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      ‘Little Fish’ Review: Do You Remember Love?

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Little Fish’ Review: Do You Remember Love?This sci-fi romance imagines a world with widespread memory loss through the eyes of one couple.Olivia Cooke and Jack O’Connell in “Little Fish.”Credit…IFC FilmsFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETLittle FishDirected by Chad HartiganRomance, Sci-Fi1h 41mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Chad Hartigan’s “Little Fish” is set amid a pandemic. Not the one we’re currently living through, but one that raises many more existential questions. Instead of Covid-19, the film’s fictional world is suffering from NIA (neuroinflammatory affliction), which causes a mysterious, mass memory loss.Hartigan (“Morris From America”) and the screenwriter Mattson Tomlin tell the story of a newlywed couple, Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell), while jumping timelines before and after NIA, including their engagement in the fish section of a pet store. The film may be shortsighted about the global scope of this disease, but the microcosmic focus allows for a much more emotionally devastating film.[embedded content]Once you’re swept up in Emma and Jude’s romance — it’s not hard, even though the montages veer a little too precious — the skimmed-over science matters little. This is sci-fi rooted more in feelings than fact. Its resonance is similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” though it’s arguably antithetical in plot.The weight of the epidemic is felt through Emma and Jude’s small social circle. First, their couple friends Ben and Samantha are affected (Raúl Castillo and the singer Soko, who contributed to the soundtrack). Then Emma’s mother learns she has it. But the real gut-punch lands when Jude’s memory starts to fade. “They say you can’t forget feelings,” Emma says. But what happens when one party has no recollection of the past that led to falling in love? And if memories shape one’s identity, what does it mean for Emma to continue loving someone who is no longer his original self? The answers are not all there, but the questions keep the film intriguing.Little FishNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ Review: Is This All Just a Simulation?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘A Glitch in the Matrix’ Review: Is This All Just a Simulation?This documentary, from the director of “Room 237,” is a lively yet superficial exploration of the theory that our reality is actually a computer simulation.A still from the documentary “A Glitch in the Matrix.”Credit…MagnoliaFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETA Glitch in the MatrixDirected by Rodney AscherDocumentary1h 48mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In the 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov asserted, not entirely playfully, that “reality” is a word that should only ever have quotation marks around it.Contemporary technology has enabled thinkers to become more elaborate about the nature of the quotation marks. “A Glitch in the Matrix,” directed by Rodney Ascher — who also made “Room 237,” a 2013 film that gave certain Stanley Kubrick enthusiasts a platform to theorize about “The Shining”; many seemed to have too much time on their hands — explores the notion that we’re all living inside a computer simulation.[embedded content]This documentary’s jumping off point is a lecture delivered by the writer Philip K. Dick in France in the 1970s. Dick was a genuine artist, and also lived with mental illness; his pained “revelations” about the nature of his reality are moving to hear. Less rewarding are the self-assured cyber-bromides offered by the billionaire C.E.O. of SpaceX, Elon Musk, who comes off like a dorm-room tech-bro bore. The movie also explores how this idea has manifested in popular culture, hardly limited to the “Matrix” franchise.But “A Glitch” wades only shin-deep into the complex logic that’s attached to this speculation. We’re shown Philosophy 101 stalwarts Plato and Descartes as its pioneers. There’s interview footage with the contemporary philosopher Nick Bostrom, but nothing on his significant forebears W.V. Quine or Alfred North Whitehead.These ideas have consequences, and these days, they’re sometimes dire. Throughout the movie, Ascher threads in a phone interview with a man who came to believe the world depicted in “The Matrix” was genuine. This belief led him to kill his parents. The director edits the material so that, if the viewer doesn’t already know who this individual is, the end of the account plays as a suspense narrative “reveal.” It’s exploitative and opportunistic. But not atypical of the movie’s slick sensory overload, which doesn’t disguise its fundamentally glib approach.A Glitch in the MatrixNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Bliss’ Review: A High Concept, Under-Designed

