Theatrical Archives - Page 13 of 65

Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)

May 15, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

*/****
starring Alden Ehrenreich, Woody Harrelson, Emilia Clarke, Paul Bettany
written by Jonathan Kasdan & Lawrence Kasdan
directed by Ron Howard

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. In Roger Ebert’s reviews of the original Star Wars trilogy, he mentions that one of the wonders of this universe is that the droids are thinking, feeling, emotional beings, thus making their torture in Return of the Jedi a visceral thing. In Ron Howard’s expediently-extruded Solo: A Star Wars Story (hereafter Solo), a sassy robot named L3-37, voiced by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is fused into the Millennium Falcon spacecraft after being murdered in the middle of a slave and prisoner rebellion she’s incited in another interchangeable industrial backwater. I mention this as a point of interest because L3 is the clumsy mouthpiece for broad progressive beliefs in a shockingly-bad script by father-son duo Lawrence and Jonathan Kasdan. When Lando Calrissian (Donald Glover) asks if there’s anything else he can get her as he’s leaving a room, she says, “Equal rights?” It’s that kind of character. The kind usually workshopped out when the screenwriter–one of them, anyway–isn’t the most powerful person in the room. She’s Dobby the House Elf from a storyline smartly left out of the film adaptations of Harry Potter, screaming about “droid rights” during a droid Thunderdome sequence done better in everything (but particularly in A.I.), and there mainly I think so that replacement director Howard can slide his brother Clint into a self-satisfied cameo. So this character, liberating droids and releasing slaves and declaring that she’s found her calling, is fused by a grieving Lando into his spaceship to spend the next eight or nine movies getting punched and abused by her new white masters whenever she doesn’t work right away.

Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

April 25, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Pratt
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw In the Nineties, DC Comics resurrected a bunch of titles under their “Vertigo” aegis, aiming for, if not more sophisticated, at least more mature storytelling, like Neil Gaiman’s enduring, literary “Sandman” and Grant Morrison’s still-unparalleled run on “Doom Patrol” (starting with issue 19). They were a re-entry for me into comics after a childhood collecting all things “Archie” and a few things “X-Men” and “Spider-Man”. In the fifth issue of Vertigo’s “Animal Man” reboot, Morrison writes a one-off called “The Coyote Gospel” in which Wile E Coyote (essentially) is maimed and murdered in any number of ways, only to painfully regenerate and be maimed and murdered again. I like to imagine sometimes the agony of Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben, resurrected in endless franchise reboots for the purpose of being killed, Prometheus-like, over and over again. There’s a pathos to it, I think, in the Camus existentialist sense: this emotional detachment where it’s sort of impossible to tell if mom died today or, you know, maybe it was yesterday, one can’t be too sure. Maybe pathos isn’t the right word. Closer to the point is that it’s impossible to really feel anything for characters who cannot die; impossible to feel tension or fear for things that cannot be harmed. Superhero comic books and Marvel films, by extension, broadly simulate the tenets explored by French Existentialism: alienation, the absurd, the lie of freedom, the experience of dread and boredom. The only MCU entry self-aware enough to notice this to date is Scott Derrickson’s Dr. Strange. Fitting that Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) features so prominently in Avengers: Infinity War.

A Quiet Place (2018)

April 10, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe
screenplay by Bryan Woods & Scott Beck and John Krasinski
directed by John Krasinski

by Walter Chaw John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place is exactly the type of inoffensive, about-nothing movie full of beautiful people and empty jumps that is popular for a short while specifically for its yawning blandness. It’s a horror film that acts as a security blanket: the world may be over, but aren’t they a cute couple? Everything done in this movie has been done before, sometimes better, sometimes worse, meaning essentially that the horror audience has already figured out what the solution is ten minutes in while it takes the idiots in the movie another hour or so. That’s too bad. A Quiet Place is so unmoored from anything like subtext or complexity that without a keenly intelligent and efficient script, its seams start to show almost immediately. Yet the instinct is to forgive it for a while because the cast is exceptional; the chemistry between Krasinski’s paterfamilias Lee and wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt, Krasinski’s real-life wife) is effortless and true, and the kids, Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Regan (Wonderstruck‘s Millicent Simmonds), are attractive enough that it wouldn’t be entirely awesome to see them murdered by space mantises. Well, it would, but, despite an early development, A Quiet Place isn’t that kind of movie.

