Crime Archives - Page 2 of 35 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Batman (2022)

February 28, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy–to which he contributed two entries–remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves’s films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script–delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less–that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the “detective” part of Batman’s “Dark Knight Detective” moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It’s sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) – Netflix

February 22, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Streaming, Thriller

**½/****
starring Elsie Fisher, Mark Burnham, Moe Dunford, Alice Krige
screenplay by Chris Thomas Devlin
directed by David Blue Garcia

by Walter Chaw David Blue Garcia’s re-quel Texas Chainsaw Massacre could’ve been a masterpiece with a minor tonal shift from deadly self-serious to wryly self-knowing. As it stands, it falls into the same Stanley Kramer pit as the Candyman reboot, where lectures take the place of plot–and infant cardboard pedagogues take the place of legible characters. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the kind of graceless screed, in other words, that is everything its worst detractors accuse the original of being, making defending progressive messages in films like this difficult, if not impossible. Horror films in general–and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, in particular–are rich in subtext. Horror as a genre is primal (all of the Old Testament is an anthology of vile horror stories), and, as such, it’s the first one to respond when toxins are introduced into our cultural ecosystem. Horror, for lack of a better descriptor, is potentially useful as both diagnosis of what’s wrong with us and prognostication of the consequences, should we allow the poison in our systems to run its course. What’s not helpful, however, are films that eschew subtext in favour of soapbox. If you empty the basement, your basement is empty. And if you enter into a thing with the idea that you’re about to force people to get smarter, you’d better be sure that you’re smarter than anyone who might want to watch your thing. Very few artists ever get away with being didactic.

Kimi (2022)

February 19, 20222022, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Steven Soderbergh, Drama, Streaming, Thriller

***½/****
starring Zoë Kravitz, Rita Wilson, Derek DelGaudio, Robin Givens
written by David Koepp
directed by Steven Soderbergh

by Walter Chaw Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi is an escapist paranoia fantasy that has as its most unlikely conceit not any of its dire depictions of a techno-surveillance state, but that it’s possible for wealthy white men to see anything like consequences for their actions–actions up to, and including, murder. It may be Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp’s cleverest sting in a clever film, this notion that at a time when satire feels impossible because reality is so obscene, the greatest stretch of the imagination is the promise of meaningful accountability for the 1%. You could call it Pollyannaism or toxic positivity (and I confess my first response to how this movie ends was irritation), but I’ve come to realize how that speaks more to my disappointment with the world than with the story Kimi is trying to tell. This isn’t Night Moves or The Parallax View (or, more to the point, The Conversation or Blow Out), it’s a fable about how trauma can be overcome, justice can be won, and the bad guys don’t necessarily have to win every time. It could even be about how the future is minority and female and work-from-home. Or, thanks to one superb sequence, Kimi could be about a rejection of our desperate longing for superhuman intervention. Maybe it’s each of those things at once. All a revolution takes is enough individuals, flawed as they are, broken as they may be, deciding they’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. All it would take is cutting through the noise and the moral cannibalism and finally painting a target on our common tormentors.

Malignant (2021) – Blu-ray + Digital Code

December 5, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***½/**** Image A Sound A Extras C
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

by Walter Chaw James Wan’s Malignant is spectacularly, unabashedly fucking nuts. Not nuts in a random way, nuts in the way Oliver Stone’s The Hand is–or, more to the point, Brian De Palma’s Sisters. It’s what the Dario Argento The Phantom of the Opera should have been: not entirely giallo, not without elements of high opera; a classic “madwoman” picture as well as a possession movie. Also, that voice on the phone from Black Christmas, and also a loving homage to Stuart Gordon, and also… Malignant is a joyful mishmash that plays like a NOW That’s What I Call Music compilation for horror fans. It’s the North by Northwest of delirious genre fare: Bava if you want it, the most gothic Hammer if it pleases you, complete with a Universal Monsters monster I kind of can’t believe someone hasn’t done before. I’m not giving anything away by saying the cosplay is going to be lit.

