SYNOPSIS: In “Caught Stealing,” a new dark comedy from director Darren Aronofsky, and now playing in theatres, Austin Butler plays Hank, a bartender whose life is turned upside down when he agrees to look after his neighbor’s cat. Drawn into the soft underbelly of 1990s era New York City, Hank finds himself fighting for his life (and the cat’s well-being) at the hands of various gangsters who believe he has something they want. “These guys you’re messed up with,” says Detective Roman (Regina King), “they’re scary monsters.”
CAST: Austin Butler, Regina King, Zoë Kravitz, Matt Smith, Liev Schreiber, Vincent D’Onofrio, Griffin Dunne, Bad Bunny, Carol Kane. Directed by Darren Aronofsky.
REVIEW: “Caught Stealing” is a departure for director Darren Aronofsky. His movies have essayed everything from addiction and apocalypses to isolation and psychological turmoil, and while many of them, like “Black Swan,” “The Wrestler,” “The Whale,” and “Requiem for a Dream,” have been critical and commercial hits, they haven’t been what you would call crowd-pleasers.
His latest film, “Caught Stealing,” starring Austin Butler as a bartender who gets drawn into the criminal underworld of Giuliani-era New York, however, is a crowd-pleaser, but only in the most Aronofsky-esque of ways.
A violent, dark comedy that plays like a cross between Guy Ritchie’s quirky criminal dramas and the Kafkaesque absurdity of “After Hours,” “Caught Stealing” is an adrenalized, twisty trip typical of the genre, but seen through Aronofsky’s edgy lens.
Hank, the charming bartender played by Butler, is not your genre typical everyman who gets in over his head. Aronofsky and screenwriter Charlie Huston, who adapted his own 2004 novel, give Hank layers. He’s a wild child who dances on pool tables and greets the day with a Miller Light. Tormented by nightmares of an alcohol fueled accident that took the life of his best friend, he repeatedly wakes up in a sweat. As his situation spirals out of control his survival is driven by a mix of fear and desperation.
So, he’s the hero, but in true Aronofsky fashion, he’s a morally ambiguous one whose quest for survival comes with a high body count and a trail of destruction. He may not be as relatable as “After Hours’” Paul Hackett, played by Griffin Dunne, who makes an appearance here as coke snorting dive bar owner Paul, but the charismatic Butler keeps him compelling with a combo of vulnerability and steeliness.
Aronofsky populates the rest of the story with a variety of colorful characters, like observant-but-deadly Jewish mobsters Lipa and Shmully (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D’Onofrio), a throwback punk rocker (Matt Smith), gangster Colorado (Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny) and no-nonsense cop Elise Roman (Regina King), but this is Butler’s show.
“Caught Stealing” has the character complexity of an Aronofsky film, but it’s way more fun than he usually has on screen.
SYNOPSIS: Set in a small, dusty New Mexico town, the satirical neo-Western “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal and now playing in theatres, sees a humiliated man pushed to extremes in the early days of the pandemic.
CAST: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Deirdre O’Connell, Micheal Ward, Austin Butler, and Emma Stone. Written and directed by Ari Aster.
REVIEW: No one will accuse writer-director Ari Aster of a lack of ambition. “Eddington” throws a handful of genres—neo-Western, political satire, dark comedy, and thriller—into a blender to tell a chaotic story of the early pandemic era. At 145 minutes Aster digs deep into a specific time in the summer of 2020 when the world was turned up-side down by COVID, social distancing, George Soros conspiracy theories, Bitcoin, post truth and any other number of hot button topics. It was a time of ideological whiplash that Aster essays in a film that addresses those powder-keg topics without completely lighting the fuse.
Joaquin Phoenix is Joe Cross, sheriff of the sleepy little town of Eddington, New Mexico and husband to Louise (Emma Stone), a complex woman who suffers from anxiety. Her fragile mental state is exacerbated by her mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell), a conspiracy obsessed who never met a bit of misinformation she couldn’t embrace.
Joe’s anti-mask stance—”There’s no COVID-19 in Eddington,” he says—puts him in conflict with Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), Eddington’s incumbent mayor now running for re-election.
As outside influences take hold in Eddington, anti-racist protests break out on their lone main drag in response to the death of George Floyd, and calls to de-fund the police ring in Joe’s ears.
As Joe and Ted’s personal and professional animosities grow, the sheriff takes matters into his own hands and announces his bid to run for mayor. With slogans like “Joe Cross for Air! Joe Cross for Mayor!” and “Try No Corruption for a Change,” Joe’s run at public office leads him to down a dangerous and deadly path.