Isle of Dogs (2018)

April 9, 20182018, Adventure, Animation, Comedy, Directors: Wes Anderson, Drama, Germany, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Wes Anderson
directed by Wes Anderson

by Walter Chaw There’s a Sumo-wrestling match in the middle of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything else in the movie except that it sets up one of Anderson’s whip-pans to another character in attendance, Mayor Kobayashi (Kunichi Nomura). The sequence is uncomfortable because it feels like there’s about to be a joke at Sumo’s expense–Sumo being, of course, a pastime steeped in ritual and history for the Japanese people. It’s like if an American football game appeared for a moment in the middle of a Japanese film: we’re about to get pissed on, guys, amiright? But then there’s not a joke. Or if there is a joke, it’s that Sumo itself is largely inscrutable outside a very specific cultural context and that in the United States, it’s those giant foam suits they make members of the crowd wear during halftime of basketball games. Many of the film’s depictions of Japanese culture–including a series of plays on the best-known Nihonga paintings, such as Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”–are these punchlines held in pregnant abeyance: we anticipate something off-colour or ill-considered to find that perhaps the only thing happening is a certain blithe, meaningfully meaningless cultural appropriation. It’s not “okay,” I guess, but saying so lands for me the way that criticism of Sofia Coppola’s erasure of a slave narrative from her The Beguiled (or, more to the point, her portrayal of Japan in Lost in Translation) does. I don’t think Anderson should have set Isle of Dogs in Japan. And I was never offended that his doing so is the result of his particular brand of twee solipsism. I don’t know that anyone like Coppola or Anderson could make anything different. I’m also not Japanese, so my discomfort is complicated by my upbringing in a traditional Chinese household where the Japanese were not held in, shall we say, high esteem.

Ready Player One (2018)

March 31, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Mark Rylance
screenplay by Zak Penn and Ernest Cline, based on the novel by Cline
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Ready Player One is the first Spielberg film I can remember that feels contemptuous. It is at its heart self-abnegation–an indictment of playing to fandom from a filmmaker who hasn’t met a pander he couldn’t indulge, whether it be giving Philip K. Dick a happy ending or over-explaining the horrors of war/slavery/the Holocaust in condescending monologues. Taken as an auteur piece, the picture is sort of stunning: Hollywood’s Peter Pan savant pissing on Neverland and the Lost Boys. If it’s a remake in intent of Mel Stuart’s perverse Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (as its trailers suggest), it at least captures the rage and self-violence at the heart of that film. Adapted from Ernest Cline’s terrible novel, Ready Player One dials down the book’s self-satisfied checklisting but, disastrously, tacks on a “gather ye rosebuds” message about how reality–without all the intellectual property worship and dork one-upmanship–is ultimately preferable to virtual reality. It is literally the movie version of the William Shatner sketch on SNL from 1986 where he tells Star Trek conventioneers to “get a life” and, you know, maybe kiss a girl and, most viciously, how these idiots gathered before him have turned an “enjoyable little job I did as a lark for a few years into a colossal waste of time.” Consider that the solutions to the “quests” in the movie are to go backwards, to ask someone to dance, to fuck around for a while instead of trying to hit a target. It’s nostalgia defined traditionally rather than through the lens of action figures, cartoons, and videogames. It’s almost Proustian.

Red Sparrow (2018)

March 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Joel Edgerton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jeremy Irons
screenplay by Justin Haythe, based on the book by Jason Matthews
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw “Degenerate,” a young woman says during class in self-described Russian Whore School, turning away from a surveillance image in which a middle-aged diplomat is seen snuggling a younger man in a car. “Why do you say that,” asks her teacher, a frightening harridan out of a Wertmüller fandango played by Charlotte Rampling (who else?), “is it because he’s homosexual?” It is. And here he is, dragged into the classroom by scary Soviet guards. The young woman is brought to the front of the class and instructed to fellate him, since what’s “between [her] legs” is obviously of no interest to the degenerate homosexual. For his part, the prisoner grunts like an animal as he wrestles his dick out of his pants and does his best to force the girl’s mouth onto it. Let’s take a moment to consider that Francis Lawrence’s ugly, punishingly violent, ultimately despairing Red Sparrow has characterized this gay guy as a sub-vocal animal interested in getting a hummer from this barely-adult woman–and the Russians as subhuman operators interested in training their youth in the art of fucking for the Motherland. It’s not despicable to depict bigotry; it’s despicable to be bigoted.

