THE WEEKEND WARRIOR Jan 31, 2025 Reviews and Repertory Round-Up
LOVE ME, NO OTHER LAND, VALIANT ONE, YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED
This is going to be a tougher week to crank out a column since I’ll be watching Sundance movies virtually starting on Wednesday and through the weekend, plus I have a crossword tournament on Sunday. Because of that, I’m skipping Dog Man, I’ve already reviewed Companion and Love Me, and we’ll see what’s left to write about.
Just want to give a quick shout-out to the Iranian Film Festival New York 2025, which is in its third year at the IFC Center, co-programmed by film critic and filmmaker Godfrey Chesire, with a slew of premieres of some of the finest current-day films from Iran.
LOVE ME (Bleecker Street)
This probably would have been this week’s “Chosen One,” since it was one of my favorite movies from Sundance last year. I even reviewed it over at that deader-than-dead website Above The Line and gave it an “A” rating.
Fortunately, I still have more things to say about this odd sci-fi romance film, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun as the voices of a “smart buoy” and a satellite that connect thousands of years after the end of life on earth. Inspired by viral videos from an influencer couple, the two of them connect and try to have a relationship, only to realize that having a relationship is tougher than it seems. The new film from Andrew and Sam Zuchero has been quite divisive since it debuted at Sundance, and I guess I understand that. I was hoping to talk to the filmmakers but just wasn’t satisfied with the five minutes I was offered. (I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now. I always request 15 minutes and that’s generally the minimum I need for a satisfying interview for the viewer/reader. Not sure why this is so difficult for publicists to understand.)
Anyway, I’ve already reviewed the movie, but I do want to talk about it more, since I’m always kvetching how movies are covered out of festivals and then never again, once they finally get wide releases, which is when movies like Love Me really need help getting people out of their seats. Barring the lack of some time to talk to the filmmakers of this movie, I guess I just have to share more of my thoughts here.
Maybe it’s because I’m someone who hasn’t made much of an effort to be in any sort of romantic or otherwise relationship, but I found myself really relating to these non-human “characters” trying to figure things out. Another thing that was interesting is that in the year since I saw this movie at Sundance, I’ve had a lot more free time, since I haven’t really had a job so I’ve ended up watching a lot more video content from Insta/FB/TikTok, including cutesy couples comedy like the ones done by Stewart and Yeun’s characters that inspire the inanimate objects to try to pursue a romance of their own.
I can totally understand why some people didn’t care for the movie – I mean, it has some funky performance-capture CG – but it’s also such a clever look into romance and relationships and literally like nothing else I’ve seen before, at Sundance or otherwise. If you’re looking for something a little different than pretty much everything else in theaters, a movie that defies genres and expectations, I hope people will Love Me a shot.
NO OTHER LAND
Opening at the Film Forum in New York City is this fantastic and timely doc that recently received an Oscar nomination and is thought to possibly even be the frontrunner to win documentary feature, even though it’s yet to acquire a distributor.
No Other Land won a ton of critics and festival awards so far, and though it’s a film about the relationships between Israel and the Palestinian people of the West Bank, all the events took place before the Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7, 2023, and the aftermath of that horrible attack that has launched this horrible conflict into a full-scale war.
I wrote briefly about this documentary late last year, but it’s the work of a foursome of individuals, a combo of Israeli and Palestininan, that shows the destruction of a small town called Masfer Yatta on the West Bank which is being destroyed by the Israeli military in order to build a testing camp.
It’s gotten so easy to politicize the conflict in the Middle East, but in my opinion, a lot of what’s going on is a case of “two wrongs don’t make a right.” In the case of the topic of this movie, the wrong is clearly being done by the Israeli military for kicking people out of their homes and absconding with their land. As you watch the movie, it’s impossible to think otherwise. It’s this giant Goliath bringing its full force down on a poor community who just want to have homes to live in, many of which we see being destroyed, including an elementary school that’s destroyed as the teachers and kids watch.
Whatever you think about what’s going on in the Israel-Gaza-Hamas conflict right now and wherever you fall on the debate, No Other Land is a movie that sets aside those discussions and debates to focus specifically on one community of people and how their entire world has been affected by the conflict. There isn’t as much death and destruction in this as last year’s 20 Days in Mariupol, but that doesn’t make it any less hard to watch, especially knowing what is to come and how things aren’t resolved yet.
