Weekend Film Reviews

In How to Rob a Bank, criminals sell their heists for clicks, streaming their smash-and-grabs for adoring fans. They’re bitter millennials, would-be Luigi Mangiones lashing out at an America that didn’t keep the promises it made to their generation. According to film critic Dave White, the film doesn’t keep its promises either. It drops its anti-authoritarian posture to become “an FBI public service announcement about how crime doesn’t pay and about how you should just behave,” White says, “The fact that it comes from Amazon Content Services LLC is its own spoiler.” 

How to Rob a Bank is about “economic inequality and predatory lending and insurance fraud from the company owned by Jeff Bezos,” adds critic Alonso Duralde. “This movie couldn’t be phonier.” 

Duralde and White also review Ebenezer, Bitter Christmas and Paper Tiger.

In I Play Rocky, Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone as the struggling actor tries to write America’s favorite boxing movie and book the leading role for himself. According to film critic Witney Seibold, Ippolito nails his impression, but the story falls flat. “It feels like a dramatization of a special features documentary you might find on a Rocky DVD,” he says. Critic Shawn Edwards says the “fluffy” film made him want to star in his own triumphant training montage. “Right after walking out of the theater,” Edwards says, “I went looking for the nearest stairwell.”

Seibold and Edwards also review Godzilla Minus Zero, Wild Horse Nine and Soul Patrol.

Forty-one years ago, a pipe bomb went off at the office of a Palestinian-American activist named Alex Odeh. Odeh, a father of three, was killed in the seemingly targeted assasination. Decades later, the FBI still has not determined who was behind the attack. In Who Killed Alex Odeh?, two filmmakers take viewers on a journey from Orange County to Israel to investigate why. “It doesn’t feel like a true crime film that would be tied up in a nice little bow in the end,” says Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for The New York Times.

“If people don’t know enough about this particular person, about this particular historical incident, and the way that this fits into the entire tapestry we’re living in now, the filmmakers do an excellent job making that case,” says William Bibbiani, film critic for The Wrap, and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network podcast.

Bibbiani and Wilkinson also review the film Queen at Sea, and because Halloween is just days away, discuss how everything is basically a horror movie now.

In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s townhouse for cocktails and debate. They reminisced about the movement they built and argued over its meaning as Greaves recorded everything. It was never released — Greaves died in 2014 without completing the film — but now his son, David Greaves, has finished the job, editing the footage into the new documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem. “You have this once-in-a-lifetime gathering of all these extraordinary people, and [you get] to see them remember things, and remember things differently,” says film critic Alonso Duralde. 

“The very texture of the film itself transports you physically through just the color grading, and the grain of it,” says critic Dave White. “We don’t think about that much as viewers until we are bathing in the technique and formal qualities of another era.”

Duralde and White also review Wicker, Possible Love and Fatherland. 

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.