To watch Showtime’s absorbing new documentary McEnroe is to be reminded of the pervasive sense of unhealthiness that once permeated sports commentary, and that surely still imbues some of it today. Whether spoken by John McEnroe himself or the professionals reporting on his eccentrically triumphant career, we are treated to variations on an aggro theme: “You’ve got to be a bit … [Read more...]
‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ jinns up everything but fun
If the manic riffing of Robin Williams occupies one end of the spectrum of pop-culture genies, Idris Elba’s glum and mournful jinn in George Miller’s new film Three Thousand Years of Longing sits, or rather stews, on its opposite end. Downplayed and downcast, he is suffused with languor, his occasional pangs of curiosity toward modern life blunted by sullen memories of previous … [Read more...]
‘Apples’: The bearable lightness of non-being
In the world of Greek director Christos Nikou’s debut feature film Apples, it could literally happen to anyone: You go about your day — perhaps to buy a bouquet of flowers — board a bus, nod off in your seat, and wake up at the end of the line with your memory erased. Such is the predicament facing Aris (Aris Servetalis), who finds himself one of countless victims of a … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Catching up with Criterion: Lean, Kwan and Franklin
It’s been years since I’ve perused Blu-rays from the gold standard of art-house cinema, the Criterion Collection. With diverse and exciting titles continuing apace from this vital distributor, it seemed high time to revisit its ever-expanding catalog. These three new summer releases, all loaded with generous bonus features, offer a welcome return. Venice has never received a … [Read more...]
‘Murina’: From Croatia, a luminous coming-of-age story
Director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s extraordinary debut feature Murina starts and ends submerged in water, specifically the Adriatic Sea off the coast of Croatia. The beginning is serene, and the conclusion is fraught. It’s an elegant, circular structure that closes a loop while opening another. Then again, we never really leave the sea, so intrinsic is this vast, … [Read more...]
The View From Home: ‘Offseason’ an atmospheric chiller with an all-too-familiar setting
Writer-director Mickey Keating’s confident and chilling horror feature Offseason ($28.96 Blu-ray, $27.97 DVD, and streaming on Shudder) is set in a community called Lone Palm Beach. Lone Palm Beach is an isolated island off the coast of the Eastern United States, accessible by bridge, that jolts to life only during high tourist season. Its few year-round residents — all of them … [Read more...]
‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’: A likeable, powerful dance with adulthood
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...]