Tag Archives: Reel Views

Reel Views, Review

Dead Man’s Wire

Those who have lived in Indiana long enough likely know the story of Tony Kiritsis. In February 1977, the Indianapolis resident walked into a mortgage office with a concealed shotgun and held a broker hostage after falling behind on payments for a piece of undeveloped real estate. The heavily publicized events were the subject of the 2018 documentary Dead Man’s Line and now we have the fictionalized version in the form of Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire. It follows a spate of recent biopics like The Smashing Machine and Song Sung Blue, whose respective documentaries haven’t been readily available on streaming, thus leaving the opportunity for filmmakers to deliver their own adaptations. But all these iterations face the age-old test of whether or not they actually expand on the original text in a meaningful way, which this movie doesn’t pass.

In the film, Kiritsis is played by Bill Skarsgård, taking a step out of the supernatural realm after his recent stints in The Crow, Nosferatu and It: Welcome To Derry. Tony’s hostage plan immediately hits a roadblock when he arrives at the offices of Meridian Mortgage to find that M.L. Hall (Al Pacino), the bank’s owner and Kiritsis’ intended target, is on vacation. Instead, his son Dick (Dacre Montgomery) greets Tony in the lobby and offers to take the meeting in his dad’s place, not knowing the sinister turn that it would take. Once in Dick’s office, Tony holds him up at gunpoint and fashions a wire around Dick’s neck connected to the trigger of his shotgun, making for a particularly volatile standoff situation. Shortly after, the pair make their way to the streets and head for Tony’s apartment, as police officers and news media quickly register the crisis as it unfolds.

Even though Tony Kiritsis was a real person, Gus Van Sant’s character is clearly meant to share a kinship with disaffected and desperate protagonists of gritty 1970s crime sagas like Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. Along with the social consciousness of those films, Dead Man’s Wire is also of a piece with 1976’s Network, whose infamous “mad as hell” line is partially quoted by a cop trying to surmise Kiritsis’ state of mind. These era-defining thrillers are strong sources of inspiration upon which to reconsider this bizarre kidnapping, but Van Sant simply can’t compete with what Sidney Lumet and Martin Scorsese were cooking 50 years ago. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare him with two of the greatest filmmakers America has produced but when the influences are this obvious, it’s not difficult to find Dead Man’s Wire comparatively lacking in tact and tension.

Stylistically, Van Sant does what he can to mimic the mise-en-scène of the masters’ mid-70s movies, with cinematographer Arnaud Potier using refurbished broadcast cameras to emulate the grain-laden aesthetic of the time period. The set decoration and costume design are all on point, while the soundtrack is comprised of radio hits like “Love To Love You Baby” and “Your Move”; “Cannock Chase” pops up again after also being used brilliantly in Sentimental Value recently. The song choices are framed as being those of local DJ Fred Temple, played by Colman Domingo, whose smooth segues are often heard in voiceover. For some reason, Kiritsis has a god-like adoration of Temple and insists on talking to him during the standoff for comfort and consultation. Domingo certainly fits in the role and appears in the film a substantial amount but Van Sant doesn’t go much further into how this parasocial bond of Kiritsis’ became so strong.

Besides Tony and Dick, all of the other characters pushed out to the periphery don’t fare much better with their limited screen time. Cary Elwes barely registers as the constantly consternated cop who first gets called to the scene, while rising star Myha’la doesn’t make much of an impression as a TV reporter trying to chase the career-making story. Al Pacino, who I’m assuming was cast primarily due to his Dog Day Afternoon connection, literally phones it in with an aggressive Southern accent in a couple scenes. I suppose I can’t blame him for trying something because Gus Van Sant struggles throughout Dead Man’s Wire to make these real-life events interesting. In past films like To Die For and Milk, he’s covered this thematic material and this era much more evocatively before in his career. Between this, Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot and The Sea Of Trees, it feels like a once great filmmaker is lost in the forest.

Score – 2/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Arriving in theaters is 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, a horror sequel starring Ralph Fiennes and Jack O’Connell, continuing the tale of a teenage survivor from the zombie apocalypse as he joins a gang co-led by a ruthless gang member and a boundary-pushing doctor.
Also landing in theaters is Charlie The Wonderdog, an animated adventure starring Owen Wilson and Tabitha St. Germain, in which a dog gains superpowers after his owner is abducted by aliens and together, they battle an evil cat threatening humanity.
Premiering on Netflix is The Rip, an action thriller starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, following a group of Miami cops as they discover a stash of millions in cash, which leads to distrust from outsiders as they learn about the huge seizure.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

We Bury The Dead

Somehow, zombies returned. Since hanging up the lightsaber — for now, anyway — in 2019’s Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, Daisy Ridley has covered an admirable amount of genres across smaller projects and with We Bury The Dead, survival horror seemed to be next on the list. Along with the 28 Years Later franchise, which has another entry out later this month and a trilogy capper due out next year, zombie films may have looked dead there for a moment but they’re back up and running now. In the case of We Bury The Dead, the latest from Australian director and writer Zak Hilditch, the walking dead function more as a backdrop upon which the survivors deal with the unresolved issues they have with those they lost. As such, the film is a bit too pensive and self-conscious for its own good but has enough worthwhile elements to make it a decent change of pace within the horror subgenre.

