Like fellow relationship comedy Oh, Hi! from earlier this summer, the outstanding screwball farce Splitsville opens on a car-confined couple belting out lyrics of soft rock duets to one another. The former features the Parton-Rogers classic “Islands In The Stream” and the latter opts for the Loggins-Nicks hit “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend'” but in both scenes, life seems to be perfect. You’re en route to a weekend getaway and you’re singing cheesy pop songs with your partner; what could go wrong? Oh, Hi! takes a bit longer to unpack that question but Splitsville answers it early and often, with a car wreck and accidental public indecency being just the first of many misfortunes. 14 months into their marriage, Ashley (Adria Arjona) has considered divorce so thoroughly that she’s handwritten a letter she’s finally built up the nerve to read to Carey (Kyle Marvin). Pulled over on the side of the highway, Carey decides to run away as she starts reading it. After all, if he can’t hear her message, then they can’t be over.

After trekking on-foot for some time, Carey finds his way to the beach house of his best friend Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson). They’re happily married with a son, so surely they must have the answer for how he can keep things going with Ashley. Carey finds the supposed secret of their success is that Paul and Julie are in an open marriage, an agreement with which the two seem comfortable as long as they don’t have to hear details about the other partners or the trysts. Paul gets exponentially less comfortable with the arrangement when Julie chooses to sleep with Carey while he’s at their place trying to forget about Ashley. All the while, Ashley has taken Carey’s running away as tacit permission to take on other lovers and as luck would have it, Carey expresses his desire for their relationship to be open past monogamy.

Written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and solo-directed by Covino, Splitsville is a hilarious highwire act that feels like it could spiral out of control at any moment but never does. The script is a thing of beauty, packed with consistently clever and sneakily insightful exchanges about the trickiest dynamics of romantic relationships. As Ashley’s suitors stack up, they begin hanging around the house, even after she seems to have lost interest in them. Carey unwittingly ends up befriending some of them, playing video games and listening to records with some of the gentlemen in an increasingly crowded apartment more akin to a himbo harem. He even lends an ear to their romantic woes with his wife, as a clueless chiropractic hopeful laments “it feels like the universe is out of alignment and I’m not able to adjust it.”

Covino corrals an impressive amount of comedic performances from the sprawling cast while concocting bravura sequences you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a swinging indie comedy. A visually dense montage of Carey and Ashley’s home life once the latter takes on the company of other men employs a head-spinning but steadily-paced 360 degree camera motion. A slow-motion dolly shot — one that would feel right at home in Rushmore — across the front of a private school takes its time showing Julie and Carey canoodling in the carpool drop-off before eventually settling on Paul’s dejected face. There’s even a knock-down drag-out fight between Paul and Carey set within the sun-dappled opulence of a Hamptons home that is both sidesplitting in its comical escalation and accomplished in its choreography.

All four members of this quartet, along with single-scene-stealers like Nicholas Braun and Tyrone Benskin, make this material sing but I was particularly impressed with the performances from Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona. Marvin is a new face to me and following Splitsville, I thought to myself “where’s this guy been?” He has the sadsack puerility of John C. Reilly’s goofier characters and understated sensitivity found in Will Ferrell’s dramatic roles, so perhaps it’s no surprise that we just became best friends. Arjona certainly made her mark with leading roles in three releases last year but this is the best work that I’ve seen from her so far. Playing a young woman contorting her personality manically in an attempt to find herself within the arms of other men, she mines wicked humor from her character’s desperation. In a year alongside other terrific comedies like Friendship and The Naked Gun, Splitsville may be the finest yet.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Conjuring: Last Rites, a supernatural horror sequel starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, concluding the saga of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren as they take on one last terrifying case involving mysterious entities they must confront.
Being re-released in theaters is Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway smash biographical musical about one of America’s foremost founding fathers and first Secretary of the Treasury.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High And Low as a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot and conflicted by a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

In some ways, a reboot/legacy sequel of the Naked Gun films makes sense. With humble beginnings as the short-lived ABC series Police Squad!, the franchise took off with the release of The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! in 1988 and generated two sequels that also hit big at the box office. To say that the movies don’t follow a strict narrative chronology or cohesion goes without saying, so you can basically go with just about any story upon which screenwriters can throw the most jokes. But since the complete original comic trio of Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker and star Leslie Nielsen are no longer with us, it seemed unlikely that a remake could actually recapture the magic of the spoof comedy dynasty. So it’s quite surprising that not only is The Naked Gun as good as the 1988 original but it may even supersede it.

