New Releases:
Silent Night – A gritty revenge tale of a tormented father who witnesses his young son die when caught in a gang’s crossfire on Christmas Eve. While recovering from a wound that costs him his voice, he makes vengeance his life’s mission and embarks on a punishing training regimen in order to avenge his son’s death.
Expectations: It’s been a long time since legendary Hong Kong action filmmaker John Woo made an American film, two decades to be exact, with Ben Affleck’s Paycheck in 2003. Needless to say, I’m excited. Yes, the storyline feels very Death Wish adjacent but I’m on board for a high-octane actioner from one of the best in the genre behind the camera and The Killing actor Joel Kinnaman in front of it. I have some high hopes.
May December – Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, Gracie Atherton-Yu and her husband Joe (twenty-three years her junior) brace themselves for their twins to graduate from high school. When Hollywood actress Elizabeth Berry comes to spend time with the family to better understand Gracie, who she will be playing in a film, family dynamics unravel under the pressure of the outside gaze. Joe, never having processed what happened in his youth, starts to confront the reality of life as an empty-nester at thirty-six. And as Elizabeth and Gracie study each other, the similarities and differences between the two women begin to ebb and flow. Set in picturesque and comfortable Camden, Maine, May December is an exploration of truth, storytelling, and the difficulties (or impossibility) of fully understanding another person.
Review: I feel like kids of a certain generation know the case of Mary Kay Letourneau, a Washington state teacher who was caught in a relationship with one of her underaged students. Well, Todd Haynes’ new film plays in that sandbox with a filter of twenty years past on it and it works so well, his best since the Rooney Mara and Cate Blanchett drama Carol. Natalie Portman gives one of my favorite performances of her career and Charles Melton solidifies star-making talent as well. This film is constantly evolving and engrossing the whole time, easily one of this year’s best offerings.
Candy Cane Lane – Eddie Murphy stars in this holiday comedy adventure about a man on a mission to win his neighborhood’s annual Christmas home decoration contest. After Chris (Eddie Murphy) inadvertently makes a deal with a mischievous elf named Pepper (Jillian Bell) to better his chances of winning, she casts a magic spell that brings the 12 Days of Christmas to life, and wreaks havoc on the whole town. At the risk of ruining the holidays for his family, Chris, his wife Carol (Tracee Ellis Ross), and their three children must race against the clock to break Pepper’s spell, battle deviously magical characters, and save Christmas for everyone.
Expectations: Eddie Murphy is an undenied comedy legend who has a filmography of classics going back into my childhood through the nineties but in the last couple of decades? Not so many. He tries the holiday route this time, teaming with
Godzilla Minus One – Post-war Japan is at its lowest point when a new crisis emerges in the form of a giant monster, baptized in the horrific power of the atomic bomb.
Expectations: With a new series on AppleTV+ and a new Godzilla and Kong film on the horizon for 2024, the big Toho-created Kaiju is on the lips of current pop culture and the originators want another crack at it with this new prequel. Leave it to the creators to do their best as the reviews for this film are phenomenal, ramping up the spectacle big time that makes these movies work. Of course, human melodrama is always a main piece but the monsters are where it all excels. A great watch in tandem with the current AppleTV+ product I think.
Monster – A suburban town with a large lake. A single mother who loves her son, a school teacher who cares about her students, and innocent children lead a peaceful life. One day, a fight breaks out at school. It looked like a common fight between children, but their claims differed, and it gradually developed into a big deal involving society and the media. Then one stormy morning, the children suddenly disappear.
Review: This is one of the big films of the Vancouver International Film Festival for me, the latest film from writer and director Hirokazu Koreeda, the man who made my favourite film of the previous year’s festival, Broker. Knowing nothing going in, this is a fascinating story about different perspectives that evolve the film through many different filters and quasi-genre feels to end with a message that is both poignant and imperative to our current times. Koreeda reminds me a bit of the director who kicked off this year’s VIFF, Ken Loach, as they both have a good hold on the human condition.
Blu-Ray:
A Haunting In Venice – In post-World War II Venice, Poirot, now retired and living in his own exile, reluctantly attends a seance. But when one of the guests is murdered, it is up to the former detective to uncover the killer again.
Expectations: Kenneth Branagh returns both behind the camera and in front of it as Agatha Christie’s iconic sleuth Hercule Poirot in the third film he has done with the character to varying degrees of satisfaction. I enjoyed his Murder On The Orient Express but Death On The Nile was a bit of a mess in multiple places so that’s the energy I brought into this one. It served me well as, even with a genre tone shift, this movie is a bit of a mess as well. It struggles to lean into a message and dismisses and embraces those supernatural plot devices to a frustrating degree. I love Branagh’s Poirot but not the end results sadly.
Eye For An Eye: The Blind Swordsman – Blind Cheng, a registered bounty hunter of board of punishments, meets Ni Yan, a restaurant daughter who suffered family massacre and personal rape. Onlooking Cheng is then involved into a struggle with darkness forces and steps on the road of justice seeking and revenge.
Review: A new and bloody Chinese martial arts film arrived and, immediately, I was shocked at how short it is. Usually, an epic like this would be at least two hours long but this one clocks in at just over an hour and ten minutes which is unheard of for any film really. The film has some great fight sequences throughout but doesn’t really go down any unexplored avenues in the genre. I will say that there was a very inventive kill that got an audible response from me and kept me in for the endgame.
The Sandman: Season 1 – When the Sandman, aka Dream, the cosmic being who controls all dreams, is captured and held prisoner for more than a century, he must journey across different worlds and timelines to fix the chaos his absence has caused.
