544 Best Releases From the Genre Comedy

In Season 2, Shrinking has established itself as one of AppleTV+’s big winners. A considerable part of what has helped it connect with viewers is the ensemble cast, including Jason Segal as series’ lead, the grieving therapist Jimmy, Harrison Ford as his mentor and boss Paul, Jessica Williams as his best friend and colleague Gaby, and many others. Transitioning from a feature supporting role to the main cast is actor Ted McGinley who plays Derek. Derek is one half of the married couple that lives next door to Jimmy and shouldered much of the load of raising Jimmy’s daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) when Jimmy lost himself to substances and grief after the death of his wife. From the beginning, McGinley imbued Jimmy with an offbeat, seemingly unsinkable positivity. In season 2, McGinley deepened and broadened his portrayal of Derek. He kindly sat down with Tim Stevens to discuss how co-star Christa Miller helped him find Derek, the character’s evolution, and what makes the Shrinking set such an unusual place to work. Jason Segal and Ted McGinley are on a mission. (AppleTV+) THE SPOOL: You’ve been acting for some time now, dating back to Happy Days. Looking through your roles, I noticed there isn’t really just one “McGinley” type, roles where you are just sort of playing the hits. You’re always finding a way to do something a little different. With that in mind, what was the essence to Derek? Was there a moment in Season 1 where you felt like you found him? Continue Reading →

“Ha, ha, one!” How are those three words, emerging from a hysterical improvised fan-dub of Sonic the Hedgehog (2006) cutscenes, funny? Turning such a declaration into a chuckle-worthy meme is the bizarre power of Sonic. The erratic and often cynical video game series has inspired absurd flights of fan-generated comedic fancy, including SnapCube fan-dub videos and the web-comic series Tails Gets Trolled. Mainstream Sonic games often try too hard to make these characters “edgy” and “cool.” That’s why mid-2000s games had inexplicable material like the gun-wielding Shadow the Hedgehog or Sonic kissing a human woman. Ordinary souls taking this bizarre world to its inevitable absurdist endpoint, though? They’re the ones who realize Sonic’s ultimate destiny lies with Dr. Eggman bellowing, “How do you think I feel getting cucked by a hedgehog?” Sonic the Hedgehog 3 does not rise to the quality or unabashed silliness of the best SnapCube dubs or comic panels explaining how Sonic will rectify the anger in his heart. However, Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is a much more confident and unabashedly outlandish creation compared to its two predecessors. The Sonic movies are finally cutting loose, producing a consistently entertaining time at your local Cinemark. Continue Reading →

Sometimes, having any connection to your ex(es) can feel like a curse. In Laid—a Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna adaptation of the Kirsty Fisher/Marieke Hardy Australian series of the same name—that feeling becomes literalized. That’s because the former sexual partners of Ruby (Stephanie Hsu) are dying, in the order they slept with her, with increasing regularity. Some of their deaths are sad but expected (cancer), while others are shocking and bloody (an accidental gunshot). Regardless of the cause, though, they all seem marked for death. To solve the puzzle of why, Ruby enlists her best friend/roommate, the true crime-loving AJ (Zosia Mamet). Or rather, AJ nominates herself and insists on solving the case. The duo receives assistance from Richie (Michael Angarano), the one of Ruby’s exes who immediately buys the death curse and lasts long enough to join up. The group hides their actions from AJ’s on-again/off-again fiancé Zack (Andre Hyland), a streamer who expresses love almost entirely through gifts of stuffed animals. Zosia Mamet knows that every sleuth (or murderer) needs an evidence wall. (James Dittiger/PEACOCK) The already lousy situation is made worse by Ruby developing a crush on her current client Isaac (Tommy Martinez), a handsome, sensitive client planning his parents’ huge anniversary party blowout. Besides having a beautiful bikini-wearing marine biologist girlfriend, Ruby knows she is dangerous, even if she has no idea exactly how or why. Continue Reading →

