All posts by Peter A. Martin

Raised in Los Angeles repertory movie houses before spending a decade in tiny Manhattan cinemas, Peter Martin has been freely roaming in DFW multiplexes and art houses for most of the 21st Century. Founder and Editor of Dallas Film Now, Peter also serves as Managing Editor for ScreenAnarchy.com and is a contributing writer for Fandango.com. He also writes the weekly Everything But Horror.substack.com newsletter. He is a proud member of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Film Critics Association.
review, Reviews

Review: ‘Tetris,’ Video-Game Cold-War Thriller

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Taron Egerton stars in a nostalgic film that gradually becomes a thriller. 

Who knew falling blocks can be so much fun? And serve as building blocks for a retro cold-war thriller? 

The opening scene establishes Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton) in a high-rise office building, making a sales pitch to a Japanese bank executive (Rick Yune) who looks bored as Henk tells what sounds like a slight variation on his usual sales pitch. The difference is that Henk is genuinely enthusiastic about the true potential of what he’s selling. 

As Henk makes his pitch, his globe-hopping is dramatized as he narrates his introduction to an instantly-addictive video game at a trade show, followed by his relentless pursuit of the sales rights. Frankly, even though the narrated sequences are handsomely produced and propulsively sown together —  Colin Goudie, Ben Mills, and Martin Walsh are credited as film editors —  the ceaseless globe-hopping of what appeared to be a video-game origin movie was starting to wear out my patience. 

Then, as Henk arrives in Russia, sometime around 1988, director Jon S. Baird slows the pace down. Written by Nick Pink, the opening portion of the film is merely a prelude to what happens to Henk when he seeks the sales rights from the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Efremov), stumbling into a hornet’s nest, where Communist Party security officials, the Russian beauracracy, Japanese interests, a software salesman, and Nintendo all compete against each other to acquire the rights to publish a video-game that would become a worldwide smash. 

After one viewing, I could not decipher the many layers of legitimate business dealings, as opposed to those cloaked in duplicitiy and criminality. How much of this “inspired by a true story” movie is, in fact, true, and how much is pumped-up artifice?

By the end of the movie, I did not care. 

Taron Egerton is very convincing as a good-hearted family man, married to a loving and supportive wife (Ayane Nagabuchi), with multiple adorable children, and doing his very best to pull off a deal to ensure their financial future. He’s the owner of a small software copmany in Japan, where he met his wife, has a working knowledge of the language, and also wants to keep his company viable for the sake of his devoted employees. 

Multiple other colorful supporting characters populate the film, which moves at a pace that slowly picks up speed and resembles a video game. 

But it’s a good video game, and one that is irresistible. 

The film opens Friday, March 24, in select theaters nationwide. In Dallas, it opens at Alamo Drafthouse Lake Highlands. It will be available to stream March 31 on Apple TV+. For more information about the film, visit the official site. 

Reviews

Review: ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,’ Much Ado About Nothing

Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Jonathan Majors, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kathryn Newton and Michael Douglas star in a three-quel without equal in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

O Ant-Man, Ant-Man, wherefore art thou Ant-Man? Oh no, not the Quantum Realm again!!

The latest Marvel movie extravaganza cleverly disguises itself as a continuation of the Ant-Man saga, rather than an introduction to the so-called Phase V of the so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe. It features a slew of talented actors doing their very best to treat the extremely silly movie as though it were Serious And Actually Meant Something. 

The first few minutes are perfectly fine, as Scott Lang, the tiniest Avenger of them all, jauntily walks the streets of San Francisco, timed to the rhythm of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive,” as though it were the opening sequence for an updated, comic West Coast version of Saturday Night Fever (1977), only starring Paul Rudd rather than John Travolta. Instead, though, we hear “Welcome Back, Kotter,” which prompts comparisons to the sitcom, debuting in 1975, that served as a breakout role for … John Travolta. 

It’s not long before Ant-Man and his nuclear family — Hope van Dyne, aka the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), her parents, Hank and Janet (Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, respectively) and Ant-Man’s daughter, Cassie (Kathryn Newton) — get sucked into the Quantum Realm, aka Several Large Indoor Studio Lots in Atlanta that are filled with colorful lights and shapes, representing millions of hours of dedicated artistry by thousands of workers throughout the world.  

The family is trapped there for centuries, aka Nearly The Movie’s Entire Running Time, where they perform magnificently under pressure and extreme stress, and also crack jokes, when time permits. They encounter Kang (Jonathan Majors), aka The Next Big Bad Villain Who Is Even More Evil And Powerful Than The Last Guy Who Destroyed The Universe. We don’t know why he’s so evil, except that Marvel needed a new villainous character to build their movies around. Also Jonathan Majors is a fierce presence, able to leap tall mountains in a single bound and also Do Anything He Wants To Do Before He’s A Marvel Supervillain. 

