When Amy Schumer made her debut as a big-screen lead with 2015’s Trainwreck, she brought a strong personal perspective to the movie, as both the writer and star, drawing material from her own life to tell a funny and relatable (if a bit overlong and overstuffed with subplots) story about an aimless woman getting her […]
Author: Josh Bell
Truth or Dare
The very first thing that alleged best friends Olivia (Pretty Little Liars’ Lucy Hale) and Markie (Violett Beane) do in the moronic horror movie Truth or Dare is attempt to sabotage each other’s plans for their final spring break of college. Self-righteously wholesome Olivia has planned a trip to build houses for Habitat for Humanity, […]
Beirut
When Tony Gilroy first wrote the screenplay for Beirut in 1991, it was considered too politically risky to make. While movie producers may be bolder about taking on political topics in 2018 (and thus Gilroy’s screenplay is now viable as a feature film), the style of the story hasn’t changed, making Brad Anderson’s belated big-screen […]
Blockers
The selling point in the trailers for Blockers has been its over-the-top comedy featuring stars Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz as overprotective parents attempting to stop their teenage daughters from losing their virginity on prom night. But there’s a better movie trying to assert itself inside Blockers, a coming-of-age story featuring those teenage […]
Where Is Kyra?
There are plenty of easy jokes to make about the title of Where Is Kyra?, given how purposely underlit the entire movie is. But director and co-writer Andrew Dosunmu (Mother of George) takes everything about his story very, very seriously, which works when the movie is a low-key character study about a woman dealing with […]
Outside In
Director Lynn Shelton’s most successful movies (including Humpday, Your Sister’s Sister and Laggies) have deftly balanced emotionally resonant drama with gentle comedy, but with Outside In she leaves humor behind, telling a story that’s often powerful, even if it sometimes takes itself too seriously. Co-written by Shelton and Jay Duplass, Outside In stars Duplass as […]
Midnight Sun
Teenager Katie Price (Bella Thorne), the main character of Midnight Sun, suffers from a real disease known as xeroderma pigmentosum, but she might as well suffer from movie-star-itis, given how conveniently the filmmakers mold the symptoms of the extraordinarily rare condition to the heavy-handed romantic tragedy they’re putting together. Based on a 2006 Japanese movie, […]
I Kill Giants
The giants that young teenager Barbara Thorson (Madison Wolfe) claims to kill in I Kill Giants are almost certainly not real, but for most of its running time, the movie remains successfully ambiguous about the nature of the creatures that Barbara believes are a threat to her small Long Island town. Sullen and apparently friendless, […]
7 Days in Entebbe
The opening of 7 Days in Entebbe lays out its historical context in title cards that appear to the rhythm of a dance troupe’s performance, but the rest of the movie is much less effective at integrating those kinds of artistic touches into a straightforward true-life narrative. Director José Padilha helmed the forgettable 2014 remake […]
Red Sparrow
When the trailers for Red Sparrow were first released, they drew numerous comparisons to Marvel’s Black Widow character, a Russian spy trained from an early age at a strict school for secret agents, and then deployed on covert missions around the world. But the full movie of Red Sparrow shows just how different Dominika Egorova […]
The Lodgers
The atmosphere is thick in Irish horror movie The Lodgers, both in director Brian O’Malley’s style and in the remote location of a crumbling rural estate. Shot at the real-life Loftus Hall, dubbed “the most haunted house in Ireland,” The Lodgers presents itself as a Gothic ghost story, but its hauntings are pretty mild, with […]
Looking Glass
At this point, it’s not surprising to see Nicolas Cage starring in yet another cheap, trashy straight-to-VOD thriller; what’s more unusual is when he shows up in something a bit more ambitious, like recent festival favorites Mom and Dad and Mandy. Looking Glass falls in the former category, unfortunately, throwing Cage into a half-formed, vaguely […]
Double Lover
Whatever its other flaws, French filmmaker François Ozon’s erotic thriller Double Lover certainly doesn’t hold back in its depiction of sexuality. The opening shot shows main character Chloé (Marine Vacth) getting what looks like a somewhat traumatic haircut, and Ozon cuts from there to an extreme close-up of his heroine’s genitals, as Chloé undergoes a […]
A Fantastic Woman
When the title character of Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman first appears onscreen, she seems poised to live up to the movie’s billing of her: Marina (Daniela Vega) is singing a sultry cabaret song in a dimly lit bar, dressed beautifully and sensuously and eyeing her distinguished (and much older) boyfriend Orlando (Francisco Reyes). But […]
A Ciambra
A minor character in writer-director Jonas Carpignano’s first feature, 2015’s Mediterranea, 14-year-old Pio (Pio Amato), a Romani living in the Italian port town of Gioia Tauro, takes center stage for Carpignano’s follow-up, the bleak but heartfelt coming-of-age drama A Ciambra. Born into a sprawling family of petty criminals living on the edges of society, Pio […]
24 Hours to Live
For an assassin who’s touted as the best around (commanding a price of $2 million a day to take out a potential corporate whistleblower), Trevor Conrad (Ethan Hawke) doesn’t seem all that impressive during the first half-hour of the silly thriller 24 Hours to Live. He’s so bad at his job, actually, that he straight […]
Person to Person
With its separate alternating stories, Dustin Guy Defa’s Person to Person at first seems like it might be the hipster version of intersecting-narrative dramas like Crash or Babel, but Defa isn’t interested in drawing pseudo-mind-blowing connections among the movie’s various threads. Instead he just plays each one out casually, like a stoner telling a rambling […]
Festival Report: TCM Classic Film Festival 2017
The definition of “classic” can be pretty flexible at the TCM Classic Film Festival, but that’s part of what makes the event great: In addition to screening well-known, well-loved movies on the big screen, the annual event in Hollywood puts at least as much effort and attention into showing movies that are neither well-known nor […]
The Girl With All the Gifts
Mike Carey’s 2014 novel The Girl With All the Gifts was one of the most successful genre releases of that year, nominated for a number of awards and acclaimed by critics and sci-fi/horror luminaries. Its film adaptation, written by Carey in tandem with the novel, has not been as successful, despite premiering at last year’s […]
Things to Come
Although it shares an English-language title with a landmark science-fiction movie, Mia Hansen-Løve’s Things to Come (whose original French title literally translates as “the future”) is mainly about living in the present, and the difficulty of processing each moment as it comes. Philosophy professor Nathalie Chazeaux (Isabelle Huppert) has her entire life upended over the […]