Theatrical Archives - Page 3 of 65

"What would really get me hot is a ceasefire." K-Stew and Katy O'Brian in Love Lies Bleeding

Love Lies Bleeding (2024)

March 16, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Jena Malone, Ed Harris
written by Rose Glass & Weronika Tofilska
directed by Rose Glass

by Walter Chaw Love is like a lamb and love is like a sledgehammer. Love crawls into your head and fills the empty spaces, the canyons and tunnels and holes in between, making it so full of noise it makes you fucking nuts. It’s too big, but it keeps growing. It kills you, but it won’t let you die. Love makes every love story a tragedy. Everyone writes about love, but the only person to ever do it right was Maurice Sendak, who wrote a survival guide for the fury called Where the Wild Things Are. Therein, a little boy named Max threatens to leave his friends, monsters on an island where they all jamboree. They beg him to stay: “Please don’t go. We’ll eat you up we love you so.” And they will, you know, because they have fangs and dangerous desires and horrible appetites. Love growls and gnashes its teeth. Love’s claws rattle like castanets. Love roars. Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding is a love story about two terrible women and two terrible men who do bad things to one another and for one another because love is the fire in which, happily, we burn.

Dune Part Two (2024)

February 29, 2024****/****, 2024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Directors: Denis Villeneuve, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem
screenplay by Jon Spaihts and Denis Villeneuve, based on the novel by Frank Herbert
directed by Denis Villeneuve

by Walter Chaw

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of they life:”
–Genesis 3:14

Fanaticism is a closed circle, maddening because it’s impregnable, maddening because it destroys everything in the process of building itself. It’s a riddle without a solution, and once you’ve drunk deep the plasma spring, it’s a long way back–if you ever get there. There are people who “deprogram” cult members, but I don’t buy it, you guys. I’m of the belief that when you’re gone, you’re gone. You went by choice, after all. You denied your ears the beeswax but didn’t tie yourself to the mast. My mom bought into a cult for the last several years of her life. She held on to it tightly, and it gripped her right back. I suppose that’s one of the appealing things about cults: when you find the right one, you join the company of a great many people who agree with you. If you’re broken in some way, if your awareness of that has made you lonesome and alone, that must feel good. I take a little bit of the blame for her susceptibility to such things. I was a terrible son to her. Maybe she needed something to hold that would hold her back; I did, too. I found it in a wonderful wife and kids. She found it, some of it, in a cult that finally accepted her. I don’t know if I believe that. I don’t know what I believe. Maybe this is just narcissism–mine or hers, I don’t know either. But she’s dead now, and I’m the only one left to wonder about what happened between us.

Madame Web (2024)

February 17, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

The Bricklayer (2024) + The Beekeeper (2024)

January 13, 20242024, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Bulgaria, Greece, Theatrical, UK

THE BRICKLAYER
***/****
starring Aaron Eckhart, Nina Dobrev, Tim Blake Nelson, Clifton Collins, Jr.
screenplay by Hanna Weg and Matt Johnson, based on the novel by Noah Boyd
directed by Renny Harlin

THE BEEKEEPER
**½/****
starring Jason Statham, Emmy Raver-Lampman, Josh Hutcherson, Jeremy Irons
written by Kurt Wimmer
directed by David Ayer

by Walter Chaw We live in a blizzard, a brutal ice storm, a maelstrom of jagged information–and rather than bringing us any closer to a collective mean, the weight of what we know shoves us back into our balkanized bunkers. Knowledge can be scary; the truth about who we are and our relative inconsequence is terrifying, humiliating. I don’t think we’ll ever recover our sense of, if not unity, at least whatever progress we made towards unity. No, not without bloodshed. Not without a reduction in the noise. We weren’t designed for this onslaught. We don’t have the sorting mechanism for it. It’s not like drinking out of firehose–it’s like drinking out of Niagara Falls. We are a species bent into the fetal position: from fear, for protection. It’s made us mean and mistrustful. “How terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit to the wise.” Sophocles nailed it centuries ago. Perhaps that’s why movies like the John Wick and Mission: Impossible franchises remain so popular: they exist in worlds where there are discernible rules, populated by men who are good at more than manipulating information for personal gain. We like the idea of that, you see–of expertise and righteous purpose, even if it seems like competence is a myth designed to ensnare children and radicalize the gullible. Didn’t we used to be a nation of capable people? Didn’t we used to do things that were for the greater good and not merely profitable (and at someone else’s expense)? Didn’t we used to have causes that weren’t only predatory?

