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Filtering by Category: movies
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal venture out into the world. (Parisa Taghizadeh/Searchlight Pictures)
I didn’t get to see Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers at a festival or an advance screening last year, so I’m calling it the first great movie of 2024. My Washington City Paper review is here.
Two-hander* PCHH episodes are somewhat rare, but I was glad to be able to take part in one with pal Linda Holmes about Michael Mann’s new biopic Ferrari. That it was just the two of us allowed for some discussion of how the movie fits into the 80-year-old auteur’s filmography that we might not have gotten to with a larger panel.
Other critics who on the whole love Mann’s work as much as I do have taken more from this picture than I did. As you’ll hear, I found it to be surprisingly staid and conventional, coming from the guy who’s only other biopic was Ali, 22 years ago, and whose prior feature — almost nine years ago! — was Blackhat, a little-seen thriller that was at least as exciting as it was disjointed. In my City Paper review, I called Ferrari “a sensible sedan of a movie,” which I think fits. Good movie, but I don’t think it’s even as exceptional as Ali, never mind Heat or The Insider or Thief. As always, I’m open to revising my opinion upward upon a second viewing.
*I still don’t get why two-actor plays are called “two-handers” instead of “four-handers.”
Sandra Hüller has a dream house next to hell in The Zone of Interest. (A24)
Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin was my favorite film of 2014 (though it was released outside of the U.S. a year earlier). My review of his even-more-challenging follow-up, The Zone of Interest, is here. I wrote, erroneously, that the movie was in black-and-white. It’s not, but monochrome was how I remembered it. That’s definitely the strangest mistake I’ve ever made in (digital) print.
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things.
My Washington City Paper review of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, one of 2023’s most rewarding films, is here.
Once more into the breach. (Apple)
Sir Ridley Scott, the tireless 85-year-old director of two sci-fi landmarks, a classic feminist road movie, one Best Picture-winning epic and a lot of other stuff, has notched another middling megaproduction with Napoleon. My Washington City Paper review is here.
Ellen Burstun with Exorcist: Believer cowriter/director David Gordon Green.
My Washington City Paper review of The Exorcist: Believer, yet another unworthy sequel to one of the great horror films, is here.
John David Washington and Madeleine Yuna Voyles in an Gareth Edwards film. (Disney)
My Washington City Paper review of The Creator — Monsters, Godzilla, and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story director Gareth Edwards’ new sci-fi epic — is here.
Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone in Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon. (Apple)
There’re few things I love more than to immerse myself in he richly-imagined world of a movie, but even I can see that popcorn flicks, in particular, have hulked out to dangerous dimensions. I noted this alarming trend on the occasion of Avengers: Endgame in 2019 and again back in May when Martin Scorsese’s 3.5-hour adaptation of David Grann’s nonfiction true-crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon debuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Weekend Edition Sunday host Ayesha Roscoe had me and my pal Bob Mondello on to refute, which great respect, her assertion that movies are too long. According to Bob, what was originally slated for a four-minute time slot was allowed to strech out to a luxurious 7:15, which seems fitting.