The action described above plays out against a background of news and social media reports of the turbulent social, political, and economic climate that were the earmarks of the era, adding to the film’s unsettled feel.
Unlike most Westerns, even recent neo-Westerns, this isn’t a story of good guys vs. bad guys. In “Eddington,” everyone is morally ambiguous, and while you may like some characters over others, all are damaged, driven by ego, selfishness, greed or ideology.
As Sheriff Joe, Phoenix is a weak man in a job that requires strength and decisiveness, qualities that seem foreign to him until he is pushed up against a wall. A flip on the usual, stoic main figure in a typical Western, this is a guy whose character flaws make up his character. Phoenix isn’t afraid to make him pathetic, and in doing so, delivers another interesting, edgy performance. He’s a walking metaphor, an emasculated man emblematic of the fears and concerns that defined the uncertain, divisive summer of 2020.
He’s a complex guy, an attribute that can’t be said of any of the film’s other characters.
As the smooth-talking mayor, Pascal’s laid-back performance is an antidote to the film’s intensity, but the character doesn’t give him much room to maneuver. Ditto Emma Stone, whose limited screen time reveals a committed performance but little else.
On the plus side, “Eddington” is a confrontational experience, a provocative recreation of the unsettling chaos of the pandemic years and its effect on humanity. On the debit side of the leger, Aster’s reluctance to dig beneath the film’s unsettled surface puts a dull edge on the film’s satire.
LOGLINE: The 1960s set “The Bikeriders,” a new drama starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler and Tom Hardy, and now playing in theatres, is about the rise and descent into lawlessness of The Vandals, a motorcycle club founded as a surrogate family for its members.
CAST: Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, and Norman Reedus. Written and directed by Jeff Nichols.
REVIEW: “The Bikeriders,” based on a 1967 photo-book of the same name by Danny Lyon, wants to be an ode to individuality, but lacks the grit and spirit of rebellion required to feel authentic. It does do a good job of essaying the evolution of motorcycle clubs from groups of outsiders who didn’t belong anywhere—except with one another—their loyalty and camaraderie, to criminal organizations that used fear and illegality as currency.
As a timeline of how male bonding turned toxic within this subculture, the sociological history lesson is interesting, but director Jeff Nichols allows the biker aesthetic and posturing to overshadow the nitty gritty of biker gang life. It’s more effective in its portrayal of how this shift in culture affects the leader of the gang, Johnny, played by Tom Hardy. He becomes a tragic figure when he realizes his club is out of control, and legacy is not what he intended.
Using the chatty narration of Jodie Comer as Kathy, wife of the sensitive but rebellious rider Benny (Austin Butler), as a framework, Nichols injects a different and welcome point-of-view to the story. Biker movies often treat female characters as afterthoughts, but Kathy is the hub from which the story emanates. This is essentially a love story, a story of the platonic love between the bikers, and Kathy’s almost unquestioning love of wild child Benny. It’s a showcase for Comer and her plain-spoken mid-western accent, allowing the “Killing Eve” star to reveal the personality layers of someone who says, wistfully, “I used to be respectable.”
The episodic “The Bikeriders” plays it by the rules to tell a story about people who don’t.
After 2021’s “Dune” was relegated to the small screen in the wake of pandemic related theatre closings, this weekend, the long awaited “Dune Part 2” brings the thunder, debuting on screens suitable for the story’s epic scale. The sci fi saga starring, well, almost everyone, in a sprawling cast headed by Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and the giant sandworms who are literally and figuratively the film’s biggest stars, will play exclusively in theatres.
Wrestling novelist Frank Herbert’s expansive story of a psychedelic drug called Spice and reluctant messiah Paul Atreides, into a comprehensible movie has confounded filmmakers for decades. Most notably, David Lynch adapted the 1965 novel into a noble 1984 failure. The story is complex, with many characters and big, brainy concepts.
As a result, the spectacle of “Part 2,” on its own, isn’t for casual viewers. The last movie ended with Fremen warrior Chani (Zendaya) saying “This is only the beginning,” which means the new film isn’t a sequel, or a reboot. It’s a continuation, the second part of the story director Denis Villeneuve began in 2021, and to understand the story, you have to see the first film.
Equal parts action packed and philosophical, “Part Two” picks up where “Dune” left off. Set 8,000 years in the future, Atreides (Chalamet) son of an aristocratic family, and once heir to the planet of Arrakis, a desolate, almost inhabitable place, but rich in the lucrative, and psychedelic Spice, that is home to the Indigenous Fremen people.
