The latest film releases include Final Destination: Bloodlines, Magic Farm, Caught by the Tides, and Hurry Up Tomorrow. Weighing in are Alonso Duralde and Dave White, film critics and co-hosts of the movie podcast Linoleum Knife.
Final Destination: Bloodlines
In the latest installment of the franchise, a college student has a recurring nightmare about the deaths of her family and tries to save them.
Duralde: “This movie is a sequel and a prequel to the entire Final Destination series because it's basically taking you back to the OG incident of people not dying when they were supposed to, and death coming to catch up. And the premise is basically that all of the movies take place after this instigating incident, and now the final survivors are trying to figure out if there's a way to break the chain. But … death will have its due. … If you're here for the lore, and you know these movies really well, there are lots of easter eggs and callbacks. … But even if you're coming in cold, because there hasn't been a Final Destination movie since 2011, so I imagine there's going to be a whole new audience for these films. The movie tells you everything you need to know, and you're really just there for the cool homicides, and you will get them.”
White: “In real life, you're gonna die somewhere down the road, and it might be because of something like a lawnmower running over your face, but these aren't comedies, even as much as I sat there next to [Duralde] laughing through the whole thing. These films provide an opportunity to laugh at death.”
Magic Farm
A film crew flies to South America to profile a musician, but they go to the wrong country.
White: “It's a story of a group of documentary filmmakers from a place not unlike VICE News, and they're chasing a viral TikTok trend. In this case, it's a musician who wears bunny ears and a tail, although this person may or may not be real, and they wind up in the wrong country. So while they are there, they make the decision to fabricate a trend story for the sake of their deadline. Meanwhile, there's a very real and serious story happening right under their noses: the poisoning of the local population from chemical pesticides being sprayed all over the place. … It mostly just eviscerates these cynical young people involved in making this ‘content.’ … The key casting here … is Chloë Sevigny because her very presence in American culture is a shorthand signifier for that cultural trailblazing, and watching her portray the person that people often assume she really is — is quite satisfying.”
Duralde: “It's a very pointed satire, but it actually has a lot more compassion for most of its characters. The Chloë Sevigny character remains pretty irredeemable, and she's the most cynical of all of these people. … It does start out as … loud American dummies show up in a foreign country. … But they spend enough time there, and the movie grants them enough grace that they actually are less dumb and loud by the time the movie is over.”
Caught by the Tides
Zhao Tao plays a working-class woman on a long search for her lost lover as China transforms socially and economically. This is built off of footage shot across two decades, including from director Jia Zhangke’s past films.
White: “[Jia Zhangke is] one of international cinema's most acclaimed and accomplished filmmakers, one of the select group of directors whose films routinely get released in U.S. art houses. … How do you make a movie during COVID lockdown? In Jia’s case, there was a ready-made answer because his wife, the actress Zhao Tao, has been in nearly all of his films over the past 20 years, and the actor, Li Zhubin has been in four of them. … Jia took alternative takes and B roll footage going back to Unknown Pleasures, and with some plot elements from his 2006 film called Still Life, and some of the others to create a doomed romance. … The final third of the movie was shot during COVID, and the actors have aged into their present selves. … It is a stunning accomplishment. It's, I think, one of the best things I've seen so far this year.”
Duralde: “Jia … manages to be more pointed in his critiques, or at least observations, of contemporary China than almost anybody else working today, and somehow miraculously staying out of prison. … This is more a film about these characters as he has managed to assemble them over the years. But in the background, if you're paying attention, you see the changes in China over the course of the 21st century. You see a leaning towards a more capitalist society, a more materialist society. You see the transformation of the natural world into the industrial world.”
Hurry Up Tomorrow
A musician with insomnia is pulled into an odyssey with a stranger that unravels the core of his existence. This stars Abel Tesfaye (aka The Weeknd), Jenna Ortega, and Barry Keoghan.
Duralde: “The Weeknd plays The Weeknd, and his life is really hard, y'all, with the touring and everything. And then he encounters a fan, played by Jenna Ortega, who … [is] committing a crime, it's clear that this is not going to go well. … If you are looking at it at the level that writer-director Trey Edward Shults was perhaps going for, it is an exploration of the psyche, about a man doing battle with his ID and his superego. … It's a terrible movie.”
White: “There is one relentlessly punishing element of this film. I mean, there's more than one, but the one that irritated me the most was its refusal to let a camera simply capture what is happening. … It just informs us [of] a self-conscious approach that is deadly serious but quickly turns into camp. … It is colossally dumb, this film.”