Aziz Ansari and a winged Keanu Reeves outside a Denny's: "No one can be told what Denny's is, you have to see it for yourself."

Good Fortune (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical

*/****
starring Seth Rogen, Aziz Ansari, Keke Palmer, Keanu Reeves
written and directed by Aziz Ansari

by Walter Chaw Comedians can be great educators. They speak truth to power. They needle inconsistencies and hypocrisies to light like splinters coaxed from the body politic. Charlie Chaplin. George Carlin, of course. Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, Lucille Ball, Mary Tyler Moore–just the beginning of a roll call of storied court jesters attached to naked emperors. There are good modern examples, too, even ones who didn’t perform in Riyadh at the discretion of a homicidal regime fond of public beheadings, dismembering American journalists, and, you know, brutally punishing women who dare to challenge the status quo. And then there’s Riyadh headliner Aziz Ansari, who has made a career of playing the most irritating side character in other people’s stuff, parlaying whatever fame that earns a person into the smart, at times surprisingly raw three-season dramedy “Master of None”. There’s some depth to Ansari, it appears, despite his being the weakest part–whinging, facile, fast-talking, insincere–of his own strong project. Orson Welles famously said about Woody Allen:

"All the Voices That Are Frightening." by Walter Chaw (stark white text against black background)

“All the Voices That Are Frightening.”: FFC Interviews Lizzie Borden

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Interviews

by Walter Chaw Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986) was foundational for me. Looking for titilation as a young teen in the VHS age, I found instead a sensitive, uncompromising, unfiltered look at sex work as a blue-collar profession that portrayed sex workers as human beings. Neither revelation should be startling, but for a 13-year-old raised in a culture (two cultures) in which women are largely treated as objects for my consumption, it hit me like a thunderbolt.

After the Hunt group setting: Garfield and Friends

After the Hunt (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Crime, Drama, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg
written by Nora Garrett
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Angelo Muredda SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. “It happened at Yale,” an onscreen caption proclaims at the start of Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a handsomely-mounted but undisciplined culture-war sampler platter. The film is the unruly if rarely boring child born of the intellectual marriage between the Guadagnino who saw Dario Argento’s Suspiria and imagined a 150-minute adaptation about postwar Germany and longtime actor and first-time screenwriter Nora Garrett, who told BUSTLE that After the Hunt was inspired by her time in a pair of online philosophy courses in the early days of the pandemic about “how to live morally in what often feels like an immoral world.” What exactly happened to inspire a feature-length reflection on morality is not defined with much precision in After the Hunt, which prefers to raise an assortment of questions about race, gender, and privilege in higher education with the nuance of an edgelord podcaster thinking out loud rather than look directly at a concrete example of those mechanics at, say, Yale. But if a low-stakes psychological thriller about well-dressed academics in immaculate cream suits and rumpled chambray shirts with not one but two beautiful minimalist apartments is what you’re after, you could do worse.

Rebecca Ferguson on the phone: “No, I don’t want gluten-free crust, we’re all about to be incinerated anyway.”

A House of Dynamite (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Streaming, Theatrical, Thriller

**/****
starring Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris
written by Noah Oppenheim
directed by Kathryn Bigelow

by Walter Chaw Stanley Kubrick tried to tell the story of Dr. Strangelove straight until he realized how funny the end of the world is, especially as it will inevitably be ushered in by the stupidest people on the planet. See, playing a game where the only winning move is not to play defines its contestants as idiots. Indeed, there’s an essential hilarity, a baked-in hyperbolic overreaction, to just the idea of a nuclear apocalypse that makes it surprisingly difficult to frame the premise as serious drama. The movie that might come closest is Roger Donaldson’s Thirteen Days, but only in its DVD incarnation under the short-lived “infinifilm” imprimatur, which branched to extracurricular documentary or archival materials that made watching the film very much like attending an entertaining and informative seminar on the Cuban Missile Crisis. By itself, it’s light in the britches: a Kennedy-impersonation contest with a stolid Kevin Costner along for the ride. Yes, the made-for-television movies The Day After, The War Game, Threads, and Testament are uniformly excellent, but they’re focused on the aftermath of nuclear apocalypse. Ditto the not-made-for-TV When the Wind Blows, The Quiet Earth, and On the Beach.

