I've reviewed films for more than 35 years. Current movie reviews of new theatrical releases and streaming films are added weekly to the Silver Screen Capture movie news site. Many capsule critiques originally appeared in expanded form in my syndicated Lights Camera Reaction column.
Antoine Fuqua’s relentlessly violent slavery survival film Emancipation (C) both showcases and demands endurance. It is tonally out of balance, caught between being a prestige piece about a grim time in American history and an exploitative action film. Will Smith is effective in an underwritten role, and the film’s tropes and characters don’t illuminate much fresh light on their subject. Fuqua’s monochromatic cinematography is often expansive and expressive but paints its images over a hollow story. It spends long passages with dogs chasing escaped slaves who must brave forests and swamps and brush fires in an attempted journey back to family. Ben Foster has the thankless task of antagonist in a nightmarish work that doesn’t give anyone much of a showcase. There’s an important and well-intentioned story shrouded in the film, but Fuqua goes about telling it with little new or nuanced.
The future in plastics once predicted in the ‘60s comes full circle in Noah Baumbach’s absurdist ‘80s-set dark comedy White Noise (C), in which airborne toxic events, misbegotten drug deals and the power of suggestion in consumerist culture swirl in the whirling dervish of a day-glo college town. This is far from linear or logical stuff, and it only works in spurts despite lots of creativity. Based on Don DeLillo’s notoriously unadaptable postmodern novel, this go-for-broke movie introduces all sorts of intriguing ideas which are equal parts fascinating and face palm worthy. Adam Driver is the assured oddity at the center of the proceedings as an eccentric professor of Hitler studies, surrounded domestically by a bunch of loquacious, precocious offspring from multiple marriages. His current wife played by a wryly funny Greta Gerwig is largely defined by a penne pasta meets poodle inspired haircut and a possible secret. Another talky teacher friend played with relish by Don Cheadle harbors awe for Elvis and supermarkets. The plot is a series of strange events, some that linger too lovingly long on their source material roots. The ensemble’s commitment to a hilariously heightened vibe is admirable though and makes for an uneven but readymade cult sensation, a bonkers love child of Robert Altman, Steven Spielberg and Kurt Vonnegut. Perhaps the film should be accompanied RockyHorror style with a survival kit baggie of edibles. If you make it to the end, enjoy a closing credit musical sequence that’s somewhat more thematically cogent than the feature overstaying its welcome preceding it.
A new biopic spans three octaves and a major second with a wide range of major music hits and a double dose of love interests. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody (B-), directed by Kasi Lemmons, features a lovely titular performance by Naomi Ackie and a paint-by-numbers chronicle of life events that only occasionally transcends the Wikipedia entry of same. Nafeesa Williams is engaging as Robyn Crawford, Whitney’s former girlfriend and assistant, and the usually reliable Ashton Sanders is fine in a fleeting and underwritten part as husband Bobby Brown. Stanley Tucci fares much better with some authentic moments as producer Clive Davis opposite the singing superstar. Lemmons does strong work re-creating some of the most triumphant musical moments of Houston’s oeuvre and is a bit less successful in tracing her Icarus-style flirtation with dangerous drugs and relationships cutting short the iconic voice of a generation. Although she doesn’t resemble her real life character and lip syncs her vocals, Ackie is very believable in the role and is one of the very best elements of the movie, barreling past plot holes with finesse. The director’s reenactment of some live singing moments stretches out the film’s run time and short-changes several intriguing subplots. Still, if you go to the film for performances and songs, they’re there in all their entertaining glory along with sequins and sweatsuits, and it’s a highly watchable if not all that original true story. As a tribute to Miss Houston, it’s not all right, but it’s okay.
Flickers of self-reflection and self-loathing dot the terrain of Alejandro Iñárritu’s Mexico-set semi-autobiographical seriocomedy Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (C-) as it leisurely meanders through its bloated running time. There are many ambitious ideas and a few lovely and dreamlike visual flourishes, but this film rarely transcends its bursts of inspiration. Daniel Giménez Cacho is a stand-in for the director, who is often quite passive in his own morality tale. Just as this tepid protagonist is caught between the worlds of his Mexican homeland and the Hollywood/America where he has immigrated, the film alternates between meta realism and smug fantasies. It’s all quite self-indulgent and mostly hangs like a punishing squawking albatross. The film feels a little bored with its own gimmickry and may have the same effect on audiences.
Director James Cameron misses the mark again with gorgeous visuals at the service of a subpar screenplay in the action adventure Avatar: The Way of Water (C). Motion capture performers Sam Worthington and Zoë Saldaña as elongated blue creatures do lots of swimming as they endeavor to protect their family and the planet of Pandora from pesky human invaders. The first hour introduces their sprawling family, too many to much care about; the second feels like a nice visit to an aquarium as one of their teens communes with a large sea creature; and then there’s a frenzied finale of a showdown with battleships and annoying kids used as bait. Much of the conflict could have been saved by a better babysitter, and nobody needed a human character named “Spider” or a teen voiced by Sigourney Weaver. Still, the undersea vistas are often quite stunning. Perhaps this director, who has made many great movies to his credit, has a future in screen savers. I’ll save you three plus hours: “save the whales.”
