134 minutes; R; directed by Gore Verbinski Critic’s grade: B+
“Going forward, are we looking at an AI bubble or an AI apocalypse?” That’s the question a tech expert posed recently in an interview on NPR.
The answer is to be determined, says the smart money. And yet, in the not-so-distant future, things are looking pretty scary and bleak, AI-wise. That’s according to the fantastical, wildly conceived dreamscapes and nightmares — some achieved via CGI? — on screen in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die.”
The comic sci-fi action pic is Gore Verbinski’s first film since 2016’s underperforming gothic horror film “A Cure for Wellness.” The director’s filmography includes “Pirates of the Caribbean” and two of its sequels, the American version of “The Ring” and celebrated animated feature “Rango.”
With “Good Luck,” he’s headed into new terrain, thematically and visually. It’s a speedy, often very funny head trip of a movie that makes direct or indirect references to the likes of Terry Gilliam‘s “Time Bandits” and “The Fisher King”; Netflix future-tech series “Black Mirror” (nodding to an episode regarding human-channeled advertising); Doug Liman‘s “Edge of Tomorrow”; and even James Cameron‘s “The Terminator.”
Verbinski starts his adventure at a place we’ve visited before. A wild and wooly Man of the Future, played by a game Sam Rockwell in fast-talking, quip-happy hyperactive mode, careens his way around a colorful diner, frightening patrons and generally making a mess of the place. He’s recruiting would-be soldiers in his war to defeat the society-crunching tech overlords and prevent the evils that they’re spawning. It’s his 117th trip back in time, to the same location, he explains. So far, so familiar.
Cajoling and begging, he eventually gathers a crew of combatants — played by Juno Temple, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson and Michael Peña — who are variously over-eager or downright reluctant to join the loopy crusade. Particularly since its leader is a testy, potentially disconnected-from-reality stranger who uses a bomb threat to scare his corps into action.
While there aren’t multiverse-style parallel realities at work here, as in the tonally similar anything-goes “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Inception,” the film takes an approach that does sometimes leave a viewer wondering where, exactly, we are in the narrative: Is this the past, the present or are we back to the future?
Verbinski alternates the now-time narrative with flashbacks that help to explain how society got here from there: The soul-crunching disaster now in progress was urged along in part by teens hopelessly addicted to TikTok, parents who just don’t understand eccentric children and school shootings so ubiquitous that an entire kid-cloning industry has sprung up to meet the needs of the loved ones left behind.
That plot strand, with Temple as the distraught mother urged to shell out buku bucks for a replacement kid who’s physically a carbon copy of his dead predecessor, accounts for the film’s creepiest and yet most emotionally affecting plot storyline.
Some of the images and set pieces, including a rampaging Godzilla-sized kitten that relishes chomping human heads, a roving gang of zombified school kids on the attack, a roomful of scary island-of-lost-toys creations come to life (a la “Toy Story”), and a baldheaded, zoned-out little boy atop a mountain of electronic wires and gadgets who is mindlessly pecking at a computer keyboard, amount to visual smackdowns.
The whole thing, in fact, nearly achieves the state of being endearingly wackadoodle. Its saving grace: Aside from that familiar set-up, “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die” – a slogan from a video game favored by one of the story’s characters – is gloriously unpredictable, even if it’s overstuffed and doesn’t all quite add up.
Who needs perfectly tuned and tightened inner story logic when the goings-on are so heady and this much fun?
Paul Thomas Anderson’s seriocomic, politically tinted action flick makes for an exhilarating, richly textured wild ride. Early Best Picture contender, anyone?
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER 162 minutes; R; directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Critic’s Grade: A
No burying the lede here: “One Battle After Another” attacks the screen with big ideas, a textured storyline, remarkable performances by a diverse cast, eye-popping action sequences, surprisingly funny bits and disturbing allusions to contemporary political currents.
Yes, the multiple references to the type of unrestrained and unapologetic authoritarianism wielded by the administration now in power sometimes feel a bit too real. And yet Paul Thomas Anderson’s 10th feature, far from being a mere political screed, is a bustling, bristling piece of bravado filmmaking, its various thematic elements all wrapped inside a narrative focused on a tender, feelgood portrayal of a father-daughter bond.
Sprawling, but in a good way, “One Battle After Another” is energetic and bracing in a manner that many of the genre hopper’s other films — some brilliant, some messy — are not. The new movie, arguably Anderson’s best film since 2007’s “There Will Be Blood,” offers echoes of anti-establishment favorites like Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove” and Mike Nichols’ “Catch-22” but without the straight-up absurdism; “Battle” is more grounded in a milieu resembling reality.
Leonardo DiCaprio, as shaggy haired, dope-smoking bomb maker Bob Ferguson, uses expert comic timing to create one of the actor’s most indelible performances. His significant other is Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor, in a smoldering, lit-fuse turn), the tough, sexy, swaggering leader of anti-capitalist group French 75, a band of revolutionaries somewhat in the mold of real-life ‘70s Leftist organization the Symbionese Liberation Army. Bob’s demolitions expertise is a turn-on for Perfidia, who uses a show of physical domination to get her partner’s motor running.
