Matt Kennedy/Focus Features
MOVIE REVIEW
Kajillionaire (2020)
Robert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) thought naming their daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) after a homeless man who won the lottery would result in her inheriting. Instead, they live in the disused office of a Los Angeles bubble factory. Bubbles spill through a crack in the ceiling at set times a day; they must be caught in buckets and the wall toweled dry, but the inconvenience is why the rent is so cheap. The family is behind, of course. Instead of working regular jobs, they are low-grade grifters and petty thieves. Well, Robert and Theresa come up with the ideas, and Old Dolio carries them out. She steals from the post office, doing an elaborate dance to avoid the security cameras. She tries to swap a gift certificate for a cash refund, or maybe that rock on the desk. She agrees to take a parenting class on someone’s behalf for $20. They are such a codependent family Old Dolio thinks it’s growth to be the one to propose a lost luggage scam that will clear their back rent. On the plane, they sit separately, which puts Robert next to Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a chatty physician’s assistant delighted to find real-life intrigue. Suddenly, what seemed to be “not unreasonable” is no longer the case.
Continue reading “The Family That Preys Together” »
The BFI London Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Mogul Mowgli (2020)
Timing is everything, in music and in life. If you come in a little too late or off the beat, you miss your chance and spoil everything. No one knows this better than Zed (Riz Ahmed), an exceptional rapper who is finally about to get his big break, opening for a major artist on an American tour. But his girlfriend Bina (Aiysha Hart) sneers about him rapping constantly about where he’s from when he hasn’t seen his parents in two years. So Zed reconsiders. And as they say, he who hesitates is lost.
Continue reading “Home Sick” »
Matt Glass/Magnet Releasing
MOVIE REVIEW
12 Hour Shift (2020)
In “12 Hour Shift,” Angela Bettis plays Mandy, a surly small-town Arkansas hospital nurse with a drug habit who moonlights as a supplier in the organ black market. The plot of course centers on her worst day ever, when everything that could possibly go wrong indeed does. Stuck with a double shift, Mandy tasks her stereotypically dumb blonde cousin Regina (Chloe Farnworth) with transporting a kidney to a garage where unlicensed transplants are performed. Regina of courses loses the kidney, and must replace it or surrender one of her own to the menacing criminals.
Continue reading “Operation Dumbo Drop” »
Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Brothers Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Tenet (2020)
“Tenet” might not be the safest movie to release during such perilous times. For this is a film that demands repeat viewings – a dazzling puzzle box that you will need to see at least twice to comprehend, and even then there will still be gaps in your knowledge. Going once will simply not be enough as – virus be damned – you’ll feel compelled to go back for another look. Sure you could wait and stream “Tenet” at a later date, but this is a film that deserves the biggest of big screens. There will be online videos where the film will be salivated over and pulled apart like a hog roast, but relying on those is just cheating. Christopher Nolan spent years writing this thing so you owe it to him to do the detective work yourself. All you will need is a wipe-board, several different colored pens and a focus group of the world’s top physicists. Fear not reader, there will be no major spoilers in this review, for that would require me to know what the hell was going on in “Tenet” to start with.
Continue reading “Future to the Back” »
Sean Price Williams and Takeshi Fukunaga/Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Ainu Mosir (2020)
“Ainu Mosir” tells the coming-of-age tale of an indigenous Japanese teenager shouldering the weight of preserving a way of life. Kanto (Kanto Shimokura) lives with his widowed mother (Emi Shimokura) in a tourist-trappy northern Japan tribal reserve, where residents run souvenir shops and delight visitors with ritual ceremonies performed with clockwork precision. No spoilers, but Kanto has a very personal stake in a controversial village tradition. His coming-of-age isn’t the typical rite of passage for indigenous youngsters. Instead of his survival skills being put to the test, Kanto is confronted with an adult decision pitting his personal values against communal responsibilities.
Continue reading “Ritual Sacrifice” »
Daniella Nowitz/Tribeca Film Festival
MOVIE REVIEW
Asia (2020)
The Israeli entry to the Academy Awards, “Asia” often feels like a Lifetime movie gone wrong. It’s got all the trappings: dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, irresponsible mother, rebellious daughter, disability and terminal illness. Russian nurse Asia (Alena Yiv) is too busy to attend to her sick teenage daughter, Vika (Shira Haas), but she manages to find time to lure her married doctor colleague to come out to the car for a quickie. Meanwhile, Asia deploys fellow nurse Gabi (Tamir Mula), a Palestinian who can’t get enough shifts at the hospital, to care for Vika.
Continue reading “Soliciting Sexual Healing” »
Tobias Höiem-Flyckt/Dark Star Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
Koko-di Koko-da (2020)
It’s not often that a movie truly lives up to its horror billing. Sure you get scares, thrills and women being mistreated in the most unspeakable of ways, but it’s rare that you are made to feel as if you are in an interminable nightmare. This Swedish oddity, about three lives which are wrecked while on holiday in Denmark, does exactly this. It’s awful to watch, and not in a good way.
Continue reading “Unhappy Death Day” »
Patti Perret/Universal Pictures
MOVIE REVIEW
The Hunt (2020)
After President Donald Trump personally “canceled” it in a tweet, “The Hunt” was abruptly bumped from its Sept. 27, 2019, release date indefinitely — until now. Its premise involves a group of “woke” “libtards” declaring open season on “deplorables” and kidnapping a dozen of them. That’s basically its plot: The "elites” pick off the conspiritards one by one in gory detail over a bogus conspiracy dubbed “Manorgate” until a few escape and strike back in similarly gory detail. The end.
Continue reading “Disinfo Wars” »
Michael Gibson/STXfilms
MOVIE REVIEW
My Spy (2020)
In “My Spy,” former wrestler-mixed martial artist Dave Bautista plays J. J., a nails-for-breakfast war veteran-turned-C.I.A. operative on assignment staking out newly widowed Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley) and her 9-year-old daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), who have recently fled Paris and are struggling to adjust to their new life in Chicago. The clever Sophie is quickly on to J. J. and threatens to blow his cover if he doesn’t take her ice skating, participate in her special person’s day at school and train her to become a spy, all so that her new classmates will no longer ostracize her.
Continue reading “The Spy Who Bugged Me” »
NonStop Entertainment
MOVIE REVIEW
Color Out of Space (2020)
If you’re going to return to making feature films after 27 years away, you might as well pick up where you left off. The opening credits of “Color Out of Space” have Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) carrying out a Wicca ritual, appealing to the angels to take care of her mother, and the words "Directed by Richard Stanley" appear over a close-up of the antique compass in her hand. Back in 1992 Mr. Stanley’s previous feature, "Dust Devil," started with another pilgrim looking at a hand-held totem; but then the figure was a supernatural serial killer and the item was a pocket watch going backwards. And back before that, the credits of “Hardware” ended with a post-apocalyptic scavenger dressed in the very 1990 boho-gothic style of Carl McCoy from the band Fields of the Nephilim (for it was he) holding another battered compass in equal close-up, although the credits on-screen at that exact instant are the freighted names of Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Three films, three nomads, looking at three antique analogue icons for some signal from a cosmos that shows every sign of being otherwise engaged.
Continue reading “Necronomicon Air” »