It’s a standoff. 2 days before the start of her 11-year prison sentence, disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes locks eyes with comedian Nathan Fielder inside a rental house on the San Diego coast. “You’re being real right now?” he asks, and with a frozen smile and slightly cocked head, she replies, “I’m always being real.” In the teaser trailer for the mesmerizing and singular documentary You Can See Everything, which was kept under wraps until that minute-long clip debuted just 6 weeks ago, the intense close-ups of this interaction are resolved by a wider two shot revealing their faces are about a foot away from one another. We also get an answer as to why Holmes’ body seemed to be bobbing unnaturally in the previous frames: she’s been rocking her baby in a swing with an outstretched foot during this conversation. Things aren’t always what they seem.

Screened as a surprise addition to the Telluride Film Festival last month, You Can See Everything most closely resembles a magic trick in a world where magic is in depressingly short supply. It wouldn’t be Fielder’s first brush with wizardry. An episode of his satirical docu-reality series Nathan For You hinged on his ability to pick a handcuff lock in under 90 seconds to avert a fate “truly worse than death”. Last year’s season finale of his HBO show The Rehearsal revealed that he had been training for 2 years to obtain his commercial pilot’s license so he could fly a cabin of actors across the California-Nevada border. In addition to its short turnaround time from announcement to release, this almost 3-hour long documentary contains bombshells that may have already been spoiled for you following its impressive box office showing. I don’t plan on uncovering the film’s more surprising revelations here.

Lance Oppenheim, whose similarly buzzed-about first narrative feature Primetime was released just last month, co-directs with Fielder. The two, along with a limited camera crew, were invited in the spring of 2023 by Holmes and her partner Billy Evans to document their lives before the former CEO of Theranos heads to jail for defrauding investors. Though Oppenheim has directed several documentaries that were well-received in the critic’s community, he’s not the first name that might pop into your head when selecting someone to cover your exclusive pre-prison interview, and Nathan Fielder, even less so. Holmes and Evans say they saw a brief clip of him interacting with a convenience store clerk they thought was humorous and thought he’d do a good job. Are they lying? After he moves in with them, Fielder even points out the irony to them that his show Nathan For You was, in essence, about business scams. Holmes confesses she didn’t consider the correlation to her defunct tech company.

If the see saw of You Can See Everything is between authenticity and deception, then the fulcrum is the foundation of performance. Everyone inside of that beach house — probably even the scantily-seen camera crew — is performing for one another. It doesn’t mean they’re always being deceitful but it certainly doesn’t mean they’re being forthcoming all the time either. Though Holmes was found guilty by a group of her peers, she professes her innocence steadfastly and offers to show the crew the components behind the infamous blood-testing black box that led to Theranos’ demise. Elizabeth, perhaps subconsciously, performs her pitch to them, using hyper-specific language tailored to skirt fraud claims. She’s repeated the prospects of the technology that was proven not to work so many times, even she believes it. When Fielder points out the semantics in her proposal that misled investors, his use of a famous comedy routine to illustrate his point results in one of the year’s most captivating scenes.

Going into You Can See Everything, one could assume the convicted fraudster would be the main person “performing” for the camera but across the robust runtime, Oppenheim, and even Fielder, himself broach the idea that she may not the only one playing to camera. Billy has been with Elizabeth for 6 years at this point, enough to be a “true believer” in her deception, to the extent that he’s even mirrored the appearance of her hypnotic eyes. But does he really believe in Holmes or is he using her to further a new tech grift of his own? Fielder knows he’s literally face-to-face with an inscrutable figure, a dream subject for an exposé. Is he nodding politely to get Holmes to keep talking or is he actually buying into her lies? Just as waves lap the shore, the narrative current of this fascinating, first-rate doc perpetually makes and unmakes our perceptions of reality.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Clayface, starring Tom Rhys Harries and Naomi Ackie, reimagines the DC Comics villain as a rising movie star who volunteers as a test subject to restore his original face after having been brutally disfigured but experiences a series of horrifying side effects.
Wildwood, starring Carey Mulligan and Mahershala Ali, is a stop-motion fantasy tale about a teenager who must find the courage to rescue her abducted infant brother from a hidden magical forest near their home in the Pacific Northwest.
Klara And The Sun, starring Jenna Ortega and Amy Adams, takes place in a dystopian future where technological advances in genetic engineering have divided humans into strict social classes, where an obsolete companion android tries to bond with a sick girl for whom she was purchased.

