Film Reviews
Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s BigBug Is a Glitchy Robo-Farce: Review
The Pitch: It’s the year 2050, and advances in artificial intelligence have led to a bright, bubbly utopia where robotic servants and maids see to our every whim, from cleaning our homes to, well, cleaning our pipes. But when one brand of security robots, the Yonyx (François Levantal), decides to take over and wrest control of Earth from humanity’s hands, the domestic robots of one suburban home decide to lock their humans inside their well-manicured domicile — for their own safety, of course. As the hours and days pass, the unwitting hostages of domesticity — including divorced couple Alice (Elsa Zylberstein) and Victor (Youssef Hajdi) and their respective new partners Max (Stéphane de Groodt) and Jennifer (Claire Chust), daughter Nina (Marysole Fertard), Max’s bratty son Leo (Hélie ...
Sundance Review: Meet Me in the Bathroom Is a Time Capsule of 2000s Indie Rock
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Pitched between the doomsday-prepping of Y2K and the existential horror of 9/11, 2000s New York was also home to another seismic change in American culture: the burgeoning indie-rock scene, where dingy clubs on the Lower East Side played home to acts like Interpol, The Strokes, The Moldy Peaches, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. That’s the hazy, deafening, beer-sticky stage on which Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace (who previously directed the LCD Soundsystem doc Shut Up and Play the Hits) operate for Meet Me in the Bathroom, less an adaptation of Lizzy Goodman’s 2017 oral history of the same name than a living companion piece. Related Video Comprised almost entirely of archival footage stitched together b...
Sundance Review: jeen-yuhs Paints a Humanizing Portrait of Kanye West’s Beginnings
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Before his marriage to (and subsequent divorce from) Kim Kardashian, before his abortive 2020 presidential campaign, before the wild tweets and outrageous behavior that would define his public persona in the 2020s, there was just Kanye West and the music. From the beginning, the Atlanta-born, Chicago-raised producer turned rapper knew he was going to be one of the greatest musicians of all time; his first album, 2004’s The College Dropout, is studded with lines to that effect (“I was born to be different”). But it took the world a while to catch up with his ambition, and the problems didn’t stop there even after he finally broke through. By his side for the last twenty years was Clarence “Coodie” S...
Sundance Review: Director Amy Poehler Gets to the Heart of Two Entertainment Pioneers with Lucy and Desi
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: I Love Lucy is so inextricably tied to pop culture that many of its trademarks are still recognizable today, over seventy years since the show first aired. The central duo, brought to life by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, has been an object of fascination for almost as long — look at Aaron Sorkin‘s current project, Being the Ricardos, which has the edge in flashiness thanks to the star power of Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem. Director Amy Poehler‘s thoughtful documentary on the subject has one extremely important thing Sorkin’s series lacks, though — access to the real thing. Thanks to a treasure trove of audio tapes and home movies shared by the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Lucie Arnaz, Luc...
Sundance Review: Ramin Bahrani Tests the Conscience of the American Id in 2nd Chance
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: America is a land of mythmaking: if you’re savvy and lucky (and often, unscrupulous) enough, you can carve out a legend of your own design. That’s what happened to Richard Davis, the oddball inventor of the bulletproof vest, who spun a tall tale about self-defense in a Michigan alleyway into a million-dollar company selling protective body armor to America’s police and military forces. A blustering showman with no small sense of spectacle, Davis hawked his wares with, as one flyer declares in bold letters, “SEX & VIOLENCE”: amateur films that featured everything from comedy skits to bikini-clad women to schlocky fictional shootouts that make Samurai Cop look like Dirty Harry. Oh, and he shot hi...
Sundance Review: You Won’t Be Alone is Staggering, Contemplative Folk Horror
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: In 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is born to a woman in a remote mountain village. But mere days after her birth, the mother is approached by Old Maid Maria (Anamaria Marinca), a mysterious, ancient witch — covered in flame-scarred skin — who lives outside the village and takes the blood of first-born children. Fearing for her child’s life, the mother takes her to a remote mountain cavern free from the witch’s influence, keeping her there for sixteen years without any other human contact. Eventually, the witch comes for her anyway, and soon the girl is transformed into a witch-creature like her, living under yet another stifling parental environment. Before long, she’s left to wander the Macedonia...