The Ugly/The Furious

TIFF ’25: The Ugly + The Furious

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, China, Crime, Disability, Drama, Film Festivals, Hong Kong, Martial Arts, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

THE UGLY
*½/****
starring Park Jeong-min, Kwon Hae-hyo, Han Ji-hyeon, Shin Hyeon-bin
written by Yeon Sang-ho, based on his graphic novel Face
directed by Yeon Sang-ho

火遮眼
**½/****
starring Xie Miao, Joe Taslim, Yang Enyou, Brian Le
written by Frank Hui, Lei Zhilong, Tin Shu Mak, Kwan-Sin Shum, Aidan Parker
directed by Kenji Tanigaki

by Angelo Muredda In his 2007 book Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation, Ato Quayson suggests that disability “short-circuits” the protocols of representation, throwing into crisis all kinds of formal and thematic properties as a text struggles to account for its disruptiveness. If there’s a prize for the most aesthetic nervousness, or for a text whose nervousness about how to depict disability all but causes it to self-destruct, it ought to go to Train to Busan director Yeon Sang-ho’s dispiriting The Ugly. A slow-burn procedural mystery-thriller about a documentary crew and a son in arrested development getting to the bottom of a historical murder, The Ugly is thrown into a full-blown panic attack by the aesthetic challenge posed by something as simple as depicting its disabled characters moving through the world.

Wahlberg. The caption reads, "Make this quick, I have a 4am shower and then prayer and then a 4:30 shower and then family time"

Play Dirty (2025)

Posted in2025, Action, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Streaming, Thriller

½*/****
starring Mark Wahlberg, LaKeith Stanfield, Rosa Salazar, Tony Shaloub
written by Charles Mondry & Anthony Bagarozzi
directed by Shane Black

by Walter Chaw It took me 72 hours to finish Shane Black’s Play Dirty, his long-gestating take on Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under his nom de plume, Richard Stark), which adapts no particular one of the 28 published but rather attempts to transplant the general vibe of the series into a complex, violent heist concept set in the current day. I can maybe get behind the idea of it. Especially since it began life as (or at least shares a title with) the legendary–and legendarily discarded–script for Lethal Weapon 2. You know, the one that Black, after getting paid a then-record six figures to write it, was asked to make less sadistic. A skosh lighter on the misanthropy, perhaps; a soupçon more likely to support a burgeoning franchise by, oh, not killing off the star, let’s say. I like Shane Black, for all his lapses in judgment and vile bedfellows. I think he has a way with hard-R action, and I’m a fan of his patter, his dense verbal humour, whose frat-boy sensibility I could rationalize until now. I’m starting to think it’s a reflection of someone not entirely capable of growing up. In other words, Black is feeling like an indictment of me, this child of the Blockbuster, holding on too long to my affection for one of my obnoxious uncles.

Paula Beers in a red convertible, looking skeptical

TIFF ’25: Miroirs No. 3

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Mystery, Thriller, TIFF

Mirrors No. 3
***/****
starring Paula Beer, Barbara Auer, Matthias Brandt, Enno Trebs
written and directed by Christian Petzold

by Angelo Muredda Not content to have already put his stamp on Vertigo with 2014’s postwar noir Phoenix, where an Auschwitz camp survivor and cabaret performer who’s undergone facial reconstruction surgery finds herself remade into the image of her former self by the scoundrel husband who sold her out to the Nazis, Mirrors No. 3 sees Christian Petzold delivering a lower-key riff on Alfred Hitchcock’s masterwork. An uncanny, tragicomic European idyll that improbably takes equal inspiration from Vertigo, Final Destination, Mulholland Drive, and Hansel and Gretel despite largely being set on sun-kissed porches and in open garages, Mirrors No. 3 is a beguiling, singularly strange picture that could only have been made by the simultaneously heady and easygoing German auteur.

Xin in The Sun Rises on Us All, Johnston in Obsession

TIFF ’25: The Sun Rises on Us All + Obsession

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, China, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, TIFF

日掛中天
***½/****
starring Zhilei Xin, Songwen Zhang, Shaofeng Feng
written by Shangjun Cai, Nianjin Han
directed by Shangjun Cai

OBSESSION
***/****
starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless
written and directed by Curry Barker

by Bill Chambers In Shangjun Cai’s masterful The Sun Rises on Us All, Meiyun (Zhilei Xin, deservedly feted at the recent Venice Film Festival) is a wannabe influencer who sells dropship clothing out of a crappy little outlet in a Guangzhou mall. Newly pregnant by her married boyfriend Qifeng (Shaofeng Feng), she’s a woman in her late thirties with the lifestyle of someone considerably younger, suggesting an interruption in the past that will soon be confirmed. While at the hospital for a prenatal checkup, Meiyun spots a man she recognizes, Baoshu (Songwen Zhang), who’s recovering from gastrointestinal surgery after being diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. There is palpable tension between them, but Meiyun cares about him, and as he needs somewhere to convalesce, she makes room for his dour ass in her cramped one-bedroom. He’s such an unpleasant guest that it’s easy to feel sorry for Meiyun, whose romance with Qifeng is complicated enough. Indeed, you could go so far as to call Baoshu and Meiyun’s on-screen dynamic S&M, although it’s not always him doing the S and her doing the M. (When Baoshu goes on a mini-hunger strike, for instance, Meiyun literally slaps sense into him.) But as the details of their shared history come to light, our sympathies begin to shift–or, more to the point, even out.

