Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Little Sister, Can’t You Find Another Way?

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Oddity

by Hope Madden

Back in 2021, writer/director Damian Mc Carthy cast a spook house spell, rattling chains and all, with his pithy survival story Caveat.  He’s back, and with him another claustrophobic but gorgeous supernatural tale of familial grievance.

Carolyn Bracken is Darcy, twin sister of the recently slain Dani (also Bracken). Darcy is a little touched—she still runs the curiosity/antique shop her mother left her and still holds on to the giant wooden man a witch gave her parents for their wedding. Darcy is also blind, so when she arrives at her brother-in-law’s home—the very spot where Dani came to her bloody end—Ted (Gwilym Lee) and his new live-in girlfriend (Caroline Menton) don’t know how to politely ask her to leave. And to take her giant wooden friend with her.

Oddity stitches together a handful of common enough ideas with a few real surprises. More importantly, Mc Carthy hands this tapestry of folklore and soap opera to a nimble cast and a gifted cinematographer. Together this team casts a spell too fun to break.

Mc Carthy’s framing inside and around the house where Dani died is gorgeous, surfaces of buttery caramel colors that shine and echo with the clicks of heels or rattle of ghosts. And when we’re not in this haunted space we’re in the age-old horror stomping grounds of a mental asylum—filmed rigidly and hopelessly, as if to suggest that the science of men is cruel and ugly.

But that beautiful, buttery home—Darcy and the wooden man have claimed that and they have no fear of men and science.

Both Lee and Menton deliver solid performances, while Steve Wall and Tadhg Murphy are flip sides of a terrifying coin. But Bracken owns Oddity—at first the warm and engaging Dani, authentic enough to make you mourn her, and then the elegantly spooky Darcy. Bracken, who was so terrifying and feral in Kate Dolan’s 2022 horror You Are Not My Mother, frightens in a very different way here.

At times Oddity suffers from a throwback sensibility—like an old Tales from the Darkside episode. But there’s no denying Mc Carthy’s talent for creating an atmosphere where anything can happen.

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Identity Crisis

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My Spy The Eternal City

by George Wolf

I said it four years ago and I still stand by it: My Spy is “the best huge-former-wrestler-stars-with-little-kid movie I have ever seen.”

Amazon Prime brings almost all the gang back for a trip abroad in The Eternal City, a sequel that unfortunately forgets to pack much of what made the original so charming.

CIA agent JJ (Dave Bautista) is still with Kate (now played by Lara Babalola), but she’s conveniently out of the country, which means JJ is guardian for Sophie (Chloe Coleman) just as she’s getting that teenage itch to test boundaries.

Happily domestic, JJ is still resisting offers from his boss David (Ken Jeong) and partner Bobbi (Kristen Schaal) to quit desk duty and return to the field. But like it or not, JJ is about to be forced back into action.

Chloe’s school choir has earned a trip to Italy, and JJ comes along as a chaperone under the demanding eye of Vice Principal Nancy (Anna Faris). David’s son Collin (Taeho K) is also part of the choir group, until he’s kidnapped by some evildoers so his dad will cough up the info needed to activate all those suitcase nukes hidden by the KGB.

And how do the bad guys know where all those suitcases are? Duh, they stole the thumb drive. It’s always the thumb drive!

Director Peter Segal again teams with co-writers Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber, but this time they seem much more interested in joining a genre they were winking at in part one.

My Spy would have used all this evil plan exposition for more charmingly self-aware humor. The Eternal City has lost much of that awareness, instead vying to launch some sort of hybrid stepdad/daughter action franchise that can also throw out teen hijinks and adult wisecracks.

Juggling is not in this CIA handbook. As likable as this ensemble is, only a few of the gags actually land, the running time starts to swell and the film spreads its tone so thin that no one gets out of The Eternal City feeling like they had a good time.

Especially those of us so pleasantly surprised with the first outing.

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Queen of the Waves

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Young Woman and the Sea

by George Wolf

She died in 2003 at the age of 98. And to this day, the New York parade that honored her in 1926 is the largest the city has ever given to a single athlete, man or woman.

Her name was Trudy Ederle, and that year she became the first woman to swim the 21 miles across the English Channel.

Disney’s Young Woman and the Sea brings Trudy’s story to streaming with broad strokes of sports inspiration, and a grounded lead turn from Daisy Ridley that consistently keeps engagement afloat.

Ridley brings intimacy to Trudy’s early struggles against health issues and sexism, crafting a quiet determination to conquer both through swimming the Channel.