Ridley stars as Ava Newman, a physical therapist based in the US who travels to Tasmania in search of her husband Mitch (Matt Whelan) after an EMP weapon accidentally detonates and leaves tens of thousands on the island affected. It’s bad enough that the majority of the victims are dead but somehow even worse, some have awakened in a zombified state and attacked members of the rescue effort. This makes Ava’s job in the body retrieval unit more dangerous than it typically would be, although fellow volunteer Clay (Brenton Thwaites) doesn’t seem nearly as bothered by the state of things. Blithely lighting up a cigarette as he exits a corpse-infested house behind an upchucking teammate, Clay registers to Ava as a cooler head who will help her prevail through this tragedy. After the pair get acquainted and discover a motorcycle during one of their assignments, they plan to head south and look for Mitch.

In most zombie movies, the detours these two might encounter as they zoom down military-surveilled highways would involve gory run-ins with the undead but We Bury The Dead intentionally focuses on the humans that can still be just as dangerous. One such impediment, a soldier named Riley played by Mark Coles Smith, has a particularly creepy way to express his grief about losing his pregnant wife to the experimental explosion. Similarly, Hilditch treats us to flashbacks to Ava and Mitch stateside before the latter travelled down under for an ill-fated work trip, depicting a marriage that was already against the ropes before the accident in Australia. It’s an open question through most of the film how Ava will cope if she finds Mitch alive and unaffected by the zombie-like symptoms from the blast, as unlikely as that scenario might be.

Given the obviously heavy subject material, I appreciated Zak Hilditch’s attempts to dissipate the somber mood with tension-breaking moments of reckless relief or cheeky defiance. The groovy drum shuffle of “Vitamin C” by Can always hits the spot for the former and the latter is brought to the forefront nicely, thanks to a cut from raucous Aussie punk rockers Amyl And The Sniffers. A PJ Harvey track from Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea also scores a rare tender scene that still percolates with unease and the threat of violence. The stellar music moments stand out in a movie that’s a little too light on incident and oddly self-conscious about being a zombie flick. It’s clear Hilditch is trying to sidestep the rote horror beats we’d expect but too often, he substitutes them with moments that should fill us with dread but feel too sedate to register salient amounts of fear.

As with other decent indies like The Marsh King’s Daughter and Sometimes I Think About Dying that Daisy Ridley has starred in since her Rey-cation, her performance in We Bury The Dead is one of its strongest selling points. She’s an actress who simply does an outstanding job portraying introverts on-screen, suggesting genuine inner worlds within each of her characters that effortlessly draw us into these stories. Here, Ava has the determination and intellect we’ve seen Ridley convey with her heroines before but the scenes with Mitch showcase marital vulnerability that give us a deeper glimpse into Ava’s headspace. I applaud Ridley’s effort to pursue smaller projects, and likely help get them made with her name attached, but I also wish she’d hold out for scripts that are truly next level. She’s had quite a few base hits but she really deserves a home run.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Primate, a natural horror film starring Johnny Sequoyah and Jessica Alexander, in which a tropical vacation goes awry when a family’s adopted chimpanzee is bitten by a rabid animal and suddenly becomes violent.
Also playing only in theaters is Greenland 2: Migration, a survival disaster thriller starring Gerard Butler and Morena Baccarin, following a family who must leave the safety of their apocalypse bunker and embark on a perilous journey across the wasteland of Europe to find a new home.
Streaming on Netflix is People We Meet On Vacation, a romantic comedy starring Emily Bader and Tom Blyth, following a a free-spirited travel writer and and a a reserved teacher who reunite for one last trip to mend their friendship and confront their unspoken romantic feelings.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Column, Reel Views

My Top 10 Films of 2025

As with the past few years, 2025 found studios scrambling to figure out what will get increasingly selective moviegoers back out to theaters opening weekend. Fortunately, some of the top earners — 2 on this list were also in the top 10 for domestic box office — happened to be excellent movies too. As is often the case, there were plenty of other titles that didn’t make much money but are absolutely worth seeking out. Here are my 10 favorites from another strong year of film:

