the action and in several ways, Guadagnino replicates this experience. After establishing a critical event in 2019 that unexpectedly binds the three characters together, he sends us zig-zagging chronologically at points when both Patrick and Art seem to have the upper hand in either their careers or in their relationship with Tashi. Editor Marco Costa has a ball setting the rhythm of these sequences, with some exchanges between characters emulating a lightning-fast rally and other scenes playing out at a practice pace. Thankfully, the cinematography from Sayombhu Mukdeeprom isn’t non-stop whip pans the whole movie but he does judiciously utilize camera movements that evoke the motion of an exciting match.

It’s all set to a propulsive and unforgettable score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who broke onto the film composition scene together with their Oscar-winning work in 2010’s The Social Network. Like that film, Challengers uses a nonlinear narrative that builds up tension like strings on a racket as we throttle through time and gain more context for the individual plot points. I’ve said for years that the advantage with IMAX screenings is necessarily for the larger picture but rather for the more sophisticated sound setup and the music in this film alone is worth the upgrade from standard presentation. The tennis scenes here are among the most cinematic I’ve ever seen, with Guadagnino and his team constantly finding inventive angles to showcase the action, while Reznor and Ross keep our hearts pounding with their galvanic beats.

While Challengers more than holds its own as a sports movie, it mostly functions as a romantic drama between these three complex characters and is just as electrifying as such. Zendaya has been everywhere these days but this is the best place to see her, giving the best performance so far in her young career. It would be easy to see Tashi as a prize to be won by both of these boys but thanks to Zendaya’s boundlessly confident performance along with strong writing from first-timer Justin Kuritzkes, her character always feels in control of her situation and the story at large. One-dimensionally, Art could be viewed as the white knight while Patrick can be seen as a rapscallion but the two trade off between virtuous and wretched often enough that it’s hard to label one as “good guy” and the other as “bad guy”. Challengers is sinewy and sultry filmmaking that truly deserves to be seen in the largest format possible.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Fall Guy, an action comedy starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt about a down-and-out stuntman who must find the missing star of his ex-girlfriend’s upcoming blockbuster film.
Streaming on Netflix is Unfrosted, a comedy biopic starring Jerry Seinfeld and Melissa McCarthy which is loosely based on the true story of the creation of Pop-Tarts as Kellogg’s and Post Cereal compete to see if they can produce a revolutionary breakfast pastry in 1963 Michigan.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is The Idea Of You, a romantic comedy starring Anne Hathaway and Nicholas Galitzine centering on a relationship that develops between a single mother and the lead singer of a popular boy band.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

To describe what Civil War is, it may be more helpful to first describe what it isn’t. It’s not a movie that’s interested in moralizing about how the United States could hypothetically end up in a 21st century civil war. It doesn’t get caught up in polemics of which side is right and which side is wrong in the conflict, nor does it try to directly tie the factions to current political allegiances. The film will almost certainly be a Rorschach test for viewers, who could come away with wildly differing experiences depending on how they’re inclined to receive the story. For me, it’s a movie about the importance of journalism and the power of images more than a political statement of some kind. Of course it’s political, in the sense that it involves how a government could fall, but it’d be difficult to view it as partisan.

In one of her finest performances to date, Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee Smith, a harried war photographer whose captivating images have made her legendary in her field. Unfortunately, the Colorado native doesn’t have to travel far for her latest assignment, which is to cover the conflict between the US government and secessionist forces originating from California and Texas. At a protest in New York, Lee’s quick thinking saves aspiring photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) from a suicide bombing, which understandably makes her want to stick by Lee in the future. Along with reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) and veteran newspaperman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Lee and Jessie travel to Washington DC in an attempt to get an interview with the President before the potential governmental collapse.

It’s obviously fair to call Civil War a war movie but for most of its runtime, it registers more as something between a dystopian thriller and a road movie, though it’s not a conventional version of either. The four main characters are cut from separate archetypes meant to highlight the differences in each other but characteristics gradually overlap in surprising and nuanced ways. Aside from other actors who pop up along the journey, we spend the most time with the four journalists in the car and each of the performers do a stellar job fleshing out their characters. I was particularly taken with Dunst, who brings a completely believable world-weariness to her work here. The young photographer Jessie is a fantastic foil for Lee, whose altruism has been beaten down from the horrors she’s witnessed over the years. While developing film during a pit stop at a football stadium, Lee conjures up all the optimism she can muster to authentically compliment Jessie for a photo she’s taken.

