‘Judas and the Black Messiah’ is the urgent black story of 2020

Posted on February 24, 2021 by reelentropy
Yeah, I know it’s 2021, but the copyright for this movie is 2020. It was delayed, you know why. Images courtesy Warner Bros.

9/10 Three and a half years after the Charlottesville rally, after a year of grotesque displays of police violence, Judas and the Black Messiah is the story that puts these things in context, and it’s a fine film.

Chicago, 1968- Professional criminal Bill O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) is caught red-handed stealing a car and impersonating a federal officer. Instead of sending him to prison, real FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) sets him up as an informant. O’Neal spends a year or so spying for Mitchell on the Illinois Black Panther party and its chairman, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), eventually playing a key role in Hampton’s assassination.

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A24 manufactures another masterpiece in ‘Saint Maud’

Posted on February 19, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy A24.

9/10 When theaters closed last March and everything that was about to release was delayed, the biggest pain point for me was Saint Maud, set for an April 10, 2020 release and positioned as A24’s next horror masterwork. Now, almost a year after the bomb dropped, Maud has finally proceeded into American theaters, and she doesn’t disappoint. 

On the English coastline, a palliative care nurse who introduces herself as Maud (Morfydd Clark) begins working with Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a moderately famous American dancer dying of lymphoma. Maud had accidentally killed a patient when working at a hospital, after which she moved to private care and converted to Catholicism – she seems to have taken the name “Maud” as part of her conversion. Deeply traumatized, profoundly isolated and in constant stomach pain, Maud sinks rapidly into her mental and physical health crises, interpreting all her symptoms as communications from God and harming herself as a way to become closer to him. She determines to save the soul of Amanda, who is an atheist.

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‘Little Things’ great but eclipsed by classics

Posted on February 8, 2021 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

8/10 Warner Bros.’ moody new noir The Little Things is primarily being dismissed as too close to the 1995 classic Seven, and, yeah. That’s pretty much all there is to say. It’s a beat-for-beat remake of Seven with a significant helping of themes and imagery lifted from 2013’s Prisoners, and those are both far superior movies that you should watch instead. The Little Things is still quite good, though.

October 1990, California- A killer of women stalks Los Angeles County, and police are at a loss for suspects. Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Joe “Deke” Deacon (Denzel Washington) makes the long drive from Bakersfield to Los Angeles to pick up evidence, bloody shoes being tested for DNA in a Kern County case. Deke left the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department acrimoniously five years ago, and there is friction between him and the department. Spending the night, LASD Det. Sgt. Jimmy Baxter (Rami Malek), Deacon’s replacement on the force, invites him to a fresh murder scene. The two become convinced that this murder is connected not only to the current spat of killings, but the case that caused Deacon to leave Los Angeles, eventually settling on Albert Leonard Sparma (Jared Leto) as a primary suspect.

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On ‘Tenet,’ ‘Fury Road’ and the end of blockbusters

Posted on January 29, 2021 by reelentropy
Image courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Tenet came out on DVD Dec. 15, 2020, three months and change after its long-delayed theatrical release over Labor Day weekend. It’s still playing in 70 theaters as this is being written, I’m actually of a mind to go see it again, but it had pretty much stopped making money by its eighth weekend. 

I’m used to being one of a small handful of people who sees any given film, it’s true to some extent for almost every movie I see, but I never expected that to be the case for something like Tenet, this $200 million monster with the advertising campaign that lasted more than a year in an age where movies are often cycling completely, from first trailer to release to home media release, within less than a year’s time.

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‘Promising Young Woman’ is not the revenge story you’re looking for

Posted on December 30, 2020 by reelentropy
Images courtesy Focus Features.

3/10 I think we all really needed this. Three years after the Harvey Weinstein saga kicked into gear in October 2017, horrifically realizing the old casting couch, “who’d she blow for that role” stereotypes in a way that reveals what poor taste those jokes were always in, after four years of “grab her by the pussy,” it’s so wonderful to finally get some cinematic catharsis, an extravagant, brutal rape-revenge story in Promising Young Woman.

In the film, Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan) is a formerly promising young woman who dropped out of med school to take care of her friend Nina, who was gang-raped while blackout drunk and harassed off campus by her main assailant’s lawyer when she sought justice. Nina is referred to in the past tense throughout the film, and we’re meant to assume the worst. Thomas spends her weekends going to clubs and pretending to be extremely drunk, intending to lure in an opportunistic man to take her home and try to rape her. She then snaps out of it and…

…gives them a mild talking to. There’s no murdering, no dismemberment, none of that sort of graphic catharsis, she just sort of tells them off and enjoys the reversed power dynamic without actually employing it to any advantage.

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