VALIANT ONE (Briarcliff)
Co-written and directed by Steve Barnett, this military drama that claims to be “based on true events” has a simple-enough plot to sell it, involving a group of soldiers in a chopper flying over the DMZ (Demilitarized zone) that crash lands, forcing them to use any resources at their disposal to get back to safety.
Valiant One stars Chase Stokes (Outer Banks) and Lana Condor – yes, the actress who played Jubilee in one of the X-Men movies and led the “To All the Boys” films – as well as four or five other actors as the main troupe that gets caught in this situation. There isn’t a ton of finesse or flair to how their chopper crashes down – the gimble work to create this illusion is horrifyingly bad – but even worse is the bad writing and acting that permeates every bit of the movie.
Not being familiar with much of the cast, it’s hard to tell if this is better or worse than anything they’ve done before, but there’s no denying that Lana Condor is sorely miscast, since she looks like a teenager dressing up as a soldier for Halloween. At one point, they all hole up at a farm and meet a couple with a younger daughter, but then troops show up, leading to one of a couple firefights. Some of the characters, but you never care about a single one of them.
Even worse than anything else are some of the terrible musical choices like having rap tunes playing over the action to try to pump up the excitement, but it doesn’t work at all and that’s on top of the flagrant over scoring.
There are just so many great movies made in Korea proper, so why on earth would anyone care about this poorly-made American military movie set in the area? Even though the movie does start getting better as it goes along, it really couldn’t possibly get any worse. Black Hawk Down, this is not.
Rating: 4.5/10
YOU’RE CORDIALLY INVITED (Prime Video)
Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon star in this high-concept wedding comedy, written and directed by Nick Stoller (Neighbors), which has them playing the father and sister of brides-to-be who accidentally book the same island venue for the weddings on the same weekend. Hilarity ensues, but only on Prime Video, since this isn’t getting a theatrical release.
Ferrell plays Jim, widowed father to a Gen-Z Jenni daughter (Geraldine Viswanathan) who has just gotten engaged to her equally-young boyfriend, but when he tries to book the same island venue where he married her late mother, something happens that doesn’t get the booking into the actual book. Soon after, Reese Witherspoon’s television producer Margot is booking the same venue and weekend for the wedding of her beloved younger sister Neve (Meredith Hagner), and a year later, everyone realizes the double-booking… once everyone is already on the island where there isn’t enough room for two big weddings.
You’re Cordially Invited is about as high concept you can get, and because we’ve seen so many similar wedding comedies over the years, it might be tough to set that aside to appreciate it for what it is. If any other filmmaker was behind this, I might be worried, but Stoller truly is one of the best comedy directors out there. He knows how to fill his scripts with jokes and crazy characters so that his comedies never get tired or stale. Mostly.
Ferrell and Witherspoon approach comedy so differently, and one might not think pairing them together would work, but much of that once again comes down to Stoller’s ability to surround them with so many other funny characters and actors. Much of the humor comes from the conflict between the two leads but also from the differences between the two wedding parties: Jenni’s younger woke friends who are outraged about everything, and Margot’s estranged Southern family, mostly white Southern trash, which almost makes the film an allegory for our country today. The casting is great across the board, but I was especially excited to see Celine Weston as Margot’s mother, who has never approved of her daughter’s L.A. lifestyle and the fact she seems to have snubbed her family. In some ways, I preferred the cast playing Margot’s family more than the Will Ferrell side of the family, maybe because there was just so much more for them to do.
It also was a little strange that Jenni’s wedding party were all young people with no other direct relatives and no explanation why that’s the case, but besides Viswanathan, who is always great, I loved seeing Keyla Monterroso Mejia as her bridesmaid, so soon after she gave such a scene-stealing role in One of Them Days. (If you saw the last season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it’s impossible to forget how hilarious Mejia is.)
That’s not to say the movie is perfect by any means. There are aspects to the movie that I thought didn’t work as well, such as the overuse of “Islands in the Stream.” There’s also some of Stoller’s trademark cleverness, such as early on, introducing some of Margo’s reality shows, “Is It Dead?” and “Masquerade.” These might seem like witty throwaway jokes, but both things return later in the movie as plot point.
You’re Cordially Invited, like most comedies, might not seem equally funny to everyone who sees it, but as with Stoller’s previous comedies, there’s enough non-stop jokes and funny characters to keep one entertained even if they’re not fans of one or both stars.