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Bliss’ Review: A High Concept, Under-DesignedNot even the charisma of Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek could energize this science-fiction film about telekinetic drifters.Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek in “Bliss.”Credit…Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/Amazon StudiosFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET”Bliss”Directed by Mike CahillDrama, Romance, Sci-FiR1h 43mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Greg (Owen Wilson) begins the science-fiction film “Bliss” at the end of his rope. He’s in the middle of a divorce and has just been fired from his job when he meets a mysterious woman at a bar. Her name is Isabel (Salma Hayek), and with a wave of her wrist, she shows Greg that she has a telekinetic ability to manipulate reality.Isabel promises a bewildered Greg that the world he believes to be real is a simulation. They are the only real people among fakes.“Bliss” doesn’t try to poke holes in Isabel’s reality-altering claims; it’s plain that Isabel’s powers have material effects. She shows Greg how to light fire at a distance, how to crumple a car with his mind — and the writer and director Mike Cahill creates practical effects that look real enough to confirm Isabel’s story.[embedded content]Cahill previously explored the idea of multiple universes in his film, “Another Earth,” but in this movie, he flounders with creating a sensory experience to match the story’s cerebral ideas. Greg and Isabel gallivant around a dingy, dark Los Angeles and entertain dreams of the better, cleaner, realer world that lies outside the simulation. But when Cahill gets a chance to show the audience what that true home might look like, it’s as color-corrected, underlit and under-designed as the reality they abandoned.There may be a way to justify the shoddiness of the movie’s images with a high-concept explanation — maybe it’s intentional that no matter what reality Greg and Isabel occupy, it looks grubby, flimsy and fake. But “Bliss” fails to engage the senses, resulting in cinematic disappointment.BlissRated R for drug use as a metaphor, language and brief sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Amazon.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Rams’ Review: Ailing Sheep and Quirky Characters

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Rams’ Review: Ailing Sheep and Quirky CharactersThis comedy-drama starring Sam Neill, Michael Caton and Miranda Richardson depicts a catastrophe for a farming community in Western Australia.Sam Neill in “Rams.”Credit…Samuel Goldwyn FilmsFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET”Rams”Directed by Jeremy SimsAdventure, Comedy, DramaPG-131h 58mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The rough, dirty life of Australian sheep farmers would seem an unlikely topic to yield much in the way of cinematic lyricism. Especially in a narrative involving sheep actually dying of a devastating disease. Nevertheless, “Rams,” rooted in a 2016 Icelandic movie of the same name, has its pastoral moments (mostly in its breathtaking views of Western Australian landscapes), not to mention raucous comedy.The screenwriter Jules Duncan’s narrative, given a hemispheric switch from the Grimur Hákonarson original, is not generically unfamiliar. It’s a story of brothers at odds who are forced, after much resistance, to become brothers in arms.Colin (Sam Neill), a taciturn type, shares land but not much else with his older brother, Les (Michael Caton), an angry type who’s more voluble than Colin only in that he likes to cuss people out. They live and work on two adjacent plots, which were once owned as one by their father. Their rams are of a special breed and, as a contest at the movie’s opening attests, are invariably the envy of the region.[embedded content]Colin notices a problem with one of the prize specimens. A friendly local veterinarian (Miranda Richardson) confirms that there’s a rare but catastrophic disease at work. All the ovine beasts in the vicinity have to be liquidated, and the area quarantined for a couple of years.Colin isn’t having it, and he secretes a few sheep in his house. Soon Les, with whom he hasn’t spoken in decades, gets wind of this — literally, as the odor increasingly attaches itself to and wafts from Colin’s place. Much of the movie’s comedy derives from Colin’s futile efforts to keep his animals hidden. And his new alliance with Les comes from what they need to do to keep those beasts alive.Directed with a genial breeziness by Jeremy Sims, the movie negotiates emotional downshift and uplift with confidence. Some of the characterizations are unpredictably quirky — Les’s enthusiasm for the 1970s hard rock group Humble Pie is unexpected. The main pleasures of “Rams,” though, come from the watching the three veteran lead actors play their eccentricities out.RamsRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Falling’ Review: Father and Son Reunion