Writer/director Alex Garland is so careful in choosing what to include and what to omit in his sobering tale of an empire in ruin. There are crumbs of exposition — we learn that the President is serving a third term and that the FBI has been disbanded, for instance — and we get flashbacks of atrocities that Lee has witnessed. But Garland doesn’t want to lecture us on “how we got here” or even necessarily treat this as a cautionary tale for a country that isn’t as divided as it’s depicted here. More than politics, he seems to be more interested in themes like desensitization to violence and the survivalist roles that one subscribes to when the chips are down. The quartet encounter horrors along their journey that test their moral and ethical compasses but above all, their journalistic instinct tells them it’s best to document rather than intervene.

What I found most valuable about Civil War is the conversation around what it means to be a journalist in the most dire scenarios. The chief conflict these characters face — itself its own civil war — is in being pragmatic in situations that necessarily call for an emotional response. If you see someone bleeding from a gunshot wound, how can you not act to save them? These photojournalists have to deny these instincts and we can see the toll it takes on them. The concept of centrists or pacifists or conscientious objectors is brought up several times in the movie; Lee and Jessie sound envious when they confide in each other that their parents are living on their farms waiting the war out. By capturing images of the war while not technically fighting it, are they actually taking a side? Civil War is a movie bound to stir up many such questions with no easy answers.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Abigail, a horror movie starring Melissa Barrera and Dan Stevens centering on a group of criminals who kidnap the ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure but come to discover that she’s a vampire.
Also playing only in theaters is The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare, an action comedy starring Henry Cavill and Eiza González telling the story of a small group of highly skilled soldiers who strike against German forces behind enemy lines during World War II.
Streaming on Netflix is Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, a sci-fi epic starring Sofia Boutella and Djimon Hounsou concluding the story of a band of surviving warriors who defend their new home world against the armies of a tyrannical ruling force.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Thanksgiving is a superb slasher, one that does all the things that it’s supposed to do very well, in addition to doing other things that it wouldn’t necessarily need to do well but does anyway. Adapted from the best of the fictitious movie trailers that appear throughout 2007’s Grindhouse, the long-gestating feature is comparatively more straight-faced than its farcical predecessor but is still stuffed with just the right amount of camp. Given that this is directed by Eli Roth, who debatably hasn’t made a good movie since the original Thanksgiving short, and that it’s a Sony horror movie released after Halloween that was barely screened for critics, I did not go into this film with high hopes. Sometimes, lowered expectations can be a beautiful thing.

The outset of Thanksgiving covers a scenario that is sadly becoming more familiar: a crazed crowd forming outside a retail store (RightMart, a stand-in for WalMart) on Thanksgiving evening ahead of Black Friday. When a few shoppers get in early, the incensed mob pushes their way through the doors and carnage ensues. A year later, RightMart owner Thomas Wright (Rick Hoffman) waffles on whether or not to have a Black Friday sale, given the previous year’s riot. His daughter Jessica (Nell Verlaque) saw the violence firsthand with her friends Gabby (Addison Rae) and Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks), the latter of whom has been missing ever since. When members of the community who were also present that night start getting picked off in brutal fashion, it’s up to Sheriff Eric Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) to track down the killer.

While the original 2-minute Thanksgiving trailer is aiming for laughs with its corny line readings and increasingly improbable decapitations, the feature-length adaptation isn’t as much as send-up of slashers as it is a genuine student of their craft. Roth is obviously versed in horror filmmaking but this is his most exquisitely-enacted entertainment yet. The movie’s killer, who dresses in pilgrim garb and goes by the moniker “John Carver”, is a dynamic dispatcher who favors an ax but isn’t above a flashbang grenade or silenced pistol when the situation calls for it. Appropriately, Carver makes creative use of holiday meal props like pop-up turkey timers and corn cob forks as well. There aren’t a ton of Thanksgiving-set slasher movies out there but those kinds of festive touches immediately shoot this entry to the top of the list.

Even more than your average horror flick, Thanksgiving sports a sometimes overwhelming amount of primary and secondary players but the actors make the most of their screen time regardless. Verlaque is outstanding as final girl Jessica, smart and sensitive while no doubt tough enough to fight off Carver’s numerous ambushes. Joe Delfin is a hoot as McCarty, a Black Sabbath-loving hooligan whose impressive gun stash is concealed so ingeniously that it would make the arms hustler from Taxi Driver jealous. Dempsey is seemingly the only one in the cast who decided to be deliberate with their New England accent but I’m happy that he did nonetheless.