Annihilation (2018)

February 26, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac
written by Alex Garland, based on the novel by Jeff VanderMeer
directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw

‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory.’
–Virginia Woolf, The Waves

This is what I said. I said, “If you survive, you are this rare thing. We are members of an endangered species, you and I, born with this romance for self-destruction. Most of us don’t survive, or survive as something else. But if you do survive, in thirty years, maybe you find yourself across from someone your age now, telling them that there’s more to their story if they choose to read on. And it’s the most wonderful thing and it’s worth the pain of getting there.”

Before We Vanish (2017)

February 16, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Esoterica, Japan, Road Movie, Romance, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring Masami Nagasawa, Ryuhei Matsuda, Mahiro Takasugi, Hiroki Hasegawa
screenplay by Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Sachiko Tanaka, based on the play by Tomohiro Maekawa
directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa

by Angelo Muredda The apocalypse becomes an occasion for everything from learning what makes humans tick to getting to know the distant alien who is your significant other in Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s genre-defying twentieth feature Before We Vanish, which might be most firmly characterized as a black comedy if it weren’t so puckishly sunny. A return to form of sorts after Creepy and Daguerreotype, neither of which were without their charms but did feel at times like a master’s idle wheel-spinning, Before We Vanish works best as a high-concept sampler platter of the wildly divergent tones Kurosawa is uncommonly good at mixing up. That isn’t to say the alien-invasion framework and neatly bifurcated dystopian road movie/romcom structure are purely excuses to see how much mileage Kurosawa can get out of his generic indeterminacy. Still, one would be hard-pressed to deny that half the fun lies in taking the film in as the strange sum of its many seemingly ill-fitting parts.

Black Panther (2018)

February 14, 20182018, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o, Andy Serkis
written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw There are issues Black Panther raises that I’m not equipped to discuss. I don’t understand them. I do understand that its closest analogues are Wonder Woman and Rogue One, in that these are deeply flawed films that, for particular audiences, hold a near-totemic value as representative artifacts. I can’t possibly express the joy and immense satisfaction I felt seeing Asian faces in a Star Wars film. I can’t possibly share in the same joy and sense of satisfaction that women got from Wonder Woman and that African-Americans will likely experience with Black Panther. They are all three films that you only really dislike from a position of privilege, and such is the conundrum of our current discourse. I will say that there are a handful of scenes in Black Panther that are as powerful statements of racial outrage as anything I’ve ever seen in mainstream cinema–that is, in a film that is not otherwise directly about slavery and the African-American experience. During its prologue/creation myth, I gasped at a scene of slaves, chained together, being led onto a slaver’s galley. There are moments so bold (if not reductive) that they’re genuinely breathtaking in their audacious impoliteness. Bold enough that some of my more conservative peers left the screening soon after a particular pronouncement about the legacy of slavery poisoning race relations into the modern day. At the end of it, a character proclaims they’d rather die than live in chains. It couldn’t get balder than that, nor more revolutionary. Yeah, man.

The Road Movie (2017)

January 15, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Documentary, Russia, Theatrical

**½/****
directed by Dmitrii Kalashnikov

by Alice Stoehr Dashboard-mounted cameras are surveillance tools. They can prove who’s at fault in an accident, counter insurance scams, and record run-ins with the police; in the corruption-riddled nation of Russia especially, they’ve become widespread as legal safeguards. But the footage they capture can also double as entertainment. For what, in the whole history of moviegoing, has stimulated a viewer’s lizard brain better than a car crash? In The Road Movie, documentarian Dmitrii Kalashnikov has compiled dozens of clips shot by his countrymen on dashcams and uploaded to video-hosting websites. Their lengths range from a few seconds to a few minutes, and the events they document are unpredictable, but they all share the same vantage point: gazing through a windshield onto the road. The director’s input is subtle. He’s present mostly in the curation and arrangement of the videos, with signs of trimming here and there. Kalashnikov achieves a seamless flow that keeps the film’s 70 minutes from growing monotonous. So, for example, during one stretch a cloud of smoke pours from a burning bus; runaway horses block a car’s progress through the snow; then a driver ricochets off a snowbank and right into oncoming traffic. Kalashnikov doesn’t impose any context on them, so that task falls to the vehicles’ occupants, whose faces usually go unseen and whose subtitled chatter is only sporadically relevant to the scene in the road.