The film stars a fantastic Liam Neeson as Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr., son of Leslie Nielsen’s bumbling badge from the original trilogy. Kneeling before a plaque of his dad in the Police Squad station, Drebin Jr. remarks “I want to be just like you but, at the same time, completely different and original.” His investigation into a fatal car crash in Malibu brings the deceased driver’s sister Beth Davenport (Pamela Anderson) to his office, claiming that her brother’s death was no accident. The investigation leads Frank to tech billionaire Richard Cane (Danny Huston), whose electric car model is the same as the one found at the crash site. But Drebin uncovers an even more nefarious plot in the process, one involving a device that can beam an audio signal through cell phones that turns bystanders into barbarians with the hit of a button.

Where The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear and Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult were partially undone by plotlines that were needlessly complicated, The Naked Gun opts for a more straightforward storyline that even those under the age of the PG-13 rating could follow. These movies aren’t about developing compelling characters or generating thought-provoking themes; they’re about generating as many laughs as possible. This new entry not only succeeds at that goal but also does so at a laudably brisk pace. The 85-minute runtime is padded by a fourth wall-breaking mid-credit gag and end credits that pepper in phony acknowledgements e.g. Set Dressing as Ranch, Italian, French, Russian. There’s an under-appreciated craft to editing a comedy like this, keeping the pacing fast while still firing off more than enough comedic beats to keep the audience from feeling like they were cheated out of a longer production.

Director Akiva Schaffer, who also helmed more conceptual parodies like Hot Rod and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, doesn’t just get the timing right with The Naked Gun but he also nails the spirit and tone of the best ZAZ collaborations. There’s a vaudevillian energy not just in the pace of the comedy but the variety of comedic styles that Schaffer and his co-scribes Dan Gregor and Doug Mand employ throughout the film. While it mainly riffs on police procedurals and the tropes therein, the mechanics of getting those jokes to land travel through the gamut of comedy genres from the absurd to prop work along the way. Not only is the movie not afraid of potty humor but the best quote from the whole thing even has the word “toilet” in it.

As threadbare as the plot is, The Naked Gun doesn’t work unless you cast correctly for Drebin, given how inextricably linked Leslie Nielsen is with the original films. In fact, the project actually flailed for years when a direct-to-TV sequel starring Nielsen fell through and a re-work starring Ed Helms (thankfully) never manifested. Fortunately, co-producer Seth MacFarlane saw the potential of Liam Neeson after directing him back-to-back in comedies A Million Ways to Die in the West and Ted 2. Neeson is simply sensational in this role, his grizzled gravitas and presence in innumerable actioners over the years lending itself perfectly to deadpan deliveries and tough guy pratfalls. In a time when most straight-ahead comedies have been relegated to streaming services, it’s a joy to watch an uproarious comedy like The Naked Gun in the theater, laughing with strangers in the shared darkness.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Weapons, starring Josh Brolin and Julia Garner, is a horror mystery involving a community sent reeling when all but one child from the same classroom in town mysteriously vanishes on the same night at exactly the same time.
Freakier Friday, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, is a comedy sequel reuniting a mother and daughter who inadvertently switch places once again but this time, a daughter and stepdaughter are now mixed up in the body swap madness.
Sketch, starring Tony Hale and D’Arcy Carden, is a fantasy comedy about a young girl coming to terms with the death of her mother whose sketchbook falls into a strange pond and brings her drawings of strange creatures to life.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Now playing at Cinema Center, the new comedy Friendship isn’t technically an adaptation of the sketch show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson but it’s about as close an approximation as we’re likely to get. Across three seasons, the Netflix series has found a considerable audience since debuting in 2019, filled with bizarre and profane vignettes that creator and star Tim Robinson may have first dreamed up during his three-season writing stint at SNL. It’s a show that leans heavily into the awkward and absurd, often featuring characters who are unable to navigate social situations and whose trepidation typically triggers outlandish consequences. If you don’t like this brand of humor, this film will be an unpleasant experience. If you delight in “cringe comedy”, then this movie is likely to be your new best friend.

