Film review

Weapons, Zach Cregger’s sophomore picture after the acclaimed Barbarian, was a conspicuous success story in its opening weekend: brilliant reviews, an A- CinemaScore from audiences (rare for the horror genre, in which anything above a B is considered a major hit) and, of course, a massive box office. Its first weekend gross was $43.5 million, an astonishing amount for a film without an existing intellectual property, A-list stars (although Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich and Julia Garner are hardly unknowns) or big-name director.

Like many Westerns, Eddington, Ari Aster’s latest feature, unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It’s late May 2020 – the height of Covid. The ominous opening shot shows the construction site of an artificial-intelligence data center, which threatens the scarce water resources of the titular New Mexico town. A bird drops dead from the sky; a sick homeless man, coughing and rambling incoherently like a mad prophet, slouches toward the town, the dead bird clutched like an omen in his fist. From the outset, we already know the town is doomed. It’s not a question of if, but how. The Western genre and Greek-tragedy framing shape the exploration of this era’s still-disputed history, transforming the recent past into something mythic.

What would an American odyssey look like today? There are too many rabbit holes to go down, too many traps. Besides our fractious politics, everything in 2020s America is busted. Broken self-checkout machines and petty theft are scapegoats for a spiritual and economic crisis — it feels like the end of the world could come at any moment. Non-linear digital media and smartphones have destroyed the monoculture of popular movies and television that used to gird our pop culture. Everyone can find their own niche now, but we have so little to talk about together — not even the dread permeating the country. And it’s been this way for the better part of a decade.  The Sweet East presents the most accurate, from-the-front picture of America today.

The complaints about the Marvel Cinematic Universe are by now widely known. Their films follow predictable formulas and story beats. Characters become increasingly indistinguishable quip machines. The stakes are never high. The streaming content is overwhelmingly forgettable. Other than the death of Tony Stark onscreen and the sad passing of Chadwick Boseman offscreen, emotional moments are few and far between, as it's hard to care about characters when everything can be reset with a bit of multiverse mumbo jumbo. And then there's the problem of, well, as the Critical Drinker refers to it, THE MESSAGE. Expect a lot of that in the already twice-postponed production of The Marvels, girlbossing into theaters this winter.

Nobody liked Bama Rush: not the viewers, not the sorority sisters at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa (where the film is set), not TikTokkers. It is a remarkably unlikable film that ostensibly attempts to position itself as a “shocking” inside look at sorority recruitment at the University of Alabama. Meandering, self-absorbed and lazy, it somehow even manages to fail as anti-Greek life propaganda. Props to director Rachel Fleit for that though: it might be the film’s only achievement in a climate where people are frothing at the mouth to vilify anything resembling a uniquely American and time-honored tradition. (HBO Max/YouTube screenshot) Bama Rush is first and foremost a transparent attempt to cash in on the 2021 viral success of #RushTok.

All worthwhile horror films are products of their culture. They distill its neuroses and fears, forcing protagonists to make value judgments with life-or-death stakes. And that’s why the genre continues to compel: beyond the adrenaline rush of jump scares, watching old chillers is like opening a metaphysical time capsule. They show how past generations understood their world. The exorcism subgenre tracks that pattern — only its questions tend to be explicitly religious. William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, arriving at the height of modernist theology, directly foregrounded the question of faith within a liberal world order.

I have a confession, or perhaps a boast. I have never played the roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, and now, at the grand old age of forty-one, I doubt I ever shall. But there’s no doubt it’s a cultural phenomenon that has long since transcended any suggestion of being the preserve of adolescents, literal and overgrown alike. Since it was created in 1974, sales of the game have grossed billions, and it has been played by tens if not hundreds of millions of people worldwide. To be an aficionado is to find yourself in broad company — but how does that translate at the movies?  The first answer to this question came in 2000, when a film that starred Jeremy Irons as the villainous Mage Profion was released in cinemas.

Fourth installments of mega-franchises don’t exactly have the greatest reputation — just think of The Phantom Menace, The Matrix Revolutions, Live Free or Die Hard and Jaws: The Revenge, to name a few. By this point, film sagas are usually bogged down by their own internal mythologies and find themselves replaying familiar beats in a bid to recapture the magic. But every so often, there’s that Mad Max: Fury Road, an utterly unexpected burst of wild creativity that outdoes its predecessors. And John Wick: Chapter 4 is such a triumph. As Chapter 4 begins, legendary assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is at odds with the High Table, the governing authority of the assassin underworld.

For over a decade now, every new Marvel Cinematic Universe film has promised a visual extravaganza, and Quantumania is no exception. Alas, in a franchise that has produced some genuinely emotional moments, a grand spectacle may be all it is. Following the events of 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, our eponymous shrinking hero, played by Paul Rudd, has settled into comfortable domesticity with main squeeze Hope van Dyne and teenage daughter Cassie. With the world mostly safe, his biggest problem now is keeping the idealistic Cassie out of trouble. At least, so he thinks.

The thing about a new M. Night Shyamalan movie is that, going in, one never knows whether it’ll be “one of the good ones.” Few directors have quite as uneven a track record: in the wake of the much-loved The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, Shyamalan helmed a string of disasters, culminating in the big-budget catastrophe that was 2013’s After Earth. On the other hand, 2016’s Split and 2019’s Glass were both great. Knock at the Cabin falls somewhere in the middle. The film centers on a gay couple, Andrew and Eric (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff, respectively), and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), who are forced to confront a nightmare scenario. Holed up in a lonely cabin in the forest, they are accosted by a quartet of heavily armed outsiders.

Based on the trailers, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bullet Train was a gritty, serious-minded action thriller in the vein of John Wick. Nothing could be further from the truth: the best way to describe this movie is if Quentin Tarantino and Guy Ritchie co-directed a remake of Murder on the Orient Express. And happily, in the hands of director David Leitch — the talent behind Atomic Blonde and Deadpool 2 — it’s a genre mashup that mostly works. As the film opens, an enigmatic man codenamed “Ladybug” (Brad Pitt) boards one of Japan’s famous “bullet trains,” which travel at high speed and stop at each station for only a single minute. His mission: to recover a mysterious briefcase filled with ransom money and escape before anyone’s the wiser.

He's officially back. The past month has seen the quiet return to public life of comedian Louis C.K. as the incredibly popular — but very much canceled — creative genius has gone on a podcast tour promoting his latest film, Fourth of July, which is available to stream at his website starting August 6. His path to a comeback was made possible not just by his stature as a member of most comedians' Mount Rushmore of comics, but also by his innovative approach to connecting with his fans — an approach that was ahead of the curve at the time, and signals the path comedians may increasingly take in an era where their jokes can cause headaches for streaming services. C.K.