3 Best Releases Like The Talk Of The Town 1942 on Netflix

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 →

Early on in the proceedings of the long-gestating Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F, an actual Beverly Hills cop, looks over files chronicling Axel Foley’s previous visits to the city of glitz and glamor. The officer remarks, “94–not your finest year,” a clear shot at the dismal Beverly Hills Cop 3. Ironically, as bad as it was, 3 feels like a near-masterpiece compared to Axel F. This installment is a wheezy, depressing collection of franchise tropes that have long exhausted their comedic value. Eddie Murphy delivers one of the more listless performances in a career that has been, to put it politely, uneven. It somehow pulls off the seemingly impossible task of making Bad Boys: Ride or Die seem vital and cutting-edge. This time, our hero continues to cause chaos as a Detroit cop, chasing crooks through the streets in a snowplow in the opener. Almost immediately, he’s once again summoned to Beverly Hills when he learns that his estranged daughter Jane (Taylor Paige) is receiving death threats. As a defense lawyer, her current case, involving an accused cop killer and possible police corruption, has apparently upset some dangerous people. Axel teams up with Jane and her former flame, the honest cop Det. Bobby Abbott (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to investigate the threats. It isn’t exactly Chinatown in its complexity, though. The bad guy, corrupt top cop Capt. Grant (Kevin Bacon) essentially announces his villainy the minute he appears. Cue the alleged wackiness. Villain or not, Kevin Bacon has that jawline. (Netflix) The original Beverly Hills Cop was not a particularly great film, an often-uneasy fusion of violent cop thriller and comedy. But it did effectively milk its basic fish-out-of-water premise with a just ascending to superstar status Murphy. At this point, however, that premise has long since been milked dry. Former outsider Axel is now such a fixture in these posh surroundings that I suspect there’s a sandwich named after him at Nate’N Al’s. Continue Reading →

I have to admit, I wasn’t really on board with Hollywood’s attempt to make Glen Powell the Next Big Thing. I thought there was something a little generic and forgettable about him, like he had been grown in a laboratory that specialized in manufacturing blandly handsome blonde actors.  But I’m not too proud to admit that I was wrong, at least as far as Hit Man is concerned. Powell may at first blush be little more than a chiseled jaw delivery device, but as it turns out he has a lot of charm to spare, and a witty sense of humor, if the script he co-wrote with director Richard Linklater is any indication. It’s a fun, spicy comedy thriller for adults that might just give the struggling film industry a bit of juice, but of course in this era of truly baffling decision-making by those who earn far more money than they deserve for such things, it’s only getting a limited theatrical release before going direct to Netflix. Like Linklater’s criminally underrated Bernie, Hit Man is loosely based on a Texas Monthly article, this time about Gary Johnson, a Houston-area philosophy teacher who worked a side gig with the local police, passing himself off as a killer-for-hire in dozens of sting operations. Powell plays Johnson, an unassuming dork who lives quietly with two cats and considers a day of birdwatching to be the peak of excitement. Continue Reading →