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Search resuls for: "Kyle Smith"


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☆ ‘Paint’ Review: Owen Wilson at the Easel
  + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
When folks ask me what movies I’ve seen lately that I like, I always respond with enthusiasm. Ten minutes later, when I’m out of breath, comes the inevitable response: “Well, I’ve never heard of that one,” people always say, eyeing me with suspicion, as though I might have imagined the entire experience. “Paint,” whose marketing budget appears to be in the pennies, is my current answer. It’s unlikely to rival “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” for brand awareness. However, it is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.
☆ ‘Air’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Sneaker Story
  + stars: | 2023-04-07 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
Do you care enough about a sneaker-endorsement deal from nearly 40 years ago to watch a movie about it? “Air” and its director, Ben Affleck , think that you might, if the sneaker is Nike and the endorser is Michael Jordan . And wouldn’t it be great if people returned to the multiplexes for a reality-grounded story that features no superpowers unless you count Mr. Jordan’s celebrated ability to fly to the bucket? Instead of the usual green-screen overload, Mr. Affleck offers lots of what used to be known as star power, before it became clear that actors no longer drive sales. Welcome to a strange attempt at an underdog tale about a publicly traded corporation with sales in the hundreds of millions and a boss who drives a high-end Porsche.
☆ ‘Paint’ Review: Owen Wilson Channels Bob Ross at the Easel
  + stars: | 2023-04-06 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
When folks ask me what movies I’ve seen lately that I like, I always respond with enthusiasm. Ten minutes later, when I’m out of breath, comes the inevitable response: “Well, I’ve never heard of that one,” people always say, eyeing me with suspicion, as though I might have imagined the entire experience. “Paint,” whose marketing budget appears to be in the pennies, is my current answer. It’s unlikely to rival “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” for brand awareness. However, it is the year’s sweetest cinematic surprise so far, containing much of the childlike tenderness and dry whimsy of a Wes Anderson film, minus that director’s sometimes-suffocating obsession with surfaces.
☆ ‘A Thousand and One’ Review: Teyana Taylor’s New York Blues
  + stars: | 2023-03-31 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
It turns out that he has fallen out a window and been hospitalized. Inez, sensing an opportunity, simply takes the boy home with her and hopes to disappear with him in the vast city. It’s unclear to me how someone might get away with snatching a kid from a hospital, but it’s a reasonably compelling premise for a movie. “A Thousand and One,” however, does very little with it. It’s a cousin to other superficially gritty but essentially cloying movies about the traumas of urban striving, such as “Precious” or “Moonlight.”
☆ ‘Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’ Review: Dumbing Down a Nerd’s Pastime
  + stars: | 2023-03-31 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
It’s amusing to think that a generation of movie watchers may be unaware that Hugh Grant was once a floppy-haired charmer. Playing a duplicitous failed actor in “Paddington 2,” a murder-minded politician in “A Very English Scandal,” a sleazy tabloid reporter in “The Gentlemen” and himself on the red carpet at the Oscars, Mr. Grant in maturity is proving to be one of the screen’s most entertaining miscreants. He is the most delightful element of some very good movies. He is also the best thing about “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.”Mr. Grant’s gleeful villainy pumps (some) life into his scenes as a scheming usurper in the medieval-ish fantasy world of “D&D,” where monsters and wizards coexist with humans who seem far too unimpressed by the wonders around them. Leading the band of the nonchalant is Chris Pine as Edgin, who in a prologue establishes himself as a literal social-justice warrior (he rides around righting wrongs in defense of the downtrodden) who turns into a rascally thief after his wife gets murdered.
☆ ‘The Lost King’ Review: A Woman’s Search for Richard III
  + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
If only every harried middle-aged father trying to hold down the fort while Mom is out doing important things could enjoy a payoff like the one depicted in “The Lost King”: “Boys, boys! Your mother’s just found Richard III !”The woman is Philippa Langley ( Sally Hawkins ), today Philippa Langley M.B.E. after being honored by the queen in 2015 for her services to the United Kingdom. You may recall, as I did, hearing in 2012 a jolly little news item about how “they” found the bones of the slain Richard in a parking lot. Let the film tell you.
☆ ‘John Wick: Chapter 4’ Review: Keanu Reeves Keeps Killing
  + stars: | 2023-03-24 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
According to one obsessive website, assassin extraordinaire John Wick has killed 299 people in his first three screen outings. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers are slackers by comparison. Continuing on with “John Wick: Chapter 4,” the hit-man action franchise continues to excel at its job as well. We go to these movies to see hyperviolence choreographed with an intricacy that would shame a Broadway musical, and we are not disappointed. As the receipts generated by the films have grown, so has their scale, which was once somewhat modest but has now reached “Mission: Impossible” levels.
