Oppenheim, a talented documentarian (Some Kind of Heaven, Ren Faire), basing the film on Luke Dittrich’s seminal Esquire article, “Tonight on Dateline This Man Will Die,” takes a kind of interpretive tack with Hansen. As portrayed by the ever-twisty Pattinson, the line between his performative self (thrusting out from behind a literal curtain with the professionally grave, self-important sweep of a high-school principal, or maybe a mortician) and his actual self with his wife and kids, gets smudged into a dark smear, leading him deeper into psychosis. At one point, when one of Hansen’s perp-jump scares goes wrong, he lies down in a fetal position and sinks into a fugue state, unable to be reached by the increasingly agitated Andie.

It sounds like the set-up to a comedy, and to be sure, writer/director Kristoffer Borgli (himself, the cause of controversy, given his recent admission to dating a teenager when he was a decade older than she), plays a lot of this material for uneasy laughs. The wedding scene itself, at the end, is a sort of culmination of everyone’s bad choices in the most public of spectacles (Charlie makes an absolutely ghastly wedding speech resulting, in part, by him getting his nose broken by an angry guest), with various turns of the screw. 

Bong Joon Ho is like an avant garde chef who’s opened a pop up kitchen in some strange part of the city you don’t know very well. You don’t know what to expect, but when you try the food, it’s a brilliant combination of disparate ingredients you never would have thought to put together

Breathing is something that Nolan apparently expected you to take care of on your own time

Tenet ultimately leaves you mentally and physically exhausted yet ready to go back(wards) into the theater to repeat the experience.

Good Time has the feel of being composed by writers with no real life experience.

The Lost City of Z is more lost than the fabled city.

An eerily detached loner with a singularly obsessive focus chases after the men who ran off with his car in The Rover. In a dystopian Australia, after a devastating economic upheaval, everyone’s left to fend for themselves for their own daily survival. The collapse turns most of the sparse populace into desperate opportunists or outright bandits. Eric […]

Apparently from what I’ve heard Water for Elephants is a much-beloved novel that I’m guessing Oprah recommended based on all the women in the theater the day I saw it. Obviously I never read the book but the movie was certainly quite entertaining. I went into it a bit skeptical as circus movies tend to […]