As both director and co-writer, Roth does an excellent job evoking the tropes embedded in the slasher subgenre while he reminds us how effective they still are. There’s the rival high school with their loudmouth football captain, the weird loner who wants to fit in, and the jock with a heart of gold. All potential victims and all potential suspects. It’s a tricky balance, getting the audience to care about characters who could either be killed one minute or revealed to be unspeakably evil the next. Masters of horror like Tobe Hooper and Wes Craven manage this expertly and while Roth doesn’t have the track record of those two, he does a pretty darn good job running at their pace with this one. Thanksgiving is a massively satisfying meal that will have horror buffs coming back to the table each year for seconds.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this week:
Playing only in theaters is Napoleon, a historical epic starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby depicting Napoleon Bonaparte’s rise to power in France through the lens of his volatile relationship with Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais.
Also coming only to theaters is Wish, an animated musical starring Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine following a young girl who wishes on a star and gets a more direct answer than she bargained for when a trouble-making star comes down from the sky to join her.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Velveteen Rabbit, a holiday special starring Phoenix Laroche and Helena Bonham Carter adapting the classic children’s book about a boy who unlocks a world of magic after receiving a new favorite toy for Christmas.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When winter creeps in and the days grow shorter, we gather close together for light and warmth. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a movie that honors this primal instinct and helps clarify the importance of human connection during our darkest days. Like most of Payne’s other films, this one starts with characters who are sarcastic and snipe at one another but slowly reach a better understanding of each other through hard-fought vulnerability. Few in the business are better at this sort of character transition than Paul Giamatti, reuniting with Payne from 2004’s Sideways. In one of his best performances in years, Giamatti plays a stern instructor who’s so easy to hate that you have to imagine he has a heck of a redemption arc in him. Yes, this is a film that plays in some familiar narrative territory but it does so wonderfully.

It’s 1970 at the New England prep school Barton Academy and almost all of the kids are getting ready to head home for Christmas break. The few that remain — the “holdovers” — are those whose parents are planning to be out of town for holiday or have some other reason they can’t host their children over break. One such student is Angus (Dominic Sessa, in his first film role), a troubled teen who recently lost his father and gets the news that his stepparents have stepped away from the holidays, leaving him out in the cold. Similarly sideswiped is Paul (Giamatti), a history teacher who gets roped into supervising the holdovers after another professor comes up with a bogus excuse at the last minute. He’ll at least have some help with the school cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) present but besides that, he’s stuck with a group of kids who take exception to his strict demeanor.

The movie’s first act is its weakest, spending a little too much time with a group of ill-defined students who soon flee the picture, but The Holdovers really hits its stride when it’s down to Paul, Angus, and Mary. This is a terrific trio of performances, filled with empathy and humanity, upon which the entire film can cast its foundation. As good as Giamatti is, Sessa and Randolph play up to his level and similarly put in outstanding work. Sessa takes a character we’ve seen before — a snot-nosed punk who can’t stay out of trouble — and somehow makes him easy to love and care about as the story progresses. Randolph plays the most easy-going of the three main characters but also the one who has endured a terrible tragedy — the death of her son in Vietnam — that she’s trying to overcome. Even if the script was crummy, these performances would still shine.

Thankfully, the adroit screenplay from David Hemingson is far from crummy and serves up a cornucopia of both pithy one-liners and jewels of character insight. Paul is one of those obnoxious academics who is always trying to educate people who aren’t in the mood or mindset for a lesson, as when he (fittingly) lectures the kids about the origin of the word “punitive” over lunch. He repeats an adage equating life to a henhouse ladder that speaks to his worldview and the phrase “entre nous” is spoken several times between Paul and Angus, first played as a laugh line but gaining a momentum of meaning upon each repetition. Being the most good-natured of the three, Mary has little ways of cutting through the cynicism of her two male boarders. An episode of The Newlywed Game inspires conversation and when Paul shuts down his own hypothetical scenario of happiness, she laments, “you can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”

Payne goes all-in on the early 70s aesthetic, filling the frame with a thousand shades of brown and beige while adding the occasional pop and click — replicating a spinning record — to the sound design. The excellent soundtrack includes usual suspects from Badfinger to Cat Stevens but also sports anachronistic selections from modern acts Damien Jurado and Khruangbin atop a menagerie of Christmas hits. Around the holidays, people look for movies like The Holdovers that not only take place around Christmas but capture what it feels like to spend more time indoors with people we aren’t near the rest of the year. Without being cloyingly sentimental, it’s a film that gives us hope that we can relate with each other not just during the cold months but the whole year through.

