Sadly, we won’t be hearing the methodical “Mr. Anderson” of Agent Smith in The Matrix 4. Hugo Weaving has confirmed he won’t be returning to the sci-fi franchise that helped make him a huge star in the early 2000s.
The reason is any beef he has with the Matrix films, it all boils down to boring ol’ scheduling conflicts. Weaving and director Lana Wachowski were keen on working together again, but as he tells Time Out London it just wasn’t meant to be…
“It’s unfortunate but actually I had this offer [for The Visit] and then the offer came from The Matrix, so I knew it was happening but I didn’t have dates. I thought [I] could do both and it took eight weeks to work out that the dates would work – I held off on accepting [a role in The Visit during that time]. I was in touch with [director] Lana Wachowski, but in the end she decided that the dates weren’t going to work. So we’d sorted the dates and then she sort of changed her mind. They’re pushing on ahead without me.”
She “changed her mind”? What does that mean, exactly? Did Wachowski write Agent Smith out of the script? Or did she decide to recast the role? As we saw…or better yet heard, in Avengers: Endgame during the Red Skull sequence it’s not hard to find someone who can replicate Weaving’s voice.
So Weaving won’t be joining the other returning Matrix stars, Keanu Reeves, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Jada Pinkett Smith, when the sequel drops on May 21st 2021.
We’re happy to offer our DC readers the chance to attend a free early screening of Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen! The film stars Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Marsan, Colin Farrell and Hugh Grant.
SYNOPSIS: From writer/director Guy Ritchie comes THE GENTLEMEN, a star-studded sophisticated action comedy. THE GENTLEMEN follows American expat Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) who built a highly profitable marijuana empire in London. When word gets out that he’s looking to cash out of the business forever it triggers plots, schemes, bribery and blackmail in an attempt to steal his domain out from under him (featuring an all-star ensemble cast including Charlie Hunnam, Henry Golding, Michelle Dockery, Jeremy Strong, Eddie Marsan, Colin Farrell, and Hugh Grant).
The screening takes place tomorrow, January 22nd at 7:00pm at AMC Mazza Gallerie. If you’d like to attend, go to the STX ticketing site here. Please remember all screenings are first come first served and you’ll need to arrive early to ensure seating. Enjoy the show!
The Sundance Film Festival lineup is always good for eating up a chunk of my “Best of” list at the end of each year. That’s just one of the many reasons why the journey to the frigid climate (which suits me just fine) of Park City is always worth. Another is that I get to escape from the typically bad movie month of January, leaving those reviews to others.
So while the site sorta goes through a shutdown while I’m away, the value is in getting to review so early many of the films that we’ll be talking about throughout the year. There will be a couple hundred films vying for my attention out there, but here are just ten that have my attention. One of the interesting things about Sundance is that each day brings new discoveries; a movie’s buzz either gets louder or fades away with each screening. There’s always something that emerges, and always something that disappoints. Hopefully, nothing on the below list will be in the latter category.
Be sure to follow my reviews here on the site, of course, or on Twitter @punchycritic and @pdcmovies.
Black Bear
Director: Lawrence Michael Levine
Cast: Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, Sarah Gadon
The latest from Wild Canaries and Gabi On the Roof in July director Lawrence Michael Levine (usually partnered with wife and fellow director Sophia Takal), Black Bear pretty much had me with its central cast of Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, and Sarah Gadon. A dramatic thriller set in a remote lakehouse in the Adirondacks, it centers on a married couple who host a filmmaker friend looking for some inspiration. What unfolds is a blurring of art and reality, of autobiography and invention, as a web of jealousy and manipulation is spun. It’s a rare turn for Plaza away from comedy, especially here in Park City, but that makes me want to see this even more.
Shirley
Director: Josephine Decker
Cast: Elisabeth Moss, Michael Stuhlbarg, Odessa Young, Logan Lerman
You can always peg Elisabeth Moss to make an impact each year at Sundance, but not always in a leading turn like this. After a killer 2019, she kicks off 2020 with Shirley, in which she plays horror author Shirley Jackson who, along with her husband, invite a young couple to stay in their home to get a fresh start. What the guests find instead is that they are becoming the inspiration for Shirley’s next horror novel. Decker, who previously directed the wildly imaginative Madeline’s Madeline, is a creative force and I’m hoping some of her visual splendor carries over to this.