West Side Story (2021)

December 2, 2021****/****, 2021, Crime, Drama, Musical, Romance, Spielberg, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ansel Elgort, Ariana DeBose, David Alvarez, Rachel Zegler
screenplay by Tony Kushner, based on the stage play by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw West Side Story is the perfect vehicle for all of Spielberg’s prodigious strengths while deemphasizing his obvious weaknesses. In that way, it reminded me of another Stephen Sondheim adaptation, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd, wherein a savant-like visual artist is paired with a genius for storytelling, plotting, and characterization. It occurs to me that every single Robert Wise film would be better had Spielberg directed it. This isn’t because Wise butchered The Magnificent Ambersons and betrayed Val Lewton, it’s because he played in the same sandbox as Spielberg and no one has ever been better at building those particular sandcastles. There’s a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Spielberg, with a drumbeat gathering power on the soundtrack, transitions from a sign at a crossroads pointing to Berlin to a book burning in a public square. Kind of like the ones they’re organizing in central Virginia right now. He does it again in A.I. in the lead-up to the Flesh Fair. The combination of action and the rising thrum on the soundtrack is…visceral? Yes, that; kinetic, too. Chills-inducing. He uses the tactic again in the build-up to the “Mambo” number as Anita, Bernardo, and Maria arrive at the school gymnasium for the big dance. You hear the music, muted, through the doors, and then they’re thrown open, and Jerome Robbins’s ageless choreography explodes with all the furious vibrancy a collaboration between Jerome fucking Robbins and Steven fucking Spielberg promises. It’s a synesthetic representation of life and youth, ridiculously effective. We speak of spectacle films and the magic of “big” movies–I don’t know that I’ve felt a film’s scale like this in decades. All of this West Side Story‘s showstoppers are just that. They are alive and fresh, and Spielberg gets that when you have a Robbins or a Fosse or an Agnes DeMille, your job is to dance it like your shoes are on fire and let us see the bodies from head to toe. There is possibly no better visual storyteller in the history of movies than Spielberg, who finds in this partnership with great artists alive and dead the truest fruition of his gift.

House of Gucci (2021) + Benedetta (2021)

November 26, 20212021, Al Pacino, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Biopic, Canada, Crime, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, France, Netherlands, Romance, Theatrical

HOUSE OF GUCCI
***/****
starring Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Jared Leto, Al Pacino
screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna
directed by Ridley Scott

BENEDETTA
***½/****
starring Virginie Efira, Charlotte Rampling, Daphné Patakia, Lambert Wilson
screenplay by David Birke and Paul Verhoeven, based on the book by Judith C. Brown
directed by Paul Verhoeven

by Walter Chaw Ridley Scott’s second based-on-a-true-story prestige period piece of 2021 after The Last Duel takes place in the I Love You to Death cinematic universe, wherein formerly dignified actors affect ridiculous Italian accents while taking bullets from hitmen hired by their wives, ex or otherwise. Just the spectacle of watching Adam Driver do a scene with Al Pacino at an Italian picnic, the two of them talking like Mario brothers while a brunette Lady Gaga croaks in an accidental Russian accent is… And the soundtrack! George Michael, Donna Summer, New Order, the Eurythmics–it’s all of it like a Nagel painting come to life: gaudy affectations of glamour and art for the bawdiest appreciators of unintentional camp. Indeed, House of Gucci is prime grist for the headliner in a midnight call-along, or the feature presentation in a future episode of “MST3K”–although, at two-and-a-half hours, I worry the same jokes would keep getting recycled, most of them about the accents, a few of them about sex-pest Jared Leto’s turn as Paolo Gucci, buried beneath a ton of prosthetics that make him look on the outside what he is on the inside. (Here’s the punchline: Leto steals the movie.) A deadly drinking game could be devised from the times Pacino’s accent slips from hilarious Italian to Al Pacino to, during a weird funeral scene, Bela Lugosi Transylvanian. There’s a scene in the last half of the film where Paolo groans into an airport payphone, “I got to wash! If you could smell-a between my groins, you’d-a unnerstan!” while Aldo makes the “c’mon” expression trying to get his attention, and then later Aldo gives Paolo, his little Fredo, the “you disappointed the hell out of me” kiss of death and, again, it’s… Well, it’s notably, spectacularly terrible is what it is. And I liked it.