  1. Sinners (streaming on HBO Max and available to rent/buy)
    The most compelling horror release of the year, Ryan Coogler’s marriage of monsters and music synthesizes his strengths as both a storyteller and a stylist. In a dual role, Michael B. Jordan leads an exceptional ensemble as a pair of twins trying to turn over a new leaf by opening a juke joint, before uninvited guests show and want a bite of the action. Set mostly during a sweltering autumn evening in the Mississippi Delta, Sinners moves with an infectious rhythm that gets in your veins and doesn’t leave until after the post-credit epilogue.
  2. Splitsville (available to rent/buy)
    There were plenty of excellent comedic choices from Friendship to The Naked Gun but none had quite as many hard-earned laughs as this raucous relationship romp. Writer-director Michael Angelo Covino also co-stars as a real estate wheeler-dealer who feels secure in his open marriage with his wife (played by Dakota Johnson), until his newly divorced best friend soon takes interest. Knock-down drag-out fights are had, songs by The Fray are desperately sung and mentalist tricks for an ill-suited crowd are performed.
  3. Predators (streaming on Paramount+)
    Unrelated to the pair of Predator movies that were released in 2025, this provocative and incisive look at the Dateline spin-off To Catch A Predator is as stirring and unpredictable as documentaries get. Both an indictment of the artifice behind reality television and the carnivorous culture that ceaselessly consumes it, director David Osit’s exposé tackles taboo subject material with laudable focus and conviction. The film’s final moments and closing line have reverberated in my head and stayed with me longer than I could’ve expected.
  4. Wake Up Dead Man (streaming on Netflix)
    Rian Johnson’s magnificent murder mystery franchise maintains its high-water mark for quality with a whodunnit set in a rural Catholic church that has plenty of secrets for Daniel Craig’s detective to uncover. In one of his four starring roles of 2025, Josh O’Connor plays a young priest who’s the main suspect when a senior member of the parish is found stabbed to death in a storage closet. A supporting cast that includes Glenn Close and Josh Brolin — among many other familiar faces — bolster another engrossing cinematic page-turner.
  5. A House Of Dynamite (streaming on Netflix)
    An American nightmare in three chapters, Kathryn Bigelow’s apocalyptic thriller buzzes with a trademark intensity she’s developed after decades of superlative filmmaking. It’s a fly-on-the-wall depiction of how high-ranking officials in the government and military react when a ballistic missile of unknown origin is launched with its sights on a major US city. Written with believable precision by Noah Oppenheim and edited ruthlessly by Kirk Baxter, the movie is thematically taut and almost unbearably suspenseful.
  6. Superman (streaming on HBO Max and available to rent/buy)
    It feels like it’s been a bit since a superhero saga actually felt like it was pushing the genre onward and upward but James Gunn’s inaugural entry in his DC Universe does just that. Digging deeper into the comic book lore and forgoing the Man Of Steel story beats we’ve seen on-screen too many times before, Gunn also carefully considers how a symbol of hope and optimism would fare in 2025. Superman’s tights are never easy to fill but David Corenswet makes the iconic role his own with a self-deprecation and vulnerability that don’t come at the expense of heroism.
  7. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (available to rent/buy and streaming on HBO Max starting January 30th)
    Rose Byrne gives the year’s finest performance as a psychotherapist ironically disobeying the “oxygen mask” principle of self-care as she’s stretched beyond her emotional limits. With inspired casting choices like rapper A$AP Rocky and Conan O’Brien as an unindulgent colleague, this psychological drama is a raw depiction of motherhood as a black hole of perpetual pressure. Steeped in autobiographical details from writer-director Mary Bronstein’s personal life, this is ferociously honest storytelling of the highest order.
  8. No Other Choice (coming to theaters this month)
    Korean maestro Park Chan-wook follows up his romantic mystery Decision To Leave with a pitch-black comedy ripped right from the headlines. Squid Game standout Lee Byung-hun stars as a recently unemployed executive in the paper industry who decides to off his competition for a potentially lucrative job offering. With loads of tongue-in-cheek digs at caustic corporate culture and organizational indifference, Chan-wook takes a darkly funny conceit and goes to surprisingly profound places.
  9. The Testament Of Ann Lee (coming to theaters this month)
    I certainly didn’t have “musical about the founder of a religious sect” on my bingo card at the start of the year but Mona Fastvold’s ephemeral and audacious period piece is an immediate triumph. Amanda Seyfried puts everything she has into her portrayal of the titular Shaker who overcomes persecution and personal tragedy to lead a movement of community and equality. Co-written by Fastvold’s partner Brady Corbet of last year’s The Brutalist, with unforgettable music from that film’s composer Daniel Blumberg, The Testament Of Ann Lee is a stunning achievement.
  10. One Battle After Another (streaming on HBO Max and available to rent/buy)
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth feature finds the master painting on his most grandiose canvas yet, shooting in VistaVision with his cinematographer Michael Bauman to jaw-dropping effect. In a career filled with stellar work, Leonardo DiCaprio delivers his best performance to date as an ex-revolutionary forced back into action when his daughter is kidnapped. Anderson has made several masterpieces already in his career but there’s a centeredness and worldly wisdom that makes One Battle After Another a particularly remarkable statement.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Marty Supreme

The second Safdie brother sports drama coming out this quarter — following the release of Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine a couple months ago — Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme takes the gold among the two efforts. It’s the one that most mirrors jittery character studies like Uncut Gems and Good Time that the brothers crafted together before forging separate paths for themselves. While both Machine and Supreme are technically both based on true stories, the former is much more slavishly devoted to an accurate depiction of events than the latter. Loosely inspired by the life and career of table tennis champion Marty “The Needle” Reisman, the propulsive and brash tale is one of American exceptionalism post-World War II through a very specific prism of ping pong competition. Happy Gilmore meets Once Upon A Time In America certainly isn’t a concoction that should work but through sheer force of will, it does.

