It remains to be seen whether Cooper Raiff can play anyone other than Cooper Raiff, but when the results are this strong, he may as well stay in his lane for perpetuity. The immensely likeable Cha Cha Real Smooth is the writer-director-star’s follow-up to his 2020 debut, Shithouse, and while the characters he plays bear different names — Alex in the freshman feature, Andrew in … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A bracing, anti-nativist love story; a ‘90s art-house classic of urban longing
Call it love in the time of nativism. Darkly comic and fretfully relevant, Bulgarian writer-director Ivaylo Hristov’s Fear (Film Movement, $24.95 DVD) exists on a pitch-black nexus between satire and documentary. It’s set in a seaside village along the Turkish border, where the locals are bracing for a brutal winter. Signs of life are scant, as fog blankets skeletal trees, … [Read more...]
‘Jurassic World Dominion’: Franchise’s ‘final’ film overstuffed and clunky, but still has some teeth
Nostalgia, as they say, never goes out of style. And in a pop-culture space increasingly populated by aging Gen-Xers and millennials with time on their hands, affection for the more sanguine 1990s has reached its pinnacle of saturation. The X-Files, Sex and the City, Friends, Scream — and we might as well throw the box office-crushing Top Gun in there because it’s close enough … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Dementia’ a brilliant, experimental plunge into psychosis
It’s safe to say there’s never been a film, before or since, quite like John Parker’s 1953 psychodrama Dementia (now on Blu-ray from Cohen Film Collection, $19.99). An uncanny marriage of avant-garde cinema, horror and noir, it was somehow both ahead of its time and, boldly, behind it: Parker shot it as a silent film, without intertitles, in an era when such an approach was … [Read more...]
‘The Automat’: Affectionate documentary sings praises of Horn & Hardart
As an American on the blurry border between Gen X and millennial, when I hear the term automat, I think of a car wash. To previous generations, especially those who grew up in Philadelphia and New York, the automat was a culinary phenomenon. Established in 1888 by entrepreneurs Joseph Horn and Frank Hardart, who adapted the idea from similar institutions in Europe, the … [Read more...]
The View From Home: A new DVD collection resurrects the paranoid Atomic Age
As a longtime devotee of Mystery Science Theater 3000, I expected to encounter a familiar brand of B-movie schlock with the new triple-feature DVD Drive-In Retro Classics (Corinth, $22.99). The cover art depicts a man gleefully shooting death rays from his eyes, and the titles — The Brain From Planet Arous, The Hideous Sun Demon — seem ripe for riffing. The biggest surprise … [Read more...]
‘The Northman’: Revenge pic’s hallucinatory power will go all medieval on you
If Alexander Skarsgård is a Method actor in the pop definition of the term — someone who never breaks character even when the cameras stop — I wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near his quarters in Northern Ireland from August through November 2020, during the shoot for The Northman. God forbid I were a gofer with unpleasant news; say, craft services were out of … [Read more...]
‘Adam Project’ gets lost in the Garden of Edenic cliché
Having made it through every CGI explosion, glib one-liner and mawkish revelation of Shawn Levy’s The Adam Project (now on Netflix), I feel I owe Moonfall a partial apology. Roland Emmerich’s bonkers apocalypse picture from earlier this year was an embarrassment on every creative and technical front, but at least it embraced its badness. It seemed, like its self-replicating … [Read more...]
‘Compartment No. 6’: Accidental couple at best when story stays on rails
We’ve read enough mysteries and seen enough thrillers to know by now that, in fiction, by and large, nothing good ever happens on a train. Corpses appear; ladies vanish. Don’t get us started on Snowpiercer. True to form, misery and dread seem to be the traveling companions for Laura (Seidi Haarla), a rudderless Finnish exchange student voyaging solo on a locomotive from … [Read more...]
‘Drive My Car’: When grief leaves you in neutral
If only Paul McCartney earned royalties for mental playbacks, he’d be an even bigger billionaire this Oscar season. I’m sure I’m not alone in taking the Beatle’s libidinous 1965 earworm for a spin around the cerebrum every time I see another headline about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. But this Drive My Car, now … [Read more...]