Director Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) and writer Jeff Nathanson (Catch Me If You Can) adapt Jeff Stout’s source biography with a familiar treatment of Trudy’s path to history. Solid supporting players (including Jeanette Hain, Kim Bodnia, Tilda Cobham-Hervey) create an Ederle family unit with an earned humanity. In contrast to forced underdog sports dramas such as the recent The Boys in the Boat, the family dynamics here feel earned, and that fuels the conflicts that come with the arrival of Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham).

Burgess – who swam the Channel himself years earlier – sees through the attempts by insecure males to sabotage Trudy’s quest, and commits himself to helping her succeed, even when the Ederle family wants to call it off. The period details are affecting, Rønning mines tension from an outcome we already know, and Ridley makes sure Trudy is inspirational without becoming a one note hero.

Young Woman and the Sea may never attempt to shake up the sports biography playbook, but it doesn’t feel like pandering, either. Disney obviously knows the game plan, and the film’s commitment to execution delivers a satisfying and overdue salute to a woman who earned it.

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Knock at the Cabin Door

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Crumb Catcher

by Hope Madden

You want to see a nice evening unravel quickly?

Chris Skotchdopole takes an intriguing premise—groom gets too drunk on his wedding night and can’t quite remember what happened—and layers on something hypnotically, catastrophically banal.

Leah (Ella Rae Peck) and Shane (Rigo Garay) have not started their marriage off on the best foot. Last night was a bust, but maybe a quiet honeymoon at Leah’s boss’s gorgeous, art-bedecked cabin will right things.

Garay and Peck develop a believable antagonism, Skotchdople’s first sleight of hand. Because the performers and the writing (penned by the director along with Garay and Larry Fessenden) slowly deepen and tenderize the relationship so that you buy them as a couple, and hope for their best.

And then.

Most couples contain one person who cannot bear to be rude to someone no matter how obliviously, insistently annoying that person is. The other member of the couple can’t decide who to be angrier with, the annoying stranger or their own placating partner.

John (the magnificently deranged John Speredakos) is that annoying creature, and you have absolutely met this guy before: doesn’t pick up on hints, aggressively friendly, needy and clearly has an agenda.

So it is with much contention that the newlyweds greet John late on their first night together at the cabin. What follows is a bold mix of home invasion horror, comedy of manners, and absurdist timeshare nightmare.

Skotchdopole’s feature debut benefits from his years behind the camera, including shooting Fessenden’s 2019 Frankenstein analogy, Depraved. Crumb Catcher’s disorienting camera emphasizes its chaotic, freakshow quality and visually represents the rising anxiety of the hellish social trap.

Garay delivers an often internal, tender performance nicely offset by Peck’s droll sarcasm. Lorraine Farris turns in strong support work as well, but Speredakos owns this show. His display of desperation and entitlement turned delusional would be hilarious were it not so unsettling.

Skotchdopole’s managed a tightwire of tones, delivering a tense and compelling thriller that turns banality into a weirdly funny nightmare.

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Love Taken Too Far

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Just the Two of Us

by Eva Fraser

L’amour et les Forêts. Love and the Forests. This title, in the film’s original language, deepens the meaning of the English title “just the two of us,” encompassing the audience in a tale of love so vast, manipulative, and obsessive it becomes suffocating like the sickly sweet air in a watchful forest.

Just the Two of Us, directed by Valérie Donzelli, is a story we’ve seen before. That lessens nothing. These 105 minutes of lust, fear, and desperation center on Blanche Renard (Virginie Efira) and her relationship with Grégoire Lamoreux (Melvil Poupaud)— documenting its toxic development over nearly a decade. 

As soon as the film begins, cinematographer Laurant Tangy gives it life with his close-up shots of micro-movements and facial expressions that tell all. The lighting strengthens every shot, intensifying the emotions of each moment: red for lust, blue for a calculated almost-love, and green for jealousy. Everything teems with vibrancy, then it doesn’t, signaling that something must be wrong, priming us for a closer look.

The performances in this film are phenomenal. Efira, who plays twin sisters Blanche and Rose, conveys everything with her deep, expressive eyes. At one point, she licks a tear from her own face so quickly it seems invisible.

Poupaud terrifies as Grégoire, his sharp-witted duality between tenderness and cruelty giving the film its rightful label as thriller. There are no fantastical monsters or jump scares, only the dramatic irony of a dangerous relationship.

Time feels ambiguous and the pacing variable, but it works with the concept of a disorienting relationship that puts love in a liminal space. A few loose ends don’t taint the film because its main focus is the relationship, not the minute details.

Be warned: this film is very intense and could be triggering for those who’ve been in an abusive situation. Just the Two of Us is beautiful with its realism, but it is also hard to watch. But the stunning performances and technical execution are worth it.