Wonka (2023)

December 22, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Family, Musical, Theatrical, UK

**/****
starring Timothée Chalamet, Olivia Colman, Matt Lucas, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Simon Farnaby & Paul King
directed by Paul King

by Walter Chaw Paul King’s Wonka is the sort of film upon which it’s so difficult to find purchase that it attracts critical facility: the Gene Shalit school of equivocal wordplay favoured by capsule writers and elderly sports columnists that substitutes cleverness for insight. A bad thing when there is critical insight to be mined, but some artifacts are possibly only interesting for the fact of them. About ten minutes into Wonka, I started thinking in terms of confectionary puns: how airy and light this movie is, how sugary sweet on the tongue yet troublesome for the gut. How it’s an indulgence, a gobstopper somewhat less than “everlasting.” A bean somewhere short of every-flavoured. I used to joke that there are movies that should come with an insulin plunger. And before I knew it, Wonka opened a chocolate factory, made a deal with a workforce addicted to his product (like a drug dealer, yes?), sang half a dozen songs, I bet, and then the film was over, and I remembered almost nothing about it. And so it is, and so it has remained.

Dream Scenario (2023)

December 17, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Nicolas Cage, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Cera, Tim Meadows
written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli

by Walter Chaw There’s so much to like about Norwegian filmmaker Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, it’s a shame it takes such a sharp detour at its end, veering away from existential chaos into a more drab and conventional social critique. More’s the pity, considering Borgli already trod the “influencers are the horsemen of the apocalypse” ground in last year’s queasy Sick of Myself, and trod it well. Where it felt fresh in a movie structured around its Luddite didacticism, in Dream Scenario it feels like an escape hatch that exhibits an essential misunderstanding of what’s good about the picture in favour of an uncontroversial popular maxim. The fall of empire is preceded by social media, cancel culture, and going viral against your best intentions? Got it, Grandpa. If this is really where Dream Scenario wants to land, it would’ve done better to take the route of Stéphan Castang’s contemporaneous Vincent Must Die by going hard on its schlub-goes-viral theme from the beginning. Why spend so much time dissecting and undermining Nicolas Cage’s seat of honour in our cinematic imagination? At its best, Dream Scenario is the better version of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. At its worst, it’s recycling futurist paranoia from at least Minority Report and Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s more recent (and brilliant) Strawberry Mansion.

Eileen (2023)

December 9, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

***/****
starring Thomasin McKenzie, Anne Hathaway, Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland
written by Luke Goebel & Ottessa Moshfegh, based on the novel by Ottessa Moshfegh
directed by William Oldroyd

by Angelo Muredda Thomasin McKenzie gives the armpit-sniffing Mary Katherine Gallagher a run for her money as the eponymous weirdo loner in William Oldroyd’s Eileen, an admirably icky take on the Ottessa Moshfegh novel of the same name, adapted by the author and her partner, Luke Goebel. An awkward, horned-up femcel, Moshfegh’s Eileen is the kind of ostensibly normal but secretly maladjusted creep you’d find in a Patricia Highsmith novel–as relatable as she is perverse. While Highsmith’s work has lent itself to any number of successful treatments (including Carol, the film this one most closely resembles in its melding of pulp and queer desire), Moshfegh’s text is less of an obvious sell for the movies, fixated as it is on its protagonist’s unruly gut feelings, which frequently extend to her actual bowel movements. While Eileen, with its lovingly upholstered retro-1960s aesthetic, is a tidier affair than the novel, it’s to Oldroyd’s credit that he realizes something of its shabby outlook on the human experience, where violence is your best, if not only, ticket out of your crummy small-town New England existence.

The Holdovers (2023)

December 4, 2023****/****, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne

by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.

Saltburn (2023)

November 26, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant
written and directed by Emerald Fennell

by Walter Chaw People keep expressing in the weariest, archest way how disappointing Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) has turned out to be, or, if they’re more passive, how they do hope he doesn’t end up like the last one–you know, that one; why do they all end up that way? Well, who wouldn’t snap under that kind of aristocratic disapproval, I ask you? It’s like if Jay Sherman’s butler caught you nicking from the buffet table. And indeed, all of Emerald Fennell’s insufferable Saltburn is like The Talented Mr. Ripley written by Fleabag–if Patricia Highsmith and Phoebe Waller-Bridge were trying to follow up an underbaked piece of shit with another underbaked piece of shit while producers were still bedazzled by her empty, shit-eating bullshit. Sorry, I mean to say Saltburn is hackwork that doesn’t know what it’s trying to say because Emerald Fennell, a member herself of the larded gentry, isn’t remotely self-aware enough to recognize the extent to which she’s completely bought into her systemic privilege and its attendant noblesse oblige. Yes, good Queen Emerald has a story to tell about how bad her people are. Now listen up, peon.

