Welp, it’s March already and that means two months of the year have gone by and since I’m taking a break from Above the Line, I’m still hoping that I can revive this column on a semi-regular basis with at least a few reviews a week. (Right now, time is still a major factor ,at least in terms of actually watching movies to review.)
Up at Film at Lincoln Center, the annual Rendezvous with French Cinema will begin on Thursday, Feb. 29, running through March 10. It’s a series that I used to cover quite a bit, especially when they had more press screenings for the movies playing at it. It will open on Thursday with Thomas Cailley’s The Animal Kingdom, starring Romain Duris (a regular at Rendezvous!) in which an infection is mutating people’s bodies into animal hybrids, and it’s previewing at Rendezvous ahead of its March 15 release by Magnet. It’s Cailley’s French box office hit that was a follow-up to Love at First Fight, which played “Rendezvous” in 2015.
Ladj Ly’s Les Indésirables will also have its New York Premiere, his follow-up to his Cannes Jury Prize-winning debut, Les Misérables, which was nominated for an Oscar. Not only will Ly be in town for this on Saturday, but he’ll also be down in my neck of the woods for an event at the Metrograph on Friday night. Another film getting its New York premiere is MIchel Gondry’s The Book of Solutions, his first movie in God only knows how many years.
Also, the annual Athena Film Festival begins on Thursday. I rarely get up to Barnard College up in Harlem to catch any of this live, since it’s too much of a shlep, but it’s a great program focused on women filmmakers run and programmed by a great group of women! The opening night film is Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine’s doc COPA 71, which is about women’s soccer, and a film I definitely hope to see sometime soon. Check out the great line-up here.
Of course, the big release of the weekend is…
DUNE: PART TWO (Warner Bros.)
I’ve already reviewed the movie for Above the Line and interviewed Denis Villaneuve for same. I’ve also written about its box office prospects for Gold Derby here and here, so I don’t have too much more to say about it, but it should do very well this weekend.
Not sure I can say the same about THE CHOSEN SEASON 4 Episodes 7,8 (Angel Studios), a decision that has shown diminishing return over the course of the month, but this is a streaming series will probably get a lot more viewers in that medium.
Anyway, we’ll get right into…
THE BOX OFFICE CHART
1. Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros.) - $86.8 million N/A
2. Bob Marley: One Love (Paramount) - $7.2 million -47%
3. Ordinary Angels (Lionsgate) - $4.2 million -32%
4. Demon Slayer - To The Hashira Training (Crunchyroll) - $4 million -65%
(NOTE that Crunchyroll didn’t report 2nd weekend box office for last year’s Demon Slayer “clip reel,” so who knows if they will for this one?)
5. The Chosen Season 4 Eps. 7 and 8 (Angel Studios) - $3.8 million N/A
6. Madame Web (Sony) - $2.7 million -55%
7. Migration (Universal) $2 million -30%
8. Wonka (Warner Bros) - $1.5 million -40%
9. Argylle (Apple/Universal) - $1.4m -47%
PROBLEMISTA (A24)
Former Saturday Night Live and Los Espookys writerJulio Torres wrote, directed and stars in this quirky comedy in which he plays Alejandro, a young man from El Salvador who comes to New York City with dreams of being a toy designer for Hasbro, but when he loses his job at a cryogenic laboratory, his work visa is in danger, to the point where he might get deported. His savior comes in the form of Tilda Swinton’s Elizabeth, an art critic whose artist husband has been frozen for future revival. She needs help putting on a show to sell her husband’s art, so she calls upon Alejandro, offering to help with his visa issues. What Alejandro doesn’t realize is that Elizabeth is an absolute nightmare boss, and as someone who has had a few of those,
I had heard a bit about this when it premiered at the SXSW Film and TV Festival almost a year ago, and A24 was going to release it sometime last summer but then delayed it, presumably due to the writer and actors strike, which would have kept Torres from doing much press. That problem is over and A24 is giving this a limited release this weekend before expanding it nationwide on March 22.