Betrayed by Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), the former steward of Arrakis, the family is all but wiped out, with Atreides and his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), left in the desert to die. If they are to survive it will be with the help of the Fremen—including Chani and Stilgar (Javier Bardem), leader of the Fremen tribe at Sietch Tabr—who call Atreides “The Chosen One” and believe he is a prophet with the power to bring peace to their world.
“Part 2” sees Atreides embedded with the Fremin in a mission of revenge against the House Harkonnen, the treacherous Baron, his sinister nephews, the brutish Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) and Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who Atreides holds responsible for the death of his father. Fighting gallantly alongside the Fremin, he’s mostly unconcerned with their belief that he is their messiah. His feelings for Chanti and his thirst for creating a conflict that will place him within striking distance of Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken), his daughter Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), and Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother and the Emperor’s Truthsayer, Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling), are top of mind.
As the reckoning approaches, Atreides is plagued by terrible visions of the future.
There is so much more, but that is essentially the peg on which Villeneuve hangs his epic vision of Herbert’s tale. The director gives voice to the author’s study of vengeance, spirituality, fanaticism, liberation and conquest, articulating the story’s humanist nuances in the framework of a film that can only be described as a spectacle. It’s a bigger, wilder vision, an answer to the stately elegance of the first film.
The action sequences fill the screen. Villeneuve overwhelms the senses with grand images of desert warfare and Atreides sand surfing courtesy of giant “grandfather sand worms.” It’s blockbuster filmmaking writ large, exciting and laced with high stakes. Perfect for IMAX screens.
But the action sequences wouldn’t mean much if the film’s world building and characters didn’t set the stage. Arrakis is a sand swept hell, so immersive you’ll think you have sand in your underpants by the time the end credits roll. The vision of the planet is aided considerably by Greig Fraser’s gorgeous cinematography.
The devil, though, is in the details. On an arid planet, the Fremin syphon water from the bodies of their vanquished enemies to use in their cooling systems. Minutiae like this, and more, give the story depth, creating an exciting world for the characters to inhabit.
The stacked cast of a-listers deliver. Chalamet’s character comes of age on his hero’s journey, shedding any boyish traits Atreides may have had, to become a worm riding warrior and leader of armies.
Also making a mark is Butler as the eyebrow-challenged Feyd-Rautha (the part played by Sting in the Lynch’s adaptation). He maintains the rock star swagger of Elvis, his best-known role, but brings the danger as the sadistic nephew and heir.
It’s good stuff that showcases Villeneuve prowess, even if it feels rushed in its last act.
What Villeneuve isn’t good at, are endings. His first “Dune” film left audiences hanging, finishing up with no definitive ending. The end of “Dune Part 2” doesn’t dangle in quite the same way, but tensions are still unfolding as the end credits roll. Looks like we’ll have a “Part 3” coming in a couple years.
Despite the open-ended conclusion, however, “Dune Part 2,” with its stunning visuals, deep emotional core and good performances, suggests “Part 3” will be worth the wait.
“Elvis,” the new King of Rock ‘n Roll biopic from maximalist director Baz Luhrmann, begins with a sparkling, bedazzled Warner Bros logo and gets flashier and gaudier from there.
The movie is told from the point of view of Elvis’s (Austin Butler) manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks under an inch or two of makeup), a huckster with a flair for spotting talent and a gift for manipulation.
Working on the carnival circuit taught Parker that a great act “gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure if they should enjoy,” a standard the early, hip-shaking Elvis met and exceeded.
Their partnership is one of the best known, and well documented success stories of the twentieth century. For twenty years, through the birth of rock ‘n roll of the late 1950s and the cheesy Hollywood years to the legendary 1968 Comeback Special and the Las Vegas rise and fall, Elvis and the Colonel shimmied and shook their way to the top of the charts and into the history books.
“Elvis” covers a lot of ground. From young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) discovering his love of music from the Black rhythm and blues artists and Mississippi church music he absorbed as a kid to his final white jumpsuit days in Vegas, Luhrmann shakes, rattles and rolls throughout in a blur of images and spectacular sound design.
It entertains the eye but feels akin to skipping a stone on a lake. If you hold the stone just right and throw it across the still water at the correct angle, it will skim along for what seems like forever without ever piercing the surface.
“Elvis” is a great looking movie. A pop art explosion that vividly essays the story’s various time frames and styles, it makes an impact visually and sonically. Unfortunately, Luhrmann is content to make your eyeballs dance, your gold TCB chains rattle and simply skim across the surface.