On the surface, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s first three features circulate around the era-specific screens in which characters lose themselves and find their way back out, transformed. We’re All Going To The World’s Fair‘s centerpoint is a computer monitor anchored in the nascent 2000s Internet days of fanfiction and forums, where I Saw The TV Glow involves its protagonist’s connection with a half-remembered 1990s television show. Schoenbrun’s latest effort, Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma, reckons with the sempiternal effect the slasher genre — specifically entries from the 1980s — had on the silver screen and the future storytellers sitting in front of it. Upon the success of their Sundance smash in 2021, Schoenbrun was offered to reboot the Leprechaun horror franchise and, like Charlie Kaufman with Adaptation., writing about the experience yielded a richer result than just sticking to the script.

Set to a cloudy cover of “Nightswimming”, the sublimely ornate opening credits of Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma depict the rise and fall of the titular, Friday The 13th-mirroring slasher series. Looking for fresh blood, the studio behind the Camp Miasma property hires queer filmmaker Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) to paper over the problematic past attached to the franchise. To clarify her complicated feelings about the project, she journeys far up the west coast to meet with Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), the actress who portrayed the final girl in the inaugural Camp Miasma movie. It turns out Presley actually lives in isolation on the snowbound campgrounds where the films were shot and carries psychic wounds from her time embodying the character. As the two spend more time on the premises of the haunted Camp Trivoli, the worlds of the real and the cinematic intermingle.

As much as Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is playing in the sandbox of the slasher milieu, the fundamentals of its story call back to darkly funny and mysterious film noir tales going back decades before the horror subgenre was birthed. Specifically, the film points to Sunset Boulevard as an inextricable influence, even being overtly referenced in dialogue a few times before Kris meets Billy at the otherworldly camp. Sure enough, Billy’s entrance near a flickering projector is worthy of a classic femme fatale, with her hat brim pulled down low and her breathy Southern drawl trickling out slow. As the two watch the Camp Miasma movie in which Billy starred, she even sports Norma Desmond’s signature jeweled headwrap and seems to stop just short of saying, “I am big; it’s the sequels that got small.” Gillian Anderson does a outstanding job of giving her former screen star an outsized off-kilter presence while also grounding her in warmth and woundedness.

Schoenbrun’s first two movies were emotionally heavy affairs and while there’s, of course, nothing wrong with that, I appreciated the sense of play they brought to this new project. Scream has long been thought of as the standard-bearer when it comes to satire in horror but now on its seventh entry, it’s satisfying seeing Schoenbrun take swipes at the machine tasked with scaring up dollars at the box office. When Kris chats with her agent, played by Sarah Sherman, she’s literally displayed in her phone as “Your Agent”, just as Kris is labeled “Your Client” in hers, a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the industry’s transience. While Kris is thrilled calling to say she wants Billy to be the lead in her project, the agent is careful to manage expectations, walking through a racquetball area with the phrase “THIS IS YOUR PLACE” plastered on the wall.

But Teenage Sex And Death At Camp Miasma is mostly a love letter to, more than a deconstruction of, the slasher classics that clearly had a strong impression on Jane Schoenbrun in their youth. Kris and Billy represent two camps when it comes to approaching these films, with Kris intellectualizing the images to death and Billy absorbing them on an ephemeral level. For every Kris in the audience, pointing out split-diopter shots and poorly-aged cultural depictions, there’s a Billy whose jaw is on the floor at the sensuous power movies can have. As someone who routinely analyzes film — I’m doing it right now as I’m typing this — I found freedom in embracing the complicated and messy feelings Schoenbrun has about this corner of cinema.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Coyote Vs. Acme, starring Will Forte and Lana Condor, is a live-action/animation hybrid following the efforts of Wile E. Coyote as he enlists a billboard attorney to sue the Acme Corporation for repeatedly selling him alleged faulty products.
The Dog Stars, starring Jacob Elordi and Josh Brolin, is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film set after a virus wipes out humanity where a former civilian pilot and a hardened Marine team up against roaming scavengers and hold onto the possibility of a better future.
Idiots, starring Dave Franco and O’Shea Jackson Jr., is a crime comedy following two down-and-out drivers as they transport a wealthy teen to rehab, but their simple job spirals into a chaotic journey of drugs, danger, and crime as their passenger derails their plans.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this, he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.” So reads the chilling opening text of Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s masterful biopic surrounding the father of the atomic bomb. In his latest theatrical excursion, Nolan gets even more literal with myth deconstruction by adapting Homer’s The Odyssey, the ancient text that launched a thousand hero’s journeys. Despite being one of the few modern directors who can claim to be a household name, Nolan confesses he didn’t quite feel he had the “blank check” he wanted for his monomyth but when his first outing with Universal Pictures scored 7 Oscars, the ask became more realistic. As a result, The Odyssey is the auteur’s grandest spectacle, one that feels both state-of-the-art and a work that could endure as long as the epic poem that inspired it.

