Movie reviews

If you’re a genre nostalgic who’s looking for a romantic comedy that could’ve been made in the ‘90s or early aughts, and that features all of the comforting types (including the widowed protagonist, the dreamy lost love, the sassy, truth-telling best friend, the equally hunky potential new love and his cynical yet adoring sister) “The Greatest Hits” will tick most if not all of the boxes. The problem, in the end, is that you’re probably going to be too aware of the boxes as they’re checked—and although the performances are nearly faultless, the characterizations rarely rise above the requirements of their respective “types.” And only one of the three central relationships in this love triangle (between a grieving woman, the memory of her dead boyfriend, and the incredibly appealing new guy that she meets in a grief counseling group) comes completely alive as a person, thanks more to the performer than the role.

As a piece of filmmaking, “The Greatest Hits” doesn’t lack ambition, much less a pedigree. Writer-director Ned Benson took a huge swing ten years ago with “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” which recounted a relationship from two lovers’ perspectives, and was reedited into a combined, “Rashomon”-sh story (they were subtitled “His,” “Hers” and “Them,” and are available in all three versions). This new feature has a splash of “Slaughterhouse Five,” in that its heroine Harriet (Lucy Boynton) trips backwards in time whenever she hears a song that reminds her of a moment she shared with her late boyfriend Max (David Corenswet, James Gunn’s newly anointed Superman), and one of Benson’s smartest decisions as a screenwriter is to keep you guessing during first two-thirds as to whether Harriet’s condition is scientifically quantifiable or if she’s so deep in the grief-pit that she’s starting to crack up.

The big problem, for this viewer anyway, is that when the movie finally pulls the trigger on its concept and entirely commits to it, in a scientific procedural way, the story is getting ready to be over. Chung Chung-hoon shimmering, lens-flare-y photography, Page Buckner’s dense and meticulous but never showy production design, and Olga Mill’s costumes go right up to the edge of a sci-fi parable love story (parts of it are reminiscent of “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” particularly the moments when Harriet is triggered by a song and the movie itself seems to be straining and vibrating inside the projector) but don’t quite cross over. 

I wanted it to. I’m admitting that here, even though it’s poor form to dock a movie for not being what you wanted it to be rather than embracing what it is, because what it is becomes repetitive, and without enough real-world messy specificity to make the repetitiousness the point, and the reward, of watching. Harriet’s best friend Morris (Austin Crute), a DJ, keeps sweetly but firmly informing her that she’s stuck in a self-punishing grief loop and needs to get out of it because it’s turned into a sort of twisted safe place giving her permission never to move on. (“Grief is temporary, but loss is forever,” is her group’s mantra.) 

The better realistic dramas about grief have either an anthropological level of detail about how and why people feel certain things, or else translate it into bold but easy-to-grasp metaphors (science fiction and horror are particularly adept at this). This one is stuck somewhere between the two, unable to move ahead and make choices, rather like Harriet. I’d applaud the movie for taking the form of its heroine’s pathologies if the result was something more than a good try with a lot of heart.

Boynton does a lot with a little here. The character is defined almost entirely by her loss (which is something nobody who’s lost a mate would want) and the steps she takes to cope with her condition (such as wearing noise-canceling headphones in public avoid hearing a triggering song, culling her own music collection to remove anything that could send her into the grief zone, and getting a job at a public library, which is of course silent). Her great, lost love is an abstraction. You don’t learn much about him except that he was incredibly handsome and loved Harriet and was a musician and that she produced his albums and (a belated bit of detail that one wishes were explored) he could be a bit of a self-centered prat. Are we seeing him this way because Harriet idealized him to the point of dehumanizing him? There’s nothing in the movie to indicate this, except for a couple of too-late intimations in the third act. All of the other supporting players have maybe one-and-a-half dimensions at best, though they’re so appealingly performed that it’s hard not to like them regardless.

Justin H. Min, who made such a strong impression in “After Yang,” rescues the movie from the doldrums just by showing up. He’s got a naturally sunny presence that could seem self-regarding and irritating if it weren’t so brilliantly modulated. No matter what he says or does, you believe that he has Harriet’s best interests at heart and is a fundamentally good dude. He might be the latest evolutionary iteration of the character that John Cusack played in “Say Anything,” who was—despite the scene with the boombox, which has been retroactively identified as “stalking”—nearly a perfect specimen of young straight American manhood, so pure of heart that you might have rejected him out of hand if the actor playing him didn’t make you believe every moment. 

Reviewed at South by Southwest 2024. It premieres on Hulu on April 12th.

Author: Matt Zoller Seitz
Posted: March 17, 2024, 5:42 pm

There has been a growing subgenre of non-fiction films that I jokingly call “Internet Bad” movies. The worst of these feel like shallow fearmongering, playing up the fears of older viewers like a modern “Reefer Madness.” Part of the problem with this subgenre is that too many filmmakers try to paint something as complex as the internet and technology in general with a very broad brush. The truth is that our technological revolution is way too complex for most feature films to begin to capture or even really comment on, especially as it's shifting every day, so doc filmmakers end up not saying anything by trying to say too much. “The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem” has a little bit of this problem as it traces the impact of 4chan from Rickrolling to the insurrection, but it’s more engaging than a lot of this doc subgenre by virtue of the filmmaking acumen of directors Giorgio Angelini (“Owned: A Tale of Two Americas”) and Arthur Jones (“Feels Good Man,” one of the best films in this category, by the way).