Score – 4/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is The Marvels, the latest MCU movie starring Brie Larson and Teyonah Parris continuing the story of Captain Marvel as she gets her powers with those of two other superwomen, forcing them to work together to save the universe.
Also coming to theaters is Journey To Bethlehem, a Christmas musical starring Fiona Palomo and Milo Manheim that weaves classic Christmas melodies with humor, faith, and new pop songs in a retelling of the story of Mary and Joseph and the birth of Jesus.
Streaming on Netflix is The Killer, an action thriller starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton following an assassin who battles his employers, and himself, on an international manhunt he insists isn’t personal.

Review reprinted by permission of Whatzup

One of the very best film debuts of the year, Chloe Domont’s Fair Play is a bracingly taut psychosexual thriller that leaves an impact. Acquired by Netflix for a hefty $20 million sum after it screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, it’s the kind of serious-minded adult drama that could gain gobs of traction if it doesn’t get lost in the algorithm after its release. Increasingly, Netflix’s content machine is more focused on producing disposable entertainment that checks off demographic or genre boxes rather than rewarding exceptional filmmakers with attentive audiences. It’s a common practice now for people watching TV at home to also have their smartphone out in front of their face at the same time, effectively creating a “two-screen” experience. Fair Play is a movie that demands your single-screen attention.

We meet Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) at the wedding of the latter’s brother, where the couple sneak off for an unexpectedly messy bathroom tryst. An engagement ring falls out of Luke’s pocket, a hasty proposal is carried out and the happy couple covertly leaves the wedding in lovedrunk bliss. But the 4:30 AM alarm comes all too soon and the two go about getting ready for their workdays, which we soon learn take place at the highly competitive firm Crest Capital. They’re keeping their relationship a secret from everyone at the office, desperate not to break company policy in front of their boss Campbell (Eddie Marsan). After the calamitous firing of a portfolio manager, analysts like Emily and Luke wait with baited breath to see who will fill the new opening but after Emily gets the promotion, Luke’s jealousies and insecurities bubble up and threaten their relationship.

Though there have been plenty of tense movies set in the world of high finance, what makes Fair Play especially fraught is the personal stakes atop the high pressure setting of the hedge fund world. Emily first hears a rumor that Luke is next in line for the coveted PM position and when she tells him, they’re both excited at the proposition. There’s implicit gender bias at play when Emily is expected to be happy for Luke and report to him with no issue but when the roles are reversed, he is clearly uncomfortable with her being the boss. He fakes excitement upon hearing the news but after just the first day of working under her, he’s clearly bitter and pouts at a bar when the work day is over. From there, the passive aggressive missives get less “passive” as the story steams ahead. Even though their relationship gets more toxic and twisted over time, I somehow still wanted things to be reconciled between the two of these characters.

The pair of performances at the center of Fair Play are nothing short of electric. Dynevor has a more complex role, given that she has the biggest shifts between how she represents herself in her personal life with Luke versus how she runs her professional life in the office. Emily puts a tremendous amount of pressure on herself not only to excel in her new position but to salvage a relationship that used to be filled with passion and understanding but is becoming more doomed by the day. Dynevor is incredible in so many scenes but the one in which she begs with Luke to try to refer him to another firm so that he can save his career and their engagement was particularly heart-wrenching. Ehrenreich has the less empathetic role as the rampantly petulant Luke but his unnerving level of ambition certainly makes him a compelling antagonist. Between this and his rewarding work in Oppenheimer back in July, Ehrenreich is continuing to carve quite a career out for himself.

As with many thrillers, the pace is critical to keeping the audience hooked and Domont along with editor Franklin Peterson assert a sprinter’s clip through the almost two-hour runtime. There are moments that mirror one another, as when a phone alarm first goes off early in the morning but each subsequent instance of it appearing finds one or both of the protagonists already wide awake, drearily looking at the phone in anticipation. I particularly loved a timbre match cut late in the film, where a character yelling an expletive merges seamlessly into a train brake screeching outside. Speaking of sound, there are also soulful doo-wop tunes embedded throughout the film which call to mind that this should be this couple’s honeymoon period instead of their unraveling. It may not be the easiest watch but in its ruthless examination of sexual politics and cataclysmic competition, Fair Play is riveting and unmissable.

