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Tag: Drama movies

  • Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

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    Mike Etienne and D’Johé Kouadio in Dao by Alain Gomis. © 2026 – Les Films du Worso – Srab Films – Yennenga Productions – Nafi Films – Telecine Bissau Produções – Canal+ Afrique

    Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.

    Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.

    It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.

    Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.

    The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.

    Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.

    DAO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Alain Gomis
    Written by: Alain Gomis
    Starring: Katy Correa, D’Johé Kouadio, Samir Guesmi, Mike Etienne, Nicolas Gomis
    Running time: 185 min.

    There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.

    Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.

    However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.

    And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.

    Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.

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    Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • The Best Documentaries of 2025

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    The documentary often gets a bad rap. Maybe you watched a few boring (or prescriptive) ones in school, in which talking heads drone on about what you ought to think or feel. However, despite its reputation as constrained retelling—emphasis on the “telling”—the medium also offers storytellers practically limitless formal flexibility, and the power to show us reality in dazzling new hues. 

    This was a year of numerous stunning nonfiction releases, as well as many festival premieres of works yet to be distributed. When viewing them in unison, it’s clear that the medium’s stylistic and thematic ingenuity could not be in better hands. These 25 films from 2025, hailing from all across the globe, represent the very best of what documentary cinema has to offer. 

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • Screening at NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s ‘Is This Thing On?’

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    Will Arnett. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

    Bradley Cooper’s third feature after Maestro and A Star is Born—the divorce-and-stand-up dramedy Is This Thing On?—departs from the musical focus of his previous efforts but, like them, comes achingly close to being great. The actor-director is three-for-three when it comes to films about art and artistry that just come up short, while displaying enough thoughtful flourishes to convince you he’ll create a masterpiece down the line. Sadly, today is not that day, but the result remains perfectly entertaining.

    The story, penned by Cooper, Mark Chappell, and the movie’s lead actor will arnett, begins with dour finance man Alex Novak (Arnett) and his anxious homemaker wife Tess (Laura Dern) mutually deciding to separate. It’s a spontaneous moment seemingly informed by lengthy consideration off-screen, and while this framing provides little context as to their reasons, the movie opens up space for both characters to re-litigate their relationship in some unique and enticing ways. The couple’s ten-year-old boys readily accept the amicable separation, even if it means splitting their time between Tess in their suburban home and Alex in his new bachelor pad in Manhattan. However, in order to cope with the unexpected grief of the situation, Alex finds himself—at first by happenstance and then by intent—at various open mic nights at New York’s Comedy Cellar, letting his troubles pour out of him in the form of some decidedly average stand-up. It’s an experiment he keeps close to his chest, like a dirty secret, the gradual reveal of which makes for some fun situational comedy.

    Cooper and cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s camera remains tethered to Alex’s uncomfortable close-ups for most of his sets as he finds ways to turn his impending divorce into fodder for his act and learns the ropes from more seasoned comics in scenes filled with snappy wit. All the while, he and Tess remain in each other’s orbit and gradually navigate the awkward complications of remaining close despite going their separate ways. At first, Is This Thing On? plays like the tale of an artist discovering his hidden talent, but while Alex’s routine gestures at catharsis, it seldom helps him address his avoidant personality—or the lingering tensions that prevent him and Tess from figuring out their new dynamic. After all, men will literally [insert hobby here] instead of going to therapy.

    A man and a woman sit facing each other in a dimly lit wooden room, appearing to argue or have an intense conversation on a bed.A man and a woman sit facing each other in a dimly lit wooden room, appearing to argue or have an intense conversation on a bed.
    Will Arnett and Laura Dern. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2025 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

    The supporting characters around the couple weave in and out of focus, between Alex’s loving parents (Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds) and a litany of married pals, including Cooper himself as a floundering actor named Balls. Unfortunately, these B-plots tend to feel more intrusive than informative, especially when Cooper keeps the camera running—often on himself—for extended periods that reveal little about the characters and move the story even less. Still, they’re idiosyncratic enough to be amusing, even if Cooper could afford to leave some of his riffing on the cutting room floor.

    However, when Will and Tess are the movie’s focus, there’s no end to its audiovisual delights. Cooper moves between scenes with furious momentum; one uproarious transition in particular makes literal the idea of bringing domestic woes to the stage, while James Newberry’s jazzy score creates numerous anxious crescendos at every turn. His commitment to capturing drama in real time yields engaging and side-splitting dialogue scenes, where the camera—although it oscillates noticeably between its leads without cutting away—affords his actors the chance to dig deep into the uncertainties underlying their confident, personable façades. These are polite masks they wear before one another, even during pleasant interactions, if it means never letting slip that they might blame themselves for their breakup. But as Alex explores stand-up and Tess tries to get back to her former career as a volleyball coach (with the help of an acquaintance played naturalistically by former NFL quarterback Peyton Manning), the duo also explores a complicated friends-with-benefits dynamic, while the question of whether they’ll ever admit their faults to themselves—let alone each other—continues to loom.

    IS THIS THING ON? ★★★ (3/4 stars)
    Directed by: Bradley Cooper
    Written by: Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Mark Chappell
    Starring: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, Bradley Cooper, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds
    Running time: 120 mins.

    The thorny evolution of the couple’s relationship speaks to an artistic desire to solve some kind of riddle that has no easy answer. Cooper and Arnett have both been through divorces themselves, and the movie captures vignettes of reality in energetic spurts, especially in isolated moments where the lead characters grow more worried, frustrated, or aggrieved, sometimes all at once. As a performance piece, Is This Thing On? is unimpeachable, and results in surprising despondency from Arnett and remarkable work from Dern, whose silent reactions and introspections speak louder than words. However, the adrenaline of the movie’s drama tends to wane the longer it goes on without a real objective in mind. It’s a film that ultimately has too many open questions without the dramatic rigor to justify them, even when its plot wraps up neatly (albeit too quickly and conveniently).

    In a broader sense, one has to wonder if Cooper has taken criticisms of his preceding work to heart. “No one wants an Oscar as badly as Bradley Cooper,” wrote Alex Abad-Santos for Vox, in a piece that also refers to him as a “try-hard.” It’s just one of several such sentiments that tend to accompany his writer-director-actor-producer (and occasionally singer) ventures, although this time, he’s mostly removed himself from the equation on screen and diverted his focus away from music altogether. This is unfortunately at odds with the kind of visual verve he usually brings to his movies. I also wrote in 2023 that he should just direct a musical already, a sentiment that holds true here as well, given how purposefully he moves his camera around each performer, creating enrapturing rhythms even when the movie’s other pieces don’t necessarily fit.

    I tend to disagree with assessments like Abad-Santos’s, given how much of Cooper’s output is laced with emotional sincerity, whether or not his end goal is some intimate emotional purging or simply winning a trophy. Then again, in the intensely rendered but chaotic A Star Is Born, the more cogent but reserved Maestro, and now the more focused but less ambitious Is This Thing On?—all tales of artists finding themselves by opening up their veins and showing audiences what pours out—is there really a difference between the desire for catharsis and major accolades? Cooper’s latest is clearly the output of someone who has been through personal anguish, and like Alex Novak, he attempts to use his pain as the basis for not just something healing but something hilarious, albeit something deeply imperfect, too.

    Screening at NYFF: Bradley Cooper’s ‘Is This Thing On?’

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • Screening at Venice: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’

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    A rushed follow-through leaves the film’s mere 105 minutes feeling somewhat purposeless in the grand scheme of things. Courtesy Venice Film Festival

    There’s something to be said about movies that are just good enough, especially those that refashion real events into cinematic junk food. It is, however, hard not to be disappointed when one such work comes from Gus Van Sant, which makes Dead Man’s Wire a frustrating experience despite its climactic vigor. The tale of a disgruntled Hoosier who takes a rich man hostage in 1977, the film re-creates the lengthy standoff in immense visual detail but rarely probes beneath the surface of its colorful characters and relegates any sense of tension or intrigue to its climactic scenes.

    Van Sant has made several biopics (or pseudo-biopics) involving American gun violence, from the Palme d’Or-winning school shooter drama Elephant (2003) to the Oscar-winning gay rights drama Milk (2008). After decades of doing so, any artist is likely to lose their fascination with the subject, given how it’s ground to a standstill politically. And yet, the director presses on despite this, crafting a film where the threat of pulling a trigger is rarely riveting and even verges on doltish at times, as troubled Indianapolis resident Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) tethers a wire to himself, his shotgun, and his wealthy would-be victim Richard Hall (Dacre Montgomery), in a kind of janky proto-Saw trap set to go off if the police intervene. But while the drama seldom feels zealous or threatening, it’s underscored by disappointment and disillusionment, the kind that has driven the weary Kiritsis to hold Hall at gunpoint.

    DEAD MAN’S WIRE ★★1/2 (2.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Gus Van Sant
    Written by:  Austin Kolodney
    Starring:
    Bill Skarsgård, Dacre Montgomery, Colman Domingo, Al Pacino, Cary Elwes, Myha’la
    Running time: 105 mins.

    Whatever Van Sant’s feelings about this kind of subject matter may have once been, he appears to now translate them through a lens of sheer exhaustion. “Here,” the movie gestures wearily. “Another one of these. Pew pew.” It is, on one hand, fascinating to watch a film whose director seems fed up with his own characters and with the very premise of being driven to gun violence while fashioning oneself into a martyr. And yet, Van Sant’s Taxi Driver-esque tale (by way of Fargo; his delusional anti-hero is surprisingly polite) lives in the body of a based-on-real-events saga without embodying the reality from which it draws.

    Kiritsis, like Van Sant, is methodical, and the character responds to each of his plans going awry with a scrappy backup ploy (and a backup to each backup). This results in him kidnapping Hall from the fancy offices of his family mortgage company instead of his elderly father (an underutilized Al Pacino), who happens to be on vacation, and taking Hall to his cramped apartment as a number of policemen—with whom he happens to be friends—roll their eyes while in pursuit. Kiritsis’ motives are gradually revealed, and his demands involve apologies and restitution. His public declarations over the TV and radio establish how heroically he sees himself, so it’s no surprise that he foolishly believes the world to be entirely on his side, to the point that he thinks he’s in no danger of being arrested once things are all said and done.

    It’s all very interesting on paper. The oddball case makes you wonder whether a crime so idiosyncratic really transpired, and the performances do a great job of selling the oddity of it all. Skarsgård, although he taps into Kiritsis’ wounded-animal nature and occasional snappiness, is a treat to watch in the moments he dials back and acts completely casually, as though trying to convince Hall he’s approachable despite holding a 12-gauge Winchester to his neck. Montgomery, meanwhile, eschews the usual charisma for which he’s cast and makes himself physically meek and small, embodying a sniveling desperation that, on occasion, makes Kiritsis’ grievances seem worth considering.

    However, Van Sant never pushes Dead Man’s Wire in either of these two directions and instead lets it wallow in a casual middle ground. The unfolding action is never farcical enough to make the film satirical or outright funny, but it’s also never imbued with enough historical gravity to truly matter. Snapshot re-creations of known photos and news footage, and the presence of locally popular field reporters and radio hosts (played by Myha’la and Colman Domingo, respectively) seek to clarify the film’s reality, but these characters end up bit players in its opaque dramatic fabric rather than becoming living, breathing people crossing paths with an extraordinary, potentially violent scenario. The bigger picture, the moving pieces, and the various plans and strategies to save Hall never fade into view.

    When it comes time for the standoff to end, the questions of how it’ll wrap up, who’ll survive, and which somewhat personable character will be forced to pull the trigger grant Dead Man’s Wire a temporary intensity. This last hurrah isn’t quite “too little too late,” but its rushed follow-through leaves the film’s mere 105 minutes feeling somewhat purposeless in the grand scheme of things. It’s a tale with no purpose beyond letting viewers know, with a bemused cadence, that something quirky once happened in Indianapolis and that it could’ve been much more destructive—and perhaps much more enrapturing—than it really was.

    More from Venice:

    Screening at Venice: Gus Van Sant’s ‘Dead Man’s Wire’

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    Siddhant Adlakha

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  • ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Heartfelt, Full of Pain, Laced With Humor and Remarkable

    ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Heartfelt, Full of Pain, Laced With Humor and Remarkable

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    Kieran Culkin and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

    The Jewish tradition of placing stones on the grave markers of the deceased as a form of respect and remembrance becomes a central animating force in A Real Pain, the new film written, directed and starring Jesse Eisenberg. While visiting Poland with a Holocaust tour group, cousins David and Benji (Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, respectively) place stones on one of the markers at the country’s oldest gravesites; they try it again at the front entrance of the home where their beloved grandmother grew up, until they are alerted in brusque Polish by a concerned neighbor that an old woman actually lives there now and is likely to trip over the stone and break her neck.  

    A REAL PAIN ★★★★ (4/4 stars)
    Directed by: Jesse Eisenberg
    Written by: Jesse Eisenberg
    Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan
    Running time: 90 mins.

    Eisenberg’s remarkable film—which won Eisenberg the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance earlier this year—is like that mislaid second marker: heartfelt, awkward, full of pain it’s desperate to do something with, and laced with an all-too-necessary mordant humor. It at once recalls the works of Woody Allen, Alexander Payne and, most notably, the comedy of Adam Sandler (Culkin’s live-wire Benji’s too-muchness is an outcome of his outsized anger and vulnerability). But Eisenberg, in his second writer-director effort following 2022’s When You Finish Saving the World, has somehow created an of the moment tragicomedy in a style identifiably his own.

    Or to put an even finer point: it is identifiably himself. 

    The lead characters—the highly-medicated worrywart seller of internet pop-up ads played by Eisenberg and the stoner charm-monster disrupting everything in the search for something genuine embodied with ruthless abandon by Culkin—are like the filmmaker split in two. Watching these two actors bounce off of and grate on each other as they navigate well-appointed hotel rooms, air-conditioned train rides and finally, in absolute silence, the Majdanek concentration camp, is like witnessing a Socratic dialogue if Plato had spent a few seasons writing for SNL.

    Jennifer Gray in A Real Pain Agata Grzybowska/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures

    Filmmaker and actor Will Sharpe delivers a deftly attenuated performance as the well-meaning tour guide with the impossible task of respecting the enormity of what they are there to see while keeping the mood light enough to not be crushing. Like a lost crush from a Catskill’s summer many moons ago, Jennifer Grey turns up on the bus as a recently divorced Los Angelino looking for meaning in her life. Kurt Egyiawan, a child soldier in Cary Joji Fukunaga’s 2015 war film Beasts of No Nation, plays a Rwanda genocide survivor who turned to Judaism as a way to connect with and process his own trauma.

    Eisenberg seems incapable of an inauthentic moment, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that nearly everything he does as an actor, writer and now director confronts the sheer impossibility of achieving anything approaching authenticity. But his deftest act as a filmmaker may be simply handing the ball off to Culkin and clearing a hole so he can run with it. Like a one-winged bird forever trying to escape a cage of its own construction, the Emmy-winning Succession star thrashes, soars and crashes with a breathtaking transparency. 

    Admittedly, A Real Pain is an acquired taste; like a top-flight IPA, it is at once overly aggressive and serenely balanced. As a director, Eisenberg holds a preternatural understanding of when to exhale when it all gets to be too much, whether it’s Benji’s antics, David’s brittleness or the enormity of the Holocaust.   

    Like several of the year’s very best films—including Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist and Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5, a recreation of how ABC Sports covered the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics—A Real Pain demonstrates how we can and must reconcile with the forever festering wounds of the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in dynamic ways and with distinct styles. It has never been a more crucial time to listen to and engage with those stories.

    ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Heartfelt, Full of Pain, Laced With Humor and Remarkable

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    Oliver Jones

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  • ‘Speak No Evil’ Collapses in Carnage

    ‘Speak No Evil’ Collapses in Carnage

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    From start to finish, James McAvoy mesmerizes. Courtesy of Universal Pictures

    Remakes are odious, but Speak No Evil, while thoroughly unneeded and unasked for, is an Americanized remake of a 2022 thriller from Denmark that services its original material well, thanks mostly to a sprawling, contradictory and totally galvanizing centerpiece performance by James McAvoy. He’s the fine Scottish actor best known for his outstanding work in The Last King of Scotland and Atonement, not to mention his memorable Cyrano de Bergerac on the New York stage. In Speak No Evil, McAvoy plays the villain, over the top and all over the place, and he has such a blast doing it that you can’t take your eyes off him for a minute.

    SPEAK NO EVIL ★★★ (3/4 stars)
    Directed by: James Watkins
    Written by: James Watkins, Christian Tafdrup, Mads Tafdrup
    Starring: James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Scoot McNairy, Alix West Lefler, Aisling Franciosi, Dan Hough
    Running time:  110 mins.

    Despite some updates by writer-director James Watkins and a lot of savage violence to make it more palatable for an American movie audience, the plot begins in basically the same way as it did two years ago: Louise and Ben Dalton (Mackenzie Davis and Scoot McNairy) are an American couple living in London with their daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), who meet a friendly British family during a getaway in Italy. Paddy (McAvoy), his wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and their mute son Ant (terrific young newcomer Dan Hough) are all so charming that the Daltons accept an invitation to visit them for a weekend at their rambling farm in the British countryside. Things begin oddly.

    Worried man and woman with their daughterWorried man and woman with their daughter
    Why don’t they just leave? They try. Courtesy of Universal Pictures

    Louise and Ben can’t hide their marital problems. Their daughter Agnes is almost 13 but still emotionally attached to a stuffed rabbit. Ben is an unemployed lawyer who feels emasculated by his inability to get a job in England. Paddy knows Ciara is a vegetarian but insists on feeding her a goose for dinner. Ciara pretends to perform oral sex on Paddy under the table. Louise is at first aghast by their role-playing, then annoyed when they lecture Agnes on how to behave publicly. Tensions turn to horror when Agnes and Ant, forced to share a bedroom, become intimate friends and the little boy confides in the little girl that the Daltons are not his parents at all, but two fiends who killed his real family, kidnapped him and cut out his tongue with a pair of scissors so he could never tell anyone the truth.

    Why don’t they just leave? They try. Horrified, the Americans plan to escape in the middle of the night and save Ant in the process, but somebody always does something stupid in horror flicks like this, so they all foolishly return to fetch Agnes’ stuffed rabbit. From here on, Speak No Evil loses its claim to reality and goes berserk in an assault on the senses that defies credibility and collapses in carnage. It’s all rather far-fetched and silly. The thrills are contrived but effective enough to make your hair stand on end. I had a good time watching it, against my better judgment. And I especially applaud the relentless one-man show that is James McAvoy, from start to finish. He’s mesmerizing.

    ‘Speak No Evil’ Collapses in Carnage

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    Rex Reed

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  • ‘Challengers’ Review: Zendaya Serves Up a Psychosexual Tennis Flick

    ‘Challengers’ Review: Zendaya Serves Up a Psychosexual Tennis Flick

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    (L-R) Mike Faist as Art, Zendaya as Tashi and Josh O’Connor as Patrick in Challengers. Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures

    Loud, long, a little messy and very sweaty, Challengers may not be as sexy as its explosive first trailer implied, but it’s still a hell of a movie. Zendaya, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor make for quite the toxic tennis love triangle at the center of it all, each co-star crackling with chemistry and some deeply realized character work.

    CHALLENGERS ★★★ (3/4 stars)
    Directed by: Luca Guadagnino
    Written by: Justin Kuritzkes
    Starring: Zendaya, Josh O’Connor, Mike Faist
    Running time: 131 mins.

    The film follows three people who have tied themselves to tennis, for better or worse. Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) was a junior champion poised to be the sport’s next big thing before a horrific injury forced her into coaching; she’s now married to Art Donaldson (Faist), a player who’s great but far from being one of the greats, despite Tashi’s coaching. They met over a decade prior, when Art was besties with the slightly less respectable Patrick Zweig (O’Connor). Challengers makes frequent use of flashbacks to tie this complicated threesome together, as Art and Patrick go from friends to enemies, Tashi and Patrick from lovers to nuisances, Art and Tashi from tennis pals to husband and wife.

    Much of the movie’s action takes place over a two-week competition (amusingly called Phil’s Tire Town Challenger, situated on some quaint New Rochelle courts). It’s where Art, Patrick and, inevitably, Tashi meet again after years apart, all nearing the end of their careers but at different stages of acceptance over it. When Art and Patrick face off against each other in the final round, it triggers a great deal of memories that fuel the fire of what could very well be their last match.

    Mike Faist and Zendaya in Challengers. Niko Tavernise

    That kind of non-linear storytelling gets jarring at times, and the erratic volleying between timelines is one of the film’s major faults. The hair and makeup team do wonders to distinguish these characters over the years, and the actors perform the wear and tear of aging more than well enough to keep things clear. It’s not that it’s confusing, given how each flashback feeds into the current match and vice versa, but it makes for a choppy viewing experience. And it’s not helped by an overzealous use of chyrons, with everything timestamped in a 13-year period with enough specificity that you need to do the math in your seat.

    Challengers has this same overbearing streak in other areas too. Director Luca Guadagnino, still chasing the career high of 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, goes maximalist on this movie, using bizarre camera angles, relentless slo-mo, and a few questionable needle drops. It’s occasionally overpowering, and sometimes the sound mix even makes it hard to hear the excellent, incisive dialogue. Also, the Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross soundtrack may have used too much synth, a feat this critic thought all but impossible.

    There’s a lot to nitpick here, but it’s only because so much of the movie works so well otherwise. The central drama is juicy beyond words, and the way the relationships unravel is delicious. As Tashi Donaldson-nee-Duncan, Zendaya gets to flex a very different acting muscle than what audiences have seen. She’s a tennis-obsessed sociopath (in the way that elite athletes must be, at least a little), determined to stay in the game whatever way she can. She needs to win, but, at the same time, she doesn’t have the most traditional definition of winning. In the flashback scenes to Tashi’s first meeting with the boys, she riles them up not just for her enjoyment, but for the love of the game.

    Though the film earns its R rating, it’s not through sex—the three stars are never fully nude, never go further than a steamy makeout or some dry humping. But that doesn’t stop Challengers from being exceptionally sensual, and Tashi’s voyeuristic view of Art and Patrick (and their tennis) adds to that. The boys aren’t on her level as athletes or as psychosexual tennis lovers, and watching Zendaya pull their strings with that sly grin of hers is an absolute delight. She also gets some of the movie’s best lines, delivered with an iciness that’ll knock the wind right out of you.

    Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor in Challengers. Niko Tavernise

    Faist and O’Connor deliver some fantastic dueling performances too. Faist, best known for his scene-stealing turn in the recent West Side Story redux, sheds any vestige of a theater kid background to play Art. In the flashbacks, he’s sentimental and soft, polite but with a penchant for passive aggression. In the now, he’s a tennis machine verging on a mid-life crisis that’s only exacerbated by seeing his old friend—his inevitable emotional implosion comes with a rocket serve that’ll make you jump in your seat. As for O’Connor, Patrick somehow manages to be greasier than the actor’s wayward wanderer in La Chimera and infinitely more smarmy. Patrick’s cool guy schtick is out of gas somewhere in the middle of the movie’s timeline, and though he’s self aware about it, Patrick is still a man who thinks he can charm and connive his way out of anything. He’s not likable, but he’s certainly magnetic, with the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth saying more than he ever will.

    The boys go from bunkmates to rivals to bitter foes on and off the court, and as they come to blows over the final round, Challengers serves up greatness. It takes a bit long to get there in the end, and some cinematic tricks may distract you, but when Patrick goes to serve that fateful final ball and Art runs to meet it, all with Tashi watching and waiting to feel that kind of power again, it’s game, set, match.

    ‘Challengers’ Review: Zendaya Serves Up a Psychosexual Tennis Flick

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    Laura Babiak

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  • Michael Keaton Proves He’s Forgotten Nothing in ‘Knox Goes Away’

    Michael Keaton Proves He’s Forgotten Nothing in ‘Knox Goes Away’

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    ‘Knox Goes Away’ proves Michael Keaton still has everything it takes. Courtesy of Saban Films

    Agreeable, multifaceted Michael Keaton has been away from the screen for a while, but as both star and director of Knox Goes Away, his fresh and sophisticated new crime thriller, he proves he’s forgotten nothing about how to invest an offbeat film with his own unique sensibility and control it with precision and power.

    KNOX GOES AWAY ★★★(3/4 stars)
    Directed by: Michael Keaton
    Written by: Gregory Poirier
    Starring: Michael Keaton, Al Pacino, Marcia Gay Harden, Ray McKinnon
    Running time: 114 mins.

    In a smart script about crime and psychology by Gregory Poirier, Keaton irons out more twists than a scenic railway as John Knox, a sophisticated and highly educated hit man diagnosed with a rare neurological condition that prolongs mental collapse and hastens a fast-moving form of dementia. He has one last job before retirement, but with this toxic new condition and a prognosis of only a few months to live, everything goes south and he mistakenly kills three victims instead of one, including his partner and best friend (Ray McKinnon). Then, during months of decline, while he’s trying to re-organize his game plan, regain his old self-confidence, adjust to the knowledge that his career as a contract killer is over, and arrange his assets to cash in on the money he’s saved, his problems are further exacerbated when his estranged son Miles (James Marsden), whom he hasn’t seen in years, shows up at his door in the midnight hours, bloody and desperately in need of help. He’s just killed his 16-year-old daughter’s boyfriend and begs Knox to help cover up the violent crime. All he wants is to end a tense, regretful life in peace, but before Knox “goes away,” there are several loose ends he must tie together. It doesn’t matter how many more bodies he adds to the growing crime scene. He’s going away for good, so will anyone care?

    While Knox devises an elaborate plan to take care of the people who survive him, it’s interesting to watch Keaton go through the motions of his life—disposing of evidence, opening locked doors, eating spare ribs with great relish. In and out of his struggles parades an imposing cast of supporting players who fill every role with the kind of substance that keeps an uncommon thriller thrilling: Marcia Gay Harden as his ex-wife, Al Pacino as the gangster boss who offers advice when the cops close in, Joanna Kulik as the call girl who betrays him. Knox is not an easy man to warm up to—and the movie doesn’t ask us to—but as he begins to correct the mistakes he’s made and act like the father and grandfather he’s never been as his last act of reconciliation (and because of Keaton’s charisma), a sense of compassion begins to surface. The star directs this forlorn neo-noir with a solid and unwavering strength, portraying both Knox’s decline from the cold, calculating professional criminal and the lost, confused father searching for ways to make a fresh start at the end of the game. Knox Goes Away is an exemplary crime drama that looks at old cliches with a fresh slant and gives a reliable but still surprising star a chance to demonstrate the range and depth of character he rarely gets the chance to explore.

    Michael Keaton Proves He’s Forgotten Nothing in ‘Knox Goes Away’

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    Rex Reed

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