Robinson plays Craig Waterman, a marketing exec “living the dream” in suburbia with his wife Tami (Kate Mara) and their teenage son Steven (Jack Dylan Grazer). A piece of misdelivered mail leads Craig to meet Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd), a meteorologist living down the street with whom Craig develops a strong bond upon meeting. Where Craig is more cloistered and spends most of his evenings sitting in his La-Z-Boy, Austin is comparatively more free-spirited and gigs out with a local rock band after his night shift as weatherman. The two hang out in a group of Austin’s friends but a handful of vibe-killing faux pas from Craig cause Austin to scale the relationship back considerably. Predictably, Craig doesn’t get the message and commits a series of increasingly poor decisions in an attempt to rekindle the spark with Austin.

Much like Adam Sandler comedies of the 1990s, the success of Friendship for viewers will depend on how heavily one buys into the schtick of the intentionally abrasive protagonist. Tim Robinson’s persona is effectively a deconstruction of the everyman type, someone who can converse appropriately with friends or co-workers up to a point until they hit an obstacle. Where more emotionally enlightened folks may try to delicately traverse or politely withdraw, this guy digs in with temerity and crashes through the metaphorical road block. It’s a comically exaggerated form of what we all do in our brains when we butt up against social conventions that elude us; we can’t do this in real life but it sure is fun watching someone else try. Naturally, the scenario of one friend “breaking up” with another is a perfect premise upon which to implement this character.

What makes Friendship work so well at feature length is how director and writer Andrew DeYoung keeps finding new avenues to send Craig down without betraying the central dilemma. Much like the hidden tunnel system that Craig and Austin tread through during one of their initial hangs, there are many places this story could go and still arrive at a fitting and earned conclusion. Whether it’s a misjudged pitch to the town’s mayor for a PR refresh or a psychedelic trip with hilariously banal results, DeYoung sees the comic potential for this put-upon putz within innumerable crannies in the storyline. There are also moments centered around male bonding that don’t have to do with Craig’s incompetence and are just funny on their own terms. Men don’t usually sing Ghost Town DJ’s tunes spontaneously a capella in the round but, come to think of it, maybe they should.

Robinson also has support from reliable players who aren’t typically known for comedy — this style of comedy, anyway — but plug into the narrative nicely. Paul Rudd starts off with the cocksure poise of his field reporter character from Anchorman before revealing shades of darkness and doubt. Kate Mara is similarly playing things straight off Robinson in what could be considered a thankless role but she keeps finding surprising ways to make it her own. I Think You Should Leave regular Conner O’Malley pops up for a brief but memorable scene; the way he chooses to finish up an impromptu toast at a party is the hardest I’ve laughed in a theater all year. Those who are already put off by Tim Robinson’s specific comedic styling will not be won over by Friendship but those who already beat the drum for him will find even more here to love.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Ballerina, an action thriller starring Ana de Armas and Anjelica Huston, spinning off from the John Wick series to tell the story of a specific “Ballerina” assassin who sets out to seek revenge after her father’s death.
Also coming only to theaters is The Phoenician Scheme, a spy comedy starring Benicio del Toro and Mia Threapleton, following a wealthy businessman as he appoints his only daughter as sole heir to his estate before becoming the target of scheming tycoons.
Premiering on Hulu is Predator: Killer Of Killers, an animated sci-fi action film starring Lindsay LaVanchy and Louis Ozawa Changchien, involving three of the fiercest warriors in human history as they become prey to the extraterrestrial hunters known as Predators.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Up to this point, director and writer Ryan Coogler has made a name for himself working within frameworks like the Rocky and Black Panther franchises but his latest, Sinners, takes things to — to borrow a phrase — a whole ‘nother level. It’s a staggeringly ambitious blockbuster, an epic Southern Gothic equally inspired by the feverishly sensuous artwork of Ernie Barnes and the devil-may-care, us-against-the-world actioners of John Carpenter. Understandably, it’s been marketed most prevalently as a vampire movie, which it assuredly embraces eventually but decidedly takes a bit of time to show its fangs. But genre-blending and influences aside, this is Coogler’s most lived-in film so far, with such an evocative sense of character and conflict that its slight sins of cinematic coherency can easily be forgiven.

