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The stilted dialogue and unreality of everything was constantly reminding me of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis all throughout. Come to find out both movies are adaptations of books by the same author, Don DeLillo. I haven't read DeLillo's work, but he clearly has a unique style if two directors as different as Noah Baumbach and David Cronenberg wind up making such similar feeling movies out of his source material. I guess his style must work better on the page because it doesn't quite work on screen, though it is constantly interesting. The best thing to come from this is that it got us a new LCD Soundsystem song, New Body Rhumba, and it **** slaps. --- This movie ended up being weirdly prophetic of the train derailment/ecological disaster in Ohio, which is where the movie was shot oddly enough.

Sporadically compelling. There is a fantastic 90-minute movie stuck inside this 148-minute movie. It is not a script that demands the runtime. The film clearly wants to be a big epic with an overture and intermission but its way of achieving that goal is to take a smaller, simple story and inject a bunch of air into it. There is some great dialogue and acting to be had, and a strong ending, but also far too much downtime with basically nothing happening other than killing time for long stretches.

You could lop the first 10 or so minutes off of this entirely without changing anything. The opening really feels like front-loaded killing time to reach 90 minutes (and couldn't be more cliche with the character waking up in bed and turning off her alarm clock), but what follows is an excellent 80-minute drama and dual character study. Tom Noonan and Karen Silas are both fantastic, not to mention the impressive work Noonan does as the writer and director. As a single-location piece, this is all about character and performance, and those aspects fully deliver. The two feel as natural as could be and capture this type of awkward energy exceptionally well to the point of becoming uncomfortable to watch at points. This is very much a filmed play, which I know rubs a lot of people the wrong way but that never really bothers me. Your mileage may vary. Noonan keeps things just a tiny bit more visually interesting than a real-time drama set entirely in an apartment could have been. The titular storybook sequence where Noonan starts hearing things from the dolls and seeing movement in the dollhouse seems pretty out of place tonally and stylistically within the rest of the film. I enjoyed how strange it was, and, obviously, it's not literal, but it really doesn't mesh with the overall piece. The biggest drawback to me is that the characters become their most interesting selves with their two big monologue reveals, but then the movie just ends immediately afterward. There was so much unexplored potential left on the table that went disappointingly unseized. Ditch those useless first 10 minutes and give me 10 extra minutes at the end that dive deeper into those final revelations and all of the inherent baggage and drama that comes with them.

I find it truly disturbing the number of times these characters use the bathroom without ever washing their hands. Hoffman uses the bathroom and then is immediately dunking his dirty **** fingers in the kid's french toast batter, yuck. Here's a video essay that I talk about this film in: ****/iQYPMFknG1Y

The action elements aren't executed very well with everything feeling slow and clunky but the thriller plotting is superb, which is no surprise with William Goldman writing the script and the source material it's based on. Olivier makes a fantastic villain and there are some wonderfully tense sequences.

It all felt rather played out and familiar for the first 2/3, and I found the super loud jump scare noises even more annoying than usual given this is a film that presents itself as the more artsy, "elevated" type of horror. I wasn't into it. But then the last third won me back over in a major way. It went in some interesting and unexpected directions, and I found the way everything came together in the end to be quite satisfying. Apparently, a lot of people consider this film to be really good until it falls apart at the ending, but I feel the exact opposite. I would hazard to guess that I might enjoy this significantly more on a second watch now that I know what it's building toward and that the payoff is worthwhile.