Like so many things that the internet poisons, 4chan started innocently enough, a community for people with shared interests to come together. One of the interesting tidbits learned in “The Antisocial Network” is how this system essentially followed another down the rabbit hole to toxicity as 2chan had been turned into a political nightmare in Japan. The early days of 4chan are almost lovingly memorialized, a time when people were fascinated by an online presence named “moot,” aka Christopher Poole, who would go on to become the Mark Zuckerberg of this organization. Seeing the early in-person meetings is fascinating, as is watching the groups fracture as more and more people wanted to make an offline impact through the pranks that ultimately developed into the work of Anonymous and the QAnon conspiracy nuts. There’s a cautionary tale in the inherent flaws that come in this kind of shitposting and trolling in terms of escalation. When the trolls of 4chan, some of whom are interviewed here, got away with one thing then it would only lead to the desire to do something more impactful or crazier in the future.

For better or worse, “The Antisocial Network” seems reticent to point fingers, almost taking the stance that the kind of unchecked power that was held by 4chan was destined to corrupt and so we shouldn't really blame any of the people caught in this spider web. It sometimes feels like a few people, including one being interviewed, are let off the hook in terms of personal responsibility in a way that can be frustrating. These folks still did make choices. And, while the truth is that much of the activity on 4chan may not have created the giant riffs in society in 2024, it sure didn’t help, amplifying garbage like PizzaGate into the actual national conversation. Yes, Anonymous brought attention to issues like privacy and income inequity, but the cavalcade of conspiracy theories and flat-out lying to get clicks have dumbed down the entire country because no one knows what’s true anymore in a world where so many people believe that Q is real.

At its best, this point is embedded in “The Antisocial Network,” pulling back the curtain on so much of the bullshit of the last decade and revealing it to be just a bunch of people who tugged at the strings of national anxiety for the lulz. The film can be a big weighed down in terms of hyperactive editing, but that’s because it’s trying to tell bits and pieces of so many stories, cutting between interviews about the practical history of 4chan and attempting to convey its international impact at the same time. In an era in which Netflix usually turns everything into a multi-episode series to drag it out for the viewing hours, it’s almost funny that a true story that could have justified more time gets shoved into a feature-length box that makes some of it feel shallow. 

With all of its unpacked tragedies, “The Antisocial Network” fits pretty snugly into the “Internet Bad” category of documentaries, but it’s better than most because of how deftly it chronicles how it broke that way in the first place.

This review was filed from the SXSW Film Festival. It premieres on Netflix on April 5th.

Author: Brian Tallerico
Posted: March 16, 2024, 2:34 pm

At eighty-one years of age, Paul Simon is still producing the most interesting music of his career. That makes over six decades of Simon’s impact on the popular music consciousness—from his earlier days as an Everly Brothers-inspired double act with collaborator/nemesis Art Garfunkel to his branching out into world music. Now, in his twilight years, he’s released a nearly forty-minute-long album, all one track, called Seven Psalms, a sermon delivered via plaintive guitar and his own soft whisper of a voice. 

His body of work is as huge as the man is short, so it makes sense that a documentary spanning his career would stretch well past the three-hour mark. But for fans of Simon, Alex Gibney’s two-part doc “In Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon” should serve as a healthy diagnostic on a pop music icon—comprehensible, digestible, and chock-a-block with more than a half century of the man’s stamp on pop culture. It’s his “Eras Tour,” basically.

Framed largely around the recording sessions he conducted in 2021 for Seven Psalms at his studio in Wimberly, Texas, “In Restless Dreams” zips back frequently to let Simon reflect on the various moments of his career. (Suffice to say, Paul Simon has to think about his entire life before he plays.) It’s in these stretches that Gibney, a veteran documentarian who normally handles more politically prescient material (“Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World,” “Totally Under Control”), breezes casually through the usual mix of interviews, narration, and archival footage of Simon’s relatively uncontroversial career. 

This isn’t to say Simon’s career hasn’t been a rocky one, as Gibney makes clear (though frustratingly refuses to explore deeply). A good bit of the doc’s first episode—which Gibney cheekily dubs “Verse One”—details Simon’s early collaborations with, then bitter feuds, with Garfunkel, a close childhood friend who becomes a bitter creative partner. Then, his solo career (and life) stumbles more than a few times, from his attempt to follow Garfunkel in front of the camera in the 1980 flop “One Trick Pony” to the accusations of “cultural slumming” he faced around his Grammy-winning world music tracks in “Graceland.” 