The Post (2017)

January 12, 20182017, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Spielberg, Theatrical

**/****
starring Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Sarah Paulson, Bob Odenkirk
written by Liz Hannah and Josh Singer
directed by Steven Spielberg

by Walter Chaw Two scenes. The first a posh dinner where Spielberg subtly changes the field of focus to show that the ostensible star of this show, WASHINGTON POST publisher Kay Graham (Meryl Streep), is listening in on a conversation recklessly shared in her presence. (It’s at once a subtle presentation of gender dynamics and a master class in visual storytelling.) The second a shot of Graham descending the steps in slow-motion to rapturous, feminine approval following a Supreme Court victory. Both are vintage Spielberg, the best technical filmmaker the medium has ever produced and a big giant, sentimental, cotton-headed ninny-muggins who can’t leave the audience to their own devices and doesn’t have the muscle to end things on a down note. When he manages one, his films are nigh well perfection. When he doesn’t–and he hasn’t, really, since Munich or maybe Catch Me If You Can–his films are 90% the best thing you’ve ever seen and 10% the worst. That’s good enough for most. For me, it’s the fantastic six-course feast that ends when you find a cockroach in the flan.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

December 24, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan
screenplay by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers and Scott Rosenberg & Jeff Pinker, based on the book Jumanji by Chris Van Allsburg
directed by Jake Kasdan

by Walter Chaw Inexplicably named after a Guns N' Roses song, Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (henceforth Jumanji 2) is a deeply problematic film that castrates its smartest ideas in order to please the broadest possible audience on opening weekend before dragging itself off somewhere to show up in a Redbox in a few months' time. Start with Kevin Hart–reunited with his Central Intelligence co-star, Dwayne Johnson–playing a porter, essentially, in a jungle adventure. Which, you know…what the actual fuck? I'm sure it means well, and Hart's threadbare shtick of being short and put-upon certainly fits the situation, but there's opportunity here, should director Jake Kasdan have chosen to take it, for Hart to comment on how degrading it is for a star of his stature to be appearing in a movie as Bagger Vance. He doesn't seem to notice there's baggage related to his playing a character who essentially carries a bag and hands weapons to the hero. He complains about it, though mostly he complains about not being able to run very fast and having one of his avatar's weaknesses be pound cake.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)

December 13, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi
***/****
starring Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Benicio Del Toro
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Walter Chaw I wrestled for a long time with this review. Not what I would write but whether I should write it at all. I consider director Rian Johnson to be a friend. He’s kind, smart, true, and unaffected despite having been handed the reins to the most revered American mythology–save for becoming somehow more humble during the course of it. In the middle of a period in which everyone in the business, it seems, is being outed as a cad, Rian is something like hope that there are good and decent men left. Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (hereafter The Last Jedi) is every inch his movie. It’s about hope, see, and hope is the word that’s repeated most often in his script. By the end of it, he suggests that hope can even grow from salted earth. It’s a beautifully-rendered image as open, guileless-unto-corny, and genuine as Rian is. I don’t love everything in the film, but I do love Rian and The Last Jedi as a whole. In a franchise this venerated and valuable, it’s ballsy as fuck that he decided to do his own thing and that Disney let him. Now they’ve decided to invest another $600M or so in letting him do his own thing some more.

Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

December 1, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson, Sam Rockwell, Peter Dinklage
written and directed by Martin McDonagh

by Walter Chaw There are three young women in Martin McDonagh’s Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri (hereafter Three Billboards)–four if you include Abbie Cornish as Woody Harrelson’s twenty-years-his-junior wife–and two of them (or three) are absolute fucking idiots and the third was raped while dying and then set on fire with gasoline. As a man who has been told often lately that it’s not his place to talk about these things, I’ll leave it at that. I didn’t think it was funny when the 19-year-old girl (Samantha Weaving) dating the abusive shit-fuck ex-husband (John Hawkes) of our anti-heroine, Mildred (Frances McDormand), is used as an object of derision/tension-breaker, and I didn’t think it was funny when secretary Pamela (Kerry Condon) is treated identically before getting punched in the face as her exit from the film. (I’m not mentioning the girl Mildred kicks in the crotch because the trailer spoiled it.) I also have a hard time with a scene where Cornish’s Anne berates Mildred for something she knows very well didn’t happen (or should know, anyway), which just goes on and on in the McDonagh fashion. Maybe it’s that there’s this cast of actors here whom I’ve loved, almost without exception, in everything I’ve seen them in and now they’re suddenly all terrible in exactly the same way. It doesn’t take talent to make a bad movie, but it takes a lot of talent to make a movie that’s bad like this. Or maybe a lot of arrogance. McDonagh, to his credit, has been doing it since the beginning–a real auteur.

Justice League (2017)

November 17, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

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

by Walter Chaw Marrying the worst parts of Zack Snyder with the worst parts of Joss Whedon (who stepped in to complete the film after Snyder had a family tragedy), DC’s superhero team-up dirge Justice League shambles into unnatural half-life with a message of apocalyptic doomsaying presented now without puke filters, so that it looks like a movie my mom watches on her television with the motion-smoothing turned on. The same trick has been attempted with a script burdened by Whedon’s patented hipster-ese, which went stale about halfway through “Buffy”‘s run, let’s face it. The Flash’s non sequiturs (Whedon’s suggesting he’s autistic (which isn’t funny)), Aquaman’s hearty, get-a-haircut bro-clamations (“I dig it!” and “Whoa!” and so on)–all of it is so poorly timed that it’s possible to become clinical about what happens when a punchline is grafted onto a piece at the eleventh hour, and it doesn’t help that no one in this cast is known for being even remotely funny or glib. Jason Momoa is a lot of things; Noël Coward ain’t one of them. When Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) shakes her head bemusedly (I think) and says warmly (I guess), “Children. I work with children,” you get that sick, embarrassed feeling that happens when you’re watching a person you want to like succumb to flop sweat and overrehearsal.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

November 1, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Tom Hiddleston, Cate Blanchett, Anthony Hopkins
written by Eric Pearson and Craig Kyle & Christopher L. Yost
directed by Taika Waititi

by Walter Chaw I’ve reached a limit with facility, I think–a point at which things that are professionally executed and entirely meaningless just slide off into a kind of instant nothingness. I’m talking about machine-tooled product, a brand like Kleenex or Kellogg’s, where the only time there’s any awareness of consumption is when the experience of it is unexpected in some way. There’s a reason people see the Virgin Mary in potato chips sometimes. Variation in extruded products is so exceedingly rare that it’s akin to holy visitation: some accidental proof of the supernatural; a glitch in the Matrix. Marvel films are akin now to your daily lunch. You can remember the stray meal. Mostly, it’s something you do knowing you’ve had one yesterday and are likely to have one tomorrow. If you’re like most of us, you could probably eat better.

The Snowman (2017)

October 22, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Sweden, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Rebecca Ferguson, Charlotte Gainsbourg, J.K. Simmons
screenplay by Peter Straughan and Hossein Amini and Søren Sveistrup, based on the novel by Jo Nesbø
directed by Tomas Alfredson

by Walter Chaw Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman, an adaptation of the seventh in Jo Nesbø’s literary crime series, treats its narrative as gestural performance art: a suggestion of a suggestion of genre. When it’s fascinating, it operates with a certain dream logic, where one thing leads to another thing senselessly, nightmarishly, the dreamer buoyed along powerless to affect his own fate within the larger, obscure narrative. Harrison Ford famously complained that Blade Runner is a movie about a detective who doesn’t do any detecting. The Snowman is a movie about a detective who can’t do any detecting because there isn’t any connective tissue. No matter what the teasing notes left by its serial killer claim, there are no clues. It’s very much like Andrew Fleming’s own abortive attempt at a franchise, Nancy Drew, which is also alien in its behaviour, acting like a movie would act if it were made by a sea cucumber. Consider a scene in The Snowman that pushes the story to its conclusion: there’s a revelation, a key piece of evidence or something, and a location, and the heroine, Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson), stands up at her desk. A male colleague, who was sitting in a cubicle across from Katrine, suddenly teleports to the balcony above her as she leaves. He asks if she’s all right. The better question would be if there was so little footage shot that every bit of it was used, continuity be damned. The great Thelma Schoonmaker was brought in at the eleventh hour, presumably at the behest of executive producer Martin Scorsese (once slated to direct the film), in a presumed attempt to save the project. Schoonmaker, for everything she’s great at, was never that great at continuity under the best of circumstances. Something Scorsese played around with in Shutter Island. Something that occasionally turns The Snowman into a Gertrude Stein piece.

