Reaction Shots

I missed “Inland Empire” the first time around. I lived near Boston and I assumed that it would be playing for an extended period because, hey, it’s Boston. People are hip to cinema, right? Well, to be sure, they are, but the film left before I had a chance to get to the theater and for me, this was blasphemy. I have seen every Lynch feature (except “Dune”) on the large screen since “Eraserhead”.   That I know of, “Inland Empire” did not play the repertory circuit or at least, if it did, I missed it. I recall it being released on DVD/Blu-Ray but the idea of watching a Lynch film on a smaller screen is anathema to me. So when I found that the newly restored “Inland Empire” was playing at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts’ new Wyatt Theater, it was a no-brainer to get my ticket.  Recounting the film would be a fool’s errand and the equivalent of telling you about a dream I had. I could do it, but my dreams are personal; I feel actually somewhat similarly proprietary about Lynch...

In limited release, Jenny Slate and Dean Fleischer-Craig’s “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is a joy. There were more moments where I laughed out loud than I expected there to be. There were also gentle, reflective moments and exquisite poignance throughout its brief running time.   Based on a character created by Slate and Fleischer-Craig in a series of YouTube   videos , it seemed improbable that there would be enough to carry a feature film. Or so I thought; which is why they are feature filmmakers and I am not. With a script by Slate, Fleischer-Craig, and Nick Paley, “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” is a lovely surprise during a season mostly known for explosions and fight scenes. Marcel, voiced by Slate is a prepossessed, intelligent and articulate shell with one eye, a mouth and two feet with red sneakers. He and his grandmother Connie (Isabella Rossellini) inhabit an AirBnB as the last of their family. Dean, a documentary filmmaker shows up to stay for awhile as he ...

“Thor: Love and Thunder” is a deeply silly, goofy movie with a lot of heart and if it’s not top-tier Waititi or Marvel, it gets credit from me for zigging where I thought it would zag and for bringing a robust freshness to the often formula-bound MCU. The movie opens on a grounded tragic note with Christian Bale’s Gorr losing his daughter and being chosen by the Necrosword to slaughter all the gods. We scroll up to Jane Foster getting her chemo and then onto the framing device of Korg unspooling the tale we’re about to watch. And what unspools is at first kind of clunky.  After we leave Jane (Natalie Portman reprising her role from the first two Thor movies) and Kat Dennings’ Darcy (can we please give Darcy her own series?), we’re off to a clunky start with Korg as exposition machine and a rocky Guardians of the Galaxy segment. Hemsworth is way too broad and Thor way too dense in this stretch. Quill and the gang are given shorter shrift than seems to make sense (I wasn’t expecti...

It’s fortuitous that Cronenberg’s latest film opened shortly after I finished a piece on his first four features (and his two featurettes). Having early works in mind when you look at current work is instructional and actually a lot of fun if you are familiar with most of an artist’s oeuvre.  “Fun” may not be a word people typically associate with David Cronenberg, but frankly, I do find engaging with his work fun. He can be opaque, relatively demanding, but he is equally capable of injecting biting humor into his work and frankly, the visual and sound design of his films will keep you engaged, if nothing else. To be sure, there may be scenes of intense violence or grotesquerie, but these serve the material so well, and are executed often flawlessly.  It has been a bit over twenty years since Cronenberg dealt explicitly with his older themes of physiologically liminal spaces, environmental catastrophe and humanity’s adaptation to it, and the very questioning of what being...