Peppered throughout these sections is the same sense of perfectionism Simon lends to his music. We watch his boyish face and weary eyes grow and change over the years; his hairline grows thinner, his blazers boxier. He and Garfunkel come right out of the gate with The Sound of Silence, and recount the way “Mrs. Robinson” was essentially being written as they recorded it, rushing to complete it for “The Graduate.” Whether there, or in the minutes-long jam sessions we see in South Africa with some of that nation’s most talented musicians or finding the right lyric for Seven Psalms—complete with handwritten text floating overhead—we get a decent sense of Simon’s perfectionism. 

Docs less enamored with their subject might eke out some more interesting tidbits about their famous feud in the ‘70s and ‘80s. (Garfunkel is only seen in voiceover and archival footage; it would have been nice to get a reunion of sorts with him.) But Gibney seems content to leave it up to a few snide remarks at awards shows and shrugged acknowledgments of bitterness. Even the way he elides the aforementioned accusations of appropriation feels defensive, and we don’t get him reflecting on those controversies in the present day. In 2021, Paul Simon is all but focused on getting Seven Psalms done, to the point where that footage feels a little divorced from the archival stuff we’re seeing.

In general, the doc seems to lean into Simon’s outward persona as a shy, gregarious guy—and indeed, the bits of contemporary footage we see bear out a wise old songwriting legend ruminating on his own life, with wife Edie Brackell and a flood of millennial musicians and sound engineers by his side. But for a work that feels like the final punctuation mark on the man’s life (he is, after all, in the middle of recording an album about whether he truly believes in God in his eighties), it feels a bit too curated for the unironic fan. The arrogant songwriter who had rocky relationships with Carrie Fisher and was accused of cultural appropriation in his world music era of Graceland? We see him only in a few scenes. Gibney’s approach, like Simon at his peak, is to play the hits.

In so doing, even the darker parts are lacquered over with a healthy dose of Simon’s output, like the teeny-bopper hit “Hey Schoolgirl” he released with Garfunkel—back when they were called “Tom & Jerry”—and extended footage of the various hit concerts he headlined. Admittedly, these are a treat for Simon (and Garfunkel, mind you) fans, and the footage of the ‘81 reunion concert with Art and a concert in Zimbabwe are particular standouts. Those looking to groove out to the man’s music will be well-supplied, especially in “Verse Two,” where Simon’s life smooths out a bit more and he’s just looking for the next thing to focus on.

Paradoxically, “In Restless Dreams” feels like it could, or should, go on longer—it ends at the Rhythm of the Saints portion of his career before zooming back to the present and Seven Psalms. But even so, Gibney knows the appeal of this man to his public is the music, first and foremost. He’s not about to sacrifice that for a more withering, clear-eyed expose on the musician. 

“I’m afraid of the nights,” a frail Simon says into the phone while he preps for more recording sessions at a local church for Seven Psalms; he’s been prone to terrifying coughing fights in the dark. Just a couple of minutes later, he dances on the stage with all the playful energy of a man thirty, forty years his senior. “In Restless Dreams” captures Simon in both modes, for better more than for worse—a reverential doc about an iconic musician.

On MGM+ on Sunday, March 17th.

Author: Clint Worthington
Posted: March 15, 2024, 6:17 pm

Another day, another traffic jam. A father, François (Romain Duris), chides his son Émile (Paul Kircher) for feeding the family dog potato chips. He tells his son to stay away from them as well since they’re probably not very good for him, and Émile rolls his eyes as any 16-years-old would. They argue. Émile gets out of their car in defiance since the traffic is at a standstill. Suddenly, an ambulance stuck in the opposite lane of traffic starts to wobble and out bursts a bird-like man. He escapes, and the son and the father run back to their car in shock. “Strange days!” a neighboring driver responds. It is an understatement. 

In Thomas Cailley’s striking sci-fi fantasy “The Animal Kingdom,” the birdman is a sign of things to come. In this present-day world, some humans have started to genetically mutate into other species, morphing into winged, reptilian, beastly hybrids that the larger non-mutated society have decided to ostracize, keeping them in hospitals or zoo-like centers away from the rest of the population, even their loved ones, for the potential risk that they can hurt someone with their outsized claws, fangs, and wings. 

This was the case for Émile’s mother, Lana, who is shown only briefly at first in the hospital with fur growing around her eyes. Soon, there are other creature sightings in the background and in the forest. This is their new normal. Running parallel to these fantastic beasts are problems of everyday life – of a son challenging his father’s authority, François starting a new job, and Émile struggling to fit into his new school. Then, Émile starts to have problems riding his bike, his mannerisms are changing beyond his control, his back feels different, and soon, fur and claws appear. He is also mutating. 

“The Animal Kingdom” moves swiftly between its characters’ everyday problems and the story’s fantastical elements in a magical realist way that quickly captivates its viewer. Cailley, who co-wrote the film with Pauline Munier, uses the creatures as a metaphor for how the world responds to health crises. Because they are not understood and feared, they are locked away from the rest of this society, which recalls how some countries isolated the first wave of HIV/AIDS patients in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. In the movie, characters spoke of other countries adapting to live side-by-side with the humanoid creatures and showed how politicized the issue became among Émile’s classmates and François’ boss, which mirrored the discussion around how other countries handled the recent COVID-19 epidemic and how politicized the discourse around public health and safety became around the issue. That life still continued during these “strange days” of masking, testing, periods of isolation, and family tragedy for some only makes “The Animal Kingdom” all the more relevant. 