Rating: 6.5/10
A few other things I didn’t get to watch or review …
DARK MATCH (Shudder)
AEW wrestling superstar Chris Jericho (who recently appeared in Terrifier 3) stars in Lowell Dean’s horror-action movie about a small-time wrestling company who take on a lucrative gig in a backwoods town, only to learn that the community is run by a mysterious cult leader. It premieres on Shudder on Friday.
CLONE COPS (Freestyle Digital Media)
Opening in select cities (NY, LA, and Nashville) as well as on VOD and Digital HD, including Apple TV, Prime Video, and Fandango at Home is Danny Dones’ sci-fi action comedy set in an alternate future, where outlaws go up a police force made up of disposable clones programmed for violence.
And some other movies out this week include…
CREATION OF THE GODS II: DEMON FORCE (Well Go USA)
LIKE FATHER LIKE SON (Lionsgate)
MARCELLO MIO (Strand Releasing)
THE MARTIAL ARTIST
TIME PASSAGES (AOK Productions)
GREEN AND GOLD (Fathom Events)
REPERTORY
This is a truncated version of the weekly repertory round-up due to time limitations, and I had to leave a few of my regular theaters out.
Perfectly-timed after Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez received 13 Oscar nominations last week, my local theater has the series “Emilia Perez and Jacques Audiard Selects,” although the movie is still playing at the Paris AND the IFC Center AND it’s on Netflix. Has anyone not seen this movie yet? Either way, the series will screen Daniel Schmidt and Gabriel Abrante’s Diamantino (2019) this weekend, as well as Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (1967), the Safdies’ Uncut Gems (also 2019), and it will screen David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which oddly, is not part of the Laura Dern series, but it’s also playing at just about every theater in town… the Metrograph screening this weekend is sold out.
Also on Sunday, Metrograph is presenting “Art Cinema For Tots: Food and Friends” as part of its presentation of kid-friendly experimental shorts.
What else do we have this weekend?
“15 Minutes” will screen David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake (2018), starring Andrew Garfield, which I still haven’t seen, but it plays this weekend once very late on Saturday night.
“Amongst Humans” has one last screening of John Sayles’ classic The Brother From Another Planet (one of the movies that convinced me to move to NYC), John Carpenter’s classic They Live (1988) – starring “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, so it kind of ties into this week’s Shudder release, Dark Match – and Joe Cornish’s absolutely brilliant, Attack the Block (2011), the movie that introduced many of us to John Boyega.
Only one movie for “The Many Lives of Laura Dern” this weekend, and it’s a single screening of Noah Baumbach’s 2019 drama Marriage Story, for which she won her Oscar.
The series “Knock Knock” will screen Pier Paolo Passolini’s Teorema (1968) a couples times this weekend.
“Brigitte Lin on Screen” continues with screenings of Police Story (one of Jackie Chan’s breakout films), Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express (1994), and Tsui Hark’s Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain from 1983.
It looks like “Delphine Seyrig: Rebel Muse” is coming to an end this weekend with Babette Mangolte’s 2019 film, Calamity Jane, a film that Seyrig brought Mangolte onto make back in 1983 but it finally was finished in 2011. Ms. Mangolte will be on hand to introduce Friday night’s screening and do a QnA after the screening on Saturday evening.
“Raise Ravens and They Will Pick Your Eyes Out” screens Marcel Carné’s 1945 film Children of Paradise and Glauber Rocha’s Black God, White Devil (1964).
Lina Wertmüller’s Swept Away… by an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August (really? That’s the full title?!) will screen a 50th anniversary 4k DCP restoration for one week only (but probably longer if it proves popular). This Sunday’s “Film Forum Jr” is another film classic, Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day (1993), directed by the late great Harold Ramis. Michael Roehmer’s Dying wraps up on Thursday, as does the A.I. series with one final screening on Thursday night of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Iranian actress Fatemeh Motamed-Aria is getting the spotlight as part of this year’s Iranian Film Festival New York with screenings of two of her collaborations with Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1992) and The Actor (1993), as well as more recent films, Avalanche (2015), The Blue Veiled (2019), and Once Upon a Time, Abadan (2021), the latter getting its US premiere.