DiCaprio on a pay phone in sunglasses: "Hello, ICE tip hotline? Baba Booey!"

One Battle After Another (2025)

Posted in****/****, 2025, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Best Picture (Academy Awards), Crime, Directors: Paul Thomas Anderson, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

****/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro, Regina Hall
written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

by Walter Chaw One Battle After Another feels like contraband. It’s the sort of movie the Ministry of Culture would ban before offering the position of Head of the Ministry of Culture to its director. A Fritz Lang situation, if you will, where a nation-under-siege’s Best shoot their shot before being silenced or recruited–or they escape in the last crepuscular years before the curtain finally drops. It’s impolite. It’s outraged about what’s obviously outrageous and outspoken at a time when most everyone else is stunned into silence or cowed into surrender. It’s as sick of the bullshit as you are. A miracle, then. Or it feels like a miracle, anyway. Depending on how things go, we could eventually be talking about it the way we talk about Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise. Do I exaggerate? If I do, it’s only by degrees. We are all in this pot together, and it’s hotter than you think. Not noticing has brought us to where we are: bright red and just south of parboiled. Do you notice? Paul Thomas Anderson does.

Bald white Emma Stone leashed around the neck and wrists

Telluride ’25: Bugonia

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Crime, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Ireland, Sci-Fi, South Korea, Telluride, UK

**½/****
starring Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Aidan Delbis, Alicia Silverstone
screenplay by Will Tracy, based on the screenplay by Jang Joon-hwan
directed by Yorgos Lanthimos

by Walter Chaw I don’t know what it’s like to come to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia fresh, given that it’s a remake of Jang Joon-hwan’s gonzo, lacerating Save the Green Planet!, a film about wild conspiracy theories and the people who drink deep from them that seemed considerably more novel in 2003 than it does in 2025. Now, some pathetic incel white supremacist dufus doing a terrorism is a weekly–soon to be daily–occurrence, making Bugonia a lot like Ari Aster’s Eddington: too late to be a warning and too directionless to offer solutions. What is it, then? Well, it’s sort of like Idiocracy, if Idiocracy came out today instead of 20 years ago, when it was a terrifying prophecy of unusual prescience. I guess the proper term for this exercise would be “past its sell-by date,” but what I think it is, mostly, is a very fine vehicle for Jessie Plemons and possibly a test of how close we are to Lanthimos and Emma Stone finally pushing their luck a little too far and launching themselves into the land of the terminally overexposed. I love that they continue to inspire each other and stuff, though their collaboration is starting to feel like a party where everyone else has left and I have to work in the morning, you guys, please.

Tall Margaret Qualley holding flowers and short Ethan Hawke holding court in Blue Moon

TIFF ’25: Blue Moon

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Comedy, Directors: Richard Linklater, Drama, Film Festivals, Ireland, Music, Romance, TIFF

***½/****
starring Ethan Hawke, Margaret Qualley, Bobby Cannavale, Andrew Scott
written by Robert Kaplow, inspired by the writings of Lorenz Hart and Elizabeth Weiland
directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda Contrasting epitaphs set the tone for Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, a melancholy tribute to the self-destructive genius of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, a not especially handsome guy played by Linklater’s decidedly handsome long-time muse, Ethan Hawke. Moments before we see the man’s lonesome onscreen death from pneumonia on a rainy street, a title card offers Hart’s posthumous characterization from a pair of observers: his contemporary Oscar Hammerstein II, who hails him as “alert and dynamic and fun to be around,” and cabaret performer Mabel Mercer, who pronounces him “the saddest man I ever knew.” Hawke’s Hart is both–a charming but embittered barfly in a personal and professional crisis who loves conversation as much as he resents having to make it with perceived dullards like Hammerstein, who, in the film’s timeline, has just replaced him as Richard Rodgers’s creative partner on the verge of their major commercial breakthrough, Oklahoma!.