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘Falling’ Review: Father and Son ReunionViggo Mortensen writes, directs and stars in this lacerating drama about a son dealing with his father’s mental decline.Lance Henriksen and Viggo Mortensen in “Falling.”Credit…Brendan Adam-Zwelling/Perceval Pictures/Quiver DistributionFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETFallingNYT Critic’s PickDirected by Viggo MortensenDramaR1h 52mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.The dementia drama is on something of an upswing, and recently actors like Anthony Hopkins, Bruce Dern and Javier Bardem have joined the growing ranks of performers eager to portray a fragmenting mind.Of these, Lance Henriksen’s work in “Falling” might be the most brutally demanding, and the hardest to watch. As the foul-tempered, bigoted Willis, the actor is a weeping wound of intolerance and invective. Fully committing to dialogue rarely heard outside of scabrous comedies, Henriksen is the incendiary heart of a movie that ultimately proves more involving — and rather more complicated — than we expect.We meet Willis during a tantrum on an airplane. His middle-aged son, John (Viggo Mortensen, in his writing and directing debut) is bringing him to Los Angeles to house-hunt. Willis, no longer able to manage his beloved farm in upstate New York, has reluctantly agreed to move closer to John and John’s sister, Sarah (Laura Linney). In the meantime, he will stay with John and his husband, Eric (Terry Chen), and their young daughter (Gabby Velis). Brace for the homophobic slurs.[embedded content]Extensive flashbacks reveal that Willis has always had a mean streak (“I’m sorry I brought you into this world, so you could die,” are some of his earliest words to the infant John), but illness and the early stages of senility have made him monstrous. Somehow, though, Henriksen lets us see the loneliness and fear that gnaw at the edges of Willis’s anger — and help explain why John responds to his father’s abuse with such calm resignation. The film, though, is not without its comic moments: I’ll go a long way to see David Cronenberg play a proctologist.A small movie with outsized philosophical ambitions, “Falling” doesn’t go down easily. The nuanced performance of the Icelandic actor Sverrir Gudnason, who plays the younger Willis, is crucial, exposing the volatility and subdued menace that has alienated two wives and caused untold damage to his children. Some scenes scrape your senses like sandpaper, while others are so tender they’re almost destabilizing. Together, they shape a picture that’s tragically specific, yet more comfortable with mystery than some viewers might prefer.Though not entirely autobiographical, “Falling” is informed by Mortensen’s memories of caring for several family members stricken by dementia. The result is a movie keenly aware of the effort involved in reconciling the parent we have with the one we might have wished for.FallingRated R for sexism, racism, homophobia and terrible table manners. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity’ Review: Is It Art?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity’ Review: Is It Art?A documentary examines the methods and interests of this Dutch printmaker, who felt his work was also indebted to mathematics.Escher’s “Band of Union,” as seen in “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity,“Credit…Kino LorberFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETM.C. Escher – Journey to InfinityDirected by Robin LutzDocumentary1h 21mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.Providing some orientation for the disorienting work of the Dutch printmaker M.C. Escher (1898-1972), the documentary “M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity” takes its cues from Escher’s writings, which it uses as narration. (Stephen Fry’s voice-over applies an unwarranted grandiosity to these self-effacing musings.)Escher is quoted as saying that he often dreamed of making a film, although he adds, “I would most certainly bore people to death with it.” Whether anyone else, including Escher, would have done a more engaging job is debatable, but this movie, directed by Robin Lutz, offers an only intermittently satisfying look at his interests and methods. Don’t call it art; Escher felt his output hovered between art and mathematics.[embedded content]The film is strongest when it uses animation to illustrate Escher’s ideas, as when it unbends the curves of a lithograph to more clearly show what it depicts: a man in a gallery looking at a picture of the very scene he is in, a perspective repeated endlessly. We learn how Escher applied ideas from the mosaics at the Alhambra in Spain to imagery from the natural world. He describes the associative thinking — his mind jumping from a hexagon to a honeycomb to a bee — that inspired his subject matter and says he feels a kinship to Bach’s use of repetition and variation.Present-day footage of the sites discussed and interviews with Escher’s sons are more perfunctory, as is the commentary from the admiring folk rocker Graham Nash. Escher apparently did not understand why his “cerebral and rationalized” work found favor with the freewheeling 1960s counterculture — which was, in its own blissed-out way, also concerned with infinity.M.C. Escher: Journey to InfinityNot rated. In English, Dutch, Italian and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Malcolm & Marie’ Review: Fight Flub

