Gillan, Karen (1987- )

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    ‘Next Exit’ Review: End of the Road

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    Two strangers reflect on their lives as they embark on a cross-country drive to join a study involving life after death.In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.Next ExitNot rated. 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Dual’ Review: Seeing Double, Inviting Trouble

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      A woman prepares to battle her clone in Riley Stearns’s imprecise satire that invites questions about the self and then leaves them unexplored.The premise of “Dual,” which hinges on a woman feuding with her clone, feels as if it were cooked up after skimming a book of Jungian psychology. It takes place in a woodland dystopia where cloning is an option for terminal patients seeking to replace themselves. The pair cannot coexist, however; should the sick person recover, he or she must duel the clone to decide who lives on. It’s ego death, literalized.The movie follows Sarah (Karen Gillan), who learns that she suffers from an unidentified, rare and incurable illness. Considering her loved ones, Sarah pays for a clone and begins priming her to fill her shoes. But dual identities are tricky. It turns out that Sarah’s double is less a sponge for her sensibilities than a lovelier, livelier foil, and even once Sarah goes into remission, her boyfriend (Beulah Koale) and mother (Maija Paunio) inexplicably snub her for the substitute.Talk about stellar material for psychotherapy. Yet Sarah — not to mention the movie’s writer and director, Riley Stearns (“The Art of Self-Defense”) — seem nearly indifferent to issues of the self and psyche. Instead, the movie dedicates its run time to Sarah’s training for the obligatory battle against her clone. Aaron Paul, playing Sarah’s solemn and supportive combat coach, offers by far the most effective performance among a cast devoted to deadpan enunciation and blank stares.There is something insincere in this movie’s manner, an aloofness that masquerades as satire but repels inquiry or emotion. “Dual” takes a worthy idea and throws a smoke bomb in its middle, leaving the audience to squint through the haze.DualRated R. She beats herself up. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Bubble’ Review: Swabs, Camera, Action

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      Judd Apatow’s new film is a comedy about actors trying to make a dinosaur movie during the pandemic that plays more like a documentary of actors trying to make a Covid comedy.“The safest place in the world right now is a film set,” an agent (Rob Delaney) tells his actress client Carol (Karen Gillan) to encourage her to join the quarantined production of “Cliff Beasts 6.” “The Bubble,” a new comedy from Judd Apatow, tells the story of how the stars of this apparently long-running dinosaur franchise spent their pandemic while doubling as a sort of documentary about how Apatow, who wrote the screenplay with Pam Brady, spent his.Carol, who skipped “Cliff Beasts 5” and stretched herself by playing a half-Israeli, half-Palestinian space-alien fighter, is being edged out as the series’ youth appeal by a TikTok sensation (Iris Apatow). Their fellow stars and bubble occupants include Keegan-Michael Key as an actor trying to build a lifestyle brand, Leslie Mann and David Duchovny as ex-spouses who can’t keep their hands off each other and Pedro Pascal as a drugged-out playboy with designs on a hotel employee (an underused Maria Bakalova, from the “Borat” sequel).Ask those real-life actors (and these characters) to work together under strict Covid protocols, and it would be hard not to get some laughs. Gillan’s escalating exasperation is especially funny.But elements that have the potential to become running gags — the prospect of forced re-isolation when a crew member tests positive, a rash not of Covid but of the flu, a mysterious security chief (Ross Lee) who uses violence to prevent escapes — either languish or are dropped, as if Apatow simply cut together what he felt were inspired improvisations without regard for flow (or the uncharacteristically cheap-looking visuals). And the Hollywood satire, with Fred Armisen as the Home Depot employee turned Sundance darling hired to direct “Cliff Beasts 6,” is not just safe. It’s airless.The BubbleRated R. Drugs, sex, violence — life on a film set. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Gunpowder Milkshake’ Review: The Ladies Who Punch

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      This neon-lit, female-led Netflix shoot-‘em-up tries way too hard to be cool.At one point in “Gunpowder Milkshake,” Navot Papushado’s slick, homage-heavy Netflix crime picture, Michelle Yeoh has a raucous fist fight with a Russian mobster that culminates in her strangling him to death with a length of steel chain. Now, this is important information, because Yeoh is one of the greatest screen martial artists of all time and, now at 58, is rarely afforded opportunities to pummel bad guys with gratuitous flair. Papushado lets her wreak carnage — alongside the great Angela Bassett, who wields a pair of claw hammers — and for that we can be grateful.I would have liked to have seen an entire movie about Yeoh and Bassett, who play the Librarians, assassins who operate a space that serves as both a sanctuary and an armory for others in the profession. The two are infinitely more interesting than the actual hero of the film, a young assassin named Sam (Karen Gillan) who finds herself embroiled in an elaborate kidnapping plot that involves a shadowy underground crime syndicate known as the Firm. Gillan, blithely quipping as she dispatches waves of anonymous henchmen, seems totally flat in comparison to the magnetic stars with whom she shares the screen.Papushado, who garnered acclaim as a co-director of the blackly comic thriller “Big Bad Wolves,” is clearly a movie buff, and “Gunpowder Milkshake” feels like a composite of cinephile-friendly references. The splashy, neon-hued aesthetic draws from Michael Mann’s “Thief” and Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive,” while the sprawling, complexly choreographed action sequences riff on the Hong Kong shoot-‘em-ups of the 1980s and ’90s, chiefly John Woo’s “The Killer” and Johnnie To’s “Running Out of Time.” Perhaps unavoidably, thanks to its real-time plotting and complicated underworld mythology, it feels strikingly similar to “John Wick.”The filmmaking favors the kinds of showy stylistic flourishes — slow motion dollies, split diopter shots — that, when used tastefully, can make action dazzle, as in the films of Brian De Palma. But Papushado’s flamboyance feels cocky and indiscriminate, as if he’s simply trying really hard to make every image seem cool. While this may guarantee the movie a long Twitter afterlife through GIFs and screenshots, it doesn’t make for particularly savvy or sophisticated cinema.Gunpowder MilkshakeRated R for graphic violence and some inappropriate language. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More