Score – 4/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is The Exorcist: Believer, a supernatural horror sequel starring Leslie Odom Jr. and Ellen Burstyn, in which the parents of demonically possessed girls search for help by way of Regan MacNeil’s mother from the first The Exorcist.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Totally Killer, a horror comedy starring Kiernan Shipka and Olivia Holt about a teenager who accidentally travels back in time to 1987 determined to stop an infamous local serial killer before he can start his spree.
Premiering on Paramount+ is Pet Sematary: Bloodlines, a horror prequel starring Jackson White and Forrest Goodluck taking place 50 years before the original Pet Sematary, where a young boy first discovers a local cemetery where the dead can live again.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Adapted from a 2020 short film of the same name, the laugh-out-loud hilarious Theater Camp considers what Waiting For Guffman would look like if it attended Tairy Greene’s Acting Seminar For Children. This is the kind of intelligently-rendered comedy that has loads of jokes for general audiences but is also filled with references to musicals and performance subculture that will make theater kids swoon. True to the nature of the narrative, the film was conceived as a collective among a tight-knit group of stage players who have since made the leap to film and television. Co-directors and co-writers Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman both have close ties to star and co-writer Ben Platt, the former an acting collaborator from a young age and the latter a frequent director of Platt’s music videos. Their camaraderie pays off big time here.

Theater Camp is largely set in the confines of AdirondACTS, a summer refuge in upstate New York for young thespians looking to hone their craft. The crew is preparing for a new season when their intrepid leader Joan (Amy Sedaris) suddenly falls into a coma after a strobe light during a rendition of Bye Bye Birdie triggers a seizure. Regrettably, the duties of running the camp fall to her hopelessly half-witted son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), a would-be finance vlogger who wouldn’t know a foreclosure from a forearm. It turns out actual fiduciary knowledge would come in handy, as the camp is buried with back payments and capitalist firm representative Caroline (Patti Harrison) is waiting in the wings to buy the facility for pennies on the dollar. It’s up to veteran counselors Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) and Amos (Platt) to salvage the summer program and produce an original musical that will make the parents of the resident theater kids proud.

The almost overwhelmingly talented ensemble of Theater Camp also includes quickly-rising stars Noah Galvin and Ayo Edebiri, the latter of whom appears in 3 films that are currently in theaters right now, with one more (Bottoms) due later this month. Edebiri plays a hastily-acquired replacement instructor who embellishes mask work and other esoteric theater techniques to disguise the fact that she doesn’t know what stage combat is, much less how to actually teach it. Her character Janet, along with Troy and first-time camp attendee Devon (Donovan Colan), underscore an intriguing subtext of the movie. All three being novices to the theater world makes them outcasts in this environment, even though they could be seen as the most “normal” characters in the film.

But, of course, Theater Camp isn’t a searing psychological investigation of in-group/out-group bias; it’s a comedy, and one of the funniest of the year at that. Shot and edited in a mockumentary style, the film captures just the right moments from each character to let us in on their entire worldview with just a couple lines of dialogue. The actual storyline, which involves tropes like lopsided friendships and a scrappy underdog defying the odds to come out on top, isn’t anything new but doesn’t end up bogging down the end result. From the auditions to rehearsals to the final stage performances, there are small yet hysterical moments that immerse us in this weird world that musical geeks call home. Just the way that show tunes “Oh What A Beautiful Morning” and “Give My Regards To Broadway” were quoted through PA pronouncements had me in stitches.