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Malcolm & Marie’ Review: Fight FlubA gorgeous Hollywood couple has an extended, exhausting argument in this claustrophobic example of pandemic filmmaking from Netflix.John David Washington and Zendaya in “Malcolm & Marie.”Credit…Dominic Miller/NetflixFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETMalcolm & MarieDirected by Sam LevinsonDrama, RomanceR1h 46mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.A movie of dueling monologues and competing grievances, Sam Levinson’s “Malcolm & Marie” traps us inside the luxury rental and dysfunctional relationship of two enormously privileged, fiercely self-involved people.The mood is so depressingly combative that the elation and grace of the opening scene feels like an unfulfilled promise. As the golden beats of James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City” flood the soundtrack, Malcolm (John David Washington), a rising-star filmmaker, dances exuberantly across his living-room. He and his girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya), have just returned from a successful premiere, and he’s high on acclaim and his own virtuosity.His peacocking, however, irritates Marie, who heads for the bathroom in a sulk. A former drug addict whose grueling experiences inspired Malcolm’s film, Marie is about to unload a wealth of resentment on her unsuspecting partner. First, though, she’ll have to listen to him, his joy evaporated, complain about critics who define him by his Blackness — a justifiable loathing of categorization that doesn’t prevent him, later in the film, from singling out one female Los Angeles Times critic for special scorn.That rant, an almost 10-minute scream-and-stomp tirade against, in part, the inadequacies of film criticism, isn’t the movie’s lowest point, only its most exhausting. (In Levinson’s script, the couple’s relationship woes are constantly competing with industry-related whining.) Malcolm may or may not be a megaphone for his director’s personal gripes, but Washington, a charismatically intense and supple performer, is ill-served by speeches that have the cadence and calculation of acting-school exercises.Zendaya, for her part, fares slightly better with a character who is more willing to be vulnerable. When Malcolm cruelly tells Marie she’s not special, listing all the damaged women he has known who could have served as inspiration, she is touchingly wounded. Yet she also senses the insecurities behind his swaggering egotism, smartly pointing out — given his educated, upper-middle-class background — the artifice of his underdog posturing.Fighting the metronomic beats of the movie’s equal-time speeches, Zendaya (who has the advantage of working with the crew and creator of her HBO show, “Euphoria”) allows us to glimpse the suffering that brought Marie to this point, and to this man. And while Marcell Rev’s high-contrast, black-and-white photography is often quite lovely — in one surreal shot, trees outside the home rear up like twisted, fairy-tale villains — only occasionally do his camera movements ease the claustrophobia of the stage-like setting.A stylized stab at pandemic filmmaking, “Malcolm & Marie,” is at once mildly admirable and deeply unlikable. Beneath the film’s Old-Hollywood gleam and self-conscious sniping, serious questions are raised, only to lie fallow. What obligation, if any, does an artist have to their muse? And how do we separate an artist’s work from their ethnicity?“I promise you, nothing productive is going to be said tonight,” Marie says near the beginning of the movie. Sadly, she’s telling the truth.Malcolm & MarieRated R for foul language, crude foreplay and toxic egotism. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Son of the South’ Review: Tale of an Alabama Activist

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Son of the South’ Review: Tale of an Alabama ActivistSometimes absorbing, sometimes mortifyingly tone-deaf, the film dramatizes the memoir of the white civil rights figure Bob Zellner.Lucas Till as Bob Zellner in “Son of the South.”Credit…Vertical EntertainmentFeb. 4, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETSon of the SouthDirected by Barry Alexander BrownBiography, DramaPG-131h 45mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Son of the South” gets off to an appalling start, with a man being dragged by two others, and then a freeze frame, accompanied by a voice-over: “That’s me, Bob Zellner.” As the meme goes, we’re probably wondering how he ended up in this situation — being dragged toward a noose. That Bob is white and not Black is presumably supposed to make the use of this glib and much-parodied device permissible in this context. But given that lynchings have historically been directed by whites against African-Americans, the introduction is mortifyingly tone-deaf.[embedded content]“Five months ago, life was simpler,” Bob explains, in another line so overworked it should have been cut. The screenplay, by the director, Barry Alexander Brown, a longtime editor for Spike Lee, somewhat eases up on the clichés from there. Based on the memoir that Zellner wrote with his fellow civil rights activist Constance Curry, the film tells the story of how Zellner (Lucas Till), the grandson of a Klansman (a late role for Brian Dennehy, who died in April), became an active figure in the civil rights movement in early-1960s Alabama, eventually becoming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s first white field secretary.A biopic that foregrounds the perspective of a white Alabamian — who was treated violently for his activism but could protest from a position of relative safety — yet turns John Lewis (Dexter Darden) and other Black activists (including a love interest played by Lex Scott Davis) into supporting characters is an ideologically fraught proposition in 2021. Accepted on its terms, the film does a reasonably absorbing job of dramatizing how Zellner’s convictions strengthened, pulling him away from the security of inaction.Son of the SouthRated PG-13. Racist violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More