Past Lives ★★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) Carousel of Time “Past Lives” opens in a bar in New York City. It’s 4 a.m., and we hear off-screen Americans trying to figure out the relationships among three people seated across from them at the bar, without being able to hear what the three are saying. Two—a man and woman—are Asian, and a third is a white man, seated to their right and not saying much, while the other two talk. Though they can sense the discomfort and distance of the white man, the observers are uncertain about what is going on.…
Author: 2 Film Critics
Bottoms ★★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) Fight Club Goes Queer Two high school lesbian losers set out to find sexual partners by starting a fight club in this raucous, over-the-top comedy where girls hit each other in the face. If this seems not your ideal movie experience, think again, maybe even think “Barbie.” True, Emma Seligman in her second film is no Greta Gerwig, and “Bottoms’” $11 million budget is less than a tenth of “Barbie’s.” But Seligman’s willingness to take on the Woke culture, to make fun of almost everything in sight—from feminism to terrorism—makes “Bottoms” an entertaining 90…
Frances Ha ★★★ (out of four stars) A Mailbox of One’s Own You’ll have to wait until the final scene to make sense of the title, a metaphor for Frances’s (Greta Gerwig) incompleteness, the sense of herself as not yet whole, not yet fully formed, a view she articulates when she finds herself with neither cash nor a valid credit card: “I guess I’m not a whole person.” The apartment mailbox in that final scene also has relevance in that her instability as a person and as a social being is tracked throughout the film—all in black and white—by the…
A Training Bra for Barbie Damsels in Distress ★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) One stop on the path to understanding Greta Gerwig’s enormous success as co-writer and director of the megahit “Barbie” is her mid-acting career role as Violet, a know-it-all college student in Whit Stillman’s 2011 “Damsels in Distress.” Violet leads a pack of wolves—make that female college students—who see themselves as the moral arbiters of the once women-only “Seven Oaks University,” a not-too-subtle reference to the Seven Sisters. (Gerwig, born in 1983, attended Barnard College, one of the once all-women “Sisters,” majoring in Philosophy.) The trio of juniors runs…
Honey, You Shrunk My Self-Esteem You Hurt My Feelings ★★ (out of 4 stars) A writer-wife overhears her husband say her current manuscript is just not that good: “I don’t like this new book,” he tells his wife’s brother-in-law. Fodder for marital discord, and for an exploration of truth-telling: should you tell your spouse/child/student/best friend your negative assessment of their work or, with all good intent, lie? Julia Louis-Dreyfus (of TV’s “Seinfeld” and “Veep” fame) as the wife, Beth, and director Nicole Holofcener (co-writer of “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” [2018]) anchor a production of little more than 1½ hours,…
Existential Barbie Barbie ★★★★ (out of 4 stars) “I wanted to make something anarchic and wild and funny and cathartic,” Oscar-nominated director and writer Greta Gerwig told a New York Times reporter. Though it may not be cathartic for everyone, Gerwig’s blockbuster hit “Barbie” is all that, and more. “Funny”—an inadequate word that English is saddled with—hardly does justice to a screenplay that may be the cleverest and, yes, funniest since the “Toy Story” series (1995- ), which also featured playthings that come to life. To Gerwig’s description, we would add “fascinating,” “complex,” “visually delightful” (today’s equivalent of “The Wizard…
“I Am Become Death” Oppenheimer ★★★★ (out of four stars) Christopher Nolan’s sprawling yet intricate “Oppenheimer” is a biopic like no other. Using three time periods and moving between them, with each following its own chronology, Nolan turns a personal story into a mystery, not of the creation of the atomic bomb, but of the measure of a man. Ostentatious displays of Oppenheimer’s genius open the film: not-too-subtle visions of his whirring mind, facile learning of foreign languages (Dutch in a month to deliver a scientific paper; Sanskrit for its poetry—while having sex). Thankfully these in-your-face genius scenes are over…
Mission Unlikely Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One ★★★ (out of four stars) After sitting through 5 hours and 17 minutes of “blockbuster” action—the film under review and the recently released “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny”—we think we’re entitled to make a few comparisons, before getting to the meat of the current, 7th edition of “Mission Impossible.” “Mission 7” has better action scenes, especially the last, gravity-defying adventure on a train that’s in, let’s say, a precarious position. An absolutely riveting moment, even if to get to it one must endure still another episode of two guys-fighting-on-top-of-a train,…
Dial of Disappointment Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) For action scenes per minute, the latest of the Indiana Jones series is hard to beat. It’s more than 20 minutes into a 2:20 film before there’s any pause. And that opening scene may be the highlight. It reprises the Nazi setting of the franchise opener, this time in 1944, closer to the end of the War, with Hitler in a bunker. The classic chase in and on top of a train pays homage to Sean Connery in “The Great Train Robbery” (1978) with a younger…
You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep Asteroid City ★★★1/2 (out of four stars) It goes without saying that film is an emotional medium, replete with fear, jealousy, hatred, love, rejection, loneliness, triumph, failure, revenge, pain and suffering, and every other emotion or emotional experience one can imagine. It goes without saying, that is, unless you’re inside Wes Anderson’s head, a place where emotion, while acknowledged, is held at arm’s length. Anderson’s perspective on emotion is apparent from the first scenes of “Asteroid City,” when Augie Steinbeck’s family of 5 pulls into the (too) brightly colored desert town…