It’s an extremely strange and quirky movie that might have trouble finding a diehard audience, because unlike last year’s Dream Scenario, the closest it has to a star like Nicolas Cage is Tilda Swinton doing this very bizarre and unlikeable character. Torres is a good writer, but not necessarily as strong an actor, much of the humor in his character from the strange way he walks around, though Alejandro certainly is likeable enough. Still, it puts much of his movie’s entertainment factor firmly on Swinton, who really takes Elizabeth so far over the top that it’s hard not to be amused by how difficult and awful she is.
Just to give you an example of how strange it is, there is a point where Alejandro is looking for jobs on Craigslist, as portrayed by Larry Owens, who gives Alejandro descriptions of the most horrific jobs possible for him to survive and pay to keep his work visa. Greta Lee from Past Lives has a small role as a woman who slept with Elizabeth’s artist partner, who she has to apologize to in order to get one of her husband’s
Problemista is probably going to be an acquired taste leaning more towards 20-something A24 enthusiasts who like strange and quirky fare like Torres delivers. It’s a movie I enjoyed, but not enough to necessarily want to see it more than once. Really, this is more about Swinton’s absolutely bonkers performance and how unreasonable her character is, but at times, Torres just goes too far into the world of weird for my own personal tastes.
Rating: 7/10
SHAYDA (Sony Classics)
I saw Noora Niasari’s semi-autobiographical drama, drawn from her own personal experiences, around the time of TIFF last September, before it was announced as Australia’s entry for the International Feature Oscar. It stars Zar Amir Ebrahami (Holy Spider) as the title character, Shayda, an Iranian woman living in an Australian woman’s shelter with her young daughter, Mona (Selina Zahednia), in hiding from her abusive husband Hosseim, who suddenly is granted partial custody of Mona.
Knowing this is an extremely personal story from Niasari as a young girl living with her mother in a woman’s shelter does make this more of an intriguing venture, and Ebrahami is fantastic as the title character, but the movie is still pretty dull and leaves a lot to be desired in terms of storytelling and filmmaking. Obviously, comparisons are likely to be made to A Separation and like that film’s director Asghar Farhadi, Ms. Niasari doesn’t use incidental score to enhance the drama and emotions, and that really hurts the movie greatly, since there isn’t enough actual meat to the story to keep the viewer interested in Shayda’s journey despite the unique setting and perspective. (And it does earn points by how adorable Selina Zehednia is as Shayda’s daughter.)
Shayda works as a strong portrait of women trying to survive the difficult things they’ve been subjected to by men, and in that regard, it’s quite a worthy endeavor, though it doesn’t have the strongest writing or filmmaking to really deliver the type of emotional impact one might expect from a drama with this subject matter. It’s compelling for its look into Iranian culture, but not much else.
Rating: 7/10
SPACEMAN (Netflix)
Adam Sandler stars in Johan Renck’s outer space drama in the vein of Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey, though not nearly as good as either. Sandler basically plays Jakub Prochazka, an astronaut on a solo mission on the outskirts of the solar system, who starts going a little crazy and seeing a giant spider creature, voiced by Paul Dano. Carey Mulligan plays his pregnant wife left at home. I still remember seeing Renck’s Downloading Nancy at Sundance, and it being one of the worst movies I saw that year, and Spaceman isn’t much better, as it’s just so boring and weird that I really couldn’t figure out why Sandler or any of the cast would do this, particularly Mulligan. I was just so vexed by this that I didn’t watch the whole thing, and because of that, I’m not reviewing, but it’s not good, and I generally have liked Sandler’s forays into more serious drama.
OUTLAW POSSE (Quiver Distribution)
2nd gen filmmaker Mario Van Peebles (New Jack City) wrote directed and stars in this Western, with a cast that include Neal McDonough, Whoopi Goldberg,Cam Gigandet, Edward James Olmos, John Carroll Lynch, M. Emmet Walsh, and William Mapother. Taking place in 1908, Van Peebles plays Chief, who has returned from hiding out in Mexico to claim stolen reparations gold hidden in Monday, while being chased by Mapother’s vicious Angel, who will do anything to get his hands on that gold.
