B | An alien hunter lands in 18th century Dakota amongst Comanches and French trappers. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg Starring Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, and Dane DiLegro Review by Jon Kissel |
Of all the things to get irritated about in the last three years, the release of Luca direct to Disney+ streaming is extremely low on the worthiness scale, but that Pixar release was some of their best, most atmospheric work and I watched it at home, as opposed to in a theater. It’s not a question of Covid either, as it was released in a post-Alpha, pre-Delta period where even Covid maximalists would’ve been fine going out to see it. Instead, as they have for four of their last five releases, Pixar and their corporate monopolist masters dumped Luca on streaming. I’m an old-school cinephile, and skipping theaters feels like disrespect. The same can be said for Prey, a film shot on location in Alberta with practical effects that contains all the cathartic, chest-thumping moments that characterize the action genre. A film that would’ve done great in theaters instead lands on Hulu, and the world gets a tiny bit smaller. Prey, the fifth and arguably best entry in the Predator franchise, deserves better than it got, but what’s to be expected from a company that is increasingly shunting work it acquired through Fox off to the side in favor of gray CGI sludge and in-house production.
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It’s Robert Pattinson’s turn to put on the cowl and the cape in The Batman, Warner Brother’s latest crack at its foundational superhero. Befitting a franchise reboot, director and writer Matt Reeves takes Batman all the way back to his early days just like Christopher Nolan did with Batman Begins, though this is no origin story. Reeves has the difficult task of rebooting a story that most people on earth are familiar with by this point, of trying to find something new in a ubiquitous character. He reaches into a broader cinematic past and the dark anti-elite/anti-institution present for the right combination, and makes a film that, though universally regarded as too long at three hours, provides an introduction to the cast and the tone that’s going to carry the character through the next several years. Batman’s gone from being relatively grounded in Nolan’s trilogy to a cosmic character who fights next to or against Superman with Zach Snyder’s films. Reeves strips the character down to when it was most recently successful, and then strips it down some more for a gritty crime/serial killer drama that, if given its druthers, would jettison the part about a guy who goes out at night dressed like a bat.
Richard Linklater is the foremost filmmaker when it comes to American male childhood. He nailed high school in Dazed and Confused, college in Everybody Wants Some, and boyhood in… Boyhood. Linklater takes another crack at being young and Texan in Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood. If that seems like a retread after Boyhood, it does to Linklater, too, because he mixes fantasy and reality here in way that he couldn’t in Boyhood. Apollo 10 ½’s nostalgic journey into unsupervised exurban bliss gets its greatest oomph from the tiny details of Galveston beach instead of its moon-walking adventure, likely because Linklater’s been stung by a jellyfish but never left footprints on the lunar surface. |
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