Streaming Archives - Page 3 of 4

The Tomorrow War (2021)

July 1, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller, Time Travel

**½/****
starring Chris Pratt, Yvonne Strahovski, J.K. Simmons, Betty Gilpin
written by Zach Dean
directed by Chris McKay

by Walter Chaw Not to be confused with Joe Haldeman’s classic 1974 novel The Forever War, Chris McKay’s super-stupid The Tomorrow War doesn’t bear up under the slightest prodding yet demonstrates an admirable agreeability to “sciencing the shit out of” part of its solution while dealing, however rotely, with its father/son and father/daughter abandonment themes. Pratt, whose Q-meter stock has fallen because of a few public missteps, proves an affable presence as science teacher-cum-future soldier Dan Forester, enlisted by future soldiers into fighting the tomorrow war against thorn-tossing, bugbear monster things dubbed “White Spikes.” See, in 30 years or so, humans are down to their last half-million and need people from the past to bolster their ranks. But doesn’t that create some temporal anomaly problems? I’m very glad you asked. Yes, it does. That’s why they only recruit people who are going to die within a decade anyway, which is either an incredibly stupid plan in its looseness or an incredibly cynical plan that presumes none of these people will procreate again within the next 10 years–or, you know, otherwise do something that will fuck with the future in an unexpected way. Maybe they’ve accounted for all that and simply don’t share. Or maybe it’s like that Mark Hamill anecdote about how his hair should have been filthy and wet for a scene shot out of sequence but meant to follow the trash-compactor escape in Star Wars: As Harrison Ford sagely informed him, “Kid, it ain’t that kind of movie.”

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.

Without Remorse (2021)

April 30, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Streaming, Thriller, War

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jamie Bell, Guy Pearce
screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples, based on the novel by Tom Clancy
directed by Stefano Sollima

by Walter Chaw A little less than halfway through Stefano Sollima’s Without Remorse, ex-Navy SEAL hotshot John Kelly (Michael B. Jordan), decked out in an orange prison jumpsuit, tells his former commanding officer, Lt. Greer (Jodie Turner-Smith), that they fought for a country that didn’t love them for the promise the United States represented–and that, somewhere along the way, a contract was broken. Kelly is the blunt object the Daniel Craig Bond cycle identified Her Majesty’s finest as: the spiked ball at the end of a medieval pike, all dressed up in fancy gadgets and ritualized dogma, amounting at the end to savagery in patriotic drag. He’s not Odysseus in this construct, he’s Achilles; his only weakness is that he believed there was ever a contract in the first place. The message is clear in this re-imagining of one of Tom Clancy’s lesser-known bits of military/industrial agitprop that should this become a franchise, the thrust of it will be that its rage is righteous…and righteously Black. Simply the name change for Kelly from the source material’s “Clark” speaks to the idea of rejecting one name, given by a white person, in favour of a name one chooses for oneself when specific social contracts have been breached. And the moment of Kelly’s radicalization, when his home is violated and his life is stolen, likewise assumes a particular racial resonance.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

April 22, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Martial Arts, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Tadanobu Asano, Hiroyuki Sanada
screenplay by Greg Russo and Dave Callaham
directed by Simon McQuoid

by Walter Chaw I saw Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat movie on opening night at a two-screen strip-mall theatre in Seattle with my friends Keith, Sam, and Dan. We knew the catchphrases from endless nights playing the game on a Sega Genesis, and we shouted them in jubilant concert like a Catholic callout and response. Since we were also fans of Highlander, the casting of Christopher Lambert as another ageless super-being felt exactly right. We were assholes. It was the best time of our lives. They were my groomsmen when I got married a few years later. Time has scattered us; Sam killed himself a couple of years ago. It all starts feeling like the framing story for Stand by Me. What’s left are memories like this, which seem the easiest way now to get a movie project off the ground–a strip-mining of nostalgia that speaks more to a generational experience of loss than to a real paucity of imagination. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t keep happening, and our deathless hunger for polyglot mosaics in pursuit of personal white rabbits is symptomatic of our despair.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 9, 20212020, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it’s not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn’t the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world–who’s playing an immortal superhero–tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I’m saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