French 75 robs banks, blows up corporate headquarter buildings and government offices and, during one of the film’s most thrilling set pieces, frees hundreds of immigrant detainees — men, women and children — from a border-adjacent camp jointly operated by the military and police forces. Sound familiar?
Anderson’s story, adapted from a Thomas Pynchon novel (as was the director-writer’s 2014 “Inherent Vice”) is essentially split into two parts, the first taking place circa 16 years ago.
The revolutionaries’ nemesis, steely but twisted Col. Steven J. Lockjaw, played by an alternately scary and riotous Sean Penn, is determined to destroy his human targets by any means necessary. The grizzled army lifer, who has very particular taste in women, makes an unexpected love/lust connection — no spoilers — in the film’s first half.
Fast forward to the present, and medal of honor winner Lockjaw is desperate to join the prestigious Christmas Adventurers Club, a super-secret cabal of elite, wealthy white nationalists focused on remaking the country by way of “racial purification.” The oily, reptilian men, shot in extreme close-up and played by actors including Tony Goldwyn and James Downey, pledge to rid America of “dangerous lunatics, haters and punk trash.” They say hello to one another with hearty greetings of “Merry Christmas” and conclude every meeting with a chorus of “All hail St. Nick!” It’s all ridiculous and creepy and, yes, reminiscent of the kind of language spoken privately, and even publicly, by some of the powerful folks whose visages constantly flicker across our TV screens, particularly since Jan. 20.
Lockjaw’s new mission, to raid a Latino sanctuary city and track down the long-disappeared revolutionary Ferguson and his daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti, brightly shining), sets the story’s second half in motion. It’s an extended game of cats and mice, with the colonel chasing the father and daughter, his forces coming down hard on the Latino men, women and children of Baktan Cross, a fictional northern California town, and a different Christmas Adventurers Club member trying to track down Ferguson, Willa and Lockjaw.
It all makes for the wildest of cinematic wild rides, bolstered by the agile 35mm camera work of Anderson regular Michael Bauman. The goings-on encompass runs through tunnels and across rooftops, speedy car chases over impossibly hilly roads in desert country and a visit to a convent full of rebel nuns known as the Sisters of the Brave Beaver. There are also sequences involving the use of a portable paternity test, shouted exchanges of a verbal secret code involving the titles of ‘60s sitcoms, and the derring-do of a wily, kindly and resourceful martial arts sensei slyly played by Benicio del Toro, one of the movie’s not-so-secret weapons.
The film additionally benefits from a creative, eclectic score by Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead), who deploys clanking solo-piano figures, sudden blasts of strings, and roaring percussion. Not to mention the artful use of vintage radio tracks, including The Delfonics’ “Ready or Not Here I Come,” The Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy,” Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work” and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “American Girl.” Plus Beyonce’s “Freedom,” with Kendrick Lamar, along with several other contemporary tunes.
A final thought: The exhilarating “One Battle After Another” is the first movie I’ve seen this year that made me want to see it again. Immediately, and on a big screen.
Copyright 2025 by Philip Booth. All rights reserved. Follow me at Philip’s Flicks on Letterboxd.
“The Requin” offers a moderately promising, if familiar, set-up: A married couple, troubled by a recent domestic tragedy, vacations at a resort in a tropical paradise. There, they spend their days lolling along the beach, and their nights in a “floating villa,” an open-air room just a few feet from the water. Warm breezes blow, sheer curtains billow, and ballads flicker on the soundtrack.
The two (Alicia Silverstone and James Tupper) indulge in seaside views, fruity drinks, exotic cuisine, impromptu swimming and snorkeling, and the perhaps welcome social and cultural isolation of temporarily living in a place where nobody looks like them, or speaks their language.
Alas, on the horizon are dark clouds — it’s monsoon season in Vietnam, after all — along with psychological threats to the pair’s marital bonds. Not to mention that awfully temperamental wi-fi connection. There could be worse things than not being able to readily document your happy travels on social media.
Right on cue, here come the cheap thrills and unconvincing horrors: In rolls a big storm, followed by the arrival of menacing creatures from the deep. And, eventually, the kind of “I’m-so-scared” moaning, shrieking and whimpering from Silverstone that grows scarier and more annoying by the minute.
“The Requin,” reportedly shot using green screens at Universal Studios Orlando, is like a poor man’s cross between “Jaws” and “Open Water,” starring the most talented actors from your high school. Bonus: The title — French for “shark,” ya know — has to be the year’s silliest sounding and most off-putting name for an English-language movie.
In case you need to know: The cast of “The Requin,” mostly a two-person affair, also includes Deirdre O’Connell and Jennifer Mudge as Silverstone’s mom and sister, respectively, seen only on video screens. Credit or blame for the pedestrian direction and soapy screenplay goes to Vietnamese-born Le-Van Kliet (“The Princess,” “Furie”).
Aside from the gimmicky shark action, the special effects are passable. But the filmmaker succeeds in neither plumbing the depths of a relationship sinking under the weight of trauma nor creating the kinds of chills and suspense suggested by the harrowing circumstances faced by the movie’s lead characters. Consider it a lost opportunity.
Message to all those other sea-horror movies: Breathe easy. This “Requin” is no real threat.
