What’s happening on college campuses across the country right now is nothing short of disgusting and distressing. Thousands of students — and faculty members, too — are protesting and creating encampments in support of the Palestinians.
Or so they say.
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Two of the most underrated films of the last 10 years were The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Ready or Not. Both were released late in the summer and were pleasant surprises that successfully blended humor with classic genre appeal (action and horror, respectively). The latter even made my list of my favorite films of 2019 (it ranked #6).
Coincidentally, both films’ creators are back with new releases this week. While their new movies aren’t as good as these other works, they are still worth checking out.
Here are my reviews.
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In Luca Guadagnino’s last film, 2022’s awful Bones and All, Timothée Chalamet played half of a young cannibal couple in love and on the run from a society that doesn’t understand them.
Now, Guadagnino’s followup features Chalamet’s Dune 2 costar playing a man-eater of a completely different sort.
In Challengers, Zendaya is Tashi Duncan, a former tennis prodigy at the center of a love triangle involving her husband, Art (Mike Faist, West Side Story), and Patrick (Josh O’Connor, The Crown), who is Art’s former best friend and Tashi’s ex-boyfriend.
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In this day and age, when evidence of how divided our country is can be found just by turning on any one of the multiple 24-hour news channels, do we really need a fictionalized cautionary tale of how bad things can get?
Not really.
But Alex Garland’s dystopian new film Civil War is exactly that. It plops us right into the middle of a United States where all the dire predictions we’ve been hearing about for years on CNN, Fox News, and the rest have come true. It’s not a pretty sight. But it is a pretty great movie.
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For 50 years, Steve Martin has been different things to different people: For those of a certain age, he was a “wild and crazy” standup comedian, whose shows and albums broke records in the late 1970s. To others, he’s the star of classic films like The Jerk, Three Amigos!, Roxanne, and All of Me. To others, he’s the star of family-friendly movies like Parenthood, Father of the Bride, and Cheaper by the Dozen. To others, he’s a sophisticated writer of New Yorker articles. To others, he’s a musician and composer, who collaborated with Edie Brickell on the Tony-nominated Broadway musical Bright Star. And to others, he’s the co-creator and star, alongside Martin Short and Selena Gomez, of the Hulu TV show Only Murders in the Building.
Suffice it to say, the man has invented and reinvented and reinvented himself multiple times throughout his career, adapting to the highs and lows — which is why today, he probably has fans of all ages.
However you know Steve Martin, you’re likely to know him a little better after watching Steve! (martin): A Documentary in 2 Pieces, which premieres on Apple TV+ this week. Directed by Morgan Neville (Won’t You Be My Neighbor? and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom), the roughly three-hour doc is broken into two parts: “Then,” which traces Martin’s rise through the standup circuit, and “Now,” which documents many things since then.
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It’s the middle of March 2024, but moviemakers seem to have their minds on the 1980s. This week, two films are dropping that hope to recapture the fun of much loved movies from back in the day.
Are they worth seeing?
Read on to learn what I thought of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and Road House.
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We’re already at the end of January 2024, and awards season is in full swing. (If you missed them, the Oscar nominations were announced earlier this week.) Unfortunately, I had to wait to see some of the potential contenders till they were released widely, so I decided to wait to share my final reviews of 2023.
And so, better late than never, and just like I did in the first, second, and third quarters of this year, here’s a (slightly delayed) roundup of what I thought of all the movies I saw in the — let’s call it, second half of the fourth quarter of 2023, in reverse chronological order, with a note about how/where I saw them.
FYI: You won’t see recent wide-release films like All of Us Strangers or Poor Things here; I saw those in the first half of the quarter. For the record, they both earned a spot on my list of the year’s best films.
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We have reached the end of another year, and I don’t know about you, but I am exhausted.
The first half of this year was good, and I had a lot of fun. But the second half? Definitely more stressful and challenging.
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It may be hyperbole to say this, but 2023 was the year the movies came back.
After three years of Hollywood being in pandemic mode and struggling to recover, including a year like last year when the films just felt so forgettable and meh, this year was filled with so many movies that were worth seeing that it was hard not to feel like things were back to normal.
Of course, it was interrupted by the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which set production on many projects back a few months (or, in some cases, a year) and meant that nearly every film that was released during the strikes did so with little to no fanfare. If one of those releases found an audience, it could consider itself lucky.
But by year’s end, things were back on track, and here we are again taking stock of the best and worst releases of the year.
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Every year, I’m fond of looking back through the music I’ve added to my annual Time Capsule playlist on Spotify and seeing what it says about those 12 months, if anything.
Rather than ranking the “best” music of the year, like so many music writers and publications do, or letting Spotify tell me my most-listened-to songs and artists, I find the Time Capsule playlist is a more accurate representation of not only what I listened to but what I want to remember about the year. Often, it reveals a narrative, providing a soundtrack of sorts for the last 12 months that helps me recall good times and bad, significant milestones, and the everyday joys of driving around with a good song playing at top volume.
This year, when taken as a whole, my Time Capsule playlist is kind of an odd collection of tunes — but then again, it was also kind of an odd year (more on that in another blog post). There’s less new music than usual, some definite themes or trends, and a bunch of seemingly random inclusions. The playlist (which is largely chronological and not ranked) is all over the place.
In short, what appears here requires a little explanation.
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Martin's Musings 