There’s so much to cope with that Émile nursing a crush on a fellow classmate and sparks forming between François and a disaffected cop named Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos) only occasionally registers next to the mortification of mutating (another metaphor for coming-of-age) and grieving. It’s difficult to move on from something when you’re still going through it, even if it is in a setting as idyllic as the way Cailley’s brother and cinematographer David Cailley captures the sun-soaked French countryside and untamed forests. As a tired dad just trying to do the best for his son, Duris does an impeccable job carrying his character’s weariness of these events opposite Kircher, who meticulously embodies his character’s adolescent anxiety and animal impulses. 

“The Animal Kingdom” is indeed a strange beast. Like “X-Men” minus the superpowers, it's an analogy about the way people are ostracized for differences beyond their control. It’s a premise that could have suffered with bad CGI effects, but we see just enough of chimeras that blend feathers, scales, and fur onto human skin to understand what’s happening, to empathize with both the person mutating and the fear of the people around them trying desperately to return to normalcy. There is no going back, these “strange days” are the new normal. Dad still argues with his son for feeding chips to their Australian Shepherd while he lights up another cigarette, on and on it goes. The movie is effective in its ability to make us emphasize for the hunted “others” as well as observe how humanity becomes the very thing it fears: monstrous in its attempt to restore law and order. Life is complicated like that, and yet it continues to find a way forward.

Author: Monica Castillo
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:30 pm

The word “sport” does not begin to do it justice. Adventure Team Racing is the most extreme, demanding, endurance activity in the world. It makes the Iron Man combination of running, swimming, and biking look like a game of hopscotch. An adventure race can involve running, biking, climbing, kayaking, and any other imaginable strenuous movement forward, over every possible kind of treacherous terrain. Races can last for many days, with only brief permissible stops and time penalties for aids like IV fluids. “Arthur the King” is based on the true story of one of these races, with an American team racing through the jungles, mountains, and rivers of the Dominican Republic (the real story involved a Swedish team in Ecuador). Mark Wahlberg plays team leader Michael Light, who bonds with a stray dog he names Arthur. 

It is really three movies in one, all watchable, but the pieces do not always mesh.  The first and least compelling piece is Michael’s story. He is a restless character, possibly an adrenalin junkie, or just someone with something to prove after being called “the best adventure team racer never to win a championship” by “Man vs. Wild” host Bear Grylls (playing himself off camera). Michael loves his wife and daughter but he does not love working for his former military-turned realtor father. He will not let his legacy be a viral image of his losing team literally stuck in the mud. 

No one wants to sponsor him after his last failure. But with just half of the money he needs, Michael assembles a team: Chick (Ali Suliman), the navigator, who was let go from the championship team for his bad knee, Olivia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the expert free climber and daughter of an ailing former champion, and Leo (Simu Liu), the one who posted that viral mud photo, a social media star who is still angry with Michael over the bad decisions that cost them the prize in the previous race. Michael promises that this time Leo will have a voice in the team’s direction and Lou warns him, “It will be a loud one.”

The second piece of the film is the story of the race, “5-10 days racing the toughest terrain on earth.” With a limited budget, the team cuts back on the crucial on-site preparation time. They arrive just before the race begins, with not enough time to acclimate to the climate. “The first rule is anything can happen,” Michael tells the team, and everyone responds with sports-y pep talk aphorisms like “Whatever it takes” and “We accept it. We embrace it.” 

The first event is a 24-mile trek through the jungle. There’s no set path, so one of the challenges of the sport is to find shortcuts through terrain that is treacherous and uncharted. This part of the film has gorgeous settings (though the racers hardly ever take time to look at them) and very exciting sequences, including a real nail-biter on a fraying zip line. 

The third piece, of course, is the story of Arthur, an abused street dog who improbably, after “not a dog person” Michael gives him a meatball, follows the team for hundreds of miles and at one point saves them from running off a cliff. Arthur and Michael both begin the film as loners, but over the course of the race we see them become a team and then a family. The entire team’s “whatever it takes” spirit continues but there is a shift in the idea the human members have about “it,” the goal they are willing to risk everything for, should be. 

At times, as Michael spoke to Arthur, it did feel like Wahlberg was imitating Andy Samberg imitating him and I half expected him to tell the dog to say hi to his mother. But the connection between Michael and Arthur, and the way Michael transfers the determination he brings to the race to the fight to bring Arthur home is undeniably moving. We look forward to the inevitable shots of the real Mikael and Arthur over the closing credits.

Michael’s wife calls his dream “a magical finish line,” and the movie reminds us that we should pay close attention to the goals we set for ourselves, to decide whether achieving them will really give us what we are hoping for and what it means to win.

