Critic's Notebook

Time 2020-10-09 07:02:31

Web Name: Critic's Notebook

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Matt Kennedy/Focus FeaturesMOVIE REVIEW Kajillionaire (2020)By SARAH MANVELRobert (Richard Jenkins) and Theresa (Debra Winger) thought naming their daughter Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood) after a homeless man who won the lottery would result in her inheriting. Instead, they live in the disused office of a Los Angeles bubble factory. Bubbles spill through a crack in the ceiling at set times a day; they must be caught in buckets and the wall toweled dry, but the inconvenience is why the rent is so cheap. The family is behind, of course. Instead of working regular jobs, they are low-grade grifters and petty thieves. Well, Robert and Theresa come up with the ideas, and Old Dolio carries them out. She steals from the post office, doing an elaborate dance to avoid the security cameras. She tries to swap a gift certificate for a cash refund, or maybe that rock on the desk. She agrees to take a parenting class on someone’s behalf for $20. They are such a codependent family Old Dolio thinks it’s growth to be the one to propose a lost luggage scam that will clear their back rent. On the plane, they sit separately, which puts Robert next to Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), a chatty physician’s assistant delighted to find real-life intrigue. Suddenly, what seemed to be “not unreasonable” is no longer the case. The BFI London Film FestivalMOVIE REVIEW Mogul Mowgli (2020)By SARAH MANVELTiming is everything, in music and in life. If you come in a little too late or off the beat, you miss your chance and spoil everything. No one knows this better than Zed (Riz Ahmed), an exceptional rapper who is finally about to get his big break, opening for a major artist on an American tour. But his girlfriend Bina (Aiysha Hart) sneers about him rapping constantly about where he’s from when he hasn’t seen his parents in two years. So Zed reconsiders. And as they say, he who hesitates is lost. Melinda Sue Gordon/Warner Brothers PicturesMOVIE REVIEW Tenet (2020)By ALAN DIMENT“Tenet” might not be the safest movie to release during such perilous times. For this is a film that demands repeat viewings – a dazzling puzzle box that you will need to see at least twice to comprehend, and even then there will still be gaps in your knowledge. Going once will simply not be enough as – virus be damned – you’ll feel compelled to go back for another look. Sure you could wait and stream “Tenet” at a later date, but this is a film that deserves the biggest of big screens. There will be online videos where the film will be salivated over and pulled apart like a hog roast, but relying on those is just cheating. Christopher Nolan spent years writing this thing so you owe it to him to do the detective work yourself. All you will need is a wipe-board, several different colored pens and a focus group of the world’s top physicists. Fear not reader, there will be no major spoilers in this review, for that would require me to know what the hell was going on in “Tenet” to start with. Tobias Höiem-Flyckt/Dark Star PicturesMOVIE REVIEW Koko-di Koko-da (2020)By SARAH MANVELIt’s not often that a movie truly lives up to its horror billing. Sure you get scares, thrills and women being mistreated in the most unspeakable of ways, but it’s rare that you are made to feel as if you are in an interminable nightmare. This Swedish oddity, about three lives which are wrecked while on holiday in Denmark, does exactly this. It’s awful to watch, and not in a good way. Patti Perret/Universal PicturesMOVIE REVIEW The Hunt (2020)By MARTIN TSAIAfter President Donald Trump personally “canceled” it in a tweet, “The Hunt” was abruptly bumped from its Sept. 27, 2019, release date indefinitely — until now. Its premise involves a group of “woke” “libtards” declaring open season on “deplorables” and kidnapping a dozen of them. That’s basically its plot: The elites” pick off the conspiritards one by one in gory detail over a bogus conspiracy dubbed “Manorgate” until a few escape and strike back in similarly gory detail. The end. Michael Gibson/STXfilmsMOVIE REVIEW My Spy (2020)By MARTIN TSAIIn “My Spy,” former wrestler-mixed martial artist Dave Bautista plays J. J., a nails-for-breakfast war veteran-turned-C.I.A. operative on assignment staking out newly widowed Kate (Parisa Fitz-Henley) and her 9-year-old daughter, Sophie (Chloe Coleman), who have recently fled Paris and are struggling to adjust to their new life in Chicago. The clever Sophie is quickly on to J. J. and threatens to blow his cover if he doesn’t take her ice skating, participate in her special person’s day at school and train her to become a spy, all so that her new classmates will no longer ostracize her. NonStop EntertainmentMOVIE REVIEW Color Out of Space (2020)By TIM HAYESIf you’re going to return to making feature films after 27 years away, you might as well pick up where you left off. The opening credits of “Color Out of Space” have Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) carrying out a Wicca ritual, appealing to the angels to take care of her mother, and the words Directed by Richard Stanley appear over a close-up of the antique compass in her hand. Back in 1992 Mr. Stanley’s previous feature, Dust Devil, started with another pilgrim looking at a hand-held totem; but then the figure was a supernatural serial killer and the item was a pocket watch going backwards. And back before that, the credits of “Hardware” ended with a post-apocalyptic scavenger dressed in the very 1990 boho-gothic style of Carl McCoy from the band Fields of the Nephilim (for it was he) holding another battered compass in equal close-up, although the credits on-screen at that exact instant are the freighted names of Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Three films, three nomads, looking at three antique analogue icons for some signal from a cosmos that shows every sign of being otherwise engaged. Bernard Walsh/Paramount PicturesMOVIE REVIEW The Rhythm Section (2020)By MARTIN TSAIThe Broccolis, whose Eon Productions holds film rights to Ian Fleming’s lucrative James Bond franchise, are probably keen on turning Mark Burnell’s Stephanie Patrick novels into their next cash cow, but “The Rhythm Section” plays out more like “La Femme Nikita” than “Dr. No.” Blake Lively channels Anne Parillaud as Stephanie Patrick, a junkie prostitute trained into a deadly assassin under the Tchéky Karyo-esque hard-bitten Jude Law. She then trots the globe to hunt in exotic locales replete with sand roads and teal walls and colorful parrots chirping for the terrorists responsible for murdering her entire family. Patrick Redmond/Universal PicturesMOVIE REVIEW The Turning (2020)By MARTIN TSAIIt’s difficult to imagine “The Turning,” Universal Pictures’s newest throwaway in the January trash heap following the dismally reviewed “Cats” and “Dolittle,” being worse than those two debacles. Indeed, music video auteur Floria Sigismondi’s first film since indie gem “The Runaways” a decade ago could pass as respectable if not for its utterly impenetrable final minutes. Twentieth Century FoxMOVIE REVIEW Underwater (2020)By MARTIN TSAIA remarkably late addition to Fox’s 1980s sci-fi canon, “Underwater” finally surfaces some three years since the completion of principal photography. To be sure, the studio has never gotten out of the B-picture business entirely, but for the past few decades its niche pipeline has been mostly outsourced to Eurotrashy outfits like Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp, resulting in more bargain actioners like “Taken” while the low-budget sci-fi well ran dry in favor of . . . James Cameron’s other preoccupations.

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