Theatrical Archives - Page 4 of 65

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.

Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)

July 7, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

****/****
starring Tom Cruise, Hayley Atwell, Ving Rhames, Henry Czerny
written by Christopher McQuarrie & Erik Jendresen
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw I’ve liked every film in this series to some extent, the last few very much. Yet, pressed, I couldn’t tell you what any of them are about. If you ask me to recount the plot of this latest entry, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One (hereafter Dead Reckoning), I would have a tough time only a few minutes out of the screening. This isn’t an inherently bad thing. If you were to ask most people who’ve seen North by Northwest, they wouldn’t know it’s about microfilm being smuggled in South American figurines, just as they will not question whether a crop duster is the best way to kill someone waiting for a bus in the middle of nowhere. They wouldn’t remember that Notorious is about radioactive ore hidden in wine bottles, or that Psycho is about a petty embezzlement scheme. That’s because it doesn’t matter. You’d probably even get pushback about how that’s not really what those films are about anyway, which is correct. Hitchcock called those things that matter a lot to everyone in the film–and almost nothing to anyone watching it–the “MacGuffin.” The Mission: Impossible films are the quintessential modern example of an old concept: if you do everything well enough, if you understand how to keep things snappy and populate the story with characters who feel like real, live people (thus imbuing all the noise with stakes), well, it doesn’t matter what the picture’s about, because what it’s actually about is so instantly relatable. Will they survive? Will they fall in love? Archetype and craft. There’s nothing simpler and nothing more complex.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023) + No Hard Feelings (2023)

June 30, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS
**½/****
starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Jeannie Berlin
written and directed by Nicole Holofcener

NO HARD FEELINGS
***½/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Andrew Barth Feldman, Laura Benanti, Matthew Broderick
written by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips
directed by Gene Stupnitsky

by Walter Chaw Nicole Holofcener’s You Hurt My Feelings belongs, alongside stuff like Tamara Jenkins’s Private Life and Lynn Shelton’s Sword of Trust, to a very specific sub-genre of comedy. They’re talky, WASP-y, verging on the cusp of self-awareness at all times without ever quite slopping over from solipsistic, and clearly courting an educated, middle-to-upper-middle-class (white) audience. I like them, for the most part, with their hangdog protagonists, weary of idiots and drowning in debt to therapists and assorted medical specialists–none of whom seem capable of solving their own existential blues, much less their clients’. I know that emotional quagmire. I’ve made maps of it. This is the playland to which Zach Braff and Alison Brie bring their gnarled cinematic projects as well, slumming them up in quotidian drag so that their appeals to melancholy ring hollow, manipulative, and self-serving. They lack authenticity; their troubles aren’t lived-in but instead theoretical put-ons–the fake stories successful people tell at champagne brunches to appear afflicted by the same disappointments as you or me. You Hurt My Feelings doesn’t feel natural, either, I have to say, although that’s more to do with saturation than disingenuousness. I feel like I just saw Julia Louis-Dreyfus doing this in You People; I feel like indie comedies on indie budgets are all doing variations of the “talking in different found sets” thing. I feel like this is the third or fourth time this year I’ve been caught in a dense conversation with the same people complaining about the same problems in the same tone. It’s that phenomenon where you try to give your baby a novel name, and when they reach school-age, it turns out everyone in their class is named the same thing.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023)

June 27, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spielberg, Theatrical

*/****
starring Harrison Ford, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Antonio Banderas, Mads Mikkelsen
written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (hereafter Indy 5) is sad and tired. Some of that is on purpose, essaying a lonesome old man who has lost everything he cared about, is terrible at his day job, and is retiring in any case; and some of that is decidedly not on purpose, as the action sequences are simultaneously bloated and flaccid–pale imitations of past glories in a revered franchise whose first two installments are so extraordinary, it hardly matters it hasn’t done anything great for three films now across almost 35 years. Indy 5 tries to infuse some life into itself with the addition of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, whose Helena Shaw introduces herself as a young woman Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) knew at some indeterminate point in the past. Given that Indy’s reunion with Marion (Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark drops the nugget that she was likely a victim of statutory rape (“I was a child. I was in love. It was wrong and you knew it”), I spent a few minutes wondering if Indy had molested a child Helena. But while Helena–the daughter of new character Basil Shaw (Toby Jones), the obvious replacement for Marcus Brody (the late Denholm Elliott)–remains blissfully clear of one of the darker intimations of the Indiana Jones character, she does function as a hollow doppelgänger for Marion, just as Basil is a hollow shade of Marcus. Meaning that for as bad as the de-aging effects are in this picture, its sparkless attempts to recapture some of the chemistry of the original films are somehow worse.