“Elvis is everywhere,” roots-rocking revivalists Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper declare on the 1987 novelty hit of the same name. The video features shots of the duo and Elvis Presley interspersed with images of average folks of every age, race, sex, body type and nationality dressed up like the American icon or showing off their Elvis-inspired products.
“Elvis is everything,” Nixon sings. “Elvis is everybody/ Elvis is still the King/ Man, O, man/ What I want you to see/ Is that the big E’s/ Inside of you and me, yeah.”|
To be sure, Elvis was still everywhere back then, 10 years after his untimely if not altogether unexpected death at age 42. Impersonators of the King flourished at Las Vegas wedding chapels and on stages all over the country. “Elvis has left the building,” fried-peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, and TCB — “taking care of business” — were still touchstones.
Elvis gold chains and license plates continued to pop up all over the place, and Graceland routinely swarmed with tourists (and lent its name to a Paul Simon album released the year prior). Countless folks swore that they had seen Presley’s face in the clouds or on a piece of toast. Some said that they had run into the flesh-and-blood man himself at a gas station, a barbershop, or the mall. Multiple pop stars pointed to Elvis as a musical forebear and major influence.
The subject of ritualistic, near-religious and maybe slightly creepy devotion, Elvis seemed to be more alive during the three decades or so after his death of a cardiac arrest — which occurred on the throne, as the crass joke went (he expired on his bathroom floor) — than he’d been in the last few chapters of his troubled life. He was gone too soon, thanks to a weak heart aggravated by a dependence on drugs and alcohol, probably worsened by a terrible diet and other maladies. Fun fact: his complete autopsy will finally be unsealed in 5 years.
Thirty-five years after “Elvis is Everywhere,” the King no longer holds sway over pop culture to the degree that he once did. But with “Elvis,” filmmaker Baz Luhrmann performs imaginative rites of onscreen zombieism: He practically brings the movie’s title character back from the dead for the viewing and listening pleasure of contemporary audiences, at least a couple of generations of whom weren’t born until after Presley died. That’s no mean feat, and the results are largely a delight to behold.
Luhrmann, the Australian-born director and high-concept movie magician, created an unstoppable audiovisual carnival with 2001’s “Moulin Rouge!,” gave new life to Shakespeare with his refried “Romeo + Juliet” in 1996, and reimagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel of the 1920s with “The Great Gatsby,” released in 2013.
“Elvis,” arriving nearly a decade after Luhrmann’s last film, is a sometimes intoxicating mixtape of Elvis-ness, a wannabe cosmic collage of the Saturday night Delta blues, Sunday morning tent-revival gospel, pure charisma & hip-swiveling sexiness that helped transform the Tupelo country kid and devoted Mama’s boy into an enduring global celebrity. It’s mostly big fun, with a whole lotta shakin’ going on.
Is “Elvis” truly greater than the sum of its hyperactive, swirling, in-your-face, time-tripping parts, not all of which match the level of Austin Butler‘s fascinating and gripping impersonation of The King? Not sure yet.
But Luhrmann once again demonstrates his ability to reach out, grab viewers, and hold on to us nearly all the way to the end, when he closes more than two-and-one-half hours of passion, pathos, drama and humor in the life of this Elvis incarnation with footage of the real thing. It’s a coda that, yes, may make some viewers feel a bit of sadness about the loss of an era that — nominally, at least, from the vantage point of 2022’s social, political and economic turmoil — seems less confusing and more innocent.
Austin Butler, left, as Elvis Presley, right.
If the “Elvis” movie were a stage of its subject’s career, it would be the Fat Elvis years, when “Also Sprach Zarathustra” on the sound system announced his arrival on a Vegas stage with an oversized band. His shows were exercises in too-muchness, over the top and proud to be born that way. That’s in contrast to the early years, when he led a rootsy, stripped-down band, recording raw, intimate-feeling tracks like 1954’s “That’s All Right” at Sun Studios in Memphis and then making a splash at local auditoriums.
Likewise, Luhrmann’s extravaganza of a movie is all about the excess, dazzling viewers with a relentless, frenetic assault of sights and sounds bolstering a story that’s probably too large to tell within the confines of a movie of this length.
Luhrmann begins by connecting the dots among the various sounds that influenced Elvis’s approach to music making — in the movie, it’s “I’ll Fly Away” in its bluegrass and black gospel versions, and the blues of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s “That’s All Right Mama” and Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog.” Austin blues star Gary Clark Jr. plays Crudup, and the late Shonka Dukureh portrays Thornton.
Frequently flashing forward and back, Luhrmann touches on many of the familiar mileposts on Elvis’s road to superstardom. Most chapters are here, if not necessarily presented according to the real-life timeline. After Frank Sinatra’s adulation by the bobby soxers but before crowds went gaga for the Beatles, Elvis makes the girls hyperventilate — on stage at the Louisiana Hayride country music radio show, his first of many appearances there. He signs a lopsided management deal giving half of his earnings to shady Dutch-born promoter “Colonel” Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), a former Tampa dogcatcher who declares that “show business is snow business.”
Then: Elvis leaves Sun for RCA Records, buys the Graceland mansion, goes into the Army, suffers the loss of his beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson), and marries Priscilla Parker (Olivia DeJonge); the two met cute — or creepy cute? — in Germany when he was 24 and she was 14 (her age is glossed over).
