NEON is usually good for a few prestige dramas that make waves during the awards season, and this year is no different. With films such as Anatomy of a Fall, Eileen, and The Royal Hotel looking like potential contenders, the biggest gun in the studio’s arsenal is undoubtedly Ferrari, Michael Mann’s passion project starring Adam Driver.
Driver stars as former racer turned auto entrepreneur Enzo Ferrari, as he navigates a crumbling company, a turbulent marriage, and championship aspirations in 1957.
The film also stars Penélope Cruz, Shailene Woodley, Sarah Gadon, and Gabriel Leone. Jack O’Connell and Patrick Dempsey. Buzz was politely positive out of Venice, but hardly what one would call rapturous.
Here’s the synopsis: It is the summer of 1957. Behind the spectacle of Formula 1, ex-racer Enzo Ferrari is in crisis. Bankruptcy threatens the factory he and his wife, Laura built from nothing ten years earlier. Their volatile marriage has been battered by the loss of their son, Dino a year earlier. Ferrari struggles to acknowledge his son Piero with Lina Lardi. Meanwhile, his drivers’ passion to win pushes them to the edge as they launch into the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia.
Similar to my thoughts on Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, the more I see of Ferrari the less interested I am in it. I’m still gathering my thoughts on this, but it’s like both directors are trying to make relevant old stories that are past their expiration date. On the flip side, there’s Martin Scorsese, who feels more relevant than ever with Killers of the Flower Moon because it’s a story nobody has seen told before.
Anyway, I hope to be proven wrong and that Ferrari turns out to be the fast-paced, blistering drama that a Ferrari movie should be. We’ll find out when it opens on December 25th.
Apple has dropped a new trailer for Ridley Scott’s pet project, Napoleon, the historical thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix as the iconic French emperor and conqueror. Even though this is only the second trailer for the film, to me it feels like we’ve already seen a lot…perhaps too much, and I’m not sure it’s for the better. In fact, this movie is looking increasingly bloated and ridiculous to me.
Perhaps it has something to do with Scott already teasing a 4-hour cut of Napoleon to be released on Apple TV+. You know that means the theatrical version is already going to be epic in length, and other than the huge battle scenes and Phoenix’s strangely modern vernacular, is anything about this especially interesting?
Anyway, I’m sorta feeling the same way about Michael Mann’s Ferrari movie…which also has a new trailer out this morning.
Napoleon has a script by David Scarpa, who previously wrote Scott’s overlong and dull All the Money in the World. The cast surrounding Phoenix is extraordinary, though, with Vanessa Kirby as Napoleon’s lover and muse, Josephine, plus Tahar Rahim, Ben Miles, Ludivine Sagnier, Matthew Needham, and Mark Bonnar.
Here’s the synopsis: “Napoleon” is a spectacle-filled action epic that details the checkered rise and fall of the iconic French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, played by Oscar winner Joaquin Phoenix. Against a stunning backdrop of large-scale filmmaking orchestrated by legendary director Ridley Scott, the film captures Bonaparte’s relentless journey to power through the prism of his addictive, volatile relationship with his one true love, Josephine, showcasing his visionary military and political tactics against some of the most dynamic practical battle sequences ever filmed.
Napoleon opens in theaters on November 22nd via Apple, while Sony Pictures presents the 70mm and IMAX versions.
The arrival of a new film by Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Studio Ghibli animator’s first in a decade, is a very big deal and should be treated as such. And we’re seeing it get exactly that treatment with the star-studded English voice cast revealed by GKids.
Christian Bale, Robert Pattinson, Florence Pugh, Gemma Chan, Dave Bautista, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Mamoudou Athie, Tony Revolori, and Dan Stevens are all voicing The Boy and the Heron. The voice cast will be led by Luca Padovan as Mahito Maki, with Pattinson as the Grey Heron, Fukuhara as Lady Himi, Chan as Natsuko, and Bale as Shiochi Maki. Pugh voices Kiriko, with Bautista as The Parakeet King, and Dafoe as Noble Pelican.
Here’s the synopsis:
A young boy named Mahito
yearning for his mother
ventures into a world shared by the living and the dead.
There, death comes to an end,
and life finds a new beginning.
A semi-autobiographical fantasy
about life, death, and creation,
in tribute to friendship,
from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki.
The Boy and the Heron opens stateside on December 8th. [Deadline]
Chances are if you know the name Alice Englert it’s for her roles in such films as Beautiful Creatures, Ginger & Rose, and most recently, You Won’t Be Alone. But she’s also the daughter of acclaimed filmmaker Jane Campion, and a director, as well. Her feature-length debut, Bad Behaviour, premiered earlier this year at Sundance and now a new trailer has arrived for the film despite not having a firm release date.