Christoph Waltz in a top hat in Frankenstein

Telluride ’25: Frankenstein

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blog, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mexico, Telluride

****/****
starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz
screenplay by Guillermo del Toro, based on the book Frankenstein; or: The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley
directed by Guillermo del Toro

by Walter Chaw The poetry lives in the father. Do I mean the poetry? I’m not sure. No, I mean the place where this piece breathes and has always breathed is the father. The fathers. I say “poetry” because it’s a term that covers a lot of ground for me. Poetry is something that is ineffable, ephemeral, inexplicably alive. It is ageless and immortal. Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is about his father and Our Father. Fathers is where the poetry of it lives. It is, itself, poetry. My God, it’s beautiful. Let me explain.

Emily Blunt and The Rock taking a nighttime stroll in The Smashing Machine

TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

Posted in2025, Action, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Canada, Film Festivals, Japan, Sports, TIFF

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

David Jonsson and Cooper Hoffman, fg, in The Long Walk

The Long Walk (2025)

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Horror, Stephen King, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Charlie Plummer, Mark Hamill
screenplay by JT Mollner, based on the book by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman
directed by Francis Lawrence

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. My least favourite thing is to go after something I mostly agree with, made by people who seem well-intentioned despite failing to recognize their dangerous biases. Francis Lawrence’s The Long Walk nails who we are right now: a nation that leads the world in pride and trails the field in things to be proud of. A nation crowdfunding life-saving healthcare while bankrolling genocide. A nation where dozens of billionaires control the same amount of wealth as the millions of everyone else. Last I checked, the thing America laps every other industrialized country at is the percentage of our adult population that believes in angels. Throughout The Long Walk, the cartoonish Major (Mark Hamill), channelling the spirit of Sgt. Rock, lets loose with jingoistic statements about the greatness of these United States and how it will one day, through a baptism of blood and the violent suppression of generations of hope and self-worth, be great again. It’s “IRONIC” spelled out in blazing letters across a dystopian sky, like the fireworks that greet our heroes after their long walk–but what is irony when it’s just the facts? What is satire when we are beyond satire?

Amanda Seyfried, arms spread wide in ecstasy amid a crowd of followers

TIFF ’25: The Testament of Ann Lee

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Musical, TIFF, UK

Ann Lee
***/****
starring Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott
written by Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet
directed by Mona Fastvold

by Angelo Muredda Speaking at the press conference following the Venice world premiere of Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee, co-writer and second-unit director Brady Corbet, Fastvold’s husband, illuminated the couple’s fruitful creative partnership, which also yielded their co-screenwriting duties on 2024’s The Brutalist. “We firmly believe,” he said, pointing to Fastvold’s ownership of and final cut on the film, “that you can only serve one master at a time.” To say nothing of the film’s numerous aesthetic and thematic echoes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, not to mention those of their previous project, Corbet’s comment is an interesting critical pathway into an often impenetrably busy, ambitious work that, when one breaks it down, is about both a marriage in tension and a husband working in service–far more glumly than the gregarious Corbet–to his spouse’s singular vision of the world. Pricklier than the more awards-friendly The Brutalist, though vulnerable to the same structural imbalances and ambiguity, The Testament of Ann Lee is a pleasantly odd text: a rich, overstuffed period musical that makes a grand figure of its impossibly marginal fringe subject.

Adult sisters lying on bed in an emotional embrace

Telluride ’25: Sentimental Value

Posted in****/****, 2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Denmark, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Telluride, Turkey, UK

Affeksjonsverdi
****/****
starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Elle Fanning
written by Eskil Vogt
directed by Joachim Trier

by Walter Chaw Joachim Trier is my favourite living director. Through his work, I’m seen, and in being seen, I am less lonesome, less self-loathing. For a while, anyway. When he finds value in the melancholy heroes of his films, riddled though they may be with depression, prone to stupid mistakes and debilitating anxiety though they are, he finds value, somehow, in me. The first movie of his I saw was Oslo, August 31st, which opens with druggie-in-recovery Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) filling his pockets with rocks like a Danish Virginia Woolf and, on the first night of a day trip away from rehab, walking into a lake. He fails to kill himself, however, as he’s failed at everything else. I’ve failed in the same way. It’s hard to explain what that feels like if you haven’t experienced it. He’s 34. An old friend tells him he’s got a fresh start and should make the most of it, but he tells her it’s too late. All of his friends have transitioned into the next part of their lives while he’s been stuck in place with his addiction, anchored down by the dead, flat weight of his unmet potential. What kind of life is left for someone who was only ever really good at self-sabotage? What kind of next step is there for someone afraid to take the first one? Oslo, August 31st is one of the very few movies ever to nail what depression feels like. Sadness? Sadness is easy. Despair is easy. Hard is feeling like you’ve disappointed everyone who ever believed in you. Or they will be disappointed, given enough time. Hard is knowing you’re the problem. It’s the last day of summer. I’ve never felt so old.