Halloween Kills (2021)

October 14, 20212021, Authors: Bill Chambers, Crime, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**/****
starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Anthony Michael Hall
written by Scott Teems & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green
directed by David Gordon Green

by Bill Chambers Depending on your perspective, Halloween Kills, David Gordon Green’s follow-up to his 2018 Halloween, is the third Halloween II, or the second Halloween III, or the twelfth entry in a long-running serial with a compulsion to press the reset button. Though other horror franchises have splintered into manifold continuities (you’d need Ancestry.com to sort out the various branches stemming from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre), Halloween is unique in that it’s not (just) a cash cow getting milked to death by new content farmers–no, a fairly consistent chain of ownership has made a habit of calling a mulligan whenever the consensus is that they’ve strayed too far from the beaten path. After a failed bid to rebrand as an anthology with the John Carpenter-backed Halloween III: Season of the Witch, whose reputation has since been reclaimed, the series resurrected Michael Myers and his Ahab, Dr. Loomis, only to fly too close to the sun with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween H20 followed, and in bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Michael’s sister, it wallpapered over the events of Halloweens III through VI. Then Halloween: Resurrection undid all of that movie’s goodwill, so Rob Zombie wrote and directed a remake of the first film. Zombie returned for a sequel that was roundly rejected despite being the ne plus ultra of Halloween movies for the misfit fans like myself, and the unlikely team of Green and Danny McBride took the reins, making the somewhat unconventional decision to do a legacy sequel to Carpenter’s 1978 original alone, again with Curtis but without the early retcon that Laurie and Michael are related.

TIFF ’21: The Guilty (2021)

September 27, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Film Festivals, Streaming, Thriller, TIFF

**/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Ethan Hawke, Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard
screenplay by Nic Pizzolatto, based on the original screenplay by Gustav Möller & Emil Nygaard Albertsen
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw Landing midway between Pontypool and Talk Radio, Antoine Fuqua’s The Guilty finds disgraced cop Joe (Jake Gyllenhaal) bumped down to 9-1-1 operator as he awaits trial for something the press is eager to hear his side of the story of. He’s falling apart, though; this much we can tell by the way his superiors in the call station keep him on a short–very short–leash, and by the way he looks at himself in the bathroom mirror like an animal injured and cornered. He calls his estranged wife and begs her to let him say goodnight to his daughter. She begs him to leave her alone. He can’t seem to catch a break. But he gets a call from Emily (voiced by Riley Keough), who’s been abducted by her ex-husband, Henry (Peter Sarsgaard). They’re travelling east on the 10–Joe figures that out because she sees a forest fire raging out the driver’s-side windows. Joe figures out a lot of things while, on a bank of screens in front of him, an apocalypse plays out. It’s a vision of hell. Our hell–we made it. It’s ours. Emily gives Joe one last chance to do a good thing before he vanishes, so he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s too late. It’s been too late for a long time.

Lady of the Manor (2021) + Copshop (2021)

September 17, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Theatrical, Thriller

LADY OF THE MANOR
½*/****
starring Melanie Lynskey, Judy Greer, Justin Long, Ryan Philippe
written and directed by Justin Long & Christian Long

COPSHOP
**/****
starring Gerard Butler, Frank Grillo, Alexis Louder, Toby Huss
screenplay by Kurt McLeod and Joe Carnahan
directed by Joe Carnahan

by Walter Chaw The first perky, jaunty violin strokes in the oppressive score announce exactly the kind of garbage Justin and Christian Long’s Lady of the Manor is going to be: self-satisfied, high-concept comedy that apes Neil Jordan’s High Spirits and Jared and Jerusha Hess’s Austenland while entirely wasting Melanie Lynskey and Judy Greer. I would watch Lynskey and Greer in anything–and Lady of the Manor tested me sorely, immediately, repeatedly. Its execution is ’80s VHS Screwballs quickie tossed together with cheap gags, an overreliance on fart and dick jokes, exaggerated in-camera effects, and skits that fall flat and don’t stop falling for at least ten or twenty beats after they’ve died. They were dead before they got there. There are montages that are just expository scenes strung together and there’s a running gag where Greer is asked to shake her head disapprovingly while Lynskey sucks on a bar of soap and shrugs. There’s another where Greer makes “silly” faces in a mirror for a long, long time to demonstrate how she misses her friend and also how maybe she’s loosening up, and it’s unbelievably painful to watch someone so brilliant and naturally hilarious shoehorned into a square hole as stolid and unforgiving as this. Admittedly, it takes actual talent to make something this terrible. I mean, you can’t do it accidentally.