 

Author: Nell Minow
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:29 pm

Ambiguity and extreme emotional states occur simultaneously in Jessica Hausner's films, where what "is" is not a simple question, and what we should take from all of it is equally obscured. Her characters are in extremis, and their emotional or spiritual states create a separate reality. The everyday business of going through life doesn't come into play. There's a monomaniacal devotion to one idea whether it is religious fanaticism in "Lourdes" (2009), the marriage of love and death in "Amour Fou" (2014), or the mesmerizing dark-magic orchids of "Little Joe" (2019). These films exist in a bell jar where rationalism has no place. Hausner's new film, "Club Zero," is an intense entry in her exploration of ideas run amok, of fantasy overtaking reality to the degree that reality itself is called into question (and regarded as an enemy).

The film takes place at a school for special or "difficult" kids. The school is expensive, and some of the parents are very involved in what goes on there, while others have clearly just dumped their kids off because they are too busy with their own lives to deal with a high-needs kid. The school uniform is extremely odd—yellow T-shirts and billowy khaki shorts, bright blue knee socks, white sneakers. A new teacher has appeared on the scene, Miss Novak (Mia Wasikowska), whose specialty is nutrition. She has developed a program called "conscious eating", and she wears the almost beatific expression of a true fanatic. She speaks in measured tones, and the six or seven students, seated in a circle, are pulled into her orbit instantly. When she asks them why they are taking the class, the answers are varied. One student wants to save the planet. One wants to reduce her body fat. One wants to detach from consumerism. The scholarship student just needs the credit. This is the first scene in the film. The establishing shot of the classroom, its wood-paneled walls and mid-century Modern furniture, is static, almost like it's from a security camera in the corner of the ceiling. When the kids go around the circle sharing their thoughts, it's shot in a continuous sometimes dizzying pan. The kids all seem to be in a dissociated deadpan state. Perhaps this leaves them vulnerable to the workings of a master manipulator.

Miss Novak's credo is that everyone needs to eat less. The way to achieve this is by taking deep meditative breaths before every bite, and reducing the amount you eat. Miss Novak says, "The slower you eat, the less food you'll need." Some of the kids resist, but most succumb to her program, almost like they're under a spell. The kids all take on her beatific expression as they sit in the cafeteria, holding up a small forkful of food, breathing in and out with closed eyes, before slowly eating the morsel. They look at each other and smile. They feel elite, they feel special. They float through the hallways with a distracted air of superiority. It is behavior modification and brainwashing at work.

Miss Novak uses every cult-leader trick in the book. She creates an Us vs. Them mentality, separating the kids from their peers and, more worryingly, their parents. The parents are, of course, alarmed when their children stop eating, but Miss Novak reassures the students that their parents are trapped in "old beliefs", and cannot be expected to understand. "Your parents don't seem to see you for the way you really are." Only she sees them. She holds self-confession sessions, where traumatized students admit they cheated and had something to eat. There's love-bombing when a student accepts the program. The peer pressure to conform, and the resulting sense of togetherness, is addictive.

Naturally, in this environment, eating disorders are seen as not just normal, but preferable. Some of the other teachers are disturbed by what's going on with these now-unreachable students, but some are inspired to try "conscious eating" themselves. Ambiguity is a hallmark of Hausner's fascinating work. At times, it's hard to tell what is being critiqued. The kids are so easily manipulated, and there is a warning implicit in this. Teens' brains aren't developed yet. They are vulnerable to suggestion by mesmerizing adults. Presenting what it means to live in service of a single ideology could also be a "critique", but Hausner's approach leaves room for interpretation. Ideology creates monsters. The belief in Utopias also creates monsters. Is that what we're seeing? The parents are all pretty awful (except for Ben's concerned working-class mother, played by Amanda Lawrence, who rings the alarm bell to school officials.) The film's ambiguity might be frustrating to some people, particularly because it could be perceived as "endorsing" eating disorders (although that would be just an interpretation, and not one I share). The young cast (Florence Baker, Samuel D Anderson, Luke Barker, Ksenia Devriendt, and Gwen Currant) are completely believable in their eerie devotion to the project and to Miss Novak. The assurance that nobody in the cast lost weight for the film is a welcome addition to the end credits. 

This is Hausner's eighth collaboration with cinematographer Martin Gschlacht. Gschlacht's cinematography completely de-stabilizes the already odd atmosphere. There are those clinical establishing shots of empty rooms, the camera slightly elevated, looking down on the characters. There's also a calculated use of sudden zooms, or God's-eye overhead shots, creating a paranoid and otherworldly atmosphere. The final shot, which reminded me of the culminating stanza in Helen Reddy's extremely weird song "Angie Baby," leaves you with more questions than answers. Cult leaders want to bring their followers to paradise, whether it's on earth or in some other dimension. The goal is to separate people from contact with other humans who might sully the purity of their ideology.

What is Miss Novak's end game? She crosses multiple lines in supplanting the parental units, as well as discouraging any intimacy between the students. She must be the kids' sole focus. One girl is confronted by her terrified parents and her reply is full of what brainwashing expert Robert J. Lifton termed "thought-terminating cliches", all memorized buzz words like a mantra: "Those who can live without food are free from all social and commercial pressure. Thus, we are threatening the capitalist system. This will be politically explosive." Her ideology is so impenetrable it's like Brutalist architecture. Anyone who has tried to talk sense into a fanatic, to poke holes in an ideology to a "believer," knows the helplessness of the parental attempt.

