Early in the second half of J.C. Chandor’s Triple Frontier, Ben Affleck’s character executes a South American cocaine farmer, lying on the ground, just moments after killing several others in a split-second act of self-defense. There’s plenty of violence to go around in the film, but this killing is markedly different.…
Us begins with a sincerely spooky prologue taking place in 1986, when young Addy wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and encounters what appears to be her own smirking, scary double, an experience that apparently leaves her traumatized. Cut to the present, and adult Addy (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband (Winston Duke) and two children (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) return to their summer home near that same beach. Even while Addy feels constantly on edge…
Stanley Kubrick’s final film is one of the least-sexy films ever made about sex. Libidinous, yes, and full of naked bodies in salacious motion, engaging in lubricious acts — but also off-putting, too meticulous to be arousing. Eyes Wide Shut is a dreamy traipse through the nocturnal fantasies of a successful Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise) who, married to a beautiful…
OK, so things don’t really vanish anymore: even the most limited film release will (most likely, eventually) find its way onto some streaming service or into some DVD bargain bin assuming that those still exist by the time this sentence finishes. In other words, while the title of In Review Online‘s new monthly feature devoted to current domestic…
Like Black Panther before it, the representational bona-fides of Captain Marvel, the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe, entry have been at the forefront of its marketing and will assuredly be a prominent feature of future discussion. That this is the first female-fronted installment, after 11 years and 20+ films, is certainly noteworthy. Unfortunately, the film isn’t particularly distinctive beyond that. …
We’re a long ways away from when directors like Allan Dwan and Joseph H. Lewis could pack an absurd amount of plot into 70-minute features; even rom-coms and straight-to-dvd action flicks today clock in at over two hours (to say nothing of the glut of extremely long superhero epics and prestige dramas). Neil Jordan’s Greta, then, is praiseworthy for its narrative compactness, as it moves through its story swiftly and concisely. Jordan sets the plot in motion and establishes three main characters during the…
It’s been 20 years since game-changer The Blair Witch Project hit cinemas, and yet the found-footage horror sub-genre is going strong. Just last year, both the well-regarded horror sequel Unfriended: Dark Web and the missing-persons thriller Searching pulled off novel formal feats, weaving together action…
In Alex Lehmann’s Paddleton, Mark Duplass and Ray Romano play Michael and Andy, a couple of sadsack, socially awkward, loser neighbors who have struck up a friendship based seemingly on proximity and mutual apathy. When Michael is diagnosed with terminal cancer, he enlists Andy to go on a brief road trip with him to acquire…
Jean Luc-Godard’s career came to an end in 1967, with Weekend — only for it to rise again out of the ashes, and for the filmmaker to summarily dismiss everything he’d made before. The violent and vehement events of May 1968 marked a return to zero for Godard, the requisite thrust towards a revolutionary form that asserted cinema’s capabilities beyond mere representation. Rejecting the ‘bourgeois’ image which Godard saw as necessarily resulting from an attempt to “reflect reality,” the director sought…
A Perfect World‘s title is contradictory, born from a phrase that implies that life will never really amount to what we want it to — but abbreviated, so as to suggest that the central relationship in Clint Eastwood’s film is a utopian alternative to the injustices of reality. And yet, the world that is shared and created by the film’s surrogate father and surrogate son is never quite that, because for all of its ability to warp time and space and…
Brothers of the Night concerns a loose network of young Bulgarian men who, unable to find work in Vienna, instead prowl the city streets selling their bodies. The opening scene of Patrice Chiha’s film locates two young hustlers in a shadowy concrete overpass, one sloshed out of his mind and the other trying to control him. This might sound like the typical start of a documentary realist portrait, but the scene’s febrile lighting and vaguely theatrical presentation immediately place…
The unconventional comedic drama Dear Ex has become a major success story for Taiwanese filmmakers Mag Hsu and Chih-yen Hsu. Nominated in eight categories at the Golden Horse awards, and winning three, this queer-interest tale deals with the fallout from the death of family man Zhengyuan (Spark Chen), who chooses to leave his life insurance money to his secret boyfriend, Jay (Roy Chiu), rather than his 13-year-old son, Cengxi (Joseph Huang). “Do you know that adults are the stupidest creatures on Earth?” Cengxi muses…