The latest film releases include Borderlands, Cuckoo, Good One and It Ends with Us. Weighing in are Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International and the author of This Is How You Make a Movie, and Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times.
Borderlands
Based on the video game of the same name, this action-adventure stars Cate Blanchett as a bounty hunter who assembles a rag-tag team to crack open a vault of alien technology on her home planet. Jack Black is a wisecracking robot. Jamie Lee Curtis and Kevin Hart also star. This movie went through extensive reshoots, and Deadpool director Tim Miller stepped in to replace Eli Roth.
Walsh: “In the very beginning of the film, Cate Blanchett is doing her voiceover, and she says, ‘If this sounds like a bunch of wacko BS to you.’ And then it is a bunch of wacko BS. I mean, it's just a very loud video game adaptation. … It has a snarky, obnoxious Star Wars vibe to it. … Something about the aesthetics, the humor, it feels very dated. … It’s trying to be edgy and cool and hyper violent, but it's just not quite getting there. And I do think [director] Eli Roth can stage a horror suspense sequence very well, but the action in this is absolutely illegible. … I think Cate Blanchett … I couldn't tell if she was having fun or not. She's definitely hitting that video game pose, always standing with one hip cocked out, like a video game character might be. And so, I mean, I just don't really know what's going on here.”
Grierson: “[Cate Blanchett] played so many different roles in her career, and she's really never going to be a butt-kicking, gun-toting action hero, and it's fun to see her just dive into that. This movie is dreadful, to be very clear. But she is, I think, on an island by herself, understands what this role requires. … She gives it her all, and so she does not embarrass herself. And I was relieved because of that. … Down the road, someone's gonna make a super cut on YouTube of all [of] Cate Blanchett's best moments in the movie — just watch that when that comes out.”
Cuckoo
In this horror-comedy, Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) plays a teenage girl whose family moves to a haunted corner of the Alps. She gets a job at a resort, and things get cuckoo when the owner becomes fixated on her sister.
Grierson: “What is fun about Cuckoo, up to a certain point, is that this is a movie that is meant to be a midnight movie. This is a movie that you and your friends go to see late at night, and you just enjoy the freakouts, the weird things that are happening. I think Hunter Schafer is really fun, she's a great guide for us into the film. She's very smart, very resourceful. I think there's a ceiling in terms of how much weirdness is going on in this film. … And not all of the logic works in Cuckoo. But that being said, I had a fine time being lost in it. … I don't entirely understand what's going on, but the vibe of this film is creepy and unsettling enough that even though it doesn't entirely make sense, I liked it.”
Walsh: “I really loved Cuckoo. … It explains itself just enough that you kind of know what's going on, but it is mostly just weird, creeping dread, and vibes, and strange performances. I felt like every actor was in a different movie, but I was okay with that. For some reason, the tone being all over the place just made this more entertaining and enjoyable for me. … I think Hunter Schafer is a really good final girl type in this movie. … She immediately realizes something's wrong. … You're never screaming at her to do something differently. You feel like she actually has got a good head under her shoulders in terms of what is going on around her and trying to escape it, even though she can't. Yeah, I think this is a super fun movie for the midnight crowd, for the horror fans.”
Good One
This follows a teenage girl roped into a camping trip with her father and best friend. Over three days in the Catskill mountains, she has to navigate their clashing egos.
Walsh: “It's a very small character study. A teenage girl who goes on this camping trip with her father, played by James Le Gros, and his friend comes along, this guy played by Danny McCarthy. The friend is this failed actor. He's drinking a lot. It's just an interesting film to watch how this teenage girl, who's on the cusp of adulthood, is learning how to navigate the emotions of these men around her. All of the drama is in these really minor, small conversations, looks, glances. I felt like at the end of it, I just was feeling like it's hard to be a girl sometimes, and especially when you are learning how to manage men.”
Grierson: “This movie is very quiet and very observant, and it's really interesting to see how Sam, the teenager, she is part of the relationship with these other two guys, but she's really watching them and watching them suss out a long, festering male rivalry. … There's something that happens near the end of the movie, and it happens so quickly and so casually that some viewers may be like, ‘Wait a second. Did I just hear what I think I heard?’ It goes by so fast, but it profoundly changes the relationship between the three characters and how the audience will feel about the three characters, and it's really nicely done.”
It Ends with Us
Based on the massively popular novel by Colleen Hoover, this follows a woman torn between her partner and a teenage love. It stars Blake Lively, Brandon Sklenar, Jenny Slate, and Justin Baldoni, who also directed.
Grierson: “I think most people who have read the novel, or at least been aware of this movie, know that there is an element of domestic violence in this film. … Just talking to friends and people who've gone through it, there is often the question of: Why do people stay in relationships that are toxic, that are bad for them? And I think that this movie, despite … some stereotypical, cliched plot twists and stuff like that, I think the movie honors that question, and really talks about it in a way where, as a viewer, I'll just speak for myself, you understand … what is complicated about it. And I think the way the movie also resolves itself is messy in a way that I think … doesn't cut corners. … It's enough for me to barely recommend.”
Walsh: “The book is not good. The prose is very bad. It is poorly, poorly written. But it comes from a place of truth because Colleen Hoover, it's a cathartic story for her. It is based on personal experience in her family life. The movie does make some choices that I felt muddled the emotional truth here. I think it made the character a little bit more delusional. Because it's more of an intimate partner violence story than it is a love triangle, even though it is that. … But I think that it is serving an audience that wants these kinds of stories about … the challenges of romantic relationships. … So I think it's an interesting example in that genre, and I kind of enjoyed it.”