The Last Thing He Wanted
Director: Dee Rees
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Willem Dafoe, Ben Affleck, Toby Jones, Rosie Perez
Mudbound director Dee Rees continues her partnership with Netflix, while Anne Hathaway makes her return to Sundance after 2017’s Colossal. Based on the novel by political author Joan Didion, the film tells the story of a reporter who quits her job covering the 1984 Presidential election, only to inherit her father’s shady arms-dealing business. This being a Netflix joint, it’s hard to gauge what kind of impact this will have, but there’s no doubting the talents of Rees, who has made Sundance her home since 2011’s Pariah.
Bad Hair
Director: Justin Simien
Cast:
Elle Lorraine,
Vanessa Williams,
Jay Pharoah,
Lena Waithe,
Blair Underwood,
Laverne Cox
Justin Simien had all of Sundance buzzing with his controversial debut feature, Dear White People, and he looks to do the same with Bad Hair. A psychological horror with Simien’s satirical eye, it centers on an aspiring TV personality with a bad hair care history, who dares to drop her natural look in favor of a more-telegenic weave. While the weave appears to be her key to success, it may also have a mind of its own.
Wendy
Director: Benh Zeitlin
Cast: Devin France, Yashua Mack
Welcome back, Benh Zeitlin. Where ya been hiding? Zeitin made an impact on Sundance like few before him with 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild, and then he just…well, vanished. Now he’s back with another unusual fairy tale, a retelling of the Peter Pan story from Wendy Darling’s perspective. It’ll be tough for Wendy to reach the multiple Oscar-nominated heights of Zeitlin’s debut, but it’s exciting to see him back behind the camera.
Come Away
Director: Brenda Chapman
Cast: Angelina Jolie, David Oyelowo, Keira Chansa, Jordan Nash, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Clarke Peters, Michael Caine
Leave it to former Disney filmmaker Brenda Chapman (Her removal from Brave is still a touchy subject) to come up with something this imaginative and bring it to Sundance. Another riff on classic fairy tales, Come Away features a star-studded cast in a story that imagines Alice from Wonderland and Peter Pan as siblings, living with their parents in an idyllic setting well-removed from the fantasy worlds they would later visit. However, real life begins to intrude as their family must cope with a tragedy that may split them apart. It’s a film that Disney might’ve wanted for themselves under different circumstances.
Downhill
Directors: Nat Faxon and Jim Rash
Cast: Will Ferrell, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Miranda Otto, Zoe Chao, Zach Woods
Unlike other American remakes of successful foreign films, Downhill probably didn’t need much tweaking from its source material, 2014’s Force Majeure. Because who can’t already imagine Will Ferrell as the cowardly husband who looks out for himself when an avalanche endangers his family during a ski vacation in the Alps? And who can’t already see Louis-Dreyfus raking him over the coals for his spinelessness? The comedy writes itself, and the explorations of marriage and gender roles are icing on the cake.
Sylvie’s Love
Director: Eugene Ash
Cast: Tessa Thompson, Nnamdi Asomugha, Eva Longoria, Aja Naomi King, Wendi Mclendon-Covey
The jazz era romance Sylvie’s Love features Sundance staple Tessa Thompson alongside ex-NFL star Nnamdi Asomugha, who turned heads with the 2017 prison drama Crown Heights. He’s been keeping busy ever since, and now gets to play lead opposite Thompson in the story of two lovers in the New York summer of 1957. She’s waiting on her fiance to return home from the war, he’s a saxophonist looking for his big break. The story tracks them as their lives go in separate directions, but the love between them never fades.
Possessor
Director: Brandon Cronenberg
Cast: Andrea Riseborough, Christopher Abbott, Tuppence Middleton, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Bean
It’s like this is the year when breakout directors from 2012 finally decide to remind us they exist. The sophomore effort from Antiviral director Brandon Cronenberg is a sci-fi/horror his old man would be proud of. Andrea Riseborough returns to Sundance after a trio of buzzy indies (Mandy, Nancy, Burden) to play a corporate agent who inhabits other people’s bodies using brain transplant tech, forcing them to commit assassinations that benefit the company. Damn. A different kind of body horror from the Cronenberg clan, and I’m down for it.
