A comedy of horrors
Not that Viy (Konstantin Yershov, Georgi Kropachyov, 1967) is the first-ever Soviet horror film (There's A Spectre Haunts Europe (1923)) or even the first adaptation of the Nikolai Gogol story (the first was 1909, considered lost)-- but it's the rare Soviet horror film so visually striking and tonally bizarre it's at least worth a look.
Birth of a supervillain
Calling it: there will not be a more terrifying film to come out this year than Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, a startlingly evoked, reasonably entertaining, essentially accurate biopic of the former and possibly incoming president Donald J. Trump.
The lower depths
There's David O. Russell's approximation of a Martin Scorsese film, and then there's the original. The Wolf of Wall Street is everything American Hustle is-- sexy, funny, fluid, profane-- and more: disgusting, despairing, demented, in both a good and bad way.
That's entertainment
Saw Joker: Folie a Deux and-- well I liked the ending.
Todd Philips can't direct traffic to save his life and the movie still looks like a recycle bin of older better films, among others Umbrellas of Cherbourg, One From the Heart, Pennies from Heaven, and (a Scorsese, can't not have a Scorsese) New York, New York and you can feel the droplets of sweat showering down like a morning thunderstorm from Joaquin Phoenix's brow as he strains to make a profound statement out of yet another $200 million comic book villain movie-- but I did like that ending.
Came out of Megalopolis feeling a lot of things but what I did not feel was disappointed-- not a bad thing but not necessarily a good thing either.
I run hot and cold on Francis Ford Coppola. Thought his first two Godfather films were classically well-written if visually conventional, too-carefully curated portraits of a corrupt American family, thought Apocalypse Now was a vividly directed Vietnam war movie that had little to do with the actual war, thought The Conversation (easily his best early work) was a nicely done portrait of loneliness and introverted paranoia.
I actually prefer Coppola's wilder less disciplined later works: the lowkey monochromatic Rumble Fish, the emotionally extravagant One From the Heart (my favorite), the beautifully mounted Bram Stoker's Dracula (despite Keanu Reeves as an alleged British solicitor, and a haphazardly grafted love story), and now this, his wildest most undisciplined yet, basically a retelling of the Catilinarian conspiracy transposed to modern-day New York.
The mild robot
Dreamworks' latest (and arguably last to be fully animated in-house) movie has at least two things going for it: 1) the flattened handmade painterly look of the Spiderverse movies and Puss n Boots: The Last Wish that's currently all the rage; and 2) the fact that it's not Pixar or Disney.
On the minus side are two: 1) It's not Pixar or Disney but sure as hell feels like a Pixar or Disney movie; 2) most everything else.
