The latest film releases include The Alto Knights, Snow White, Misericordia and Ash. Weighing in are Alison Willmore, film critic for NY Magazine and Vulture, and Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and author of This Is How You Make a Movie.
The Alto Knights
Robert De Niro, now 81 years old, plays the characters of Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, based on two real-life gangsters. The screenplay is by Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote Goodfellas.
Willmore: “These characters are not like siblings or twins. They were just two different guys. So Robert De Niro playing them both feels like it's meant to be some gesture towards them, the fact that these two men … represent a duality when it comes to the mob, like one is an old-school guy who believes in violence and chaos, and the other one wants to shield the mob under legitimacy and paying taxes.
… This movie is odd, it just feels like it's endless amounts of exposition that never actually gets to the action.”
Grierson: “This is one of those films that is based on true events, and it leads to … something that, according to the movie, profoundly changed how U.S. law enforcement dealt with the mob. … But when you watch the film, you just go, ‘Saw that in Goodfellows, saw that in The Godfather.’ … It's not a movie that feels like it is saying something new or even commenting on the genre itself.”
Snow White
In this live-action remake of the Disney classic, Rachel Zegler is the titular character and Gal Gadot is the Evil Queen. However, the film drew backlash for casting Zegler, who is Latina. Peter Dinklage also criticized the inclusion of the seven dwarves, which he believed reinforced dwarfism stereotypes.
Grierson: “The negative publicity … I think that will end up being more interesting than the actual film. … Zegler is pretty okay as Snow White. She looks the part. People who know her from West Side Story, she's got the voice to sing some of the well-known songs that we know from the animated original. There are new songs added by the team that did La La Land. Those new songs are not very good, but Zegler gives them her all. … Most of it feels like it is shot on a soundstage. It does not have the sense of a magical kingdom. We meet Doc and Dopey and the rest of them, they just look like garden gnomes, they don't look magical.
… It's worth pointing out that the movie actually does not use the original title … Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. They don't actually use that word once throughout this film, a nod to little people in terms of their complaints about it. … When the movie gets into politics, about the idea of the lower class being taken over by the ruling class, and how the people need to rise up, that all feels pretty safe.”
Willmore: “It looks oddly like it is set in parts of a theme park they have already built. … This movie cost an unimaginable amount of money, and you really don't see it on screen. But yeah, Disney has been operating from this defensive crouch for a while now, I think both creatively in terms of just being trapped in this recycling of its past classics and, its attempts to milk more out of the various franchises it owns.”
Misericordia
This follows eccentric characters in a small French town, including a priest, a widow, and a man returning to this town. Director Alain Guiradie is known for his filmmaking style that observes queer identity.
Willmore: “It's hard to explain how odd and unpredictable this movie is. … It becomes almost this dark comedy after a while. It is about a man named Jérémie, [who] goes to what feels like a crumbling, depressive hometown … to attend a funeral, and then he ends up staying with the widow of the man who died. He was friends when they were children with her son. There's all of these weird undercurrents where the son … seems to really resent him, but also maybe desire him. They keep having these fights that seem to … verge into maybe kissing, but it does become the story of a murder and a cover-up. It's hard to say more than that because this movie unfolds so unexpectedly.”
Grierson: “his is not a movie that is necessarily like a ‘who done it,’ partly because we know who did it, but also because the way Guiradie tells the story, it's almost as if because the main character does not try to make a run for it and just stays in the town. It's more of a question of: When are people eventually going to figure out what is actually going on, and when they do figure out what's going on, will they actually do anything about it?”
Ash
This psychedelic sci-fi flick stars Aaron Paul and Eiza Gonzalez, whose characters are on a deserted spaceship. Some reviews compared it to the Alien franchise. It’s the second movie directed by the multi-hyphenate Flying Lotus, who’s also a well-known musician.
Grierson: “The director … did the terrific score for the movie, works at a low budget, and the concept is very simple. Gonzalez's character … wakes up on a space station on a distant planet. She doesn't know who she is, she doesn't know how she got there. … Everybody else around her has been slaughtered. Aaron Paul's character, who is a pilot, lands in the space station and says, ‘I'm like the only other person that's left alive, but I don't know exactly what happened. Do you know what's going on?’ They don't know if they can trust each other. … This is a movie that's more about its vibe than anything else. Flying Lotus’ music is very atmospheric and trippy and cool, and those are good adjectives to describe Ash as well. … Its story is somewhat familiar, but the way that he tells it, in a trippy, low-budget way, with pretty decent effects … makes it a fun B movie.”
Willmore: “What got tedious was there are long stretches where this is just Eiza Gonzalez by herself for a long stretch, and then just her with Aaron Paul. And I think it's a tough act for any actor to be like, ‘You are going to have to carry this by yourself without often lines.’ Because you are just solo over a long stretch trying to convey internal conflict and confusion. And I think that she's not always up for the task. That said, I am really looking forward to seeing what Flying Lotus does next because I think he has a lot of talent and also really interesting taste.”