The tradition of film protagonists who pine for prime time glory has whisked away a portly Baltimore heroine with fabulous flair and hair to break bandstand barriers, a Brighton Beach widow to risk addiction en route to game show gains and a failed comedian to pursue his darkest impulses with a sinister smile on a late night broadcast. The isolated adolescent characters played by Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in Jane Shoenbrun’s psychological horror-drama I Saw the TV Glow (B-) dream of escape into a nostalgic supernatural girl power show to fight monsters of the week, but it’s unclear who’s the show-runner and if either is remotely in control of overcoming a series of traumas. Shoenbrun creates a luminous look for this movie, laced with ribbons of lavender haze and mesmerizing low budget creature effects, and a detailed backstory so fully fleshed out, you almost wish the show-within-the-show took center stage. As committed as both leads are to their roles, they bring similar ambivalent energy that doesn’t always fully enliven the pace but offer aching portraits of coming of age in a world of mixed signals. It’s a film full of creative ideas, many more fully rendered than others. A less than satisfactory final act fails to build on some of the most intriguing plot points, but the movie is overall an original with enough intrigue and whimsy to earn this mystery box a recommendation.
Denis Villeneuve brings IMAX-certified cameras to a knife fight and creates a picturesque panorama largely missing the joy of discovery so present in its predecessor as the director continues his interplanetary sci-fi saga in Dune: Part Two (B-). As the protagonist, Timothée Chalamet has grown into a more credible and physically impressive action hero this time around, and he’s paired nicely with Zandaya as he endeavors to be a man of the people on the desert planet known for its valuable spice and menacing sand worms. The first installment included lots of enjoyable palace intrigue and even some moments of sentiment and humor; part two is super-serious, even leaden at times, and it mainly meanders toward a showdown without introducing too many new locales, costumes or bags of tricks into the mix. Despite their pedigree, Christopher Walken and Florence Pugh don’t make much of an impression, but Austin Butler is definitely doing some sort of big swing as the big bad of this sequel; it seemed briefly promising he was going to breathe some new life into the ponderously paced second reel. The film is technically impressive though, with swirling vistas and majestic production design more than worthy of its somewhat underdeveloped themes about destiny and heroism. As a piece of cinema, it’s a wonder to behold with action sequences well blocked and the ante being upped a time or two, even if it just doesn’t land the ship like the first movie did. There were frankly some elements I preferred in the universally derided David Lynch adaptation. Villaneuve’s film is so gorgeously shot, it could have been a great silent movie, with two hours plus of splendid pageantry and Hans Zimmerman’s rousing music swelling before our eyes and ears. See it on the big screen, for sure, but I’m going to bring expectations down just a notch.
Available in limited theatres and Showtime on Demand. An A-24 film.
A tone poem of gorgeous atmosphere and production design, Kogonada’s futuristic After Yang (B) probes questions such as, “What would you do if an android who is a major part of your family becomes terminally ill?” It’s a quite lovely and contemplative film and a showcase for an understated Colin Farrell as the soft-spoken patriarch. Jodie Turner-Smith as the mother Justin H. Min as Yang the “techno sapien,” Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja as his sister and Haley Lu Richardson as a mysterious friend of the cyborg are all delights in quiet roles. The talented Sarita Choudhury stands out as a museum curator interested in immortalizing the memory banks of the unresponsive robot. There are some wonderful grace note sequences such a flashback of Farrell and Min discussing the indescribable bliss of a good tea, and there are pensive drives through modern cityscapes to bring dimension to the talky proceedings. For many it will be a quietly moving meditation on the mysteries of life while it may be a little too dramatically inert for others.
Welcome to sci-fi succession as director Denis Villeneuve unleashes a new Dune (titled onscreen as Dune: Part One) (A). The futuristic plot centers on political intrigue surrounding a rare natural resource on a desert planet and a protagonist who, despite featherweight appearance, may indeed be a messianic super-being with the capacity to unite warring factions of the universe. Timothée Chalamet is the aforementioned nebbish who rises to the occasion in both his acting and action; he is quite magnetic in the lead role. There’s also a charming trio of more traditional movie stars – Jason Mamoa, Oscar Isaac and Josh Brolin – present and accounted for in space scuffles of their own, and these guys bring great energy to their sequences. Rebecca Ferguson is also a highlight as the hero’s mother who teaches him the ways of a mythical magic. Absorbing from the get-go, the film overcomes some pacing awkwardness as it judiciously chronicles the first half of the book. The cinematography and effects are marvelous and fully transport viewers to this otherworld. There are rousing battles and intriguing revelations around every bend of the breathtaking planetary landscapes. The source material may be more than a half century old, but under the direction of a true visionary, this text certainly has some substantial spice left in it.
