Critic's Notebook

A Loose Screw

Patrick Redmond/Universal Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
The Turning (2020)

By MARTIN TSAI

It’s difficult to imagine “The Turning,” Universal Pictures’s newest throwaway in the January trash heap following the dismally reviewed “Cats” and “Dolittle,” being worse than those two debacles. Indeed, music video auteur Floria Sigismondi’s first film since indie gem “The Runaways” a decade ago could pass as respectable if not for its utterly impenetrable final minutes.

Creep Dive

Twentieth Century Fox

MOVIE REVIEW
Underwater (2020)

By MARTIN TSAI

A remarkably late addition to Fox’s 1980s sci-fi canon, “Underwater” finally surfaces some three years since the completion of principal photography. To be sure, the studio has never gotten out of the B-picture business entirely, but for the past few decades its niche pipeline has been mostly outsourced to Eurotrashy outfits like Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, resulting in more bargain actioners like “Taken” while the low-budget sci-fi well ran dry in favor of . . . James Cameron’s other preoccupations.

Girls Tripped

Eli Joshua Ade/Paramount Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Like a Boss (2020)

By MARTIN TSAI

Miguel Arteta’s distinctive directorial style could, depending on the film, be seen as either auteuristic or indicative of a limited range. He is at his most memorable, for better or worse, when his characters walk the line of childlike naiveté and mental imbalance à la “Chuck & Buck” and the recent “Duck Butter.” “Like a Boss,” only the second studio film in Mr. Arteta’s two-decades-plus career, retains this intangible indie/sitcomesque sensibility in spite of the raunchiness promised by his star Tiffany Haddish.

They Shall Not Grow Dull

François Duhamel/Universal Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
1917 (2019)

By MARTIN TSAI

Alfred Hitchcock pulled it off in 1948 with “Rope.” Regarding “1917,” Paul Schrader wrote on Facebook: “The ‘one shot film’ is no longer an innovation. It has its own Wikipedia entry. The question is no longer ‘how did they do that shot?’ but ‘why did they do that shot?’ ”

Taxied to the Dark Side

Jonathan Olley/Lucasfilm

MOVIE REVIEW
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

By SARAH MANVEL

The first three words in the crawl are "The dead speak!"

Other critics can talk about how the movie looks awful – the reliance on CGI and seizure-inducing light effects doesn't make up for its feeling of flatness. Others can tell you how the camera swooshing around constantly is supposed to provide big emotions. Others can tell you that the death of Carrie Fisher apparently killed all the ideas the film apparently had for its climatic 40-year resolution of this fight between good and evil, but that did not stop them using her likeness (body doubles, CGI superimposed on footage with poor Daisy Ridley, and yes, full CGI again) to make it appear she was part of this. And if that was the only way the dead spoke, it would almost – almost – have been bearable.

Suffering Succotash

Universal Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Cats (2019)

By MARTIN TSAI

There is nothing wrong per se with musicals, but Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh have been rubbish. With that out of the way, any big-screen adaptions of their work can be afforded some leeway to be judged independently of flaws inherent in the source materials. Regardless of what one thinks of Mr. Webber’s 1981 West End production, “Cats,” Tom Hooper’s expensive version feels like belling the cat. A musical of course necessitates the suspension of disbelief, but Mr. Hooper seems never to have quite made up his mind on whether to approach the material with theatrics or realism and winds up with something the cat dragged in.

Hang 'Em High

Claire Folger/Warner Brothers Pictures

MOVIE REVIEW
Richard Jewell (2019)

By MARTIN TSAI

There are at least three aspiring heroes in Clint Eastwood’s “Richard Jewell”: Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser), the security guard turned suspect at the 1996 Summer Olympics bombing in Atlanta; Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm), an F.B.I. agent investigating; and Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde), an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter covering the story. How the three disparate attempts at heroism parallel and intersect might have made an interesting movie in expert hands, but "Richard Jewell” isn’t it. The film focuses on the demonization of Jewell by law enforcement and media, while itself hypocritically vilifying Shaw and Scruggs in the exact same fashion.

The Hosts

Claire Folger/Lionsgate

MOVIE REVIEW
Knives Out (2019)

By MARTIN TSAI

As one would expect from a whodunit, “Knives Out” is rife with false leads and misdirection. But it’s not so slick as to warrant or withstand repeat viewings. Without spoiling who did it here, the film's big reveal replays a couple of clues, in case you miss them early on, and intersperses those with previously unseen footage and information withheld from the characters and the viewers. The film never shrewdly pulls the wool over our eyes, because its ending isn’t so much a twist as it is context to facts we’ve already gathered.

Relatively Distant

Bruno Machado/BFI London Film Festival 2019

MOVIE REVIEW
Invisible Life (2019)

By SARAH MANVEL

Teenage Eurídice (Carol Duarte) has a slightly older sister called Guida (Julia Stockler). They live a precarious middle-class existence in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, under the thumb of their unkind father Manuel (António Fonseca). Guida plans to escape via her Greek sailor boyfriend. Eurídice escapes via her world-class piano playing. Life being what it is, things don’t work out the way the sisters planned. Manuel being who he is, things are much, much worse than they need to be. The title implies something hidden would be made visible, but the movie delivers a very different story.

Parts Unknown

Trigon-film

MOVIE REVIEW
To the Ends of the Earth (2019)

By SARAH MANVEL

“Lost in Translation” remains a deeply wonderful and deeply problematic movie about two Americans at loose ends in Japan, a strange and alien culture for them that reflects their own confusion and discomfort. Being isolated and scared in their own separate ways brought the hero and heroine together. The Japanese heroine of “To the Ends of the Earth” has no such human companion on her journey in a wild and strange place – in her case, Uzbekistan – which means the emotional impact is very different. This is not necessarily wrong, especially in comparison, but the movie’s own mistakes are what lessen its power.