Set in early 1950s New York City, Marty Supreme focuses on young shoe salesman Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), whose life moves at such a relentlessly ramshackle pace, it’s like a high-wire act on a taut shoestring above the abyss. In line to move up to a manager position, the path for ordinary schnookdom is lain clearly before him, but Marty has no shortage of confidence that he’s in line for much greater things. In his downtime, he’s become something of a ping pong prodigy, so talented that he’s been invited to compete in table tennis on America’s behalf at the international level. After putting together the cash through characteristically underhanded tactics, he books a ticket to London, where the International Table Tennis Federation is holding the championships for the up-and-coming sport.

While being interviewed in the lobby of his hotel, Marty’s eye catches movie star Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow), who is there traveling with her pen magnate husband Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary). Her marital status does little to deter Marty’s freight-train guile, barely wasting any time to rush back up to his room so he can call her and invite the both of them to watch him play ping pong. Oblivious to Marty’s interest in his wife, Rockwell offers an all-expenses-paid opportunity to face off against Japanese champion Endo (Koto Kawaguchi) in an exhibition match before the next tournament. But when Marty discovers he’s to throw the match in the interest of entertainment and spectacle, he refuses the offer with colorful enough remarks to draw Rockwell’s permanent ire. Unwavering in his desire to go after what he wants, Marty pursues an affair with Kay, despite his girlfriend Rachel (Odessa A’zion) being pregnant back home.

Bookended by two fantastic Tears For Fears cuts and supported by a sublime, synth-heavy music score by Daniel Lopatin, Marty Supreme may start in 1952 but its ears and grindset are more reminiscent of 1987. It’s a stout 149 minutes but it flies by like a ping pong ball whizzing from an ace serve; this movie has more happening in the first 5 minutes before the title card hits than some have in their whole runtime. Like Uncut Gems, which found Adam Sandler hocking diamonds and hustling breathlessly, this film is similarly built around the magnetic determination of both its central character and respective performer. With the way Timothée Chalamet has been promoting Marty Supreme the past couple months, it’s hard to tell exactly where he ends and where Marty begins, but I suspect that’s the point. Whether he’s a real genius or not, Chalamet is crucial to making this epic fly and if you still don’t “get” the actor’s appeal, this film would be the one to potentially win over the unconverted.

The Oscars are introducing a new Academy Award for Achievement In Casting next March and absent a clear frontrunner, members should absolutely consider Marty Supreme as a top choice. In addition to selecting a Shark Tank judge for a main role, Josh Safdie and casting director Jennifer Venditti make a myriad of calculated bets in terms of actor selection that pay off big time across the board. Controversial director Abel Ferrara creeps in as a shady figure whose path crosses with Marty and rapper Tyler The Creator appears as Marty’s partner-in-crime, helping him hustle chumps in the darkened ping pong clubs. Even Ted Williams, whose radio-friendly voice caused him to go viral as The Man With The Golden Voice years ago, pops up as a pool hall doorman. Safdie and his cinematographer Darius Khondji shoot them often in urgent close-up, reminding us that movie theaters were purpose-built to show us gigantic faces illuminated in the darkness.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming to theaters this holiday season:
Avatar: Fire And Ash, starring Sam Worthington and Zoe Saldaña, continues the epic sci-fi saga of the Na’vi on Pandora as they encounter a new, aggressive tribe headed up by a fiery leader.
The Housemaid, starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, is a psychological thriller which finds a young woman with a troubled past as she becomes the live-in housemaid for a wealthy family.
Anaconda, starring Paul Rudd and Jack Black, tells the tale of a background actor and wedding videographer as they travel to the Amazon to film an amateur remake of the 1997 film Anaconda.
Song Sung Blue, starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, adapts the 2008 documentary of the same name about a married Milwaukee couple who performed as the Neil Diamond tribute band Lightning And Thunder.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Wake Up Dead Man

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

Reel Views, Review

100 Nights Of Hero

As niche holiday releases go, 100 Nights Of Hero is proudly about as niche as it gets. Based on the New York Times Bestselling graphic novel The One Hundred Nights Of Hero, itself a reworking of the timeless One Thousand And One Nights folktale, the film feels like it was made exclusively for those who already find themselves enamored with the text. It has the pomp and theatricality of a costume drama mixed with the romanticism and whimsy of a lovelorn fantasy; if Emerald Fennell was told she needed to tone it down and spin up a PG-13 period piece, this might be what she’d come up with. As such, the movie comes up with a few empowering moments and poignant exchanges but at 91 minutes, it feels curiously attenuated for something that’s derived from a retelling of an epic tale. When each of your Nights is less than a minute of average, it may be a sign that you don’t have enough for a feature-length project.

Taking place in the far-off land of Migal Bavel, 100 Nights Of Hero stars Maika Monroe as Lady Cherry, the waifish bride living in an opulent castle with the uncaring Lord Jerome (Amir El-Masry) and a bevy of armed guards. The only kindness in the kingdom afforded to Cherry comes from her loyal maid Hero (Emma Corrin), who carries a flame for her highness that she hides carefully. Feeling pressure from religious followers known as the Beak Brothers and their leader Birdman (Richard E. Grant), the wedded couple is to produce an heir but Jerome stubbornly refuses the obligation. In a gentleman’s wager with his best chap Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), Jerome bets that he won’t be able to seduce Cherry, if given 100 nights of Jerome’s absence from the castle to do so. Manfred’s attempts to woo the fair lady come to a head when Hero attempts a seduction of her own in telling a seemingly endless story that keeps Cherry and Manfred waiting with bated breath.