Summertime
Director: Carlos Lopez Estrada
The Opening Night film at Sundance is always a big deal. It’s expected to kick off the festival with a certain energy that’s meant to last all the way to Closing Night. Director Carlos Lopez Estrada did just that a couple of years ago with Blindspotting, and now he’s back in that spotlight with Summertime, a film that looks to have the same lyrical style and raw creative spirit. Multiple stories weave in and out of of one another, following 25 Los Angeles high school poets: a limo driver, a tagger, a skating guitarist, a fast food worker, and more.
Bradley Cooper’s followup to A Star is Born, a biopic of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, is headed to Netflix. The film was originally set up at Paramount, and as we’ve seen many times in the past, when they’ve got a project that looks like a commercial failure, Netflix is usually eager to take it off their hands.
Cooper will co-write, direct, and star in the film on Bernstein, the composer known for his scores for West Side Story, Candide, Peter Pan, and many more. The respect for Bernstein has attracted some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers as producers, including Martin Scorsese, Todd Phillips, and Steven Spielberg. The Bernstein estate has been working closely with Cooper, as well.
Variety says “The film will span over 30 years, telling the story of the marriage between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre.”
This is just the latest example of Paramount and Netflix’s close business relationship, which began when the streaming giant saved them from a potentially disastrous release of The Cloverfield Paradox. They would later take international distribution on high-concept sci-fi film Annihilation, which went on to bomb domestically, by the way. Most recently they scored Beverly Hills Cop 4, when all of the franchise’s previous films were released by Paramount.
Jeff Baena may not be a household name to most people, but to those who frequent Sundance he’s probably very high on the radar. Park City has been the launching pad for every film he’s directed: Life After Beth, Joshy, and the religious black comedy The Little Hours. So naturally, it’s also where his latest, Horse Girl, is set to debut, and this might be the weirdest of them all.
Starring and co-written by Alison Brie, who worked with Baena on The Little Hours, Horse Girl follows a socially awkward with a love for horses and crime shows, who begins to lose her grip on reality. Brie is surrounded by a stellar cast that includes Sundance favorites Debby Ryan, John Reynolds, Molly Shannon, John Ortiz, Paul Reiser, and Jay Duplass, ensuring this will be one of the hottest tickets in town.
This looks positively bizarre, and a showcase for Brie who always brings her A+ stuff to Sundance. That it also comes from the producers of surreal, existential films The One I Love and Safety Not Guaranteed is no surprise.
SYNOPSIS: Sarah (Alison Brie), a socially isolated arts and crafts store employee, finds herself more content in the company of horses and supernatural crime shows than people. But when a series of strangely surreal dreams upend the simplicity of her waking life, Sarah struggles to distinguish her visions from reality. Directed by Jeff Baena, Horse Girl is a darkly humorous psychological thriller about a woman’s search for the truth, however abstract it may be.
Horse Girl is a Netflix joint, and will hit the streamer on February 7th.
Silly title aside, The Rhythm Section might just be a big deal. The vengeance thriller stars Blake Lively, who has proven herself to be quite the box office draw with a string of hits; it’s directed by acclaimed director Reed Morano, most recently of I Think We’re Alone Now; and it’s the first non-007 movie from franchise producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.
Lively plays a woman who seeks the truth regarding her parents’ death in a plane crash that was definitely not accidental. Similar to his role in Captain Marvel, Jude Law plays her mentor, training her in the ways of an assassin. The cast also includes Sterling K. Brown, Max Casella, and Daniel Mays.
The trailer goes out of its way to clear up what the title means. Basically, it’s a reference to the coping mechanism for Lively’s character when she’s under high-pressure situations.
Last year saw a number of actors revitalize their careers, but perhaps nobody did it better, or had further to go, than Shia LaBeouf. He kicked off the year at Sundance with his feature writing debut Honey Boy, an emotionally raw coming-of-age story that saw LaBeouf digging deep into his own troubled childhood. He followed that with the acclaimed feel-good drama The Peanut Butter Falcon. Getting back in Hollywood’s good graces hasn’t slowed LaBeouf down any, as he’s already completed work on his next screenplay.
Recently posted to the Black List is LaBeouf’s script for Minor Modifications, about rapper and Brockhampton founder Kevin Abstract. The two attended weekly therapy sessions together which is where they became acquainted, and apparently where LaBeouf got the idea to do a movie on him. Here’s the synopsis:
“Based on the life of rapper Kevin Abstract, this biographical fiction follows a Texas teen as he struggles with identity, finding meaningful relationships, sexual fluidity, and his direction in life.”