Wish (2023)

November 24, 20232023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Theatrical

*½/****
screenplay by Jennifer Lee & Allison Moore
directed by Chris Buck, Fawn Veerasunthorn

by Walter Chaw It’s possible to catch the zeitgeist express and still suck, and here’s the proof: Fawn Veerasunthorn and Chris Buck’s flaccid, disturbing, Les Miz-for-kids Disney flick, Wish. On the verge of giving her fondest wish to the autocrat King Magnifico (Chris Pine) in exchange for his beneficent magical protection, 17-year-old Asha (Ariana DeBose) discovers that Magnifico is actually a fanatical, power-drunk, authoritarian zealot. His greatest fear is that one of his people in the kingdom of Rosas may nurse a fond wish that leads to his downfall, so he hoards them, extracting them during a ritual from his people as they grow from childhood to the rest of their wish-less lives. He keeps them as bubbles of blue smoke in a glass observatory in his castle. Why doesn’t he just destroy the ones he deems dangerous?

Napoleon (2023)

November 19, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Ridley Scott, Drama, Theatrical, UK, War

**½/****
starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby, Tahar Rahim, Rupert Everett
written by David Scarpa
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw I wish Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was weirder, kinkier, as perverse as it seems like Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the diminutive emperor, wants it to be. I wish it had more time for his relationship with Josephine (Vanessa Kirby), who, in this incarnation, is cast as a kind of succubus: a barren nymphomaniac who pulls up her bloomers and spreads her legs during her courtship with Napoleon and tells him if he looks at her holiest of holies, he’ll never stop wanting it. It’s deeply weird, is what I’m saying, and there’s a version of this film that is just ninety minutes of these two actors, ready for anything, going full-tilt boogie. Maybe he puts on a dog collar, and she steps on him; then he goes out and murders a few tens of thousands of Egyptians while firing cannons at the Great Pyramids. In that Napoleon, however, we wouldn’t see the million-dollar battle sequences, but instead a series of disturbing tableaux vivant of codependency and sadomasochistic sex play ending in the same title card tallying up the number of people who died (over three million) because of this creepy little freak. “Him?” we would marvel–and then consider that maybe it’s only damaged men, damaged in exactly this way, who would consider the military conquest of the world a thing to be desired, possible to accomplish, and more, possible for them to accomplish. But, alas, that’s not the sort of movie Ridley Scott makes.

May December (2023)

November 17, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore, Charles Melton
screenplay by Samy Burch
directed by Todd Haynes

by Angelo Muredda “You just don’t know with these Hollywood types,” Julianne Moore’s wilted Southern belle Gracie says early in Todd Haynes’s intricate hothouse melodrama, May December. She’s referring, by way of a throwaway reference to a prior encounter with Judge Judy, to the impending visit at her idyllic Savannah, Georgia home by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a TV actress who’s about to play her in a movie about the defining event of her life more than twenty years prior. Gracie is a tabloid celebrity, famous for her exploitative sexual relationship with a 12-year-old boy, for which she served time in prison. Improbably, she’s also a proud matriarch, having married and built a home with her victim, Joe (Charles Melton), who now finds himself an empty nester at the ripe age of 36, as the couple’s twin children, born while she was in prison, prepare to go off to college. Loosely inspired by the story of sex offender Mary Kay Letourneau, who went on to marry and start a family with the victim of her abuse until their separation in 2019, May December isn’t a work of true crime so much as a playful, sly, tonally restless exploration of Gracie’s observation about the unknowability of Hollywood folks, which turns out to be broadly applicable to the unfathomable nature of everyone, including herself and her partner.