Along the way — in addition to the above mentioned artists — there are encounters with entertainers B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Hank Snow (David Wenham), Jimmie Rodgers (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and of course Sun Studios owner Sam Phillips (Josh McConville).
The cast is well chosen: All turn in galvanizing performances, and Yola, Mason, Clark and Dukureh (who died July 21 at age 44) are straight-up knockouts. The tasty soundtrack is bolstered by vintage and recent material, including some snatches of hip-hop; all work well together to underscore the action.
Parker is the teller of this tale, with some passages deploying his voiceover narration. If “Elvis” is flawed, that positioning could be part of the problem — it frequently feels a bit artificial and contrived. Maybe that’s because of Hanks, who seems to be walking through a role that comes off as corny, and too heavily relies on a goofy, showy accent. Would the performance have been enhanced had it been played by someone less famous than Hanks?
Anyone with at least a passing interest in Elvis, or a thing for the roots of modern pop music and/or that period of history, will want to see Luhrmann’s movie on the big screen, with speakers cranked. The nostalgia buzz at the heart of “Elvis” is real.
And yet Luhrmann’s movie is about more than simply reanimating a cultural corpse. The filmmaker’s apparently genuine affection for everything Elvis has resulted in a blast of giddy Americana that may prove infectious even to those who know The King only as a faded, easily mocked musical curio from the increasingly distant past.
Word is that there also exists a four-hour director’s cut of the movie that includes Elvis’s off-the-rails encounter with President Nixon and pays more attention to Presley’s relationship with his bandmates, guitarist Scotty Moore (Xavier Samuel) and bassist Bill Black (Adam Dunn).
I wouldn’t be surprised if an Elvis series were to be announced for one of the streamers — just speculating here. Stay tuned, and keep your eyes open for a sighting of The King at your local diner. Hey, it could happen.
David Cronenberg‘s latest head-twisting journey into the universe of the bizarre takes us to a place located in the not-distant future — or simply untethered from time? who can really say? — where the denizens of a mysterious unidentified land certainly appear to look like us.
But these characters behave like a species from another planet, and the trip offers more than a bit of cinematic deja ju for fans of the Canadian filmmaker.
Got body horror, as in fears about an indescribable thing growing inside of you that might kill you or someone else? Check. How about the melding of flesh-and-blood life forms with non-human entities, as a next step in mankind’s evolution? Yep. Sexual desire triggered and fulfilled by pain, or at least, from extreme discomfort? Naturally. Technological advancements as conduits to human salvation? Of course. Unintended consequences of medical manipulation gone wild? Gooey, slimey, oozing objects that may or may not have something to do with body parts? Folks who sometimes move about as if sleepwalking, have dead-eyed stares, and frequently speak in an affectless manner? Check, check, and check.
“Crimes of the Future,” released six years or so after the provocation-minded director, now 79, suggested that he was considering retiring due to the difficulties of obtaining financing for his productions, is perhaps even more grim and gruesome than many of the Cronenberg films it directly references, particularly including “Videodrome,” “eXistenZ,” “Crash,” “Dead Ringers,” “The Fly” and “Scanners.” On the other hand, the new one doesn’t pack nearly the same emotional wallop punch as did some of those movies.
Is that because viewers are less disturbed by these types of images? Or is it because self-consciousness has crept into the approach of a film artist who appears to be recycling his own tried-and-true themes? Is the law of diminishing returns at work here?
Cronenberg, working from his own original screenplay for the first time in more than 20 years, knows how to construct a strikingly original, wildly creative setting that doesn’t remotely resemble anything else that’s likely to flicker across the big screen this year. His new tale, shot in Greece, appears to be set in a vaguely European, oddly underpopulated seaside village, with winding cobblestone streets and ancient buildings, the exteriors of which are defaced with graffiti. Everything in this vacuum-sealed universe is grey and dark, and vast warehouse-size spaces and cramped offices alike look as if they’re located in some isolated, mostly forgotten Eastern Bloc burg. Bright colors are few and far between. Spiritual and emotional oppression seem to reign. What kind of fresh hell is this, anyway?
Cronenberg gives no mercy in the opening act, immediately throwing viewers into a bit of dramatic action that transpires between a boy (Sozos Sotiris), playing at the shore, and a young mother (Lihi Kornowski), calling to him from the balcony of a nearby home. Shortly later, the kid is in a tiny bathroom, furiously chewing up a plastic wastebasket. And then comes a disturbing sequence that won’t be described here (no spoilers). The filmmaker seems to be issuing the first of several similar dares: If you can stomach this, then maybe you’ll hang on for the oddities and horrors to come.
Soon, enough, the protagonist arrives, in the form of Saul Tenser, played by Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen (A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method). Frequently seen hunched over, writhing in digestive pain — it’s all tense, per his surname — and hiding behind a black hooded cloak, he’s enmeshed in a long-term sexual and business relationship with Caprice (Lea Seydoux), a former trauma surgeon. The two are performance artists whose specialty is live surgery on stage, where she uses a fleshly controller to guide instruments that cut into the torso of her partner, who lays inside a contraption called a Sark (variation on “sarcophagus”?). Nearby, a screen flashes “Body is Reality.” A hush settles over the crowd as the grisly proceedings unfold.