In fashioning herself a Scheherazade, Hero weaves a convoluted and cliffhanger-ridden tale that Cherry and Manfred think they recognize as a fable of one of Jerome’s ex-wives, but Hero throws in enough specificities to differentiate it. The story involves three sisters, who have been learning to read and write in secret, which is forbidden in the patriarchal and oppressive Migal Bavel. One of the sisters is Rosa, played by Brat pop sensation Charli XCX in her film debut, who is pursued by a wealthy merchant that discovers her impropriety and endeavors to conceal it from the townspeople that would deem her a witch if they found out. Both the setting of 100 Nights Of Hero and the intentionally meandering allegory that Hero weaves within it point to the themes of female liberation and queer self-discovery that will ultimately serve as the movie’s raison d’être. It just all feels like window dressing for a room we’ve been invited into before.

Writer-director Julia Jackman lends some fun flourishes along the way, as with a droll recapping of Cherry’s hobbies of chess and falconry that would make Wes Anderson doff his beret. Similarly, a montage early on — with voiceover by Felicity Jones — details Jerome’s past doomed marriages with stained glass portraits captioned harshly, e.g. Janet The Barren and Sara The Unfaithful. But despite the nods to Migal Bavel as a place where women are either demonized and commodified, this doesn’t feel like a tangible place we can actually get lost in. Perhaps it’s a small budget or the limited scope of the story but we never truly get a sense of how this village actually runs and why things got to this place where revolution feels inevitable. It whiffs of a medieval mishmash of stately repression and rigid caste structures but the mythology here needed some fine tuning to feel less embryonic.

The direction of the acting is another aspect of 100 Nights Of Hero that felt underdeveloped, as most of the performers feel like they’re playing in separate projects. Emma Corrin and Nicholas Galitzine are both speaking in their native English tongue, which we’ve come to expect as “standard” for tales of lords and ladies, but California-born Maika Monroe isn’t even trying to deviate from her American accent. Following her brilliant breakthrough in It Follows ten years ago, she’s mostly stuck to horror projects that, frankly, don’t ask too much but when Monroe stars in elevated material like this, her blasé disposition sticks out like a sore thumb. She and Corrin have one scene that smolders but the rest never kindle into a romance that catches fire and is worth investing in.

Score – 2.5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Five Nights At Freddy’s 2, a horror sequel starring Josh Hutcherson and Elizabeth Lail, which reunites a security guard and his younger sister with the possessed animatronic cadre that haunts the defunct entertainment center Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza.
Streaming on Netflix is Jay Kelly, a dramedy starring George Clooney and Adam Sandler, following a friendship between a famous movie star and his manager as they travel through Europe and reflect on their life choices, relationships, and legacies.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is Oh. What. Fun., a Christmas comedy starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Felicity Jones, involving a beleaguered matriarch who makes the Christmas magic happen every year for her family but they don’t realize the effort it takes until she goes missing.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Eternity

Joan is in a tricky place. To begin with: she’s dead. When she wakes up in the afterlife, she’s on a train headed for a terminal where recently departed souls choose where to spend their eternity. This cinematic version of limbo, called the Junction, is like Grand Central Station crossed with a packed convention center atop of a milquetoast 3-star hotel. New arrivals walk around disoriented by their new state of being, while Afterlife Coordinators (ACs, for short) assist them underneath an enormous “departures” board. It’s explained that the appearance of the newly deceased is dictated by the time in their lives when they were happiest, so old Joan (played by Betty Buckley) now reverts to her younger self (played by Elizabeth Olsen). Her husband of 65 years Larry (played by Barry Primus) died a week earlier and his mid-30s manifestation (played by Miles Teller) almost doesn’t recognize Joan as she passes on an escalator.

As they reunite and marvel at their mutual recaptured youth, the honeymoon phase doesn’t last long as Joan’s first husband Luke (Callum Turner), who died in the Korean War, appears. He’s been waiting for her in the liminal Junction for 67 years, tending bar and delaying eternity until he can see his “girl back home” once again. Glossy-eyed and mouth agape, Joan whispers, “I never dreamt you this clearly,” as she and Larry stare at the reanimated Luke with decidedly different emotional reactions. The awkward reunion/meeting is exacerbated by a pair of ACs (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early) who tell Joan she has a week to decide where, and with whom, she wants to spend the rest of her afterlife. Women in romcoms have been put in high pressure love triangles before but given the stakes, the one in which Joan finds herself here feels particularly nerve-racking.

Despite its existential themes, Eternity is a resolutely good-natured and utterly charming cross-generational crowd-pleaser, a cinematic cornucopia perfect for families on the hunt for Thanksgiving viewing. The risible screenplay, co-written by Pat Cunnane and director David Freyne, finds plenty of opportunities to quip about the absurdity of the setting while still taking Joan’s dilemma seriously. The hall of the Junction is packed with representatives from eternities like Beach World and Mountain World clamoring to pitch the perks of their realms to prospective clientele. As the ACs explain: once you pick your place, you’re stuck there forever, so it’s not a decision to be taken lightly. Anyone caught trying to escape from their eternity is tracked down by security and sent to “the void”, as a fugitive from Museum World, who tires from looking at paintings all the time, finds out firsthand.