Top left to right bottom): Aftersun, RRR, Top Gun: Maverick, The Woman King, The Batman, The Fabelmans
It was actually a pretty stellar year for movies for those who followed the art form. My populist proclivities are dotted with a few indie gems throughout the mix. It was a solid year for studio franchise films, twisted horror and dark comedy on streaming services. I’m still catching up on some international films and documentaries and haven’t seen Women Talking yet. Critical darlings Triangle of Sadness and the Avatar sequel didn’t make my top 25, nor did curiosities I wanted to adore such as Crimes of the Future, but lots of other surprising titles did. All are reviewed here on the website as well as on Letterboxd.
1 Aftersun– an emotional drama about a woman’s memory of her last vacation with her dad, told partially in home movies
2 RRR – two legendary Indian revolutionaries fight back against British colonialists in the 1920s in an action musical extravaganza
3The Batman– a caped detective ventures into Gotham City’s underworld when a sadistic killer leaves behind a trail of cryptic clues
4The Woman King – an all-female army of warriors protects its African kingdom from foreign invasions in the 1800s
5 Top Gun: Maverick – a top Navy aviator confronts the ghosts of his past as he trains new pilots for a dangerous mission
13 Elvis – a rock and roll legend ascends despite the machinations of his corrupt manager
14Three Thousand Years of Longing – an intellectual gets more than she bargained for including fantastical tales when a djinn offers her three wishes
15 Everything Everywhere All At Once – a creative fantasy in which an ordinary woman must traverse the multiverse to reconcile with her family
16Cha Cha Real Smooth – an aimless twentysomething learns life lessons from a mother and daughter he meets on the bar and bat mitzvah DJ circuit
17Bones and All – two young cannibals in love travel cross country in search of safety
18 Prey– the hunt is on as the “Predator” made famous in past action movies faces off with a First Nations tribe
19The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent – an actor must channel his iconic and beloved characters when a birthday party abroad becomes the scene of espionage
20 Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio – a lonely woodworker builds himself a son in this stop-motion animated film set in Fascist Italy
21The Black Phone – an abducted 1970s suburban teenager must plot his escape from a psychotic man called The Grabber in this psychological thriller
22 X – a film shoot becomes the site of a Texas massacre as an elderly couple doesn’t take kindly to the antics taking place on their land in this taut horror movie
23I Want You Back– two recently dumped strangers team up to sabotage the new relationships of their exes in a reverse romantic comedy
24Do Revenge – two high school outsiders devise a plan to avenge the act of one another’s rivals in a candy-colored dark comedy
25 Barbarian – a young woman discovers the rental home she booked is already occupied by a stranger, but that’s just the start of a twisty tale of terror
This is the story about how one creative community rebounded from the biggest existential threat to its way of life: the chronicle of how Broadway survived 551 dark days benched by COVID-19. Capturing the full ecosystem from producers and performers to the folks who launder the costumes and staff the venues, Amy Rice’s documentary Broadway Rising (B) is a tribute to resilience and a stirring summons to the best in all of us. Rice cleverly accesses multiple theatre community personalities and perspectives to trace the time period between the shutdown and reopening. Some people passed away, some cope in unexpected ways and others still found a whole new way to give back to their adopted stage families and others in need. Interviews with actors and artisans such as Patti LuPone and Lynn Nottage help knit the tale from a true behind the scenes vantage point, with performers from popular shows such as Wicked, Waitress, Hamilton and Hadestown drawing in a populist POV . Rice deftly weaves vital issues of social justice and inclusion into the piece and finds apt intersections to propel her central storyline. The idiom dictionary for the phrase, “the show must go on” would undoubtedly point directly to this film.
Stinging in the reign over his cinematic kingdom, “provoc-auteur” Damien Chazelle delivers his famed hometown of synthetic dreams a tart tragicomic valentine box filled with live grenades in the audacious multi-character drama Babylon (B+). This is a movie so singular and sprawling, with so much budget spent on bodily fluids and bacchanalia, that it’s bound to attract polarizing reactions. A trio of Tinseltown’s talkie-era troubadours – an old guard swashbuckler played by Brad Pitt and up-and-comers Margot Robbie and Diego Calva as a starlet and studio gatekeeper, respectively – chews and gets chewed up by the scenery in this occasionally bloated but most often blissful circus maximalist. It’s so completely overstuffed that at one point nobody realizes the elephant in the room is a literal pachyderm. Chazelle creatively crafts an amped-up Wild West moviemaking fantasia and whisks viewers up into an absurdist mile-a-minute travelogue through the underbelly of a mad, mad dreamworld; just when you think he’s dug deep into the city’s noxious center, you recognize he’s just getting started. The voyeuristic whirling-dervish of the camera consistently discovers playful details in its panoramic production designs, finding whimsy even in some of the film’s most uneven passages. Through the slyly observant lens of a filmmaker with lots on his mind, this full and frantic epic wields its poison pen with a brass band syncopation boldly matched by a jazz-infused Justin Hurwitz score . The anachronistic screenwriting about the haves and have nots is hit or miss, but memorable monologues glide like a heat-seeking missile to the luminous Robbie who delivers a spectacular supernova of an unhinged performance. Pitt and Calva are also standout gems at either end of the cynicism spectrum in a crackling ensemble. The film’s more than three hours of running time highlights the evolution of its characters from fresh celebrity flesh to jaded stars with scars. The film’s rumination on the origins of a sometimes scandalous art form is sexy, shrill and everything in between and ultimately holds up its sparkling mirror ball to reflect a bit about that Hollywood flicker that has become resident in all of our collective aspirations.
