6 Best Movies To Watch After EverAfter (1998)
Thelma
“How could Zuckembourg let this happen?” Thelma (June Squibb) stammers at the police officer trying to make out a report. Though her loyal grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), assures her that Mark Zuckerberg had nothing to do with this, someone needs to be held responsible. She’s been the victim of a scam, convinced to drain her bank account for a fake emergency, and now it’s payback time—literally. Writer/Director John Margolin’s Thelma is an endlessly thrilling action film that moves at its own speed. Clearly a loving student of the genre, Margolin uses the standard beats of an action film but on a much more senior scale. The chase scenes feel familiar; they just occur on mobility scooters. Working in tandem with the film’s composer, Nick Chuba, the filmmaker uses thumping action-thriller cues and whirling camerawork to give even the opening of a handicapped door a sense of life-or-death excitement. In some ways, simple falls are honestly more perilous for the 94-year-old protagonist. By using perfectly placed musical themes that feel archetypal to the action film, Thelma puts in her hearing aids like its Mission Impossible tech. Clearing pop-ups feels like hacking the mainframe. June Squibb sets the tone for the whole film, which appears delicate but still full of hardscrabble tenacity, just like her character. There’s no stopping Thelma when she has an errand. We can say the same of Squibb in every scene she’s in. Thelma begins the story as a victim, but by the end, Squibb has straightened her spine and takes aim at the resolution with full guns blazing. Though people are constantly telling her character that she’s fragile, Squibb is always the center of gravity, not pulling focus but creating an orbit for her colleagues to perform and find the space to play. Continue Reading →
Ghostlight
“I don’t know what normal is,” Dan Muller (Keith Kupferer) says toward the end of Ghostlight. His family might be dramatic, but to him, “they don’t get it from me.” And maybe he’s right. He’s a Chicagoland construction worker whose marriage to Sharon (Tara Mallen) isn’t particularly strong. When they receive a call from their daughter’s (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) school, they learn she’s been expelled for allegedly shoving a teacher. Perhaps it’d be “normal” for 16-year-old Daisy to go through a turbulent phase, but as the movie slowly reveals, the three are reeling from a tragedy. The movie approaches what happened with a euphemistic ambiguity for almost an hour, even if it’s rather obvious early on. And the stress is accumulating. While preparing for a deposition, Dan berates a pedestrian on the job, resulting in a temporary leave. As chance would have it, though, a stranger named Rita (Dolly De Leon, Triangle of Sadness) witnesses the altercation. And guess what? She’s in a local theater troupe putting on Romeo and Juliet. So, what does this blue-collar, midwestern dad do? Despite not knowing the story, he joins in, which mirrors some stuff he’s still grappling with. It’s funny how that always happens. It's a contrived bit of plot in the face of character progression, and not the only time Ghostlight forces itself forward despite trying to feel seamless. How on-the-nose the concept is is another issue. And yet it mostly works, thanks in part to the movie’s tonal and technical normalcy. Kelly O’Sullivan & Alex Thompson’s direction may not leave the starkest impression, but they know how long to hold on a scene. The result welcomes the viewer to see their characters past the occasional issues with O’Sullivan’s script. Continue Reading →
Napoleon
Ridley Scott’s surprisingly hollow biopic of the French military commander falters as a character piece and comes shy of victory as an epic. For a film with as many contradictions as Napoleon, it’s odd for it to be so straightforward. It covers 28 years, but it never feels like a lot of changes. It’s over two and a half hours, which, while not a herculean runtime, never entirely slows down. Perhaps it’s because it never really gets started. Ridley Scott’s latest opens with a public decapitation of Marie Antoinette (Catherine Walker), giving way to the 1793 Siege of Toulon. The violence is often unsparingly graphic, so why, then, does it feel so cosmetic? Shouldn’t a live horse eviscerated by a cannonball to the chest do something to the viewer? Maybe not when there’s such little context. If Napoleon is one thing, it’s episodic—ahistorical, even. David Scarpa’s script begins in the trenches and is content on staying there. Everyone and everything are simply window dressing. That includes Napoleon Bonaparte himself (Joaquin Phoenix), whom the film oversimplifies from intrinsically flawed leader to wholly externalized man-child. After the Siege, he wins the affections of Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby). The two soon marry. Continue Reading →
The Garfield Movie
When I was around thirteen, two classmates, Christina and Taylor (their real names, it’s not like they’re going to read this), played a prank on me that resulted in my eating dog food. In retrospect, it could have been worse: nobody else saw it happen, and for whatever reason they kept it to themselves. But when I think about my teenage years (and I try not to much at this point in my life, other than at a superficial pop culture level), my mind often goes to that moment. Continue Reading →
悪は存在しない
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