Taking place over a 24-hour period in October 1932, Sinners introduces us to a pair of brothers known as the Smokestack Twins, comprised of Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan). After working for years in Chicago under Al Capone, they’ve decided to return to the Jim Crow South — the Mississippi Delta in particular — to open a barrelhouse called Club Juke. We watch the Twins recruit proficient blues players like Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Sammie Moore (Miles Caton) for their opening night, hoping to start things off with a bang. Along the way, Smoke reunites with his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), while Stack crosses paths with his lascivious ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld).

They all convene at the Club as the sun gets low, with singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) belting out tunes and Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) acting as bouncer at the entrance. The music and atmosphere attract many, including Irish immigrant Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a musician who is particularly taken with Sammie’s transcendental blues guitar chops. Despite offering money well over the cover price to gain entry, Remmick is turned away at the door but develops a following of his own outside the juke joint. After a patron is assaulted by Remmick and his crew after stepping outside for a moment, it becomes clear that the gang outside is composed of vampires bent on trying to gain access to the club to turn the partygoers into bloodsuckers. Using the limited resources they have available, the Smokestack twins and the Club Juke staff aim to defend their establishment by any means necessary.

Sinners is an interesting beast because those going in expecting a straight-ahead vampire tale could be put off by how long it takes for horror aspects to lock into place, but those going in without expectations could be put off by what’s effectively a period drama turning into a monster movie. Coogler is at his most “yes, and” here as a filmmaker, embracing both the high-minded films and schlocky cinema that contribute to his voice as a storyteller. It’s the kind of exquisite gumbo that you can only cook up with this kind of budget once you’ve already proven yourself on the big stage, which, these days, essentially means within the superhero milieu. My hope is that other studios like Warner Bros. continue to see the value in putting their money where their mouth is by backing visionary directors with stout budgets.

The money, as they say, is on the screen with Sinners. Shooting on 65mm film for a superlative IMAX presentation, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw delivers a sumptuous, supersized silver screen experience. Also reteaming with Coogler on the crew is composer Ludwig Göransson, who continues to push himself stylistically with a dobro-led score that’s completely different from the other film music he’s put out thus far. In addition to the original score, the movie is packed wall-to-wall with existing tunes from various cultural backgrounds that deepen the aural canvas. In a film with almost too many great music moments to count, a sequence set to “Pale, Pale Moon” is perhaps the most luminous. Missing out on Sinners while it’s in theaters would be a sin.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Accountant 2, an action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Jon Bernthal, reuniting the titular auditor/hitman with his equally lethal brother as the two track down a group of assassins responsible for a Treasury chief’s murder.
Also playing only in theaters is Until Dawn, a supernatural horror film starring Ella Rubin and Michael Cimino, following a group of friends trapped in a time loop, where mysterious foes are chasing and killing them in gruesome ways, must survive until dawn to escape it.
Premiering on Netflix ix Havoc, an action thriller starring Tom Hardy and Jessie Mei Li, about a detective must fight his way through the criminal underworld to rescue a politician’s estranged son, unraveling a deep web of corruption and conspiracy that ensnares his entire city.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

