Weekend Film Reviews

Disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes has made a few curious decisions throughout her life. The most perplexing may be inviting absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder to make a documentary about her in the 34 days before she went to prison for defrauding investors. Film critic Tim Grierson says the result is “a kind of standoff” between Fielder and Holmes, who have something in common: neither are reliable. Holmes “is someone who is playing with reality and truth in ways that are akin to what Nathan Fielder does” in his own work, Grierson says. 

Critic Alison Willmore says You Can See Everything is the movie of the year. “It also becomes a film about the nature of documentary,” Willmore says. “And about how you get to know someone, and whether you can — by asking them questions and pointing a camera at them — get to a truth.” 

Grierson and Willmore also review Street Fighter, La Bola Negra and Whalefall.

Billionaire tech CEOs are villainized in two big releases this week: The Social Reckoning, a dramatization of Mark Zuckerberg’s showdown with a Facebook whistleblower, and Musk, a documentary about Elon Musk. Critics Amy Nicholson and Katie Walsh say that the films, while informative, turn unpleasant men into unpleasant viewing. Zuckerberg is portrayed before “his bro-y makeover,” Nicholson says, “which is sort of sad for Jeremy Strong, who just plays him as this very uptight, solemn, serious, dour, humorless, miserable little man.” According to Walsh, Musk is similarly grating in Musk, but she argues the film has at least some merit. “I do think it’s important that people know how much power he has,” Walsh says. “And how dumb he is.”   

Nicholson and Walsh also review Misty Green and Fjord.

It took world-class makeup and prosthetics to turn Tom Cruise into Digger Rockwell, the titular star of Alejandro Iñáritu’s climate apocalypse satire Digger – even though Rockwell happens to be roughly as old as Cruise is in real life. The actor’s dramatic physical transformation is one of many heightened choices in the film, which, according to critic Christy Lemire, makes its arguments too loudly for them to land. “It is frantic, it is shrieky, it is incessantly pitched at the same level for nearly all of its two-hour running time,” Lemire says. 

“The approach is let’s turn everything to 11 – in fact, let’s turn everything to 12 or 13,”  says critic Tim Grierson. “It’s a movie that’s really hard to sit through.” 

Lemire and Grierson also review Verity, The Last First: Winter K2, and Atonement.

NBC’s hidden camera series, To Catch a Predator, transfixed audiences in the early 2000s. Host Chris Hansen baited suspected child predators with actors playing minors, then intervened at the last second with police. A new film, Primetime, asks whether this was moral. “After the screening, I couldn’t get home fast enough to take a shower,” says Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City. “But Robert Pattinson is excellent” as Hansen. Alison Willmore, film critic for New York magazine, was more impressed by supporting performances from Merritt Wever, as the show’s producer, and Skyler Gisondo, as one of the actors hired to bait potential predators. They’re “terrific as characters who are much more conflicted, and also tragic, in getting swept up in this really nightmarish production.”

Edwards and Willmore also review Heart of the Beast, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!

What do you know about concrete? Not much, reckons John Wilson, the deliciously awkward filmmaker behind the HBO series How To with John Wilson. That show is an exercise in misdirection: each episode begins as a tutorial, narrated by Wilson, on how to complete a certain task — before meandering into unexpected territory. In keeping with that model, his new film, The History of Concrete, is about more than the building material. “It’s also about the impermanence of things,” says film critic Alonso Duralde. “How nothing lasts forever – certainly not concrete.” Wilson “understands that the mundane isn’t really mundane, it’s part of all our lives,” says film critic Dave White. “His sense of humor sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’re feeling something.” 

Duralde and White also review Resident Evil, The Weight and The Condor Daughter. 

There’s no outrunning it. Anyone writing a monster movie must eventually decide whether or not they’re going to show their monster. As Steven Spielberg demonstrated in Jaws, it’s usually more frightening to hide the face of the beast. But if the credits roll and it’s still hidden, the audience is going to be mad. In Hope, an alien movie set just south of the Korean DMZ, director Na Hong-Jin puts off the inevitable for more than 60 minutes as an anonymous force wreaks havoc on a sleepy harbor town. “The first hour of this movie when we don’t see the monster is incredibly intense and incredibly involving,” but “the CG doesn’t hold up” when the monster finally arrives, says William Bibbiani, film critic for The Wrap. Witney Seibold, senior writer at SlashFilm, says the visual effects looked “about 30 years old,” which made it feel like a B movie. “For me, that worked,” Seibold says. “But I could see how it could also be very, very distracting.”

