7 Best Movies To Watch After The Net (1995)
A Real Pain
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 →
AGGRO DR1FT
Perhaps it’s best to talk about AGGRO DR1FT by specifying something: this isn’t a movie. It sometimes doesn’t even feel like art. Harmony Korine’s latest premiered at the Venice Film Festival to a mixed reception and has gone on to a limited theatrical run, but that doesn’t make it a film. Stretches of it feature AI-generated visuals, the dialogue is barely present enough to be asinine, and there’s no true emotion behind its infrared photography. Some parts of it even look bad—like utter garbage, really. As for its 80-minute runtime? Well, even that has some boring pockets. And yet, despite all this, it works, perhaps because of it rather than against it. Whether about what’s onscreen or not, it makes the audience think. In that way, it’s incredibly stimulating, particularly given the material involved. Korine’s work here follows BO (Jordi Mollà), a depressive Miami assassin whose voiceovers wax on about how much he loves his wife and two kids. “I close my eyes. They give me purpose,” he moans. Put this up against an angel-winged baddie who thrusts his pelvis and grunts, “Dance, bitches,” to women locked in go-go cages, and that’s about as deep as anything gets. One is good. One is bad, and maybe a drug lord or whatever. The former is trying to execute the latter. Again, this isn’t a movie. It’s an approximation of one, and any themes that arise during the experience of seeing it are unrelated to what it follows. Continue Reading →
Bad Boys: Ride or Die
Two questions face most rational people when confronting the existence of Bad Boys: Ride or Die. To the first, why did the filmmakers give it such an anonymous title? Especially while the previous installment had the seemingly more apt name Bad Boys For Life? For that, there is no answer. To the second? Yes, there is a joke involving Will Smith and someone getting slapped. And, yes, it is just as smug, stupid, and predictable as one would fear. The one compensating factor is one can describe the film as smug, stupid, and predictable too. That leaves hope most viewers will feel too numbed by the cacophony of crap to even register the slap gag. The film begins inauspiciously with an extended and mostly pointless act in which Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) foil a convenience store robbery while on the way to Mike’s wedding to love Christine (Melanie Liburd). Shortly after that, Marcus upstages things by having a massive heart attack and near-death experience at the reception. Those beats out of the way, the cobbled-together plot finally kicks into gear. The local news fills with posthumous accusations that their beloved Capt. Howard (Joe Pantoliano) took bribes from cartels to allow drugs into the country. This cannot stand, of course. But when the two start an investigation to clear his name, everyone with information starts turning up dead. Continue Reading →
Memory
Both the main characters in Michel Franco’s Memory are struggling to deal with the echoes of their past. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain), a recovering alcoholic and single mother to 13-year-old Anna (Brooke Timber), desperately wants to forget the unspoken traumas of her childhood. Saul (Peter Saarsgard), on the other hand, can’t grab a hold of his past. He’s powerless as early-onset dementia slowly but inevitably steals it from him. After their high school reunion, he wordlessly follows her home and spends the night standing outside her building. In turn, she visits him at the house he shares with his brother (Josh Charles) and niece (Elsie Fisher). Then she takes him for a walk and accuses him of participating in a rape that she endured at the age of 12, a crime that he has no memory of committing. Continue Reading →
Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
One of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One's earliest pieces of marketing was a trailer-by-way-of-behind-the-scenes featurette. In that clip, Tom Cruise, strapped to a motorcycle, rockets off the edge of a cliff in the Swiss Alps. He lets the bike drop away before popping his parachute and sailing into the horizon. It's one of the most death-defying sequences ever captured on film and, as we now know, it's one Cruise himself did again and again and again. The sequence, even devoid of context, sums up exactly what director Chris McQuarrie and Cruise (the two are also co-producers) hoped to achieve in Dead Reckoning: grade A movie spectacle. Continue Reading →
Singles
Most of Generation X has received our AARP memberships in the mail, as our lurching journey down the road towards irrelevance comes to an end. Both the smallest generation in numbers, and the first generation to not do better than our parents financially, we’ve long been caught in the middle of the endless battle for dominance between Boomers and Millennials, and now with Gen Z steamrolling over them both, we’re fading out of the cultural picture altogether, like Marty McFly’s brother and sister. Continue Reading →
The Matrix Resurrections
It's hard to overstate just how seismic The Matrix was when it was first released in 1999. Looking back on it now, in an age of focus-tested corporate franchises, extended universes, and an even more top-heavy IP landscape than we had back then, it feels positively revolutionary. Even in its imperfect but-radically-reappraised 2003 sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski manage to build a world that's at once evocative of so many of its influences (cyberpunk, bullet opera, kung fu film, Star Wars) but feels highly original. And what's more, is unafraid to tackle challenging, often heady psychological questions while still revolutionizing the way action movies were made. Continue Reading →