Review: Before this show even saw release on Netflix it was seeing immediate hatred from comic book gatekeepers and Netflix production haters alike but I would like to point out that the subject matter is already heady with deep lore so it would have been divisive anyway. I would liken it to The Witcher which felt like it was dripping with an already established and fully built world right from the beginning but at least The Sandman tries a bit of back story with its first episode. Based on the popular Vertigo comic from creator Neil Gaiman, I have to say that this show looks gorgeous, the cross-pollination of Warner Bros. DC Comics television division and Netflix has made a giant of a potential mountain. I love Gaiman’s writing style and have been impressed with the page-to-screen transition of it so far.
Steve’s Blu-Ray Geekouts:
NCIS Hawaii: Season 2 – The world’s most successful television series continues on the seductive shores of Hawai’i as the first female Special Agent in Charge of NCIS Pearl Harbor takes command. She and her team balance duty to family and country, investigating high-stakes crimes involving military personnel, national security, and the mysteries of the island itself. This NCIS: Hawai’i team is a skilled mix of mainland transplants who’ve relocated to the tranquillity of the Pacific and wizened locals who know their mahalo from Kapu.
Review: With New Orleans and now Los Angeles ending its NCIS run and now Australia joining the fray, we also still have a crime-solving unit located in the same place where the Five-O reigned and the Magnum continues to roam on the procedural powerhouse that is CBS. Vanessa Lachey is the only known star that I can recognize but it’s all about the culture, the seaside locations and, of course, the terrorist acts that need to be taken down. For cut-and-dry procedurals like this, you are either into the criminal of the week type storyline or you’re not. There isn’t really an in-between on this.
Blue Is The Warmest Color – Adèle is a high school student who is beginning to explore herself as a woman. She dates men but finds no satisfaction with them sexually, and is rejected by a female friend who she does desire. She dreams of something more. She meets Emma who is a free spirited girl whom Adèle’s friends reject due to her sexuality, and by association most begin to reject Adèle. Her relationship with Emma grows into more than just friends as she is the only person with whom she can express herself openly. Together, Adèle and Emma explore social acceptance, sexuality, and the emotional spectrum of their maturing relationship.
Review: A Criterion Collection entry that I went out and got myself, this is one of my favorite French films of the last twenty years, featuring two of the most gorgeous actresses working today, Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos. The story of a hidden love awakening is palpable in every moment and writer and director Abdellatif Kechiche commands every moment of it with such deft beauty to mirror his players on screen. This purchase was a long time coming and I’m so glad to have it.
The Flash: The Final Season – Barry Allen is a forensic scientist and crime-scene investigator at The Central City Police Department with a reasonable happy life, despite the childhood trauma of a man in a bizarre red-and-yellow costume killing his mother and framing his father for it. All that changes when a massive particle accelerator created by visionary physicist Dr. Harrison Wells and his team at S.T.A.R Labs causes a malfunction creating a freak storm, killing many people and causing Barry to be struck by lightning in his lab. He wakes up after a coma nine months later. He and his new friends at S.T.A.R Labs discover that he has superhuman speed and can run on both land and water. He can move, think and react at light speeds. He can also vibrate so fast that he can pass through walls, travel through time and lend or borrow speed. He heals more quickly than an average human. Later, he learns that he is but one of the many affected by the incident, most of them who are using their powers for evil. Determined to make a difference, Barry dedicates his life to fighting such threats as The Flash.
Review: The final piece of the Arrowverse for the CW network drew to a close and , besides the fun of DC’s Legends Of Tomorrow, this series was the most consistent with its tone and characters. This isn’t a knock on Arrow but it seemed to meander a bit during its run. I will also say, now that we’ve gotten the full resolution, Grant Gustin’s Flash and Barry Allen might be my favorite live action interpretation. It was so good that the movie should have been scrapped, Ezra Miller fired and Grant should have been the golden child. It is all such a massive missed opportunity.
Television:
Obliterated (Netflix) – An elite special forces team who thwarts a deadly threat to Las Vegas. After their celebratory party, filled with booze, drugs and sex, the team discovers that the bomb they deactivated was a fake. The now intoxicated team has to fight through their impairments, overcome their personal issues, find the real bomb, and save the world.
Review: Douche-bros crossover with special forces mercenary mission in this new series from those two guys who brought Harold and Kumar into the stoner zeitgeist and if you can dull your comedy senses more than those films commanded, you will be ok. The excessiveness of the partying gets a bit much but that is all set up so our players can be ultimately brain scrambled in order to save the world and it kind of works. Former What I Like About You star Nick Zano is doing a full on Brad Pitt impression here but he does a solid job in bringing the action as well as some good line deliveries. This probably won’t see a second season but this one is entertaining enough I think.
Slow Horses: Season 3 (AppleTV+) – Slough House is a dumping ground for members of the intelligence service who’ve screwed up: left a service file on a train, blown a surveillance, or become drunkenly unreliable. They’re the service’s poor relations. The slowest horse and most bitter among them is River Cartwright, whose days are spent transcribing mobile phone conversations. But when a young man is abducted, and his kidnappers threaten to behead him live on the Internet, River sees an opportunity to redeem himself. But is the victim who he first appears to be? And what’s the kidnappers’ connection with a disgraced journalist? As the clock ticks on the execution, River finds that everyone involved has their own agenda.
Review: It is probably best for any Gary Oldman fan to get into this AppleTV+ series because the Academy Award-winning actor has declared that once the show has made it’s run, he will most likely retire from acting. Yes, I’m panicking too but the great news is this show is really solid and definitely worth going out on his shield. This is one of those sleeper hit shows and one of the better releases from AppleTV+ but unfortunately got dwarfed in its first and second-season releases by shows like See and Ted Lasso. For those people who have the streaming service and have gotten through the more notable shows, this one should be next on your list.
Steve Stebbing 