A marriage story disguised as a spy caper, Steven Soderbergh’s latest Black Bag stars Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett as the partners at the center of this outstanding potboiler. They play George and Kathryn, respectively, both intelligence officers working for the same British organization, who use the phrase “black bag” like a safe word when skirting around confidential intel with one another. George’s boss Meacham (Gustaf Skarsgård) asks him to investigate the leak of a dangerous software program named Severus and gives him a list of potential suspects within their agency. They include satellite imagery specialist Clarissa (Marisa Abela), her boyfriend Freddie (Tom Burke), psychiatrist Zoe (Naomie Harris), and her boyfriend James (Regé-Jean Page). The fifth name on the list, as it should happen, is Kathryn.

Like NEON did with Soderbergh’s Presence a couple months ago, Focus Features is pitching Black Bag as something a bit different than what it actually turns out to be. The ads make it seem like more of an action-packed affair along the lines of a James Bond movie; incidentally, two alumni from that franchise (Harris and Pierce Brosnan in a small role) also appear here. Instead, its story is driven not just on dialogue but the tone and inflection of how the characters, all trained in espionage, carefully deliver their words. Serving as screenwriter for a third time with Soderbergh after Kimi and Presence, David Koepp loads his script with tense exchanges and spy lingo, along with bits of droll humor, to make this tricky, duplicitous world seem plausible.

Even the most adroit script could fall flat with pedestrian storytelling but with Soderbergh working, as he’s often done, as director, cinematographer and editor, Black Bag is quietly riveting. A dinner scene with six guests could absolutely be a ho-hum volley of shot-reverse shot interactions but without getting too ostentatious, Soderbergh finds perfect angles around the corners of the table to pique our interest. George suggests they play a game where each person effectively speaks on behalf of the person sitting to their right and the pacing and composition of the shots turns this normal-seeming party game into something much higher stakes. As with many of his projects, Soderbergh uses natural room lighting here and the globe lights on the table provide enough coverage on each of the characters’ faces but also emit a gauzy halo that smears the frame the way these suspects fudge their facts.

While George is undoubtedly Black Bag‘s central character as the paranoid interrogator, the film gives ample time for each of the main players in the exceptional ensemble cast to shine. The standout for me is Marisa Abela, playing an analyst who is still trying to prove herself early in her career but who also demonstrates she’s more than capable in the art of deception. Following up his role as a war-ready tanker driver in last year’s Furiosa, Tom Burke is back to playing the more conniving and cunning roles that helped him break out in The Souvenir and Mank. Regé-Jean Page and Naomie Harris play things cool and sharp-tongued while still allowing for spots of vulnerability to shine through. Every one of them is impeccably dressed and, yes, everyone in this movie is, to quote Zoolander, “ridiculously good looking”.

Black Bag is certainly a riveting whodunit within this cloak-and-dagger world but I especially appreciated the level of domestic drama Soderbergh and Koepp infuse in this movie. Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender also flesh out their characters beautifully, both coming across as unreadable and enigmatic at the outset but slowly revealing the emotional concentric circles that would cause the two to fall for one another. It also helps that the two actors, some of the best we have, possess dynamite chemistry with one another. With almost 40 films under his belt at this point in his incredible career, Steven Soderbergh is simply one of the most exciting filmmakers around and Black Bag is yet another example of how there’s no genre he can’t enliven.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Snow White, a live-action Disney remake starring Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, retells the story of a princess who joins forces with seven dwarves to liberate her kingdom from her cruel stepmother The Evil Queen.
The Alto Knights, a biopic starring Robert De Niro and Debra Messing, involves a pair of legendary mob bosses — Vito Genovese and Frank Costello — who were rivals for control of a major crime family in the mid-20th century.
Ash, a sci-fi horror thriller starring Eiza González and Aaron Paul, follows an astronaut as she wakes up to find that the entire crew of her space station has been killed and sets course for a nearby planet to find answers.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Following up his much-lauded remake of All Quiet On The Western Front, director Edward Berger returns with another stirring ensemble piece that will likely garner attention as we enter awards season. Conclave, adapted from the Robert Harris novel of the same name, is technically a more hushed affair than Berger’s war epic from a couple years ago but no less subtle in its thematic ambitions. Fortunately, the obvious allegorical parallels go down easier when the story is pulpy papal pap and not a deadly serious wartime fable. Peter Straughan’s screenplay isn’t aiming for an entirely plausible and comprehensive step-by-step account of what happens within the walls of the Vatican during times of transition but proves that you don’t have to do so when you give a talented cast delicious barbs to volley at one another.

