*/****starring George Clooney, Adam Sandler, Riley Keough, Laura Dernwritten by Noah Baumbach & Emily Mortimerdirected by Noah Baumbach by Walter Chaw Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly wants to be two things. It wants to be Cinema Paradiso, and it wants to be George Clooney’s All That Jazz–a hagiography for the temple of film on the one hand, a self-lacerating reflection on the cost of stardom on the other. A tightrope, in other words, requiring an abiding, all-consuming, some might even say sl...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
***/****starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Luke Grimes, Emma Stonewritten and directed by Ari Aster by Walter Chaw The problem I have with Ari Aster movies is that Ari Aster is contemptuous of his characters. He gives them anxieties he then maximalizes into catastrophes so extreme they’re funny. (How else does a cake allergy turn into a telephone-pole beheading?) And once he creates an unbearable situation, he scoffs. It’s tempting to draw a corollary between his work and that of pos...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
*½/****starring Allison Williams, Violet McGraw, Jenna Davis, Jemaine Clementwritten and directed by Gerald Johnstone by Walter Chaw Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN 2.0 feels like one of those 1980s teensploitation sci-fi adventure flicks. D.A.R.Y.L., for instance–D.A.R.Y.L. exactly, let’s face it. Given that D.A.R.Y.L. hardly set the world on fire, this does not bode well for M3GAN 2.0. To its credit, it takes a wild swing at relevance, M3GAN 2.0 does, in a way that’s at complete odds with...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
****/****starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoeinspired by the screenplay Nosferatu by Henrik Gallen and the novel Dracula by Bram Stokerwritten for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers by Walter Chaw The hysteric female can be viewed as a ‘flipped’ version of the male paranoiac; while the male represses his fears about the nature of his sexuality, the female’s hysterics seem to circle around her inability to direct her sexuality as she pleases, or he...| FILM FREAK CENTRAL