Following his victory in the Trojan War, Ithaca’s king Odysseus (Matt Damon) parts with Agamemnon (Benny Safdie) and Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) as he sets course for he and his men to go home. On their way, they encounter numerous grueling obstacles, including a skirmish with Poseidon’s one-eyed son Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) and a battle with the giant Laestrygonians of Aeaea. The years-long trek creates a power struggle in Ithaca, as Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) is pursued by slimy suitors like Antinous (Robert Pattinson) in the king’s absence. Desperate to find his father and aid him in his voyage home, Odysseus’s son Telemachus (Tom Holland) works with faithful farmer Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) to get Odysseus back to an Ithaca that becomes more dangerous to his return with each passing day.

Characteristic of almost every Christopher Nolan movie that’s come before it, The Odyssey is told in a non-linear fashion, weaving in glimpses of past and future that give the narrative both context and resonance. While I’m sure brushing up on Greek mythology before seeing the film wouldn’t hurt, you don’t need to call up your high school English teacher for a refresher on Homer’s tale before walking into the theater. The screenplay uses vernacular that may sound a touch too modern in a few places but, on the whole, does an outstanding job setting the table and defining the stakes. In juggling myriad characters, both human and magical, Nolan never loses the thread of how all of the story elements weave into a timeless tapestry about honor and justice. He also imbues his take on the legend with somber reflections on the nature of memory and the toll of combat on the warrior’s psyche.

Even by Nolan standards, the ensemble cast of The Odyssey, which also includes Charlize Theron and Zendaya in mystical roles, is especially sprawling and full to the gunwales with talent. Every actor makes the most of their, in some cases, minutes-long appearance but the commanding performance at the center of this fantastical adventure remains the film’s finest. As ubiquitous a movie star as Matt Damon is now, his work here is so electrifying and layered that it reminds us why his stature in Hollywood has remained so strong for the past 30 years. Though this Odysseus calls back to defining characters from Damon’s filmography, be they the amnesiac assassin Jason Bourne or his abandoned voyager The Martian, the stalwart actor plays notes of regret and yearning that you feel in your chest.

A question lingering over The Odyssey prior to its release is how Nolan, infamous for his insistence on practical effects over CGI, would translate the fantasy portions of Homer’s text to the screen. While monsters like Charybdis and Scylla are computer-generated, the majority of the events are captured in the most tangible terms possible. The sequence involving Odysseus’s men trapped in a cave with a Cyclops is terrifying in no small part due to the practicality and “realism” of the creature design and sound design. Another arduous affair on Aeaea seamlessly blurs the line between the origin of the visual effects for the movie’s most horrifyingly effective setpiece. Every piece of Ruth De Jong’s world-class production design makes this universe feel impossibly expansive, one that audiences will undoubtedly be rewarded for revisiting multiple times on the largest screen possible. The word “epic” gets thrown around plenty these days but if The Odyssey doesn’t warrant the superlative, nothing else does.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Her Private Hell, a sci-fi thriller starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, following a troubled young woman who searches for her father after a mysterious mist engulfs their futuristic city and unleashes a deadly, elusive entity.
Also playing only in theaters is Hadestown: The Musical, a live stage recording of the Broadway production that retells the Greek mythology legends of Orpheus & Eurydice and Hades & Persephone.
Premiering on Apple TV is The Dink, a sports comedy starring Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller, telling the tale of an aging tennis pro who must go against his instincts and play pickleball to save a local club.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Writer/director Rian Johnson is officially 3 for 3 with his Knives Out mysteries, as Wake Up Dead Man becomes the latest addition to the wonderful whodunnit cinematic collection. The brilliant and suave gumshoe Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) is back on the case again, traveling to a Catholic church in upstate New York, where its fiery leader Monsignor Jefferson Wicks (Josh Brolin) is found fatally stabbed in the storage closet. As police begin to investigate, the young Reverend Jud Duplenticy (Josh O’Connor), recently transferred to Our Lady Of Perpetual Fortitude due to a physical altercation, initially becomes the primary suspect. But police chief Geraldine Scott (Mila Kunis) has a hunch that this murder isn’t as simple as it seems and once Blanc arrives, he agrees there are many more factors that make this crime anything but open-and-shut.

