Film Reviews
Fire Island Review: A Delicious Jane Austen-Infused Rom-Com That Matches the Master’s Wit
The Pitch: Right from the jump, thanks to the voiceover of Noah (Joel Kim Booster) and a carefully planted copy of Pride and Prejudice, Fire Island tells you what it’s going to be — a retelling of the Jane Austen classic tale, relocated to a place and time that Jane Austen would have had a very hard time imagining: the titular gay party mecca centered in the hamlets of Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. Noah and his friends (including Matt Rogers, Tomás Matos, and Torian Miller) are making their annual trek to the island for a week of fun, sun, drugs, dancing, and most importantly — hooking up. But this year, things are a bit different. For one thing, their beloved adoptive mom Erin (Margaret Cho) has to sell her house on the island soon, giving this trip an air of finality. And also, Noa...
Adam Sandler Opts for the Lay Up with Broad Sports Drama Hustle: Review
The Pitch: In his first major dramatic outing since 2019’s Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler returns to the arena of basketball, this time as Stanley Sugarman, a depressed but whip-smart scout for the Philadelphia 76ers. Unlike the impulsive, materialistic Howard Ratner, Sugarman is a selfless and honest working man, tirelessly trotting around the world to bring the best of the best to the NBA. Even with his passion for the game, Sugarman’s intense drive causes friction both at work and at home. His stubborn approach drives a wedge between him and his slimy boss Vin (Ben Foster) and his constant international traveling costs him quality family time with his supportive wife Teresa (Queen Latifah) and their aspiring-filmmaker daughter (Jordan Hull). On one lucky scouting trip to Spain, Sugarman comes...
David Cronenberg Plays the Fleshy Hits in the Evocative, Squicky Crimes of the Future: Review
The Pitch: In a near-future world where pollution and technological advancement have led human beings to develop “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome” (i.e. the spontaneous development of new organs and bodily configurations), bodily modifications are the norm and pain is virtually a thing of the past. Save, it seems, for Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a celebrity performance artist whose gimmick is tattooing, then surgically (and publicly) removing, the new organs his body generates in elaborate showcases with his creative partner/probably-lover Caprise (Léa Seydoux). He lives a life of constant pain, one which no number of bio-technological devices — floating orchid-like beds that attach fleshy tentacles to his limbs, living high chairs that rock him as he eats breakfast so he can keep h...
Downton Abbey: A New Era Delivers Exactly the Sort of Period Drama Fans Crave
The Pitch: It may have been a few years since the last one, but never mind that; it’s time for the newest episode of Downton Abbey! Yes, all your favorite characters are back as the clock chimes on the year 1928, and the good folks of this lovely English countryside continue to puzzle over the encroachment of the modern world. First automobiles, then the telephone, and now — moving pictures! What is a stately English manor and its staff and residents to do?!? The above is this writer’s best efforts to inject some extra drama into a description of Downton Abbey: A New Era, the second theatrically-released installment continuing the saga of the wildly popular ITV/PBS period drama. But also, that’s really not necessary. While this isn’t something unique to Downton, it has always been a franch...
Firestarter Review: Zac Efron Stars In a Stephen King Remake That Quickly Flames Out
The Pitch: Stephen King adaptations have been a fixture of the big and small screens for decades, but there’s been a particular surge in recent years, following the blockbuster success of It. So it’s only natural that studios might circle back and revisit some of the adaptations that weren’t especially beloved in their day. Firestarter seems like a good candidate; the 1984 film version is more notable for its eclectic cast (including George C. Scott, Louise Fletcher, and a young Drew Barrymore!) than its meandering story (albeit one that’s largely faithful to the events of King’s book). The new Firestarter still follows Charlie (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), the pyrokinetic daughter of two telepathic parents, who goes on the run with her dad Andy (Zac Efron), pursued by the shadowy government for...
Top Gun: Maverick Review: Tom Cruise Goes Full Throttle In a Sequel That Does the Original Justice
The Pitch: It may have taken 36 years, but even pandemic delays couldn’t keep Tom Cruise away from the danger zone. When viewers are reunited with Captain Pete Mitchell in Top Gun: Maverick, one of the military’s best-ever fighter pilots is still a Navy man, working on experimental aircraft after decades of avoiding promotions that would pull him out of the cockpit. But the brass, personified here by a very cranky Jon Hamm, has a new assignment for the ace: Train up a team of hotshot youths for an incredibly difficult (dare we say… impossible) mission into enemy territory. While a dozen officers are selected as candidates for the task, the most prominent are a very Maverick-esque pilot known as Hangman (Glen Powell) and Rooster (Miles Teller), the grown-up son of Maverick’s tragically dece...
