Category: Film Review

“Dead for a Dollar” returns Walter Hill to the director’s chair, a spot he hasn’t occupied in years. And for good reason too, with his last two features, 2013’s “Bullet to the Head” and 2017’s “The Assignment,” lacking creative authority, trying to be chewy genre entertainment with little lasting value. Hill revisits the western for “Dead for a Dollar,” a genre he’s spent quite some time in (including “The Long Riders” and “Wild Bill”). In fact, almost every picture the helmer has made has been a western in one way or another, but his latest returns him to the ways of horses, card games, hard men, and shootouts, trying to be a thick slice of B-movie escapism with a more theatrical sense of dramatic engagement. Hill aims to soak the production in atmosphere, delighting in traditional confrontations between salty characters, but he struggles to bring a cinematic quality to the endeavor, which often resembles a filmed play occasionally broken up by violence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2014, writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour collected a small but loyal fanbase with her debut feature, “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” She lost a lot of that support with her follow-up, 2017’s “The Bad Batch,” with some viewers catching on that while skilled at creating memorable imagery, Amirpour wasn’t much of a storyteller, boldly refusing dramatic interests in the pursuit of atmosphere. Five years later, the helmer returns with “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” which involves even less of a plot than anything Amirpour has mounted before, keeping the picture in a weird state of paralysis as attempts at comedy crumble and a proposed mystery is never tended to. Amirpour has her colors, lame offerings of playfulness, and cartoonish performances, but there’s nothing going on in “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” highlighting her severe shortcomings as a moviemaker. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Someday, Rob Zombie will write his autobiography, sharing his experiences in music and art, but also detailing his filmmaking career. Hopefully, there will be a chapter examining his desire to remake “The Munsters,” the beloved 1960s sitcom about monsters making it in human society. It’s a shame the book doesn’t exist today, as any help decoding Zombie’s decision-making skills is most necessary while watching this valentine/redo, which is meant to celebrate the silly world of the original series, but mostly resembles “The Paul Lynde Halloween Special.” Zombie tries to retain his usual interests in macabre cinema and pop culture while building a slightly different “Munsters” for the masses. It’s a cult-ready package that probably won’t please longtime fans or keep family audiences engaged (against all odds, this sucker is rated PG), remaining a distinctly Zombie-fied production highlighting his oddball sense of humor and love of extreme visuals. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Tyler Perry provided a surprise early this year when he broke his promise to the public, pulling his most popular character, Madea, out of retirement. The idea was to deliver some laughs to a world that desperately needs the distraction during bleak times. The result was a mess, with “A Madea Homecoming” as profoundly unpleasant as anything Perry has made before, reinforcing his severe limitations as a filmmaker and judge of funny business. Perry returns with “A Jazzman’s Blues,” which was actually shot before Madea’s unwelcome return, but is only now seeing a release, with autumn a more appropriate season for a more serious picture from the writer/director. “A Jazzman’s Blues” isn’t high art from Perry, who doesn’t stray far from his love of melodrama, cooking up a juicy tragedy concerning race relations and forbidden love in 1940s Georgia, going all-in with broad performances and thickly sliced horrors of the heart. While sections of the endeavor show some restraint, Perry can’t help himself, aiming for pure audience reaction with this exhausting soap opera. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Beloved actress Allison Janney, known for her skills in comedy and drama, is now an action star? That’s the idea driving “Lou,” which puts the actress behind the wheel of her own bruiser, albeit with slightly less interest in a sustained run of physical activity. Screenwriters Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley are in charge of making this magic at least partially credible, transforming Janney into an ex-government recluse with a particular set of skills, out to protect a young mother searching for her kidnapped child. It’s the stuff of Neeson, but Janney is a nice change of pace for this type of entertainment, providing an authoritative performance as the eponymous character, giving director Anna Foerster some behavioral business to manage while also participating in stunt work. “Lou” doesn’t win points for originality, but it does provide an enjoyable viewing experience, and a chance to watch Janney go into butt-kicking mode is certainly worth a look. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2019’s “Booksmart” was special, emerging from a murky sea of lame teen comedy films, trying to offer a fresh take on adolescent high jinks from a female perspective. It was the directorial debut for actress Olivia Wilde, and she managed to balance tone and performances, working with co-screenwriter Katie Silberman to offer something oddball and somewhat loveable, capturing a volatile high school energy. It was a pleasantly surprising offering from Wilde, and she returns with an intentionally cryptic endeavor in “Don’t Worry Darling,” reteaming with Silberman for a much different study of power and paranoia. While “Booksmart” carried a casual energy, “Don’t Worry Darling” is attempting to be a suffocating viewing experience, hammering viewers with an intimidating soundscape and cranked-up acting. Wilde’s trying to master a mystery with her second feature, but she’s mostly making noise with this aggressive picture, which is too derivative of other movies to truly shock. And while its messages on the state of gender relations are valid, the effort’s violent execution and painful overlength erodes any lasting appreciation for its themes. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While time travel is often used to create fantasy scenarios of heroism and discovery, it’s also become a device to launch romantic comedies, with the potential of grand manipulation and relationship obsession driving a different kind of year-jumping momentum. “Meet Cute” is the latest production to use a “Groundhog Day”-ish approach to the obstacle course of love, with stars Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson tasked with playing people meant to be, only the path to partnership is complicated by disruptions in time. Writer Noga Pnueli offers some silliness with her concept, which involves weird science and dramatic repetition, but she’s also in sync with relationship concerns and demands, understanding how people often get in their own way when it comes to connecting with other human beings. “Meet Cute” is slight but funny, and Pnueli finds fresh ways to explore the same crisis of appeal, manufacturing a puzzle of emotions Davidson and Cuoco handle with authority. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Bandit” tells the story of Gilbert Galvan Jr., who, during the 1980s. became known as “The Flying Bandit,” traveling all over Canada to rob nearly 50 banks over a three-year period. It’s a tale that involves dented nobility and economic pressure, disguises and friendships, and a romance of sorts. It’s amazing this tale hasn’t found its way to the screen before, but the production turns to a 1996 book by Robert Knuckle for inspiration, trying to create a crime story worth paying attention to, filled with strange characters and conflicts of the heart. “Bandit” is a spirited picture, with director Allan Ungar (“Tapped Out,” “Gridlocked”) aiming to balance the sugar rush nature of criminal behavior with Gilbert’s emotional crisis, caught between the job he loves and the people he’s responsible for. Ungar keeps the feature on the move, and he has a dependable leading man in Josh Duhamel, who rises to the tonal challenge when playing this odd man and his particularly sticky situation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Adaptations can come from anywhere, but “The Infernal Machine” attempts to do something with a newer form of media, trying to form a feature-length movie from a 25-minute-long episode of “The Truth” podcast. “The Hilly Earth Society” explored the declining sanity of a writer dealing with a most determined stalker through a series of calls to an answering machine, giving writer/director Andrew Hunt a foundation for a mystery, building on the thinnest of ideas. What he ultimately comes up with is a very Stephen King-esque overview of paranoia and intimidation, working to create a story to pair with the central phone call concept, coming up with an uneven viewing experience. The first half builds to a few promising questions of sanity, but “The Infernal Machine” slips out of control soon after, as Hunt gets sloppy with his ideas for suspense. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While it walks and talks like a generic thriller, “The Enforcer” has moments when it feels like it’s genuinely trying to do something with its characters and their seemingly hopeless situations of criminal activity. Perhaps this has something to do with the screenplay, which is credited to W. Peter Iliff, who long ago created “Point Break,” helping to bring one of the finest action films of the 1990s to the screen. Iliff doesn’t have a high caliber director this time around to bring intense visuals and extract ideal performances, but there’s something interesting buried in the feature, which attempts to get past B-movie formula on occasion. Unfortunately, there’s not enough of the promising stuff to support “The Enforcer,” which soon gets tangled up in underworld cliches and dismal casting, losing sight of its more compelling elements. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Action films aren’t as special as they once were. Blame the VOD market, which has inspired producers to go crazy making violent entertainment for the masses, churning them out without much regard for quality. “Section 8” is part of this generation of B-movies, offering a decent tale of dark servitude that’s poorly executed all around. Director Christian Sesma has worked this routine before, helming similar exercises in low-wattage distractions (including “Paydirt” and “Take Back”), but he’s not one to challenge the norm when it comes to the ways of hard men trying to intimidate other hard men. “Section 8” could’ve worked with some passion for the game, pushing the endeavor into more of a free-for-all experience of shootouts and fist fights. Sesma doesn’t have the vision to really go for it, and the writing (credited to Chad Law and Josh Ridgeway) has no imagination, sticking with familiar grunts of bad dialogue and unwelcome turns of plot. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Dig” is a minimally budgeted production made in the COVID-19 era, offering a low stakes plot featuring a handful of characters, with the action largely contained to a single location. It doesn’t exactly charm with its bland visuals, but it does open with a loaded moment of suspense and horror, establishing hope that the screenplay by Banipal Ablakhad might be interested in a more gripping level of viewer engagement, dealing with the dangers of the real world as a road rage incident goes horribly wrong for the lead character. “Dig” has a chance to be different than most VOD offerings, but such promise isn’t realized by the production, which gradually falls into routine with cartoonish villains and basic acts of survival. Director K. Asher Levin puts the movie into motion early on, but he’s soon stuck with a bad case of storytelling inertia, leaving the viewing experience disappointingly uneventful. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Blonde” began life as a 2000 novel by Joyce Carol Oates, who presented a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe’s life, playing up her torturous experiences and the violence, in many forms, forced on her by men. The book was quickly adapted into a 2001 television miniseries, sanitized for the mass audience, and now returns to the screen in an NC-17 interpretation, with writer/director Andrew Dominik (“Killing Them Softly,” “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford”) free to explore the murky headspace of the subject as she craves to be treated humanely, only to face horror. There have been so many versions of this story across all forms of media, but Dominik doesn’t lead with his Monroe obsession, looking to explore the turbulence of her existence, spending nearly three hours in the swirling vortex of her cancerous thoughts. The helmer touches on the steps in Monroe’s life, but he’s more interested in creating a suffocating viewing experience, which works to a certain degree, especially when interpreted by star Ana de Armas, who delivers a full-body breakdown in the part, singlehandedly supporting the feature at times. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Goodnight Mommy” was originally a 2014 Austrian chiller from writer/directors Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. The pair concocted a dark tale of suspicion featuring twins who no longer trust the identity of their mother, going to extreme lengths to deduce if she’s truly the woman she claims to be. It wasn’t a horror endeavor in the traditional sense, aiming for more of a slow-burn churn of discovery, and it worked wonderfully, delivering terrific menace. The premise has been recycled for an American remake, with “Goodnight Mommy” attempting to summon the same level of unease with a different set of actors, with director Matt Sobel and screenwriter Kyle Warren tasked with sprucing up the fear factor while retaining the same story. Unfortunately for the filmmakers, “Goodnight Mommy” didn’t need a remake, especially one that doesn’t do anything special with the working parts of the original movie, sanding down some of the sharper edges of the 2014 effort to appeal to a wider audience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Originality is in short supply in “Do Revenge.” The screenplay is an update of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 thriller, “Strangers on a Train,” and the rest of the feature is a homage to teen cinema of the 1990s, even working with a soundtrack from the decade. It’s the second directorial outing for Jennifer Kaytin Robinson (who co-wrote last summer’s “Thor: Love and Thunder”), and she’s not in the mood to push the material very far, keeping things familiar to help find an audience for the dark comedy, where plans for murder are replaced by grand schemes of high school humiliations. “Do Revenge” has a game cast to embody troubled characters trying to keep up appearances, and early scenes suggest sharper antics to come, but Robinson isn’t interested in sustained cattiness, trying to give the endeavor an emotional core, which adds more formula to an already overwhelmed and overlong picture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While certainly boosted by the mega success of “Black Panther,” “The Woman King” hopes to sell a more historical story, going the “Braveheart” route as it mixes elements of culture and character