Really, the movie is divorced from reality, logic, and common sense, but I’m sure that everyone involved tried very, very hard to make a movie that everyone would want to see in movie theaters. Occasionally, the combined star power manages to pierce the animated atmosphere by wisecracking or evincing genuine humanity. And the story revolves around the importance of a strong family unit, which isn’t a bad thing at all in fighting off evil villains from another realm, if your entire family is superpowered. 

Moments of joy are few and far between for jaded adults, though younger ones may well find unbounded delight in the light show, as did one young person at the critics screening I attended last night. He continually beamed, often broke out in laughter and displayed not one iota of cynicism throughout the endless running time, which made it pass a little more quickly for me. 

Indeed, this movie may be perfect family entertainment. The IMAX presentation looks smashing and sounds spectacular. Never mind the ceaseless death and destruction. Let the kids go and enjoy. Just keep repeating to yourself: “It’s only a movie. It’s only a movie.” 

The film opens in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding cities on Friday, February 17, via Walt Disney. For more information about the film, visit the official site.

Reviews

Review: ‘The Son,’ Chronicles of Unhappiness

Hugh Jackman, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby, Zen McGrath, and Anthony Hopkins star in an agonizing drama.

By all appearances, it’s a tragedy in the making. 

Unhappy Nicholas (Zen McGrath) lives unhappily with his unhappy mother, Kate (Laura Dern), and wants very much to live with his happy father, Peter (Hugh Jackman), nevermind that Peter entered into an adulterous affair with happy Beth (Vanessa Kirby), thereby ruining his marriage and breaking up the household. Peter now lives happily with Beth and their newborn infant, but upon hearing Nicholas’ plea, he quickly caves, overruling Beth’s natural concerns. 

Very soon, everyone is unhappy. 

Two years ago, Anthony Hopkins starred in The Father, an adaptation of an acclaimed French-language play by novelist Florian Zellner that was then translated into English by Christopher Hampton (Les Liaisons Dangereuses). Hampton wrote the screen version, helmed by Zellner in his feature directorial debut, and I was very much impressed by the film, which staged the lead character’s splintering existence “as a horrifying reality.” I could relate to it on a personal level, too. 

The film raised my expectations for The Son, which is adapted from Zellner’s stage play of the same name, which, like The Father, was translated into English by Christopher Hampton and staged in London. (In between the stage versions of The Father and The Son, The Mother premiered, but that’s not yet been adapted.) The script for the screen version is credited to both Zellner and Hampton, with Zellner once again directing. 

Unlike The Father, though, The Son is a forthright melodrama, and suffers from any comparison. Its narrative proceeds, inexorably depicting the slow self-strangulation of a teenager who is not merely unhappy, but is clinically depressed. Unable and unwilling to address Nicholas’ serious mental-health issue, Peter continues on his merry, busy way, leaving Nicholas in the hands of Beth, who is consumed with caring for their newborn child, and is already stressed out herself. 

Acting more out of guilt over his adulterous affair, which clearly destabilized the unsteady Nicholas in the first place, Peter steadfastly pursues his own career goals, while throwing money at Nicholas and pretending that he has any idea how to raise or help him. He thinks he is acting differently than his own father did, but in truth, he is acting just as horribly, though perhaps in a more dignified manner. 

It’s agonizing to watch the slow decline in Nicholas, whose simmering anger and seething resentment gradually becomes manifest, mostly expressed against the long-suffering Beth, who is trapped at home, while Peter skips above the fray. With a self-confidence born of his upbringing and professional success, Peter thinks he knows how to “fix” Nicholas, yet in truth, he hasn’t a clue. 

The actors all bring their anguished characters to life, which only makes watching them all dance toward doom all the more difficult to watch. It’s like watching a slow-motion automobile accident, frame by frame, without being able to do a thing to stop it. 

What made The Father freshly disturbing to watch was that it developed empathy for its characters in an unexpected, cinematic fashion. What makes The Son difficult to watch is that it evinces no sympathy for its beleaguered characters, and does so in a profoundly straightforward fashion. 

The film opens Friday, January 20, in Dallas, Frisco, Fort Worth, Garland, Grapevine, and Plano via Sony Pictures Classics. Get tickets here. For more information about the film, visit the official site. 

Reviews

Review: ‘Broker,’ Baby, It’s Cold Outside

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, the absorbing drama stars Song Kang Ho.

'Broker' (Neon)

Who would sell a baby? More importantly: why? 

As he demonstrated in Shoplifters (2018), writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda knows that family units are not always bound by blood. Instead, some of the tightest families are those who come together for a single purpose, and then remain united for a variety of reasons, no matter the obstacles they may face.

His latest film, Broker, begins with a young woman (Lee Ji-eun) leaving a newborn child at a church’s so-called “baby box,” where loving care will, presumably, be provided thereafter. Except that two miscreants have been abusing the charitable provision for some time, stealing babies left in the overnight hours and then selling them on the black market. 