Priscilla (2023)

October 26, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Directors: Sofia Coppola, Drama, Italy, Music, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, Jacob Elordi, Dagmara Dominiczyk
based on the book Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley with Sandra Harmon
written and directed by Sofia Coppola

by Walter Chaw Sofia Coppola takes a lot of heat for making movies about what she knows. This strikes me as peculiar, because I don’t really have any desire to see a Sofia Coppola film about, say, enslaved African peoples. But one about a rich little girl lost? Yes, please. It seems, in fact, that what Coppola is doing as an author is the kind of thing generally celebrated with auteur theories and canonization. I wonder why she’s been popularly singled out as a creator who’s failed to checklist minority groups outside her own. What would the reception of her remarkable remake of The Beguiled have been like had she foregrounded the enslaved African American character and attempted to write her through the lens of Sofia Coppola’s experience? Was her eliding of the character seen as whitewashing, was that the problem? How was the character treated in Don Siegel’s version? How do the Oscar-winning depictions of enslaved African Americans in Gone with the Wind fare? I wonder if the cries for Coppola to have more diversity in her films is a disingenuous complaint driven primarily by a general dislike of Coppola because she’s some combination of a woman and a nepo-baby who doesn’t seem the least bit interested in catering to a larger audience. I wonder why Jean Renoir didn’t get crucified for the same thing. Honestly, I don’t wonder.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

October 19, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

**½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw I think Martin Scorsese is perhaps too principled a filmmaker to indulge in the dark poetry of Killers of the Flower Moon; too bound by limitations he’s aware of and wary of violating, too respectful of the horror of the history to mark it with the crackle of verve and vitality. A sober topic deserves a sober treatment, no question, yet Scorsese at his best is doing lines off the hood of a vintage Impala, not running lines with actors and advisors, all with competing interests and hardwired biases, to find the most cogent, most reasonable way to approach a tripwire. He’s so careful not to set off the powderkeg that is the Osage Murders of 1921-1926 that he doesn’t set off any sparks at all. While I don’t think Scorsese is capable of making a bad movie, with things like Hugo and even The Irishman, he’s shown he can make movies that are enervated in the fatal way of a conversation you have with a beloved elder you’re lucky to engage with but dread, too, for the repetitiveness and dusty formality. I’m not saying Scorsese was the wrong person to adapt white-guy journalist David Grann’s NYT-feted true-crime book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, a celebration of an organization that has done grievous harm to these very people it swooped in belatedly to protect this one time. On the contrary, he’s told what is probably the most palatable version of that story–but it’s a story I don’t want to hear. I guess I’m saying I have a hard time investing much in devalued institutions and their saviours.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

October 13, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Teen, Theatrical, Vampire

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like “Wednesday” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, for whatever that’s worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize’s likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

When Evil Lurks (2023)

October 8, 2023****/****, 2023, Argentina, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Horror, Theatrical

Cuando acecha la maldad
****/****
starring Ezequiel Rodríguez, Demián Salomón, Luis Ziembrowski, Federico Liss
written and directed by Demián Rugna

by Walter Chaw I felt like there was a hand pressing down on my chest during Demián Rugna’s When Evil Lurks, a horror film so vicious and uncompromising I wasn’t always sure I could finish it. I’ve seen it three times now, not because I’ve become desensitized to its lawlessness, but because it’s so well-constructed that I’m drawn back to it despite the anxiety it inspires. There’s comfort in the thrall of an artist who’s in complete control of his medium. When Evil Lurks is Rugna’s fifth film, and I don’t think it’s too soon to declare him an important filmmaker and a true innovator. I’ve never seen what he does in the horror genre before; I’d call it experimentation, except that it works on a more than theoretical level. Between this and his previous picture, Terrified (2017), he has deconstructed the familiar, reconstituting it into a beast that feels new and dangerous. When I take a shower now, it’s not Psycho or The Seventh Victim that comes to mind, it’s the long opening sequence of Terrified in which a man traces the source of a strange thumping in the middle of the night to something unspeakable happening to his wife in the bathroom for what must have been hours. There’s nothing new about locating terror in intensely personal private spaces, but there’s a revolution in having the idea to mate Martyrs with Poltergeist.

The Creator (2023)

October 2, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring John David Washington, Gemma Chan, Ken Watanabe, Allison Janney
screenplay by Gareth Edwards and Chris Weitz
directed by Gareth Edwards

by Walter Chaw Fifty-three minutes into Gareth Edwards’s The Creator, there is a “What is Heaven?” talk between a hardened American soldier broken by grief and regret and a little Asian kid who happens to be a potentially world-destroying cyborg. The cyborg asks the question, and the G.I. says it’s where people go when they’re turned off, then clarifies that he won’t be going there because only good people get into Heaven. The A.I. then observes they have something in common, as it, too, will be denied entrance to Heaven as a non-person and, it goes without saying, non-Christian. I think this is maybe a critique of Christianity, which believes that the 69% of people on this planet who do not share their beliefs will literally burn for an eternity in a lake of fire. Or perhaps it’s a critique of American exceptionalism that believes we have the corner on morality, even as the country’s engaged in vicious dynastic colonialism and has been since its conception. Mostly, and accidentally, it’s a meta-critique of how whenever white creators seek to get all dewy-eyed about trans-humanism (see: Cloud Atlas), they tend to use Asian bodies as the battleground for their philosophical evolution, thus exposing a bias that should probably be examined with the help of non-white creators involved in the decision-making process. Why is it, they might ask these science-fictional advisors and creators, that when you talk about spiritual thought-leaders who transcend this mortal plane, the first thing you think of is a magical, mystical Oriental? Think hard.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023)