Englert wears all of the hats in this one, directing as well as writing the screenplay, on top of composing the score. She co-stars alongside Jennifer Connelly, Ben Whishaw, Dasha Nekrasova, Beulah Koale, and Marlon Williams in the story of a mother and former child actress in the midst of a spiritual crisis.
Here’s the synopsis: Lucy seeks enlightenment. The former child actress makes a pilgrimage to join her guru, Elon Bello, for a silent retreat at a beautiful mountain resort with a Tesla-crammed parking lot. Before she shuts off her phone to the world, Lucy reaches out to her daughter, Dylan — a stunt person training for a dangerous fight scene — to interrupt her concentration and announce that she will be unavailable and out of range, and that she is very worried about her, and that she might extend her stay. It is co-dependent, bad behavior. When a young model/DJ/influencer at the retreat is paired up with Lucy to do a mother/daughter role-playing exercise, hellfire stokes Lucy’s bad behavior to an astonishing low.
This past Sundance was overloaded with movies from the children of well-established Hollywood professionals, and some of them were pretty terrible. Bad Behaviour has its share of issues, as well, mostly to do with the uneven tone, but ultimately I liked that Englert trusted her instincts and her cast.
We’ll let you know once Bad Behaviour scores a stateside release date.
If you don’t know anything about Eileen, the twisty new thriller that stars Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway, by God don’t let anyone spoil it. The film from director William Oldroyd, an adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel, is more than it appears to be on the surface.
Suffice it to say, there’s a lot more going on than a lonely young woman working at a detention facility who falls under the sway of a beautiful, worldly colleague. NEON walks a tightrope with the new trailer and synopsis, but fortunately, I don’t think they give too much away.
SYNOPSIS: Set during a bitter 1964 Massachusetts winter, young secretary Eileen becomes enchanted by the glamorous new counselor at the prison where she works. Their budding friendship takes a twisted turn when Rebecca reveals a dark secret – throwing Eileen onto a sinister path.
The film also stars Shea Whigham, Marin Ireland, Owen Teague, and Jefferson White. Tonye Patano and Siobhan Fallon-Hogan. This is Oldroyd’s first feature since 2016’s Lady Macbeth and was co-written with Moshfegh and Luke Goebel.
Eileen opens in NY and LA on December 1st before expanding on December 8th. You can find my review from its Sundance world premiere here.
Culture stands at the heart of Martin Scorsese’s sweeping, devastating crime epic Killers of the Flower moon. The loss one of one’s noble culture, and the terrible confirmation of another’s. The film, an adaptation of David Grann’s novel that brought this horrible period of the 1920s to light, begins with a council of Osage tribal leaders, meeting to discuss the loss of their culture after a forced move from Missouri to Oklahoma. The Osage believed they were chosen by a higher spirit, and this title became truer than ever when the Osage discovered oil on the supposedly barren land. They became, per capita, the richest people in the world, going to college, wearing fancy clothes, and being served by white people.
And it was this mixing with white society that began to doom the Osage. More white people moved in, they began marrying into the Osage and diluting their mighty warrior bloodline. But worse than that, the white men came with an agenda to separate the Osage from their wealth. It begins with forcing the ingigenous people to have handlers, always whites, to manage their finances. Greed, and taking that which is not theirs to have, is the unfortunate culture that the white man has brought to Fairfax, Oklahoma. In another tribal council meeting, a leader exclaims that if they could see the enemy, they would fight them like warriors. But these white men move in the shadows.
Scorsese and co-writer Eric Roth have done their due dilligence to make this fundamentally a story about the Osage. Sure, the biggest stars are white men, Leonardo DiCaprio’s “handsome devil” Ernest Burkhart, and Robert De Niro’s seemingly magnanimous philanthropist William Hale, Ernest’s uncle. The heart and soul of the story are the Osage, in particular Mollie Burkhart, played in the latest dynamic performance of the year by Lily Gladstone.
The Osage have been dying in unexplained ways. Some are murdered, others of are labeled depressed and accused of committing suicide. Still others by disease. In the case of Mollie, whose family is one of the wealthiest, she has been afflicted with diabetes, a “white man’s disease” that kills most by the age of 50. In one scene, she’s warned by a doctor that she’ll die young if she doesn’t stop eating like a white. But this apparent frailty also makes Mollie desirable. See, if she dies, then her oil rights transfer to another, and an opportunistic spouse…well…
There’s something else going on, too. The Osage, rich though they might be, can’t do anything about a system that’s fundamentally set up against them. Murder after murder and yet the police do nothing about it. The white men who work for the Osage walk around like they own the place; there’s racism everywhere, and when the Osage act out, usually in a drunken response, they pay the price and nobody else. Oklahoma begins to feel like an especially oil-rich prison.