Freyne’s direction doesn’t get too hung up on the fantastical details within each of these otherworldly domains and instead focuses on the romantic conundrum that ensnares the love-locked trio. Larry immediately figures he’s the obvious choice for Joan but the more time she spends making up for lost time with Luke, the more Larry justifiably becomes nervous. Because so much time has passed since Luke died, he’s keenly aware that Joan’s crystallized memory of him is a more idealized version of who he actually is. The three play off each other terrifically, especially Teller and Turner as rivals Larry and Luke, who snipe at each other both in front of Joan and behind her back. A performance detail I enjoyed was how Olsen and Teller, whose characters on Earth were in their 90s, bring an old timer timbre to their line deliveries.

As funny and sweet as the main three are, Eternity‘s secret weapons are Da’Vine Joy Randolph and John Early as Anna and John, the ACs for Larry and Joan, respectively. In a sense, they’re akin to audience surrogates, cheerleaders for each of the beaus that Joan will potentially pick for her great beyond. As they represent “Team Larry” and “Team Luke”, they get some of the script’s snappiest lines supporting their assigned suitors; “there’s nothing more powerful than emotional blackmail,” Anna cheekily advises Larry. Even though the film has plenty of moments to make us laugh, it has just as many that make us reflect on the eternal wonder of love, and assuredly has moments that will have certain audience members grabbing for tissues. If it feels like forever since a good romantic comedy came out, don’t wait too long to see Eternity.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this week:
Opening in theaters is Zootopia 2, an animated comedy sequel starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, reuniting rabbit cop Judy Hopps with wily fox Nick Wilde as they team up to crack a new case against the mysterious pit viper Gary De’Snake.
Streaming on Netflix is Left-Handed Girl, a family drama starring Janel Tsai and Shih-Yuan Ma, following a single mother and her two daughters as they relocate to Taipei to open a night market stall, each navigating the challenges of adapting to their new environment.
Also premiering on Netflix is Jingle Bell Heist, a Christmas romcom starring Olivia Holt and Connor Swindells, involving two thieves who realize they both have designs on robbing the same department store at the height of the holiday season in London.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Predator: Badlands

After a detour on Hulu, with two entries that streamed exclusively on the platform, the Predator franchise is back on the big screen for the first time since the 2018 dud The Predator. Those direct-to-Hulu movies, Prey and Predator: Killer Of Killers, and this latest theatrical release, Predator: Badlands, are all headed up by 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg, who has effectively taken over the series for 20th Century Studios. Reteaming with his Prey scribe Patrick Aison, Trachtenberg continues to delve deeper into this treacherous universe and reconsider what a Predator movie can even be. This particular chapter explores more about the Yautja extraterrestrial species, who typically act as the “Predator” villains in most of the other films but essentially serve as the main characters this time out.

On the planet Yautja Prime, we meet the brothers Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Kwei (Mike Homik) as they spar to train and prove themselves to their bloodthirsty tribe. As the runt of their clan, Dek is even most desperate to assert his dominance and ventures to the deadly planet Genna in order to win the respect of his father Njohrr (Reuben de Jong). There, he intends to hunt the “unkillable” Kalisk creature and bring it back as a trophy, as their kind is wont to do. On other planets, the Yautja may be considered “predators” but on Genna, they’re lower down on the food chain and about as vulnerable as the humans were in the original ’80s actioner that kicked things off 38 years ago. Fortunately, Dek finds help in the form of Thia (Elle Fanning), a bisected android whose knowledge of Genna and its perils can help Dek on his mission.

Reframing a Predator movie as one where the titular creature is on the run as opposed to running things lends itself to a hero’s journey and Badlands makes a proper protagonist out of Dek. Thanks to stellar motion-capture work by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, this is the most expressive and vulnerable a Yautja alien has looked in the franchise thus far. Sure, they may not be much more glamorous than how Arnold memorably described them in Predator, but Dek’s eyes adequately convey the emotions we need to relate to his struggles. There are other tweaks to the design that help too, like leaving Dek without the typical Yautja armor and giving him one tooth that’s shorter than the other three to drive home his underdog state. As his peppy sidekick, Elle Fanning sometimes lays it on a bit thick but Thia’s wide-eyed optimism generally plays well against Dek’s fierce determination.

Predator: Badlands is rated PG-13 but it certainly doesn’t skimp on the sci-fi action that we’ve come to expect from these movies; apparently the MPA goes easier on bloodletting when the blood in question is bright green. Thia isn’t exaggerating when she tells Dek that everything on the planet is designed with death in mind. Not two minutes after crash landing on Genna, branch monsters are out to kill the new visiting Yautja. With spontaneously exploding caterpillars and fields of grass so sharp that it can cut flesh just by grazing it, this is clearly a planet that woke up and chose violence. The ways that Dek and Thia battle back implement creative creature design and inventive choreography, as when Dek first tangos with the Kalisk to find that it can regenerate limbs at an alarming rate. Another terrific fight scene finds Thia’s disconnected top half and bottom half simultaneously duking it out with fellow Weyland-Yutani synthetic robots.