"Club Zero" has a monotonous quality, ultimately, because existing with a Brutalist-architecture ideology is monotonous. Still, the film exerts an unnerving pull.

Author: Sheila O'Malley
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:29 pm

Gene Wilder couldn’t have chosen a better stage name. “Gene” is so ordinary, so sane. It promises gentleness: genial, congeniality. But Wilder? That’s the sort of actor who could play Leo Bloom, Willy Wonka, Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson, or The Waco Kid. 

Sure enough, from his breakout role as Bloom, the accountant who gets pulled into a criminal scheme opposite Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” through his Emmy-winning supporting performance as Mr. Stein on TV’s “Will & Grace” in 2003 (after which he retired), his performances blended gentleness, volatility, and a romantic spirit. He was mesmerizing whether starring in classics like “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” or misfires like “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” or his self-directed “The Woman in Red.” He was calm and chaos, reason and madness. He made you believe in whatever he was doing on screen, no matter how preposterous. He had that gift.

His personal life was marked by tragedy. Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and dropped into cinema via theater in the late 1960s, he lost his mother to ovarian cancer at 23 when he was serving in the Army, and his wife Gilda Radner to the same disease decades later. He remarried (to Karen Webb a clinical supervisor for the New York League for the Hard of Hearing who advised Wilder on his performance as a deaf man in “See No Evil, Hear No Evil”), battled non-Hodgkin's lymphoma into remission with chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, but died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2016. 

“Remembering Gene Wilder” covers this and more, though not too much more. It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized. 

Wilder’s glory years were roughly 1968-1980, a stretch bracketed by “The Producers” and his biggest box-office success “Stir Crazy” (opposite Richard Pryor, with whom he made five features). After the one-two box office punch of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” in the same year (Wilder co-wrote the script to the latter and was Oscar-nominated) he decided to go the route of his pal Brooks by writing and directing his own star vehicles, starting with “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” and “The World’s Greatest Lover.” 

But the productions were a mixed bag, and the movies he made for other directors tended to be worse and less intriguingly personal. By the ‘90s it became clear that he was the sort of acquired taste that audiences wouldn’t automatically come out to see. After losing Radner and then his friend and comedy teammate Pryor (to multiple sclerosis) Wilder started to lose interest in acting and filmmaking, and by the end of his life concentrated mostly on writing novels and nonfiction, painting watercolors and tap-dancing with Webb, and raising money for cancer awareness and treatment in honor of Radner.

The movie doesn’t offer much critical analysis of Wilder’s creative or personal choices. Even for a film about a guy who was, by all accounts, a decent chap who brought joy to the world, this is a borderline hagiography–and that’s too bad, because Wilder was a complicated, fascinating person. He clearly had an ego as big as that of any of the legendary artists he worked with. He was catnip to women: married four times (always quickly); no biological children, but an adopted daughter from his second wife Mary Joan Schutz’s previous marriage. Schutz divorced Wilder after “Young Frankenstein” because she thought he was having an affair with costar Madeline Kahn, but it was another castmate, Teri Garr, that he ended up dating after the split. None of this is in the movie.

Gene Wilder seems to posthumously narrate parts of his own story, thanks to tracks lifted from audio books (a technique also used in the half-hour documentary “Gene Wilder: In His Own Words,” as well as other nonfiction celebrity bios, including “Listen to Me Marlon”). There are also interviews with Webb; Brooks; Carol Kane (his co-star in “The World’s Greatest Lover”); Alan Alda (a friend); Wilder’s cousin Rochelle Pierce; Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz; and musician-actor Harry Connick, Jr., whose connection to Wilder is unclear, but who offers sharp insights, including this description of Wilder’s voice: “It was almost like the way a wise person would speak to you from on top of a mountaintop.”

The editing (also by Frank) is smooth within each section but chunky overall. The movie lurches from one phase of Wilder’s life and career to another. The quick fade-ins and fade-outs make it feel like the commercial TV version of the movie, minus the commercials. Some key works are represented by full-length clips, others by behind-the-scenes material that seems to have been pulled from DVD extras. Brooks is such an entertaining storyteller that the movie gets sidetracked by him. Fans of both entertainers will have already heard most of the anecdotes about their collaborations, but it’s still fun to hear Brooks tell them again. 

The film is held together by Wilder’s eerie bright energy, which is palpable even now, years after his passing. His eyes are haunting, and haunted. There are a lot of closeups, still and in-motion, that capture the sadness Wilder endured and subtly communicated to viewers, on top of the hilarity he was known for. 

Author: Matt Zoller Seitz
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:29 pm

Two years ago Lindsay Lohan had her first starring role in almost a decade in the Netflix Holiday film “Falling for Christmas”, which she elevated with her innumerable charms. Re-teaming with director Janeen Damian, Lohan has returned to that same kind of screwball romantic comedy formula for "Irish Wish," this time with a bit of fantasy and the luck of the Irish added to the mix. 