Malignant (2021)

September 13, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Annabelle Wallis, Maddie Hasson, George Young, Michole Briana White
screenplay by Akela Cooper
directed by James Wan

Beckett (2021) – Netflix

August 14, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brazil, Crime, Drama, Greece, Italy, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring John David Washington, Alicia Vikander, Yorgos Pirpassopoulos, Filippos Ioannidis
screenplay by Kevin A. Rice
directed by Ferdinando Cito Filomarino

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s obvious what Ferdinando Cito Filomarino is after with Beckett: a 1970s paranoia thriller in the Three Days of the Condor vein. And it’s just as obvious that he misses the mark. Beckett isn’t even a prestige knock-off version à la the Peter Hyams remake of Narrow Margin. Lots of reasons for its failure, chief among them that it doesn’t have a point of view; landing somewhere in the junction between a “wrong man” thriller and a film about a truth-seeker finding more truth than he bargained for makes it all seem arbitrary. To be clear, not arbitrary in the sense that what’s happening to our heroes is meaningless (a capricious universe is the fodder, after all, for great paranoia)–arbitrary in the sense that the film itself has no real reason for being, and that’s a hurdle very little art can overcome. It’s a hurdle that not even great cinematography (by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom) and a Ryuichi Sakamoto score can ameliorate. Instead, they underscore how top-heavy it all is. Great cast, too, scenic locales–everything top of the line. But there’s nothing mooring it to relevance, despite all its arched-eyebrow pipe-smoking about the state of Greece and American interventionism.

Fantasia Festival ’21: Baby, Don’t Cry

August 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Fantasia Festival, Film Festivals, Romance, Thriller

*/****
starring Zita Bai, Boni Mata, Vas Provatakis, Helen Sun
written by Zita Bai
directed by Jesse Dvorak

Fantasia Festival runs from August 5 to August 25, 2021. For more details, visit their website.

by Walter Chaw Zita Bai stars in and scripts Baby, Don’t Cry, a film by Jesse Dvorak that follows a rough few weeks in the life of troubled teen Baby (Bai). Unsuccessfully navigating a dysfunctional home and hostile high-school environment, she meets bad boy Fox (Vas Provatakis) and, in the tradition of stuff like Badlands and Gun Crazy, falls in love and engages in some very bad things–not necessarily in that order. The promise of the piece is that Baby initially seems unfamiliar: a heavily-accented Chinese-American who consoles her loneliness with a habit of filming people and things–perhaps to contextualize them, though more likely to hold them in digital amber, thus negating their immediate threat. The problem is that this promise is largely squandered in a series of repetitive conflicts and resolutions punctuated now and again by hints of magic realism (like her mother sprouting pig ears, or a cartoon fox pacing a car) that, again, are suggestive of a deeper exploration of alienation and loss without the muscle to provide an adequate reckoning with them.

Spiral (2021)

June 14, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

Spiral: From the Book of Saw
½*/****
starring Chris Rock, Max Minghella, Marisol Nichols, Samuel L. Jackson
written by Josh Stolberg & Peter Goldfinger
directed by Darren Lynn Bousman

by Walter Chaw It’s so familiar it’s fatiguing, another one of these projects that begins with passion and the best of intentions and ends up chewed to paste and regurgitated as this thin, masticated gruel. Is Darren Lynn Bousman’s Spiral (a.k.a. Spiral: From the Book of Saw) the product of too many notes from too many people, or simply the wrong people? Or maybe there weren’t enough voices in the room to challenge accepted wisdom, which tends to be unreliable more often than not. Spiral occupies a weird space where it’s both desperate and cocksure. In moments of duress, one tends to revert to the familiar and the comfortable, so when things are obviously going south for Chris Rock, still-aspiring movie star, Chris Rock, legendary stand-up comic, tries to assert himself. The script is a mess, and the grafts meant to save the patient have been rejected. Spiral probably should’ve been killed at inception.

