Carrie Kahn – Page 6 – Spinning Platters

Film Review: “Armageddon Time”

Hopkins anchors melancholic but hopeful coming of age picture

Paul (Banks Repeta, l.) has a special bond with his Grandpa Aaron (Anthony Hopkins).

With Armageddon Time, writer/director James Gray (Ad Astra; The Immigrant) has made his Belfast. Gray’s loosely autobiographical film substitutes the dawn of the Reagan era in early 1980’s Queens for the Troubles of 1960’s North Ireland. Like Kenneth Branagh’s protagonist Buddy (Jude Hill), though, Gray’s stand-in Paul (Banks Repeta) similarly faces the confusion and challenges of growing up in a volatile and uncertain time. The result is a film that, while occasionally heavy handed, nevertheless boasts some strong performances and leaves us with a message of hope.

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Film Review: “The Good Nurse”

A bad nurse rising: Horrifying true story becomes chilling thriller

ICU night shift nursing colleagues Charlie (Eddie Redmayne) and Amy (Jessica Chastain) become close friends.

Anyone who has ever spent any significant time in a hospital knows how much blind faith patients put in the medical staff. You’re sick or injured and helpless and scared: you not only trust the doctors and nurses caring for you, but you’re beyond grateful to them for helping you get healthy and back to your life. But what if a nurse didn’t have your best interest at heart, but the exact opposite? Suddenly the hospital would no longer be a safe space of healing and comfort, but a house of horrors. Such is the chilling premise of the terrific new film The Good Nurse.

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Film Review: “Tár”

Blanchett delivers award-worthy performance in imperfect classical music drama

Cate Blanchett as world famous conductor Lydia Tár.

Cate Blanchett can play icy cool confidence like nobody’s business (see Carol and Nightmare Alley), but she won an Oscar for having an emotional breakdown in Blue Jasmine. That skill at playing a woman on the edge of madness just may yield her another trophy for her stellar work in writer/director Todd Field’s problematic new film Tár.

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Film Review: “Don’t Worry Darling”

Wilde should be worried: Pre-release hype overshadows mediocre picture

Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack (Harry Styles) live an idyllic life. Or do they?

Even if you’re not one to follow celebrity gossip, no doubt you’ve seen at least a headline or two about director Olivia Wilde’s new film Don’t Worry Darling. Stories about casting, the Venice premiere, tensions between director and star, and salacious sex scenes have saturated the Internet gossip machine. All this chatter either speaks to genuine interpersonal problems among the cast, or reveals a sly and savvy PR move by Wilde, who gained notoriety when she began dating her film’s star Harry Styles after her much publicized divorce from nice guy Ted Lasso himself, Jason Sudeikis. All publicity is good publicity, as the saying goes, and all the frenzied rumors certainly have kept Wilde’s film in the spotlight. So much so that I have to admit that the constant titillating headlines worked on me: when the screening came through, I of course had to see what all the fuss was about.

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Film Review: “See How They Run”

The only mystery here is how this tiresome picture got made

Inspector Stoppard (Sam Rockwell) and Constable Stalker (Saoirse Ronan) are on the case when a Hollywood director is murdered at a London theater.

With the success of Knives Out and its upcoming sequel The Glass Onion (which will open the Mill Valley Film Festival on Oct. 6th), murder mysteries are back in vogue, and you can’t blame filmmakers for wanting to capitalize on the trend. But just because you can make a murder mystery doesn’t mean you should, and the new British whodunit See How They Run is a case in point.

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Film Review: “Mack & Rita”

Keaton rises above sophomoric material in body-swap comedy

Never a good idea: Mack (Elizabeth Lail) tries out a regression pod in Palm Springs.

You have to hand it to Diane Keaton. At 76, she’s not afraid to embrace screwball comedy, pratfalls and all. What’s a shame, though, is that she doesn’t have a better vehicle for her comedic talents than the embarrassingly bad new picture Mack & Rita.

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Film Review: “Thirteen Lives”

Howard successfully dramatizes extraordinary rescue story

Diver Rick Stanton (Viggo Mortensen) is skeptical that the underwater cave rescue will succeed.

Last year, for the first time ever, I selected a documentary as my number one film of the year. That doc, The Rescue, plays out like a thrilling Hollywood screenplay as it recounts the inspiring true tale of the rescue of 12 members of a boys’ soccer team and their coach after 18 days trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Now art imitates life as that story that so captivated the world back in 2018 gets the high-powered Hollywood treatment. Directed by Oscar winner Ron Howard, Thirteen Lives proves itself an equally thrilling and moving dramatization.

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Film Review: “Vengeance”

Kutcher excels in Novak’s mixed feature film debut

Music producer Quentin (Ashton Kutcher, l.) talks with journalist Ben (B.J. Novak) about Ben’s recently deceased acquaintance and life in West Texas.

Perhaps best known as Ryan from The Office, B.J. Novak has long been a writer as well as an actor, and now, with his new film Vengeance, he can add feature film director to his resume. With this picture, he pulls off the cinematic trifecta of acting/writing/directing, and, for a first effort, the results aren’t bad. While not stellar by any means, the picture definitely has its moments, and signifies Novak as a filmmaker to watch.

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Film Review: “Where the Crawdads Sing”

Edgar-Jones, Strathairn bright spots in otherwise forgettable bestseller adaptation

Tate (Taylor John Smith) and Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) spend a lot of time sitting dreamily in gently waving grass.

Readers of the massive (over 12 million copies sold!) 2018 bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing have likely been eagerly anticipating the Reese Witherspoon produced adaptation of her book club phenom. To prep for the movie, I read the Delia Owens novel, and can tell you up front that the movie does indeed capture the gist of the book. Some small plot details have been eliminated or changed slightly, and longer sections have been compressed, but the book’s themes and emotional underpinnings remain intact. The novel’s readers will have an inherent interest in the film, just for the curiosity of seeing how the story and characters translate to the big screen.

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Film Review: “Emergency”

This emergency needs to be seen, stat

Kunle (Donald Elise Watkins, l.), Carlos (Sebastian Chacon, center), and Sean (RJ Cyler) face an emergency.

Nominated for the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year, Emergency took home the Festival’s Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. After seeing the film, you’ll understand why. Adapting her 2018 Sundance short of the same name into a full length feature, screenwriter K.D. Dávila has done something sly here. She starts the picture as if we’re in for a spring break high jinks, wild college party comedy à la Animal House. But then she turns the tables in such a dramatic, urgent, and tense fashion that you’ll leave the picture reeling. And that’s a good thing.

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