In addition to Jud, Blanc proverbially makes his way up and down the pews to investigate core members of the church with which Wicks spent the most amount of his time. Among them are the town doctor Nat Sharp (Jeremy Renner), the lawyer Vera Draven, Esq. (Kerry Washington) and her politician son Cy (Daryl McCormack), concert cellist Simone Vivane (Cailee Spaeny) and prolific author Lee Ross (Andrew Scott). There are also those employed at Our Lady Of Perpetual Fortitude, including Wicks’ right-hand woman Martha Delacroix (Glenn Close) and groundskeeper Samson Holt (Thomas Haden Church). All seem to have been accounted for in the congregation during the Good Friday service when Msgr. Wicks is discovered with a knife in his back but no one’s alibi is as airtight as it seems.

As with 2019’s Knives Out and 2022’s Glass Onion, Wake Up Dead Man uses its twisty narrative and beguiling mystery to explore themes of division and polarization that have seemed to define our current era. In this chapter, Johnson investigates faith, religion and what passes for being considered a “good person” in the year of our Lord 2025. A former boxer with a checkered path to penitence, Rev. Jud seems like an obvious choice upon whom to pin the murder of the monsignor but it doesn’t take many flashbacks to see that Wicks didn’t have trouble making enemies. From a literal bully pulpit, he would tailor homilies to specifically call out newer members he suspected of trying to “poison the flock” merely with their presence. Johnson ties this brand of public shaming to the daily digital pile-ons that occur on social media and argues that whether it’s under a cassock or behind a keyboard, it’s easier to dish it than it is to take it.

These films routinely benefit from a bevy of acting talent and the ensemble this time around is aces as always. Daniel Craig is absent for the majority of the first act, allowing Josh O’Connor to cement himself as the film’s lead as Ana De Armas and Janelle Monáe did in the previous two Knives Out installments. Despite Jud’s position in the church, he’s still human after all: he lets loose the occasional curse word, he has a temper that he works hard to keep at bay and he isn’t above casting judgments of his own. But despite this, it’s clear that the reverend is honorable and his empathy for others is anything but performative. With his stellar breakout in Challengers last year and lead roles in three indies outside of Wake Up Dead Man in 2025, O’Connor should be well on his way to becoming a household name.

Rian Johnson once again spins up a superlative script full of playful misdirects, convincing red herrings and testy exchanges that make for whodunnits that you can revisit numerous times even after you know, well, who done it. Teaming again with cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay, Johnson crafts a puzzle box that is slick in its execution and inviting in its aesthetic without broadcasting how proud it is of itself. He’s as consistent as ever with the branding of his franchise too, once again adopting a title from a rock song that cheekily applies to the narrative too. I also appreciate that Johnson has considered the seasonality of these movies too; the sweater weather autumnal Knives Out and suns-out-guns-out summer flare of Glass Onion find a companion in the promise of redemption and spring awakening of Wake Up Dead Man. Whether it’s on Netflix or through another studio, my hope is that Johnson has one more winter-set Knives Out mystery in him.