Cruella (2021)

June 3, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Crime, Disney, Theatrical

***/****
starring Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Mark Strong
screenplay by Dana Fox and Tony McNamara
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw It’s better to think of Craig Gillespie’s Cruella as a riff than as a prequel–a variation on a theme rather than the puzzle-box predecessor to a beloved intellectual property. In fact, one’s ability to do so informs the extent to which this film is not merely enjoyable but indeed good. Cruella is a mindfuck of a construct, a postmodern exercise in which nothing of it could cohere without knowledge of, and experience with, other cultural artifacts–but even there, it occupies two spaces simultaneously: the Disney side, where the references are all to 101 Dalmatians, against the Gillespie side, where the references are to pop-cultural movements in music, fashion, even literature. Early on, a young Cruella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), born “Estella,” is urged by her saintly mother Catherine (Emily Beecham) to contain Estella’s exuberant, sometimes-violent and “evil” side by dubbing her “Cruella” and, in so naming it, caging it. The suggestion, then, is that “Estella” is the polite-if-constricting requirement that Cruella be a prequel to a Disney “vault” classic, while “Cruella” is the Something Wild barely contained that, like Michelle Pfeiffer’s resurrected Catwoman in Batman Returns, is a creature born of violence returned as the avatar for perversity and chaos. Imagine how great this good film would have been were it just the one with none of the other.

Army of the Dead (2021) – Netflix

May 20, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Horror, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

*/****
starring Dave Bautista, Ella Purnell, Omari Hardwick, Garret Dillahunt
screenplay by Zack Snyder & Shay Hatten and Joby Harold
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw A band of highly-outfitted soldiers enters a hive of monsters on a rescue mission. Accompanying them is a person scarred psychologically by a fight with these monsters, as well as a representative of an evil corporation that is more interested in harvesting the monsters–not for any humanitarian purpose, but to use as WMDs–than in exterminating them. For a little heroic comic relief, meet the not-completely-ordinary-seeming pilot, who, at a moment of crisis, appears to have disappeared only to reappear once our survivors have lost all hope. That’s right, Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead is a remorseless, brazen rip-off of Aliens, down to outfitting a monster-killing badass exactly like Jenette Goldstein’s “Vasquez” and to cribbing a few lines from James Cameron’s script wholesale. At some point, Aliens apparently became an obscure, seldom-seen relic of a forgotten past ripe for strip-mining in this hotly-anticipated, deeply disappointing and distended genre epic. To be fair, Army of the Dead doesn’t only rip off Aliens (which it does remorselessly): it also lifts Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend conceit of “who are the real monsters, here?” in conceiving of a zombie civilization attempting to find purchase in the Nevada desert. If you have to steal, may as well steal from the best.

The Woman in the Window (2021) – Netflix

May 18, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Streaming, Thriller

**/****
starring Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Anthony Mackie, Julianne Moore
screenplay by Tracy Letts, based upon the novel by A.J. Finn
directed by Joe Wright

by Walter Chaw By the end of her career, after decades spent weathering abuse and disappointment, Joan Crawford turned in a series of extraordinarily nuanced performances playing older women doing their best against despair. Watch the look on her face in Sudden Fear when a much-younger Jack Palance shows some interest in her, even after she’s been cruel to him–the mixture of hope and suspicion, the hard-won wisdom of a lifetime of betrayals at her expense. Crawford and legendary rival Bette Davis were slotted into stuff like this in their middle-age–an entire “psycho-biddy” subgenre of exploitation picture that, despite being engineered to humiliate them, nonetheless resulted in a few sublime gems made exceptional, some would correctly argue, for the unexpected dignity these women brought to the projects. Case in point, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?: come for the camp, stay for the devastating existential pathos. By any measure, 46 is not “biddy” territory, but that’s the age Crawford is in Sudden Fear (probably; no one knows for sure when Crawford was born). At 46, Davis reprised the role of Queen Elizabeth, this time well into her dotage, and, indeed, 46 is how old Amy Adams is in the role of drunk and doped-up, agoraphobic nutjob Dr. Anna Fox in Joe Wright’s ridiculous–but not ridiculous enough–The Woman in the Window.