When the pope is found dead after a heart attack, there’s a vacancy in the Vatican and it’s the job of Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) to gather the College Of Cardinals to select a new leader of the Catholic Church. Sequestered until a majority vote of 72 is reached, the clergymen convene and several lead candidates naturally emerge. Lawrence’s vote is for Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a progressive whose views Lawrence feels will be a relatively smooth transition from the liberal-leaning former pope. An early favorite hailing from Nigeria is Joshua Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), certainly more conservative socially than Bellini but not as much as staunch Italian traditionalist Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto). Also in the running is Canadian Cardinal Joseph Tremblay (John Lithgow), who worked very closely with the pope before his unexpected death.

The stellar cast of almost all male performers, also including Carlos Diehz and Brían F. O’Byrne in small but crucial roles, gets a sliver of gender diversity with Isabella Rossellini as the nun in charge of feeding and housing the Cardinals during the conclave. Most of the runtime — believe it or not, the fastest 2 hours you’ll spend in a theater this year — is dedicated to shifty-eyed, zucchetto-wearing men whispering about alliances and strategy. By contrast, the scenes with Rossellini’s Sister Agnes have an openness and even empathy to them, which breaks up the ministerial maneuvering nicely. Having said that, most of the fun of Conclave is in seeing how these Cardinals scurry off to their corners to quietly decide the fate of the Church’s leadership and Peter Straughan’s dialogue is juicy without being preposterous.

Though the plotting, with its potboiler provocations, seems fitting for seedier surroundings, Conclave is nothing if not a first-rate production from any aesthetic aspect. Because of Vatican City filming restrictions, the production couldn’t actually take place within the Sistine Chapel but thanks to set designers who worked tirelessly, a replica was crafted for shooting. The results are extraordinary, as ornate and thorough as you would expect from the pope’s actual ancient residence. The pristine cinematography from Stéphane Fontaine revels in the marvel of this hallowed space, often contrasting hues of red and white to imply the conflict and reverence associated with the duty these men are taking on.

It’s no secret we’re in the middle of a contentious election season and while Conclave isn’t partisan in its political proclamations, it doesn’t make a secret of tying its events to the selection of the US President. “No sane man would want this papacy,” an anxious Bellini remarks at one point, the irony of course being that he is one of those men. Though it’s done under the guise of humility and grace, the Cardinals participate the same kind of gamesmanship and blackmailing that we’ve seen in countless election cycles before and will no doubt see in the future. While Edward Berger and Peter Straughan aren’t saying anything especially profound with this commentary, it undoubtedly lands better when politics already seem to be on the top of everyone’s minds. Paradoxically, Conclave could also function as a diversion for those seeking reprieve from endless campaign texts and phone calls.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Here, a family drama starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, covering the events of a single spot of land and its inhabitants, spanning from the past to well into the future.
Streaming on Netflix is Time Cut, a sci-fi slasher starring Madison Bailey and Antonia Gentry, following a high school senior student and amateur inventor as she accidentally finds a time machine and travels back to 2003, the year her sister was murdered by an unknown killer.
Premiering on Disney+ is Music By John Williams, a documentary about the life and career of the titular composer and conductor, responsible for countless classic pieces of film music.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Now playing at Cinema Center, the new prison drama Sing Sing stars Academy Award nominee Colman Domingo as John “Divine G” Whitfield, an inmate at the titular New York jail. He’s on the steering committee for the prison’s Rehabilitation Through The Arts (RTA, for short) program, a real-life initiative that sponsors a theatre group for the incarcerated. After completing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Divine G and the rest of the group set their sights on their next project, which they decide should be more comedic and modern after just finishing Shakespeare. The volunteer director Brent (also Oscar-nominated Paul Raci) decides to take a pass at a script, which the group agrees should implement disparate themes from time travel to Egyptian pharaohs and a couple monologues for good measure.