It’s the perfect atmosphere for these crimes to be committed, and Scorsese, who knows a thing or two about criminal networks, establishes a different kind of mob movie with Killers of the Flower Moon. Unlike Grann’s novel which obscures the complicity of folks such as Ernest and Hale, Scorsese’s film is a lot more obvious. Hale entrusts the dopey but likable Ernest to use his charms to win over Mollie. She’s suspicious, and she even admits he’s a devil after her money, and yet she marries him anyway. What’s fascinating is watching as Mollie and Ernest do this toxic tango, where she knows what he’s up to and he plays at the caring, nurturing husband. Do they really, truly love one another? The duplicitous dance that DiCaprio and Gladstone weave is some of the best acting you’ll see in any movie all year. Truly incredible work between the two of them, because it’s never 100% clear where Ernest and Mollie are coming from. All we know is that Mollie’s friends and family keep dying, Hale and Ernest keep making more money, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it.
I don’t want to skip past Gladstone too easily here. The third of a truly breakout year that includes performances in Fancy Danceand The Unknown Country, Gladstone’s Mollie is at times a pillar of strength, a concerned spouse, a devoted sister, and the center of a paranoid conspiracy. We see Mollie as she looks at the man she loves and is forced to wonder if the insulin he gives her is meant to kill her, or if he’s truly looking out for her as she hopes. Scorsese taken on a few muses over his career, and thsi first time with Gladstone has me hoping she is the next one.
Speaking of muses, we finally get to see De Niro and DiCaprio together in a Scorsese joint. The results are predictably out of this world, with the fatherly De Niro’s Hale looking down at DiCaprio’s Ernest like a school kid at detention. De Niro has always had this unique ability to be, at the same time, an intimidating and caring father figure, both of which he employs judiciously here. And it’s just a blast to see the high-wire act DiCaprio pulls off, equal parts slimy and charming as Ernest. He’s played secretive characters before but never one with such high emotional stakes as this, nor one who falls victim to a hilariously corporal punishment at the old man’s hands. Watch as the movie goes along just how haggard and pathetic Ernest becomes while in Hale’s presence.
Like the novel, Killers of the Flower Moon becomes something altogether different with the introduction of federal lawman Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a former Texas Ranger sent by Hoover (Yes, the same J. Edgar once played by DiCaprio) to investigate the murder. Whereas the book became more of a procedural, the film begins to distance itself from the emotional core of Mollie and Ernest. We follow the beats of the investigation, which proves rather Scorsese-esque with so many dim-witted criminals running around trying to save themselves, but we lose track of Mollie as she wastes away in her bedroom. It’s still quite an entertaining film at this point, and often quite funny, but in a lesser way as before. The Osage as a whole see their role diminished in the latter stretch.
Still, it’s good that Scorsese doesn’t focus on the murders so much. Violence is kept to minimum, but it’s quick and shocking when it does occur, achieving maximum impact. Robbie Robertson’s string and drum-heavy score carries us through this remarkable true-crime epic that rumbles us through the hills and mountains of Oklahoma where the moonshiners lurk. The steady corruption, the rot in the gut of this cherished land is captured in stunning natural colors by cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto.
Killers of the Flower Moon is a complete, utterly masterful film that echoes the very birth of America. And it comes not without its share of potential drawbacks by having a White filmmaker tell this uniquely Native American story. But Scorsese is clever indeed, framing the film around a fictional true crime radio serial, with white actors humiliatingly acting out the tribal roles while voices we know and respect pay final homage to the Osage who stood like warriors against the tide of violence and corruption that would infect this country. I’ve been down on Scorsese of late; the combined 200+ dull hours of Silence and The Irishman will do that, but Killers of the Flower Moon shows that he is still a filmmaker in full control and at the top of his game on every level.
Apple releases Killers of the Flower Moon into theaters on October 20th.
Does Apple REALLY need to drop one more trailer for Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Of course not. It’s already one of the most anticipated movies of the year, and it opens in just three days. So I’m not going to bore you with the details, especially since my review will be posting here in about five minutes.
You can look forward to a pair of Scorsese muses, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, starring the crime epic that tells the true story of murders of the wealthy Osage tribe for their oil rights in the 1920s. Also in the cast are Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons, Brendan Fraser, Tantoo Cardinal, and John Lithgow.
Here’s the synopsis: At the turn of the 20th century, oil brought a fortune to the Osage Nation, who became some of the richest people in the world overnight. The wealth of these Native Americans immediately attracted white interlopers, who manipulated, extorted, and stole as much Osage money as they could before resorting to murder. Based on a true story and told through the improbable romance of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), “Killers of the Flower Moon” is an epic western crime saga, where real love crosses paths with unspeakable betrayal.