Score – 4.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is Ella McCay, a political dramedy starring Emma Mackey and Jamie Lee Curtis, following an idealistic lieutenant governor who juggles familial issues and a challenging work life while preparing to take over her mentor’s gubernatorial position.
Also coming to theaters is Silent Night, Deadly Night, a slasher remake starring Rohan Campbell and Ruby Modine, involving a Santa-costumed killer who embarks on a violent quest for retribution against those responsible for a traumatic event from his childhood.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Merv, a romantic comedy starring Charlie Cox and Zooey Deschanel, which finds an estranged couple awkwardly reconciling over the holidays when they learn that the dog they share is suffering from depression following their break-up.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

After bringing his unique voice to the Guardians Of The Galaxy and Suicide Squad series, writer/director James Gunn now takes on one of the most iconic superheroes ever conceived. Superman is an exceptional comic book movie, clearly the product of someone who deeply respects the source material and truly understands what makes the central character special. Like the Spider-Verse films, it distills decades of on-page lore and storylines into one cohesive tale that is not only relentlessly entertaining but also artistically gratifying and a testament to the genre’s staying power. Gunn’s clearly studied Superman’s on-screen legacy — from Christopher Reeve’s outstanding portrayal in the 1978 original to Henry Cavill’s misbegotten cameo in the final seconds of Black Adam — and avoids every potential Man Of Steel-shaped pitfall along the way.

A brilliant set of title cards thrusts us right into the action, which finds Superman (David Corenswet) up against the ropes while fighting a new foe being instructed by maniacal billionaire Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult). All the while, he operates under a human alter ego as Clark Kent, an unassuming reporter working alongside Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) in the newsroom. While Superman is occupied in Metropolis, Luthor and his nanotech-fueled henchwoman The Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría) break into the Fortress Of Solitude and steal his superpowered dog Krypto. Aided by Justice Gang members Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), Superman sets out to retrieve his canine companion and weave around Luthor’s insidious masterplan in the process.

Gunn knows what we’ve seen before when it comes to this character (and superhero movies in general) and instead generates countless comedic and dramatic beats that feel fresh and rewarding. Besides forgoing an origin story — who’s unfamiliar with Superman at this point, honestly? — he makes other bold creative choices that pay off with stunning consistency. Often the films lean into the dichotomy of Clark Kent and Superman, depicting him as perpetually switching between the two and desperate to keep his true identity a secret from others. In Superman, several characters know they’re both the same person and the narrative conflict is instead focused on how Superman actually thinks and feels. He works tirelessly to save everyone everywhere and takes it to heart when he can’t. To quote The Smiths, “it takes strength to be gentle and kind” and in that way, this Superman flexes different muscles than we typically see from cinematic heroes.

Given how many performers have played these roles before, Superman is a difficult film to cast but casting director John Papsidera has done a super job top to bottom here. As the man in red and blue, David Corenswet taps into an earnestness and altruism that we haven’t seen from this character in a very long time. Somehow, he makes Superman’s underlying corniness compelling and finds a unique sense of humor that works perfectly for this modern iteration. Nicholas Hoult is likewise excellent as the follically-challenged foil pulling all the strings around Supes, bringing proper intellectual menace to his portrayal. Rachel Brosnahan has a kind of romantic spark with Corenswet that is desperately needed in a genre that’s been considerably chaste the past 10 or 15 years. They have a breathtaking scene in front of the Metropolis skyline at the beginning of the second act that’s more heartfelt than what we typically get from most full-blown romantic dramas.

Superman, being a superhero film, is naturally an effects-heavy affair and the CG work here is as great as you’d expect it to be. Gunn particularly has fun with the abilities of the lesser-known Justice Gang and Superman fights a fun variety of enemies from kaiju to robots and everything in between. The action is terrific but it’s not what makes this movie soar so much higher than the majority of its cohorts. It’s how physically and emotionally vulnerable the film makes its protagonist, who is typically depicted as indestructible unless someone has Kryptonite in their pocket. The heroism on display here isn’t just a superhuman carrying out extraordinary feats; it’s conveying a worldview that is genuinely stirring and oddly radical. In a world that has so normalized hate and cynicism, empathy is the new counterculture.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
I Know What You Did Last Summer, starring Madelyn Cline and Chase Sui Wonders, is a slasher reboot about another hook-wielding killer who appears and begins targeting a group of friends one year after they covered up a car accident in which they supposedly killed someone.
Smurfs, starring Rihanna and James Corden, is a musical reboot which finds Papa Smurf mysteriously taken by evil wizards Gargamel and his brother Razamel, causing Smurfette to lead the Smurfs on a mission into the real world to save him.
Eddington, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, is a modern Western set during the COVID-19 pandemic where a standoff between a small-town sheriff and a mayor sparks a powder keg as neighbor is pitted against neighbor in small town New Mexico.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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