March 29, 20212021, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

½*/****
starring Godzilla, King Kong, Alexander Skarsgård, Demián Bichir
screenplay by Eric Pearson and Max Borenstein
directed by Adam Wingard

by Walter Chaw Godzilla is a reaction to America’s attack on two civilian targets with nuclear weapons in the same way the current American superhero cycle is a reaction to 9/11. King Kong is an offshoot of Edgar Wallace’s sledgehammer racist “Sanders of the River” tales, which he parlayed into early drafts of the screenplay that eventually became 1933’s King Kong. Though it’s possible to make a Godzilla or a King Kong movie without these ghosts of American war crimes, colonialism, and racism haunting it, Adam Wingard’s Godzilla vs. Kong (hereafter GvK) ain’t it. Not when these two giant metaphors for the poison of American exceptionalism destroy Hong Kong, a Chinese city the British only recently returned to the Chinese, before banding together to fight a Mexican-American’s Japanese-piloted robot dinosaur. The film is a mess, an ideological jumble and a disaster of narrative that reduces its able cast to half exposition dump, half glazed reaction shots. It doesn’t have anything to say and even in the worst of its predecessors, this was never the case. GvK isn’t interested in ecology, in arms proliferation, in sociopolitical struggles–and failing all the big things it’s not about, it’s also free of parental issues, a romantic subplot, a compelling villain, or, indeed, a compelling hero. It’s a giant nothing-burger. And that’s without mentioning this new craze of writing a perfect minority child to teach the growed-ups how to get in touch with their better natures.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

March 19, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Superhero

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air–Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder’s vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn’t earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director’s cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me–who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it’s just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it’s just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what’s most surprising to me about Zack Snyder’s Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

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.

Tom and Jerry (2021)

March 11, 20212021, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Streaming, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Peña, Colin Jost, Ken Jeong
written by Kevin Costello
directed by Tim Story

by Walter Chaw I want to say right off the bat that Hanna-Barbera’s “Tom & Jerry” cartoons were in constant syndication when I was a kid. I watched them every day after school, like all my friends did, and we agreed that we liked it best when Tom and Jerry were friends. We weren’t peaceniks; honestly, I think all the unleavened brutality of the cartoons got tedious after a short while and we were starved for something that suggested creativity beyond how best to murder a cat. Thinking back, I wonder if these cartoons had anything to do with how cat abuse is still played for comedy in movies–I mean, you can’t hurt them, right? The thing that’s tempting about reviewing the new Tom and Jerry is to not take it very seriously. There’s enough to skewer, after all, without bothering to engage it. Yet real people worked on this, an entire animation company’s creative capital was spent on doing everything they could to honour the questionable source material (and they do a really good job), and now here it is, the second attempt at a feature-length Tom and Jerry movie in almost 30 years, ostensibly landing as some sort of family entertainment designed to make your kids docile and pacific for 100 minutes. Honestly, I don’t think it’s worth the damage it potentially does. I mean, you can feed your children paint chips, too. And it’ll fill ’em up! But the cancer is something to consider.

Coming 2 America (2021)

March 4, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Eddie Murphy, Streaming, VOD

*/****
starring Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Jermaine Fowler, Wesley Snipes
screenplay by Kenya Barris and Barry W. Blaustein & David Sheffield
directed by Craig Brewer

by Walter Chaw I don’t understand Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America, probably because I don’t understand John Landis’s Coming to America, either. For me, they are both artifacts of an alien culture where the references are obscure and the humour is arcane. I spent most of my life thinking the first film was making fun of Africans, only to learn that for a generation of Black creatives, the film was a rare example of positive, even admiring, representation of Africans in the American popular culture. I think that’s true; I also know the fish-out-of-water machinations of Coming to America‘s plot–the cheap sex jokes, the gay terror, the burlesque of it–rubbed me the wrong way then and still do. But there’s a sweetness to Akeem (Eddie Murphy), isn’t there? These films are decidedly not for me. I do trust people with vital voices like Ryan Coogler, who apparently loved the first film and had his own ideas about a sequel–and I would say the analogue I can find while I’m grasping for one is the reception of Short Round in Temple of Doom, which I initially rejected with horror but now embrace as one of the few positive Asian representations in that same American popular culture. Strange bedfellows, Shorty and Prince Akeem, but there you have it.