The Flash (2023)

June 16, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Elemental (2023)

June 14, 2023****/****, 2023, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Drama, Family, Fantasy, Pixar, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn

by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

The Little Mermaid (2023)

May 30, 20232023, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Fantasy, Musical, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Halle Bailey, Jonah Hauer-King, Daveed Diggs, Melissa McCarthy
screenplay by David Magee
directed by Rob Marshall

by Walter Chaw I have long, disquieting thoughts about Ursula the Sea Witch’s anatomy in the live-action version of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. As I understand it, with octopi, the centre of their body cavity, ringed by tentacles, is a beak. Ursula is a mermaid whose top half is human and whose bottom half is octopus–but her face doesn’t emerge from the centre of her ring of tentacles. Rather, the tentacles function as an expressive, sentient dress–like Dr. Strange’s cloak, I suppose, if we’re keeping it in the Disney family. This didn’t bother me when Ursula was a cartoon of a drag queen, but it’s bothering me now because it’s Melissa McCarthy, and what the hell is happening down there? Nightmare fuel is what’s happening down there. There’s a moment during her big number where she, like Bruce Springsteen during his Super Bowl halftime show, teabags the camera–and, friends, I was craning to catch a glimpse. What did I imagine? A chthonic, Lovecraftian horror of luminous tentacles and vagina dentata in a horror film’s ink-murk deep of shipwrecks and sharks. The scene where the title heroine, Ariel (Halle Bailey), goes to sell her voice to Ursula even begins with a hall of grasping pink “hands” springing from the walls. It’s insinuating like one of the post-rape hallucinations from Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. Is The Little Mermaid good? I have no idea how to answer that question.

Renfield (2023) + Sisu (2023)

May 6, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Fantasy, Finland, Horror, Theatrical, VOD, War

RENFIELD
*½/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Benjamin Schwartz
screenplay by Ryan Ridley
directed by Chris McKay

SISU
**½/****
starring Jorma Tommila, Aksel Hennie, Jack Doolan, Mimosa Willamo
written and directed by Jalmari Helander

by Walter Chaw Chris McKay is an able director still looking for a project that isn’t an embarrassing high concept. His years on “Robot Chicken” and “Moral Orel” demonstrate a strong sense of timing and a willingness to offend the status quo, but so far–between The Lego Batman Movie, The Tomorrow War, and now Renfield–McKay has only been tasked with shepherding a few expensive (if laboured and overburdened) cows to pasture. Renfield is both a workplace comedy and a Raimi-esque slap-stick splatter (“splat-stick?”) flick in which bug-eating vampire familiar Renfield (Nicholas Hoult) attends codependency support groups to listen to other people complain about toxic relationships. It seems his boss, Dracula (Nicolas Cage), is a raging narcissist, and Renfield, after centuries of servitude, has finally had enough. There’s a parallel plot, too, involving a crime family led by imperious Bellafrancesca Lobo (a slumming Shohreh Aghdashloo) and her asshole son, Tedward (a not-slumming Ben Schwartz), running amuck while dedicated cop Rebecca (Awkwafina) and her FBI agent sister Kate (Camille Chen) try to bring them down.

Evil Dead Rise (2023)

April 26, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Ireland, New Zealand, Theatrical

***/****
starring Lily Sullivan, Alyssa Sutherland, Gabrielle Echols, Morgan Davies
written and directed by Lee Cronin

by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise is mean. It’s that scene from The Exorcist (1973) where little Regan McNeil masturbates with a crucifix and then shoves her mom’s face into her crotch mean. Vicious. But it’s not Ari Aster mean, where you infer it hates its characters and/or its genre. Rather, it’s mean in the sense that demons are mean, and it makes people we like do terrible things to other people we like. Evil Dead Rise is the line separating a horror film from a horrible film. It’s closer in tenor to its immediate predecessor, Fede Alvarez’s similarly vicious–brutal, really–Evil Dead (2013), than to Sam Raimi’s original trilogy, though more to the point, it’s exactly as mean as the first two entries in that trilogy but without Raimi’s sillier visual affectations and Bruce Campbell’s beloved caricature of a hambone persona. Indeed, most of the “fun” of those Campbell/Raimi pictures is the amount of humiliation and abuse heaped upon Campbell, with Campbell’s physical resemblance to a cartoon character becoming the central gag of the third film, Army of Darkness, as his features are stretched and multiplied, shrunken and deformed to fit whatever comic-strip setup is required of him in that moment.

