In Smile, psychiatrist Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is exposed to a smile demon-ghost thing, a tedious and obvious metaphor for post-traumatic stress that causes victims to hallucinate that people are smiling at them before causing them to kill themselves.
Smile is a synthesis of A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Ring and It Follows with some scenes ripped out of a small but terrific horror movie called The Wind. That makes it sound killer, but it isn’t.
It’s interesting to think about the details of Don’t Worry Darling’s fantasy. One of the things that puts Alice Chambers off is realizing every couple has one of a handful of backstories about how they met. The same people who put so much work into perfecting this Stepford Wives environment couldn’t figure out more than three places someone might have had a honeymoon. Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.
4/10 I like Olivia Wilde as an actress. I’ve never met her, but I’m sure she’s a very nice lady.
Now that’s out of the way, Don’t Worry Darling is a lukewarm mess, not terrible, interesting enough to be as bad as it is but not interesting enough to be as dumb as it is. There are some specific stock plot twists that are very difficult to take seriously – like a child’s poorly performed magic trick, everyone’s seen it before. What really amazes about the performance is its naivety and the second-hand embarrassment it conjures. Both the film and the furor surrounding it are revealing about Hollywood social politics and how they unfurl outward into the culture at large. Wilde’s background and personality are deeply entwined with why the movie is the way it is and why it’s being talked about the way it is, so we’re going to get more personal than usual here.
Somewhere in the Sierra Nevada, 1950s- Alice and Jack Chambers (Florence Pugh and Harry Styles) live in marital bliss in a secret nuclear weapons testing industry town to which only married men are recruited and in which an extremely gendered social order is maintained outside the office by the boss, Frank (Chris Pine). As she makes their home never knowing where her food comes from and never able to leave the town, Alice Chambers begins to notice glitches in reality.
8/10 In March, A24 released writer/director/editor/producer Ti West’s X, a time capsule of a slasher film set in 1979 in which amateur pornographers run headfirst into exactly the kind of sadistic murderers who would fill the void pornography was about to leave on the big screen. The film features Mia Goth in dual roles as both the lead character and the elderly Pearl. Days after X started rolling, it was announced that West, Goth and much of the same behind-the-scenes team had, on the same set at mostly the same time, produced another film set in 1918 about Pearl as a teenager. That’s simply titled Pearl, and it came out in September.
Texas, 1918- as the Great War draws to a close and the influenza pandemic chokes domestic life, Pearl (Goth, who also produces), despairs. She knows she has that “X” factor, that she could be a star in those newfangled pictureshows, but even without the pandemic, she’d be stuck on the farm with her abusive mother and infirm father, and she knows when her husband returns from the trenches, she’ll never escape. As she desperately prepares to audition for a Hollywood crew in town, she begins to take her frustration out through compulsive sex and murder.
8/10The Woman King is equal parts a sweeping war epic that actively uses the power of mass media to center black, female and queer stories, a brutal muscle movie and a wet, messy soap opera that lives for drama. It’s an incredibly important work of cinema and culture that is also imminently watchable with all sorts of appeal.
Porto-Novo in present-day Benin, 1823- The Kingdom of Dahomey and the Oyo Empire, from which the Dahomey are rebelling, have begun selling each other’s war captives into slavery in exchange for Portuguese firearms, a suicide pact that will poison both nations to death long before their escalating war. General Nanisca (Viola Davis, who also produces) of the Agojie, the Dahomey’s ferocious female battalion, has just lead a coup to install King Ghezo (John Boyega) as the Dahomey’s new leader in hopes that he will cut off the slave trade, but caught between the Oyo and the Portuguese’ Faustian open offer, he hesitates. Against this backdrop, Nanisca trains a new generation of Agojie for the war effort.
7/10 If you liked Avatar, you’ll love Avatar: The Way of Water, and if you didn’t like Avatar, The Way of Water puts what the original movie is missing onscreen.
More than a decade after the first film, the sky people have returned to Pandora, not for rare metals, but to fully colonize and terraform it into a new home. Former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), who has lived on as a recombinant human/Na’vi hybrid “avatar” and chief of the forest Omaticaya, leads a fierce guerilla resistance, but when it becomes clear the humans are targeting him personally along with his wife and four children, they flee and seek asylum with the Metkayana, a clan of frog Na’vi with webbed limbs and tails who live on the reef. As the Sully family treads lightly while learning the ways of their uneasy new hosts, Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), who was killed in the first film but has returned as an avatar, hunts them through the archipelago, burning as he goes.
Reel Entropy 