SILVER HAZE (Dark Star Pictures)
I saw Sacha Polak’s drama, starring Vicky Knight and Esme Creed-Miles, at Tribeca last year, and I think I liked it okay, but it’s been so long since I saw it, I don’t really remember enough about it to review, and I just didn’t have time this week to rewatch it. Knight plays 23-year-old Franky, a nurse living with her family in an East London borough, looking to get revenge for a traumatic fire 15 years ago that left her scarred and unable to have a meaningful relationship until she meets Creed-Mills’ Florence. I generally remember this being a decent drama, but don’t remember absolutely loving it or anything.
AMELIA’S CHILDREN (Magnet)
Gabriel Abrantes (Diamantino) returns with this Portugese horror-thriller starring Carloto Cotta as Edward, who is searching for his biological family which brings him and his girlfriend Riley (Brigette Lundy-Paine) to the mountains of Norther Portugal where he hopes to meet his long-lost mother and twin brother (also played by Cotta). But as with most horror films, nothing is truly as it seems and it leads to a monstrous secret. Again, another movie I just didn’t have time to watch and review.
NYC REPERTORY
This is going to be a huge weekend for repertory stuff in the city, so if you have some free time after seeing Dune: Part 2, see what’s playing around town at various rep theaters below.
This is an exciting time at my favorite local rep house since March means that there’s a new catalogue (or “book,” as they call it) and NEW SERIES! And there are some GREAT things happening this month, making me sad that I’m away this weekend. You might want to sit down for this one…
The first exciting new series is the appropriately-titled “Bad Actress,” which will show David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Robert Aldrich’s classic Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) this weekend.
“Forever Young” will screen Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001) – one of my favorite comic book adaptations – Jean-Luc Godard’s Masculin Feminin (1966), and Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine (1995), starring Vincent Cassel
“Mad House or Mad World” will screen James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted (1999), for which Angelina Jolie won her Oscar, and Nicolas Refn’s Bronson (2009), starring Tom Hardy,
“Animal Farm: Pigs” is the latest in this series, and this weekend will screen the animated Animal Farm (1954) and Razorback (1974).
“Also Starring… John Cazale” puts the spotlight on one of the greatest characters of the ‘70s, and this weekend, Metrograph once again screens The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974) in 35mm (!), and they’ll screen a few times over the next couple weeks.
Lastly, there’s this look at a classic crafts person from the ‘70s with “Remember Every Frame: Edited by Dede Allen,” showing Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), starring Harry Belafonte, this weekend. (And later this month, the American Cinema Editors aka ACE will be doing a special panel program on Dede Allen’s work.)
Of course, I’m out of town the weekend that Film Forum has one of its coolest series ever about Japanese Horror with everything ranging from the original Godzilla (1954) and Mothra (1961), to Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), Ringu (1998), Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) – a long-time Film Forum staple – and many MANY more. Definitely will try to spend a day at Film Forum catching some of this great programming. This Sunday’s Film Forum Jr. is a stone-cold classic in the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers (1932). Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia has been extended through March 7.
Screening Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense: 40th Anniversary Re-Release on Friday and Sunday, and then as part of “The Machine,” MOMI is screening Fassbinder’s World on a Wire (1973) and George Lucas’ early film, THX-1138 (1971). Also screening Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977) as a series on snubbed performances (in that case, for Shelley Duvall) and Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), for which Michelle Pfeiffer was snubbed.
This weekend’s “Last Night Favorites” is one of my favorite sci-fi films, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, from 1997.
Some fun stuff this weekend, all in 35mm, including Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience (2009) and Scorsese’s Cape Fear (1991).
That’s it for this week. Going to Columbus this weekend, for a little RnR and to celebrate my birthday, but fingers crossed, there will be a Weekend Warrior next week, too!