A Good Person (2023)

April 15, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Florence Pugh, Molly Shannon, Chinaza Uche, Morgan Freeman
written and directed by Zach Braff

by Walter Chaw The answer to a question no one asked (what would happen if you smushed misery porn into eldersploitation and had Zach Braff do it?), A Good Person is, on a scale of 28 Days to Less Than Zero, somewhere in the Bright Lights, Big City neighbourhood of Girl, Interrupted. That’s not fair–it’s not as good as any of those movies. I don’t know if this trainwreck caused Miss Flo to come to her senses and leave her two-decades-older beau, but I like to think so, because then at least something good came out of this self-pitying 15-year-old’s adaptation of The Bell Jar. The hope that catastrophic events can lead to positive outcomes is the engine driving A Good Person, too, as Braff’s patented manic pixie dream construct, Allison, a girl who sings and plays the piano at her own engagement party, gets high and complains about not being able to feel her ankles, and tells her dull-as-dishwater fiance, Nathan (Chinanza Uche), about how a creepy doctor at work is maybe hitting on her. So effervescent! So full of life! Look at how she puts her foot in his face to underscore her ankle’s numbness! Look how she does a silly interpretive dance that Braff only shoots from the chest up, for some reason, before Allison wants to make out under a top sheet. Anyway, Allison is in the middle of a riff when she drives her future sister-in-law into a backhoe, killing her and sending Allison into a shame spiral as she faces the consequences of her quirkiness for the first time in her life. Apparently, she’s killed her future brother-in-law as well, though no one seems to care. I mean, both of her victims appear for all of 20 seconds before they become tragic devices inaugurating an irritating white girl’s redemption arc. They make so little impact that for the film’s first hour, I thought the brother-in-law (Toby Onwumere) was Nathan and that Nathan was a ghost.

If you think you’re exhausted, imagine how I feel.

Showing Up (2023)

April 14, 20232023, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro, Judd Hirsch
written by Jon Raymond & Kelly Reichardt
directed by Kelly Reichardt

by Angelo Muredda “You’re ruining my work day,” Michelle Williams’s sculptor Lizzy whines to her cat Ricky early in Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, which might be the most incisive portrait of the artist working from home to date. Its mundane, thoroughly lived-in depiction of Lizzy’s domestic puttering among companions, both animal and human, under the clouds of an upcoming show, a slow-burning family crisis, and a few weeks without hot water, hits particularly hard post-COVID, even as Reichardt takes pains to emphasize the comforts and support that Lizzy enjoys as compared to the more precarious outsiders in films such as Wendy and Lucy. Originally co-imagined with frequent collaborator Jon Raymond as a film about post-impressionist Canadian artist Emily Carr becoming a landlord to pay the bills (before Reichardt realized Carr’s outsized fame in Canada was roughly equivalent to Andy Warhol’s in the U.S.), Showing Up has been retooled as, improbably, a contemporary comedy–a mordantly funny look at the myriad push-pull interactions between art, commerce, and communal obligation. That tangled mess, Reichardt’s assured film suggests, makes it a wonder that any art gets made at all, let alone that anyone shows up to honour either the work or the people who make it.

The Pope’s Exorcist (2023)

April 13, 20232023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Spain, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

½*/****
starring Russell Crowe, Daniel Zovatto, Alex Essoe, Franco Nero
screenplay by Michael Petroni and Evan Spiliotopoulos
directed by Julius Avery

by Walter Chaw Right off the bat, I feel I must warn you that no popes are exorcised in this film. The prospect of Russell Crowe reading the rites over a levitating, pea-soup spewing Franco Nero, shuttled in to play the Pope in Julius Avery’s The Pope’s Exorcist, is incredibly juicy, so I get why they would attempt to mislead audiences in this way, but it’s terribly dishonest. The cruellest blow, however, is that in place of Franco Nero in his dotage doing a spider-walk downstairs and pissing himself in his papal robes before a drunken astronaut (which, let’s face it, once I hit 82, I can’t promise that won’t just be a Tuesday), we get Crowe, as real-life exorcist Father Gabriel Amorth, riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, no doubt in search of an espresso, a gelato, spaghetti, and his portly, Vespa-riding twin for the Guinness Book photo shoot. It bears mentioning, too, how Crowe straps on the world’s most offensive Mario Bros. accent to free poor little Henry (Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) from demonic possession. Why is Henry in Rome? Because his mom, Julia (Alex Essoe), is renovating a building, which happens to be the primary reason anyone moves to Italy. (See also: Donald Sutherland’s character in Don’t Look Now and Genevieve Bujold’s character in Obsession and Diane Lane’s character in Under the Tuscan Sun.) There’s probably a piece to be written about how our perception of Italy is of a beautiful place the Italians have neglected, but now that P.J. O’Rourke, who once wrote, “Italy is not a third world country but nobody told the Italians,” is dead, I don’t know who’ll write it.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) + Champions (2023)

