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MOVIE REVIEW
Puaada (2021)
An intoxicating mix of rom-com and thriller, “Puaada” gets more hilarious the more dire the situation its characters face. It starts out pretty ordinary – Jaggi (Ammy Virk), a humble milkman from the countryside, only has eyes for Raunak (Sonam Bajwa), an educated daughter of snobbish Air Force officer Mr. Dhillon (Hardeep Gill). Despite her façade of playing hard to get, they’ve been an item for two years. He unexpectedly shows up and sabotages her first meeting with a suitor arranged by her parents, yet his own haphazard efforts to impress them have been laughable, to say the least.
Continue reading “A Very Long Entanglement” »
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MOVIE REVIEW
Mad God (2021)
Humanity is moldy on the inside and ugly on the outside, which isn’t news to anyone. Phil Tippett’s “Mad God” has plenty of both mold and ugliness, plus blood and viscera and the contents of the digestive tract, lovingly rendered through the full resources of the animator’s craft. Mr. Tippett’s Stygian odyssey, a film that has been in the works for decades, employs models and some C.G.I. and a smattering of live action; but mainly tells its story through stop-motion animation, the venerable field in which Mr. Tippett’s skills are nonpareil in Hollywood. Propelled by unseen hands, a cast of critters long of fang and foul of breath prowl the circles of “Mad God’s” post-human hell in that slightly jerky over-cranked gait that always conveys the infinite patience of the animator and the fragile mortality of the puppet character, stop-motion’s mix of divinity and disgust. And drollery, since the heavyweight visuals and colossal suffering don’t stop the film cracking a few sprightly jokes from the pit, a distinctly American rather than European damnation.
Continue reading “The God, the Bad and the Ugly” »
Magnet Releasing
MOVIE REVIEW
Mandibles (2021)
When Quentin Dupieux pitches a film, the producers get what they were promised. “Mandibles,” as the people who paid for it were no doubt happy to find, really is about two amiable French layabouts who discover a genuine giant red-eyed fly the size of a 10-year-old child in the trunk of a stolen car and who immediately consider training it to go and fetch things from the shops, rather than asking why the fabric of reality has sustained major damage. But reality is always a bit threadbare in Mr. Dupieux's tales, with their bleached daylight and vivid nonsense. His last film, “Deerskin,” steered the director's absurdist style into a darker lane, as a psychotic Jean Dujardin discovered his life's purpose in basic narcissism. The two guileless goons in “Mandibles” don't have a narcissistic thought in their heads, or indeed much else. They’re a blithe underclass, abandoned by the materialist world before and after something amazing happens. They're dumb and dumbeur.
Continue reading “A Bug’s Life” »
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MOVIE REVIEW
Bellbottom (2021)
Is there anything Akshay Kumar can’t do? Over the course of “Bellbottom” he does a lot of manful striding, filmed from a low angle, so we can best appreciate his magnificence. He rides a motorbike with sunglasses but without a helmet. He has a training montage in the woods involving a lot of chin-ups and exercises with tires. He is invited to sing at a wedding reception, which then involves a montage of him and Vaani Kapoor (badly underused as his clever and perky wife Radhika) having a much better time on a train in Scotland than usual. And as a spy/analyst specializing in airplane hijacks – which were an unfortunately regular occurrence in India in the mid-’80s – he is able to boss around senior politicians of several different countries, up to and including Indira Gandhi (Lara Dutta) herself. And while this adoration is a little silly, it’s not remotely ridiculous. Somehow in the context of the plot, Mr. Kumar's star wattage is justified.
Continue reading “A View to a Thrill” »
Wiesner Distribution
MOVIE REVIEW
El cuartito (2021)
Set in a San Juan, Puerto Rico, airport (presumably, Luis Muñoz Marín International) during the Trump presidency, “El cuartito” revolves around travelers flagged by customs officers for “additional processing.” Among them: Toti (Mario de la Rosa), a washed-up Spaniard rocker scheduled to perform a Thanksgiving concert without a work visa; Lina (Claribel Medina), a melodramatic former actress lugging an entire medicine cabinet worth of pills en route to meet her sister on a cruise ship; Mariel (Isel Rodriguez), traveling with an expired U.S. passport after falling for an Argentinian and leaving the U.S. in her teens; Jesús (Ianis Guerrero), attempting to reunite with his family after their botched border-crossing attempt; and Santo (Fausto Mata), a delusional preacher with a forged missionary visa.
Continue reading “Dread on Arrival” »
Adam Jandrup/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
The Lost Leonardo (2021)
The documentary “The Lost Leonardo” tracks a Salvator Mundi painting billed as “After Leonardo” by a New Orleans auction house and bought in 2005 for a song ($10,000, so relatively speaking). The purchasers were a group of art dealers that included Alexander Parish, a professional “sleeper hunter” in the business of finding works of art that are more valuable than auctioneers perceive, and Robert Simon. In 2017, Christie’s auctioned the painting, now dubbed “the male Mona Lisa,” for a record $450.3 million.
Continue reading “The Da Vinci Code” »
Anna Kooris/A24
MOVIE REVIEW
Zola (2021)
The timing of its release might end up working very well for “Zola.” The frenetic depiction of a weekend from hell, full of sex, guns and godawful decisions in the Floridian heat, it certainly gives us a sensory rush that the pandemic has deprived us of (for better or for worse). It has two equally matched but differently heroic performances from Taylour Paige and Riley Keough; and despite its wild origins and even wilder subject matter, it follows a fairly standard narrative arc: a young woman gets in over her head and suddenly discovers what she’s truly capable of. But director Janicza Bravo makes a silly decision towards the end that dilutes the impact of her heroine’s sudden struggle for survival in favor of cheap laughs.
Continue reading “A Long Road to Hoe” »
Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
The God Committee (2021)
Based on a Mark St. Germain play, “The God Committee” centers on a panel at the fictional St. Augustine Hospital in New York City that periodically makes the call on who receives an organ transplant from a waiting list of candidates. Each member of the panel is a caricature placed there to deliberate toward a “12 Angry Men”-type verdict: a star surgeon with a conflict of interest (Kelsey Grammer), an idealistic young doctor (Julia Stiles), a bureaucratic administrator (Janeane Garofalo), a no-nonsense old-timer (Patricia R. Floyd), a grief-stricken psychiatrist (Peter Kim) and a utilitarian disbarred lawyer/hospital board member/priest (Colman Domingo).
Continue reading “Change of Heart” »
Maria Rusche
MOVIE REVIEW
Dating & New York (2021)
Romantic comedies are such an endangered species who cares if “Dating & New York” lives up to its generic title. The fact an adorable movie concerned only with the happiness of pretty young people has been made these days is automatically worthy of high praise.
Continue reading “Benefits With Friends” »
Logan Floyd
MOVIE REVIEW
Poser (2021)
“Poser” should have been about how a young woman finds her voice through the words of others, but sadly it doesn’t quite come together. Lennon (Sylvie Mix) is in that liminal time where she’s an adult but doesn’t feel like one. While she’s old enough to drink, she still lives like a student in an efficiency apartment in Columbus, Ohio. She is desperate to be part of the city’s artistic community while not quite yet comfortable sharing her own art, so she starts a podcast in order to explore the scene and carve herself a place in it. Since the scene is small and young, the participants pay each other courteous attention, and welcome Lennon’s interest.
Continue reading “Almost Infamous” »