Palmer (2021) + Music (2021)

February 16, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Drama, Musical, Streaming, VOD, ZERO STARS

PALMER
*/****
starring Justin Timberlake, Juno Temple, Alisha Wainwright, June Squibb
written by Cheryl Guerrero
directed by Fisher Stevens

MUSIC
ZERO STARS/****
starring Kate Hudson, Leslie Odom Jr., Maddie Ziegler, Hector Elizondo
screenplay by Sia & Dallas Clayton
directed by Sia

by Walter Chaw I feel like I’ve seen Fisher Stevens’s well-intentioned Palmer dozens of times in the last three months alone. This version takes a few half-hearted stabs at social relevance with a heartfully-plucked acoustic guitar on the soundtrack but is finally nothing more than Justin Timberlake’s latest shot at movie stardom. He’s going deep as Palmer, fresh out of prison with a gruff attitude and a neckbeard denoting his impoverished status, reminding largely that his best role isn’t the one where he plays a guy married to Carey Mulligan in Inside Llewyn Davis, but the one where he lip-syncs The Killers‘ “All These Things That I’ve Done” in Southland Tales. The familiar movements: Palmer has to get laid, get a job, and become the guardian to a moppet, who saves him. He’s got a hard shell, that Palmer, though the hint of a grin halfway through as he’s driving his catalyst-towards-redemption to school hints that underneath his hard shell, there’s a big ol’ softy. The twist is that the moppet is non-gender-conforming Sam (Ryder Allen), who likes to wear pink, put barrettes in his hair, and have tea parties with the girls in his class. He also hates football but lives in the south, and Palmer used to be a bigshot high-school football player. Man, what a conundrum in which Palmer’s found himself. A dadgum conundrum’s what it is.

Judas and the Black Messiah (2021)

February 11, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, LaKeith Stanfield, Jesse Plemons, Martin Sheen
screenplay by Will Berson & Shaka King
directed by Shaka King

by Walter Chaw Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah is a fantastic Vietnam War movie that is not simultaneously a fantastic biopic of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It reminded me a lot, and directly, of Brian De Palma’s moral opera Casualties of War, which first challenged me to reckon with the American military not as a source of global good but as the perpetrators of atrocity at the whim of an inexorable capitalist, expansionist empire hiding behind the cowl of religion and white supremacy. In that film, ’80s emblem of white, “compassionate” conservatism Michael J. Fox plays a green soldier who turns whistleblower as the witness to the misdeeds of his rapacious, brutal company commander, (Sean Penn). Based, like Judas and the Black Messiah, on true events, Casualties of War, again like King’s film, sees white America as engaged in war crimes against minority populations. Alas, like De Palma’s indisputably powerful piece, King’s film is a better cultural self-excoriation than it is an examination of whatever’s embedded in the American character that sees the flaying of Black (and Asian) bodies as both inevitable and isolated throughout our short history. In each film, there is the implication that justice of a sort has been served: in the one with trial and imprisonment for the malefactors, in the other (Judas and the Black Messiah) with the reported real-life suicide of the rat in Fred Hampton’s cupboard. Neither movie really reckons with the growing silence of minority voices in our discourse.

Malcolm & Marie (2021) – Netflix

February 6, 20212021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Zendaya, John David Washington
written and directed by Barry Levinson’s son

by Walter Chaw An eight-minute diatribe is the noxious centre of Sam Levinson’s intolerable ego trip Malcolm & Marie, distinct neither for the obnoxious volume at which it’s delivered nor for the hollowness of its content, but because it manages to stand out at all, coming as it does in the middle of the other shouted invectives that form the rest of it. In this diatribe, flavour-of-the-moment, hotshot movie director Malcolm (John David Washington), on the night of the premiere of his well-received debut, reads a glowing early review by “that white lady at the L.A. Times” and rails on about “woke” culture and how he, as a Black director, is only compared to other Black directors as opposed to people like William Wyler and Billy Wilder? Does he mean real directors, or does he mean white directors? Does he mean that he doesn’t like to be compared to John Singleton and Spike Lee because they are not good, or because they are Black and what he does, what Malcolm does, is entirely independent of his identity as a Black man? Is he suggesting that he has no identity as a Black artist? And if he’s not suggesting that, is Levinson, the unimaginably-privileged white son of Hollywood royalty (Oscar-winning Barry is his dad)? Why is either Levinson or Malcolm complaining about this straw lady also talking about how Malcolm’s film addresses trauma, recovery, and violence towards women? Is this not the one area in which she should be “allowed” to opine?