Also getting a 50th Anniversary DCP release is Pete Weir’s classic Australian true crime thriller, Picnic at Hanging Rock, about a group of Australian school girls who go for a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900 and some of them vanish with no one ever figuring out what happened to them. While a movie like this could infuriate me as much as L’Aventurra, which also never resolves it, I was impressed with Weir’s filmmaking during this time, even though he had already been making movies, shorts, and TV movies for 8 years at the time. This movie probably helped him break out, and if you blink, you might miss a very young future Oscar nominee, Jacki Weaver. Other rep stuff playing this week includes David Lynch’s Eraserhead, Mulholland Dr, and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me as part of “Remembering David Lynch”; a 4k restoration of Jim McKay’s 1996 film Girls Town; and Rob Reiner’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Misery will screen on Friday and Saturday night late night.
Mostly new stuff this weekend – Paul Schrader is doing a QnA after his Oh, Canada on Saturday night – but there’s one more screening of the 1972 boxing drama, Fat City on Thursday night. On Monday, the “Wild Child” series continues with James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted (1999) which won Angelina Jolie her Oscar, as well as the 2001 film, Tart. On Tuesday, you can see a 4k restoration of Wim Wender’s Paris, Texas with something called “Youth Lagoon” premiering their music video?
On Thursday night, you can see David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), as arthouse theaters around the city continue to commemorate the legendary late filmmaker. It’s screening twice. On Monday, the “Angelika Classics” is showing Norman Jewison’s Moonstruck, starring Cher and Nicolas Cage, which I just watched for the very first time recently.
I’ve never really got into the cinema verité documentary work of the legendary Frederick Wiseman, but he is clearly beloved and FilmLinc will be showing most, if not all, of his films as part of Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution,” which runs from this Friday through March 5. Word of warning: A lot of Wiseman’s films are VERY long, but this weekend, we get a lot of his earlier and shorter films. I wish I had the time and the funds and tenacity to try to watch more of Wiseman’s work, but it’s just not going to happen right now.
Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven screens on Friday night as part of the New York Film Critics Circle series with cinematographer Ed Lachman doing a QnA. Also starting this weekend is “Why Not Cinema?!” presented by Why Not Productions who “powered” Emilia Perez – geez, that movie just isn’t going away, is it? At least they’re showing some cool stuff like Claire Denis’ White Material, starring Isabelle Huppert, on Saturday; a rare 35mm print of Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queens on Sunday; Cristian Mungiu’s Beyond the Hills on Wednesday, and then next Thursday, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, which made my Top 5 the year it was released.
NITEHAWK CINEMA PROSPECT PARK & WILLIAMSBURG
On Thursday night at Prospect Park, you can see Robert Altman’s classic, Short Cuts (1993), as part of “All About Altman,” and on Monday night, you can see Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness (1992) as part of the new “Iconic Chainsaws” series. I don’t know anything about Nelly Kaplan’s A Very Curious Girl (1969) as part of “Misfit Alley” at Prospect Park.
Williamsburg is launching a Denzel Washington retrospective called “Man on Fire,” kicking off on Saturday and Sunday afternoon with the Tony Scott movie that gave the series its title, Man on Fire, co-starring a super-young Dakota Fanning. Apparently, Prospect Park is also getting in on the Denzel action, screening Edward Zwick’s 1989 film, Glory, next Weds night, which got Denzel his first Oscar.
On Thursday night, they’re screening Al Jolson’s controversial, The Jazz Singer (1927) with Richard Bernstein signing his new book about the film. On Friday night, they’re showing Brian De Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise (1974), and then Saturday’s “Cult Café” is the 2020 film, Dinner in America. The Sunday Schmooze is Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and they’re also showing Space Jam for the kiddies, and then on Monday, it’s another theater showing David Lynch’s Eraserhead! Tuesday night, they’re showing Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat in black and white, and then Wednesday is the anime, Cowboy Bebop: The Movie. Lots of good stuff out there in Huntington, Long Island!
Hideaki Anno’s 1998 film Love & Pop screens via 2K DCP restoration on Saturday night.
As mentioned, I have jury duty next week and have a ton of Sundance movies to watch this weekend, so not sure what I’ll be able to crank out in terms of a column, but it’s Super Bowl weekend next week and Ke Huy Quan’s action movie, Love Hurts, takes on the slasher comedy, Heart Eyes. And that’s with Valentine’s Day will still be almost a week away!
Woah. I gotta know more about Clone Cops.
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