The setting for most of Christopher Landon’s clever thriller Drop is a fancy restaurant in downtown Chicago called Palate. Enclosed in glass walls, it lives on the top floor of a colossal building, with vertiginous views that look down on the city’s other skyscrapers. Its curvaceous interior is full of rounded corners, and the experience following the maître d’ down the ribbed … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Schrader’s latest explores a callous documentarian’s jumbled reckoning
Richard Gere’s Leonard Fife, the unreliable narrator at the core of Paul Schrader’s latest film Oh, Canada (Kino, $23.96 Blu-ray, $15.96 DVD), is seldom without a woman in his life. Yet he shares plenty in common with the brooding loners of the director’s recent de facto trilogy of First Reformed, The Card Counter and Master Gardener: the tendency toward self-flagellation, the … [Read more...]
‘The Monkey’ proves to be all blood, no guts
Hal Shelburn has a monkey on his back. Not an actual monkey, mind you, but one of those grinning, wind-up, midcentury percussion-playing simians that, outside of the jaundiced world of supernatural fiction, may only be the culprit for violating a noise ordinance or two. But in writer-director Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey, death follows every thwack of the snare. Hal, played by … [Read more...]
Hap’s fearless Oscar picks: Wins for ‘Conclave,’ ‘Brutalist,’ Brody, Moore
Predicting the Academy Awards last year was easy, because of the evident dominance of Oppenheimer. But this year's field for Best Picture, and several other categories, is wide open. But that does not stop me from jumping into the fray with my insightful, though probably erratic, picks. With these answers, you have just enough time to hop a plane to London and place a bet … [Read more...]
‘Bad Shabbos’ examines, hilariously, the art of coming together
If you believed the hit Netflix series Nobody Wants This would have benefited from a healthy dose of mistaken identities, physical humor and other hallmarks of vintage slapstick, then Bad Shabbos is the film for you. Wait long enough, and one character is literally hit in the face with a pie. But this is no flippant dismissal of Daniel Robbins’ irreverent new comedy centered … [Read more...]
Jewish Film, Sun and Stars festivals offer feast of fresh cinema
Now celebrating its 35th year of bringing thought-provoking and entertaining Jewish-themed films to the area, the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival kicks off Saturday with Matchmaking 2, an Israeli rom-com about love in the Orthodox community, the first of some 34 movies to be screened over the following three weeks. Jodi Michelle Cutler, arts and culture director of the … [Read more...]
‘Nickel Boys’: Keeping the faith while in a Florida hellscape
In director RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s celebrated 2019 novel The Nickel Boys, we’re denied the whole picture in more ways than one. First, there’s the literal sense of visual deprivation: Ross shot the movie in the square 1:37:1 aspect ratio, meaning it leaves voids of black space on both sides of the movie screen. Secondly, for a film that is inspired by the … [Read more...]
‘Wolf Man’: Staying human, as the fur flies
Lycanthropy is not for the faint of heart. Bloody lacerations appear, seemingly out of nowhere, on arms and legs. Teeth tumble from mouths like dew from plants. Toenails detach themselves from their appendages, the useless flotsam of a metamorphosis in progress. Bones wriggle and readjust with the curdling cracks of a nightmare visit to the chiropractor. It’s been a good 20 … [Read more...]
The View From Home: WWII spycraft, stealth feminism in Kino’s latest film noir box set
Kino Lorber recently retrieved three titles from the distributor’s seemingly bottomless well of obscure noirs from the genre’s golden age for yet another impactful box set. The Dark Side of Cinema XXI ($33.22 Blu-ray) features three titles that largely dance around the traditional expectations of noir, mixing its shadowy atmosphere with timely espionage drama and hothouse … [Read more...]
The View From Home: Solondz’s disturbing ‘Happiness,’ and a wry wolfman movie
As director Todd Solondz himself concedes in a bonus interview for Criterion’s long-awaited release of 1998’s Happiness ($34.99 4K, $27.99 Blu-ray, $13.91 DVD), the film “never would have been financed today.” This perspective seems to be the consensus, owing to shifting social mores, to increased institutional adversity to risk, and I suppose to wokeism. Down to brass tacks, a … [Read more...]