with heavy big screen action, providing grand sweeps of physical and dramatic conflict. It tells the story of the Agojie, an all-female African team of warriors tasked with defending the kingdom of Dahomey from potential invaders. Director Gina Prince-Bythewood (who recently helmed “The Old Guard,” preparing her for the stunt-heavy gig) makes a valiant attempt to preserve the reality of this story of bravery while remaining highly cinematic with the work, providing a gripping ride of dangerous events and tight relationships. There’s deep feeling and power on display here that’s thrilling to watch, with Prince-Bythewood extremely focused on making a mostly overlooked tale of honor and dedication feel enormous and emotional, largely achieving her ambitious goal, especially with help from star Viola Davis, who was born to play such roles of fiery authority. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The character Irwin Maurice “Fletch” Fletcher was born from the mind of author Gregory Mcdonald. For two decades, the author developed a universe for the investigative reporter, delivering multiple novels that tracked his interactions with crime and mischief. He was a popular literary creation, but perhaps most people know the character from 1985’s “Fletch,” with comedian Chevy Chase hired to bring the wiseacre to the big screen. The Michael Ritchie film was a hit, giving Chase one of his most important successes in the 1980s, and there was a 1989 sequel that effectively terminated future tales of Fletch in action. For “Confess, Fletch,” Chase is out, with Jon Hamm taking over the part, bringing his debatable comedic personality to the picture, working with director Greg Mottola (his first feature since 2016’s “Keeping Up with the Joneses”) to create a slightly less wacky take on Mcdonald’s creation. Humor remains, but “Confess, Fletch” would also like to be taken a bit more seriously as a mystery, putting the clever man in the middle of a collection of eccentric characters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The monster success of 2019’s “Knives Out” was sure to stir interest in the return of the big screen mystery movie. “See How They Run” hopes to ride a trend with its own take on the ways of Agatha Christie, this time involving the author in a different way. The screenplay by Mark Chappell looks to restore some period activity to a classic Christie whodunit, returning audiences to post-war London, which is prime setting for cinematic troublemaking. The material launches as something of a comedy, having fun with its assortment of fussy characters and secret motivations. “See How They Run” doesn’t remain spirited for long, with director Tom George endeavoring to shape a substantial tale of criminal activity while still tending to a rapidly diminishing sense of playfulness. It’s a handsome feature with lively performances, but George can’t get the film off the ground at times. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“God’s Country” takes some getting used to, as it wants to be many different films over the course of its run time. Co-writer/director Julian Higgins uses the comfort of a revenge movie to lure in viewers, teasing them with classic Charles Bronson/Clint Eastwood elements of intimidation, almost crafting a neo-western in many ways. It’s compelling, watching as the main character deals with an escalating situation of intimidation featuring two unhinged antagonists. Suddenly, all that work is set aside as Higgins explores a few different tales of confrontations and frustrations, sniffing around for additional themes useful in the pursuit of characterization. “God’s Country” loses focus soon enough, and Higgins is in no mood to maintain a steady pace to the endeavor, almost intentionally pushing away his audience after a set-up that connects as intended. There are some creative choices made here that are difficult to appreciate, but lead Thandiwe Newton works uphill to make her moments count, giving a deeply felt performance in a picture that wavers between searing and slack one too many times. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1994’s “Clerks” had a very appropriate ending, offering a sudden resolution to a crude comedy that was more about scenes than a narrative journey. 2006’s “Clerks II” had a perfect ending, with writer/director Kevin Smith successfully creating a full circle moment for his lead characters, concluding their convenience store odyssey on a bittersweet, borderline ominous note. “Clerks III” is the unexpected third installment of Smith’s study of minimum-wage shenanigans, and it doesn’t really have an ending, reflecting a picture that spends most of the run time trying to understand why it even exists. The helmer wants another bite of the apple, continuing his recent career choice to revisit past glories (2019’s “Jay and Silent Bob Reboot”), but “Clerks III” makes some strange creative moves, including Smith’s decision to turn the feature into a dramedy, looking to mine some emotions while juggling the raunchy humor he’s known for. It’s a deeper, more sensitive “Clerks,” leading to an uneven, somewhat befuddling viewing experience. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com