The latest film releases include One of Them Days, Wolf Man, I'm Still Here, and Wish You Were Here. Weighing in are Alison Willmore, a film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture, and Witney Seibold, senior staff writer at SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed.
One of Them Days
In this buddy comedy, Keke Palmer and SZA star as friends and roommates on the verge of getting evicted – with one day to scrounge up the rent money.
Willmore: “I was really charmed by this movie. It's a studio comedy, which barely exists anymore. … It's a kind of old school buddy comedy. … It has the rhythms of a stoner comedy, even though no one on screen has time to partake. You have Keke almer, who I find just one of the great comedians of our era, and then SZA in her first film role, really a natural. … She's the woo-woo friend who believes in trusting the universe, and Keke Palmer is the planner friend who's really trying to move up in the world and get off of this paycheck-to-paycheck grind she's been on. … It's very much a comedy about feeling like maybe you don't have any chance to rise up above a place where you're just constantly in this economically precarious position. … It's very clever about how it handles that theme, while going from … outrageous episode to outrageous episode.”
Wolf Man
From the horror powerhouse Blumhouse, a husband is with his family in the woods, when they’re attacked and he begins to lose his human senses. Director Leigh Whannell’s previous movie, The Invisible Man, was a success.
Seibold: “Christopher Abbott plays a dad who lives in San Francisco. We see a flashback at the beginning of the movie. He was raised in the woods of Oregon by an abusive father who taught him lessons about shooting guns and how the natural world is out to kill him. And there's a story lurking about how there's a hiker that went missing, and they got infected with something that turned them into some wild creature. His father dies when he's an adult. He takes his family, his wife, and his young daughter out into this cabin in the woods. And wouldn't you know it, on the drive, they're attacked by some wolf creature, and dad gets bitten, and over the course of a single night, he starts to mutate into some creature.
Clearly, the director Leigh Whannell is trying to go for something really, really stylish and downbeat and thematically rich with the traditional Wolf Man material. And as a result, the movie's really not that scary. … We get to see what wolf vision looks like, what it looks like when he's turned into a creature, how lights change, and how he hears human beings speaking in gibberish, all of that's very interesting. But ultimately it's just kind of okay. Nothing's wholly successful in bringing a new spin to the Wolf Man material.”
Willmore: “Both it and The Invisible Man are going at the same idea, which is what is lurking within these classic monsters: toxic masculinity. And I think with The Invisible Man, with
Elizabeth Moss, it was this whole story about an abusive relationship, right, where the invisible man is her wealthy husband who is terrorizing her and gaslighting her while being invisible. Wolf Man, it definitely is more straightforward. And this one was pretty compact, it takes place mostly over the course of a night. … It tries to get at … being so consumed with … needing to protect your family, that you become the threat to your family.
… One thing that I think the movie does do really well is when it does show you how his point of view, he can't really understand what the non-infected people are saying anymore. You understand that he is slowly starting to see his wife and child as prey, essentially. … They look like these vulnerable figures in the dark. And that, I think it is effective.”
I'm Still Here
From director Walter Salles, this historical drama is set during Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Fernanda Torres stars as Eunice Paiva, who becomes a vocal activist after the government takes away and murders her husband. Torres already won a Golden Globe for this performance.
Willmore: “The best part of this movie for me was the beginning, because it starts off just really establishing this family living in the 70s in Rio de Janeiro. And this whole family dynamic of this older daughter is about to go off to school in London … this vibrant house and these cultural tides. … It's so effective at showing this life happening, that when this intrusion happens, it's so frightening. You just understand how it felt like a total rupture in the world, and this reminder of just the ways in which people disappeared. … It struggles with … this is a real story, and it's one that doesn't offer the closure that a convenient, scripted fictional drama might. What happened is there was a lot of waiting and trying to go on with life and trying to fight back. … But it does have a great lead performance, and it really … shed a lot of light for me on a period of Brazilian history that I wasn't very familiar with.”
Seibold: “This is a terrific movie, and I think it really is anchored by that first 30 or 40 minutes where we do just see the slice of life drama about this family that lives really close to the beach, and they have so many kids, and there's kids just walking in and out, and they're making these big meals. There's not a lot of story. There's just a lot of atmosphere being set up. And a big part of the drama is the father is just taken away one day. And the most frustrating thing is they're not given any information. They don't know anything. Then they're taken to be interrogated, and they're still given no information whatsoever.
… Another 10 years have passed, another 15 years have passed, you just realize how hopeless this struggle is. … And it's not until the present that we even get to know the truth. So it's also incredibly bleak and aggravating and weirdly timely.”
Wish You Were Here
This is the directorial debut of Julia Stiles, known for acting roles as a teenager in 10 Things I Hate About You and Save The Last Dance. This film is based on a 2017 novel of the same name, about a woman who falls in love with a man she just met, then discovers that he is terminally ill.
Seibold: “This film stars Isabelle Fuhrman, who as a young woman named Charlotte, she's living with her best friend and roommate, and she is trying to reassess her career because she really hates working as a waitress in a Mexican restaurant. While she is having a drink with her friend out on a stoop one afternoon, the most boring meet cute in the history of cinema happens. The man simply walks past them, and they say, ‘Hey,’ and he stops and talks to them. It turns out this man is Adam. He's played by Mena Massoud from Aladdin. He is devastatingly handsome. He's very, very charming. He's an artist. And he ends up taking Charlotte just out on a wild night. They paint a mural together, they go back to his place, they talk about the relationship they might have, and they have a one-night stand, and then they go their separate ways. She continues to try dating other men, but keeps on thinking about Adam. And about a third of the way into the movie, she reconnects with Adam and learns that he hasn't been calling her because he has terminal movie cancer. … He's clearly dying but displays no symptoms whatsoever. And the rest of the movie, a frustrating percentage of this movie is just wistful montages of these two people doing lovey-dovey things. The story isn't really being progressed. Charlotte is learning a little bit about herself. It feels really, really just trite and manufactured and sentimental.”
Willmore: “I was not familiar with the book that this is based on, but it did remind me of this recent swing of book … hits getting adapted, where it has a lot of tropes. It's got a rich guy trope. It's got … one partner in this romance is very ill. And then it is also a movie about someone who's lost, trying to find herself and figure out what she wants in life. But none of these elements are really developed. … This is one for the hardcore devotees of this genre only, or Julia Stiles heart fans who want to support her first venture into directing.”