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Kimi

1/18/2023

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C+
​2.33

A tech worker for an Alexa-esque device hears a suspicious video recording.

Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Starring Zoe Kravitz
​Review by Jon Kissel

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​I’m using Facebook less and less, as my most friends have long since migrated off it to other social media and the ads are suffocating.  It’s entertaining to watch people fall further down various conspiracy holes, but it’s not a good kind of entertainment.  I know that a lot of work goes into making the news feed as banal an experience as possible.  Despite the cleanliness of what pops up on my screen, armies of workers are scanning posts for content that is beyond the pale, from child pornography to live beheadings.  I can’t imagine calling a shift when one sees a mere three human deaths a good one, because the average is nine.  Plenty of articles have been written about the psychological toll that kind of job takes, and in Steven Soderbergh’s latest, one of these workers takes center stage.  In Kimi, vast human experiences are served up to an already-shaky woman, little tidbits that are mostly useless and occasionally horrifying.  The perfect job for the Covid era of the film, especially for the agoraphobic protagonist, can’t fully protect her from the outside world.


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The Banshees of Inisherin

1/11/2023

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A-
​3.74

Two Irish friends come to a crisis point in their relationship.

Directed by Martin McDonagh
Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson
​Review by Jon Kissel

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Playwright/filmmaker brothers Martin and John Michael McDonagh have made eight films between them.  In the best of them, John Michael’s Cavalry stars Brendan Gleeson as a version of Paul Schrader’s lonely man, the last decent priest during a period of maximal Irish disillusionment towards Catholicism.  Martin’s experienced greater success with films like In Bruges and Three Billboards, but thanks to the brilliance of Cavalry, the superior comedy of John Michael’s The Guard, and an insistence on working on American-set films despite neither McDonagh doing their best work in the US, Martin’s been stuck in his brother’s shadow.  With The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin’s finally made a film that matches his older brother by returning to the McDonagh’s ancestral home of Ireland.  The bleak melancholy of the setting and the wry humor of the characters are a perfect mix in Martin’s best film to date.  Despite its setting amidst the Irish Civil War, the McDonagh brothers need not fight against each other for supremacy.  They can now lay claim to their own masterpieces.


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Elvis

1/5/2023

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C+
​2.23

Elvis Presley's conman manager reflects on his career on his deathbed.

Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks
​Review by Jon Kissel

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It’s understandable if a viewer is out on Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis from its first scenes.  Unfolding kaleidoscopes of rhinestones bedazzle the title card while breakneck zooms in and out of Colonel Tom Parker’s (Tom Hanks) eye accompany his portentous narration in an accent best described as indescribable.  It’s overpowering in its first five minutes and there’s another 150 to go.  Luhrmann will immediately abandon his framing device of the Colonel’s deathbed confession by showing childhood scenes of Elvis that he wouldn’t have known anything about, and the movie will make awful decisions in its storytelling and its filmmaking over and over again.  Luhrmann and Hanks are both doing all they can to break Elvis, but in the titular role, Austin Butler keeps putting it back together.  This is a mess that indulges in all of Luhrmann’s worst impulses to such an aggressive degree that it implies the director is in on the joke of his own filmography.  However, there’s so many lifeless, rote musician biopics that injecting some gonzo energy into one is appreciated, especially with Butler at the center.  


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