The gunfighting doesn't fare as well as the hand-to-hand combat but the action in general is pretty solid for a movie of this scale. Uses its action stars to good effect, and it's quite cool to see three different body types and fighting styles square off. Dolph is huge and powerful, Tony Jaa is small and acrobatic, and we all know Michael Jai White is built like a brick **** Quite poorly edited in some places but the choreography makes this just barely worth a watch for action junkies in my book.

pretty great action, pretty terrible everything else. Adkins is a beast as usual

Worth the price of admission to see Van Damme do a split against a moving car, otherwise standard straight to video action schlock

Overstuffed and way too long (you could cut the entire Berlin act without affecting the plot whatsoever). There is a laundry list of little things that don’t make sense or are inconsistent with the prior films. John is barely a character at this point with the other characters all commenting on how he has no purpose and no real reason to do any of this. He also needs to turn off the cheat code that disables fall damage, that ain’t fair. All that being said… it is so goddamn entertaining. The action is stellar and the amount of it is perfect. The new characters are all significantly more interesting than the returning characters, and Donnie Yen totally steals the show. It’s a fitting conclusion to the John Wick Saga, the upcoming spinoffs notwithstanding of course. It’s a poor script executed in bravura fashion and significantly elevated. The story is not good, but the action is so great you might not care.

How Ruben Ostlund tracks the ripples of a moment (video essay): ****/96KlMB6ZCDs

Bay's direction is a mess like always. His camera is constantly doing ridiculous spins and sweeps for no reason (the way Bay uses a drone is so obnoxious) and the tone is all over the place with the content being cheesy as hell but the soundtrack and slow-mo golden-hour shots insisting that everything is so dramatic and emotional in the first act. Give me a break. I would call this the worst original score I've heard in a long time but it's possible the music itself might be totally fine in a different context. It's like putting the score to Schindler's List over Hobo With a Shotgun, it just doesn't make any sense. Bay aims for Heat and hits Wrath of Man

Fun violence, a compelling performance from Kazuki Kitamura that elevates a cliche character, and a cool sense of style are unfortunately dragged down by a pretty weak script. Oka Antara's character arc would be interesting if it wasn't presented in such a hard-to-believe way. The script is packed with moments large and small that don't make sense or just don't quite add up, including the whole impetus for the core plot with Bayu uploading the murder footage. It's also way too long. I thought for sure I was watching the final scene, then the movie just moved on to other things and kept going for another half hour. The plot doesn't fully work but the Mo Brothers are strong enough visual directors (and I've especially enjoyed Timo's solo work) to likely keep you invested and engaged despite the shortcomings.

It is downright criminal for something this schlocky and stupid to be this long. This **** is only 7 minutes shorter than GOODFELLAS and for no reason at all. The over-the-top gore is super fun but whenever the clown isn't on screen this thing grinds to a halt. I spent about half of the movie trying to figure out if the acting, dialogue, and cinematography were all terrible on purpose. The film is certainly intentionally campy in ways and seems totally self-aware at some moments but it also takes itself way too seriously at other moments, and all the melodramatic family stuff should have been left on the cutting room floor. My viewing experience was a cycle of being totally checked out and hating the characters, then being won back over by some wild moment with the clown, rinse and repeat. But even the clown and the crazy violence grew tiring long before the end. There is a tipping point where the gratuitous torture can stop being fun and just feel gross and nihilistic, and Terrifier 2 crossed that line in a couple of scenes. It almost even feels a little misogynistic since the victims are mostly innocent young women but the movie clearly wants you to be rooting for the clown and reveling in his sadistic violence against them. Seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of why the best slasher movies work.

The story isn't anything special and it's pretty messily told. Exposition is doled out at bizarre times like waiting an hour into the movie to reveal that the main character has a daughter and all of the randomly placed flashbacks to things that do not matter. But, the action is pretty good once it finally kicks off and when it isn't hampered by bad VFX

Well made and acted, but the story lacks any sense of purpose. It seems to be trying to say something about dominant vs. submissive personality types but offers no commentary or cogent point beyond simply acknowledging that they exist. The film is a slow burn that only shifts into horror in the last 20ish minutes, but when it makes that shift, there is no surprise, satisfaction, scares, or catharsis. The plot unfolds exactly how you expect it to from the outset without any subversion or even anything clever to mix things up. The actions of the main characters become less and less believable as the film moves along and what starts out feeling realistic ends up requiring through-the-roof suspension of disbelief to not see the gaping plot holes. The first 2/3 function as an effective uncomfortable social drama, but the third act squanders any potential that was built up.