Linda Schuyler in a chair in a nicely appointed living room being interviewed

TIFF ’25: Degrassi: Whatever It Takes

Posted in2025, Authors: Bill Chambers, Canada, Documentary, Film Festivals, TIFF

**/****
directed by Lisa Rideout

by Bill Chambers For my brother’s birthday a couple of years ago, I bought him an officially licensed novelty T-shirt for The Zit Remedy‘s “Everybody Wants Something Tour” that he continues to wear proudly for the, well, novelty factor. Talk about kitsch heaven, if you’re a Canadian of a certain age. But as I watched Degrassi: Whatever It Takes, Lisa Rideout’s new and decidedly uneven documentary about the television institution that spawned The Zit Remedy (among other fictional acts, including Drake), I began to worry I’d erred in giving money to the Degrassi Industrial Complex, whose genesis dates back to 1979, when Linda Schuyler adapted the children’s book Ida Makes a Movie into a short subject that was shot on, dun dun dunnn, De Grassi Street in Toronto. Ida Makes a Movie later became the retroactive pilot for “The Kids of Degrassi Street”–itself a dry run for “Degrassi Junior High”, which is when Schuyler’s dogged vision of a TV show that’s all Afterschool Specials finally hooked the zeitgeist. Everybody wants something they’ll never give up, indeed.

TIFF ’25: The Fence

TIFF ’25: The Fence

Posted in2025, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, TIFF

***/****
starring Isaach De Bankolé, Matt Dillon, Mia McKenna-Bruce, Tom Blyth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Suzanne Lindon, and Andrew Litvack, based on Black Battles with Dogs by Bernard-Marie Koltès
directed by Claire Denis

By Angelo Muredda A sparsely populated construction site in West Africa becomes the locus of a nocturnal power struggle between Black labourers, white occupiers, and the land that rejects the latter like a virus in Claire Denis’s The Fence, an eerie postcolonial thriller where the subaltern not only speaks but compels, standing at the gate of the white occupiers’ ill-acquired homes and enterprises. Adapted from French writer Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play Black Battles with Dogs, the film comfortably slots into Denis’s oeuvre alongside her earlier works examining the uneasy presence of white settlers in Africa, even as its commitment to the symbolically freighted, dialogue-heavy text makes it, to its detriment, talkier than her usual work. Although it often threatens to devolve into a stilted filmed play, The Fence thrums along to its own strange rhythm on the strength of its magnetic cast, a quartet of polarized opposites bumping into one another in close-quarters, and Denis’s sensitivity to the particular sensory experiences of her characters, each feeling acutely out of place in an uncanny space that one longtime settler assures a new arrival is “very real.”

Devilishly handsome George Clooney standing a few feet away from a giant George Clooney poster

Telluride ’25: Jay Kelly

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, Italy, Telluride, UK

*/****
starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dern
written by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimer
directed by Noah Baumbach

by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sloppy love of movies paired with a genius-level creator. You see the problem. I have admired many of Baumbach’s works, both individually and in collaboration with Wes Anderson, but I’ve never found any of them to be particularly in rapture over the transformative potential of film as a medium. I have admired much of George Clooney’s work, but have never found him to be a once-in-a-lifetime talent with a deeply troubled backstory like, say, Bob Fosse. The closest analogue to Jay Kelly is actually Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Telluride ’25: Hamnet

Posted in2025, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, Shakespeare, Spielberg, Telluride, UK, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Maggie O’Farrell, based on O’Farrell’s novel
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw There is so much acting in Hamnet. So much. The most acting. A host, a bounty, a feast. Remember Denzel Washington’s Fences? It makes Fences seem subtle and reserved–even dignified, if you can imagine, which I could not. Hamnet is heavy with acting in the sense that brood cows are heavy with young in late July, teats pendulous and bellies stretched like unrefrigerated yogurt capsules whose live colonies have boomed under torpid, incubated petri-dish conditions. Miserable. Suffering. Ridden with monologue and gesticulation. The term “to the rafters” doesn’t begin to cover it, given how the great abundance (embarrassment, superfluity, profusion, glut) of acting in Hamnet is directed at the very heavens themselves, forsooth, screeched in the key of rent flesh and ripped bodice to the bowed ears of weary Danish gods. What is a stage that is only proscenium? Hamnet is the answer now and going forward.