For its audience of entranced cool-kid viewers, some of whom later thrill to the dancing of a man who has sewn — grown? — human ears all over his body, the act is artistic and erotic. “Surgery is the new sex,” exclaims one believer. But for the performers, it’s also pragmatic: Saul inexplicably is regularly growing new organs. Rather than waiting to see what might unfold if a new system of organs were to develop on his insides, he chooses to excise the invader from his body. He simultaneously views himself as simply the nearest available warm body in the duo’s shows and also as a first-born creature, an accidental messianic figure whose biological transformation points to the shape of humans to come: “I’m just a mechanic,” he explains. “I install doors and windows into the future.” Later, he describes his unsolicited gift in terms that a pregnant woman might use: “I do have something cooking (inside), maybe a few things.”
Saul is able to go under the knife, without anesthesia, because humans who occupy this era have lost their capacity to feel pain. For fun, they practice surgery on one another in the open streets. These images suggest nothing as much as glazed-over young people shooting up with heroin or other drugs — surgery may be the new sex on this planet, but it’s also the new high.
And growing organs is the new pregnancy, available to males, females or the sexes in between. As ever, though, the government has a vested interest in all the bodily comings and goings. Thus the existence of the National Organ Registry, located in a dingy office staffed by a couple of maybe loveable oddballs played to near-perfection by Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart. The two, who practically melt in Saul’s organ-star presence, are the source of some of the most lighthearted moments in a film that benefits from some well-measured injections of dark comedy.
The film’s narrative is also driven by the a “New Vice” police detective’s (Welket Bungue) investigation into a cult of plastic purple-bar eaters led by Lang Dotrice (Scott Speedman), the father of the boy seen in the opening sequence.
If “Crimes of the Future” (not to be confused with Cronenberg’s hourlong 1970 movie of the same name) is classified as a genre film, it might best appreciated as a multi-genre effort, a potentially combustible blend of sci-fi and horror, with a crime story and psychological drama tucked into the mix, heavily sprinkled with social commentary about human evolution, sexual variations, and environmental catastrophe.
While neither as accomplished nor as riveting as the filmmaker’s earlier work, and fitted with an abrupt ending that feels as if Cronenberg simply couldn’t settle on a satisfying conclusion, “Crimes” stands as another quite striking vision from a veteran innovator and provocateur whose film art is unlike that of anyone else making theatrically released feature films. That’s no mean feat.
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Would someone please turn up the lights? That was my first, somewhat frustrated response to Matt Reeves‘ much anticipated, much hyped “The Batman,” with former teen idol Robert Pattinson occupying the role played by approximately 150 stars and others — most recently including Ben Affleck — in movies and television over the decades.
Visually, the latest version of the Caped Crusader tale inspired by the beloved DC Comics series, is far, far darker than any of its predecessors. In fact, it’s gloomier than any recent film — of any genre — that comes to mind. Every scene is shot at night or at dusk, or made to look that way, and every interior sequence is murky and extremely underlit. At some of these crime scenes and cop shops, you could cut through the darkness with a bloody knife. The overall look of contemporary New York City, er, Gotham, is sort of 2022 by way of the bad old days of the gritty, crime-laden terrain of ’70s NYC. Everything is drenched in darkness, as if we were permanently trapped in the darkest recesses of the Bat cave. Did the Gotham City cops suddenly stop paying the light bills? Did the sun go on vacation?
The Batman, who carries that “the” around like an appendage meant to convey untold depths of mystery and intrigue, telegraphs what’s to come with some of the first words he delivers. “Two years of nights have turned me into a nocturnal animal,” he says via voiceover, in the kind of raspy delivery that has become de rigeur for contemporary Bat flicks.
Unlike some of his cheerier, funnier, complex predecessors in the Bat costume, Pattinson’s guy is more depressive Gloomy Gus than the split personality man of yore, a dapper billionaire playboy by day and heroic crime stopper by night who likes to lob occasional comic quips. In this film, I could count the lighthearted lines on a finger or two. By now, the campy TV series starring Adam West is nearly 60 years in the rearview mirror, and perhaps it’s even despised by some contemporary Bat fans.
Reeves’ vision, spiritually speaking, is as dark as cinematographer Greig Fraser’s murky if sometimes hypnotic visuals. Philosophically, it’s not as different from Chris Nolan‘s superior Dark Knight trilogy or other recent versions of the story as some might have you believe: Reeves (the last two “Planet of the Apes” movies, vampire shocker remake “Let Me In,” “Cloverfield”) and co-screenwriter Peter Craig (“The Unforgivable,” the forthcoming “Top Gun: Maverick”) simply cranks the nihilism to its logical conclusion.
Emo Batman — raccoon eyeliner, resting dour face, low-energy vibe except when he’s fighting — doesn’t appear to have much to live for, aside from ramping up his plans for retribution against the forces threatening to destroy his once-fair city. He calls himself “Vengeance,” after all. Even his dalliances with a sexy new Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz), who has her claws deep in the Gotham underworld (or is it the other way around?) don’t seem to lift his spirits much, although her bright-eyed charisma helps provide a much-needed lightening of the mood. The inclusion of Nirvana’s spooky, angst-filled “Something in the Way” on the soundtrack is no accident.