August 14, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Germany, Horror, Italy, Malta, Theatrical, UK, Vampire

**½/****
starring Dracula, Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, Liam Cunningham
screenplay by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw I like André Øvredal movies. I liked Trollhunter, and I loved Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, along with most of The Autopsy of Jane Doe. They deliver exactly what they promise and do so with an at times striking sense of how to convey the poetry of the beginning of things. His movies feel like mythology, in a few cases are mythology. And like mythologies, they’re earnest, direct, and deceptively simple in narrative but rich with subtext. He makes sense for a Dracula prequel–not a Vlad the Impaler creation story, but a picture extrapolated from the “Captain’s Log” portion of the Bram Stoker novel that details, in just under 2000 words of the seventh chapter, the fate of the doomed freighter tasked with bringing Dracula’s stuff over from Transylvania to England, whose crew became provisions for the grand fiend en route. Murnau’s Nosferatu covered the voyage in a few swift, expressionistic strokes (coffin play, hilariously), allowing Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter to expand on the circumstances while paying homage to that film’s character design. As played by Javier Botet, Øvredal’s Dracula is barely humanoid at all.

Shortcomings (2023)

August 2, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Justin H. Min, Sherry Cola, Ally Maki, Timothy Simons
written by Adrian Tomine, based on his graphic novel
directed by Randall Park

by Walter Chaw I feel about Randall Park’s Shortcomings the same way I feel about Stephen Frears’s High Fidelity (2000), in that they’re both films I (would have) liked in my mid-twenties that I don’t like in my early-fifties, now that the ardour of my sexual jealousy has waned in proportion to my increased confidence in myself and my marriage. Similarly, I see the angst of its essentially unlikeable hero as distasteful rather than relatable and not meaningfully salved by trenchant cultural observations or incisive insights or wit, what little there is of it. It’s…a bit of a wallow in the company of a meanspirited, self-hating narcissist so self-destructive it’s easy to lose empathy for the three women in his life he takes for granted, abuses, and otherwise exploits. He’s a charisma vampire, sucking the energy out of every environment. He’s a black hole–and like most black holes, his primary function is to suck. I’m aware that Woody Allen made an entire career out of ethnically sucking, but I’d offer that at least Woody, in his prime, was funny. A creep, maybe, but a funny creep.

Barbie (2023)

July 22, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Romance, Satire, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Will Ferrell
written by Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach
directed by Greta Gerwig

by Walter Chaw Margot Robbie is so good in good movies–and she’s also in Greta Gerwig’s smug, self-congratulatory, painfully obvious, subtext-free screed Barbie, playing Mattel’s signature doll-for-girls, which, despite occasional attempts at empowerment, are still primarily thought of as regressive artifacts of a reductionist patriarchy. Does this review immediately sound like a didactic thesis more appropriate for a freshman-level gender-studies course? One that condescends to presume neither prior knowledge nor scholarship but rather hopes to build consensus through the most basic of shared sociological experiences, catchphrases, and facile platitudes? Well, fight fire with fire, I guess. It’s tough to sit through populist groaners like Barbie because it’s right about the wrongs it’s angry about, but in the act of being right, it validates the criticisms of the worst people in the world–a strident preach to the choir that embitters the villains while actually showing those same incels, rapists, corporate stooges, and other clinically-twisted narcissists an uncomfortable amount of grace and mercy. I’m sympathetic, don’t get me wrong. But while I think it’s a long and rocky road to make something thorned and substantive out of a corporate icon under the supervision and financial control of said corporation, I’m of the mind that you might have been better off asking, say, Andrea Arnold to give it a go instead of Gerwig. Someone good, I mean. That is, if you were ever really serious about meaningful subversion as opposed to the stealth launch of your plastic-based cinematic universe using a name with a perplexing niche pedigree as the frictionless, candy-coated disguise for your rapacious intentions.