Hustlers

Lorene Scafaria'sHustlers serves up heavy doses of social commentary and feminist homilies as it retells the story of a crew of underemployed pole dancers in post-economic  collapse New York who operate a scheme, directed by the crew's stripper goddess / badass Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), to entice, drug and fleece horny Wall Street traders and bankers to fill the ladies' empty designer purses. Constance Wu (Crazy, Rich Asians) plays Destiny / Dorothy,  the new dancer who is befriended and schooled by Ramona and becomes the crew's CFO. Though Scafaria tries to add layers to the women at the center of this story, the film never moves much beyond its two-dimensional cat-and-mouse construct. Both Ramona and Destiny have children but motherhood is more a device to soften the women than to actually reveal more about their capacities. They talk about their duality more than act within it, I feel, which isn't to say the picture is weak. Its message of empowerment and vindication are welcome, even if the glow fades pretty quickly.

Ad Astra

James Gray's space mission film Ad Astra (Latin for "to the stars") is intriguing because it successfully navigates on two planes -- the planetary exploration plane and the personal, existential plane. And Brad Pitt, in an exceptionally contemplative role, is the agent at the center of both of those stories. Gray, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ethan Gross, has set the action in the "near future," after the moon has been colonized by earthlings and turned into a bit of the Wild West with marauding bands of pirates robbing anyone who happens to wander away from the safe zone. From the moon, Pitt's Maj. Roy McBride hitches a ride to Mars to send a message to his father (Tommy Lee Jones), who captained an exploration to Neptune in search of life. Something has gone wrong with that party, and its cargo of anti-matter is fueling power surges that threaten all life in the solar system. During all of this doom and catastrophe, Pitt's McBride reflects on his interior life, his relationship, actually lack of one, with his father, and anyone else, for that matter. This has left him a highly functional clutch player for the space program but not much else. In this way, the film, which will no doubt remind some viewers of 2001: A Space Odyssey, is less in the mold of Kubrick's space masterpiece and more like last year's First Man, the story of a stony Neil Armstrong's personal quest to set foot on the moon and the human cost required for such a feat.

Fauve

Canadian director Jeremy Comte's disturbing French-language short Fauve follows two boys -- competing alpha males -- playing daring games in the environs of a Quebecois mine until one of them gets stuck in a pit, fun turns to fear and the natural world intrudes abruptly and definitely. The last 5 minutes, filled with expanses of barren grayness, are haunting.

It Chapter 2

The best of Stephen King relies more on the horror of being human than inhuman. The terror of Andy Muschietti's It Chapter Two is homegrown -- crash and slash abuse and neglect and enervating guilt and fear. Yes, there's a toothy clown (Bill Skarsgård) snacking on the children of Derry, Maine, but that's almost secondary to the hurting the townspeople are putting on themselves. Or maybe this hateful clown is feeding the town's nastiness.This message is introduced in Chapter Two with a lamentably tone-deaf gay bashing that opens the film. I found it a perplexing stunner that got me wondering if this is indeed the movie about the scary clown, until he appeared to finish the job the haters began. Yep, this is the place. This misstep along with the film's excessive length and jokiness (provided by Bill Harder and James Ransone) make for a long, strange trip -- and not in a good way.

Celine Dion

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Madre (Mother)

I took a 20-minute break from the hell that is Trump's America to visit the private hell of Madre, in which a Spanish mother gets a call from her 6-year-old son who has been abandoned by his father on a deserted

beach in France. Director Rodrigo Sorogoyen shot the incredible Oscar nom in nearly one single, unbroken take and it's an absolute nightmare. 

Marta Nieto plays the titular mother who unravels before the audience's eyes

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Timothée Chalamet

I'll be presenting a paper on Timothée Chalamet's breakout film Call Me By Your Name (2017) at the Popular Culture in the South con this month. I've analyzed how time is threaded through the film's narrative. For a young actor, Chalamet takes on some exceptionally difficult parts -- most of them with a lot of interior performance -- brooding, uncertainty, self-destruction. I don't know this film, The King, but Joel Edgerton, one of the most interesting writer / director / actors to come along since Mel Gibson, is attached to the picture so I expect it will be serious and well-crafted. Chalamet is also starring in Greta Gerwig's Little Women with Saoirse Ronan and Emma Watson, which will be released around Christmas.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3281548/?ref_=m_nv_sr_1

Gillian Anderson

I read Gillian Anderson will be playing battle-axe Maggie Thatcher on The Crown. That should be something to see. Anderson has been more interesting, at least to me, than her partner in crime solving David Duchovny, who's actually a pretty breezy writer. She's done more interesting films and series and has been nominated for Olivier awards for her stage work. But the real key to Anderson's allure is her being bidialectical, which means that Downton accent she uses in The Fall is authentically hers.

Ready or Not

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett borrow a bit of Get Out's relational paranoia and class warfare and mixes them with heaping helpings of survivalist lunacy in Ready or Not. Aussie actress Samara Weaving's Grace must outrun her cursed in-laws on her wedding night as the family of blue blood game board heirs hunt the new bride in their cavernous mansion with pistols and crossbows, thwarted not only by young Grace's chutzpah but their own familial dysfunction. Blood flows freely. It's a gas!

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark

André Øvredal's Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark is a fairly solid creepy horror film with serviceable acting from its casts but production design befitting a stronger story. Zoe Margaret Colletti is a commendable lead as the motherless child Stella who finds a haunted book that scripts and executes all who trouble it. The story shimmers with Stephen King-like weirdness and will certainly strike some viewers as a bit of a retread of earlier (and better) movies. Still, the young actors who fall victim to the unhappy spirit's scorn are believably freaked out by the intrepid creatures (no doubt courtesy of producer Guillermo del Toro's imagination) who come for them.

Good Boys

 

Gene Stupnitsky's Good Boys features a trio of tweens stumbling through some fairly clever writing and robbing a film that should be more than outrageous of valuable cinematic weight. It feels gimmicky and exploitative. As talented as Jacob Tremblay (Room) is, his co-stars -- Keith L. Williams and Brady Noon -- are cute and energetic but only adequate line deliverers and in some scenes so off-key and out of synch it's painful. The plot is of little consequence but involves a kissing party to which Tremblay's Max has been invited and further to which his lifelong buds Lucas and Thor will accompany him as wing men IF they can replace Dad's destroyed drone and score some MDMA for a duo of teenage girls. The film was backed by the Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg stable of producers, which means the picture is verbose and profane and occasionally brilliantly. To that point, listening to 12-year-olds dropping f-bombs non-stop is fleetingly entertaining, pour moi, if you'll pardon my French. The deeper into the picture the more grating it becomes and one ends up feeling sorry for these kids who probably understood little about what they were saying and less about the marital aids they were juggling throughout.