☆ ‘Scream VI’ Review: Ghostface Is Still Slashing, Now in New York
  + stars: | 2023-03-10 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
There is no “Scream V,” but now we have “Scream VI.” In case you’ve lost track (or lost interest), the latest self-aware slasher flick is the sequel to a “re-quel,” last year’s modestly successful “Scream.” That entry helpfully included characters who, referring to the franchise-within-the-franchise “Stab” and its successors, in effect told the audience that it was a combination of reboot and sequel (cf. What was once cleverly self-referential now comes across as nostalgia for ’90s comfort food, like the fried ice cream at Chi-Chi’s. The 1996 franchise-starter, written by “Dawson’s Creek” creator Kevin Williamson , fondly mocked the slasher-movie clichés beloved by Gen X audiences who had grown up watching “Halloween” and “Friday the 13th” on cable TV. Two generations later, however, Mr. Williamson’s meta-cinematic framing is everywhere and the tang of originality is long gone. “Scream VI” feels like a photocopy of a photocopy.
☆ ‘Creed III’ Review: A Punch From the Past
  + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
What if Rocky Balboa were an arrogant lout? The question opens up dramatic possibilities and adds some unexpected conundrums to “Creed III,” the ninth boxing movie in the universe created 47 years ago in “Rocky.”We probably didn’t need a third “Creed” film—the basic recipe of underdog training hard, rising to the challenge and winning a climactic fight has been done enough times—but in his directorial debut, the franchise’s star Michael B. Jordan proves more than capable of hitting the right beats and telling a straightforward story without getting distracted by cinematic gimmicks, except for a brief fantasy interlude in the third act that feels out of place.
☆ ‘Linoleum’ Review: Jim Gaffigan’s Cosmic Midlife Crisis
  + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
Midlife disappointment becomes a problem in much the same way as bankruptcy overtook Mike Campbell in “The Sun Also Rises”—gradually, then suddenly. Jim Gaffigan is an inspired choice to play its flabby, saggy embodiment in the quirky dramedy “Linoleum,” in which he plays a frustrated, 50-something children’s television-show host who is beginning to agree with everyone around him that his existence hasn’t added up to much. Mr. Gaffigan is a sneakily brilliant stand-up who deserves more opportunities to shine on the big screen. I wouldn’t cast him as Batman or Thor, but in the small subset of movies that remain centered on characters much like ourselves, he is underutilized. With his body-by-Pillsbury shape and his aura of being woefully familiar with defeat, he makes for a much more convincing option as an aggrieved Everyman than, say, George Clooney .
☆ ‘Cocaine Bear’ Review: Elizabeth Banks’s Smokey Meets Scarface
  + stars: | 2023-02-24 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
The bear who does cocaine in ‘Cocaine Bear’Like “Snakes on a Plane” and “Sharknado,” “Cocaine Bear” seeks to entice an audience with an amusingly trashy title. But the title is by far the most noteworthy element of this lumpy horror-comedy. One of those “inspired by true events”—i.e., almost wholly fictitious—stories, “Cocaine Bear” takes place in 1985, when (as a news clip of that era featuring Tom Brokaw tells us) a cocaine trafficker fell to his death from a plane in Tennessee while ditching duffel bags full of the stuff. In real life, some of the bags landed in the woods of Georgia, where a black bear ingested the drugs and died. In legend, the animal was stuffed, put on display, at one point owned by country superstar Waylon Jennings , and wound up entertaining shoppers in a Kentucky mall.
☆ ‘Emily’ Review: Imagining the Origin of ‘Wuthering Heights’
  + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
The biographical drama “Emily” contains a wonderful moment—spooky, disturbing, as chilling as a November wind sweeping across the Yorkshire hills—when the young Emily Brontë is playing a silly party game with her sisters and summons the Gothic spirit before their panicked and needy eyes. The game involves putting on a mask and inviting others to guess which prominent figure one is pretending to be. Charlotte and Anne are both horrified and ensorcelled, begging for any kind of contact with the departed and overcome with emotion at how Emily channels their mother’s kind thoughts. So movies about writers tend to fall into the trap of depicting them as glorified transcribers of things they happened to see. Gilbert getting the idea for “The Mikado” from an exhibition on Japan, a legend that has been discredited.