Selling a home is, at best, a time of sanitized chaos. As they say about ducks, above the surface, like during open house, everything is serene to the point of sterile. But beneath the surface, behind the scenes, it is a whirling dervish of activity and emotions. So it only makes sense No Good Deed, a series that revolves around a home for sale, would be an absolute mess. For better and worse. Ironically, the house part of the story is the easiest to grok. Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) and Paul (Ray Romano) Morgan are selling what was once their dream house. The reasons are unclear, but there are hints. Their two kids no longer live at home. Paul, a contractor, was responsible for the repairs and upgrades. Despite that, though, it still cost them a pretty penny. Lydia, a former concert pianist forced into early retirement when she developed a tremor, undoubtedly made those costs feel more dire. Regardless of the why, Paul’s anxious to unload as fast as possible. Lydia, on the other hand, feels a ton of ambivalence and will only accept the perfect new owners. Perhaps not even then. Denis Leary's energy has always screamed "friendly greeter." (Netflix) Nearly all the characters that matter show up at the Open House, the series’ first big set piece. Highly energized real estate agent Greg (Matt Rogers) oversees the whole thing, laying on the “a beautiful place to raise a family” hard. Then there’s former soap actor JD (Luke Wilson), a neighbor who covets the classic style of the Morgans’ home. The social climbing Margo (Linda Cardellini) makes an appearance, unaware that Lydia would rather burn the place down than let Margo take up her former home. Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris) are recently married and with child. They’ve brought along Dennis’s mom, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford), for the tour, a choice the couple may not be on the same page about. Sarah (Poppy Liu) and Leslie (Abbi Jacobson), on the other hand, have given up on children and filtered that money and effort into finding a new home. Continue Reading →

There’s something to be said for an opening title sequence that eliminates the need for in-dialogue exposition. Over a collage of images and items, Sweethearts rapidly lays out its setup. Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) and Ben (Nico Hiraga) are longtime best friends attending their first semester of college at the same school. They both decided to remain with their respective significant others, effectively killing their on-campus social life. Their other best friend is Palmer (Caleb Hearon) who skipped college to live and work in Paris for a year. The setup dealt with before a word is spoken, Sweethearts is free to dive into the specifics of the case immediately. Jamie’s beau, Simon (Charlie Hall), is a football hero who parlayed high school glory into admission to Harvard despite having the lowest entrance GPA in Crimson’s history. He and Jamie mostly communicate through sexting and phone sex, neither of which genuinely excites Jamie. Ben and his girlfriend Claire (Ava DeMary), on the other hand, seem to have the sex thing down pat. It’s everything that’s suffocating Ben. Together, the best friends decide to dump Claire and Simon when they’ll all be together again during Thanksgiving break. Only then can the duo be happy and fully experience college life. They enlist Palmer to help them make it happen. He’s game despite it complicating his own return-to-town plan: revealing to his former classmates that he’s gay. This image of Charlie Hall, Ava DeMary, and Caleb Hearon screams the day after Thanksgiving Freshman year. (MAX) From the moment the best friends make the decision following a disastrous attempt at attending a stereotypical college party, nothing goes right. Each bump in the road reveals that perhaps it isn’t just their romances in need of a reevaluation. Continue Reading →

The suburbs may seem like bright, safe places, but there’s rot under those perfectly manicured lawns. I know, I know, this probably will come as a shock, but it’s true! And Based on a True Story Season 2 is daring to drag it all into the light. I am, of course, having a bit of fun here. Filmmakers, authors, poets, playwrights, and TV showrunners have been taking shots at the suburbs since the beginning. Maybe your first encounter was the worms in the soil shot in Blue Velvet. Perhaps it was the original Stepford Wives that clued you in. The when of it may be in question, but you’ve been treated to the thesis of darkness behind those bright white picket fences, guaranteed. So, Based on a True Story Season 2’s vision of the upper middle class American suburban life isn’t exactly groundbreaking. What’s to the series’ credit is that it knows that. Its heart doesn’t lie in pulling back the curtain on middle age (or just before) married with kids and a four-bedroom, two-bath life. Instead, it just uses that oft-played trope to have a blast. That’s not to say it is empty of message or meaning. It still has plenty to say about “life these days”. It just does it without the air of self-congratulatory “Can you believe how transgressive we are!” that one can often detect in similar tales of suburban decay. Continue Reading →

