Monthly Archives: June 2024

New In Theaters

Now Hiring

Leave a comment

Hit Man

by George Wolf

What better way to have some breezy fun with our identity-challenged times than by embellishing the true-life story of one Gary Johnson?

Johnson was a phony hitman in Texas who would don different disguises working undercover work for the police. After a 2001 article in Texas Monthly profiled his adventures, various screenwriters toyed with the project. And though Johnson died in 2022, he can sleep well knowing Richard Linklater and Glen Powell’s Hit Man finally does him proud.

In the Linklater/Powell take, Johnson (Powell) is a mild-mannered psych professor at a New Orleans college who likes birding and jean shorts. A proficiency for tech gadgets lands him a moonlighting gig doing surveillance with the cops. But when their undercover man gets suspended for shady activities, Gary emerges from the van as “Ron,” fake hitman for hire.

Turns out, Gary has a knack for this new identity, and impresses his team with some suave method acting.

“Okay, Daniel Day!”

He also impresses Maddy (Adria Arjona from Morbius) who wants her abusive husband dead. “Ron” talks her out of the hit, they begin a steamy affair, then the husband turns up dead anyway.

And so the heat (the Body Heat?) is on.

Powell is all charm and charisma as he bounces from one persona to the next (the Patrick Bateman impression is particularly hilarious), Arjona is a captivating possible femme fatale, and the chemistry between them is undeniable.

Linklater’s direction is slick and well-paced, with a vibe that recalls a winning mix of Fletch whodunnit, Spy humor and Ocean’s 11 sex appeal. But Hitman still feels very much in-the-moment, with a repeated focus on how our point of view can shape our reality, and how our path to change starts by being honest with ourselves.

That’s right, Powell and Linklater find room for a serious message in Hit Man. But don’t worry, you’ll be having so much fun it won’t hurt a bit.

New In Theaters

Life Sucks and Then Your Mom Dies

Leave a comment

Edge of Everything

by Christie Robb

In the middle of the long transition from child to adult, high school freshman Abby (Sierra McCormick, The Vast of Night) loses her primary caregiver. Now, she has to move in with a distant father (Jason Butler Harner, Ozark) and his much younger partner and navigate her grief and the horrors of adolescence without much of a safety net.

She’s got her friends, sure—a few she seems to have known since kindergarten. They all seem smart, stable, sensible.

But they aren’t what she’s craving right now. Abby is looking for distraction and drama. And she finds it in Caroline (Ryan Simpkins, Fear Street), an underage drinker and Bad Influence willing to trade sexual favors for drugs or booze. With Caroline, Abby experiments with a new persona and new experiences, some of which veer toward the dangerous.

The film could have become a morality play, but the debut feature-length writer/director team of Sophia Sabella and Pablo Feldman aren’t here for that. Instead, they depict—without judgement—a slice of what can be a hugely complicated time in a person’s life, even when they aren’t flattened under a glacier’s worth of grief.

With its short run time, The Edge of Everything could have stood to flesh out some of the relationships and characters a bit more, particularly that between Abby and her father. But what we do have is good. McCormick delivers such a subtle, natural performance that at times it’s hard to remember you are watching an actor at work. She’s a talent to keep an eye on.

New In Theaters

Unreal World

Leave a comment

The Watchers

by Hope Madden

Tales of Irish fae folk can be terrifying. Often part ecological horror, part folktale, they can hit a primal fear of powerlessness and loss of identity. Ishana Shyamalan’s feature debut The Watchers, which she adapted for the screen from a novel by A.M. Shine, tackles these notions and adds a comment on voyeurism as entertainment.

Mina (Dakota Fanning), an unhappy American girl working at a pet store in Galway, agrees to drive a day to get a rare bird to a zoo. “Good chance to see the Irish countryside.”

GPS is shite in heavily forested areas, the road becomes just muddy tracks, then the car seizes and stops. One terrifying thing leads to another and suddenly she’s racing, birdcage in hand, toward a metal door being held open if she can get to it in 5, 4, 3, 2…

Credit Shyamalan (or my enduring fear of the woods?) for ratcheting tension early on. If you’ve seen the trailer, you know what happens next: she’s trapped inside with three others, one wall is a window, and at night those damn fae folk come to watch those inside.

It’s a great set up and a compelling, strange premise—the kind of thing the filmmaker’s father might make, and just as fraught with possible missteps. Remember how cool the trailer for Old was?

The Watchers is heavy with symbolism, from the bird in the cage to Mina’s personal roleplay games to the reality TV DVD collection someone left for the trapped to watch. There’s no denying the film is impeccably structured, Shyamalan unveiling complications and backstory as the structure dictates. Performances are solid as well.