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.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020) – Netflix

January 6, 2021****/****, 2020, 2021, Authors: Walter Chaw, Charlie Kaufman, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Streaming, Thriller

****/****
starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis
screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid
directed by Charlie Kaufman

by Walter Chaw The thing I say about Charlie Kaufman films is that I never really understand them, but they always seem to understand me. I suppose there are many ways to unpack his work, but it always only means one thing to me, and I wish I could articulate what that one thing is. If I were able to, I would know something important. Then I wonder if I don’t know it already, and I’m just protecting myself from articulating it because the thing that is important to know is also very painful to know. I’m Thinking of Ending Things tells me what it’s about when Jake (Jesse Plemons), on an interminable drive home to the family farm with his girlfriend Lucy (Jessie Buckley), tries in vain to recite the first few lines of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Lucy interrupts him as he starts to make fun of the long title (“Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), asking if he’s sure that’s not the body of the poem and generally souring the atmosphere enough that Jake gives up. The first lines of the Immortality Ode are:

The Midnight Sky (2020) – Netflix

December 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring George Clooney, Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Caoilinn Springall
screenplay by Mark L. Smith, based on the book Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
directed by George Clooney

by Walter Chaw Of late, I’ve wondered what my madness will come up with when it reaches the point of conjuring metaphors. Will it be a house of peeling wallpaper, rats in the spaces between the upstairs as a reference to me falling apart? Will it be the phantom of the ghost of a memory of something I regretted doing as a child, made manifest as a foundling I must take care of but can’t ever quiet? Maybe it’ll be the manuscript I write obsessively in spirals on the floor, or the way I wipe down every surface, exposed and hidden, in a Lady Macbeth-like compulsion to erase the indelible stink of a lifetime of creeping moral corruption. Maybe it’ll just be three ghosts telling me it’s not too late. It is too late for Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney), who sits by himself in an abandoned arctic research facility in 2046, three weeks after THE EVENT that has caused Earth to become uninhabitable for humans–though not so uninhabitable that Dr. Augustine Lofthouse doesn’t have time to eat cereal and give himself blood transfusions. Metaphors have survived, too.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

December 23, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

WW84
½*/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

News of the World (2020)

December 20, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Western

*½/****
starring Tom Hanks, Elizabeth Marvel, Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham
screenplay by Paul Greengrass and Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles
directed by Paul Greengrass

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see this movie in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw It’s a “Spongebob Squarepants” gag, maybe, or something from “Phineas & Ferb”. Some smart, post-modern cartoon. There’ll be a bunch of quick-cuts, several different angles, self-conscious camera movements, and whooshing noises to reveal, at the end of it all, a snail or a sloth moving along glacially. Maybe the punchline is a frog giving out a bored ribbit. This is how Paul Greengrass starts News of the World as well, with Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kidd the bored frog in question. So much sound and fury in the opening moments of the piece, ending with the exciting reveal of Captain Kidd packing his horse to go somewhere. The movie doesn’t get better as it goes along, but it does calm down a little, settling into the comfortable cadence of a frictionless, awards-season prestige piece so aerodynamic it’ll pass right through you without leaving a mark. Like magic. Call it “The Road to Perdition, Anti-Western Edition” and you’d know enough about it to save yourself the fat awards-season runtime.

On the Rocks (2020)

December 16, 2020****/****, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Romance, Streaming

****/****
starring Bill Murray, Rashida Jones, Marlon Wayans
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Of all the people making them, Sofia Coppola makes Sofia Coppola movies better than anyone else. Her body of work is remarkable for its consistency–such as that of a Japanese master like Ozu or Mizoguchi, frankly. So the chief complaint of nepotism levied against her strikes me as something of a mixed blessing. I don’t know that many creators have ever had the cachet to make exactly the films they want to make. Every single time. And the ones I can think of for which this is also true, it either wasn’t always true, hasn’t resulted in the level of visibility that Coppola’s films earn, or tend to be the province of men exclusively. I wonder about the resentment of some critics towards Coppola for somehow not being representative enough, as though any one artist can or should be expected to check every box. Best, often, not to try. I think of another woman and filmmaker with a similar amount of creative single-mindedness, Claire Denis, scoffing in an interview with Jonathan Romney of THE GUARDIAN when asked about the Hollywood #MeToo movement: “That’s a discussion that’s only being had in rich countries. The world is not just the United States and Europe. It’s a debate of spoiled children. I couldn’t care less about the Weinstein affair.” Where Denis is indicated mostly by how little she cares what you think, Coppola is branded as a figure mortally wounded by her time in the public view. That vulnerability, real or only perceived, inextricably infuses every frame of her movies with just a little extra trembling pathos.