Film Reviews
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...
SXSW Review: Richard Linklater Goes to the Moon, But Keeps Things Grounded in Apollo 10 1/2
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Anyone and everyone who was alive in the summer of 1969 likely knows where they were when they saw the first men landing on the moon on their television screens. But for young Stan (Milo Coy), his experience was a li’l different. Turns out, months before the iconic trip, the suburban Houstonite was approached by a couple of NASA suits for a once-in-a-lifetime mission. You see, due to an engineering blunder, they’d built the lunar module juuust a bit too small for an adult astronaut. So they needed a kid. And Stan, of course, is the perfect candidate. Related Video This didn’t happen, of course; it’s the stuff of childhood reverie, and adult Stan (Jack Black), who narrates, establishes early that he was a “fabuli...
SXSW Review: Under the Influence Interrogates the Addictive Escalation of David Dobrik
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: Out of the great, grand entertainment experiment that is YouTube, David Dobrik is easily one of the platform’s greatest successes. Leveraging his devil-may-care attitude and penchant for increasingly ambitious or invasive stunts, Dobrik quickly became a multi-millionaire on a level most non-movie stars would never enjoy, with six-figure sponsorship deals, 18 million subscribers, and a cadre of fellow sex-and-booze-loving daredevils (colloquially known as the Vlog Squad) whose boats his rising tide would also lift. But the same sensationalism that fueled Dobrik’s success would also be his downfall (inasmuch as one of the richest kids on YouTube, with a cultish zoomer following, can fall). In 2021, he suffere...
SXSW Review: Tony Hawk Keeps His Distance in Skate Doc Until the Wheels Fall Off
The Pitch: The secret to Tony Hawk’s success is his willingness to fail. When we first see him in the opening minutes of Sam Jones’ doc Until the Wheels Fall Off, we see exactly why: The skateboarding titan, still the face of the sport even in his fifties, tries and tries again to pull a 900 — the borderline-impossible skate trick he miraculously pulled off at the 1999 X Games — only to eat shit on each attempt. His body slams into the wood with concussive force every time, occasionally hurting enough to make him scream in pain. And yet, he gets up and tries again. What fuels someone like Hawk to keep sacrificing his body for the chance at a twice-in-a-lifetime flip? Over the course of two hours, Jones interrogates this question, charting Hawk’s youth as a child skating prodigy, his d...
SXSW Review: X Is Ti West’s Raucous TeXXXas Chain Saw Massacre By Way of Shyamalan’s Old
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: X has a lot on its mind, and the line between exploitation and empowerment is just one of many rich themes mined by Ti West in his first feature film since the 2016 John Travolta and Ethan Hawke-starring Western In A Valley of Violence. “So the camera changes things,” Lorraine (Jenna Ortega) says midway through the film, just before RJ, Lorraine’s boyfriend and the young starry-eyed director of the porno at the center of the film, storms out of the shoot, furious and uncomfortable with her sudden interest in appearing on-screen in their dirty picture. Lorraine, quiet as a church mouse, is the innocent boom mic operator, not like these other girls willing to debase themselves on-camera, or at least that’s how RJ ...
SXSW Review: Dolly Parton Doc Still Working 9 to 5 Chokes on Its Own Ambition
This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The Pitch: More than 40 years ago, 9 to 5 burst onto movie screens with a deceptively winning formula for 1980: Take three women at the top of their game — actress/producer/activist Jane Fonda, top-tier comedienne Lily Tomlin, and country music superstar Dolly Parton — and throw them together in the dreary workplaces of Carter-era America with a chauvinistic boss (Dabney Coleman) you’d just love to see tied up and tortured. It may have played like a lark, thanks in no small part to a whip-smart script from Patricia Resnick (3 Women) and fanciful direction from Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude), but it had feminist teeth underneath the laughs, which led it to box-office success and decades of appreciation. Decades ...
Ryan Reynolds Is Really, Really Reynolds-y In Netflix’s The Adam Project: Review
The Pitch: The Adam Project is centered on the kind of question asked during job interviews and looming existential crises: “What would you say to your younger self, should you have the chance?” But in the case of Adam Reed (Ryan Reynolds), that’s not why he’s traveled back from the year 2050 to the present. Adult Adam’s on a quest to find his wife Laura (Zoe Saldana), a fellow time traveler in the program controlled by the duplicitous Maya Sorian (Catherine Keener). Unfortunately, he doesn’t quite hit the time period he was looking for, instead blundering across his pre-teen present-day self (Walker Scobell), a plucky but troubled kid coping with the recent death of his scientist father Louis (Mark Ruffalo), school bullies, and other indignities of growing up. While initially reluctant to...
Uncharted Review: An Indiana Jones Riff That Still Delivers Some Unique Thrills
The Pitch: For non-gamers, Uncharted is a remarkably straightforward project: Hot treasure hunters go on an action-packed adventure to track down a centuries-old treasure? Sure, checks out. Maybe these particular treasure hunters aren’t as nobly intentioned as, say, one Dr. Henry Walton Jones Jr., but that doesn’t mean 25-year-old bartender/history buff/aspiring thief Nathan Drake (Tom Holland) isn’t just as dedicated to tracking down some long lost gold. We first meet Nathan as a 10-year-old living with his older brother Sam in an orphanage, though Sam makes his escape from the place after a run-in with the law, leaving his brother with a family artifact (an engraved ring), followed by, in the ensuing years, a trail of vague postcards from exotic locals. Now (ostensibly) an adult, Nate’s ...