The Florida Project (2017)

October 17, 2017****/****, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Theatrical

****/****
starring Willem Dafoe, Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, Caleb Landry Jones
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Sean Baker’s The Florida Project follows the day-to-day of a group of five- or six-year-olds as they run wild through the broken-down streets, hot-sheet motels, and abandoned buildings that serve as the ramshackle spokes radiating out from Disney World in Orlando. Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) is the ringleader, impossibly exuberant and sly in exactly and only the way a six-year-old in full operational mode can be. She is a force of nature, and Prince’s performance is entirely unaffected. It’s a miracle. Moonee’s best friends are Scooty (Christopher Rivera) and Jancey (Valeria Cotto), and they roam far afield, standing on picnic tables, exploring empty housing units, experimenting with lighters, and scamming ice-cream cones from marks more exhausted by their pitch (“I have asthma and my doctor said that I…”) than convinced by it. I was free like this when I was 5. I grew up in downtown Golden, Colorado, which has as its main identifying feature a wooden sign stretching across its “main” street (“Washington”) that says “Howdy Folks!” I used to catch flies and shine shoes in the barbershop on the corner. The barber was the mayor, Frank. I spent the pennies I earned at the 5 and 10 across the street. The Florida Project is about that.

The Foreigner (2017)

October 15, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, China, Jackie Chan, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

**½/****
starring Jackie Chan, Pierce Brosnan
screenplay by David Marconi, based on the novel The Chinaman by Stephen Leather
directed by Martin Campbell

by Walter Chaw Martin Campbell’s The Foreigner, based on Stephen Leather’s novel The Chinaman, showcases the great, the incomparable, Jackie Chan as a grief-stricken man with a Special Forces past, galvanized into action when an IRA bomb kills his only, and last, daughter in a chichi London retail block. Having failed in his attempts to bribe London officials for names, Chan’s Quan, restaurateur/owner of The Happy Peacock, focuses his attentions on former IRA/Sinn Fein leader Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan). Quan terrorizes the terrorists, stakes them out at Hennessy’s farmhouse/fortress, and generally makes life miserable for everyone until he finds the people responsible for his daughter’s death. It’s a role that Liam Neeson would have played had there not been a recent hue and cry over yellowface and whitewashing, and so Chan, in the twilight of his action career, is forced into somewhat thankless service in a film that wants to be more like The Fourth Protocol than like Police Story. The Foreigner isn’t a great film, but it’s an interesting one for all its mediocrity.

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

October 4, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***½/****
starring Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Ana de Armas, Jared Leto
screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is oblique without inspiring contemplation, less a blank slate or a Rorschach than an expository nullity. It’s opaque. There are ideas here that are interesting and inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick source material, but they’ve all been worked through in better and countless iterations also inspired by the original film and Philip K. Dick. The best sequel to Blade Runner is Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, with a long sidelong glance at Under the Skin, perhaps–and Her, too. All three films are referenced in Blade Runner 2049 without their relative freshness or, what is it, yearning? There aren’t any questions left for Villeneuve’s picture, really, just cosmological, existential kōans of the kind thrown around 101 courses taught by favourite professors and at late-night coffee shops and whiskey bars. Yet as that, and only that, Blade Runner 2049 is effective, even brilliant. It’s a tremendous adaptation of a Kafka novel (a couple of them), about individuals without an identity in tension against a faceless system intent on keeping it that way. It has echoes of I Am Legend in the suggestion that the future doesn’t belong to Man, as well as echoes of Spielberg’s A.I. and its intimate autopsy of human connection and love, but it lacks their sense of discovery, of surprise, ultimately of pathos. This is a film about whimpers.