☆ ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Review: Where More Is Less
  + stars: | 2023-02-17 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
Anyone who has been to a comic-book movie lately can tell you that should any interlude dare to linger more than about 37 seconds in a situation where not much is taking place except people talking, the theater will start twinkling like a galaxy as viewers take out their phones to check their messages. To forestall such fidgeting, superhero sagas grow increasingly desperate not to let any period appreciably longer than a Toyota commercial elapse without a frenzied chase, thunderous battle, jolly musical interlude, display of things not seen on this earth, or instance of the universe being turned inside out. The latest hectic example, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” inaugurates Phase Five of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which is as financially hale as it is creatively tired. Thanks to a few sweet father-daughter moments and a relatively direct plot, this entry is a notch better than some even-more-febrile recent efforts such as “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and “Thor: Love and Thunder.” But overall it’s another lackluster blockbuster. It does contain one genuinely awe-inspiring visual spectacle (the face of Paul Rudd , the only American man who looks nearly as good now as he did during the Clinton administration) and one truly scary concept (teen activist daughters bent on achieving universal social justice when you wish they’d just do their homework).
☆ ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’ Review: Few New Moves
  + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
If anyone was clamoring for a third Magic Mike vehicle, I missed it. It has been 11 years since the movie of that name about surprisingly complex male strippers and eight years since its sequel, “Magic Mike XXL.” Each of them deployed cinematic sleight of hand: Although they beckoned audiences with the erotic dancing of men who were carved in granite and yet as flexible as licorice, both films offered in-depth character studies within finely observed portraits of an intriguing subculture. With “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” however, the series reverses course. Those who turn up expecting more sharp writing will find that the third installment has almost nothing to offer except sexy dancing. It may be cheaper than a trip to see the gentlemen of Chippendales but, artistically speaking, it’s on roughly the same level.
☆ ‘Full Time’ Review: Desperate Days of a Working Mom
  + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
France’s “Full Time” re-creates an ordinary slice-of-life situation, but what a heaping slice it is. Staggering, even. I picture moviegoers in the audience shouting out, “Stop it, I can’t take any more.” This is the story of being a single mom. During a train strike. One of the capital’s favorite pastimes is strikes, and chaos radiates in every direction when the trains shut down.
☆ ‘Knock at the Cabin’ Review: A Daft Devil’s Bargain
  + stars: | 2023-02-03 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few filmmakers of his generation who has made himself a brand. If his surname were a bit shorter, he might even have made himself a household adjective by now. To buy a ticket for one of Mr. Shyamalan’s films is to accept an invitation to be wowed by a deliriously intriguing premise and, in the third act, to witness with delight the world being turned upside down. Mr. Shyamalan also carries the unfortunate distinction of having perpetrated more terrible movies than practically anyone else in his class of blockbuster auteurs: “The Village,” “Lady in the Water,” “The Last Airbender,” “After Earth.” This list is not comprehensive. Once he made a thriller about murderous trees (“The Happening”) whose script seemed as though it got lost on the way to Mel Brooks ’s office.
☆ The Sundance Film Festival: A Lively Market for Indie Cinema
  + stars: | 2023-01-27 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
After two years of Covid-19 fears, the Sundance Film Festival returned to in-person screenings, and exhilaration was in the air. Given the chance to screen most offerings remotely, I attended from my living room. These days, with indie cinema still having trouble attracting ticket buyers, the festival is becoming more and more of a shopping center for streaming services. Drawing a similar price, this time from Apple for its streaming service, was “Flora and Son,” another musical drama from writer-director John Carney (“Once”). Keeping its titular promise, the film is thoroughly campy, far too much for my taste.
☆ ‘Saint Omer’ Review: A Mother on Trial
  + stars: | 2023-01-13 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
France’s “Saint Omer,” which has made it to the 15-film shortlist of contenders for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, has the trappings of a courtroom drama but with a far stranger script. For starters, the guilt of the woman in the dock, for drowning her infant in the sea, isn’t in question. The movie takes place mostly in a courtroom in Saint-Omer, a town near the northern shore of France. An author named Rama (Kayije Kagame) has obtained a seat for the jury trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese-born immigrant who caused her own baby to die in the waters of the English Channel, having taken a train to the town of Berck-sur-Mer for that purpose. Based on a real trial that took place in 2016 and was witnessed by the filmmaker Alice Diop , a specialist in documentaries who co-wrote and directed “Saint Omer,” the film inverts the conventions of the legal drama by, for instance, concluding without showing us a verdict.