Sometimes, you end up respecting what a movie’s trying to discuss more than you enjoy the film itself. Case in point, Spellbound. In the new animated feature, Princess Ellian (Rachel Zegler) is on the eve of her 15th birthday. Sadly, the celebration is a bit muted this time around. That’s because her parents, Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman, eventually) and King Solon (Javier Bardem, after a fashion), aren’t quite themselves. A year earlier, they encountered a whirling black cyclone in the woods. It turned the couple from attractive royal types into big, brightly colored, childlike monsters. Ever since, Ellian has been struggling to find a solution to their conversion while hiding it from the kingdom of Lumbria. Growing desperate after a meeting with the Oracles of the Moon and Sun (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess, both as hammy as you please) goes poorly, the Princess decides to drag her parents back to the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, where the curse began. As a plot goes, it’s fine. In practice, it often feels hobbled together from pieces of other films. There’s a bit of Brave here. A dash of How to Train Your Dragon there. If you squint, you can even spot some Frozen in its DNA. Fairy tales, by their nature, are remixed and rehashed from previous source material and other stories, so none of this is especially egregious. However, it isn’t what makes Spellbound interesting. Continue Reading →

In one of A Man on the Inside creator Michael Schur’s previous series—The Good Place—there’s a moment when one character explains that, as humans, we all know that we will someday die. That means we all walk around a little sad, even during our happiest moments. That kind of melancholic joy is where his newest series dwells. It’s a show with lots of laughs, excellent characters, and the pervasive knowledge that there is an end somewhere out on the horizon. For most of A Man on the Inside’s characters, that end feels close indeed. That’s because the action primarily focuses on a Senior Living facility in San Francisco, Pacific View Retirement Community. That’s where private investigator Julie Kavalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) sends her newest hire, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson). The mission is simple enough. Someone stole a necklace from Evan Cubbler’s (Marc Evan Jackson, doing WASP with a side of withering contempt as only he can) mother Helen (Danielle Kennedy). He wants it back and the thief hauled in. Charles, lost in many ways after the death of his wife, sees it as an opportunity to honor his daughter Emily’s (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) request he finds something to spark his passion. Julie thinks she can’t find anyone his age nearly as spry or capable of using a phone. Stephanie Beatriz and Mary Elizabeth Ellis discuss fashion and wallpaper. Specifically, how pastels and neutrals are great for both. (Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix) In other hands, this could be an invitation to a bunch of jokes about how older adults are weird and/or gross and/or dumb. Thankfully, Schur and his collaborators Emalee Burditt and Morgan Sackett are not other hands. While there are some “this person/these people are weird” bits, they’re personality, not age-based. The show doesn’t pretend the bulk of the cast isn’t seniors but they don’t use that to other anyone. That’s not surprising given Schur plays in the same kind of “humane, but hilarious” sandbox as Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Shrinking), although Schur typically trends gentler and less ribald. Continue Reading →

Interior Chinatown looks great, features plenty of talent, and is rich with metatext as it explores the cliches of police procedurals and depictions of Asian Americans in media. And yet, it never quite comes together as a satisfyingly cohesive whole in the five episodes provided to critics. The overall plot, taken from showrunner Charles Yu’s novel of the same name, initially presents as reasonably straightforward. Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) grew up in his brother’s (Chris Pang) shadow and was largely happy to do so. However, his brother’s disappearance rocked the family and left Willis rudderless. Now, Willis works at his uncle’s restaurant with his friend Fatty (Ronny Chieng), and his ambitions only reach as high as being a witness to a crime. Chloe Bennet always seems to catch the breeze just right. (Mike Taing/Hulu) When he seemingly achieves just that—seeing the abduction of a woman on the sidewalk outside the restaurant—it drops him into an increasingly surreal world populated by TV-perfect cops Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy). He quickly leapfrogs from witness to a variety of cliched parts for Asian actors that double as episode titles, including “Tech Guy” and “Chinatown Expert,” teaming with Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet). Like Willis, she’s an outsider hoping for hero status. Unlike him, she’s in the game and far better at faking it til you make it. Continue Reading →

Try as hard as one might, there is no objective evaluation of art. First, there are all the biases—conscious and unconscious—each person brings to the work. Then there are factors like mood, health, comfort, and company. Finally, there are current events. The latter is especially relevant to Joy, which chronicles the development of In vitro fertilization in 60s and 70s Britain. It’s hard not to think about the parallels to the current state of reproductive rights in America. On its own, Joy is a perfectly adequate film. Handsomely, if conventionally, shot under the direction of Ben Taylor, the film centers its point of view on nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie). The script, written by the husband-and-wife team of Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason from a story by Emma Gordon and Shaun Topp, is deliberate and methodical. It drops the occasional rhetorical flourish but mostly sticks to the facts and lets the actors do their thing. It’s the kind of film that is accurate enough to be shown in class and interesting enough not to bore the students to death. But Joy doesn’t exist on its own. It wasn’t released in 2021 or in June. It’s hitting theatres in the UK and Ireland a week and a half after the American Presidential election and Netflix streaming stateside a week after that. It’s impossible to view the film without that in the back of one’s head. And in that context, Joy has a bruised, rebellious heart beating in its chest. It doesn’t provide catharsis, per se, but a perhaps heartening reminder of the previous struggles and triumphs. Continue Reading →

Sometimes, there’s nothing wrong with a television show or film from a creativity or execution standpoint. Sometimes, it just has bad timing. It’s still unclear which--or how much of each--is true of St. Denis Medical after screening the six episodes (1-5, 7) provided to critics. Certainly, the series’ choice of the mockumentary with interspersed talking heads format does suffer for timing. There’s little to no freshness left in the approach made storytelling structure du jour back when the American incarnation of The Office entered its imperial era in 2006. While by no means ubiquitous, the subsequent critical and/or ratings successes of shows like Modern Family, Parks and Recreation, What We Do in the Shadows, and Abbott Elementary have made the subgenre’s pleasures familiar. That doesn’t mean it can’t work. After all, both Shadows and Abbott continue to be two of the more consistent pleasures on TV. But it does give a new show playing in that sandbox a bit tougher time. That acknowledged, the format still can give great performers an excellent stage. So St. Denis Medical’s sweet and pleasant but not hilarious vibes suggest that the familiar—perhaps tired—subgenre isn’t the only issue here. Of course, there might be a gulf between what appeals to this critic and what the show wants to do. At this juncture, it seems to be looking for a slower, gentler pace. A show that’s less a joke machine and more a “love and learn with laughs” style throwback. Lead nurse Alex’s (Allison Tolman) stymied efforts to get to her daughter’s musical in the pilot, capped by a milkshake and pep talk from veteran doctor Ron (David Alan Grier) supports this. Continue Reading →

Doppelganger films are a weird but fairly well-documented phenomenon at this point. They’re two films with eerily similar plots. However, their release dates happen so closely together, tarring either as plagiarism is unfair. And yet, their plots share eerie similarities. Think your Deep Impact and Armageddon or Dante’s Peak and Volcano. It happens again with the release of Your Monster, a modern-day echo of February’s Lisa Frankenstein. In this spin on the theme, Laura Franco (Melissa Barrera) survives cancer. Sadly, everything about her life that isn’t directly about her heart beating, her lungs respirating, and so on seems utterly decimated. Her boyfriend Jacob (Edmund Donovan) ditches her while she’s still in the hospital under the weakest of excuses. To make matters worse, he’s going forward with the musical he wrote for her and with her help. Instead of Laura, though, he’s cast some Hollywood dabbler, Jackie (Meghann Fahy), in the leading role. Her best (only?) friend Mazie (Kayla Foster) picks her up at release. It isn't long, though, before Mazie rushes off for some vague other commitment. That it comes moments after promising Laura she’ll be there no matter what only adds salt to the wound. Thanks to the break-up, she has to move back into her childhood home with her mom. Except mom is too busy globetrotting to even come home for her recovering daughter. And, of course, there’s still a chance that the treatment and surgery didn’t work. Continue Reading →

Many interpret the magic of the movies as referring to film’s ability to show audiences something they’ve never seen, immersing them in worlds they’ll never visit. But the flip side of it is also true. Sometimes, movies can magically ground viewers in worlds achingly familiar, surrounded by people so recognizable they’d swear they knew them already. That latter “trick” is what A Real Pain pulls off with unfussy ease. David (Jesse Eisenberg, also pulling writing and directing duties) and Benji (Kieran Culkin) were the kind of cousins who grew up so close that you could confuse them for brothers. Time and responsibility take their toll, though. A family man, David can no longer spend all night running around the City, even as he now calls it home. Benji, on the other hand, has plenty of time but has rooted himself in Binghamton and the basement of his mom’s house. Before the start of the film, their grandmother dies, prompting the duo to finally follow through on the tour of Poland—and visit her childhood home—they had been circling for years. Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin struggle to see each other clearly. (Searchlight Pictures) The big headline of early coverage of A Real Pain has been Culkin and rightfully so. Benji is a maddening figure. He speaks empathetically and seems poised to big up everyone around him one moment, the next lashing out, unable to see a situation from anyone’s perspective but his own. His criticisms are often nasty and barbed. Yet he’s quick to dismiss them when the occasional target circles back to say, “That hurt, but you did show me something true.” He’s well-loved but pushes that love to its limits, seemingly just to point and say, “See, you don’t care about me.” It’s a perfectly cooked steak of a role and Culkin relishes it without swimming in the ham river (to mix meat metaphors). Continue Reading →

Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) have the kind of meet-cute that hits with a bang, forgive the pun. A rising chef and a techie for Weetabix, respectively, they meet when she strikes him with her car. Unaware that the reason Tobias was in the road was running to get a pen to finally sign his divorce papers, Altmut buys him dinner at a kind of Americana diner cousin to the one where All of Us Strangers set its glorious heart-ripper of a climax and then invites him and his wife to dinner at her much ritzier restaurant--as a two-part act of penance. He takes her up on the invitation. Solo. In short order, they get to connecting. Despite the guilt and the neck brace, they hit it off. There’s a spark, one they run with once it becomes clear that despite being unready to shed his wedding band, Tobias is single. That’s how We Live in Time starts, but it’s not where it starts. No, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) opens years into Almut and Tobias’ partnership. Instead of meeting Almut committing an act of near vehicular homicide, the audience first encounters her blending pleasure (a morning run) and business (gathering wild ingredients for a parfait recipe she’s been experimenting with). Pugh makes a strong first impression. She’s someone who stops to smell the flowers both for joy and utility. More importantly, she's found a balance between the two that brings happiness. Continue Reading →

Shrinking Season 2 picks up a bit down the road from where Season 1 ended in time, but it immediately reconnects with its final moments. That is when Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) client Grace (Heidi Gardner) took his guidance a bit too much to heart and violently interrupted the negative patterns in her communication with her husband. Speaking of picking up right where things left off, when I last reviewed the show? I was almost certainly a bit too harsh. Overall I recommended the series. Still, I spent much of the review vocalizing about the ways it didn’t get mental health concerns or therapy right. It can be hard to review something that revolves around your job. That’s why so many podcasters reviewing Nobody Wants This spend a considerable portion of their reviews talking about how unrealistic the show’s depiction of podcasting is. (That show’s depiction of Judaism is another matter, one I should’ve been a little more on top of, perhaps. But that’s a discussion for another day.) As I had just stopped being a therapist—perhaps for good—to write full-time, I think I was especially activated by the show’s rather…flippant depiction of the field. Jessica Williams and Christa Miller spend time in the most chaotic, best appointed therapist office ever. (AppleTV+) In Shrinking Season 2, several consequences of Jimmy’s “psychological vigilantism” come home to roost, not just with Grace. That helps refine my perspective. Additionally, with distance, the depiction of Jimmy’s rock bottom, briefly glimpsed at the beginning of Season 1, feels more honest. For once, it seems as though “tell, not show” was the better avenue to capturing his downward spiral of addiction, self-hatred, parental abdication, and general interpersonal awfulness. Continue Reading →

Have you ever just absolutely killed at a party? Everything you’re saying is hitting. Every joke connects, every random aside delights? Then you use some of the same gags at work a few days later, and, again, you crush? Then you trot them out at dinner with a few friends, and there are laughs, but maybe not as enthusiastically? Three weeks later, you realize no one is laughing at your stuff anymore? That’s the arc of The Franchise. It isn’t that the initial jokes aren’t good. They are. Some are great. Armando Iannucci and Jon Brown are two of the creators (along with Sam Mendes) with Brown handling some scripting. Therefore, as you might expect, the dialogue has their distinctive snap and gift for delightfully nasty profanity. Additionally, the likes of Billy Magnussen, Aya Cash, Himesh Patel, and Richard E. Grant, all of whom certainly know their way around a gag, deliver it. However, while repetition can make some jokes funnier—see the Simpsons’ rake gag—it doesn’t work for them all. By episode four, it becomes clear that most of The Franchise’s witticisms are the ones that do not benefit from being repeated. The variations on a theme start to feel flat. The scripts find no way to heighten the punchlines. In superhero film parlance, they go to the giant portal in the sky, spewing energy too often. As funny as the first episode is, by the season’s end with episode 8, the laughs have become chuckles and the chuckles have become smiles. It’s never bad, but it does overstay its welcome. Continue Reading →

In description, It’s What’s Inside reads like a cousin to two great recent films. First, there's the “friends get together for a reunion and it goes very wrong” Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Then, there the “through a devilishly simple device, people tap into something they rapidly lose control of” Talk to Me. If you have a longer memory, Flatliners may even come mind. It fails to achieve the heights of any of those movies. Nonetheless, writer-director Greg Jardin’s first feature effort boasts an intriguing premise and enough visual flair to make it worth a watch. On the night before Reuben’s (Devon Terrell) wedding, the soon-to-be groom brings together his old college running crew. Most important among them (for the film) are Cyrus (James Morosini) and Shelby (Brittany O’Grady). They've been together so long their friends repeatedly assume they're married. They are not and there's no nuptials on the horizon. Additionally, they’re the kind of couple in their 20s that says things like, “I thought we agreed we’d save our sexual energy for each other.” while trying to jumpstart their largely dormant sex life with wigs and nodding towards roleplaying as their friends. David Thompson wants to know if you'd like to try this new competitive card game. (Netflix) Surprising everyone, Forbes (David Thompson) is also on the guest list. Even more unexpected is that he shows up. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since he got kicked out of college for an incident involving trust fund lothario Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and Forbes’ underage sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport). Hilariously, none of the other friends seem to know what exactly happened or why Forbes got kicked out, despite them all being present for the events and at least a couple of them later giving testimony to the administration afterward. Continue Reading →

The pleasures of the romantic comedy are well-documented. When they work, they make for the best kind of fantasy. The ones where our all too numerous flaws may stall but never derail us. Of course, their failures are similarly well documented, making the ups and downs of lust and love feel like products. Moving the genre from its typical medium—film—to television with the new series Nobody Wants This carries the threat to magnify those shortcomings until they blot out anything else. And then there’s that title. Oof. If ever there was a juicy fastball down the middle for critics looking for an easy headline dunk, it’s that one. It’s more than a relief then to find that blowing out rom-com tropes from an under two-hour film to a 10-episode season helps, not harms, the storytelling. Nobody Wants This isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it plays the hits well. It makes a thing you’ve seen a hundred permutations of feel fresh and lively. Sorry, lovers of ironically mean-spirited headlines. The story is a tale of mismatched lovers. Joanne (Kristen Bell) cohosts a podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) dedicated to their love life’s successes and failures—mostly failures. Her producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) has her over for a small gathering, warning Joanne there’s a rabbi in the house. Joanne jokes with another guest, Noah (Adam Brody), about it, their chemistry immediate. When Noah blesses dinner, Joanne realizes her error. Continue Reading →

Some movies are just good enough. And that’s ok. There’s something to be said for a little better than mediocre film animated by star power. Wolfs is such a picture. At the start, the film feels serious. A tough-on-crime District Attorney (Amy Ryan) takes a much younger man (Austin Abrams) upstairs at an expensive hotel for a furtive romantic enough. Unfortunately, secret fun turns to tragedy when the Kid falls off the bed and into a glass bar cart, seemingly dying. In desperation, she reaches out to a cleaner (George Clooney). As he drives to her, writer-director Jon Watts and cinematographer Larkin Seiple give the scene an almost Michael Mann quality. Well, Mann with less interesting lighting and a firmly adult contemporary soundtrack. When Brad Pitt shows up as the hotel’s designated fixer, however, that serious to admittedly self-serious tone goes away. In its place, the film embraces a sort of low-level Odd Couple grumbling comedy. The dueling cleaners try to assert their superiority over each other, all while trying to hide their signs of aging from each other. To Wolfs’ credit, they don’t go to the well of bad backs, eroding vision, and barely contained yawns too often. On the other hand, when they do, the gags land with a smile or, at most, a gentle chuckle. If you were planning to watch the movie for a few hearty guffaws, you’d do well to look elsewhere. Continue Reading →

The difficulty in reviewing television is, often, critics only receive a fraction of the season’s episodes. As a result, one sometimes has to offer a full review on a partial product. Frequently, that’s fine. Shows often tell you who they are, if you will, fairly early on. A character or a twist that changes things might show up in an episode down the road. Even then, though, such things often don’t change the bedrock quality of the endeavor. Sharing all of this is by way of a disclaimer because, after the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, it remains unclear what kind of show it will be. Some aspects of the tone are clear from the start. It’s obviously playing with a healthy dose of irreverence. It’s clever. Kathryn Hahn slips back into Agnes/Agatha Harkness like a second skin, quickly giving her depth without erasing the villainousness of her turn in WandaVision. The supporting characters, including Teen (Joe Locke), Jennifer Kale (Sasheer Zamata), and Lilia Calderu (Patti LuPone?!), can hold the screen despite Hahn’s charisma bombardment. Aubrey Plaza’s Rio Vidal even gives Agatha a run for her money in the charm department with a frighteningly sexual/sexually frightening turn. She carries the conclusion of episode 1 with three or four sentences that are…very intense. Debra Jo Rupp, Ali Ahn, Patti LuPone, and Sasheer Zamata support women's rights and women's wrongs. (Chuck Zlotnick/Marvel Television) But is the show a drama? A comedy? A horror-drama? Horror-comedy? Horror-dramedy? One’s guess is as good as another. Episode 1, “Seekest Thou the Road,” is almost entirely a parody/homage episode, taking WandaVision’s sitcom-trappings storytelling approach and applying it to the crime-thriller limited series genre, specifically Mare of Easttown with a dollop of The Killing thrown in via the opening credits. It’s an interesting idea, a nod to the Agatha All Along’s parent series with a parallel storytelling technique. More importantly, it gives the series room enough to be more than just a reinvention of the wheel. And the show seemingly ditches it by the episode’s end. Continue Reading →

A Different Man is all about what it means to be seen, in all the best and worst ways. It’s what it means to avoid eye contact with the unhoused man on the subway and to gawk at anyone who looks remotely outside the norm. It’s the difference between simply being noticed and being intimately seen, the way only someone who actually understands you can. Writer and director Aaron Schimberg looks for as many ways as possible to play with these ideas, fitting the seer and seen inside each other in a little matryoshka doll. But first and foremost, our gaze is on Edward. Adam Pearson isn't internationally known, but he's known to rock a microphone. (Matt Infante/A24) Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling actor with a rare condition that covers his face with large, benign tumors. He’s quiet and reserved. His every movement reveals a discomfort even existing in the world, never mind taking part in it. So when he gets the chance to take an experimental new drug that can completely heal him, he does so without a thought. Reborn as his new, more handsome self, he finally gets what should be the part of a lifetime in a local play based on his life. That is until Oswald, a man with the same condition as Edward, steals the part. In the process, this new arrival reveals just how exactly Edward has actually transformed.  Continue Reading →