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

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

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

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

Score – 4.5/5

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

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

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

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

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

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

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

Score – 4.5/5

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

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune — Part One, for retroactive clarity — was originally due to come out November of 2020 but got pushed out almost a year, debuting October 2021 in theaters and on HBO Max simultaneously. Now premiering exclusively in theaters, Part Two was originally slated to come out last October but was delayed several months due to the Hollywood labor disputes of 2023. Pandemics and picket lines may have affected the release schedules for these two sci-fi epics but fortunately, they certainly haven’t affected their quality one bit. If Part One was Villeneuve’s way to introduce us to the world of Dune and its densely layered mythology, then Part Two gives us a chance to luxuriate in its singular splendor and sophisticated storytelling.

Picking up where Dune left off, Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) continue to live among and learn from the desert-dwelling Fremen tribes. The evil Harkonnens, led by the corpulent Baron Vladimir (Stellan Skarsgård), attempt to capitalize on their coup of the House Atreides but their campaign to extract spice from the sands of Arrakis is thwarted by Fremen attacks. Desperate to regain control on the planet, the Baron recruits his bloodthirsty nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) to clamp down on the frequent ambushes of their spice production equipment. Though Paul is initially treated as an outsider by the Fremen, their leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem) begins to see signs of an ancient prophecy in Paul’s rapid assimilation to their ways.

We’ve seen the hero’s journey in other large-scale cinematic adventures like Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings but where Dune: Part Two deviates from the traditional narrative is in its moral complexity. Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins are humble exemplars who resist temptation from dark forces and remain good in their quest to achieve their respective goals. With respect to those trilogies and their protagonists, Paul Atreides goes through a much more complex character arc specifically in this section of the story that I found consistently fascinating. In the finest performance of his young career, Chalamet builds upon his work from the previous chapter and reveals the thornier sides of being a monomyth’s “chosen one”. With his character’s zealot-like devotion to Paul’s ascent, Bardem scores some unexpected laughs with how effusive he becomes in his convictions.

About as tactfully as any blockbuster I’ve ever seen, Dune: Part Two taps into how fear and faith are tools that are used to maintain control of the masses by ruling parties. Through gladiatorial combat shot in stupefying infrared cinematography by Greig Fraser, Baron Harkonnen asserts psychological dominance over his House with a display of brutality by his heir apparent. But through fundamentalist teachings carried out by Stilgar and his followers, we also see how the Fremen’s actions are restricted by the dogma of divinations that may or may not be true. The film doesn’t necessarily ask us to decide which of these is the “better” or morally upstanding method but rather to consider how the two may not differ as much as it would seem on the surface. Zendaya plays Paul’s Fremen love interest who grows more wary of his deification and finally declares “this prophecy is how they enslave us!” at a pseudo-religious gathering.

Chalamet and Zendaya are excellent in their central roles but like Part One, this chapter sports uniformly terrific performances from a deep roster of some of the most talented performers out there. Florence Pugh lends an ominous aristocracy to her Princess Irulan and Léa Seydoux is seductive perfection as one of the Bene Gesserit sent to proposition Feyd-Rautha. Austin Butler is another new face here and despite his much-discussed work in Elvis, he sheds the rock star affectation and hip-swinging in a performance that’s perfectly-measured menace. If there’s a weak link, Christopher Walken doesn’t register much in the important role of Emperor Shaddam. I think there were a number of actors who could’ve brought more to the character and sadly, I kept thinking how great the late Tom Wilkinson would’ve been for it. Small quibbles aside, Dune: Part Two is another home run from the strongest voice working in cinematic science fiction today.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Kung Fu Panda 4, an animated comedy starring Jack Black and Awkwafina continuing the adventures of the titular martial arts master as he searches for his successor as the new Dragon Warrior while fighting a new foe.
Also playing only in theaters is Imaginary, a supernatural horror movie starring DeWanda Wise and Tom Payne about a woman who returns to her childhood home to discover that the imaginary friend she left behind is very real and unhappy that she abandoned him.
Streaming on Netflix is Damsel, a fantasy film starring Millie Bobby Brown and Ray Winstone involving a sheltered young noblewoman who agrees to marry a handsome prince, only to discover that his family intends to sacrifice her to repay an ancient debt.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Poor Things, the recent recipient of a record-setting 7 awards from the Indiana Film Journalists Association, is a lot. Then again, it never pretends it isn’t. The opening shot is awash with what seems like a thousand hues of blue, cerulean bleeding into cobalt as a woman with her back to the camera prepares to jump off a bridge. This is the latest grandiose vision from director Yorgos Lanthimos, whose previous film The Favourite was a provocative take on the costume drama and his newest is certain to widen some eyes in the audience as well. But unlike the recent Saltburn, Lanthimos’ provocations are borne organically from the story that he’s telling and convey a deeper subtext than simply being shocking for the sake of being shocking.