Lohan plays Maddie Kelly, a book editor who harbors a big secret: she's in love with her author, bestselling romance author Paul Kennedy (Alexander Vlahos), whose Irish charm masks his insipid personality. She's only told her mother, Rosemary (Jane Seymour), a high school principal in Des Moines, Iowa. Maddie is set to tell him – and her best friends – how she feels on the night of the book's big splashy premiere when her best friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan) and Paul meet-cute over a stray eyelash. Their chemistry is instant, and before we know it three months have passed by and the whole crew have been whisked to Ireland for a lavish wedding at Paul's country estate. 

At the airport Maddie has her own meet-cute when she mistakes the suitcase belonging to a roguish English photographer named James (Ed Speleers) for her own. After clearing up the confusion, the two share a bus ride from the airport into the country, where they share some more barbs, leaving thoroughly disliking each other. While on a walk after settling into the estate, Maddie finds herself on a stone wishing chair where an impish Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield) goads her into making a wish. "I wish I were marrying Paul Kennedy" she says with gusto, just as a gust of wind swirls fairytale pink blossoms around her and sucks her into the whirlwind of fate. 

Getting what you wished for is often more of a curse than a blessing, and although she wakes up a bride, it's clear very early on that she and Paul are ill-suited for each other. The more time they spend together, the more his boorishness reveals itself. As doubts creep in, Maddie spends time with the passionate and intellectual James, who has been roped into becoming the wedding photographer for her impending nuptials. It's only after Maddie realizes her wish has made everyone's life worse – and that she may be in love with James – that a priest informs her that Saint Brigid, taking a bit of a cue from Saint Mick and Saint Keith, doesn't always give you what you want, but might just give you what you need. 

While the structure and plotting doesn't innovate on the genre much at all, Lohan's mere presence makes the film work. She is an undeniable star and has always succeeded as a screwball comedienne, even when the material isn't the greatest (I'm looking at you, "Just My Luck”). Damian often films her in medium close-ups bathed in a golden light that brings out her beauty naturally without calling too much attention to it. Her chemistry with Speleers is palpable, allowing their patter to sizzle and infuses their romantic moments, like a secretive dart game in a faraway pub, with some actual heat. In terms of the physical comedy, her pratfalls are funny and well-timed, though occasionally the editing between the star and her stunt person isn't as seamless as it could be. 

And, of course, the Irish countryside is gorgeous. From the sparkling waters of Lough Tay to the awe-inspiring Cliffs of Moher, viewers are transported to a verdant, mystical land where mischievous fairies may well still exist and the power of true love can still prevail. The Irish-ness of it all is augmented by a sometimes cheesy, but mostly charming score by Nathan Lanier that riffs on variations of prototypical Celtic music. 

Where the film falters is in its supporting cast. Vlahos is fantastic as the vapid Paul; his inflection often reminded me of "Liberty Biberty" car insurance commercials, and I mean that in the best sense. However, Seymour is mostly wasted in the mother character. Not only does she never once share a scene with Lohan that isn't over FaceTime, her humor is just too broad and doesn't mesh well with the tone of the film. Jacinta Mulcahy doesn’t fare much better as Paul’s mother Olivia, who may as well be a walking stereotype of privilege. 

Tan as Emma is given a few moments that genuinely moved me in the alternate universe where the man she loves is marrying someone else, but their romance in either universe is not as fleshed out as it should be given the emotional stakes. A third friend, Heather, is played by celebrity chef Ayesha Curry, who hasn't yet mastered the art of saying a line and acting at the same time as well as she has the art of cooking. 

Despite its minor flaws, "Irish Wish" is as pleasantly diverting as the kind of paperback romance novel Maddie edits for Paul, and just as forgettable. I would love to see Lohan’s star shine in a bigger budget rom-com, a la "Anyone But You," but after all the unfair media scrutiny she received for all those years, if she’s finally found some creative freedom and safety working with Damian, and we get one of these small budget Netflix romps once every few years, that's a win in my book.

Author: Marya E. Gates
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:29 pm

You’ve probably seen the viral video. An elderly British man named Nicholas Winton sits in the front row of a television studio watching a silly chat show called, “That’s Life.” The host explains to the viewers that more than 40 years earlier, just before World War II, as the Nazis were invading Czechoslovakia, Winton arranged for the rescue of hundreds of children from Prague. The story had never been publicly told and none of the children knew who had arranged their transportation and found them foster homes in the UK. The host then revealed that the woman sitting next to Winton was one of those children. And in a second “That’s Life” broadcast, where Winton expected to meet two more of the now-grown children, it turned out that every member of the studio audience was one of those he had rescued.

That extraordinary story is now the subject of a less-than-extraordinary film that is nevertheless heartwarming, its theme of the difference a single person can make reflected in the title, “One Life.” Winton is played in the 1980s by Anthony Hopkins and in the flashbacks to the late 1930s by Johnny Flynn

Winton was born two years after his German parents immigrated to the UK in 1907. At that time their name was Wertheim, Anglicized to Winton as the prospect of a second world war made the family want to be seen as fully British as they felt. They had converted from Judaism and Winton was baptized, though, as he explains to a Czech rabbi suspicious of his reasons for requesting the names of the displaced children, he considers himself an agnostic and, surprisingly for someone working as a stockbroker, a socialist.