The Virtuoso (2021)

April 28, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Thriller, VOD

*/****
starring Anson Mount, Abbie Cornish, Eddie Marsan, Anthony Hopkins
screenplay by James C. Wolf
directed by Nick Stagliano

by Walter Chaw 25 minutes into Nick Stagliano’s very serious The Virtuoso, our erstwhile The American assassin, the unnamed virtuoso in question (Anson Mount), receives a note inscribed with what appears to be a child’s handwriting (it isn’t, which is only one reason why it’s funny) telling him who his next target will be. As the Virtuoso, in his own second-person narration, lays out some ground rules in a world-weary, Fight Club-aspiring way, we see him burning what is obviously a different piece of paper in the fireplace. One might wonder about the sleight-of-hand happening here: Is Virtuoso, recently traumatized by a job gone tragically (and hilariously) wrong, looking to screw his mentor The Mentor (Anthony Hopkins) by holding on to the Mission: Impossible message intended for self-destruction? Will this slip of incriminating paper be the “check and mate” of a twisty noir‘s mind-bending puzzle-box? Or is it a simple continuity error they either didn’t notice or figured didn’t really matter because the audience will be too dazzled by the clockwork precision of the compulsive, extravagant-to-the-point-of-self-satire script? You’re smart. When we’re done here, you tell me which one it is.

Nobody (2021)

April 24, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, VOD

***/****
starring Bob Odenkirk, Aleksey Serebryakov, Connie Nielsen, Christopher Lloyd
written by Derek Kolstad
directed by Ilya Naishuller

by Walter Chaw I spent a lot of my freshman year in college in the shadow of post-trauma from a failed suicide attempt, untreated depression, and what felt like hardwired self-loathing. I looked for fights then and found them sometimes. I am so full of rage and frustration. I am beset by violent fantasies. When I watch videos of people turning the tables on attackers or racists, I wonder if, in the same situation, with the same upper hand, I would be able to stop hitting once I started. Age has mellowed me; my wife and my family have civilized me to some extent, and I don’t punch walls anymore, you know? It’s just sadness and self-loathing left in the debris, should anyone think to sift through it. I don’t think I’m unusual. I think men aren’t given the mechanism to express their despair in any way other than through violence and rage, and therein lies the reason everything is broken now and why we’re largely beyond repair. We are the pure residue of a vile evolutionary animal. Everything that doesn’t make sense makes perfect sense when you consider that we’re just shaved apes barely behaving ourselves.

Cherry (2021)

March 17, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, VOD

***/****
starring Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor, Michael Rispoli
screenplay by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, based on the novel by Nico Walker
directed by Anthony Russo & Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw When you hit someone coming and going, I think that either it’s personal or you don’t know what you want. For me, when MCU wunderkinds the Russo Brothers decide to make a big-budget, S.E. Hinton meets John Irving via T.S. Garp version of Rush, shit, I’m into it. One can either complain that everything coming out is the product of an algorithm or endeavour to notice when, for good or for ill, one gets exactly the kind of auteurist dream project in all the show-offy, chaotic glory one’s been pining for in endless, exhausting thinkpieces. Criticism that the Russos are trying too hard with Cherry sounds to me suspiciously like the sort of unimaginative personal-grievance pieces cropping up around about the time Scorsese was making stuff like New York, New York, or when The Matrix sequels failed entirely to behave, or when Zack Snyder delivers a four-hour Greek God cut of a superhero movie that is distinctly the product of a single voice. I mean, hate it if you want to, but also fuck off.

The Little Things (2020)

January 28, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto, Natalie Morales
written and directed by John Lee Hancock

by Walter Chaw For a film aspiring so desperately towards a kind of shimmering, sublime, existential opacity, John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things would have done well to be not quite so gaffed and on-the-nose. The epilogue even features someone tying all of the film’s alleged mysteries up in a literal bow (well, barrette), which could be sly and knowing postmodernism but, in the hands of Hancock and composer Thomas Newman, his confederate in pabulum, is almost assuredly just as obvious as it appears. I’ve liked a couple of Hancock’s films–especially The Rookie, because it was heartfelt pap. And I’ve disliked the rest of them for being the same heartfelt pap. Saving Mr. Banks, for instance, is egregious in its Vaseline-smeared defanging of P. L. Travers, the better to pay proper tribute to an at-least-ambiguous Walt Disney. Which is still a far sight better than what Hancock did to infantilize Michael Oher in that completely irredeemable, appallingly paternalistic celebration of White Evangelical Christianity, The Blind Side. I guess I don’t mind pap in the tale of an old person getting to play baseball and like it less when it’s in the service of making strong women appear weak and Black men appear slow and affable. I guess I don’t enjoy heartfelt pap, either, in a long, dark teatime-of-the-soul ’90s throwback serial-killer procedural.