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| BLITHE SPIRIT (2021) |
"It's a good thing one doesn't really care about this sort of movie's story."
Jay Seaver says... "You probably don't get more than a minute or two into "Blithe Spirit" before the flashy colors, imminent broad slapstick, and maybe slightly exaggerated sound effects tell you that this movie is going to work hard to make you laugh. That is no bad thing - it beats the cases when filmmakers seem determined that any comedy that occurs should seem unintentional - but something like this could occasionally do with being sly as well. All that obvious effort means that even randomness has a hard time catching one by surprise." (more)
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| NOMADLAND |
"Nowhere woman."
Rob Gonsalves says... "There’s a Facebook group called “Capitalist Dystopia Stories Rebranded as Heartwarming Bullshit.” It provides links to news bits like the recent one in which a seven-year-old girl is selling lemonade to help pay for her brain surgery. I don’t know how we got to be a society that isn’t horrified by this." (more)
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| HIDDEN MAN |
"Frantic but fun."
Jay Seaver says... ""Hidden Man" is the third of writer/director/co-star Jiang Wen "bullets" trilogy, with a detour to Hollywood to be part of "Rogue One" in between, and it's got to be sort of an odd sensation, doing this sort of sprawling epic in the shadow of the sheer amount of resources Disney was throwing at "Star Wars". It almost seems to have Jiang trying to do too much even without making more than the usual effort to include a Western audience, making for a packed, frantic, but often pretty enjoyable bit of period action." (more)
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| TOM AND JERRY |
"Mouse In Manhattan"
Peter Sobczynski says... "If I had to make a list of the films of the new millennium that inexplicably flopped when they first came out but which were most deserving of being rediscovered and properly appreciated, “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” Joe Dante’s delirious and delightful 2003 live-action/animation hybrid that worked both as a tribute to the strongest and most nuanced collection of cartoon characters produced by any one studio and as a welcome riposte to “Space Jam,” the financially successful but artistically and comedically bankrupt 1996 film that brought Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and the other characters in the Warner Brothers canon back and then had them literally playing backup to Michael Jordan. I found myself thinking a lot about that film while watching “Tom and Jerry”—pretty much in the same way that a drowning man might idly think of a life raft just before going under for the third time. Hell, this attempt to bring back the hyper violent cat-and-mouse team is so dreadful that there were times when I actually found myself thinking that maybe “Space Jam” wasn’t quite that bad after all." (more)
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