In attempting to expand this universe, Trachtenberg and his team have dug deeper into the mythology behind the Yautja creatures and have woven themes about how they live into Predator: Badlands. “The Yautja are prey to no one, friend to no one and predator to all,” an opening card reads, but Dek’s tale of rugged determination intentionally calls these core tenets into question. It turns out the lone wolf strategy doesn’t work so well when you’re this far away from home field advantage and, as Thia reminds Dek, the alpha wolf isn’t necessarily the strongest but the one who best protects the pack. It’s a long way from macho contras getting picked off one by one in a Central American rainforest but, perhaps improbably, Trachtenberg is 3 for 3 in telling unique stories from this initially myopic Predator world.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Wicked: For Good, a fantasy musical starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, continuing the tale of Oz citizens Elphaba and Glinda as they embrace their new identities of Wicked Witch Of The West and Glinda The Good.
Also playing in theaters is Rental Family, a family dramedy starring Brendan Fraser and Takehiro Hira, centering around an American actor living in Tokyo who starts working for a Japanese “rental family” service to play stand-in roles in other people’s lives.
Premiering on Netflix is Train Dreams, a period drama starring Joel Edgerton and Felicity Jones, following a logger who works to develop the railroad system across the US, causing him to spend time away from his family as he struggles with his place in a changing world.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Die My Love

Lynne Ramsay isn’t a director who makes movies for the brittle of spirit. 2011’s We Need To Talk About Kevin depicts a mother reeling from unspeakable violence committed by her teenage son, while 2018’s You Were Never Really Here follows a mercenary tasked with finding the kidnapped daughter of a politician. Her latest psychological drama, Die My Love, is a similarly bruising tale of a young couple who seem to have an ideal life set out before them. We meet the pregnant Grace (Jennifer Lawrence) and Jackson (Robert Pattinson) as they navigate around the dead leaves inside the rural house that belonged to the latter’s late uncle. It could use some fixing up and TLC to make it a proper home but they’ve decided they want to make the move, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city to raise their forthcoming bundle of joy.

Moving out to the sticks also means they’ll have help from Jackson’s mom Pam (Sissy Spacek) and her friends, all of whom make themselves frequent visitors at the residence, though not as chaotically as the
“guests” in the Jennifer Lawrence-starring mother!. Sadly, Jackson’s dad Harry (Nick Nolte) isn’t as much of a presence due to his worsening dementia that contributes to outbursts he has towards his son and his girlfriend. A different kind of crisis is brewing within Grace, who, to put it mildly, is struggling amid new motherhood. Yes, their son wakes them up in the middle of the night and, as with most new parents, Grace and Jackson both struggle with getting sleep. But the unease within Grace is something deeper, pointing to a deteriorating emotional state that threatens to unravel everything they’ve built as a family.

As with Joaquin Phoenix and Tilda Swinton in Lynne Ramsay’s two previous features, the strongest element of her films can be found in the lead performance and it’s certainly the case here with Jennifer Lawrence. Presumably drawing from her own experience as a new mom, she gives a fierce and relentless performance that feels like it’s crawled its way out of her onto the screen. An interrogation of a woman’s psyche might have caused most actresses to play things more insular but Lawrence puts everything out there, leaving no doubt about the primal instincts that are brewing within Grace. The physicality and emotional abandon of the role are impressive enough but I also appreciated the sardonic wit that she lets through as well. She’s short-tempered with pretty much everyone, from Jackson to friends at a party to the cashier at a local store. Yes, it’s sad that the lashing out points to mental health instability but Lawrence makes Grace’s moodiness quite funny nonetheless.

As good as Jennifer Lawrence is in the lead role, I wish Lynne Ramsay and her co-writers Enda Walsh and Alice Birch crafted a fleshed-out story that rises to the level of the acting. Ramsay’s movies typically have a disorienting sense of pacing and chronology, which also applies to Die My Love, but the rhythm this time feels jarring without actually lending itself to meaningful tension in the narrative. Working for the first time with editor Toni Froschhammer, Ramsay will forgo important events that would have a bearing on the plot but then focus on smaller moments for longer than necessary. Perhaps that’s the intent — to mirror the way the protagonist is trying to ignore consequential mile markers and accentuate minutia — but as such, it’s a deterrent to the dramatic weight of the material.

Much like 2024’s Nightbitch, another tale of a mother coping with the stresses of raising a child without much help from the father, Die My Love has a great ear for the kinds of goofy songs one plays to satiate a newborn. None of the needle drops here are quite as good as “Dare To Be Stupid” from that Amy Adams vehicle last year, but the movie nevertheless throws down early with a sped-up version of Chubby Checker “The Twist” and follows through with the Raffi classic “Apples And Bananas”. In another scene, Grace replays Toni Basil’s “Mickey” an inadvisable amount of times, enough to temporarily be possessed to scale the stairs like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Unfortunately, the movie ends with a dud of a final song choice over the credits, an underwhelming cover of a thuddingly obvious selection. Die My Love is another successful venture by Lynne Ramsay to get us in the headspace of the protagonist, even if it doesn’t give us enough to do once we’re there.