“Everyone in Prague is trying to get out,” Winton’s mother (Helena Bonham Carter) says dryly. “My son is trying to get in.” Germany had “annexed” the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and only the European politicians thought he was going to stop there. Refugees were living in the direst conditions in Prague. The Kindertransport trains rescuing refugee children were only allowed from Germany and Austria, not Czechoslovakia.

A few exhausted British citizens in Prague were trying to help, but their priority was activists who would be the first to be arrested if the Nazis arrived. Winton’s priority was the children. There were thousands of children and innumerable obstacles. Locals and refugees were not willing to share their information for fear the Nazis would get them, by force or betrayal. There was a lot of bureaucratic red tape in the UK and the countries the children would have to go through and the need for £50 (about $10,000 today) and a willing foster home for each of them before they would be allowed into the country. And there was no time. With the help of his very persuasive mother, some friends in the UK and Prague, and endless hours of pasting the children’s photos on the visas, they were able to bring eight trains filled with more than 600 children to England. The ninth train, scheduled to leave the day the war was declared, was stopped by the Nazis. 

As the older Winton tries, at his wife’s urging, to go through the towering piles of paper in his home office, he thinks back on his life. He is overcome with the thoughts of the children he could not save. He shyly brings his scrapbook of the rescue operation to the local newspaper, but the editor says there is no local angle. And then he brings it to Betsy Maxwell (Marthe Keller), the French wife of media mogul, financier, Czech refugee, and perpetrator of a massive fraud Robert Maxwell (they were also the parents of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, but that would be another movie). Finally there is someone who recognizes its importance.

The flashback scenes are not as compelling as they try to be. The Hopkins scenes are more engaging, not just because we look forward to the re-enactment of the television reveal, but because the film is sharper at addressing the existential issues of purpose and meaning than it is in showing us the difficulties in rescuing the children. The metaphor of his pool (immersing, draining as it is covered with fallen leaves, filling it again) is unnecessarily heavy-handed. When Winton sees the children he saved, grown up and apparently flourishing, it helps him make sense of his life and tells us everything we need.

Author: Nell Minow
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:28 pm

In his second directorial effort, the underwhelming “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton portrays a heady hitman diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of dementia. His illness is so grave, when he’s finally diagnosed, he’s told he only has a few weeks to get his affairs in order. It’s a fascinating premise by screenwriter Gregory Poirier, one that is methodically and quietly built, but ultimately loses any grit, atmosphere, suspense, or emotion it could possibly carry because of a few narrative headscratchers. Even Keaton, usually a sure bet, doesn’t land what the movie is selling. 

This film needed to be a complete character study. An intellectual with PhDs in English and History and a Gulf War veteran, Knox is already enough of an enigma to pull our interest. Though we get some idea of his everyday life—he has a standing appointment every Thursday with a call girl (Joanna Kulig)—it’s minimal in comparison to what his background teases. Instead, the film diverts attention from Knox in lieu of a trite subplot: It’s been years since Knox has seen his estranged son Miles (James Marsden), who suddenly comes to his front door bloody and battered, and panting. Miles has just killed the man who raped his daughter, and he needs his dad, who knows about these kind of things, to cover it up. 

The subplot is an all-too obvious through line to retrace Knox’s life as he faces mortality. But the movie doesn’t even get that right. There are less scenes with Marsden and Keaton than you’d expect, and less opportunities to discover the inner workings of his dad before they totally dissipate. Keaton spends much of the film enacting a convoluted plan of subterfuge that’ll require the help of an old friend (a soporific Al Pacino) so he can remember it. Once again, that would be a great premise, if the twist weren’t so obvious 45 minutes into the film. What remains is a cold character study uninterested in its primary character, sunken by an all too predictable script. 

There are surprisingly even more cracks to be discovered: Keaton directs even further attention from Knox by focusing on the two detectives working to catch him. Suzy Nakamura plays the smarter, more observant of the two, and is actually a welcomed sight in this subdued action flick, if only because she has an edge to her character. But we come out knowing more about her character’s biography than Knox’s, particularly the immigrant aspirations she had to deal with from her overwhelming parents and the casual workplace sexism she encounters. Normally, I’m down for some elements of cultural specificity. Here, it’s inorganic to the film.

These glaring shortcomings and clumsy missteps would be fine if this film weren’t so garish to look at. Flat photography and ungainly cuts undo the few moments where Keaton deploys himself to dispatch some goons. None of the compositions are compelling and the visual language, whether through lighting or a sense of the mise en scene, offer any compelling information, memorable looks, or a feeling of the noir sensibilities it’s working to evoke through its woozy jazz score. 

It really all depends on Keaton giving a serviceable performance to salvage whatever is left, but even he falls short. For a character on the brink of losing himself, Keaton gives Knox too much control. It’s a calm lucidity that never approaches the magnitude of what emotions the character could be feeling, making one feel that in “Knox Goes Away,” he was never really here.  

Author: Robert Daniels
Posted: March 15, 2024, 1:28 pm