What does feel a bit twisty this time out? “The Batman” is on most counts a particularly gritty noir thriller — think “Zodiac” or “7even” — that just happens to have at its center an ace crime-solving sleuth who enjoys playing dress up in a leather costume. And nobody appreciates Batman’s investigative expertise quite as much as does doggedly determined police Lt. James Gordon (Jeffrey Wright).
The cop and the cowled one are hot on the trail of those behind the murders of some of the most prominent citizens of a city that has been ruled by graft and corruption for so long that it will take a masked superhero to straighten things out. Gangs of thugs routinely rule the streets, as demonstrated during an early sequence featuring a group of such criminals targeting a bookish man of Asian descent in the subway, referencing recent such real-life attacks in NYC and elsewhere.
Sorry, fanboys and fangirls, but Pattinson’s Grim-Gus Batman, certifiably not much fun at parties — he’d much rather Netflix and brood — appears to be located somewhere around Meh on the spectrum of Batman portrayals on the big screen. That’s no slap at Pattinson, as I thought he gave a picture-perfect performance in the Safdie Brothers’ underappreciated 2017 thriller “Good Time,” among other recent films. It’s the downbeat script, not the actor.
The actual baddies in Reeves’ movie are considerably more provocative than the main attraction, and are brought to life by some galvanizing, genuinely memorable and maybe even subversive performances, some of which clearly point to even larger presences in coming Reeves-helmed Bat pics. As The Riddler, Paul Dano is frighteningly out of his gourd, a psycho meanie with a duct-tape fetish, while Colin Farrell is unrecognizable as powerful, tough-guy crime operative the Penguin (his trademark cigar, sadly, is MIA) and his mobster boss is played by the great John Turturro, who practically cackles in evil delight. All three light up the screen.
“The Batman” suffers a bit from its nearly three-hour running time. It feels overlong, and burdened with too many endings. Still, there are solid suspense, chills, thrills and a few surprises to be had in the course of seeing some nasty criminals get their comeuppance. The dynamic duo — Batman and Gordon — ultimately promise to give Gotham a shot at a brighter, or at least less dim, future, a chance to again be more than a place that’s “eating itself,” as Batman says of the city’s problems.
And any criticisms are probably moot — superhero movies are critic proof, don’t you know? — in the context of what’s sure to be massive box-office returns, a byproduct of a loyal and enthusiastic built-in audience for comic book and superhero movies and an expected post-Covid surge in moviegoing. Burning Bat questions: What’s in store for the sequel? Will Reeves make it a trilogy? Stay tuned: Different time, same Bat channel.
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Would it be fair to think of “The Way Back” as “Hoosiers” lite?
No, not quite. But “The Way Back” does touch on the misadventures of a high-school hoops team in a small town, alcoholism and gifted coaches struggling with the burden of complicated pasts. And it rather neatly occupies the inspirational/redemption category. If you don’t find yourself getting a little rah-rah about the prospects of great achievement for the kids at the movie’s center … you might be made of stone.
Jack Cunningham (Ben Affleck), a man for whom sucking down beer and liquor comes as naturally as breathing oxygen, spends his days as a semi-tanked construction worker. Nerves of steel and sheer good luck, apparently, help him avoid serious accidents while maintaining a steady buzz. After hours, he has a regular roost at the local bar. When Jack finally comes home to his nondescript apartment, his late-night return sometimes abetted by a kindly, less drunk fellow barfly, he finds himself alone with his thoughts and a refrigerator that’s fully stacked with beer cans and little else. He’s the kind of guy who chugs beers even while in the shower, and keeps a mini-cooler in his truck.
Fate intervenes when the priest who runs Jack’s high school, where he once reigned as basketball champ, asks the former star and local hero to come back and lead a ragtag team of kids who have passion and talent but are entirely undisciplined and unfocused. Not unlike their new coach. Yes, I was reminded of “The Bad News Bears” (both versions), too.
In the wrong hands, all those elements could have coagulated into something cliched and decidedly corny. Director Gavin O’Connor, who helmed the 2016 Affleck vehicle “The Accountant” and the 2004 sports drama “Miracle,” doesn’t exactly travel new terrain here. Yet he elicits a fine, nuanced, lived-in performance from Affleck, who understands his character’s struggle with addiction from the inside out — art reflected life, as the star had recently made his way back from the bottle, a publicly dissected journey that included bouts with rehab in 2017 and 2018.
For “The Way Back,” not to be confused with the similarly titled 2013 comic drama “The Way Way Back,” the double Oscar winner turns in one of his best, most convincing performances in years. And the film, scripted by Brad Inglesby (“Our Friend,” TV mini-series “Mare of Easttown”) is among the more engaging sports dramas of recent vintage.
Although imperfect in many ways, it’s a largely winning effort that’s sometimes poignant, and sometimes funny. Thankfully, Affleck left the Batman heroics behind for his role in “The Way Back,” and found a comfortable fit as the protagonist in a film that benefits from its modest budget and limited ambitions. It’s an above-average movie bolstered by a surprisingly gutsy and affecting lead performance. Here’s hoping that it doesn’t fall between the cracks.
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There’s not much comic relief to be found in “Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” But it’s hard not to chuckle at least a little bit during one moment of extremely gory carnage, when the title goon, his chainsaw fired up and ready to go, prepares for another round of mindless, bloody slashing.
The 20something hipsters, assuming that the intruder is just part of the night’s entertainment, hold up their phones to live-stream the fun. And their followers start posting comments, naturally: “Who hired this clown?” writes davidbluegarcia. “Where is this, I wanna go?!?” asks ChaseAndersenTX. And, best of all: “THIS LOOKS SO FAKE,” says badhombre6666.
Garcia, of course, is the Texas-based director of the splatter fest (and the above is his actual Twitter handle), and Bad Hombre is one of the three production companies behind the film. What they’ve wrought is a retread that desperately wants to be a franchise reboot: It makes repeated references to Tobe Hooper’s chilling 1974 horror flick, controversial for its time, pretending that the other sequels never existed, but does practically nada to expand or enlarge the story of old Leatherface (Mark Burnham) and his murderous rampaging. Oh, but it does drop the “The” from the title. Presto, change-o!
The setting this time is a remote, abandoned Texas burg called Harlow, where a group of trendy, good-looking young folks have driven seven hours from Austin to party and stake their claims to various pieces of property on the town’s dusty main street. They want to gentrify the place and make it an artsy shopping destination for other hipsters. Could it become the Santa Fe of the Lone Star State? Here’s where the restaurant will go, they say, and over there is where they’ll put the art gallery. Or they just want to get away from the hustle and bustle of big-city life for a more peaceful lifestyle. Or something. It’s not quite clear.
After unintentionally causing the death of an elderly local resident, all hell breaks loose in the little Texas ghost town. The body count mounts, and narrow escapes are followed by brutal killings. Will anyone get out alive?
Garcia and Co. appear to sort of want us to care about some of these potential victims, including chef Melody (Sarah Yarkin) and her little sister Lila (Elsie Fisher, such a find in 2018’s “Eighth Grade.”) The latter is burdened with an extraneous storyline — she’s a victim of a mass shooting at a school with a name resembling that of Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, where a real-life attack took place just four years ago. It’s a tacky touch, maybe meant to add some kind of real-life resonance to the thing. And yet we still don’t care.
Garcia nevertheless gifts viewers with one welcome party favor: His “Massacre” clocks in at a mere 83 minutes. Thank goodness for small mercies.
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“I am not like this,” says the Geek, a booze- and opium-addicted man, disheveled and stringy haired, cruelly imprisoned as a sideshow attraction and brought out of his cage only to feast on a live chicken for 25 cents a show, in the carnival at the center of “Nightmare Alley.”
It’s the last days of the Great Depression, and the pitiful, whimpering, practically speechless creature (Paul Anderson), advertised as a being who exists halfway between a beast and a man, is kept alive only to entertain passersby promised a chance to see human freaks from all over the globe.
Questions about identity — mutable, disguised, unreliable and sometimes even genuine — are at the heart of this often stunning period noir from Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican-born filmmaker responsible for such lavishly photographed gems as “The Shape of Water” and “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
Is Stan (Bradley Cooper), the itinerant laborer seen disposing of a corpse and then lighting a house on fire during the film’s opening moments, an inherently very bad man with potential for doing good? While joining others in trying to capture the escaped Geek, he pauses in front of a funhouse mirror, above which is inscribed the words, “Take a look at yourself, sinner.” Redemption doesn’t appear to be in the cards.
On the other hand, his heart seems soft enough for him to genuinely fall in love with fellow carny Molly (Rooney Mara). He declares his intentions during a magical bout of dancing aboard a beautifully lit revolving carousel. It’s another of the Americana-esque images littered across the film — Del Toro and cinematographer Dan Laustsen also give us a neon-lit all-night diner and red-and-yellow “Jesus Saves” sign in the shape of a cross, retro-looking posters of a fictitious famed mentalist, and big-city buildings and interiors adorned with art deco touches (slightly out of time?).
So, the answer to whether Stan can transform into a better version of himself is … maybe a kind of goodness will triumph, or perhaps his sinful nature will win out. Stay tuned.
Del Toro, offering the second remake of a novel first adapted as a 1947 film featuring a cast-against-type Tyrone Power, convincingly details a world of con artists and scammers, well practiced and motivated to take money from poor clucks and marks — in the movie’s parlance — who are all too willing to suspend their disbelief in exchange for a few minutes of wonder.
The kaleidoscopically grungy carnival is peopled with a small universe of well-cast characters, particularly loving couple (with an asterisk) Zeena (Toni Collette) and Pete (David Straitharn), who collect a tidy sum pretending to read minds. Their act fails only when the latter gets too sauced to play his part in the operation; the two, we’re told, once had a four-week string of triumphant performances in Paris, where they stayed at the Ritz. Also in the mix of performers are a strong man (del Toro regular Ron Perlman, aka Hellboy), a mighty little person (Mark Povinelli), a contortionist and a spider woman. The enterprise is helmed with a firm hand by sleazy carnival barker Clem (Willem Dafoe), whose favorite possession is a gallery of pickled unborn fetuses, including a particularly scary-looking one he calls Enoch.
Having succeeded as a big fish in a lower-class pond, even fooling a local sheriff determined to bust the carny crew, Stan decides to remake his identity once more. So he takes his show, and Molly, to high society circles in Chicago, where he proves efficient at tricking audiences in upscale joints. “It’s the same grift, just different threads,” he explains. Stan soon joins forces with Lilith (Cate Blanchett), a sexy, devious psychologist who goes along with his plan for scoring even bigger paydays by conning wealthier and more powerful men, made even more vulnerable to the scam because of devastating personal losses, knowledge of which she has acquired through her counseling sessions. Is she femme? Or femme fatale?
It all builds to a whizbang pair of climaxes, one a kind of Grand Guignol piece set against the sprawling, snow-covered, mazelike gardens of an enormous estate owned by a financial magnate (Richard Jenkins, superb here again, as he was in “The Shape of Water’), the other inside Lilith’s luxurious office. Masks are dropped, weapons are fired, and blood flows.
In a coda, Clem accepts the job he says he was born to play. Similarly, Cooper, so adept at portraying such a wide range of characters in a fairly eclectic mix of movies, seems to be born to play the role of a schemer whose sins may finally catch up to him. It’s a compelling performance, — a man with so much apparent “panache,” as one character terms it, who nevertheless may have a permanent stain on his soul.
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The cadence and very words of Shakespearean dialogue can be extremely off putting to 2022 ears. That holds true even for those who have studied or at least have been exposed to the Bard ‘s works off and on — whether in high school, college or simply through seeing some of the many film adaptations of his plays, from overblown internationally produced costume dramas to straight-up contemporary retellings. The latter, including the NYC-set Ethan Hawke vehicle “Hamlet” (2000), can be quite jarring in their approach to updating a classic.
But try this: Just go with the sentences tumbling from the mouths of Denzel Washington and others in the new “MacBeth.” Let the sound of the antiquated language tumble into your ears, without worrying about whether you immediately catch the full meaning of each line, and you may soon find that the artfully delivered words — elevated, precise and frequently characterized by double or triple meanings — accumulate into a powerful storyline.
The tale of MacBeth, a narrative that has resonated so strongly in so many plays, books, movies and stage productions since its publication nearly 400 years ago, should be vaguely familiar to anyone who ever took a literature class. The title character, a prideful Scottish general, crosses paths with a trio of witches, who assure him that he will soon ascend his country’s throne. His wife, feeding Macbeth’s impatience, and driven by her own raging ambitions, urges him to murder the king. Opportunity knocks, and he does the deed. So begins a bloody killing spree, yielding a civil war.
The latest movie adaptation of the widely loved play marks the solo directorial debut of Joel Coen, best known as half of the Coen Brothers directing-producing team with his younger sibling Ethan Coen, and responsible for a long run of remarkable, sometimes brilliant movies that often touch on dark currents and comic elements, often in the same films. Perhaps not surprisingly, Joel Coen, who also wrote the screenplay and produced, makes a great match with the disturbing themes — murder, mayhem, greed, jealousy — at the heart of the story.
What does the oldest Coen brother bring to the Shakespeare party? For starters, there’s the casting, which is colorblind. Washington, always a welcome presence on the big and small screens, embodies all the egotism, arrogance and calculated, cold-blooded lust for power of the protagonist, as does Frances McDormand (aka the director’s wife) as the ever-scheming Lady MacBeth. The top-shelf ensemble also includes actors portraying King Duncan (Brendan Gleeson), his sons Malcolm (Harry Melling) and Donalbain (Matt Helm), MacBeth’s old pal Banquo (Bertie Carvel), MacDuff (Corey Hawkins) and Lady MacDuff (Moses Ingram). In a brief what’s-he-doing-here? appearance, Stephen Root plays a comic, drunken Porter.
Perhaps most striking is Kathryn Hunter. In a bit of cinematic sleight-of-hand, she portrays all three witches, rubber-limbed, grimacing and practically hissing as they bend themselves into impossible contortions. As the supernatural hag, three times over, Hunter is nearly as creepy as the stringy haired spectral girls commonly seen in Japanese horror flicks.
The biggest star of this MacBeth show, though, is the look and feel of the black-and-white film, shot by French cinematographer Bruno Belbonnel (who worked with the Coens on “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis”) in a nearly square aspect ratio on L.A. sound stages, with production design by Stefan Dechant (“Avatar,” “Jurassic Park”).
It’s all about the gorgeous play of shadows and light, played against cavernous spaces inside a castle that seems ghostly and practically empty; the visuals clearly reference German Expressionist films of the 1920s and early ’30s. Sheets of long, thin white curtains billow along long halls, dark shadows appear to catch some characters in the crosshairs, and weird, hallucinogenic sights — is that a dagger or a door handle? — appear and then suddenly vanish.
Coen’s film is characterized by a certain claustrophobic vibe, the better for viewers to focus on still-resonant dialogue and performances that make one wonder what it would be like to see this particular group of actors reprise their roles in the flesh and blood one day, on a Broadway stage. That’s not necessarily wishful thinking, given Coen’s recent “A Play is a Poem,” a collection of one-act plays that ran for a month in Los Angeles. Slated to hit New York in May 2020, it was postponed due to the Covid shutdowns. A boy can dream.
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