The newest film releases include Godzilla Minus One, Eileen, Silent Night, and Candy Cane Lane. Weighing in are Katie Walsh, film reviewer for the Tribune News Service and the Los Angeles Times, and Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed.
Godzilla Minus One
Written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, this action flick is set in post-WWII Japan — the country already suffered the horrors of the atomic bomb and is now threatened by a gigantic monster. It is the latest film in the Godzilla franchise that spans decades.
Seibold: “This is much more of an action picture than the previous Godzilla films have been. It's a lot more about the destruction and the mayhem. It's a lot more easy to watch. There's a lot of Jaws references. There's a wonderful sequence where a tugboat is sailing away from Godzilla swimming after them in the ocean. It's a lot more visceral. It feels a lot more sensational than some of the Godzilla films in the past, which really, if you go to the beginning of any of the continuities, are a lot more somber. This one is a little bit more energetic and a little bit more, frankly, fun.”
Walsh: “I loved the look and feel of Godzilla. It has almost a photorealistic quality at times, if you can even use that word about a giant kaiju. … I think [Yamazaki’s] also really grappling with a lot of political issues about the role of different governments in how you neutralize threats. … I think this is a great Godzilla movie, and you don't have to have seen all 33 Godzilla movies — or even 37 because there's four American ones. You can just jump right into this and have a great time.”
Eileen
In this psychological thriller, Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star as co-workers at a juvenile prison facility in 1960s New England. This is based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s first novel. She adapted the screenplay with her husband Luke Goebel.
Walsh: “I would describe Eileen as a sapphic Christmas noir. It's like Carol in that sense, but much darker. And it's sort of the inverse of The Holdovers, which is this cozy, New England Christmas movie. This is like a dark, damp, really bleak, New England Christmas movie. … It turned to places I did not expect, but it's terrific. It's so well-acted. … Take care going in. But it is a very terrific holiday-themed movie.”
Seibold: “The entire first 70 minutes of this 97-minute movie is just establishing that relationship between the Anne Hathaway character and the Thomasin McKenzie character. … There's a bit of a twist really close to the end of the movie where we get all of the darkness and all of the noir elements. … I liked everything leading up until that, and it felt like it was almost extraneous to add these noir elements. It didn't really wrap up the romance or the rest of the story in some satisfying way.”
Silent Night
This film, directed by acclaimed action director John Woo, includes hardly any dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays a dad named Brian, who is having a happy moment on Christmas Eve with his family when their lives are upended by a drive-by shootout. Brian loses his voice and his young son.
Seibold: “This is such a simplistic movie, it is so riddled with action movie cliches that there's really nothing to add. He loses his son. He loses his voice. There's no dialogue, and he goes about revenge, and he does it. Period.”
Walsh: “I will say, John Woo is innocent here. But the story itself is absolutely dreadful. I felt like I was watching a right-wing conspiracy theory about urban life come to fruition on screen in front of me. What you realize is that, actually, action movies really do need dialogue, because you need to not only have moments of humor to break the tension, but you also need to have humanization. So if we're just looking at a white man who is a vigilante, playing Batman on the streets of some southern California city, and then the Mexican gangsters that he is pursuing who killed his son… everything falls into stereotype and trope.”
Candy Cane Lane
Starring alongside Tracee Ellis Ross, Eddie Murphy plays a dad determined to win his neighborhood’s Christmas decorating competition. To help him, he makes a pact with an evil elf.
Walsh: “It's very silly, but I thought it was pretty charming. I think it works because it has a really big cast of a lot of funny comedians. Tracee Ellis Ross plays his wife and David Alan Grier plays Santa. … So I thought that was pretty fun for a holiday family movie.”
Seibold: “There's a lot of moving parts. The movie’s about two hours long. We'd need something a little bit trimmer for a light, sticky confection that this movie is. It's really well-designed. It's nice to look at. They clearly put a lot of money into the production design. But there are a lot of comedic scenes where they let the actors … let the scene get away from them. Let it sort of sprawl out a little bit. … It's just almost many things without being perfectly coherent.”