Score – 3/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Running Man, starring Glen Powell and Josh Brolin, is a dystopian action thriller re-adapting the Stephen King novel about a game show where contestants, allowed to go anywhere in the world, are pursued by “hunters” hired to kill them.
Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, starring Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson, is a heist sequel in which the legendary Four Horsemen magicians recruit three skilled illusionists for a high-stakes diamond robbery.
Keeper, starring Tatiana Maslany and Rossif Sutherland, is a surrealist horror film about a romantic anniversary trip to a secluded cabin that turns sinister when a dark presence reveals itself, forcing a couple to confront the property’s haunting past.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Reel Views, Review

Bugonia

Emma Stone and director Yorgos Lanthimos continue their creative collaboration with Bugonia, their third project together in as many years. This time, the two-time Academy Award winner plays Michelle Fuller, the CEO of a powerful player in the pharmaceutical space called Auxolith. She’s the kind of well-paid boss babe who gets up at 4:30 in the morning to run on a treadmill that probably costs more than most people’s cars and has table ornaments with platitudes like “let’s kick impossible’s [butt]” inscribed on them. Her routine of power striding into the office and confusing subordinates with corporate doublespeak is interrupted by the presence of cousins Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and Don (Aidan Delbis) at her house after work. They’re there in Jennifer Aniston masks and they’re there to abduct her.

Michelle is drugged and when she wakes up, her head is shaved, she’s chained up in a basement and is accused by Teddy of being the queen of an “Andromedan” alien species. Why Teddy and Don are so convinced Michelle isn’t actually human, and the lengths to which she will go to prove that she is, are best left for viewers to discover for themselves. Bugonia is a remake of a South Korean movie called Save The Green Planet!, though they’re both so seemingly singular that it’s hard to imagine either one has ties to anything else. Even more surprising is how closely Lanthimos and his scribe Will Tracy follow the narrative beats of the bugnuts predecessor, to the extent that seeing the original may actively ruin the experience of seeing this reimagining. Still, the pair do enough to distinguish this tonally and thematically from Jang Joon-hwan’s film to justify the refresh.

Stone gave what is likely the best performance of her career a couple years ago in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and even though her work in Bugonia likely won’t score her another Oscar, it’s another perfectly-calibrated piece of acting. The CEO character in Save The Green Planet! is actively awful and spends the majority of his captivity mocking the kidnappers. He even brags about his IQ at one point, a go-to for the intellectually insecure. By comparison, Michelle is much more sympathetic, still calloused and condescending in a way she can’t seem to help — her correction of Teddy’s pronunciation of “shibboleths” is so impulsive that it’s basically a sneeze — but nonetheless someone who doesn’t deserve what she’s being put through. As her eyes dart around the musty basement when she comes to, you can practically see her desperately attempting to recall hostage negotiation techniques she was likely taught at some point.

A way that Lanthimos and Tracy most meet our moment with Bugonia is in tapping into how much of a communication breakdown we’ve sustained by siloing ourselves off from one another. Jesse Plemons does an outstanding job as Teddy, a man who’s been done dirty enough that he’s retreated to the conspiracy-ridden internet to find meaning when the real world simply doesn’t make sense. He wants to turn the tables, to act as though he’s in control of the situation with power over someone who would have power over him in any other scenario, but he’s ultimately scared and confused. He wants to be right in his theory that Michelle is from another planet but he won’t accept her just telling him what he wants to hear either. The lack of direction makes things difficult for Don too, who’s blindly accepts just about everything that comes out of Teddy’s mouth but develops moral scruples when contradictions arise.

Bugonia is powerfully acted, sharp-tongued and, for all its peculiarities, is probably Lanthimos’ most approachable work since The Favourite — if you haven’t seen any of his movies, I’d consider this as strong a starting spot as any. Still, I wish he had done more to depart from the existing text and made this tale his own, not from a stylistic sense but from a narrative one. He carries over a police character, here played by Stavros Halkias, that could’ve just as easily been converted into a different plot device that forces Teddy and Don to scramble. Teddy’s backstory is better implied than directly shown, with black-and-white flashbacks that work too hard to spell out his motivations. There’s also a scene at a hospital that makes absolutely no sense. But as a darkly funny cat-and-mouse game set against the backdrop our divided times, Bugonia has plenty in it worth buzzing about.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
Predator: Badlands, starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is a sci-fi action film following a young Yautja Predator outcast from his clan who finds an unlikely ally on his journey to find and defeat the ultimate adversary.
Christy, starring Sydney Sweeney and Ben Foster, is a sports biopic chronicling professional boxer Christy Martin’s rise to becoming America’s most well-known and successful female pugilist in the 1990s.
Nuremberg, starring Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, is a historical drama involving a World War II psychiatrist tasked with evaluating Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials, growing increasingly obsessed with understanding evil as he forms a disturbing bond with Hermann Göring.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup