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It makes perfect sense that, as a director, Olivia Wilde would want to follow the extravagant, ambitious disaster of Don’t Worry Darling with a four-character chamber piece confined to one location. The Invite, based on the Spanish director Cesc Gay’s 2020 movie The People Upstairs (which was itself based on an earlier play by Gay), features an unhappy couple inviting their upstairs neighbors for a dinner party that quickly goes to some strange places; it’s the kind of supposedly focused character study that probably felt nourishing after all the off-camera craziness of Wilde’s previous directorial outing.
We can sense the theatrical origins of the story right from the start, with downcast music teacher Joe (Seth Rogen) arriving home one evening only to find that his fussy, anxious wife Angela (Wilde) is in the middle of preparing for a dinner party for their upstairs neighbors. Joe is not only unprepared for this, he doesn’t even like these neighbors, who weird them out and keep them up at all hours having extremely loud sex. Joe and Angela’s incessant bickering early on — every observation prompting an objection or a counter-observation — telegraphs that their neighbors will probably turn out to be a lot better adjusted than they are. Sure enough, when Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pina (Penelope Cruz) arrive, they seem both relaxed and all-knowing: They confess that they heard Joe and Angela arguing loudly before they even rang the doorbell. He’s a retired firefighter, she’s a sexologist, and suddenly the upstairs neighbors have the upper hand, psychologically speaking.
The Invite is primarily a comedy, and it does have some solid laughs, though the character interactions can also feel so manufactured that our bullshit detectors start going off fairly early. Angela, we’re told, is hypervigilant and neurotic — their daughter is at a sleepover and Angela tells Joe she called beforehand to ensure that there will be no men or weapons present in the friend’s house — and she’s apparently also on top of current mores and attitudes from days spent listening to podcasts. Funny, sure, but somehow, Angela also manages to organize an entire meal based on meat and cheese without ever checking to make sure her neighbors can eat such things. (It turns out, of course, that Pina can’t.) This is minor stuff, meant to add to an accumulation of interpersonal awkwardness, but such inconsistencies add up and deflate the characters’ believability. If in something like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf the characters’ inadequacies and resentments fuel their increasingly erratic behavior, here these people feel like grab bags of punchlines, their actions there primarily to get laughs.
More worryingly, the film’s stylized, theatrical dialogue only really works onscreen if there’s a musicality to the words and a rhythm to the back and forth. Wilde manages to undermine that through aggressive, insistent music cues that flatten everything out — almost as if she doesn’t trust the script, credited to Rashida Jones and Will McCormack, to do the trick. Still, these are good actors, and each brings their unique style. As a comic performer, Wilde (who also gives a tremendous performance in another Sundance movie this year, Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex) excels at going big — precise in her timing, unafraid to exaggerate for comic effect — while Rogen deploys his usual goofy, improv-style cadences — stumbling over words, anxiously repeating himself, swallowing punchlines.
When Norton and Cruz show up, they bring their own vibes: He’s soft-spoken and even keeled, she’s a bit of a flower child. This is all intentional, surely. You don’t go with a cast like this if you don’t want these actors to do their own individual things. And it does pay off, occasionally: Entering the apartment, Hawk and Pina talk a lot about the décor and the energy in the room, and Joe responds, snarkily, “We talked a lot about capturing energy, as if it’s a thing we could actually do.” But it takes seriously sharp writing and directorial control to make all these people feel like they exist in the same movie, and the truth is that the performances don’t really cohere.
Wilde leans into the comedy as much as possible, often framing shots for maximum visual humor. At its best, The Invite uses the spaces of this apartment well, putting dead air between its alienated characters and bringing them physically closer over the course of the film. But even here, the tonal whipsawing can backfire. As I noted earlier, The Invite goes to some odd places, but with each new turn in these relationships, the picture loses steam, perhaps because they’ve never come across as real people and these emotional twists don’t feel fully earned. Meanwhile, the shticky humor of the first hour makes for a disappointing mismatch with the awkward earnestness of the finale, as the characters all get their sentimental, tedious monologues, now complete with soft music on the soundtrack. (The movie is, frankly, a clinic in how not to use a score.)
Wilde’s directorial debut Booksmart, released in 2019 to great acclaim, worked in large part because she brought so much inventiveness to a familiar and chaotic coming-of-age tale, using technique to overcome the story’s tonal challenges. Don’t Worry Darling, by contrast, felt too stilted and controlled, too programmed and predictable, almost as if the director felt obligated to rein in her stylistic impulses against a supposedly more complicated story. The Invite feels at times like a film that could have benefited from more control. It’s too baggy to really work as a chamber piece. (It’s not a particularly long movie, but it drags considerably after a while.) But it also doesn’t really give Wilde any real opportunities to cut loose and demonstrate her strengths as a director, which once seemed so considerable.
Vulture first reviewed Late Fame when it premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on August 30, 2025. We are republishing the review now that it’s playing at the New York Film Festival.
“You must have been beautiful when you were young,” Greta Lee says to Willem Dafoe at one point in Kent Jones’s Late Fame, and for those of us who well remember the actor’s younger years — back when his skin was porcelain, his cheekbones sea-cliff sharp, and his eyes so angelically haunted — it’s hard not to shout “Amen!” back at the screen. First, the line hits because it works within the context of the film: Ed Saxburger (Dafoe) is a postal worker who in his youth published a well-regarded but little-read book of poems, and he’s in the midst of fondly (and melancholically) recalling all the promise of those early years in New York, when poetry was in the air, “downtown was another world, and Soho was like being on the moon.” But it also helps the movie reach beyond the screen; some of us might begin to share Saxburger’s reveries along with our own.
The line also suggests that Lee’s Gloria Gardner, a downtown actress with an aura of mystery to her, appreciates Saxburger in this moment not for who he is, but for who he once was and the world he once belonged to. (Though, let’s face it: Dafoe still looks pretty great.) Loosely adapted from an Arthur Schnitzler novella, Late Fame, as the title implies, follows Saxburger’s rediscovery by an odd group of young writers and thinkers calling themselves “the Enthusiasm Society.” Led by the wealthy and snobbish Wilson Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who makes sure to tell Saxburger he bought his book at “Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road” with ever the slightest of fake English accents, these pampered dandies “stand against negativity” and the monetization of everything. They speak of the old virtues, they call each other by their last names, they discuss Big Important Literary Ideas over expensive wine dinners, and they rail against influencer culture and technology and cellphone addiction. But of course, they’re just as glued to their devices and obsessed with their brand. Meyers has Amazon Alexa tech in his Sullivan St. apartment (which is very nice, very expensive, and paid for by his parents), and a $1200 first edition of The Naked Lunch on display. We gather the other members of the Enthusiasm Society aren’t much different; Meyers says one guy’s family “owns every soybean in the state of Missouri.” (He also claims the Enthusiasm Society stands above politics, though in a film more firmly grounded in today’s world they’d probably be Dimes Square-adjacent, which is to say, not above politics at all.)
Schnitzler was a master of narrative high concept in his day. Whenever I see a plot description of one of his works, I find myself wanting to read the story immediately. And the premise of Late Fame is so captivating that one wants to forgive its shortcomings and focus on what it does so well, starting with a truly great and nuanced role for Dafoe, whose physical presence can evoke coarse sturdiness and emotional delicacy at the same time. Saxburger has a tough exterior; he’s reserved and unassuming in his demeanor; he avoids his sister’s calls about his dying brother, and he pushes back modestly against Meyers and his pals’ anointing him as America’s great undiscovered poet. But we also see that he once had art in him, and ambition, too. And we understand that such inner reserves of sensitivity aren’t always a good thing: After one triumphant reading, he hears someone yell out, “Way to go, grandpa!” and that one quip from that one random unseen person kicks eats away at him the rest of the evening.
Also doing excellent work here is Lee, who gives the vampish and self-consciously artificial Gloria a magnetic inner life. She’s not a writer, seems slightly older than these young wannabes, and we suspect she’s not nearly as rich; the more brazen and confident she is, the more we can tell there’s a lot more going on. This character probably twists through the most dramatic extremes over the course of the film (including a riveting cabaret performance of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Surabaya Johnny”), and it’s to Lee, Jones, and screenwriter Samy Burch’s credit that the more we find out about her, the less we actually know about her.
So, that’s the good news. Unfortunately, Late Fame stumbles when it comes to its scenes with the Enthusiasm Society itself, which is unfortunate because that’s arguably the most interesting element in the picture, at least at first. But they’re ultimately too cartoonish for a film that otherwise feels so lived-in. It’s not that such tonal shifts can’t work, but here the comic-ridiculous treatment of these well-meaning poseurs seems driven by narrative convenience and the irresistibility of cheap laughs rather than anything resembling an inner life or observed reality. Come to think of it, Burch’s Oscar-nominated script for May December had a similarly slippery quality, but there it benefited from the deft hand of director Todd Haynes, whose work has always existed in a queasy tonal slipstream. Jones is a talented filmmaker — I was once on a Tribeca jury that gave his masterful previous feature Diane(2018) several well-deserved awards — and Late Fame has some true virtues. But as it proceeds, it feels less assured. Still, Dafoe and Lee are so good, and the idea behind the story so enchanting, that I keep wishing it were better. Maybe one day I’ll convince myself it is.
This review was originally published on February 3, 2025 out of the Sundance Film Festival. We are recirculating it now timed to the New York Film Festival.
Can a doodle also be a masterpiece? Maybe it’s not fair to call Peter Hujar’s Day a doodle, though Ira Sachs’s film, clocking in at 76 minutes, wears its modesty on its sleeve. Consisting of a conversation between two people in a West Village apartment, filmed austerely but evocatively, the picture revels in its spareness, its warm simplicity. It starts off as an elevation of the quotidian but transforms into something sadder and more reflective.
The film is a re-creation of an interview that happened on December 19, 1974, between the renowned photographer Hujar (Ben Whishaw) and his friend, the journalist Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), who intended their conversation to be part of a book about how different people spent their day. Having taken notes on what he did the day before, Hujar is precise in his accounting, but his fixation on seemingly meaningless details betrays his photographer’s eye. Much of what he talks about is a shoot he was assigned to do with the poet Allen Ginsberg. But other names float through over the course of the conversation — Susan Sontag, William Burroughs, Glenn O’Brien — in that rather New York way, where a conversation between two people usually becomes a conversation about a dozen other people.
It’s not hard to get lost amid all these names and half-anecdotes, but I think that’s also part of the point. Sachs is clearly animated by a love for this long-lost downtown scene, and he conveys it as much through his images and his cutting as he does through the dialogue (which is taken directly from Rosenkrantz’s transcript). As the two talk, they move around different parts of the apartment. They make coffee, they drink tea and eat cookies. They stand outside. They lounge in bed. The light changes. Their outfits change. A shaft of sunlight might hit Hujar in an odd way, the warm glow of a sunset might reflect off a surface. Distant sounds from the street drift in. They touch each other’s legs and heads and feet, glancingly and sensuously, though not sexually. Such sense memories aren’t there to precisely chart Peter Hujar’s path through Linda Rosenkrantz’s apartment. Rather, they evoke sense memories in all of us — we all understand light, and warmth, and the feeling of another person’s touch. It’s through such subtle cues that this tender, lovely film starts to feel like something we might have all experienced once.
Whishaw obviously has to do most of the heavy lifting, dialogue-wise, but Hall is his equal in the way she uses her silences. Her adoration of Hujar comes through, as well as her ease around him. Whishaw gives Hujar’s words a matter-of-fact quality, but there’s a slight hint of melancholy to him, too. He’s filled with anxieties about his art and his work. (The Ginsberg shoot, he says, is his first job for the New York Times.) Hell, he’s filled with anxieties about going four blocks down to another part of the Village. But Whishaw, whose voice is one of modern cinema’s great wonders (there’s a reason why he makes such a good Paddington), conveys the nervousness and the hope and the boredom and the sadness all at once.
Rosenkrantz’s intended book never materialized, but she did publish the Hujar interview as its own volume years later, in 2022, by which point AIDS had long claimed the photographer. So loss is, in a way, built into the very concept of the film. The intimacy draws us in, as if we might know these people. At the same time, we also understand that we’ll never know these people. The maze of names and facts in Hujar’s account, the familiarity he and Rosenkrantz have with each other, the way the setting light captures the ephemerality of this moment, it all feels like something that’s already vanished. We’re watching a mundane spectacle of a mundane spectacle — a man in a room relating the mostly forgettable events of the previous day — but somehow, we’re also witnessing the arc of time within this quiet hour. So, no, the film is maybe not a doodle. There’s too much craft, too much care here for that. But it is a masterpiece.
Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale is a work at fascinating odds with itself. On one hand, the film is the ultimate nostalgia bait, the third spinoff of Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs series that debuted in 2010 and has endured, in some form or another, since then. It goes down easy, the atmosphere so enveloping that you basically forget how this whole project is a love letter to the aristocracy and a patronizing pat on the head for the working class. On the other hand,despite being the narratively thinnest film in the franchise, The Grand Finale is also the most existentially despairing, driven by the questions of what it takes to enact social change and, ultimately, what it means to leave Downton Abbey behind.
The Grand Finale offers answers that are totally unsurprising. Time marches forward, and there’s nothing we do can stop it. The new generation will always make choices their elders don’t quite understand. Capitalism is better than socialism. (I don’t agree with that one, but The Grand Finale makes that point at least three times!) Downton Abbey fans have seen this all before. But that also might be what makes The Grand Finale such an effective end point for this franchise. It reassures us that everything the ever-growing Crawley family holds dear — their money, their property, their proximity to power, and their belief in the royal hierarchy as the best way to rule — remains worthy of protection, and it also offers the thinnest sliver of forward progress to appease any worries that the series’ interest in the past is also an explicit endorsement of conservatism or traditionalism. It’s a perfect threading of the fanciful fan-service needle, aside from the fact that (spoiler alert!) Matthew Goode isn’t onscreen for even one moment. He’s now claimed two scheduling conflicts as reasons he doesn’t appear in these movies; was Dept. Q worth missing out on Goode in a tuxedo? Arguable.
Just like how the previous film, A New Era, was a fairly meta experiment in what it takes to make a Downton Abbey movie, The Grand Finale is a meta experiment in what it takes to end the whole thing. (Simon Curtis directed this one, too.) Set in 1930, The Grand Finale begins a couple years after the events of A New Era, with everyone on the precipice of change. In A New Era’s final act, the Earl of Grantham, Robert Crawley (Hugh Bonneville), told his eldest daughter, Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery), that Downton Abbey and the future of the family were now in her hands. Similarly, longtime Downton butler Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) was finally preparing to retire and hand the running of the home’s staff over to former footman Andy (Michael Fox). What would these men, whose decades were defined by service, do when their time is over? What would their purpose be?
The Grand Finale equates these questions as if these men are of the same class, because it’s always been part of Fellowes’s imagination that Lord and Lady Grantham and all their family members are extremely considerate, kind, patient, and generous toward their household staff, no matter how anachronistic that characterization may be, as though the kindness would erase the massive wealth gaps with which these characters live. And he applies the same Pollyannaish touch to the film’s other source of drama: Lady Mary’s divorce from her second husband, race-car driver Henry Talbot (Goode). In this age of gossip columnists and paparazzi photographers, Mary is immediately shamed by negative press coverage of her divorce, and she becomes a social pariah as soon as the news gets out. (Viewers of The Gilded Age, Fellowes’s currently airing 1880s-set historical drama, will recognize that the writer is doing some double-dipping here; the impact of a high-society lady’s divorce is also a major plot point in the HBO series’ third season.) Mary’s family is ready to go to war for her, but they have bigger things to worry about when Lady Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) brother Harold Levinson (Paul Giamatti) arrives in London to discuss the settling of their mother’s estate. The fact that Harold brings along an unknown-to-the-family American businessman named Gus Sambrook (Alessandro Nivola) is weird, but Gus is such a smooth talker, effective flirter, and loquacious flatterer that Mary lets her guard down — maybe to her detriment.
Downton Abbey’s (white) ensemble grew more sprawling with each season and film, and a number of other story lines — one about a county fair and one on the entertainment industry — fly around The Grand Finale to appease them all. (A New Era had a Black band performing in Paris; The Grand Finale has a silent South Asian family bowing to nobles while watching the horse races — that’s all the diversity you’ll get in this ever-so-genteel version of Europe before World War II.) In typical Fellowes fashion, all these subplots involve class and social status in some way, and also in typical Fellowes fashion, they all boil down to “Isn’t it wonderful when the rich are nice to the workers whose labor funds their privilege? But, like, don’t get any revolutionary ideas!” How this franchise has eroded the initially shit-kicking ideologies of Allen Leech’s former Irish socialist Tom Branson boggles the mind; as if his saving the king from assassination in A New Era weren’t enough, in this film he says being a capitalist is simply “being sensible.” Fellowes’s affection for the monarchy is explicit and implicit, and his writing treats the briefest moments of attention from the wealthy — actor Guy Dexter (Dominic West) remembering Downton’s staff; playwright and composer Noël Coward (Arty Froushan) acknowledging the work of footman turned screenwriter Mr. Molesley (Kevin Doyle) — like earth-shattering events of diplomacy. Attempting any kind of praxis read of The Grand Finale is a fool’s errand.
Yet The Grand Finale moves briskly because it’s the cinematic equivalent of great gowns, beautiful gowns. John Lunn’s soaring score makes shots of Highclere Castle, which stands in for Downton Abbey, particularly magical; Anna Robbins’s luxurious costumes, all satin, lace, and brocade, are once again gorgeous; Nivola’s smirk is a welcome bit of Yankee attitude. (God, that smirk!) The resplendent production and art design complement theater shows, dinner parties, horse races, and carnival outings, and the deeply experienced cast members hit all their marks of humor and pathos. Put aside the (lack of) realism of any of this and it’s thoroughly pleasurable, especially in how it’s a movie for the girlbosses, with Mary, Cora, Isobel (Penelope Wilton), and Lady Edith Pelham (Laura Carmichael) all getting moments to tell men what’s what, another recurring Downton Abbey bit; how gracious of their elder male counterparts to step aside so they can step forward. Lord Grantham’s disgust with the word “weekend” would have been the film’s funniest moment, until Harold falls asleep reading Charles Dickens and asks if Downton Abbey has any murder mysteries in its library, only to be snippily told by the butler that there might be some in the nursery. This film has no interest in the family’s children; they only appear onscreen to be read to and play bucolically with their nannies. But Fellowes’s formula provides such smooth-brained pleasure that I wouldn’t be surprised if Downton Abbey: The New Class materializes in a decade’s time. This franchise may claim it’s finally leaping into the future, but its identity will always be in an idealized version of a wealthy white past.
The agitated, ominous vibration of giant power lines and quaking transmission towers feels like a Greek chorus throughout Paul Greengrass’s intense new wildfire thriller, The Lost Bus. Over the course of the film, Greengrass regularly cuts away to the churning cables and metal structures, as well as to the roaring flames of the 2018 Camp Fire, as the blaze makes its way across the mountains and cliffs of Northern California. This helps us follow the spread of this real-life disaster, and it also conveys the puniness and impotence of the mortals fighting it. Based on real-life stories from the Camp Fire (still the deadliest wildfire in California history), The Lost Bus, which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival ahead of a short September theatrical release and an October 3 debut on Apple TV+, offers plenty of suspense and heroism. But it’s all tempered by the knowledge that these fires are inescapable, growing, and unstoppable.
At heart, The Lost Bus is a disaster movie — a great one — and it has some of the classic moves of a disaster movie, complete with the slightly on-the-nose narrative shorthand designed to introduce characters quickly and efficiently. Greengrass cuts across a number of arenas and people, including the various fire crews trying to deal with this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the central narrative belongs to Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a down-on-his luck school-bus driver in Paradise, California, who returned here after his life fell apart elsewhere. Kevin is already having one of the worst days of his life even before everything burns down: His dog is dying, his teenage son is home sick from school (and also hates him), his mom is elderly and out of it, and his ex-wife is berating him on the phone. He’s also missed his bus’s inspection appointments, he’s running out of money, and his supervisor thinks he’s a flake. Once the flames come roaring into town, however, Kevin will be the only one in a position to drive a busload of elementary-schoolers, along with their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), through the downright biblical flames and out to safety. It’s Speed meets the end of the world.
McConaughey was made for parts like this: the good old boy facing extraordinary circumstances. He knows exactly how to sell this character and his desperation — not with confidence, but with a “damn the torpedoes, I’ll try anything once” bravado. Honestly, they should cast him in every disaster movie. Plus, he makes a fine match with Ferrera, whose teacher must exude outward calm for the benefit of her kids while she’s not-so-secretly freaking out inside. (Both Kevin and Mary have their own kids elsewhere that they’re also worried sick about.) As everything falls apart around them in ways both big and small, we enjoy watching these two opposites butt heads and quibble and then learn to function as a team.
The film feels like a homecoming for Greengrass, who cut his teeth in the world of you-are-there television documentaries before helping redefine the modern action movie with the handheld urgency of hits like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. The director also carried that approach over to docudramas like United 93, Captain Phillips, and July 22 (as well as his earlier, masterful Bloody Sunday, the movie that put him on the map back in 2002). But the “shaky cam” style ran its course some years ago; his last effort was the stately and old-fashioned Tom Hanks western News of the World, a beautiful picture whose release got swallowed up by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In The Lost Bus, Greengrass combines his thriller side with his reportorial side. He films Kevin and Mary and the schoolkids’ journey through hellfire as a no-holds-barred action spectacle full of immediacy and awe, complete with hair’s-breadth escapes and incredible visions of destruction. (It’s frankly a shame that The Lost Bus isn’t getting a wider theatrical release; it was clearly made to be a big-screen experience.) Some incidents have been a bit sensationalized, but Kevin and Mary’s heroism was very real, as evidenced in Lizzie Johnson’s exhaustively researched and absorbing 2021 nonfiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, on which the film is loosely based. To that end, the film also offers a more diffuse and heavily researched portrait of what goes into battling a wildfire, and Greengrass’s vérité style lends authenticity to the scenes of fire chiefs strategizing, of ground crews and air crews trying to combat the blazes and save lives. The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.
The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock suspense Bigelow does so well. Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix
The very basic premise of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is gripping on its own: A single missile is launched at the United States, nobody knows where it’s from, and the national security apparatus springs into action. Thankfully, the movie delivers on that promise. The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock, military-grade suspense she does so well. Bigelow intercuts multiple arenas and juggles a small army of characters without ever losing sight of the central, upsettingly simple set of dilemmas: Can they stop the missile in time? Who fired it? How should the U.S. respond? The film is already receiving hosannas at Venice and will surely grab its share of eyeballs when it eventually premieres on Netflix.
A House of Dynamite actually has a predictable set of moves, at least once the main plot kicks in, but this makes Bigelow’s ability to maintain suspense that much more impressive. Her technique gives Noah Oppenheim’s jargon-heavy script conviction and urgency. I probably couldn’t tell you much about what terms like launch azimuth and exoatmospheric kill vehicle and terminal phase and dual phenomenology really mean (not to mention the several dozen acronyms being tossed about), and I sure as hell couldn’t say if they’re being used properly here. But the film has an aura of technical accuracy, which is what matters. The actors sing their lines with a rat-a-tat confidence that’s so convincing we start to worry they’re giving away government secrets.
Watching Bigelow depict these offices, situation rooms, and control centers all abuzz with increasingly hurrying (and increasingly horrified) officials, we suspect she is drawn to these type-A professionals because she relates to them. Ever since Zero Dark Thirty, her 2012 film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was attacked for buying too fully into the CIA’s version of events, the director has been accused of unquestioningly laundering the images of the U.S. military and the intelligence industry. There will be those who take one look at a picture like A House of Dynamite and consider it a form of propaganda for the national security apparatus. This is frankly ridiculous — the film is all about how the system, even when functioning perfectly, will surely fail us.
Bigelow can make a movie like this because she understands the appeal and awe of power. She depicts these powerful spaces with elegant establishing shots and smooth camera moves suggesting control, calm, and certitude. But whenever it steps out into the real world, the film becomes agitated and hurried, our vision obstructed. A House of Dynamite doesn’t have the sweaty humanity of Fail Safe or the dark absurdism of Dr. Strangelove. Rather, it has a fascination with authority and professionalism and their limits: What if everyone follows orders and does their job really well and everything still goes to shit? (Forget what might happen if the people in charge are a bunch of incompetent, ignorant buffoons; surely that would never happen.)
The film’s action is split into three sections, each focusing on a different set of individuals as they respond to the fact that, in 18 minutes, a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific will most likely hit the city of Chicago and instantly incinerate around 10 million people. The structure elegantly goes up the chain of command: Each level of the government org chart must tackle this problem at a different point in its trajectory. In the first chapter, most of the activity centers on a missile-defense battalion in Alaska, with its command and control center run by Major David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), and the White House Situation Room, where watch-floor senior duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to respond to the rapidly developing crisis; their job is to identify and ultimately bring down the nuke. In the second chapter, we follow what happens at U.S. Strategic Command, where gung-ho general Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) begins urging the president to prepare to strike at all U.S. adversaries in case this is a coordinated attack; meanwhile, at the emergency operations center deep beneath the White House, deputy national security advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) tries to advise calm.
In the final section, we watch the secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) and the president (Idris Elba), both of whom, we gather, have only recently entered office, try to deal with what’s starting to look like the ultimate calamity. At one point, they remark that they have been briefed about this eventuality only once, whereas they’ve been briefed about filling a potential Supreme Court vacancy countless times. Even as she depicts the professionalism of her characters, Bigelow makes it clear that they are all totally unprepared for this situation. Lines like “We’ve run this drill a thousand times!” and “We did everything right, didn’t we?” ring not with optimism but with bitter irony.
Not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, A House of Dynamite is fundamentally an institutionalist’s outcry about the horrors of nuclear proliferation. The specter of atomic annihilation, once such a major part of our collective fears, has been dormant for so long, even as the danger hasn’t decreased. We get brief, little human details for many of the characters — not enough to edge into corniness but just enough to make it clear they are, in fact, people: One is dealing with a breakup, another with a divorce; one with a pregnancy, another with a child sick at home with a 102-degree fever; one needs a new apartment, another plans to propose to his girl. The secretary of Defense is mourning his wife, which gives weight to his initially selfish-sounding reflection that his daughter lives in Chicago. These tiny bits and bobs of humanity gather power as the film marches on. As a result of the overlapping timelines, certain small moments play out multiple times, each moment with fresh context.
The fractured narrative replicates the characters’ fractured perspectives. From within their highly secure rooms, where they can’t even bring their own cell phones, these people struggle to reach the outside world. Communication is fragile and inconsistent, reflecting both physical and existential claustrophobia: Nobody really knows or sees what’s going on. Early in the timeline, we see the president attending a WNBA kids’ event with Angel Reese, but this moment out among the public also feels highly choreographed and manufactured. Along with everyone else in this film, he is closed off to the rest of the world — even as he holds in his hands the power to obliterate all of it.
Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of the novel Hamnet reimagines the poetic act of creating the greatest play in the English language. Photo: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features
We know next to nothing about William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, other than the fact that he and his twin sister Judith were born sometime in 1585 and that he was buried in August of 1596, 11 years later. Even the cause of death is unknown, though the deaths of young children were not entirely uncommon at the time; three of William’s own sisters had died in childhood. Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O’Farrell’s haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao’s new adaptation of it: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Which means we know one more thing about this boy: A few years after his death, his father wrote the greatest play in the English language, and it bears his name.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.
Hamnet remains mostly faithful to the novel (O’Farrell collaborated with Zhao on the screenplay), but the two works center on different parts of the imagined timeline. The book ends with our first glimpse of Hamlet, and its final words belong to the Ghost of the play: “Remember me.” The film, on the other hand, directly grapples with the connections between real life and art, showing how the play (and his own role in it) became a vessel for Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to confront his sorrow and help bring his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) out of hers. Hamlet is thought of, not incorrectly, as a work about vengeance and the conflict between thought and action; indeed, it was Shakespeare’s version of an already-existing and popular revenge play. But in shifting her focus, Zhao fully embraces something long evident but often overlooked: As reworked by Shakespeare, Hamlet is also a play about all-consuming grief, one driven at all levels by loss and guilt and questions of how to properly mourn.
It’s a fascinating subject to imagine, but how exactly does one tell a story mired in such unspeakable sadness? Hamnet speculates that the child was a victim of bubonic plague, but it approaches the tragedy with a kind of magical realist sensibility. In this telling, the constitutionally weaker Judith (played by Olivia Lynes in the film) is the one who initially gets sick, and the loving and industrious Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who often traded clothes with her as a game to fool their parents, makes one final sacrifice, pretending to be his sickly twin sister and thereby drawing the disease out from her and into himself. Transference is thus at the heart of this story — narratively, formally, structurally.
The novel jumps back and forth in time, but it keeps circling back to Hamnet’s death, as O’Farrell’s garnished prose transmutes a horrific event into something almost unreal, though no less heartbreaking; her efflorescent descriptions of nature capture something uncanny and sinister about the world (not unlike the doomed Ophelia’s florid songs of grief in Shakespeare’s play). Zhao’s film is more linear, so it doesn’t dwell as long on the details of the death itself. Instead, its breathless, queasy energy sweeps us along. Aided immeasurably by Max Richter’s score, Zhao finds melancholy not in stillness and reflection but in movement and activity. We see how young Will, a sensitive and shy Latin tutor, first met the headstrong Agnes, once a child of nature dismissed as “a forest witch” and raised by an uncaring step-mother. Buckley, an actor who can be both ethereal and earthy at the same time, makes an ideal choice for Agnes. This is a woman who doesn’t quite belong in the world and yet seems to have emerged out of its very soil. She loves to lurk in the woods with her pet falcon, she is proficient in herbs and remedies, and she possesses the gift of foresight. Despite her reluctance to get married, Agnes has already seen that at her deathbed she will be surrounded by two children. But she has already had a daughter, Susanna, before Judith and Hamlet arrive, so the eventual birth of three children terrifies her to the core.
Will, the “pasty-faced scholar” hounded for his meekness, sees and loves Agnes for who she is, but marriage and a family also mean a taming of her wild spirits. They are kindred souls: He too can work dark magic, just with his words. Zhao suggests that even though Will was rarely home, his family life fed his art. We see the kids doing the witches’ opening incantations from Macbeth, and of course Hamnet and Judith’s cross-dressing and play-acting echo the plots of many a Shakespeare comedy. All this could come off as corny, but the family is depicted with such loving specificity that we buy all of it. Many historians have been perplexed by how such a seemingly simple man as Shakespeare could have written works of such grandeur and depth. So here, then, is a home filled with wonder and play that could have inspired some of it.
Which, of course, compounds the tragedy. Agnes might have access to certain powers, but she can’t bring Hamnet back. “He can’t have just vanished,” she says. “All he needs is for me to find him. He must be somewhere.” Will simply responds, “We may never stop looking for him.” But the film has already shown us where Hamnet is. As he hovers between life and death, we see a vision of the young boy wandering around a makeshift forest that is clearly a theater backdrop. He then steps into the dark void of a door at stage center, from which Will Shakespeare himself will later emerge, cloaked in white powder, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father. The undiscovered country is art itself.
We sometimes forget what a phenomenal actor Mescal is. This is probably because he hasn’t made a good action hero yet, which is a scarlet letter in our day and age. But also, we love to quantify, classify, and dilute complicated performers into simple impressions; despite the fact that he’s only been acting in movies for five years, we think we already know what he’s all about. But he’s not really the softboi that’s been memed to meaninglessness. With his unexpected choices in both cadence and affect, he’s something closer to a young Christopher Walken. In Hamnet, his response at the first sight of his dead son represents some of the best acting I’ve ever seen; it’s matched later when he interrupts a rehearsal of Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” speech and delivers it himself with such snarling self-loathing (“I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not born me!”) that he instantly and convincingly reinterprets the world’s most famous play before our very eyes. Agnes accuses Will of not grieving enough, but Mescal makes sure we see that oceans of pain lie beneath his hesitancy: He is Hamlet. And yes, we do get to see the actor as William Shakespeare reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in this movie, one of two very different interpretations of the same speech that Zhao presents, as if to acknowledge that everyone has their own Hamlet.
It won’t spoil anything to say that Hamnet concludes with a staging of Hamlet, one in which the play’s twisted reflection of the poet’s life becomes more evident and gains complexity. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Zhao is that this recreation of such a familiar work still manages to surprise, because we see it through Agnes’s disbelieving eyes. The drama onstage doesn’t just echo and explain Will’s sorrow, it also serves as a kind of lifeline to Agnes — and when we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another, the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways. There are references to other stories coursing through Hamnet, and one of them is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Will tells Agnes during one of their first meetings. It’s a tale of resurrection, passion, and art, and how one final longing glance traps a lover in the underworld forever. As presented here, it doesn’t apply in any schematic or obvious way to the drama of Shakespeare’s life. But it does underline a fundamental truth in both Hamnet, and Hamlet: that to see and be seen is a joyous and terrifying thing.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia began life as a remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet!, and it retains the broad outlines of that strange classic. But it also feels like Lanthimos through and through, albeit with the strangest of twists: It’s the first picture of his populated by characters who feel like they exist in the real world, people you could run into if you walked out the door. The power of Lanthimos’s work has always come from his ability to provide surreal but dead-on metaphors that take on lives of their own: a futuristic resort where one must debase oneself to find a mate, in The Lobster; or a family where the parents have trained their kids to accept absurdities as reality, in Dogtooth. With Bugonia, it feels like he’s entered our world at last, at least for a while. Which also makes it maybe the saddest film he’s ever made.
Bugonia, which premieres at the Venice Film Festival and will release in theaters in October, is basically a two-hander, albeit with three central characters. Teddy (Jesse Plemons) and his neurodivergent cousin Donald (played by newcomer Aiden Delbis) live in a ramshackle house in the woods where they keep bees and are methodically preparing for a shocking act: They will kidnap high-powered, slick-suited pharmaceutical-company executive Michelle (Emma Stone) and hold her hostage until she confesses that she’s an alien who has been sent to experiment on humans. “Welcome to the headquarters of the human resistance,” they declare after shaving her head and taking off her blindfold. Teddy wants Michelle to contact her mothership and take them to her queen, with whom he intends to negotiate for the aliens’ withdrawal from Earth.
Teddy has done his research. He’s studied all the YouTube videos and photos and he’s gathered all the necessary information, and he knows exactly what these aliens are and what their ships look like; the good-natured though not entirely convinced Donald goes along with him out of loyalty and love, and also because Teddy seems like the one person who treats him as an equal. Michelle, meanwhile, is at a loss to how to react: She’s a tough, wealthy power player, the kind of person who does martial arts in the morning and doesn’t take any shit from anyone. And she has no idea how she’s going to convince these kooks to let her go.
Lanthimos has guided multiple actors, including these, to some of the best performances of their careers (Stone won an Oscar for 2023’s Poor Things, and Plemons won the Best Actor award at Cannes for Kinds of Kindness last year), so it seems weird to say that Bugonia is also his first film to feel like a true showcase for his stars. But it is: The movie unfolds as a series of confrontations between Teddy and Michelle, her increasingly insistent desperation crashing against the rocks of his languorous immovability. Stone is remarkable (when is she not?), emotionally wriggling like a bug pinned to a wall, trying different tactics with this psycho. First, she’s calm and controlled and confident; then, she tries kindness and pliancy. Plemons’s laid-back confidence is bone-chilling initially. But he also has to fuel our ire, earn our pathos, and maybe even provoke some twinges of solidarity. The characters in Lanthimos’s films don’t really go on traditional emotional journeys. We, the audience, do.
The director’s work has always turned on humiliation and power trips. (Think of The Favourite and how beyond all its ornate rituals and ironclad hierarchies, the line between power and disgrace remained so tenuous.) Bugonia is no different. If what Teddy is saying is true, Michelle would be a more powerful being than he could ever dream of. And yet, he needs it to be true. He needs to explain his own powerlessness, even as he seemingly holds her life in his hands. If she is, in fact, an emissary from an alien race, then the degradations of his life will finally make sense. “We are not steering the ship, Don,” he tells his cousin. “They are.” It’s hard not to sense the slightest bit of hope amid all that outrage.
Gradually, we learn what lies at the root of all this. Surreal flashbacks show us how Teddy’s ill mom (Alicia Silverstone) suffered at the hands of Michelle’s company, how the empty corporate platitudes offered in exchange for his family’s horror merely confirmed his belief that there was more to what was being said and what had been done. Bugonia’s narrative trajectory is, on one level, a predictable but resonant one, as we slowly learn to accept Teddy’s irrational actions as a response to a fundamentally irrational world. But we also see that the only thing that will lead to resolution and a way out of this mess is, well, more humiliation.
So, that describes most of the movie. Bugonia heads in, let’s say, a different direction as it reaches its conclusion. (If you’ve seen Save the Green Planet!, you’ll know where it’s going.) While these developments aren’t exactly new or shocking — some viewers will probably find them predictable — they actually bring the world of this film further into Lanthimos-land. His style is Olympian on the surface, the ironic detachment of his pictures casting a cold, curious eye at humanity’s follies and derangements. But this coolness is a ruse, and he always lets the sadness peek through, making it clear that he is, after all, one of us. By the time Bugonia is over, with a series of beautiful and haunting images that seem to come out of nowhere, we understand that beneath its bemused dispassion lies a deep longing for connection. Early in the film, Teddy looks at his dying bees and sees similarities with humanity: “A dead colony atomized in a trillion directions with no way home again.” By the end, it’s clear the director has seen the same thing.
For about five minutes, “The Cut” gives the audience what they’d expect from a movie set in the world of boxing. A fighter played by Orlando Bloom is in the ring, and the action is ferocious, and ferociously photographed in bruising closeups. The punches are thunderous, the blood flows, and you know just what you’re going to get: another tough drama about an over-the-hill boxer getting one last shot at the big time.
And then director Sean Ellis (“Metro Manila,” “Eight for Silver”) and writer Justin Bull pull the rug out from under the audience – because that opening sequence in the ring is the last time boxing action is going to be center stage in “The Cut.” From there, it becomes a boxing drama in which the focus isn’t the fight, it’s the weigh-in, and in which the real violence isn’t the punching, it’s the dieting.
“The Cut,” which had its world premiere on opening night of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday, is also a film in which the heart of the story isn’t found in the sweat and blood that occupy a large chunk of the film; it’s the quiet conversations between the unnamed boxer played by Bloom and his partner and trainer, Caitlin (Catriona Balfe), a couple who are irretrievably bound to the world of boxing but who have no illusions about the price that exacts.
Balfe (“Belfast,” “Outlander”) can be an uncommonly grounded actress, and she and Bloom create a lived-in relationship that humanizes and creates real stakes for the pugilistic histrionics that surround it. His character’s lack of a name may position him as an everyman, but the little moments of their relationship – glances, raised eyebrows, tilted heads – give his couple a specificity and a shared history in a way exposition never could.
When it comes to his professional life, we know that Bloom’s character was called “the Wolf of Dublin” and that he’s the boxer with the highest knockout-to-win ratio in super-welterweight history. But after the opening few minutes of fisticuffs, we return to him 10 years past his last title shot, with the boxer reduced to teaching kids (which he seems happy to embrace) and scrubbing floors (not so much) in the gym owned by Caitlin, the daughter of a legendary trainer who wanted sons, not daughters.
Faster than you can say “Rocky,” the washed-up and beaten-down fighter is offered a title shot; the catch is that it’s in one week away in Las Vegas, and it’s in the 154-pound weight class. The aging Wolf of Dublin weighs 186, and Caitlin, the reasonable sort, doesn’t think there’s any way he can make the weight in time. But he has to try – because, he says, he tried to move on “but that hunger stayed in me.”
“The hunger never leaves you. You have to learn to live with it,” Caitlin implores.
“I can’t,” he says. “I won’t. I just need to get into that ring, and I need you to get me there.”
The over-the-hill fighter with one last shot at the title is a time-honored boxing-movie setup, and Ellis clearly knows that it’ll bring audience expectations of training montages. But you haven’t really seen training montages like the training montages in “The Cut” – which aren’t even montages, because they take up the bulk of the movie.
It turns out that he doesn’t need Caitlin to get him there; in fact, she can’t and won’t get him there, because she cares too much about him to push him to those extremes. And Bloom’s boxer certainly can’t get there on his own: His response to pressure is to head to the vending machine, get a candy bar, gulp it down and then go into the bathroom and force himself to throw up, something Bloom does with entirely unnerving conviction.
The fight promoter, who is not above bending whatever rules he needs to bend, brings in Boz, a pathologically brutal trainer and motivator played by John Turturro with an unhealthy amount of relish. “He doesn’t give a s— about you,” warns Caitlin, and Boz agrees.
“Your girl’s right,” he says. “I don’t give a s— about you. The only thing I care about is winning…. To make the weight, you’re gonna have to take the brakes off.”
Boz is a brutal man with a closet full of demons and effective if sometimes lethal training methods, and Caitlin high-tails it out of Vegas when the boxer goes along with the plan. Before long, the regimen leaves him hallucinating and passing out from 24 hours a day of sweating, running, working out and, oh yeah, taking diuretics and other drugs that’d be illegal if this title bout were to have pre-fight drug tests, which Boz assures him it won’t.
This isn’t your regular boxing-prep footage – it’s hallucinatory, overwrought and insane on a Darren Aronofsky “Requiem for a Dream” level. “We’ll squeeze your damn soul out if we have to,” says Boz, who’d be a total caricature if Turturro didn’t give him enough small glimpses of what might pass for humanity in this particular neighborhood.
Just as “The Cut” finds a relatively new angle on the fight movie, Ellis and editor Mátyás Fekete take a different approach to the training. The usual fast cuts and staccato pacing are dispensed of for the most part, replaced by relentless immersion in something deeply ugly. There’s nothing triumphant about this prep; it makes you want to look away, not raise your hands in exultation.
As for what happens – well, you have to see it to believe it, and even when you see it you might not believe it.
In recent years, boxing films have often as not justified the form by being as punishing as possible, and there’s plenty of that in “The Cut.” But the film is bookended by quiet scenes between a man and a woman, by beautifully understated performances by Bloom and Balfe. Understatement in a boxing movie? If you look past the savagery of the middle hour, that could be the craziest thing about this new take on an old genre.
Zoë Kravitz, the ultimate Hollywood cool girl, just made her directorial debut with Blink Twice — the buzzy thriller starring her finance, Channing Tatum. Luckily for us, this isn’t a Don’t Worry Darling situation — a director and actor finding love while their production burns. And it definitely wasn’t an It Ends With Us situation — a director and actor publically waging war against each other.
But beyond the drama, the main difference between the Blink Twice rollout (complete with a very cutesy press tour featuring Channing and Zoe) is that people are actually responding well to the it-girls directorial debut. A nepo baby with actual talent? More likely than you’d think.
Zoe has been stretching herself as an actor in recent years, with an especially high-profile role as Catwoman in Robert Pattinson’s emo turn as The Batman. She even got props for her acting chops for her role in Big Little Lies — Season 3 when? — and Hulu’s take on High Fidelity. But Kravitz is new on the directing scene and trying to prove her mettle.
Just from the trailer (which features the song “Iko Iko” by the Dixie Cups), you can tell Blink Twice is shot beautifully. From its vibrant color saturation to the interesting perspective choices, Zoe is as invested in the beauty of her film as her enviable beauty routine.
To the point that some freeze frames in the film feel like Sofia Coppolla-esque tapestries that would be at home on Tumblr — except her subject isn’t girlhood, it’s fame and excess.
And since that’s the world that Kravitz grew up in, she knows it well. Yes, some of the aesthetics start to make the movie feel like a collection sumptuous shots vying to mean something, to say something important.
It’s clear from the beginning that Kravitz understands the evils of fame. But does her attempt to convey them to us translate or fall flat thanks to its own self-importance?
While Blink Twice thinks it’s Get Out meets Saltburn, it’s more horrifying than most people will be able to stomach and less effective than Kravitz thinks.
Watch the Blink Twice trailer here:
Is Blink Twice a horror movie?
Blink Twice is billed as a thriller, blending psychological elements with violence and gore. The reviews are coming in and they’re falling in the upper middle percentage range with a 78% on Rotten Tomatoes. Not bad for an ambitious debut. Kravitz, who is surprisingly tight with Taylor Swift, even got the stamp of approval from the megastar via Instagram.
“This film is incredible. Thrilling, twisted, wickedly funny, and visually stunning. The performances are phenomenal. @zoeisabellakravitz conceptualized this, wrote it, obsessed over every detail, and directed it with such a clear and bold vision. I’m so blown away by what she’s accomplished here and I can’t wait to watch everyone discover this film and this brilliant filmmaker,” said Swift on her Stories.
Sure enough, she’s faring better than Swift’s other bestie, Blake Lively, whose It Ends With Us press tour has made her Hollywood’s recent favorite villain. Other stars like Ayo Edebiri have been singing the director’s praises but we have to wonder … are they just being good friends? I’ve been known to support my besties even when they make questionable decisions. Or in this case, movies.
But here at Popdust, we’re not going to applaud any movie just for deigning to have a female director and a moralistic stance on rape culture. Just look at Promising Young Woman by Emerald Fennell, who also directed Saltburn. The buzzy revenge fantasy starring Carey Mulligan got rave reviews from other critics, but we found it wanting any real message. In the same way, Blink Twice falls into the trap of style over substance. Or rather, so much style in the beginning that the director has to rush to hit us over the head with substance by the end.
In a lot of ways, Blink Twice, which was originally called Pussy Island, feels familiar. We’ve seen the “rich dude bad, women fight back” narrative so many times that it feels a bit 2017. Though this time, the story has echoes of Jeffery Epstein (a sentence I shudder to type) and more contemporary references, some are wondering if Kravitz is just cashing in on a narrative that’s already been done to death.
What’s the premise of Blink Twice?
The movie starts with Naomi Ackie as Frida doomscrolling on her phone — relatable. Scrolling past TikTok after TikTok, she stops at a video of a man we later know is Slater King (Channing Tatum), a tech billionaire who is apologizing for something we don’t know about. Frida watches the video with rapt attention before looking him up as we watch, getting the full download of King and his fame. I’ll admit: it’s a compelling opening scene — even if it starts with its protagonist on the toilet. James Joyce did it in Ulysses, after all, and Kravitz is a fan of learning from the greats.
So now that we’ve seen Frida’s life, an admittedly rushed rendering of a Struggling Person, we’re supposed to rationalize the pressing need for escape that leads her to abandon everything to follow a billionaire to a private island. That, as well as the fact that she has a crush on him before they even meet. As a cocktail waitress (and aspiring nail artist), she’s working King’s event while staring at him and sighing like a lovesick teenager. The two have a meet-cute that might make you think this is a romantic drama: she trips, and he offers his hand to help her hip. Cue the first of many sexually charged close-ups of Channing Tatum’s face. Zoë Girl, if I was making a movie that was 50% intimate shots of Channing Tatum, I’d have gotten engaged to him too.
After just one night, Frida gets swept up into King’s world and agrees to go on a lavish island getaway that turns into a nightmare. It starts off idyllic, if not a little strange. Kravitz’s directorial eye really shines in sun-drenched snaps of this idyllic retreat where Frida spends a series of seemingly perfect days alongside a cast of characters that include a former reality TV star (Adria Arjona), a wine snob (Simon Rex), and Slater’s therapist/consultant (Christian Slater). As we learned from Jonah Hill, it’s always a red flag when a person’s therapist becomes their friend.
Yet, all of King’s behaviors are explained away with a shrug — “this must be what rich people do,” Frida rationalizes with her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat). Until Jess goes missing, the dream vacation turns into a nightmare.
Is Blink Twice a good movie?
On paper, it sounds like it could be a sharp, timely thriller set poolside with sleek Spanish architecture. This is a familiar premise, popular in shows like The White Lotus and films like Knives Out. The costume design is on point too, with the women decked out in flowing white dresses that grow more and more sinister as the movie progresses. But style can only take you so far, and Blink Twice often feels like it’s trying too hard to be provocative and edgy.
The pacing is a major issue. The film’s first half drags, with endless, repetitive scenes of partying and flirting. It’s like Kravitz is so enamored with the glamorous setup that she forgets to move the plot forward. Zoë, if you wanted to make a party movie, you should’ve done that instead of spending over an hour on an ad for a luxury resort before shoving a moralistic ending down our throats. And it’s not just the messaging that’s heavy-handed; it’s the sudden shift to visceral, stomach-turning images of sexual violence.
When things finally do kick into high gear, the action feels chaotic and the plot unearned. Out of nowhere, we’re inundated with gratuitously graphic scenes that make me wonder: do we really need more female-gaze movies about sexual assault when they say nothing new, offer no fresh perspectives and trigger potential trauma?
I felt like I was having a panic attack during the whole second half of the movie. It was an overwrought but ultimately unoriginal lecture set to horrifying scenes of violence against women. And wasting such incredible actors’ work on this tired narrative feels like a missed opportunity. Where there was potential for deftness and nuance, we got a sanctimonious sledgehammer that added nothing new to the conversation about rape culture.
Blink Twice is clearly trying to say something about power dynamics, consent, and the way powerful men can manipulate and abuse women. The problem isn’t that these themes aren’t worth exploring — they absolutely are. But the movie’s approach often feels heavy-handed and simplistic. It’s giving: “I just discovered feminism and now I’m going to make a movie about it.”
There are moments where the movie hits its stride — the sequence where Frida starts piecing together what’s really happening on the island is achingly tense and well-executed. Ackie’s back and forth with Arjona in this sequence is one of the most satisfying parts of the film — but also where it starts to go south.
Blink Twice cast
Yet, despite the circumstances, the actors managed to put on career-defining performances. Naomi Ackie’s turn as Frida is almost good enough to make us forget that the character’s actions — namely, going on a trip with a famously problematic billionaire she met that night — are contrived and unjustified. She shines in the romantic moments and the comedic breaks and is hauntingly convincing in the more violent portions of the film.
Ackie especially shines alongside Adria Arjona, who is having a great summer starring in both this and Hit Man. The two make me wish this movie was more like Bodies Bodies Bodies, comedic and gory without the forced attempt at wokeness. Her character starts as a typical jealous mean girl who embodies the “cool girl” trope as a former contestant of a Survivor-type show starring girls in bikinis and evolves into one of the film’s standout roles.
Channing Tatum is a pleasant (or unpleasant) surprise. Known for his comedic roles, his raunchy dance moves, and, let’s be honest, his abs, Tatum shows he can do more than just flash that million-dollar smile. His Slater King is charming on the surface but has an underlying current of menace that grows more pronounced as the movie progresses. Those close-ups of his eyes go from seductive to sinister. But as the movie reaches its climax, Tatum hits the end of his range and, like the movie, falls flat. I just kept thinking I’d like to see him use this intensity for an actual romance — something like The Vow but with more substance.
Ultimately, the cast is the main reason to watch this film. And the curiosity about what goes on in Zoë Kravtiz’s mind. If it looks like Blink Twice up there, it seems it’s a beautiful but dark place. Despite the nepo baby allegations, there’s definitely potential here. She clearly has a good eye and knows how to create an atmosphere. With less of a need to prove something and a tighter script, she could definitely make something truly impressive in the future. The trouble with being a nepo baby is that you always have to prove you’re not just talented but “deep.” That there’s something within you that justifies your fame. Kravitz was trying to prove that here and ended up doing too much that it basically amounts to nothing.
Blink Twice controversy
What’s surprising is how little the film’s darkness — so overdone in the film — was revealed in the press tour. Clearly, Zoë has trouble with balance and tends to err toward extremes. While Blake Lively is getting flack for not emphasizing the themes of It Ends With Us enough during the press tour, the same criticism can be leveled at Kravitz. Her press rollout seems more like an ad for her relationship with Tatum than a movie about violence against women.
Kravitz has also come under fire for wading into the cancel culture debate — especially when her film is about the hollowness of celebrity apologies. She admitted to loving Roman Polanski in an Esquire interview, where she said she knew it was “controversial.” “It’s okay that somebody bad was involved in something good … What are we supposed to do, get rid of America?” But as someone making a movie about men who abuse their power over women, it’s disappointing to hear such a flippant response on such a nuanced topic.
Kravitz is not the only one whose hypocrisy is a blot on the film’s pietistic aspirations. Alia Shawkat is famously friends with Brad Pitt, who is the ultimate symbol of the status quo — despite his own allegations of violence against women and his seemingly duplicitous public persona. Yes, he’s far less sinister than Slater King, but where do we draw the line? Is badness about degrees? Or have we lost all nuance as viewers that we only recognize bad character when they murder and rape. Is that the unintentional message of Zoë Kravitz’s dark delusion?
In the end, Blink Twice is a bag of cotton candy. Rich, but hollow. It’s stylish but shallow, provocative but predictable. It’s the kind of film that will spark some interesting conversations, even if those conversations are more about what the movie was trying to do rather than what it actually achieved.
The long-in-coming sequel isn’t just a nostalgic retread — it’s a reminder of what makes the director great. Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.
Midway through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Delia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) demands to know “where’s the obnoxious little goth girl who tormented me all those years ago?” The flamboyant conceptual artist is talking to her stepdaughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), who’s grown from the morose teenager of Beetlejuice (1988) into the middle-aged star of a hokey ghost-hunting reality show. But you get the feeling that this is a question director Tim Burton could just as well be posing to himself. The original film was born out of the hectic creative heyday Burton had in the ’80s and ’90s, before he got mired in moribund Disney remakes and bewildering adaptations starring (an otherwise great) Eva Green. Like his character Lydia, who describes what she’s done as selling out, Burton passed from a youthful infatuation with darkness into more grown-up concerns, among them whichever one made 2019’s Dumbo seem like a good idea. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is in some ways itself a product of those concerns, both as a 36-years-later sequel and as a story about how Lydia has since stepped into the position of the distracted parent who’s unable to connect with their own moody child. And yet somehow there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form that finds Burton and much of the previous cast getting weird, gross, and, yes, goth in both an idyllic New England town and a gleefully bureaucratic afterlife.
In the first Beetlejuice, monied New Yorkers were just as much the antagonists as the fast-talking ghoulie of the title (sort of — he’s technically “Betelgeuse” in that film). The Deetz family first arrive in Winter River, Connecticut, full of condescension, resentment, and some regrettable approaches to remodeling, and it feels entirely in character that by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, they appear to have partially or entirely returned to the city. Lydia, who’s kept the distinct spiky bangs while graduating to more Elvira-esque dresses, plays “psychic mediator” in front of a live studio audience while her producer and boyfriend, Rory (an oily Justin Theroux), hovers nearby. Her daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega, made for this), is ensconced in a boarding school where she heads up a doomer-y climate club. Delia has become a Manhattan art star, if her gallery-wide show, “The Human Canvas,” is any indication. The death of her husband, Charles, is both the inciting incident and a handy way of dealing with the fact that the actor who originally played the man, Jeffrey Jones, is now a convicted sex offender — he gets his head bitten off by a shark and spends the rest of the film as a walking torso. Charles’s funeral provides an excuse for the three women to return to Winter River, where, in the course of cleaning out the house, they come back into contact with a certain foul-mouthed spirit who’s still holding a candle for Lydia, the one who got away.
Running through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the fitting theme of shaking off malaise, whether that comes in the form of lingering grief (Astrid’s father, played by Santiago Cabrera, died not long after he and Lydia split), romantic inertia (Rory hides his manipulations behind therapyspeak), or supernatural hauntings. While Michael Keaton slips zestfully back into the role of Beetlejuice like he never left, and the always reliable O’Hara is spookily unchanged, Ryder plays Lydia, poignantly, as a brittle adult who’s stuck dressing in the style she affected a few decades ago, as though she’d gotten interrupted before she could fully finish growing up. When she begs Rory for one of her pills to get through the day, it’s a moment that’s just on the edge of being a little too real, but the movie otherwise wears its emotional allegories lightly. Lydia may have some unfinished trauma from the past that she has to exorcize, but she also has actual ghosts to contend with. When Astrid, a devout nonbeliever, meets a dreamy neighborhood boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), she learns that her mother isn’t delusional about all the visions she claims to have after all, and soon the characters have to enlist the help of a fiend whose name they never wanted to speak again (much less say three times). In there, also, is a stop-motion sequence, undead hallways at impossible angles, all the cleverly mangled waiting-room corpses imaginable, and the amusing but poetic visual of the Deetz house cloaked in a mourning veil. It’s all rendered in scenes that lean heavily on practical effects (including a demonic baby Beetlejuice that crawls across the ceiling à la the detox scene from Trainspotting).
If that sounds like an odd, lopsided plot, well, the first Beetlejuice lurched along to its own idiosyncratic calypso rhythms too. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trades that Caribbean beat in for a disco one that works startlingly well, maybe because it matches the film’s jolting energy. When Monica Bellucci, playing Beetlejuice’s soul-sucking ex Delores, staples the chopped-up chunks of her body back together to the sound of the Bee Gees, it’s a gruesomely jubilant sequence. And when the film arrives at a lip-synced version of “MacArthur Park,” there’s genuine joy to the way the musical number is staged. So many recent revisitations of old properties play like corporate attempts to reanimate the dead — literally, in the case of movies like Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Alien: Romulus. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages to avoid the feeling that its only obligation is to dutifully run through everything familiar one more time. Instead, watching it is a small but significant relief, like reconnecting with an estranged friend and finding out that you still get along after all — and for more reasons than just shared history, back when you were both obnoxious little goth girls.
Bill Skarsgård and FKA Twigs star in the tragic love story between a Soundcloud scarecrow and a rebellious cheerleader. Photo: Lionsgate
I can’t say for sure that the doomed lovers in the new The Crow were modeled after Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. But once it occurred to me, the comparison became impossible to shake, because the only better way to sum up the film’s sweaty approach to contemporize its story is the fact that its villain is trying to avoid being canceled. Its hero, Eric Draven, as played by Bill Skarsgård, has the silhouette of a Soundcloud scarecrow, crowned with a Bushwick mullet and inked with tattoos — including a cursive “Lullaby” over an eyebrow — that scream “poor decision-making” as much as they do “emotional rebellion.” Meanwhile, Shelly (FKA Twigs) is pitched as a princess with a dark streak, all elf locks, slip dresses, and sheer layers, a girl who was raised in wealth and trained as a pianist but turned to partying thanks to toxic parenting. The Eric of James O’Barr’s 1989 comic was modeled after Iggy Pop and Bauhaus’s Peter Murphy. An emo-rap update feels right for a movie adamantly branded as not a remake or reboot but a reimagining of the original source material.
The Crow isn’t untouchable — it’s spawned way too many sequels, not to mention a short-lived TV show, for that. But O’Barr’s work and Alex Proyas’s 1994 film adaptation were accompanied by real tragedies — the death of O’Barr’s fiancée in an accident involving a drunk driver and the death of star Brandon Lee in an on-set accident — that gave added ballast to their tormented depictions of a grief-stricken man rising from the grave to seek closure in violent retribution. This new Crow, messily directed by Ghost in the Shell’s Rupert Sanders, with a screenplay by Zach Baylin and William Schneider, feels so lightweight in comparison that it’s almost endearing. Its two beautiful dummies meet in rehab, where they endure the indignity of being made to wear pink sweatsuits and fall in love during group-therapy exercises. Eric imagines Shelly topless in the sketches he pins to his wall, while Shelly is irresistibly drawn to the way Eric sits by himself, declaring him “quite brilliantly broken.” Skarsgård and Twigs have a total absence of chemistry, and while she’s adequate in what’s still basically a dead-wife role, he’s shockingly inert for someone with a career built almost entirely on characters at the intersection of creepy and hottie.
The film may insist that Eric and Shelly’s is a grand romance of soul mates, but what it actually gives us is a burnout-detention boyfriend/rebellious-cheerleader girlfriend dynamic that doesn’t feel like it would last a long weekend. Fittingly, when Eric rises from the grave after he and Shelly are murdered by henchmen on the orders of evil bigwig Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston), he proves pretty inept at undead vengeance. It’s not just that he’s not much of a fighter — that doesn’t matter when your body regenerates thanks to powers granted by a mystical crow from the afterlife. He’s also exasperatingly slow to accept what’s happened to him, he untangles the bad business Shelly was involved in only really by accident, and he doesn’t even put on a trench coat until the final act. The way that Eric fumbles his way toward retribution is right on the verge of funny — at one point, he gets run over by a truck — but The Crow can’t bring itself to display a sense of humor. Instead, it makes up for its hero’s initial bumbling by raising its gore quotient later on.
It’s a lot to ask, following in the footsteps of a subculture mainstay. If there were any sense of intentionality behind this new Crow, I’d say it’s trying to provide representation for the Incompetent Goths out there — the IncompeGoths who get an illegible stick-and-poke on their cheekbone, who are indifferent to how goofy their single dangly earring looks, and who keep getting sent back to mystical purgatory to be lectured by a supernatural mentor that IMDb assures me has a name, Kronos (Sami Bouajila). But this film isn’t coherent enough for that. Its baddie, Vincent, is an immortal arts patron of sorts who made a deal with the devil but spends the movie trying to track down a cell-phone video he’s worried will get him in trouble. It takes place in an apparently American city where almost every resident has a different international accent. Shelly is desperately on the run from a man with enormous power, reach, and demonic connections, and the first thing she and Eric do when they escape from rehab is go back to her luxury apartment, with its chubby furniture, and get trashed together.
Look, deep thoughts and deeply held emotions aren’t for everyone, and there’s something blissfully empty-headed about the scene in which Shelly, posing with a book at an Instagram-ready picnic with some random friends, informs Eric that she’s reading Rimbaud. If only The Crow were a little more self-aware, it could be a cult classic in its own right — though probably not the kind its makers were hoping for.
Axel Foley is back and better than ever. Forty years ago, Eddie Murphy starred in the original Beverly Hills Cop, which blew audiences away and became one of the comedian’s most famous films. This action-comedy hit was followed by two sequels, one of which was so critically maligned that this movie briefly makes fun of it. But thirty years have passed since Beverly Hills Cop III. After CBS put a banana in the tailpipe of a TV pilot that failed to reboot this series in 2013, Netflix took the reins from Paramount, gave Murphy his old Detroit Lions letterman jacket, and said yes to Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.
This movie is the entry that fans of the series have deserved for decades. Franchise veteran Jerry Bruckheimer, known for his exceptional work, returns to produce this long-awaited sequel. This film marks the 80-year-old producer’s third movie in the last five weeks after Young Woman and the Sea and Bad Boys: Ride or Die. His work here is terrific. He worked with Netflix to secure a whopping $150 million budget to give the fans something they’ve been hoping for for years, ensuring the highest-quality production.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is the best entry in the series. It retains the DNA of a classic Eddie Murphy comedy while injecting millions of dollars that the other films did not have. It hits you with nostalgia right from minute one, with Glenn Frey’s “The Heat Is On” blasting through the opening credits, just like moviegoers saw back in 1984. The soundtrack uses needle drops to help you remember those first three movies superbly. However, the key ingredient to a good Beverly Hills Cop movie is seeing Murphy do his schtick as Axel Foley. And boy, that man can run his mouth like a motor, just like he did in the ’80s. It’s good to have him back.
Fueled by nostalgia, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F spends the right amount of time playing the hits. It shows off the chaos of a Foley car chase and then kicks off the main story. The plot follows a defense attorney named Jane Saunders (Taylour Paige) looking into a case. This is where the film finds its most significant fault—the story is not very interesting. The crime she is investigating happened offscreen, meaning there isn’t enough here for the audience to connect to these events emotionally.
In the first movie, Axel is finding the person who killed his best friend. In the second, he’s looking for the people who shot Captain Bogomil. In the third, he’s searching for the person who killed Inspector Todd. The death that kickstarts the events of Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is nowhere near as compelling. It feels as if the crime happened in a deleted scene that was replaced with a more lighthearted opening action sequence. This event serves as an excuse to put Axel face-to-face with his daughter. We find out soon enough that Jane is Axel’s daughter, estranged from him after years of a rough childhood where Axel was not the father he should have been.
This storyline is where the heart and soul of the movie come to life. Like many long-delayed sequels to classics of decades past, Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F provides a more mature look at Axel Foley and his shortcomings. His wife is not in the picture, and there are many conversations that Axel and Jane need to have that they haven’t had yet. The movie also puts the right amount of focus on Detective Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), who must not only team up with Axel but is also Jane’s ex-boyfriend.
The action is a shining element of this film. The previous franchise directors (Martin Brest, Tony Scott, and John Landis) did a serviceable job with the action sequences, but they all could have been better. Mark Molloy directs this movie in his feature film debut. Few in history have landed a $150 million franchise film as their first movie, but he does solid work. There’s a standout action set piece with a helicopter, and it feels much more in-camera than the digitized CGI environments of recent Hollywood cinema. There are practical helicopter and truck stunts, which all feel more thrilling than the first three movies.
The film’s biggest weakness is the string that connects everything. The Beverly Hills Cop movies have never boasted phenomenal screenplays. This script, written by Will Beall (Aquaman), Tom Gormican, and Kevin Etten (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent), does its best to provide the characters with an emotional gravitas. However, the crime story at the center could be clearer and more compelling. When we have a story like this, an action-comedy movie must tie everything together with solid action sequences or hilarious comedy set pieces. Unfortunately, the quality of both is too inconsistent for this movie to have the impact it could.
It can also suffer from its predictability. A character shows up early, and right from their opening scene, it’s extremely easy to predict they will be the surprise villain. The movie also commits a third-act action movie trope where if you’ve seen any action movie in your life, you’ve seen this idea done before. You may roll your eyes a few times, but there’s a lot of charm here.
Murphy’s career has had its ups and downs. In 2019, he looked like he was on the verge of a resurgence with his fantastic work in Dolemite Is My Name. Since then, he’s made another long-delayed sequel with Coming 2 America and shown up in the underwhelmingly reviewed You People and Candy Cane Lane. This is his best movie since Dolemite, and he brings all that classic charm and signature smile into this character. Gordon-Levitt is always an enjoyable presence in everything he’s in. He’s likable as ever, and he gets some fun action-hero moments that may remind one of his heyday in Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, and Looper.
Paige gives an excellent performance as Jane. She doesn’t get to flex any comedic chops like you’d expect Axel Foley’s daughter to, but she gets one scene where she matches Murphy’s wit. Another shining element is the score from Lorne Balfe, who has had a history of putting his spin on classic action movie franchises like Mission: Impossible and Bad Boys. He uses that classic iconic Harold Faltermeyer score in all the right places. Some may be disappointed about how long it takes to get a few of the reunions we’ve been waiting for, but it feels so lovely to have Judge Reinhold and John Ashton back in this series, along with a few other familiar faces.
Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F is a decent sequel that knows how to pull the right heartstrings. It will strike a chord with longtime fans of those original movies, particularly with its 80s score and soundtrack. The film references the first trilogy while telling a new story and putting the right amount of emphasis on the characters and their depth. This movie is a strong debut from Molloy, who brings a grounded authenticity to all the action sequences and lets Murphy let loose.
SCORE: 6.5/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 6 equates to “Decent.” It fails to reach its full potential and is a run-of-the-mill experience.
Disclosure: ComingSoon received a screener for our Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F review.
Trump: Triumph of the MAGA Will — a movie review by Llib Epot, Conservative Capitol Correspondent.
A new documentary promoting the candidacy of former President Donald J Trump for reelection will be released to media outlets on Friday. Our Capitol correspondent previewed the 20-minute film; following is his exclusive review of “Trump: Triumph of the MAGA Will.”
The film opens with a vast audience — bigger than any audience ever before assembled — gathered before the Capitol at the eastern end of the National Mall. Soon-to-be-elected President Donald J. Trump is onstage and shaking a clenched fist at the crowd. The camera moves in and catches the noble president up close and in all his orange glory. Audio now comes up:
“I am,” thunders Trump, “your retribution!” At least three million crazed citizens cheer wildly.
The onlookers begin chanting, “Trump, Trump, Trump!”
Trump lifts his chin, looking for all the world like an orange Mussolini, another law & order paragon from the past. He lifts a finger and the huge crowd grows instantly silent.
“This nation,” says Trump gravely, “is infected, infested, and overrun with vermin from shithole countries.”
The screen then shows thousands of shrieking rodents scurrying through ratholes in an unidentified ghetto housing project. African American babies sit on the wood plank floor, eating gruel with their fingers. Hypodermic syringes and lines of dubious-looking powder litter the floor.
Focus back on Trump. “Shithole countries,” repeats the president. “Rapists, killers, miscreants, thieves, bent on poisoning our blood line and replacing us in society and at the polls. Caravans marching over our open-borders, pillaging, raping and voting…” He shakes his head sadly. “I will close the borders, shoot the immigrants in the leg, build a 50-foot wall,” he continues in a sing-song voice. “And,” he goes on, “Mexico and Western Europe and NATO will pay for it.” The crowd roars.
The crowd magically splits in two, allowing a magnificent military parade to pass through its ranks. Tanks, cannon, missiles, are proudly displayed by losers, suckers, and other military types.
Abruptly the gigantic crowd starts chanting, “Hang Mike Pence, Hang MIke Pence, Hang Mike…” On stage, Trump grins broadly and nods his head in approval.
Closeup on the crowd: they are all clad in brown shirts, with Trumpian extra-long red silk ties, and jackboots, and are clutching AR-15s. As a group, they spontaneously lift their right arms in salute.
Next, the camera pans over the national landmarks,: the Trump Monument, the Trump Ellipse, the Trump Memorial, the Trumpsonian Institution, the Trump National Cathedral, the Trump Museum, and Trump’s Theater.
Across the crowded grounds, vendors sell signature Trump merchandise, including Trump t-shirts, slabs of Trump BBQ ribs, Trump lemonade, and on and on. A good time is had by all.
Toward the end of the film, the camera flashes on a cluster of scaffolds, with corpses slowly twisting in the wind. One of the victims wears a military uniform and another a dress. Emerging on the screen in large red letters is the phrase, “Retribution: Count on it!” The film ends with a closeup of the now and future president, lifting his fist and shaking it again. A web site appears on-screen to provide access for making a love offering to the Trump PAC.
Screen fades to black.
Credits roll, indicating that “Trump: Triumph of the MAGA Will” was produced by the Heritage Foundation and directed by acclaimed director 121-year-old Leni Riefenstahl.
Bill Tope is a retired (caseworker, cook, construction worker, nude model for art classes, and so on) who lives with his mean little cat Baby.
Picture me with my stepmother in a college neighborhood in Seattle. We’re looking for something to do, preferably with air conditioning. We’ve sampled the artisanal ice cream shop on the main street (every college has one). But our rapidly melting cones’ reprieve from the heat was short-lived. We head to a small theatre. We decide that we’ll watch pretty much anything to escape Seattle’s unprecedented heat just for a couple of hours.
When we say “pretty much” anything, we mean anything but The Flash — which we will not be partaking in for obvious, Ezra Miller-related, reasons. And in that tiny, retro theatre, we only have one other choice: No Hard Feelings, the new movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and newcomer Andrew Barth Feldman.
NO HARD FEELINGS – Official Red Band Trailer (HD)www.youtube.com
It’s immediately clear to me that this is not a movie to watch with their stepmother. From the raunchy themes to the full-frontal nudity, the film is the definition of a late-night comedy. The premise is kind of: grooming?
Essentially, a pair of Hamptons helicopter parents hire a local girl (Jennifer Lawrence) to … turn their son into a man in exchange for . . . a car. Yes, this is precisely what it sounds like. What ensues is sometimes tough to watch. Lawrence plays Maddie (31) and Feldman’s Percy is only 19. And if this isn’t enough, she pursues and pressures him to “seal the deal” despite his constant insistence that he’s not ready. Yikes.
The only thing that saves this film is that, inevitably, they don’t go through with it. Conveniently, they both learn lessons, grow up, and get what they truly want. See? The movie seems to imply, all that discomfort and the murky dealings with consent turns out okay. Although this remains debatable, the most memorable scene in the movie is one of my favorite film scenes of the year.
The scene is part of the sequence that signals the turn from a raunchy comedy to a coming-of-age story. On the night the odd couple is supposed to finally go all the way, they . . . go to dinner — you know, because it’s a classy affair.
During dinner, Maddie asks Percy to play something on a vacant piano. After some convincing, he starts in on a Hall and Oates’ cover of “Maneater” — a song that references their first date.
Jennifer Lawrence is 🔥 #jenniferlawrence #andrewbarthfeldman #nohardfeelings #maneater
Clearly, the song has resonance in Percy’s life, and the camera keeps dramatically panning to Maddie’s tear-filled eyes to make sure we get the point. We get the point. Though the song and its symbolism hits us over the head, what’s surprising is how good Feldman is as Percy.
Feldman’s take on the song is artfully executed. True to his role, he’s tentative at the beginning, then earnest, then full-out confident. Triumphant. Musically, it’s an excellent arrangement. And Feldman? He’s got it. A voice like Ben Platt, sincerity without being saccharine, and genuine feelings.
This scene has been playing in my head all week. While problematic in premise, this film wasn’t horrid. I’ve already forgotten the trite antics — though they might have scarred my stepmother for life. (I did apologize profusely afterward for forcing her watch it. Shockingly, she insisted that she had a good time.) But despite it all, it’s this seemingly innocent scene that I keep returning to.
Whether it’s the movie magic of a musical number that always gets me — a la every fine 90s film — or the of Feldman’s surprising tenderness, this scene gave me chills. Perhaps it’s the scene’s contrast to the rest of the movie. Perhaps it’s because both Lawrence and Feldman are at their finest as actors, both vulnerable and no longer playing to the ridiculousness of the movie’s conceit.
Whatever it was, it’s worth watching No Hard Feelings just to see that scene. Or simply streaming the cover on Spotify:
Tribeca Film Festival took place in New York City from June 7th to 18th. With celebratory ceremonies, fascinating film premieres, and even the announcement of the upcoming De Niro Con — it was a jampacked two weeks for filmmakers and film lovers alike.
All over the city, fans scrambled to access rush screenings, catch a glimpse of their favorite actors strutting along makeshift sidewalk red carpets, and spot said celebs at popular downtown eateries and bars. Honestly, this is what living in New York is generally like, with celebrity events and premieres happening every day. But for two weeks, the excitement was concentrated in Tribeca.
And there I was, in the thick of it. Between tearing from screening rooms to AMC theatres, it’s easy to get swept up in managing the logistics and stress. Darting from show to show and scouring unknown neighborhoods for lunch spots, life as a writer and reviewer at Tribeca is far from glamorous. But after viewing a heaping slate of Tribeca’s selection of films, I was able to parse out some common themes.
What were the best films at Tribeca Film Festival?
With thousands of films submitted each year, the films Tribeca Festival selects are always the cream of the crop. Tribeca 2023 highlighted 109 feature films helmed by 127 filmmakers spanning 36 countries. Within the lineup, 93 showings were world premieres, there was one international premiere, 8 North American premieres, one U.S. premiere, and 6 New York premieres.
The festival is also a competition, with filmmakers competing for recognition in the following categories:
U.S. Narrative
International Narrative
Documentary
Shorts
There are special categories like Human/Nature and the Nora Ephron Award, plus categories for music, audio storytelling, games, and XR.
Major winners at Tribeca Film Festival 2023 include:
Cypher (US): Tierra Whack stars in Chris Moukarbel’s Best US Narrative winner, one of the major honors of the night. With the jury saying: “For its kaleidoscopic use of music, created imagery and found materials, in service of an interrogation of celebrity, conspiracy culture and the nature of narrative reality itself.”
Smoking Tigers (US): So Young Shelly Yo was awarded many-many honors for this feature, including Best Screenplay in a U.S. Narrative Feature, Best Performance in a U.S. Narrative Feature for Ji-Young Yoo for Smoking Tigers, and the Nora Ephron Award Special Jury Mention. The jury commented: “This screenplay pulled us into its leading characters, making us care deeply about their pasts and futures. It skillfully juggled multiple storylines and journeys with nuance, emotional honesty, deft sequencing until the final beautiful scene.”
Between the Rains (Kenya): Creators Andrew H. Brown and Moses Thuranira were awarded Best Documentary Feature and Best Cinematography in a Documentary Feature. Comments from the Jury mentioned: “For craft, storytelling, impact — and above all a raw, elegant coming-of-age portrait of resilience that unanimously blew us away.” And . . . “Combining the patience and elegance of portraiture — with the immediacy of observational cinema verite — this cinematographer truly transported us into a rarely seen world.”
A Strange Path (Brazil): This received literally all the awards for International Narratives. Yes, all four of them! It was awarded: Best International Narrative Feature, Best Performance in an International Narrative Feature for Carlos Francisco, Best Screenplay in an International Narrative Feature for Guto Parente, and Best Cinematography in an International Narrative Feature for Linga Acácio.
Mountains (US): Monica Sorelle received the U.S. Narrative Feature Special Jury Mention for this film’s “authentic, specific portrayal of a culture we had not seen on screen. A deeply emotional and empathetic portrait of a family in a changing world with brilliant leading performances.”
What were the Tribeca Film Festival 2023’s major themes?
After enduring a barrage of press about sensationalized (but subpar) works at festivals like Cannes — I’m talking about The Idol, of course — witnessing the celebration of thoughtful, transformative pieces at Tribeca felt rare. And since art reflects our life and times, the themes of major Tribeca films offer us a glimpse into the zeitgeist.
It’s interesting to note that, despite films starring mega names like Jon Hamm, Tina Fey, and Nick Jonas, the work that received the highest honors were those with highly developed characters and stories.
When surveying the big winners, it appears that the jury was most compelled by stories that dealt with identity, belonging, and an immersive sense of place. A Strange Path was lauded for how it “radiated a magnetic realism,” which can be applied to many of the winners.
Smoking Tigers is intimate and immediate, painting a lush portrait of a singular experience that — due to the expert wielding of perspective — feels inviting to the viewer. This sense of “magnetic realism” emanates from the characters (for whom we feel so much empathy), as well as the place, which becomes as emotionally potent to us as it does for the characters.
Cypher manages to evoke that feeling while being an experimental, surrealist portrait that blends fact and fiction. It manages this ambitious feat by drawing on Tierra Whack’s own charisma as a character so the viewer is anchored to the fast-moving world we’re plunged into.
All these films demonstrate a viewer’s desire to connect with compelling places and characters — the fundamentals of film that can get lost amidst the grind of the Marvel machine and celeb-driven cash grabs.
Even amongst the festival-wide programming, connection was a theme that binds many of the films together. Particularly, reunion after being distanced, and reconnection after a death. Since the festival’s closing, I’ve been mulling over the vast number of films and the judges’ verdicts. And I’ve been thinking about the common themes raised by this year’s lineup.
What keeps coming back to me is the idea of healing. While there wasn’t a preponderance of “Covid” films, many had a post-Covid resonance.
Films about returning to your childhood home. About feeling isolated. About grief. About reconciling with family — anyone who lived at home or lost a loved one during the pandemic can relate. Indeed, sitting in Q&As with writers and directors after some screenings, fellow audience members shared stories about their own losses and their own homecomings. In the dark of those theaters, audiences made sense of our own lives from the perspectives of the characters on the screen — a testament to fine cinema.
And while a number of these films are imperfect, many of the characters predictable, and the narratives too linear, I think it indicates that we’ve reached the first wave (no pun intended) of Covid narratives. These stories aren’t directly about viruses or lockdowns. Instead, they’re about how living through two years defined by distance has shaped us, and is still shaping us, socially, psychologically, and emotionally.
The first reactions to Adipurush are largely positive, with netizens praising actors for there terrific performance. Such a wonderful cinematography, mainly BGM, visuals, graphics (fire) and fight scenes caused goosebumps .The complete cast has done a great work. Watch video to know about it .
Adipurush is backed by Bhushan Kumar and directed by Om Raut. The movie is starring Prabhas as Raghava and Kriti Sanon as Janaki, Sunny Singh as Laxman and Saif Ali Khan as the antagonist Ravana, releases in cinemas on Friday, June 16. Beating the scorching summer, Prabhas fans are thronging cinemas for the first day first show with several theatres being houseful.The first reactions to Adipurush are largely positive, with netizens praising actors for there terrific performance. Such a wonderful cinematography, mainly BGM, visuals, graphics (fire) and fight scenes caused goosebumps .The complete cast has done a great work.