Those who have followed LaBeouf’s career know he has often taken an interest in the struggles of certain hip-hop stars. Years ago he proposed doing a film on one of my all-time favorite rappers, The Weathermen’s Cage Kennylz, and his battles with drug abuse. That movie never got off the ground, but it seems LaBeouf has found a suitable and more timely replacement.
I wouldn’t expect Minor Modifications to sit idle for long. Honey Boy proved LaBeouf’s mettle as a writer as well as an actor, and interest in his stuff is at a peak. Maybe he’ll reconnect with that movie’s director, Alma Har’el, given their past success?
The Thunderbolts have been rumored for their MCU debut for years, but now, following the events of Avengers: Endgame, it does seem like the right time. The most recent rumblings have William Hurt’s General Thunderbolt Ross forming the team during Black Widow, possibly even recruiting Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) for the squad, but a new rumor says they could appear on Disney+ first.
According to Full Circle Cinema (judge accordingly), Baron Zemo will form his team of Thunderbolts in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier miniseries. We do know that Daniel Bruhl is returning as Zemo, who in the comics took the villainous Masters of Evil and had them pose as heroes in the wake of the Avengers’ disappearance.
It’s possible Disney+ is also where we’ll see the formation of the Young Avengers. I don’t know about you, but a T-bolts vs. Young Avengers fight sounds pretty cool to me. Maybe the young team of heroes shows up to expose the frauds?
Take this rumor with a serious grain of salt until we know more. It’s possible Marvel has no immediate plans for the team at all.
My Dad would be going crazy if he knew Spenser: For Hire was coming back. The popular Boston detective of Robert B. Parker’s novels has been adapted many ways in different forms, including a TV series that ran for three seasons in the 1980s and led to a spinoff series A Man Called Hawk and a bunch of small-screen movies. Now the character is headed to Netflix in a movie by those two wild and crazy bros, Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg, who are joined by Us star Winston Duke.
Spenser Confidential isn’t based on one of Parker’s novels. Instead, it draws from the novel Wonderland by author Ace Atkins, who was brought on to relaunch the book franchise in 2012. The character of Spenser was most notably played by Robert Urich, with Deep Space Nine‘s Avery Brooks as the streetwise, sharp-dressed Hawk.
SYNOPSIS: Spenser moves in with Hawk, an aspiring MMA fighter with his own rap sheet. Between gym rounds, the duo’s taunts turn to trust, and they team up to solve a double homicide.
The duo of Berg and Wahlberg have been thick a thieves ever since 2013’s Lone Survivor, still their biggest film together. After a couple of well-reviewed financially-disappointing films in Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon, they teamed up most recently on the forgettable action flick Mile 22. It’ll be interesting to see what they can do under the Netflix banner where they won’t be measured by box office.
Netflix debuts Spenser Confidential on March 16th.
It’s commonplace for a low-budget horror to make a ton of money and launch into a bunch of sequels nobody asked for, but in the case of 2016’s Don’t Breathe what’s surprising is that we haven’t had one yet. The film, which was directed by Fede Alvarez in his followup to Evil Dead, made $157M and left audiences breathless with fear on a lean budget of under $10M.
So where’s the sequel at? Alvarez has been working on a script ever since, and it was reportedly completed in 2018, but it’s only now that Sony is really moving forward. THR reports Don’t Breathe co-writer Rodo Sayagues has been promoted to director. It’s a little surprising Alvarez isn’t tackling this himself given the success of the first movie, but Sayagues is a frequent collaborator and should be more than up to the task.
Don’t Breathe starred Stephen Lang as a blind man who stalks and hunts down a group three friends trapped in his home after they broke in looking for $300K in hidden cash. The film ended on a cliffhanger with one of the intruders getting away, and the blind man very deliberately not telling the police about her escape.
It was previously reported the sequel would be titled Don’t Breathe Again, but I hope that’s changed. Reportedly, the sequel “is set several years after the home invasion of the first movie, with the Blind Man living in quiet solace…until his past sins catch up to him.”
With filming set to begin in April, we should learn more soon and maybe see Don’t Breathe 2 in theaters by 2021.