☆ ‘M3gan’ Review: She Walks, Talks and Kills
  + stars: | 2023-01-06 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +2 min
In “M3gan,” the titular gadget—a “Model 3 Generative Android” that looks like the lost Olsen sister—teaches a little girl proper bathroom procedure with military rigor while the kid’s guardian occupies herself with more diverting activities. All things considered, some parents might be willing to overlook the cuddly robot’s shortcomings, such as a sarcastic streak and a tendency to commit homicide. “M3gan,” a mildly scary movie built around a valid underlying fear, became a social-media phenomenon months before it was released thanks to the killer dance moves exhibited by its title figure. Bored by the demands of a small child and pressured by her volcanically demanding boss ( Ronny Chieng ) to create a next-level toy, Gemma solves both problems by programming a lifelike ambulatory doll that, learning from feedback, can read emotions and take part in spontaneous conversations exhibiting real emotional intelligence. Within a distressingly short period of time, however, M3gan starts to turn self-aware, posing questions like, “Will I die?”
☆ ‘Turn Every Page—The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb’ Review: A Powerful Partnership
  + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
The historian Robert Caro says he has built his career exploring a single grand theme: “how political power really worked.” Not how it worked in theory, or how it was supposed to work. His subjects were two men who achieved and wielded power like few others: Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson . Moses built Lincoln Center, the West Side Highway, the F.D.R. Drive, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and many other vital pieces of the New York landscape; Johnson built the Great Society and led the U.S. into war in Vietnam. The engrossing documentary “Turn Every Page—The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb ” gives equal attention to Mr. Caro and his editor, a figure of similar renown in the publishing field, Robert Gottlieb.
☆ ‘A Man Called Otto’ Review: Forrest Grump
  + stars: | 2022-12-30 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
This was the year Tom Hanks decided to stretch himself: Lately seen portraying Col. Tom Parker as a Mephistophelean con artist in “Elvis,” he’s back as the world’s grumpiest man in “A Man Called Otto,” which attempts to disguise the famously sunny actor as a walking cloud bank. Set in a condominium development in Pennsylvania in the winter, the remake of 2015’s Swedish film “A Man Called Ove” (which was based on a novel of the same name) casts Mr. Hanks as a lonely and humorless widower who isn’t so much fighting depression as surrendering to it. He’s an inveterate rule-enforcer, whistle-blower and manager-caller who snarls and grumbles at everyone who crosses his path. But given Mr. Hanks’s history of role choices, it seems only a matter of time before Otto’s heart of gold starts to shine through his miserable façade. And without even a warning from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
☆ ‘Babylon’ Review: The Talk of Early Tinseltown
  + stars: | 2022-12-23 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
As flawed as the people who make them may be, the movies matter. They always have. They always will. No other art form can strike so deeply among a mass of people at the same time. “It’s something even more important than life,” notes a flunky named Manny who rises high in the studio system in “Babylon,” one of the year’s richest and most ambitious films.
☆ ‘Women Talking’ Review: Speaking Without Saying Much
  + stars: | 2022-12-23 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
‘Women Talking” begins in the gruesome aftermath of a hideous mass rape and a question being urgently discussed among a group of women victims: What to do about it? “What follows is an act of female imagination,” a portentous caption informs us at the outset of this impassioned and scathing film. A sort of #MeToo reworking of “Twelve Angry Men,” “Women Talking” takes place mostly in a barn in which the female members of an ultra-conservative religious sect (suggesting Mennonites) are holding a vote to decide among three options. One is to stay and do nothing, but this will require publicly forgiving the men (currently being prosecuted by government authorities) who attacked them. The second is to start a physical battle with the men as a group for enabling the rapists.
☆ ‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: A Truthful, Youthful Story
  + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: 1 min
Ireland’s lovely and transfixing “The Quiet Girl” has the feel of one of those gemlike short stories, long associated with the New Yorker, in which nothing much happens on the surface but crystalline realizations result from ordinary acts. The title figure in the picture, told almost entirely in the Irish language, is 9-year-old Cáit, played with an otherworldly gravity by Catherine Clinch as an outcast even within her own home on a struggling small farm. It’s 1981 Ireland, a time and place in which even the middle class live in circumstances that today would strike us as notably lacking, with clunky-looking cars and careworn home furnishings.
☆ ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Review: A Second Plunge Into Pandora
  + stars: | 2022-12-16 | by ( Kyle Smith | ) www.wsj.com   time to read: +1 min
With “Avatar: The Way of Water,” Mr. Cameron reaffirms himself as the blockbuster director of his generation—still the king of the world. To distinguish it from the first film, some might call the second entry in the proposed five-movie series “W.O.W.” And “Wow” is as handy a one-word review as any. With its gorgeous sea beasts, luminescent underwater fauna and pellucid diving excursions, “Way of Water” is unquestionably a great-looking movie. Mr. Cameron, the director of the first two “Terminator” films, “True Lies,” “Aliens” and “Titanic,” seems to have lost interest in character, and even the story is a bit of an afterthought. “Way of Water” is an excursion in paradise.
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