Metal Lords Review: Game of Thrones’ D.B. Weiss Delivers A Light Comedy About Heavy Metal
The Pitch: Heavy metal, with its knowingly ridiculous embrace of deafening volumes and over-the-top violent imagery, and predominantly young male audience, has been fertile territory for comedy since This Is Spinal Tap. And over the last few decades, some enduring comedies have irreverently paid tribute to hard rock bands and the adolescents who love them, including School of Rock, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Detroit Rock City. Screenwriter D.B. Weiss, best known as the co-creator and co-showrunner of Game of Thrones, has brought us a potential new addition to that canon with Metal Lords. In 2019, Weiss and his Game of Thrones creative partner David Benioff inked a $200 million deal to produce films and series for Netflix. And while some of Benioff and Weiss’s more ambitious ...
Ambulance Review: Some Deranged Grandeur, Courtesy of Michael Bay
The Pitch: In his 2019 Netflix film 6 Underground, Michael Bay stages an opening car chase where his heroes smash through the streets of Italy, goring bad guys and yelling nonsense at each other. “I’m conducting surgery!” one character screams while, essentially, just tending to a wound. But maybe that moment stuck in Bay’s head. Maybe he regretted not making that set-piece more surgical, to the point where he built an entire movie called Ambulance around the premise: What if you were performing life-saving surgery during a car chase? Technically, Bay did not come up with this premise. Ambulance is a remake of a 2005 Dutch film, and Bay is not a credited screenwriter. But his penchant for breaking tension with over-explained jokes, or breaking jokes with melodramatic bombast, transcend any...
The Bubble Tests Positive for Tone-Deaf Tedium: Review
The Pitch: It’s 2022, which means that we’re now getting the kind of movies that weren’t just filmed during COVID, but conceived during it (see also: Soderbergh’s Kimi, Doug Liman’s Locked Down). For Judd Apatow, that meant a long, hard look at the ways that mainstream studio filmmaking has adjusted to the times: masks aplenty, social distancing, and the much-vaunted “bubble” of fully quarantined people who are trapped together until, well, all this stuff is over. And that’s the environment under which the latest entry in the hit blockbuster franchise Cliff Beasts, Cliff Beasts 6: The Battle for Everest: Memories of the Requiem, is to be made, says the film’s producers (including Peter Serafinowicz and Kate McKinnon). But of course, throwing a group of temperamenta...
Morbius Review: Maybe It’s Time for Sony to Give Marvel Back Its Toys
The Pitch: The first trailer for Morbius, the newest effort by Sony Pictures to hold onto the Marvel characters to which it still owns the rights, originally premiered in January 2020, in anticipation of its planned July 2020 premiere. That premiere didn’t happen for, y’know, reasons, but in the literal years since, new trailers for the film have continued to appear online and in theaters, with one of them buttoned by a reasonably funny joke: Its central character, in full monster face, growling “I… am… Venom!” at a thug, then abruptly shifting to a smile to say, “I’m just kidding! Dr. Michael Morbius, at your service.” That moment didn’t just name-drop a previous Sony/Marvel collaboration, but showcased a clever reversal on expectations, not to mention star Jared Leto doling out some very...
Everything Everywhere All At Once Is A Lot, and That’s a Good Thing: Review
The Pitch: Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh) has lived a life of quiet, overwhelmed lament. There are so many things she could have done, so many hers she could have been. Instead, she’s a middle-aged owner of a failing laundromat, with a miserable husband gunning for divorce (Ke Huy Quan’s Weymond), a withdrawn daughter (Stephanie Hsu’s Joy), and an increasingly frail father (James Hong’s Gong Gong) who doesn’t yet know that his granddaughter is gay. It gets worse: It’s tax season, and their unsympathetic IRS auditor (Jamie Lee Curtis‘ Deirdre) is breathing down their necks. As if that weren’t complicated enough, the IRS office becomes a battleground for the fate of the multiverse as Evelyn learns that she’s the only one who can stop a multi-dimensional agent of chaos named Jobu Tupaki fro...
Windfall Review: Netflix Thriller is a Thin Exercise in Hitchcockian Style
The Pitch: A man (Jason Segel) breaks into a well-furnished California vacation home; he rifles through the drawers for cash and valuables, eats fruit from their lush orange grove, and pisses in their shower. But just as he’s about to leave, the couple to whom the house belongs — a snotty tech CEO (Jesse Plemons) and his wallflower wife (Lily Collins) — return home early and catch him in the act. Rather than break out into violence, though, a curious game of negotiation begins: What does the man want? Why did he pick this particular guy’s home to rob? And just what will it take to make him go away? This One Goes Out To…: We’re two full years into the COVID-19 pandemic now, which means we’re still dealing with the surfeit of small-scale, isolated thrillers facilitated by the restr...