Joining the group is Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (playing himself), who auditions for the role of Hamlet — albeit, a variation on the typical Shakespeare version. Divine G, who just finished playing Lysander and is typically the lead in the plays they put on, is surprised when the committee chooses Divine Eye for the central role. Watching the relationship between the “Divines” develop is one of Sing Sing‘s inimitable treasures, beginning as a reluctant tutor-pupil narrative but slowly morphing into something richer and more meaningful. Divine G has been around for a while and written several of the scripts the theatre group has used for its productions, so he has trouble hiding his jealousy when Divine Eye comes onto the scene. Their conversations start with consternation, segue to reconciliation and eventually blossom with mutual admiration.

Like Divine Eye, most of the characters in Sing Sing are played by men who were formerly imprisoned and some of whom were members of the real-life RTA. Naturally, this gives the stellar ensemble cast an organic sense of collective purpose and effortless believability. Together with cinematographer Pat Scola, director and co-writer Greg Kwedar often frames the inmate characters in close-up, reclaiming the humanity and individuality that the prison system has taken from them. Film is a format of faces and seeing Sing Sing in a theater is to meet face-to-face with people we don’t always get to see on screen. Two characters I was drawn to most are Dino and Carmine, the former a quietly wise colossus and the latter a somewhat neurotic type who sports a nervous tic of wiping his brow, even when there’s no sweat present.

Sing Sing does indulge in dramatic clichés here and there, most notably through a handful of montages that showcase the actors running lines and sets being assembled for Breakin’ The Mummy’s Code, the production they’re putting together. Fortunately, they’re scored by Bryce Dessner, one of the guitarists in the rock band The National, who has also written music for quite a few independent movies over the past several years. I’ve generally enjoyed some of his film music so far but his work here stands as his most transcendent and life-affirming yet, enough to make one’s eyes swell even when it’s not accompanied by moving images. The themes tend to coalesce around Divine G’s mindset at any given point in the story, often hopeful and tender but tense and choleric in the wake of an unexpected tragedy with one of the RTA players.

Understandably, the emotional lynchpin of Sing Sing is Kwedar tapping into what makes programs like the Rehabilitation Through The Arts so vital to quality of life for those in prison. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the recently-released Netflix doc Daughters, which also centers around incarcerated men but involves a different program that allows them to reunite with their daughters for a special “daddy daughter dance” event. Both films beam with undeniable empathy and hard-fought optimism, showcasing a segment of society that is too often portrayed with preachiness and artifice when present in the movies. Sing Sing is a quietly moving reminder of the power that creativity and expressivity have in even the most dispiriting of settings.

Score – 4/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is AfrAId, a sci-fi horror film starring John Cho and Katherine Waterston, involving a family who is selected to test a new home digital assistant device that develops self-awareness and interferes with their lives in disturbing ways.
Also playing in theaters is City Of Dreams, a thriller starring Ari Lopez and Renata Vaca, which chronicles the true story of a Mexican boy whose dreams of becoming a soccer star are shattered when he’s smuggled across the border and sold to a sweatshop in the United States.
Streaming on Netflix is The Deliverance, a supernatural horror movie starring Andra Day and Glenn Close, concerning a family living in an Indiana home who discover strange, demonic occurrences that convince them and the community that the house is a portal to hell.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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