★★★☆☆
Dir. Wes Craven. 2011. R. 103mins. Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, David Arquette.
Hello yet again, Sidney. The beleaguered Ms. Prescott (Campbell) has returned to her hometown of Woodsboro — the final stop on her self-help book tour and original site of the massacre that claimed the lives of family and friends in Scream (1996). Since then, the Ghostface killer has followed her to college (Scream 2) and the City of Angels (Scream 3), so what would her homecoming be…
Less a last will and testament than a mischievously mutual final troll, Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel sees both its director and its subject, the late spy turned novelist John le Carré (né David Cornwell), engage in a circuitous dialogue, shot over four days near the end of 2019, that’s as charming and playful as it is oblique and ominous.
Contradictions abound, beginning with the film’s title visual, which is taken from le Carré’s 2016 memoir of the same…
[Published as part of New Pollution #2]
The irritatingly genteel Nomadland, adapted from a nonfiction book by Jessica Bruder, appears well on its way to golden statuettes and other year-end plaudits. For writer-director-editor Chloé Zhao this is the last stop before the Marvel Moloch grinds her personal stamp, such as it is, to a pre-viz’d pulp with The Eternals. I didn’t much care for the mannered neo-realism of The Rider, but at least it could fall back on the authenticity…
[Published September 9th, 2019, Slant Magazine]
Excerpt
Waititi prefers to treat his audience like drooling cretins who need their hands held through every shift in tone, reassured that everything, even in a world off its axis, is going to work out. It doesn’t help that this misguided production is utterly devoid of laughs, though I admit to cracking a desperate smile when the nitwit Nazi played by Sam Rockwell demands that an underling bring him German shepherds, as in the dogs, and is instead delivered shepherds who are German. It’s a flash of punny bliss in what’s otherwise Marvel Presents Mein Kampf.
Link
www.slantmagazine.com/film/review-jojo-rabbit-is-taika-waititis-marvel-presents-mein-kampf/
