Matt Goldberg

It’s a movie that’s constantly telling you stakes and what the characters want but rarely letting you invest in a shared sense of wonder. Instead, you have a film that announces the connection between reality and imagination without letting the images speak for themselves.

It all makes for a nice movie, and I can be a sucker for nice movies when they’re handled as well as this one.

A subject as slippery as “cancellation” needs a firm grip, and Hill, who came in for his own public criticism a few years ago, seems to have little worth saying on the matter other than celebrities are as imperfect as anyone else. The lack of specificity makes Outcome painfully broad both thematically and comically where it seems more like a collection of half-sketched ideas of Hollywood life rather than anything substantive about the unique social relationships formed by fame.

How to Make a Killing has the acuity to know that even if you are willing to play such a rigged game in ruthless fashion, you’ll still lose. The film’s magic trick is taking this bleak idea and knowing how to find the fun in such brutal sport.

How to Make a Killing has the acuity to know that even if you are willing to play such a rigged game in ruthless fashion, you’ll still lose. The film’s magic trick is taking this bleak idea and knowing how to find the fun in such brutal sport.

Working from a script by Matthew Robinson, the dark comedy, like other Verbinski works, feels like it’s bursting at the seams and threatening to collapse under its big ideas. And yet the threat of combustion, along with a terrific performance from Sam Rockwell, helps provide the film with its off-kilter energy that will keep you hooked until you’re exhausted.

The fact that the movie can still stay entertaining enough is thanks to the performances and Carnahan’s claustrophobic camera work, which turns a mundane cul-de-sac into a particularly unnerving location. But once the film hits an answer on who you can trust, it can’t help but sputter to the end.

For a movie that should provide the comfort of the romance genre, People We Meet on Vacation usually tops out at being blandly pleasant.

There are some moments where the film clings a bit too heavily to genre tropes, but thankfully, its main focus is on coping with loss and the complexity of grief.

The film aspires to be yet another eat-the-rich parable in our time of oligarchs, and while there’s no rule that these stories need to be dark comedies, they should at least aspire to have some kind of personality.