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The Same, but Different

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Man of Reason

by Rachel Willis

Director and star Jung Woo-sung manages to craft his own take on the man with a criminal past trying to live on the straight and narrow in his film, Man of Reason.

Su-hyuk (Jung), newly released from prison after 10 years, finds much of his world has changed. What hasn’t changed is the expectation that he will resume a life of crime. However, an ultimatum from his ex-girlfriend (Lee Elijah) is all Su-hyuk needs to shun his former lifestyle.

But as we all know, walking away from a crime syndicate isn’t easy.

What follows is a predictable blend of attempted murder, fights, chases, and kidnap. Where Jung succeeds is the introduction of fun characters who enliven the action and the tension. Murderers-for-hire, Jin-ah (Park Yoo-na) and Woo-jin (Kim Nam-gil), are a hell of a lot of fun, despite their penchant for bombs and general mayhem. And despite their humorous inclusion, they still bring a measure of hostility to the film, especially Jin-ah, who is the colder and more calculating of the murderous duo.

As our silent, determined hero, Jung is fairly winning as Su-hyuk. In one of the best scenes, a car that was a gift from his former boss is used to great effect as a weapon against said boss. And while we often tread car commercial territory (frequent shots of the BMW emblem are front and center of several scenes), it doesn’t stop it from being a lot of fun to watch.

Of course, you know what will happen. Each beat unfolds in predictable measure. Whether or not you’re able to lose yourself in the movie and ignore the familiar territory depends on how much you like big action sequences. At this, Jung excels.

It helps that the actors are at their best, bringing the right level of humor, menace, and thrills. As you may also expect, a child at the center of the action raises the stakes, and little In-ba (Ryu Jian) is the perfect mix of adorable, sad, and precocious. Her dilemma is where most of the tension lies, and Ryu ably tugs at our heart strings.

While there isn’t anything new to find in Man of Reason, that doesn’t make it any less thrilling to watch.

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Dirty, Sweet and You’re My Girl

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Longlegs

by Hope Madden

Very few 2024 films have been more eagerly anticipated by horror fans than Oz Perkins’s Longlegs. For some, it’s the filmmaker’s criminally underappreciated features The Blackcoat’s Daughter, Gretel & Hansel, and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House that compel interest in his latest effort.

For others, it’s lead Maika Monroe, a tremendous talent who routinely chooses challenging, satisfying horror, including It Follows, Watcher, The Guest and more. But for most people, let’s be honest, it’s the chance to see Nic Cage play a deeply deranged serial killer. (We are not made of stone!)

Cage excels, as does Monroe—both aided immeasurably by memorable support work from Blair Underwood and Alicia Witt. Monroe is Agent Lee Harker whose “hyper intuitive” nature has her assigned to a confounding case of whole families murdering one another, the only sign of an outside presence being an encoded note left at the scenes.

Monroe’s green FBI agent is as stiff and awkwardly internal as Cage’s psycho is theatrical. Her terror is as authentic as his lunacy.

Perkins shines as bright as ever, too. As always, his shot selection and framing evoke dark poetry. His use of light and shadow, architecture and space is like no one else’s.

His Longlegs direction and writing contain provocative notes of his own Blackcoat’s Daughter, but the plotting here is anchored by something slightly more predictable. I defy you to watch Blackcoat’s Daughter and figure out where it’s going, and yet it ends up exactly where it needs to be. For all the many fascinating flourishes and unsettling performances in Longlegs, there is something here that feels more obvious than any of the filmmaker’s previous films. Maybe it’s the clear influence of 90s thrillers: The Silence of the Lambs, Zodiac, maybe even a little bit of Se7en.

It is nagging—the sense, for the first time in any of his films, of recognizability. But don’t let that deter you. In many ways, it’s Perkins’s sleight of hand, his way of suggesting one thing while saying something else, of rooting audiences in something familiar expressly to pull that comfy rug away.

Longlegs is strangely beautiful, deeply unnerving, and a fine reason to be a horror fan.

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Queen City

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Dandelion

by Hope Madden

Filmmaker Nicole Riegel returns to her Southern Ohio roots, but Dandelion delivers a decidedly more lyrical look at the Buckeye state than her remarkable 2021 indie breakout, Holler.

Kiki Layne is Dandelion, a frustrated musician playing to disinterested crowds at a hotel bar in Cincinnati. Confronted by the reality of her shelf life, she heads to a biker rally in North Dakota for an audition to open for a major touring act.  The audition goes terribly, but she meets Casey (Gossip Girl’s Thomas Doherty), who rekindles her dying flame of creativity—among other things.

The film plays a bit like an American version of John Carney’s Once. Loosely plotted around songwriting sessions and picturesque sightseeing, Dandelion delivers more harmony than melody, but that’s often OK. When the script weakens—a convenient stretch of dialog, a predictable turn of the plot—cinematographer Lauren Guiteras’s camera, Layne and Doherty’s performances and the music itself strengthens.

Doherty’s all vulnerability and tenderness. Layne—in easily her best role since If Beale Street Could Talk—finds a way to hold anger, resignation, hope and joy in the same moment.

Riegel’s depiction of intimacy, in the core relationship as well as the act of creation, is tactile: fingertips, chords, a rock’s surface, veins throbbing in a throat. There’s real poetry in the direction, in the way voiceover conversation floats around landscapes and sunsets, Black Hills and backroads.

The live music is as infectious as the romance, although neither is really the point. Dandelion is a character study at heart, and Layne more than delivers on that promise. But Riegel does get a little bogged down with the beauty and atmosphere—as lovely as the film is, at a full two hours, some of the poetic meandering feels like filler.

It’s interesting to see Riegel take such a sharp turn from the grim authenticity of Holler to the poetic beauty of Dandelion, but there is a common thread of fighting to find and keep yourself that gives both films focus and life.

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In Nightmares

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The Blue Rose

by Matt Weiner

There’s a deep-rooted, surreal evil lurking at the heart of the idealized, candy-colored world of Blue Velvet that traps all its characters in a web of… no, wait, this is The Blue Rose.

Writer and director George Baron’s first feature film is either a love letter to David Lynch or a pale imitation that draws heavily—heavily—on that director’s themes, mood, tone, plots, imagery and characters. Your mileage may vary depending on your affection for the original source material.

Young LAPD detectives Dalton (Baron) and Lilly (Olivia Scott Welch) take on a gruesome, high-profile murder case set in a dreamy 1950s version of Los Angeles. Like anyone in Hollywood, the two are looking for their big break, one much needed after botching their last case.

This one should be a straightforward whodunnit: painter Sophie Steele (Nikko Austen Smith) has more than enough means and motive in the death of her abusive husband. As the detectives chase down leads and interview less than forthcoming persons of interest, the lines between potential witness and suspect start to blur.

And all of that’s before the pair gets thrown into a Lynchian nightmare of an alternate reality, masterminded by a femme fatale overseeing a vast conspiracy. While this nightmare world often fails to rise above echoes of Lynch, the production design is immaculate for such an ambitious setting. It also goes a long way—along with a number of wonderful off-kilter performances—toward giving the nightmare sequences some actual teeth. (In particular, Viola Odette Harlow channels her best Isabella Rossellini as the nightclub ingenue Catherine.)

Often, though, Baron’s dream world swaps out soul-shaking Lynchian horror for jump scares. The effects are creepy but fleeting, and emblematic of the bigger problems with the story. The Blue Rose might be a fun diversion for diehard Lynch fans. But it also serves as a helpful comparison for those usually put off by the director, to see what a skin-deep send-up looks like without the cosmically unnerving core of the original.

It’s not the worst outing for a feature debut, but Baron should go beyond the sum of his influences if he hopes to equal them in profundity.

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Man in the Middle

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The Convert

by George Wolf

Director and co-writer Lee Tamahori lets us know that for 500 years, the Māori were “edged weapon” warriors. Then, the 1800s brought them muskets, and Christianity.

You can guess how that worked out.

In The Convert, Tamahori brings us into their world via Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce, solid), a lay minister who has accepted an assignment as Chaplain of Epworth, a British colony on New Zealand.

After years in the British army, Munro has a new commitment to mercy, and it almost immediately puts him squarely between two Māori warlords still committed to blood.

One Chief sends young Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne) and Pahirua (Duane Evans Jr.) to live in Epworth and be mentored by Munro. While the opposing Chief plots an invasion to take back the land he feels is his, Munro quickly finds how deeply the bigotry grows in little Epworth.

New Zealander Tamahori (The Edge, Next, Die Another Day) shows a strong respect for authenticity in casting, language and customs of the Māori people. But as we learn more about why Munro “converted” from a soldier to a man of peace, a strong Dances With Wolves vibe clouds the more compelling history of these two rival tribes.

Some worthy (and timely) points are made about wars between “have-nots” only serving the “haves,” but while the film never goes full-on white savior, you wonder how it would have benefitted from a less pale point of view.

Munro’s arc isn’t frivolous, but neither is it fresh. The emotional pull here is clearly with the Māori, and it’s a shame The Convert is content to make them side players.