Emma Stone gives a career-best turn as Bella Baxter, a young woman living under the care of deformed surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). We learn that Godwin found Bella moments after she attempted suicide and tapped into his mad scientist side to reanimate her while she still had a bit of brain activity left. The experiment saved Bella’s life but left her with the mental capacity of an infant, able to form rudimentary sentences and discover the world around her anew. Helping her along is one of Godwin’s students Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), who quickly develops feelings for Bella while assisting her. But when Godwin’s brash lawyer Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) stops by the house one day, he sets out to free Bella from her bondage and travel across the world.

The world of Poor Things is entirely its own but it begins in a version of Victorian London with steam engines and resurrection machines and incorporates even more anachronisms and impossibilities as the setting expands further. The production design is a swirling canvas of Terry Gilliam-esque futurism with German Expressionist monumentalism, a surreal palette upon which to tell this exceedingly peculiar journey. With his music score, composer Jerskin Fendrix finds appropriately wonky motifs to weave into the music. For instance, Bella’s theme sounds like a harp that is being played in a giant sink filled with dirty dishwater, its undulating timbres matching the uneven steps of Bella’s toddler-like gait.

If this all sounds oppressively weird, Emma Stone’s transcendent performance alone makes Poor Things well worth seeing. It’s a tremendously physical role, requiring her to mimic the movements of a newborn at the outset and then slowly recalibrating motor skills as her character finds her footing. But it’s also language-centric work, and exceptionally funny to boot, as Bella starts with choppy phonetics and soon forms more complex sentences with abandon for tact or social grace. The notion of “polite society” is examined through numerous lenses and through her character, Stone navigates the contradictions and quandaries that the so-called cultured class throws her way. Tony McNamara, who also wrote the biting screenplay for The Favourite, gives her devilishly humorous lines to play with all the way along.

Poor Things is getting all sorts of critical acclaim, and rightfully so, but I must confess a tiny gripe with the movie and that’s with some of the cinematography by Lanthimos regular Robbie Ryan. He’s a terrific DP, responsible not only for The Favourite but other exquisitely-shot films like C’mon C’mon and long take fantasia Medusa Deluxe from earlier this year. Here, he uses a myriad of film lenses to contribute to the movie’s otherworldly field but overdoes it in a few places. At several points, he uses a lens so narrow that it looks like a porthole on a cruise ship and it comes across as a bit too forced for my tastes. During a rollicking dance scene like the one from The Favourite, he even moves to handheld with this constrained focus and the results are fussy and overindulgent. Having said that, it’s a minor nitpick and certainly doesn’t keep Poor Things from remaining a major artistic achievement from one of the most fascinating filmmakers around at the moment.

Score – 4.5/5

More movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom, starring Jason Momoa and Patrick Wilson, is a superhero sequel in which Aquaman is forced to protect Atlantis and his loved ones from devastation after an ancient power is unleashed by Manta obtaining the cursed Black Trident.
Anyone But You, starring Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, is a romantic comedy about a pair of young attractive people who pretend to be a couple during a destination wedding in Australia, even though they secretly hate each other.
Migration, starring Kumail Nanjiani and Elizabeth Banks, is an animated adventure comedy about a family of ducks who try to convince their overprotective father to go on the vacation of a lifetime.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Nicolas Cage must know that he’s on our minds. Between GIFs, memes and the 100+ films in which he’s starred over the past 40 years, it can be a challenge getting through the week without seeing his face pop up at least once somewhere. His latest, the outstanding absurdist comedy Dream Scenario, seems to play with the idea of his unavoidable persona and the specific space he inhabits in our collective cultural subconscious. Like the shadow version of last year’s reflexive The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent, in which Cage played multiple versions of himself, this film deals with the consequences of a meteoric rise to fame. Sure, other movies have tackled the rise and fall arc of immediate notoriety under various circumstances but Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli brings a unique sense of fatalism and irony to the familiar narrative.