We do learn that Elvis was the sum of his country music and R’n’B experiences and influences, was fueled by the adoration of his audience and aware of the social change of the 1960s, but there is no excavation, no real exploration of what made the singer or his manager actually tick. It may seem fitting that a movie about a man who drove pink Cadillacs and wore phoenix embroidered jumpsuits and capes is over-the-top, but those images are so woven into the fabric of popular culture already that this feels clichéd, more like greatest hits album than a biography.
Butler is a charismatic performer, playing Elvis through several stages of his life, and despite the superficiality of the storytelling hands in a rounded performance that transcends impersonation of a man who spawned a generation (or two) of impersonators.
It’s rare to see Hanks play a character with no redeeming qualities. “I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” he says, “and yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story.” His take on Colonel Parker grates, with the theatrical Dutch accent and imperious, manipulative manner, he is certainly the villain of the piece. He’s a pantomime of the big, bad music manager, one who saw his client as a musical ATM machine and little more.
By the time the end credits roll “Elvis” emerges as an idealized look at the boy from Tupelo who became the King by paying tribute to the power of the music that made a legend.
I went to see “Pulp Fiction” on its October 1994 opening weekend at a 2:30 pm screening. I arrived at 2:15 pm, stood in line and waited. And waited. The shows were delayed because audiences weren’t leaving after the credits. They were sitting in their seats talking about what they had just seen. Months of hype in the newspapers and on shows like “Entertainment Tonight” ignited curiosity and the movie delivered, using a broken timeline, ultra-violence and witty dialogue to bend the idea of what a movie could be. Just after 3 pm the movie finally started. Later, mind blown, I didn’t stick around the theatre to discuss the movie with anyone. I ran to the box office, bought a ticket for the next screening and got back in line.
Quentin Tarantino’s new film, “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood,” doesn’t have quite the same impact as “Pulp Fiction” but it digs deeper, expanding on themes the director has spent a career exploring. “Pulp Fiction” was a seismic shift, a movie changed the face of 1990s cinema, while “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is an allegory for changing times.
As the title would suggest “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” has dark fairy tale elements. Set in sun dappled 1969 Los Angeles, it focusses on two almost down-and-outers, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) a former series star now reduced to doing episodic television—“It’s official old buddy. I’m a has-been.”—and stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), a self-described “old cowboy.” Both are on a race to the bottom in an industry they don’t understand anymore.
Next to Dalton’s luxury Cielo Drive home is a mansion owned by starlet Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and director Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha), party place to L.A. luminaries like heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson) and hairdresser to the stars Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch). As Dalton and Booth’s Hollywood era comes to a close, another is blossoming next door and further on down the road at Manson Family HQ and former western movie set Spahn Ranch.
There will be no spoilers here. I can say the various narrative shards dovetail together in a frenzy of grindhouse violence near the end, but “OUAT… IH” isn’t story driven as much as it is a detailed portrait of a time and place, the moment when the sea change was coming. Piece by piece Tarantino weaves together a nostalgic pastiche of b-movie tropes and expertly rendered sights and sounds to create a vivid portrait of a time and place. With the setting established, he plays mix and match, blending fact and fiction, creating his own history that feels like a carefully detailed memory play.
Pitt screaming down Hollywood Boulevard in a powder blue sports car is the essence of what the movie is about. The propulsive energy of Hollywood, dangerous, glamorous with the promise of ending up who knows where. The characters may all be headed for uncertain futures but an air of optimism hangs over the story. Dalton is down on his luck but when he realizes his neighbor is a world-famous director he says, “I could be one pool party away from starring in the next Polanski movie.” He’s a man out of time but still feels there might be a place for him in that world and that is the lifeblood of Hollywood, the city built on dreams.
One such dreamer is Tate. Robbie has a lovely scene as the actress enjoying her own movie in a darkened theatre. It does away with the stylized dialogue Tarantino is known for and instead focusses on the pure joy the character feels at watching her dreams come true on the big screen. It’s a lovely scene that speaks to the excitement of the first blush of success, untouched by cynicism in an increasingly cynical world.
“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” is unique in its feel. Tarantino has always been singular in his filmmaking but this one feels different. It’s clearly rooted in the b-movies that inspire his vision but here he is contemplative, allowing his leads—DiCaprio and Pitt in full-on charismatic mode—to channel and portray the insecurities that accompany uncertainty. The film is specific in its setting but universal in portrayal of how people react to the shifting sands of time. Funny, sad and occasionally outrageous, it’s just like real life as filtered through a camera lens.
