02/28-03/14

Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett's Ready or Not

This review contains spoilers.

Seems like a simple premise, but it actually takes a fair amount of Lore (derogatory) to get it off the drawing board, and even then it requires a fair amount of narrative handwaving to make it feel plausible. Once it gets going, it's passable fun—Samara Weaving deserves her spot in the pantheon of scream queens—though the ending kind of disappoints. [Spoilers commence.] Liquidating half the cast in a single scene has a go-for-broke quality that could feel delirious in a different kind of movie, but if you've gone to the trouble of creating a revenge structure filled with some memorable antagonists (Nicky Guadagni stands out as the weird aunt), why skip the part where the protagonist picks them all off with memorable kills? Outsourcing those kills to the ex machina feels a bit like a cop-out, no matter how much CGI gore splatters on the lens—ultimately, it's Lore that saves the day, which means that our protagonist succeeds mostly by just surviving till the end of the run-time. I guess that's an inherent danger of the premise—it's how Hide and Seek works, after all—but it's not too hard to reimagine this with a final act where the Seekers become the Hiders, and the end result would have been, to my mind, more satisfying.

Mike Mills' Twentieth Century Women

This movie cares admirably about its characters—but it loves its performers. I can't remember the last film I saw that loves its performers this much, that gives them this much to work with while also giving them ample room to breathe.

Other things this movie loves: records, dancing, laughter, books, ideas, complications. Honors those complications (and the underlying ideas) by choosing (for the most part) to end scenes on moments of everyday irresolution and ongoingness instead of tidily hitting the nearest available sentimental beat. All in all this is a great thick slice of capital-H capital-A Humanist Art, served up with enviable confidence and abundant technical panache.

Colin Trevorrow's Safety Not Guaranteed

Let's begin by agreeing that there could be something appealing about the idea of a time travel movie that's also a quirky indie rom-com. Now, is this a good time travel movie? No. But is it a good indie rom-com? Also no.

Duplass brings some charisma to the table, and Aubrey Plaza's performance probably would have charmed me back in 2012 (in 2026, though, it reads a bit like an early warning about the limitations of her style). Regardless, both of them are hamstrung by a lazy script which squanders its promise at every turn: it is incurious about its own premise and disinterested in its own subplots (Jake Johnson and Jenica Bergere deserve better than to be heartlessly discarded in what feels like the middle of their arc); it squanders interesting narrative setups and fails to land good jokes; it avoids investing its characters with weird details that might legitimate this thing as a cult classic (some of its surface elements bear a similarity to Grosse Pointe Blank and this film suffers immeasurably from the comparison). Some brisk pacing or visual flair or could have glossed these faults, but Colin Trevorrow's direction is lifeless and Benjamin Kasulke's cinematography is bland. Pass.

Dan Trachtenberg's Predator: Badlands