The latest film releases include The Poolman, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, Last Stop in Yuma County, and Power. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Amy Nicholson, host of the podcast Unspooled and film reviewer for The New York Times.
The Poolman
Chris Pine writes, directs, and stars as an LA poolman-turned-amateur sleuth.
Nicholson: “This is really just a movie that's a character study of a pool man who becomes … increasingly less … a reliable narrator as the film goes on. But I will say as a person who loves LA and loves LA history, I like seeing a lot of institutions get named-checked.”
Seibold: “I wish that the film had the budget and the wherewithal to take advantage of its LA locales a little bit more. All of the backgrounds seem a little bit nondescript. I feel like Chris Pine, who’s actually making his directorial debut … he didn't have the budget to really go where he wanted to go and capture the vistas he really wanted.
He decided to rely instead on characters, which was really, really unfortunate because every single character in this movie is unbearably shrill. … The Chris Pine character is clueless and chatty and annoying and completely rambling … in a way that is not amusing, and does not really superimpose itself well against the detective story material. … I wanted to get out of that theater really fast.”
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
This is the fourth installment in the reboot franchise that began in 2011 of the Planet of the Apes films, which originally began in 1968. Ten Apes films exist in total. Directed by Wes Ball (The Maze Runner trilogy), this is a sequel to the 2017 film War for the Planet of the Apes, which grossed $490.7 million worldwide.
Seibold: “The last three in this rebooted Apes franchise … were all very downbeat, and dour, and all concerned more about the downfall of humanity than the actual apes themselves. This one finally is a post-human movie. It's mostly about the apes and the ape society that they have built. And thanks to really amazing state-of-the-art motion capture special effects, the apes … look pretty darn real.
… I was really enjoying the slow pace of this movie, I was enjoying a lot of the digital landscapes. … There were moments where the sound of just wind howling, or the rain falling, really brought you into the movie in this very gentle, natural way that I really, really appreciated.”
Nicholson: “The bulk of this movie is just a fairly regular story about a bad tribe of apes and a good tribe of apes. And there's a young ape boy, and he must avenge his village, and he gets mixed up with a wise ape and a human girl. … When the human character shows up … when they befriend her, I was expecting the story to go one way … and it ultimately went a more complicated way.
… I just have maybe a personal issue with … how good the apes look. … I have a hard time telling them apart. And I was really, really struggling in certain scenes … just making sure I understood who was doing what. But the look of it, I do like a lot. This is looking a lot really like The Last of Us video game.”
Last Stop in Yuma County
Set in the Arizona desert in the 1980s, a traveling salesman gets caught up in a hostage situation. Jim Cummings stars, but overall there aren’t a lot of big names or recognizable faces.
Nicholson: “These people are all stuck at a diner in the middle of a desert that's connected to a gas station. And nobody can leave because the gas truck is late, and they can't fill up their cars. And if they try to leave, they're just gonna get stranded in the desert. It's a pretty actually fun execution. It's done with very little money, but a lot of skill and creativity in personality.”
Seibold: “This is very reminiscent of something that would have come out in the 90s. There was this whole wave … that came out in the wake of Pulp Fiction, where it was about criminals meeting in a remote place, and everybody will be dead by gunshot wound by the end. I did like some of the character work. There's a lot of menace in the film largely because of the performances. And just when you think you have a handle on the movie, it does pull some pretty excellent plot twists.”
Power
This documentary by Yance Ford looks at policing in the United States.
Seibold: “It's not so much an investigation as it is a sociological powwow, where a bunch of analysts and sociologists get together and relate the history of the police force in the United States … how it came to be and how we have, as a society, simply allowed it to go completely unchecked since then. One of the points that's repeated throughout this documentary is nobody has ever thought to curtail police power. These were a lot of ideas that came up in the wake of George Floyd's murder. … And it will leave you sad and outraged. It doesn't come to a hopeful conclusion. It ends on a note saying things are bad. … This is an important topic.”
Nicholson: “The question that it keeps asking is: If we could design a police force from scratch, is this how we'd want it to function? … One of the most compelling figures in here is a Minnesota policeman who I think represents part of what many of us would like to see. He patrols a neighborhood he really knows and he really cares about. He is a very reasonable voice in a doc that has a stance, but does want people to take this information and chew on it themselves, and draw their own conclusions about what at all could be done.”