The latest film releases include Clown in a Cornfield, Friendship, Fight or Flight, and Absolute Dominion. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, senior writer at SlashFilm and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network, and Katie Walsh, film reviewer for The Tribune News Service and The Los Angeles Times.
Clown in a Cornfield
From director Eli Craig (Zombieland and Tucker & Dale vs. Evil), a teenage girl and her dad move to a small town and learn it’s socially fractured, economically troubled, and threatened by a homicidal clown.
Walsh: “It's pretty fun. It's very reverent towards the material. But it's not doing anything new. … There's a clown. He's in a cornfield. Mayhem ensues. But it's pretty straightforward in terms of the genre.”
Seibold: “I was a teenager when Wes Craven’s Scream came out in the mid-90s, and that was really trying to deconstruct slashers. Slashers were done at that point. And for a brief period, there was this deconstructionist slasher wave where we’re just picking apart slashers. … And it's really unusual to come to something like Clown in a Cornfield and find that they're just doing it again, there's no self-reference, there's no self-awareness. We're just doing something that we would have seen in the 1980s, just with a little bit more of a teen-friendly vibe. It's still very bloody. It's still very gory. … There's one or two twists, but they're not so dramatic that they're even notable. … It is a slasher movie. It's right up the middle. I want there to be more cleverness in my slasher movies. I want there to be creative kills. And this doesn't have enough of that. It's not scary, it's not clever, it's just blah.”
Fight or Flight
Josh Hartnett is a former CIA agent who’s tasked, by his former boss and ex-girlfriend (Katee Sackhoff), with finding “the ghost” on a plane. However, he learns that his target’s location has been leaked to all the world’s assassins.
Seibold: “Every single person on this flight is a very colorful, cartoony assassin who wants to locate and kill the ghost before Josh Hartnett can protect them. This seems like pretty standard action movie fare, just a little bit overblown with the number of assassins in it. The tone of this film, however, is really broad and slapstick. It's really cartoonish. The violence is super over-the-top. And Josh Hartnett is playing his character as a put-upon slapstick everyman who just can't believe how bad his day is getting. … Your mileage is going to vary, whether you find the slapstick violence really brisk and exhilarating, or really affected and stylized and obnoxious. … I think Josh Hartnett is really the rock of this. He is the one who not only is capably handling the action, but really capably handling the comedy.”
Walsh: “The pilots are an afterthought. … I'm very here for the Josh Hartnett renaissance that's been happening in the past few years with Trap and Oppenheimer, and he just really holds it together. … There's a flight attendant on the flight played by Charithra Chandran, who was in Bridgerton season two. And I think she has really fun chemistry with Josh Hartnett. So she's also a standout for me.”
Friendship
Comedian Tim Robinson (I Think You Should Leave) plays a suburban dad named Craig who becomes obsessed with his new neighbor (Paul Rudd) who’s a local weather forecaster. But then Craig gets platonically dumped.
Walsh: “I would highly recommend seeing this in the theater. … Seeing this movie with a crowd of people is absolute joy. It is extremely funny. … It's definitely a dark comedy or a weird comedy. … It does not go into thriller, scary vibe. I think that the trailer is trying to position it as this friendship horror movie, like, ‘Oh my god, I made a social faux pas. How devastating is that?’ … It's very relatable in the sense that anybody who's tried to make friends as an adult, or felt that they did something wrong or had an awkward moment in friendship, it blows that up to epic proportions. I think it's also tackling this idea of the ‘male loneliness epidemic,’ how adult men who are married and have kids and families are maybe not socializing with each other enough, and the struggle that is to find friends as an adult. … So I think that as much as the film is over-the-top, it's also deeply human and very relatable. This is one of the best movies of the year.”
Absolute Dominion
In 2063, world religions send representatives to compete in a martial arts tournament to decide which faith will govern humanity. This stars Patton Oswalt, Junes Zahdi, and Julie Ann Emery.
Seibold: “This character … played by Désiré Mia is going to fight for the institute of humanism. He is the atheist fighter, and he is the underdog of this story. Will the atheist be able to fight all of these religions? It has a super persecution complex. … And it has all of these straw man arguments that it likes to make against and for religion. Nothing comes together just because the film is so unbearably cheap. All of the exteriors were done on Photoshop-style computer animation programs. The gigantic stadiums where the fighters are supposed to fight are clearly just like a local dojo with mats on the floor, and there's like 30 people surrounding the mat. … There are so few fight scenes that we're just wading through all of these really dull conspiracy scenes where people are snarling at the idea of religion. And we're trying to approach a serious topic about the role of faith in the modern world, but we never really get there.”
Walsh: “This is written and directed by Lexi Alexander. And I'm always going to root for Lexi. … She's very outspoken, and in a way that has made it hard for her, I think, to get things financed in Hollywood. But what's interesting is that she started as a kickboxing champion martial artist. … She also played Princess Katana in a traveling Mortal Kombat show, so it's interesting that this is a Mortal Kombat-esque movie but with a fighting tournament and everything. She shoots the fighting really well, but the budgetary limitations on this severely hold this film back, and also, I think the inelegance of the script.”