April 8, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Disability, Drama, Fantasy, Iceland, Sports, Theatrical, UK, VOD

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS: HONOR AMONG THIEVES
**½/****
starring Chris Pine, Michelle Rodriguez, Regé-Jean Page, Hugh Grant
screenplay by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley and Michael Gilio
directed by Jonathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

CHAMPIONS
**½/****
starring Woody Harrelson, Kaitlin Olson, Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin
screenplay by Mark Rizzo, based on the Spanish film Campeones written by David Marqués & Javier Fesser
directed by Bobby Farrelly

by Walter Chaw I like squad movies, always have. Heists, war, impossible missions, underdog sports teams, collections of samurai or cowboys, miscreants or heroes, misfits generally and specialists sometimes. When it came time to make a sequel to Alien, Walter Hill understood James Cameron’s pitch as exactly this formula the great Howard Hawks had perfected: the squad film. I think it works as well as it does because the requirement to craft three-dimensional heroes is lessened in favour of reliable, audience-pleasing character types. Each player has a skill–a personal Chekhov’s Gun, if you will. It’ll only be a matter of time before they use it. Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (hereafter D&D) is one recent example of the squad flick; Bobby Farrelly’s Champions is another. Both are about bands of social outcasts who learn to appreciate how their respective skills complement one another along the way to greater lessons about the world and its navigation. One sees a team of Special Olympics athletes led by an unctuous, quippy white guy; the other sees a team of nefarious and/or magical ne’er-do-wells led by an unctuous, quippy white guy. Only one of them, though, dares to deviate from the winning-means-everything formula, measuring its victory in the celebration of a friend’s sense of self-worth and confidence. Which is not to say that one film is significantly better than the other, or even that they have different aims, ultimately. Rather, I only mean to suggest that the degree to which one is lauded and the other derided probably has a lot to do with internalized bias and very little to do with any meaningful distinctions in what these movies substantively are.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

March 18, 20232023, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Esoterica, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen, Bill Skarsgård, Laurence Fishburne
written by Shay Hatten and Michael Finch
directed by Chad Stahelski

by Walter Chaw The John Wick franchise is two things: a fantasy world with rules and consequences for breaking them, and a series of films crafted with extraordinary care and meticulous attention to detail. Both qualities are front and centre in John Wick: Chapter 4 (hereafter John Wick 4), the one allowing the other to be emotionally satisfying, the other allowing the one to be viscerally pleasing. The toast given when its characters drink is literally “Consequences!”–and, of course, our hero always shows up in an impeccably tailored bulletproof suit, 42-Regular. Given that the delicate surface tension of our society’s maintenance relies on the decorum of its members, and given the last few years of seeing it all fall to shit before a treasonous wave of deplorables, this franchise is a glossy distillation of an American’s dream of justice as the offshoot of morality rather than the promise of it providing smoke for cupidity. There’s order in the world; you just aren’t allowed to see it. It makes sense in this way that, for all their neo-noir trappings, the John Wick movies are traditional westerns: the great American genre employed to tell the myth of the United States. And it makes sense the eidolon for the better angels of Generation X is the eternally sweet Keanu Reeves, who, even when he’s promising to kill everyone like a seen-it-all Sam Peckinpah mercenary, is only doing it because his dog died. Both he and John Wick are essentially simple in a complex world.

65 (2023)

March 11, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Adam Driver, Ariana Greenblatt, Chloe Coleman, Nika King
written and directed by Scott Beck & Bryan Woods

by Walter Chaw Bryan Woods and Scott Beck’s 65 is a straight-line exercise: You are familiar with where it begins, you are familiar with where it ends, and you are familiar with the line it travels. It starts with a man of action mourning a lost child. He has an opportunity to become a surrogate father to a kid who has lost her parents. Their time in our company ends with them jetting off to further adventures. If it’s true there are only one or two stories in the Western canon, then it’s not about the what but the how. The how of 65 is piew piew piew lasers and rrrrraaaawr rwar rwaaar! dinosaurs. When I was in elementary school, my best friend and I decided the greatest movie ever would involve aliens fighting dinosaurs, because, as children, we were undemanding of our entertainment to do anything beyond satisfy the most simplistic desires of our pea-sized lizard brains. We kept spending eighty 1980s dollars on Atari 2600 games because we could imagine they looked good. It was during this period that I saw most of the terrible movies I still love unconditionally for their ability to remind me of how much more promise the world seemed to hold back then. I even have an Atari 2600 connected and in working order. I’ve been grateful to have grown out of being that easy to please, though now I can’t think of a single reason why.