George Clooney directs and stars in The Midnight Sky (C+), an often frosty outer space slog with gorgeous visuals, an inert plot-line for most of its duration and a final act that almost rights the ship of all that came before. Clooney’s lone protagonist is a frail Arctic scientist who, along with a nearly mute child stowaway, must contact a crew of astronauts returning home from a Jupiter moon to catastrophe on a future earth. The action of this oddly paced odyssey occurs in fits and starts and is workmanlike, but the bifurcated drama rarely feels as ambitious as intended. A star-studded cast including Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo gets little interesting to do aside from a spontaneous third-act singalong and meteor shower adventure. The special effects provide some lovely spectacles to behold including some technological and lunar marvels and some all-too-human foibles with gravity amidst dueling stories in the North Pole and aboard the spacecraft. Themes about global/interplanetary cooperation were covered more successfully in The Martian, and adult/child survival dystopian stories were better in The Road, but some final moments of poignancy nearly rescue the film from weightlessness.
Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (B-) includes several moments of such unmitigated bliss that it’s a shame the full picture has a sloppy aesthetic, a cluttered and overlong story and utterly one-dimensional characters. It’s such a pop culture bonanza that it sometimes feels more like an incidental Comic-Con documentary than an actual feature film with a plot we’re supposed to relish. The intrepid director has a recent track record of rallying in the final sequences (“Didn’t you have a great time?”) but it’s a long slog cribbing plot elements of Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka, Tron and more to tell the futuristic story of a teen trying to unlock three clues in a virtual reality game to win a life-changing fortune against evil corporate raiders of their own lost arc. Tye Sheridan and Ben Mendelsohn are wasted in the roles of the central players, with only T.J. Miller and Olivia Cooke getting standout moments as a wry animated bounty hunter and a spry revolutionary, respectively. There’s a wall-to-wall sense of nostalgia that culminates in a horror movie homage that is by far the best sequence. Otherwise the CGI is ugly and overwhelming and the action hollow with an undeveloped emotional core. This film should have been a magical sensation, but its user experience needed a bit more polishing.
This mystical journey of meditation qualifies as a downward-facing dog. Despite tinges of uplift, Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (D+) is a folly from the get-go, an interminable bore of pretentious drivel wrapped in a semi-shimmery package. Featuring bland line delivery rivaling George Lucas’s intergalactic prequels, inconsistent effects that miss the mark of even sub-Krull intentions and a meandering plot overestimating the cinematic drawing power of mathematical mind tricks, this sci-fi fantasy makes Disney’s similarly askew Tomorrowland look like a real people mover. Out-of-her-depth child actress Storm Reid can take no shelter or solace in the company of her adult co-stars as she is visited by three spirit guides (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling, each vying for “most cloying”) to help rescue her astrophysicist dad (Chris Pine, stripped of his usual charm) from interplanetary exile. Only child actor Deric McCabe shows some signs of life as a strange and sometimes sassy li’l bro, and frankly a little of him goes a long way. This film is ultimately a chore of the first order, tripping over its own tesseracts and leaning into a laborious labyrinth with very few joys aside from occasional Sade music. Substituting new-age banter for action or substance, the film feels like a fever dream by Enya, and I just wanted to sail away. Bottom line: Know that you’re special, and you had the power in you all along; and you can spend two hours saving your world in a different way.
Writer/director Alex Garland’s Annihilation (B) is largely an incredibly absorbing sci-fi thriller about an army of women who venture behind a quarantined force field to resolve the enigma of the atmospheric abnormality going on inside. Natalie Portman is solid as the former military biology professor with a secret who discovers many of the chilling mutations and mysteries within “the shimmer.” The story is often hypnotic and the effects impressive, but the movie runs into some final act troubles. Some of the key characters are also underwritten, and there are myriad missed opportunities to more clearly articulate the film’s thesis, involving our cellular imprint toward self-destruction. The film is still smarter than your standard issue adventure, and like Christopher Nolan’s similarly ambitious Interstellar also overextends its reach.
Alexander Payne pushes more buttons than audiences may expect in his new human miniaturization movie; it’s par for the course for the midwestern provocateur. This skilled writer/director blends physical pratfalls, witty wordplay, social satire, wicked parody and almost every conceivable flavor of comedy for the deliriously inventive and surprisingly highbrow Downsizing (A-). Matt Damon is in full sad-sack mode as a nebbishy Nebraskan hoping to please his materialistic wife (Kristen Wiig) by signing them up for an experimental planned community in which citizens are shrunk to live in dollhouse-sized McMansions in a sunny country club suburbia called “Leisureland.” Christoph Waltz shines as a wee rogue defying the new community’s evolving rules, and Hong Chau is a revelation as a compact freedom fighter and humanitarian heroine. Both get absolutely delicious dialogue commenting on class issues prevalent in the upstairs and downstairs of even the tiniest of houses. Two of the film’s themes – to look closer and to take good care of the part of the world that you can affect – are developed to staggering impact. A few central plot points are jettisoned or careen off course a bit as the stakes are raised beyond simply the fates of the film’s pint-sized protagonists. There’s so much more to this comedy/drama/sci-fi hybrid than meets the eye, and it is heartily recommended for the intellectually adventurous.
Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (B-) continues the slow-burn neo-noir dystopian atmosphere of Ridley Scott’s 1982 predecessor and flips the script on some of the motifs about androids (“replicants”) being able to approximate human emotions. Handsomely produced with mesmerizing imagery and endowed with a good-looking cast of characters sorting out future L.A. life a few decades after the events of the original, the film succeeds in moments of discovery and drags when presenting indulgent sequences of exposition. This time Ryan Gosling is the “blade runner” (rogue robot hunter), and the way his character is written doesn’t do him many favors. Harrison Ford is back in what amounts to a brief cameo and doesn’t bring much either. There’s a subplot about family secrets, a nice bit about how embedded memories are made and some twisty surprises that up the ante, but the film definitely short circuits in the final act. The first film was an efficient mystery and action thriller. It was ponderous too but delivered the goods on action, which this installment does all too infrequently during its near three-hour running time. This sequel looks spectacular on the big screen. I just wished it dreamed with a little more electricity.
If you’ve ever felt like the late-night denizens on a bender in your neighborhood bar or Uber pool could be as destructive to urban life as Godzilla, Mothra or a Giant Robot, you’ll find comfort in Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal (B-), a hit or miss sci-fi fantasy with grander repercussions than are actually explored on screen. Anne Hathaway plays against type as a flighty NYC writer perpetually experiencing alcohol induced blackouts. Coinciding with her rural reboot to her childhood hometown, a worldwide panic breaks out with a gigantic monster appearing in Korea, and our protagonist and the creature just may be connected. Hathaway solidly anchors a far fetched and somewhat plot hole laden experiment with a tinge of a theme about the ripple effects of domestic squabbles and their unintended consequences. It’s a good thing the film’s undercurrents lean a bit on the feminist since the men in the ensemble including Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens and Tim Blake Nelson are fairly dreadful. The effects are impressive for what seems like a cult indie. Ultimately, it wasn’t quite an OMG when I was hoping it would at least be a BFG.
There are few phenomena more fascinating in Hollywood than a sophomore slump. And for Norwegian director Morten Tyldum, who was Oscar nominated for his first English language feature (the brilliant biopic The Imitation Game), the fact that his follow-up flail is Passengers (D) must be some cosmic poetic justice of miscalculation. In terms of extremes, there’s rarely been as handsome a physical production – all art deco parlors, digital automats and infinity swimming pools overlooking a galaxy – so sullied by such a misbegotten story. (Note: I’m not sure if something is a spoiler if it’s laid out in a movie’s first twenty minutes, but this film is different than advertised; so read on at your peril). The tale of a lonely mechanic (Chris Pratt) accidentally awakened from hypersleep and adrift as the only man left in a spacecraft on a near century-long voyage who wakes up a sleeping beauty (Jennifer Lawrence) to keep him company knowing full well that reanimating her is sentencing her to death has to be the worst Meet Cute in the history of cinematic love stories. Pratt employs his goofball everyman humor in an attempt to wrestle likability from an impossibly written character. His unfortunate portrayal is akin to Bill Cosby making his Pudding Pop funny-face while readying a shiny platter of roofies. Lawrence fares only slightly better as an author who gets more than she bargained for; after Joylast year, we’ve come to expect this prized actress to cook up a holiday turkey. Unsure of whether it’s an Adam and Eve story with the betrayal placed before the couple could even discuss it or Titanic with rohypnol instead of the blue jewel, Tyldum’s “very special episode” riff on sci-fi is a colossal catastrophe of an idea. The two to three times when the movie’s tone careens into romantic montage or adventurous befuddlement are rare respites in a tale not unlike Dr. Lecter’s drug-hazed final act of seduction in Hannibal. Careers will survive this, and the two principal matinee idols are gorgeously filmed, but Passengers isn’t what space pioneers meant when they promised to boldly go where no one has gone before.