The latest film releases include Black Bag, Opus, Novocaine, and The Electric State. Weighing in are William Bibbiani, film critic for the Wrap and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network podcast, and Christy Lemire, writer for RogerEbert.com and co-host of the Breakfast All Day podcast.
Black Bag
From director Steven Soderbergh, a husband-and-wife duo of spies (Michael Fassbender, Cate Blanchett) are managing a high-wire act of trusting each other but not revealing too much. Naomie Harris and Pierce Brosnan also take on supporting roles.
Bibbiani: “These are all middle-aged people who are sleeping with each other and hate each other and suspect each other. This is just middle-aged insecurity about our relationships and our libidos, but also we might have to murder each other. … Michael Fassbender plays a guy … he's given an assignment to investigate a group of people. They're all technically in a circle of friends. Most of them are dating each other. … Everyone starts digging into each other. Everyone starts sniping on each other. And when you have an argument at a dinner table, in normal circumstances, it's awkward, but when you're all spies and you might stab someone through the hand, the stakes are a little bit higher.”
Lemire: “They’re spies, and they're married, and they can't trust each other. But it does not have the kind of pyrotechnics of a Mr. And Mrs. Smith. … It's much more interested in their relationship. How can their marriage withstand this mistrust that is inherent to what they do for a living? And when each of them has to go up on an assignment, and they can't ask any more questions, they just say ‘black bag.’ And that's a catch-all for like, ‘Nope, you can't ask and I can't tell you.’ … I love the production design, the costume design, because the townhouse where this couple lives looks so sleek, and they use glass so well as a means of suspicion and covert actions. But then the outside of it looks like a very traditional London townhome, which is a nice metaphor for their marriage in general.”
Opus
In this horror-comedy, Ayo Edebiri plays a young magazine writer profiling an eccentric, past-his-prime pop star known as Moretti (John Malkovich), who invites writers and celebrities to a remote listening party, where it’s insinuated that he runs a cult.
Lemire: “This is the feature filmmaking debut of writer-director Mark Anthony Green. He was a longtime GQ columnist, and so he is basing this movie on, if not the exact experiences that he had, at least the idea of that celebrity-journalist relationship, and how it is transactional, and how they need each other. … It's never scary as an indictment or a satire about celebrity culture. It's just not weird enough. It's too thin, it's not sharp enough, it's not weird enough.”
Bibbiani: “I really do feel like there's something interesting in the idea here, the way that we accept an eccentricity from artists, and then it sneaks up on us that a lot of the things that we were writing off as, ‘oh, they're just quirky’ … and then actually, there's something really insidious about it. … But this is just basically every movie where someone goes into a town and thinks there might be a cult, and it turns out there is a cult. You've seen it before, and unfortunately, you've seen it a lot better.”
Novocaine
Jack Quaid plays the protagonist Nathan, who can’t feel pain and gets pulled into a mission to save his love interest.
Bibbiani: “This is actually based on a real condition called congenital insensitivity to pain, or CIP. … And in the movie, we see a lot of just how difficult it is to live like this. He talks about how he's afraid to eat solid food because what if he bites off his tongue? He wouldn't know. He has to set a timer so that he remembers to go to the bathroom, because otherwise he might forget and his bladder might literally explode. … The life expectancy for people with that condition is actually very young. It's about 25. But after we get introduced to the reality of it, the movie is like, ‘Okay, yes, but in our movie, that makes him a Looney Tunes character.’ And he can take any kind of punishment, no matter what, even though, throughout this movie, he would bleed out, his bones would break, he would not be able to accomplish his mission to save his girlfriend. … It's an entertaining time. I just don't agree with every single part of it.”
Lemire: “Jack Quaid is so insanely likable, he's giving me young Tom Hanks here. … You've got Dennis Quaid’s kid and Jack Nicholson's kid beating each other up in this, and that's entertaining. … I like this for a while. Eventually, this gets really insane for me, though. People should be dead, and it just keeps going and going and going. I think it could have ended a little sooner.”
The Electric State
This sci-fi flick is from the Russo brothers, who are known for their work with the Marvel franchise. This features Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown taking on a horde of robots. The film reportedly cost over $300 million to make.
Lemire: “It is such a waste of so much talent. And for all that money, the effects look pretty terrible. … All the anthropomorphized creatures, I think they look awful. … Millie Bobby Brown is an orphan, and the younger brother who she loved also died, and then one day, this robot comes to her with this maniacal-looking face. … The choice of that to be the conduit for her brother's consciousness, if indeed that is what he is, is so jarring the whole time, because they're aiming for poignancy, and it has this psychotic smile on its face and these giant eyes. Just nothing about that makes sense. … This is just really bad, and it keeps going and going. It's over two hours long. I hated it.”
Bibbiani: “Here you spend all of that money to create something that I was forgetting while I was watching it. … Netflix has become, rather unfortunately, a studio which spends a lot of money on mediocrity. … ‘Hey, you could click on this. You could literally click on anything else that cost 1/320th of this and get more entertainment out of it. But we have this too.’ And for some reason, that was worth it?”