Sundance Review: Karen Gillan Faces Herself in Riley Stearns’ Deadpan Dual
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: Sarah (Karen Gillan) is dying of a rare, incurable disease. It’s no big shakes, though, because up to now she hasn’t really lived: she has a strained, distant relationship with her boyfriend (Beulah Koale), her mother is disapproving, and she can’t even be bothered to cry when she receives her prognosis. Still, she unthinkingly accepts an offer to go through the process of “replacement”: growing a clone of her that will learn the ins and outs of her life, then take over when she dies. But ten months of watching her double (also Gillan, obviously) insinuate herself into her life, Sarah learns that she’s making a full recovery. But she’s got two problems: a) her boyfriend and family like the double more t...
Sundance Review: 892 Turns Real-Life Tragedy Into Mawkish Melodrama
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: On July 17, 2017, former Marine lance corporal Brian Brown-Easley (John Boyega) walked into a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs, with a grey sweatshirt and backpack, and handed the teller a simple note with four words: I have a bomb. Soon, he’s taken hostages, with police negotiators and a confused media scrambling to defuse the situation. His demands? A measly $892 in disability funds denied to him by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Those are the circumstances reconstructed in Abi Damaris Corbin’s 892, a well-intentioned and occasionally striking thriller that charts the heartbreaking moments of a desperate man’s last gasps at visibility and relevance. Related Video Attica! T...
Sundance Review: In Jesse Eisenberg’s When You Finish Saving the World, Everyone Loses
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. The Pitch: What happens when tensions between an equally oblivious mother and son (Julianne Moore and Finn Wolfhard, respectively) finally boil over? In Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, the answer is, unfortunately, sort of nothing. There’s something to be said for slice-of-life films like this one, adapted from Eisenberg’s 2020 audio drama of the same name and co-produced by Emma Stone and husband Dave McCary. The film raises plenty of interesting questions, particularly around the ideas of altruism, actual moral goodness in a world perpetually concerned with what looks good, and the tried and true theme of generational divide. The simmering story only runs 88 minutes (a dream!), but, throughout that runtime, When...
The 355 Review: Predictable Twists Bog Down This Lady Spy Thriller
The Pitch: There is a certain sub-genre of films, largely action films, that belong to a very specific time and place — an idyllic lazy Saturday afternoon, that post-lunch or brunch drowsiness kicking in as you nestle into your couch at home, searching for something to watch that won’t require too much effort to engage with on your part. The kind of movie you might watch with your dad over the holidays, just because it’s on cable. What The 355 offers up is a perfect Saturday afternoon dad movie, but instead of starring Stallone or Eastwood or Bronson, it stars five women with six Oscar nominations and two wins between them. (And was written by the creator of NBC’s Smash!) Approached with those sorts of low expectations, the new action drama starring Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélo...
The Matrix Resurrections Review: A Wild, Meta, Sometimes Muddled, Occasionally Transcendent Love Story
The Pitch: Here’s the problem with reviewing The Matrix Resurrections: At this point, we basically have to accept that the franchise peaked with the first installment. This isn’t meant as an insult, but an honest statement of fact– this is what happens when a film is a masterpiece. If 1999’s The Matrix is a nearly perfect movie, almost transcendent at some points with how it blended genre and technology in service of its storytelling, then yeah, it may be impossible to top it. What makes Resurrections such a fascinating viewing experience, though, is the fact that the movie knows this. And, rather than try to shift the narrative to some different angle on the original, director Lana Wachowski, who co-wrote the script with David Mitchell and Aleksandar Hemon, decides to take on that problem...
Spider-Man: No Way Home Review: A Daring Narrative Feat With a Lot to Say About the Web-Slinger
The Pitch: It’s very very hard to make specific references to much of what happens in Spider-Man: No Way Home without spoilers. But at one point, while discussing the memory spell that Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) has agreed to perform for Peter Parker (Tom Holland), Peter voices his concern over his beloved MJ (Zendaya) forgetting that he’s Spider-Man. Doctor Strange then points out that if MJ is only Peter’s girlfriend because he’s Spider-Man, then what does that say about their relationship? It’s perhaps the smartest thing Doctor Strange says in the entire movie, and evaluating No Way Home leads to a similar dilemma. What director Jon Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers have done with this film is an unprecedented piece of corporate-produced art. But attempting to ...