Bibbiani and Seibold also review Practical Magic 2, The Uprising and Black Zombie.

Forget “6-7.” In 1990s Middletown, New York, a high school class figured out how to really drive the adults crazy: exposing a toxic waste scandal in their backyard. A new documentary, Teenage Wasteland, tells the true story of a group of students that stumbled onto a major scoop. To uncover the truth, they followed the money, grilled corrupt local officials and got on the wrong side of the mob. Angelica Jade Bastién, film critic for New York magazine, says the film makes a “beautiful argument” for “civic courage” — that “we should look at the world with curious eyes and not just swallow the mistruths or outright lies of the broken governments we live under.” Katie Walsh, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and the Tribune News Service, says the movie is more 1990s nostalgia trip than heart-pounding thriller. “It is really inspiring to think about how a teacher empowers them to just go out and start asking questions," she says. 

Bastién and Walsh also review Onslaught, The Sun Never Sets, and Boorman and the Devil.

After decades of unsuccessful attempts to catch Roadrunner using anvils, jet packs, and rockets strapped to roller skates, Wile E. Coyote (caninus litigious) has a new weapon in his arsenal: #BigLaw. But Mr. Coyote is now directing his ire toward the Acme Corporation, which manufactures said devices that always seem to literally blow up in his face. Shawn Edwards, film critic at Fox4 News in Kansas City, says this movie couldn’t have come out at a better time. “Is this movie about Acme, or is this movie about Amazon? I mean, you really can’t tell the difference,” Edwards says. “It’s fun, it’s lively, the animation works, and it totally pulls you into that world.”

“I think it is okay, but I don’t love it,” says Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International. “The live-action actors, Will Forte, and the evil lawyer for the Acme Corporation who's played by John Cena, they're not quite as fun as their animated co-stars,” Grierson says. “The movie eventually becomes kind of a conspiracy/thriller thing where they try to actually prove that Acme's products are ineffective. I think that plot doesn't work so well.”

Edwards and Grierson also review The Dog Stars, Idiots, Buddy, and remember actor Tim Curry, who died this week at the age of 80.

It’s rarely a good sign if you’ve devoted hours to a horror franchise and you still aren’t sure what it’s about. But film critic Alonso Duralde gave it a try with Insidious: Out of The Further. “I’ve seen five of the six Insidious movies, and I feel like I still couldn’t pass a pop quiz about what ‘The Further’ is and how it works,” says Duralde, the co-host of the podcast Linoleum Knife. “It is a kind of twisted purgatory for people who aren’t able to move on to whatever the next plane of existence is, and it is constantly causing trouble for the protagonists of the Insidious movies.” But Duralde’s Linoleum Knife co-host Dave White says that actually works in this latest installment’s favor. “People might wonder, ‘How do I drop into a Part 6 of something?’ The film succeeds best, I think, in the earlier acts where the confusion is part of the terror,” White says. “We don’t know why this is happening to these people, we don’t know what’s coming next, and that provides scenes of genuine fright.”

Duralde and White also review It Ends, Franz, and American Doctor.

There are a few indispensable ingredients in any stoner flick worth its weight in weed. After drug-addled antics, the most important ingredient could be the friends we made along the way. Cheech and Chong. The Dude and Walter. Harold and Kumar. Stoner comedies seem to always follow a pair of buddies – and those buddies are usually men. That’s not true of The Wrong Girls, which stars Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat as BFFs who get high enough to communicate with their cats. The duo “are perfect,” says Witney Seibold, senior writer for SlashFilm. “I am convinced that there is nothing Kristen Stewart cannot do. If she is starring as the Cheech in a Cheech and Chong comedy, and pulling it off with aplomb, then she’s kind of stretched to every corner of her talents.” Writer and director Dylan Meyer is also Kristen Stewart’s wife. “The film really has this feel of [being made by] people who know what Kristen Stewart can do, who know that Kristen Stewart at home is a gigantic goofball,” says Amy Nicholson, film critic for the Los Angeles Times. Only the cats, voiced by Kumail Nanjiani and Seth Rogen, harshed her buzz. “These cats are talking way too much,” Nicholson says.

Seibold and Nicholson also review The End of Oak Street, Union County, and Nimrods.