The latest film releases include Civil War, In Flames, Sting, and Sasquatch Sunset. Weighing in are Alison Willmore, a film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture, and Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed.
Civil War
This dystopian action thriller follows a team of journalists in the not-so-distant future as they cover the second American Civil War. Nick Offerman plays a dictator president in his third term, and rebel factions are descending upon the White House. Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Ex Machina) is the writer and director.
Willmore: “Alex Garland has really set out to make a movie that is more about all the contradictions and the difficulties of being a war correspondent and a war photographer in particular, than to be specifically a scenario about a realistic civil war that might happen in the near future here. … We don't understand the political ideology behind the various factions who are fighting here. This is much more a movie about war itself and how horrifying it is. And in particular, it's about applying the imagery that we're very accustomed to seeing in terms of coverage of conflict in other nations, and then bringing it to the U.S.
… The movie uses a lot of ideas and buzzwords and and sometimes actual footage of protests and unrest from recent years, while also sidestepping wanting to make any real commentary beyond ‘conflict is bad and horrifying and dehumanizing.’
I was never bored during this movie, especially the last sequence is very exciting, and if you get to see this on IMAX, it is the sweeping attack on the Capitol. But at the same time, I was very frustrated with it.”
Seibold: “This film is incredibly aggravating in that Alex Garland just really is determined not to take any kind of political stance. He's not making any commentary as to what brought us here, or what the actual political climate was that brought America to a civil war in the near future. He's only interested in the war itself. And the conclusions he comes to are all incredibly bleak — the war is going to break out no matter what. And it doesn't really matter how the war started, as long as it's going on, it's just going to dehumanize everything. … It's more about capturing a certain anxiousness and horror that the American public is feeling more than it is a real story about politics or war or war correspondents.”
In Flames
Pakistan’s official entry for Best International Film at the 2024 Academy Awards explores women’s experiences living in mostly oppressive Pakistan. For the central character, Miriam (Ramesha Nawal), things start to unravel when the patriarch of her family dies.
Seibold: “There's actually a supernatural element to this movie where males begin appearing in the background of certain shots; where certain men who are in the room with them, their eyes go white, and they seem to be lurching at them in this threatening manner. This is a ghost story and the ghost is the patriarchy. It's about how men are always targeting these women. It's really, really terrifying, really, really salient, and very pointed in a way that makes horror and the horrors of the patriarchy seem like one in the same.”
Willmore: “One thing that I really appreciated about this film is that it really portrays the stress of not feeling like you can trust anyone around you. When the main character starts very tentatively dating someone who is genuinely a kind person, you can see just like how much work it takes for her to open up to him, for her to trust him. … Even smaller gestures from, say, a cab driver who offers her a free ride, every supposed gesture of kindness or offer of protection, these characters have very good reason to question because so many of them turn around and become … a betrayal or they become a way for the men … to then … demand something in return. … It leaves you just feeling constantly on guard and that just becomes this exhausting thing.”
Sting
This arachnoid monster flick stars Alyla Browne, a 12-year-old girl named Charlotte whose cute, leggy pet begins to transform. It’s set entirely in a Brooklyn, New York apartment complex.
Willmore: “It has some nice family drama, the main character Charlotte … [it’s] just showing her loneliness and resentment as the older daughter in a household with a new baby. Her mother has remarried. There's a particularly nice, grim set piece involving an older relative who has dementia who doesn't realize that she keeps calling exterminators who are then captured by this giant spider. … The spider is very creepy. If anything, I just wanted actually a bit more of a balance between the family drama and the spider stuff.”
Seibold: “This has wonderfully absurd mayhem. The spider does get larger and larger. And very luckily, the air vents in this apartment are big enough for people to just crawl through. And then of course when it starts sucking the juices out of parrots and dogs and other relatives, all of the loving close-ups of the drippy corpses are just beautiful to behold. The spider effects are really the star here. … It does an excellent job mixing some CGI, some puppetry, a lot of practical effects to make this starting-small-but-eventually-eight-foot spider look very real and menacing.
The family dynamics, maybe they could have been a little stronger. I think Alyla Browne is great, but when you realize her character is named Charlotte, after Charlotte's Web, it becomes a little bit obvious.”
Sasquatch Sunset
A family of four Sasquatches and their lives over a year are the focus of this zero-dialogue film. It stars Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg and is co-directed by Nathan and David Zellner.
Seibold: “It is frustrating. How nothing happens in this movie. I can see the filmmakers going for maybe some absurdist comedy, the fact that the movie exists is the joke. We're going to make this dialogue-free film about Sasquatches and we're going to hire famous actors like Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg and put them in Sasquatch suits. … The actual result is completely not funny, completely not entertaining.
It has maybe a few comments about the harshness of the natural world, or the encroachment of mankind. … One of the big plot points in the movie is humanity begins to work its way deeper and deeper into the woods, invading the Sasquatches’ ecosystem. But that's not really the point of the movie. The point of the movie is to chuckle at Sasquatch penises, which there are plenty of in the movie They they really want to show close-ups of those things. It is aggravating, it is obnoxious, I hated it. It's a chore to get through.”
Willmore: “It definitely feels like a movie that is meant to be seen through the haze of some substance to enhance the experience. … It's a really thin premise on which to hang a 90-ish-minute feature.”