Reaction Shots

  SPOILER ALERT Spoilers ahead, most likely. I’ll try to keep them to a minimum, but honestly, I’m going to spill some beans. So: If you haven’t seen “Glass Onion” but want to, don’t read this. Come back after you’ve seen it. If you’re kinda sorta on the fence, maybe this will help you make up your mind (but you really should see it); but be aware, I’m likely giving up serious plot points. If you have seen it already and/or don’t care about spoilers, let me know what you think! END SPOILER ALERT Right from the get-go, Rian Johnson establishes a brisker, tighter, and oddly, more expansive second entry in his “Knives Out” series. While the first was contained and intimate, there is a little bursting at the seams that became apparent to me on repeated viewings. Not that that detracted from my enjoyment of the film. Here, Johnson’s canvas is more sprawling, in terms of locations, the variety of characters (not number), and thematically. It should be in danger of tipping...

Okay, if you’re going out to a flick today and you want something that is going to put you through a series of excitations - horror, suspense, and violence - but also, oddly enough, have some non-clingy, heartfelt moments and also some really deep, guttural laughter (‘cause, yeah, it’s funny), then head for “Violent Night”.   My first thought was that David Harbour’s Santa would be a mash-up of Hopper from “Stranger Things and the Red Guardian from “Black Widow”, but he zagged when I thought he was going to zig and his St. Nick is very much its own creation. He’s less curmudgeon than vengeance at a certain point in the film; he’d give Pattinson’s Batman a run for his money in that department.  The short take is Santa’s questioning why he’s still doing the gig after all this time when kids just want the latest electric gee-gaw and no one could care less about, you know, the Christmas spirit. Santa’s also got a bit of a drinking problem, but I’m proud of him; he can...

I really wanted this movie to be good. Olivia Wilde’s first film, “Booksmart”, was fun and witty. It was a fleet coming-of-age tale told with just the right amount of restraint and at the right time, lack thereof. This is not that. “Don’t Worry, Darling” is a melange of not bad ideas, haphazardly executed. It doesn’t quite know what to do with its allusions, its influences, and aside from Florence Pugh and Chris Pine, its actors or the characters they portray. It is a beautifully shot film; there isn’t a sloppily executed scene in it. However, it takes more than that to make a movie work. There are moments that are absolutely riveting; a plane that arcs across the sky to crash beyond mountains in the desert is an exercise in silent wonder. There is the overhead shot of Harry Styles going down on Pugh and it’s as artful as anything else in cinema, perhaps directly borrowing from a similar sequence in “Emmanuelle”.  But the problems that bedevil the film are many and probably av...

To be clear, Jennifer Lawrence did take some time off to pursue educating herself about corruption in politics, COVID-19 (like the rest of us), and to pull back from overexposure, but was she really gone?   She left her representation at CAA because she discovered her agent was not passing along good scripts and she was tired of being pitched blockbusters and work that just wasn’t very interesting to her. However, I don’t know if she’s aware of this but for every “Passengers”, she’s done a “Hereditary”, or a “Joy”, or even a “ Don’t Look Up ”. None of these are exactly status quo, middle-of-the-world, or uninteresting.  I get it, though, now; she wants to return to more intimate human scale dramas, and “Causeway” is very much that. In a significant way, it serves as a bookend or an antiphonal response to “Winter Bone”, if less desperate and stark. In both, Lawrence plays a woman stripped of, well, just about everything.  In the work at hand, she plays Lynsey, a retur...