Luke Hicks

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a slog, confused about the artist at its heart and stuck on unconvincing ideas about his art.

One film too late for a sophomore slump, Alpha feeds on its own potential, turning a possibly brilliant collection of ideas into one so muddy it’s hard to say exactly what any of them connote. But the feeling of having to trudge through is there all the same, and over two hours is a long trudge.

It’s often pleasant, pretty, impressive, and well-scored (and we’ll note the spectacle of design shortly), but that isn’t enough for someone of his caliber. Where is the emotion? The feeling? The Owen Wilson perspective of his storytelling soul?

It relegates its thematic strengths to the corner of ironically thoughtless family fun entertainment that seeks to please and assuage where other projects might investigate the theme and leave you with a sense of concern over the real-world parallels without sacrificing entertainment

The movie doesn’t have much to offer by way of score, composition, camera movement, sound design, style, lighting, production design, etc. At least there will be some narrative to discover, and a pleasure in lead performers still harmoniously attuned to one another despite the script’s hobbles.

It’s so funny for the first hour and last 20 minutes that one can’t help wondering what the hell happened with the 40 in-between––a frustrating, unfunny slog of a middle section that’s so hard to sit through it will unfortunately keep many from reaching the brilliant, bizarro finale.

Despite the cool, screeching, horror-like score and some memorable moments, Kidnapped plays more like a heavy sigh than an absorbing adaptation of history.

Steve McQueen’s first documentary feels more like an unedited podcast with dizzying visual accompaniment than a feature film, despite ruminating on its subject, Amsterdam under Nazi occupation, for more than four hours.

There’s a version of the film that feels engaging and well-considered. It pops its head out every once in a while (most notably in an FBI impersonation sequence led by a gut-busting Kaitlin Olson). But it can’t even stay above water in a shallow script. Despite its name, Champions rides the bench.

It’s hard to imagine mal intent from the mind behind The Father, a film laced with an intoxicating empathy, but it’s not hard to imagine a lesser work. If we’re giving Zeller benefit of the doubt, it just goes to show how difficult it is for a director to make back-to-back bangers.

Ultimately, Don’t Worry Darling is an elaborate game of house with little pay-off, the movie version of a fake tan: it gets the job done, but might sour your interest in the tan itself in the process.

Bodies Bodies Bodies feels like A24 trying to suck up to the cool kids––a vapid, perhaps successful attempt to reel in a contemporary influencer crowd. Enjoying it feels partially dependent on one’s familiarity with celebrity pop culture, the intricacies of tabloid news, and the ever-evolving landscape of political correctness.

The explosiveness and wavering intrigue and sleek blue-gray cinematography minted for a cop movie––the kind that reflects thematic consideration and well-crafted execution in matching the steeliness of its hard-nosed leads––can’t do enough to save it.

Thirty minutes in—with all interesting ledes sufficiently buried or ignored, the charm of his husky southern drawl faded—you realize you’ve been conned into letting Coen take you on a YouTube train of his favorite Lewis performances and interviews. If you like Lewis’s sound, that’s fun for a short while. Then you realize he’s just playing the same songs on repeat and it starts to get annoying, as getting cornered at a party usually does.

It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past.