Cage stars as Paul Matthews, a biology professor so milquetoast that he perfectly encapsulates the Thoreau quote of “men [who] lead lives of quiet desperation.” In between his college lectures and his time at home with his wife Janet (Julianne Nicholson) along with their daughters, he plots a book about ant intelligence that he can’t seem to actually start. But then a strange incident keeps occurring to Paul: strangers recognize him. When he presses them, it turns out that he’s been popping up in their dreams, not even as the focal point but commonly as a bystander observing the main events. So many people begin to see him in their dreams that it becomes a worldwide phenomenon and so, this mild-mannered nobody is thrust into the spotlight, even if it’s not the manner in which he expected. But when everyone’s dreams turn into violent nightmares, the backlash is even more intense than the wave of appreciation that preceded it.

Dream Scenario is simultaneously a Kafkaesque and Charlie Kaufman-esque parable about men who say they value their anonymity but get visibly excited when a Like count on their Facebook post hits double digits. Of course, what distinguishes this movie from others about a swift rise to ubiquitousness is that Paul doesn’t have any control over what’s making him so popular. No one, least of whom Paul, can explain why he’s visiting random people during their sleep cycles and, of course, he has no say in what he’s doing in them. Borgli takes this high-concept premise to explore the ideas of identity and intention in the internet age, where captured moments and floating faces can go viral in a heartbeat. He calls to mind the notion that no matter the size and scale of our interactions, we can never completely manage how people perceive us.

Recalling his dual role in Adaptation, in which he plays struggling screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious brother Donald, Cage is pitch-perfect as a man so meek and mired that it’s hard not to feel bad for him. We learn early on that, sadly, the more Paul attempts to take hold of the bizarre situation, the harder he will likely fail. He returns the call from a PR firm, headed by a hilarious Michael Cera, who doesn’t understand the origin of Paul’s fame but wants to capitalize on it all the same. He tries to parlay the prompt popularity for an invite to a colleague’s dinner party that he previously wasn’t cool enough to attend but the evening goes wildly astray. Those who lament in watching protagonists engage in Sisyphean efforts to overcome their circumstances may be driven mad by Dream Scenario but, as a huge fan of Cage’s virtuosic pathos, I was delighted.

Of course, the film also calls back to another Spike Jonze project in Being John Malkovich, but almost in reverse; where that movie was about everyone trying to get into one celebrity’s head, Dream Scenario is about a reluctant celebrity trying to get out of everyone else’s. Like Malkovich, it also evokes how we strive to spice up the mundane nature of everyday life with pop culture fixations. Paul’s increasingly threatening pervasiveness in people’s dreams naturally points to Freddy Krueger from the A Nightmare On Elm Street series, which Borgli cleverly integrates in the third act. An iconic costume from an iconic concert film is also implemented as a lynchpin for a tender memory between Paul and Janet, similar to one that would appear in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Despite its modern sensibilities, Dream Scenario‘s central theme of how we perceive one another is timeless and endlessly resonant.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this week:
Playing only in theaters is The Boy And The Heron, an animated fantasy film starring Robert Pattinson and Christian Bale about a boy who discovers an abandoned tower in his new town after his mother’s death and enters a fantastical world with a talking grey heron.
Streaming on Netflix is Leave The World Behind, a psychological thriller starring Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali about a family’s getaway to a luxurious rental home that takes an ominous turn when a cyberattack knocks out their devices and two strangers appear at their door.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Merry Little Batman, an animated action comedy starring Luke Wilson and Yonas Kibreab about Bruce Wayne’s son Damian safeguarding his home and the rest of Gotham City from supervillains during the holiday season.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup