42 Best Releases From Paramount Studio (Page 2)

As the old adage goes, "With age comes wisdom." But as Johnny Knoxville, Steve-O, and the rest of the Jackass gang have refreshingly proven, sometimes the best way to stay forever young is to just stick close to your childhood buddies and keep doing the same dumb shit to each other over and over again. And since Jackass aired its first episode on MTV in 2000, that's exactly what they've been doing, finding ever more creative ways to kick themselves (and each other) in the balls, sic wild animals and insects on them, and generally flaunting the rules of polite society and personal safety. With Jackass Forever, the fourth anthology movie in the series, Johnny and the rest are a little older, but no more wiser, and we're all the more thankful for it. Continue Reading →

Say what you will about the Scream movies – while they’re almost as absurd as the movies they’re satirizing, they’re also each trying to say something. While the first movie was about slasher movies in general, Scream 2 explored the nature (and necessity) of sequels, while Scream 3 attempted (to less than successful results) a pre-#MeToo spotlight on sexual harassment, and, as an answer to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, Scream 4 focused on social media culture. Wes Craven set out to not just entertain and scare audiences, but to get them to think about what they were watching, exactly, and why. Continue Reading →

When it was announced in 1975 that Robert Altman, then riding high on the success of his groundbreaking epic Nashville, had been hired to direct the film version of E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime, it almost seemed too good to be true. After all, not only was he one of the most inventive American filmmakers of the era, he seemed uniquely qualified to bring the book to the screen. Additionally, with its sprawling cast of characters, multiple storylines, and cheeky mixture of fact and fiction, Nashville now seems like an experiment to test out potential approaches for tackling that book. Continue Reading →

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest won’t be available in wide release until the end of December, so in the meantime here are a handful of movies that also capture that unique lurid sunniness of 70s & 80s Southern California to tide you over. This is that time of year when cineastes shake their fists at New York City and Los Angeles, which, in preparation for awards season, often get hot film releases more than a month before the rest of the country. So is the case with Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited coming of age comedy-drama Licorice Pizza, which is currently in very limited release and unavailable to the rest of the world at large until December 25th. If you’re forced to wait, perhaps consider some of the following films to answer that call for the very strange, almost alien universe of 1970s Southern California, both its sunny facade, and the darkness that lies just beneath the surface. Boogie Nights (New Line Cinema) Boogie Nights (1997, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) It may be a bit of a cheat to suggest one Anderson movie in place of another, but if you’re looking for the very specific feeling of an L.A. hangout film, you might as well go right to Boogie Nights. Anderson’s first major release, and one that immediately established him as a formidable talent in filmmaking, Boogie Nights is a sprawling comedy-drama about the porn industry, featuring career-best performances by Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg. Reynolds is a porn mogul who treats his cast and crew like a wayward, misbegotten family, as drug abuse and the looming threat of cheaper, less artistic video porn threatens his business. When the film begins in the late 70s, the days are filled with sunshine and promise, but when the 80s come and things start to go sour, it feels like permanent nighttime has fallen. A decadent paradise now feels corrupt and ugly, a place where people go to follow a dream walk right off the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again. Continue Reading →

Watching Clifford the Big Red Dog, it immediately becomes clear that the titular canine’s red fur represents represent the blood of the proletariat spilled at the altar of capitalism. After all, why else would Clifford populate the cast with kindly working-class humans while delivering antagonists in the form of big Pharma executives, cops, and even a pesky landlord? Clifford’s slapstick rampage is directed at the bourgeoise, whose massive number of sins are reflected in Clifford’s gigantic stature. Old Dogs auteur Walt Becker is putting the transgressions of the privileged class on display and introducing children to the concept of class consciousness.  Continue Reading →

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary on a never-was musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard and its would-be makers is insightful if a bit scattered. (This review is part of our 2021 coverage of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival) “After Salome, we’ll make another picture, and another picture” and then a musical, and then a musical based on writing the musical, and then a picture about writing the musical and the musical based on writing the musical! Maybe it’s not something Norma Desmond could’ve dreamed of, but Gloria Swanson certainly would have approved. Continue Reading →

The action genre has a special built-in cheat code where the movie can be so stupid that it becomes a fun experience. There’re also action films like Antoine Fuqua’s Infinite, streaming on Paramount Plus this month, which is idiotic on a level that’s so extreme it becomes a chore to watch.  Continue Reading →

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PBS presents a fresh & engagingly modern take on the timeless tale of star-crossed lovers. Filmed over 17 days on a closed stage due to the global pandemic, Romeo and Juliet is an intimate and compelling production of a familiar story. The beats are all there: star-crossed lovers find each other amidst the bitter enmity of their families, people party, people die, the most convoluted plan in all of playwriting history is hatched, more people die. There have been, roughly, over 200 on-screen adaptations alone of the play, ranging from full-length movies to thematically appropriate TV episodes. The titular couple has been vampires and gnomes. What does a new version have to offer an audience who have known this story all of their lives? How do you film the most-filmed play of all time?  The National Theatre’s new Romeo and Juliet film (aired in the U.S. by PBS’ Great Performances) stars two familiar faces as the titular couple: The Crown’s Josh O’Connor and Fargo’s Jessie Buckley, but the pair vanish into their roles with ease. They are backed up by the strong supporting cast, including Fisayo Akinade as Mercutio and Tamsin Grieg as a chilling Lady Capulet. Directed by Simon Goodwin and adapted from William Shakespeare’s play by Emily Burns, the film shifts between playful cast moments in a rehearsal setting and fully staged scenes, though even the latter maintain a sparse Our Town-type feel. Romeo’s home-in-exile in Mantua is a bare storage room, which both throws his stark mental state into clear view but also feels a little on the nose. Maybe a chair? Or a blanket?  Continue Reading →

What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s.  Continue Reading →

Coming 2 America Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5lrkdvEZGg&ab_channel=AmazonPrimeVideo Continue Reading →

Early on in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, the third cinematic iteration of the long-running Nickelodeon series SpongeBob Squarepants -- after 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and 2015's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water -- the Tim Hill-directed road movie flashes us back to the childhood of our absorbent, yellow, porous protagonist (voiced by Tom Kenny) and his first meeting with his beloved snail, Gary. By the time the film's over, we'll learn that all of SpongeBob's friends -- Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), and the rest -- all met as kids in an undersea summer camp called Kamp Koral. Continue Reading →

Is there still time for Donald Sullivan (Paul Newman)? Old enough to regret a past he knows he can’t change, Sully staggers around his small town of North Bath, New York. He’s out of work – or at least he should be – after a construction accident left him with a damaged knee and without a lawyer good enough to secure him a settlement. Long divorced, he rents a room from an old woman named Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy). To amuse himself, he openly flirts with Toby (Melanie Griffith).  Continue Reading →

I've been told that at Christmas Time, we are honest, so in that spirit, allow me to start this look back review with my own bit of honesty. I've seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button twice before watching it for this review. The first time I hated it. The second time, I hated it until I fell asleep about 20 minutes in. Continue Reading →

First and foremost, Zodiac is a movie about seeing. Seeing patterns, seeing possibilities, seeing threads to pick up and follow, even if they don’t end up going anywhere. Like Se7en, a great deal of focus is on the tediousness of a murder investigation: the collecting and comparing of fingerprints, tired looking men discussing clues in dank, poorly-lit offices, sparring with the media, and endless, often pointless phone calls. The violence in Zodiac is shocking, but brief, reserved to the first half hour of the movie. Even the use of crime scene photos is kept to a minimum. Unlike Se7en, David Fincher isn’t rubbing the horrors we inflict on each other in the audience’s face. Here, it’s something more subtle, the creeping fear of I know I’m right...but what do I do now? Continue Reading →

Although it’s since been cemented as a derided flop upon its release 30 years ago this month, The Godfather: Part III (1990) was neither the critical nor critical disaster people remember it to be. It was a decent financial success and would go on to be nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. However, a number of factors cropped up to help trash its reputation. It had a chaotic production that reached its apex when red-hot star Winona Ryder, cast as Mary Corleone, left the production just before her scenes were to be shot. Francis Ford Coppola replaced her with his non-actress daughter Sofia. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option? The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. Continue Reading →

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The greatest trick Sonic the Hedgehog ever pulled, on the other hand, was convincing the viewer it was harmlessly mediocre. But while the Devil is outright evil, the feature debut from Jeff Fowler is much more cynical: the kind of empty calories that fattens up the audience before leading them to the slaughter. Continue Reading →

Oz Perkins' latest, unceremoniously dumped into January, is a revisionist Grimm story as atmospheric as it is thin. The original fairy tales documented by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were often bloody, dark stories. As time passed, and we decided that children were too fragile for the originals, we reshaped them into toothless Disney stories of romance and happy endings. And as society began to critique the passive nature of these saccharine protagonists, the 2010s gave us badass butt-kicking makeovers for our heroes, like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.  At the dawn of the century’s third decade, however, we see fairy tales leaning harder into their older, more folkloric elements, crafting stories that mine terror out of feeling decidedly old and out-of-step with our understanding of the world. It happened with The Witch, and now we’ve got Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), which opts for an eerie atmosphere and a decidedly dark interpretation of its source material. The movie opens with one fairy tale framing another: Gretel’s favorite childhood story of a young child, beset by illness in their infancy. In a desperate bid to save the child’s life, her father takes her to a local witch. While the witch saves her life, she also gives the child the power of prophecy and witchcraft. As the child grows, so does her power and evil, until the townsfolk have little choice but to exile her to the woods. Continue Reading →

Though cinematographer Reed Morano shows some directing chops, the Blake Lively thriller is uneven in style & tone. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Reed Morano’s bracing The Rhythm Section follows its own beat. Misleading marketing and the dreaded late January dump positioned it as a gender-reversed thriller in the vein of Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge thrillers with expert journeyman Jaume Collet-Serra -- but the film is exhilaratingly out of step with the autopilot assassin stylings of the John Wicks of the world. Whereas Keanu Reeves’ multiplex conquering series has largely thrived as moody but absurdist routines of grotesque precision; nothing about the capabilities of Stephanie Patrick (an unusually wan Blake Lively) could be considered automatic. If anything, DP Sean Bobbit and Morano shoot every scene with a life-or-death urgency – all trembling limbs and determined close ups – that refuse to shy away from the physical realities of a brittle frame faced with hardened professionals who won’t hesitate to pull the trigger, let alone, level a young woman with a body blow to the gut. Stephanie isn’t a damsel in distress by any means, but the film has been almost completely drained of the usual power fantasy element that courses through these tales of vengeance to the point that she begins the film coded at her rock bottom as a sex worker and addict beaten down by losing her whole family in a mysterious plane crash. That choice outlines the film’s occasional jarring limits of empathy, but it’s nonetheless telling in placing the first half of the film closer to melodrama than genre film. Continue Reading →