HIS THREE DAUGHTERS (no distrib): The premise of Azazel Jacobs’ film is simple enough to be staged as a play: as their father Vincent (Jay O. Sanders) lies dying in an unseen room of his Bronx apartment, Katie (Carrie Coon), Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) and Rachel (Natasha Lyonne) get in each others’ ways as they wait […]
THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN (Searchlight/Disney – October 21): After a sojourn in America with 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Seven Psychopaths, Martin McDonagh returns to Ireland with the comic tragedy (or vice versa) The Banshees of Inisherin. The setting is an island off the Irish coast in the 1920s, where Padraic (Colin Farrell) […]
WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY (Roku – November 4): A comic book fantasia of a celebrity “biography,” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (co-written with Yankovic himself, who’s also one of the producers), takes some fragments about the parody musician’s life and work, and transforms them into a nonstop array of gags that […]
LUCY IN THE SKY (Fox Searchlight/Disney – October 4): Lucy In the Sky may be Noah Hawley’s first feature film, but he’s already establishing himself as quite the overdirector. Hawley’s X-Men off-shoot series Legion had a repertoire of shifting aspect ratios, surreal imagery and dislocations in sound, space and time that felt exciting and […]
ON THE ROAD – Worth A Ticket – Kerouac’s Classic Is Beautiful and Atmospheric But Lacks Urgency ON THE ROAD, as a novel and now as a film adaptation, is so enmeshed with the mythology of the real-life people and events it thinly fictionalizes and with the many works, both documentary and fiction, it’s […]
HUSTLERS (STX – September 13): Lorena Scafaria becomes the latest filmmaker failing to ascend Martin Scorsese Mountain. Her Hustlers wants to be Goodfellas in its marrow, not only in its based-on-a-true-story tale of New York criminals who ride high and then go down, but in its structure of interspersing dispassionate after-the-fact narration with the […]
THE GUILTY (Netflix – Oct. 1): One way to cope with the challenges and costs of movie production during Covid is to limit the number of actors who have to be in front of the camera. That’s tough for a thriller, but two Festival movies this year chose the old Sorry, Wrong Number mode […]
WIDOWS (20th – Nov. 16): Widows is a genre movie that isn’t sure it wants to be one. That’s not a shock, because the idea of the aesthete director Steve McQueen, of Hunger, Shame and 12 Years A Slave renown, toiling in the land of Ocean’s 8 seemed odd from the start. And for […]