Killers of the Flower Moon opens in theaters on October 20th.
Terrifying is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the film world…but it’s not the word you’d think would describe The Zone of Interest, at least not by the first few seconds of the trailer. Budding editors, take note, this is how you cut a trailer together.
The trailer opens on an idyllic countryside, think The Sound of Music, families are seen just being together, wives making dinner, husbands reading the paper. Norman Rockwell would be proud of the scene set at the start of this trailer. Then the hammer drops, even if subtlety. These beautiful vistas, these “loving” families, are all those surrounding Auschwitz concentration camp. The footage barely even hints at the evil lying beneath, a far away shot of a Nazi uniform here, a ominous tone there, it’s just enough.
Setting this stage is probably the most important thing to make a movie like this, based off the 2014 novel, because you have to remove all the cinematic evil that’s been layered on top of what happened there. The novel, which focused on a love triangle told via three narrators, intends to paint a picture of normal on top of extraordinary evil. This has been the sociologic case study of our time, what would the average person have done if this situation was upon them. Would they do what’s right, or sacrifice others for the good of their own family?
If the trailer is any indication, I smell more awards in A24’s future. The film marks director Jonathan Glazer’s first since 2013’s Under the Skin, and earned the Grand Prix award after its Cannes debut. Those here in the DMV can also check out The Zone of Interest this weekend at the Middleburg Film Festival, ahead of a theatrical release on December 15th.
Synopsis: A group of Satanic hippies wreak havoc on a small town. A young boy tries to get even after they victimize his sister and grandfather…with deadly results.
Any time you see that “Grindhouse Releasing” splash screen and that all too familiar music starts, you know you’re in for a good time. This one is no exception. Things kick up right away on the outskirts of a dying town, with a dark fire lit scene, naked bodies and sacrificial animals. That’s right, we are watching a Satanic ritual (or at least a film version of it). A young girl is watching from the periphery and gets spotted. She is then tortured/raped by the group and sent on her way back to town. In a fury, her grandfather attempts to exact revenge on the group that has taken up residence in the abandoned hotel in town. Only to be dosed with LSD and brutalized himself. The younger brother takes things to the extreme to get even by lacing the Satanic groups’ food with rabies. Things quickly go south with Satanists foaming at the mouth, infecting the remaining residents.
This movie is batshit insane, but that’s what I’ve grown to love about 70’s exploitation cinema. Filled with demented scenarios, copious amounts of sketchy gore and tons of nudity. Originally billed as a double feature with I Eat Your Skin. These types of flicks are a time capsule of the nuttiness that was the horror genre prior to the slashers of the late 70’s/early 80’s. In this day and age, things like this just can’t be made anymore. Durston got himself an “X” rating for this one. Actually the first ever by the MPAA for violence alone.
I’m usually pretty thorough with my exploitation stuff but this one just happened to slip through. Luckily Tubi is here to save the day. Films of this era tend to be my favorite just due to the fact that you know what you’re going to get, just not how it’s going to be thrown at you. They’re usually just 90 minutes of comedic gore filled goofiness and I’m all for that.
Join me again tomorrow and we’ll continue this crazy little journey down the horror rabbit hole.
Synopsis: A used bookstore clerk and aspiring actress starts seeing the disfigured killer from her 1950’s pulp novels come to life, killing the people around her.
Virginia is a used bookstore clerk who has become obsessed with an old horror novel from the 1950’s called “I, Madman”. It’s the story of a doctor who is infatuated with a woman but the feelings aren’t reciprocal. The doctor then begins to murder people to claim parts or their faces to graft to his in an attempt to make himself likable for the object of his affection. But throughout the course of reading the book, Virginia slowly discovers that this particular piece is actually non-fiction. Every time she reads a page, she sees the mad doctor. After unsuccessfully trying to convince her detective boyfriend she’s not insane, the people around her begin to be killed and it’s a mad dash to save herself from the doctor’s grasp.
I’m actually pretty happy I found this one. It’s a bit of a hidden gem and I’m wondering why I’ve never heard of it before. The story is creative and fairly unique, blurring reality and fiction quite well. It’s well acted and visually appealing. It’s got a vibe that I’ve never really experienced prior to this, incorporating an 80’s horror feel with minimal gore and a dash of detective noir. Some of you might be familiar with the director if you’re a fan of The Gate like I am. Tibor Takacs actually directed this one smack dab in between The Gate and The Gate 2 before shifting to television and eventually Hallmark holiday fare. The guy had a really good feel for unique 80’s horror so I’m kind of bummed there isn’t really anymore genre stuff post 1990 but I’m pretty sure the route he took was much more lucrative.
Join me again tomorrow as we continue our little journey down the rabbit hole.