Fanning’s portrayal is a bit faraway and dead inside, which suits the character but makes for a relatively lowkey lead. The ever-formidable Olwen Fouéré is charismatic enough to make up for that, and both Georgina Campbell and Oliver Finnegan fill out their roles with raw tenderness.

Mina’s name (her twin sister is Lucy) is a clear nod to Ireland’s most iconic horror writer, Bram Stoker. The entirety of the film feels just that superficially Irish. Nor is there any authenticity to the ecological horror, although there’s plenty of opportunity.  But the real issue—as is so often the case in a creature feature—is the monster FX.

Not good. Bad, even.

That’s unfortunate because, though hardly revolutionary and rarely scary, The Watchers is an often-intriguing thriller. But it doesn’t hold up to the great Irish horror that came before it.

New In Theaters

Handle With Care

Leave a comment

Handling the Undead

by George Wolf

With his source novel and screenplay for Let the Right One In, John Ajvide Lindqvist mixed vampire bloodlust and emotional bonds. Handling the Undead (Håndtering av udøde) finds Lindqyist turning similar attention to zombies, teaming with director/co-writer Thea Hvistendahl for a deeply atmospheric tale of grief, longing, and dread-filled reunions.

We follow three families in Norway, each one dealing with tragedy. An old man and his daughter (Renate Reinsve, The Worst Person in the World) have lost their young son/grandson; an elderly woman still grieves for her lifelong partner; while a man (Anders Danielsen Lie from The Worst Person in the World and Personal Shopper) and his children struggle to accept that the wife and mother they depend on (Bahar Pars) may now be gone.

Hvistendahl sets the stakes with minimal dialog and maximum sorrow. Characters move through sweaty summer days in a fog of grief that’s expertly defined by cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth. They grasp at memories and battle regret over feelings left unexpressed.

And then an unexplained electro-magnetic event hits Oslo…and the dead aren’t so dead anymore.

In the film’s first two acts, Hvistendahl unveils these awakenings with a barren and foreboding tenderness. Everyone knows this can’t end well, but the tears of joy that come from seemingly answered prayers create moments that straddle a fascinating line between touching and horrifying.

How much of our grief is defined by selfishness? And how far could it push us before we finally let go?

Those may not be new themes for the zombie landscape, but the way Hvistendahl frames the inevitable bloodshed goes a long way toward making her shift of focus less jarring. While so much time is spent exploring the pain of those left behind, we know that eventually zombies gonna zombie.

And indeed they do, but Hvistendahl sidesteps excess carnage for a more subtle form of gruesome. The interactions between the living and the undead take on a surreal, experimental quality that seems plenty curious about whether we’d really think dead is better.

After all, the grieving family in Pet Sematary went asking for trouble. Here, the trouble comes calling, and Handling the Undead answers with a bleak but compelling study of desperation meeting inhuman connection.

New In Theaters

Up In Smoke

Leave a comment

Trim Season

by Hope Madden

A fine blend of supernatural chiller, cabin-in-the-woods horror, ecological thriller and cautionary tale, Trim Season may be the first weed-based horror film that doesn’t go for laughs.

Emma (Bethlehem Million) needs purpose. She needs direction. She needs cash. Emma just lost her restaurant job, and she owes her roommate months of back rent. Her lifelong BFF Julia (Alexandra Essoe, Starry Eyes, The Pope’s Exorcist) pays for a night out to lift her spirits. There, new buddy James (Marc Senter, not subtle) talks them into a two-week, high pay seasonal gig trimming cannabis out in the wilds.

Emma knows better but her options are limited, so off she goes.

Co-writer/director Ariel Vida mines drug-fueled, dreamy, out-of-control territory where better horror films have blossomed: Mandy, Hagazussa, Lovely Molly. Vida overlays nightmarish images with smoke haze and bleary audio just often enough to conjure a nightmarish high that is, of course, more nightmare than high.

The film’s opening is especially enjoyable. Vida captures a verdant, primal quality to the prologue that both sets the stage and delivers real horror. Though the balance of the film never fully lives up to that splashy intro, it keeps your interest.

Million and Essoe deliver solid performances, as do Ally Ioannides and Juliette Kenn De Balinthazy as two other doomed trimmers. Cory Hart, playing the hot headed eldest son to the villainous matriarch Mona (Jane Badler), skillfully anchors every scene he’s in.

Some plotting conveniences limit the ability to suspend disbelief and Badler’s campy villain lacks depth. It’s unfortunate, because it’s the film’s juiciest part but the delivery is superficial sinister at best. The situation is exacerbated by the third act reveal. Because the film’s mythology is never more than hinted at, the climax feel a bit unsatisfying.

Still, there’s a lot to recommend Trim Season. Luka Bazeli’s cinematography is both lush and claustrophobic, tapping simultaneously into a wonder and terror of the woods. Some of the horror imagery is impressive as well. And Vida takes the subject matter seriously, which is itself a refreshing change of pace.  

New In Theaters

Family Man

Leave a comment

The Mattachine Family

by Rachel Willis

At the heart of director Andy Vallentine’s The Mattachine Family is a story about the families you build in life—the people who aren’t related to you by blood but may know you better than anyone else in the world.

Guiding us through this world is Thomas (Nico Tortorella). A photographer by trade, his images pepper the film, generally accompanied by long moments of exposition. The film opens with one of the longest voiceovers I’ve seen in a film, images flashing across the screen as Thomas introduces us to his story. It’s a curious way to establish characters, rather than letting the story unfold more organically.

Similar scenes periodically interrupt the film, taking you out of the moments developing between characters. This gives things an episodic quality, but the interruption and exposition never cover anything that couldn’t be conveyed in a more natural way.

Thomas’s central conflict is his relationship with husband Oscar (Juan Pablo Di Pace) and their debate over whether to bring a child into their lives. The characters spend most of the film separated, limiting our chance to develop feelings for Oscar’s side of the debate.

Despite this being Thomas’s story, he comes across as selfish, never really considering how his husband feels. There’s no sense of partnership, which is where the couple’s problem truly lies.

A bright spot is Heather Matarazzo’s turn as an internet influencer who chides her child’s father for not dressing him in the “right” outfit for a photo shoot. That the outfits are indistinguishable to an outside observer gives the film its only truly humorous moment.

The Mattachine Family tackles some interesting issues that come up in the lives of LGBTQ+ couples, but the conflicts aren’t effectively fleshed out. Dialogue repeats rather than enhancing how the characters feel, effectively sabotaging any feelings the audience might have for their struggles.

While narrative voiceovers can have a place in a movie (can even strengthen them), in this case we might have had a more relatable story if they weren’t relied on so heavily.  

New In Theaters

Go Wester(ern)

Leave a comment

The Dead Don’t Hurt

by Brandon Thomas

Leave it to Viggo Mortensen to deliver a western that both cherishes and upends western tropes. Mortensen has made a career of surprising his fans and critics. Even his casting as Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings trilogy was seen as a major surprise and curveball at the time. So it really should come as no surprise that when he directs his first western, it doesn’t quite follow the typical trajectory. 

In The Dead Don’t Hurt (what a great western title, huh?) Mortensen plays Holger Olsen, a stoic cowboy and immigrant from Northern Europe. On a trip to San Francisco, Holger meets Vivienne (Vickey Krieps of Phantom Thread) and the two form an instant connection. Vivienne leaves San Francisco with Holger for his home outside of a ragged desert town. As the Civil War breaks out in the east, Holger leaves his home and Vivienne to assist the Union in the New Mexico and Texas territories. With Holger gone, Vivienne finds herself alone in an alien environment and surrounded by many unscrupulous individuals. 

Westerns have always focused on the extremes of masculinity. Mortensen seems especially interested in tackling the mixture of manhood, dignity, and misplaced duty. As the “good guy”, it’s interesting to see Holger make decisions that on paper seem noble or righteous, but to his family – especially Vivienne – is seen as complete abandonment. It’s a not-so subtle comment that during this time, even the most well-intentioned men were willing to put the women in their life at risk if there was an even greater risk to their manhood. 

Mortensen surrounds himself and Krieps with an excellent supporting cast that includes Garret Dillahunt (No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford), Danny Huston (Children of Men, 30 Days of Night), and W. Earl Brown (Scream, TV’s Deadwood). This isn’t an overly action-filled western, and so much of the excitement from the film comes from these fine actors bouncing off of one another. 

Visually the film feels right at home in the genre. While not reaching the heights of say The Searchers or Once Upon a Time in the West, Mortensen and his cinematographer Marcel Zyskind have clearly set their sights on something “bigger” than the budget would suggest. There’s a classical look to the shot design and staging that doesn’t scream “modern digitally shot low-budget film!”. 

The Dead Don’t Hurt does lose steam as the story reaches its conclusion. While the performances and technical prowess don’t suffer, Mortensen’s script loses focus and instead of ending with a definitive period, the story ends with more of a confused question mark. The disappointment at the finish line is made stronger by how successful the film is up until those final 10 to 15 minutes.

Viggo Mortensen has crafted an interesting and original take on the great American western with The Dead Don’t Hurt. While it doesn’t quite reach the heights of even modern takes on the genre such as the Coens’ True Grit, it is a fascinating film from an exciting and hard to pin down artist.