Gordon and Lieberman also nail the tone in their direction, affectionately skewering this off-beat community with just the right amount of snark and wit. This warmth for the material also comes through effortlessly in the performances, particularly Platt as the head of drama (in more sense than one) at AdirondACTS. Given how much of a disaster the cinematic adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen was, it’s nice to see Platt in a role that is perfect for him to inhabit. The movie is also a terrific showcase for Tatro, a standout from Netflix’s true-crime mockumentary American Vandal who plays an endearing moron about as well as any actor I can think of at the moment. Whether you’ve never belted out a tune on stage before or you came into the world singing Sondheim, Theater Camp is certain to delight.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Last Voyage of the Demeter, a supernatural horror movie starring Corey Hawkins and Aisling Franciosi depicting strange and horrifying events that befall a doomed crew as they attempt to survive an ocean voyage from Transylvania to London.
Streaming on Netflix is Heart of Stone, an action thriller starring Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan about an intelligence operative for a shadowy global peacekeeping agency who races to stop a hacker from stealing its most valuable and dangerous weapon.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Red, White & Royal Blue, a romcom starring Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine about an altercation at a royal wedding between the son of the US president and a British prince that gives way to a blossoming romance between the two.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Wes Anderson is the type of director whose work is so firmly situated in the cultural consciousness that even those who have only seen one or two of his films can immediately recognize his style. Over the years, parodies of Anderson doing X-Men or a horror movie have popped up on YouTube and SNL and more recently, AI has been used to create fake trailers for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings in Anderson’s emblematic style. The question around Asteroid City, the latest from the oft-caricatured auteur, is whether Anderson would drastically change things up to keep audiences guessing or continue with the muted and mannered methodology to which viewers have become accustomed. For the most part, Anderson plays to his strengths in terms of aesthetic and tone but the difference here is in the richness of emotions from the film’s panoply of characters.

Set within a play of the same name, Asteroid City takes place in a fictional desert settlement named after a meteorite that landed thousands of years ago and created a crater where a science fair is now held annually. Rolling into town for the 1955 Junior Stargazer Convention are five teenaged honorees, there to show off their impressive retrofuturistic inventions, along with their respective families. Fittingly, one of the teenagers, Woodrow Steenbeck (Jake Ryan), is nicknamed “Brainiac” and brings with him his photographer father Augie (Jason Schwartzman) and three sisters. He strikes up a fast friendship with fellow Stargazer Dinah Campbell (Grace Edwards), whose actress mother Midge (Scarlett Johansson) similarly begins a relationship with the recently-widowed Augie.

Being a Wes Anderson movie, Asteroid City additionally boasts dozens of other eccentric players and ornate vignettes to detail this world-within-a-world. He’s assembled impressive casts before but this may be Anderson’s most stacked ensemble to date; when superstars like Tom Hanks and Steve Carell pop up only for a few scenes each, seemingly because the film is already bursting at the seams with talent, it becomes even more apparent the embarrassment of riches this project has become. The sheer amount of familiar faces, which also includes Anderson stalwarts like Jeffrey Wright and Tilda Swinton, may connote that these characters are disposable or replaceable but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Some of their stories are funny and some of them are sad but they’re all interesting and would be worth diving into on their own terms.

The writing in Anderson’s work is often droll and direct, ripe for satire but also whip smart and difficult to emulate authentically. Asteroid City has several trademark pithy exchanges, the first conversation over phone between Augie and his father-in-law being a clear example, but over time, the dialogue becomes more reflective and introspective. The play can be seen both as a Cold War parable and a pandemic allegory, where isolation and fear underscore human’s desperate need for connection. Augie and Midge’s tryst is fueled by conversations between open windows in adjacent motel rooms, their framing resembling the video chat confines of computer screens. When juxtaposed with an alley-set chat between the actor playing Augie and the actress that was to portray Augie’s wife, Anderson’s comment seems to be that people will cross any barriers to carry out meaningful conversation.

If things in Asteroid City weren’t metatextual enough, there is another layer of artifice by way of a TV show narrated with Rod Serling-like candor by Bryan Cranston about how the play was performed. Though these scenes are in black-and-white and in a markedly different aspect ratio than the Panavision widescreen used for the play itself, it can be tricky keeping track of what world we’re in when. Cranston’s character even pops up briefly in one of the full-color scenes by accident, only to slyly slink away back to his own universe. Despite these veneers of unreality, Anderson is careful never to lose the thread of why each of these characters matter and why we should care about them. That’s a breakthrough worth celebrating for a filmmaker who has, from time to time in his stellar career, favored cerebral flourish over genuine sentiment.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, an action-adventure sequel starring Harrison Ford and Phoebe Waller-Bridge which concludes the 5-film arc of the titular archaeologist as he teams up with his goddaughter to retrieve a legendary artifact that can change the course of history.
Also coming to the multiplex is Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken, an animated fantasy comedy starring Lana Condor and Toni Collette about a shy teenager who learns that she comes from a fabled royal family of legendary sea krakens and that her destiny lies in the depths of the waters.
Streaming on Netflix is Run Rabbit Run, a psychological horror film starring Sarah Snook and Lily LaTorre following a fertility doctor who must challenge her own values and confront a ghost from her past after noticing the strange behavior of her young daughter.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup