Without a consistent writer or director with a tangible style (a James Gunn or a Taika Waititi, perhaps), watching the movie is an exercise in identifying all the familiar screenwriting parts as they’re pulled from the shelf. Meanwhile, we wait patiently (or not) for Holland’s character to acquire the lived-in quality that propelled the games’ strong reputation.
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The people behind the scenes are the same, but also different. Writer/director Lana Wachowski emerged as a trans icon (along with her sister Lilly), and has made a sequence of sometimes fascinating, sometimes puzzling work since the initial Matrix movies. Stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss have (oh so subtly) aged, enough that Reeves was able to fully revitalize his own career in the intervening years. What could The Matrix Resurrections do to remain relevant?
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No Time to Die proves to be one of the most surprising turns for the franchise since Casino Royale itself. And while it deconstructs and redefines the Bond character in notable ways, it also retains many of the touchstones we crave.
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Copshop is a cops-and-criminals thriller with a funny streak that features a number of recognizable talents: Gerard Butler and Frank Grillo onscreen, and Joe Carnahan behind the camera. But more than anyone, it’s co-lead Alexis Louder who grabs your attention.
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A young man must find a way out of a human trafficking operation in São Paulo, in the new film by Brazilian-American filmmaker Alexandre Moratto.
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Try as he might, Dumont’s film rarely feels like anything other than a perfume commercial grafted to an “old man yells at cloud” essay.
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The new film, despite featuring a higher budget, a recognizable cast, and the buzz of the 2021 festival circuit, fails to add meaningful value to the original telling of the story. Chastain and her co-star Andrew Garfield (as Jim Bakker) put in awards-calibre performances, but the screenplay and direction feel sloppy and overburdened by biopic clichés.
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The movie obviously revels in depicting the mayhem of a GTA-style game, and constructs elaborate set pieces around game physics, ridiculous weapons and items, and the grinding that some players undertake to level up. But there’s roughly a 80/20 accuracy split; the bulk of the observations line up, but every so often there’s a painfully awkward trope.
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The Green Knight is undoubtedly a slow-moving film. It sweeps over Gawain as he traverses the misty, almost post-apocalyptic landscape. There are frequent suggestions of bloody battles happening around him, though we don’t see them on screen. It’s as though Gawain is always too late for the action, and that he’s running out of time to become a real knight before the world forgets about chivalry and epic quests.
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If the season finale of Loki, on Disney+, is any indication, the show is finally coalescing around its own approach to the currents of time. However, its direction is very reminiscent of two other well-established sci-fi series, Doctor Who and Lost. At best, Loki features a carefree, don’t-worry-about-it attitude, and at worst, it’s mostly characters sitting around, questioning who should get to be the man or woman behind the curtain.
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Steven Soderbergh’s latest film, available on HBO Max, feels like the product of the filmmaker getting together with some frequent collaborators to knock out a film just because they enjoy it, not unlike a jam session. The result isn’t particularly cutting-edge or fresh, but there’s something to be said for when creatives meet up to bounce ideas around.
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Muscular, many-limbed and possessing tentacles that eject bullet-like spines, the so-called Whitespikes are instantly believable as a species that could overrun the Earth. So it’s a shame that the movie that introduces them feels distinctly familiar, as if constructed from pieces of other, better sci-fi movies.
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To be fair, Luca isn’t up there with Pixar’s recent list-topping achievements like Up, Inside Out or Coco. It takes some of the premise of The Little Mermaid, pairs it with a mid-20th century Italian setting, and renders it with their characteristic industry-leading visuals. It may not leave you sobbing, but it’s still an easy recommendation.
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We might expect the rest of the movie to focus on Hannah coming face to face with another fire, and learning to overcome her misplaced guilt. This is a Taylor Sheridan movie, though. So in the tradition of movies he’s written (Sicario, Hell or High Water) and directed (Wind River), it needs to have some human evil on par with the natural menace.
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The script is too thin to really grapple with the moral dilemma. We get a few sequences where the characters individually break down due to the stress, but the drama never builds to the wrenching height that the situation demands. Maybe you can chalk that up to the immense training and professionalism that these characters would exemplify, but it did leave me a bit cold.
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