The power of memory helps guide the filmmaker’s camera in a profound new motion picture. A modern woman reflects on the shared joy and private sadness of a vacation she took with her father two decades prior in the emotionally affecting drama Aftersun (A+), directed by first-time feature filmmaker Charlotte Wells. Flashbacks real and imagined, plus snippets of camcorder reels, fill in the gaps as the female protagonist tries to reconcile the dad she knew and the man she didn’t. Paul Mescal plays the young father and Frankie Corio his 11-year-old daughter who talk and play at a Turkish beach resort in the late 1990s. Beneath the surface of sightseeing, snorkeling, billiards and pranks, there’s an omnipresent melancholy and mystery undergirding the lively events of a hopeful holiday. The movie juxtaposes a coming of age story in which the little girl experiences friendships and awakenings with a poignant, intimate family portrait of a protective and sometimes idealized father. Mescal is a force of nature in the role, seizing moments of tenderness and pangs of desperation. Corio is funny and bright and hits all the right notes as the pint-sized daughter who idolizes him. Wells captures the beauty of the relationship amidst gorgeous scenery and realistic encounters. Her film leaves an indelible impression and will be a balm and reflection for anyone nostalgic for bygone relationships.
Director Matthew Warchus adapts his stage show of Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical (C+) with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but those who endure it in its entirety may find some simple pleasures scattered in its mix. First, Alisha Weir is wonderful in the title role, a precocious little girl unloved by her parents who escapes into books and braves a sinister school. Her lovely singing voice and power of telekinesis help her thwart an evil steampunk headmistress played by a committed Emma Thompson in a pancake of prosthetics. As a sympathetic teacher, Lashana Lynch is endearing and has a lovely singing voice. The filming style and scrambled tone don’t do the film’s songs any favors, and the story gets bogged down in flashbacks and a moribund schoolyard confrontation. The scope of the visual effects could fit inside Harry Potter’s broom closet bedroom, the spry highjinks rarely take flight and the stakes remain strangely inert. But we don’t get spunky female heroines very often, so there’s likely something here to entertain legions of daughters.
In parts languid and lyrical, Darren Aranofsky’s The Whale (B) takes its sweet time to arrive at its cathartic thesis, but patient viewers will be rewarded by floodgates of emotion. Brendan Fraser is dexterous and expressive as Charlie, a 600-pound man attempting to reconcile with a broken family as he contemplates a life that has become adrift. The cavalcade of people in Charlie’s orbit include a memorable Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton as his estranged daughter and wife, respectively; Ty Simpkins as a mysterious missionary; and Hong Chau as the protagonist’s friend and caregiver. Incidentally, Chau is a wonderful foil and purveyor of some of the best lines of dialogue. The director films most of the action in the confines of a claustrophobic apartment and in stark close-up. His work is a glorified character study with a few additional sparks stoked by familial and religious conflict. Aronofsky and Fraser generate intense empathy and an indelible central character in the complex Charlie, alternately optimistic and at sea. It’s a soulful drama that will be sure to spark discussion.
The stop-motion animated musical fantasy Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (B+) co-directed by the titular moviemaking wunderkind and Mark Gustafson is not only a gorgeous creation to behold but deepens a timeless tale’s themes about the father-son bond. Set in 1930s Fascist Italy, the film’s every frame reflects meticulous craft and intrigue; and the sentimental story comes to life in unexpected and lyrical ways. The directors start pulling the heartstrings immediately in the prologue by depicting time spent between lonely woodcarver Gepetto and the son he lost before willing a merry marionette to life. David Bradley and Gregory Mann are solid in the father-son voiceover roles, and Ewan McGregor as a charming cricket is a spry standout in an ensemble including Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett and Christoph Waltz. The movie takes viewers to some familiar and exotic locations, with just enough change of venue to keep an oft-told story fresh. Alexander Desplat’s score is quite lovely too except his full-out songs which are more wooden than the protagonist puppet. The fable outstays its welcome a bit, and the title character could have used a central nervous system stimulant; but it’s largely a technical marvel with solid heart.