Sang-yeon (Song Kang Ho) runs a clothing repair shop and has a gambling problem; he has teamed with the younger Dong-soo (Gang Dong-wan), who works part-time at the church-run orphanage and serves as  his ‘inside man.’ They don’t know it, but they are under surveillance by two police officers, the more-experienced Soo-jin (Doona Bae) and the less-experienced Lee (Lee Joo-young), who have caught wind of their scheme and are determined to bring them to justice. 

On the night in question, Soo-jin and Lee are watching as the young woman, and follow up in the morning when she returns to the scene, where they observe her heading off with Sang-yeon and Dong-soo. Things do not go as planned, as the baby brokers, accompanied by the infant’s mother and, later, a young boy, traipse around South Korea in search of qualified buyers, with the police in slow pursuit. 

The film steadily becomes more absorbing as it moves forward, as the characters are gently fleshed out through casual conversations and memories that turn poignant, haunting, and wistful, sometimes all at the same time. Song Kang Ho, who led the family unit in the brilliant Parasite, here plays a man who isn’t much of a father, even of the criminal sort; mostly, he’s just someone who wants to do the right thing, but doesn’t know how to do it.  

The other actors are similarly fine, with Doona Bae showing a believably desperate side to match her steely determination. Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo (Parasite, The Wailing, Burning) captures the grungy beauties of everyday life and gorgeous landscapes that appear also at random, as finely edited by the director himself. 

From the premise, it’s easy to expect something routine or tawdry. Hirokazu Kore-eda is not an ordinary filmmaker, however, as the simple yet profound Broker demonstrates yet again.

The film opens at Angelika Film Center in Dallas on Friday, January 13, via Neon. For more information about the film, visit Angelika’s official site. 

Reviews

Review: ‘M3GAN,’ I Will Always Love You

Allison Williams and Violet McGraw star in a thriller, directed by Gerard Johnstone. 

Cleverly scripted and superbly directed, the newest killer doll on the block exceeds expectations. 

With a screenplay by Akela Cooper, based on a story by Cooper and James Wan, it’s tempting to credit Wan entirely, which wouldn’t be fair to Cooper, who has some mighty fine IMDb credits. But it is hard to ignore Wan’s ventriloquist dummy movie, Dead Silence (2007), and his involvement as producer with demonic doll movie Annabelle (2014) and its sequels. 

All the ‘killer doll’ movies from the past, including Wan’s, are implicitly acknowledged in  

M3GAN, which assumes that audiences have come to the movie with certain expectations in mind and then leads everyone on a merry ride that eventually gets quite violent, mitigated by the decision to keep to a PG-13 rating, which limits explicit depictions, but not all the flowing blood. Before that happens, though, the film has developed convincing motivations for the three main characters. 

Allison Williams, who played a character who wasn’t who she appeared to be in Jordan Peele’s horror smash Get Out (2017) here essays a brilliant robotics engineer, named Gemma, who is thrust into the unexpected role of caretaker for her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw), whose parents have just died in an automobile accident. As it happens, Gemma is at a crisis point in her career, and is already carrying a heavy load of stress and responsibility. 

From all appearances, being a mother is something that Gemma has never considered or wanted up to this point in her life, but she feels tremendous guilt, more than sorrow, over her sister’s death, and feels obligated to accept the role of temporary caretaker for Cady, who obviously is far more weighed down by grief, to the point that the shy and quiet girl has practically become catatonic. 

Gemma unexpectedly provides a solution for Cady, as well as a new companion who only appears to be lifelike, until, darn it, she follows the path of many, many robots in the past who have broken Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. Getting there is much of the fun, of course, and so spoiling any more of the plot would be unkind. 

Instead, I’ll point to director Gerard Johnstone, who first came on my radar with his feature directorial debut, Housebound (2014), which quite successfully balanced horror and comedy. He also helmed the terrific, family-friendly adventure The New Legends of Monkey series on Netflix, which I thoroughly enjoyed. 

Mix those two together, enhanced with Allison Williams’ excellent performance, the excellent effects work, top-notch production values, and a sense of humor about the whole thing, and you might have M3GAN, who will always love you, as long as you play along.

The film opens today in Dallas, Fort Worth and surrounding cities, via Universal Pictures. For more information about the film, visit the official site. 

Reviews

Review: ‘A Man Called Otto,’ Lovable Grouch

Tom Hanks stars as a grumpy old man in a remake of the Swedish original, directed by Marc Forster.

A funny thing happened on the way to committing suicide. 

The film opens in Dallas movie theaters Friday, January 6, via Sony Pictures.

Tom Hanks has a Tom Hanks problem, darn it. 

By this point in his long and distinguished career, in which he has played (almost) entirely heroic roles, it’s difficult to take him seriously as a grumpy old man. Indeed, he must do his level best not to be entirely charming; it feels disingenuous for him to play a disagreeable so-and-so who, even before he attends his retirement party, is already making arrangements for his own suicide. 

Truthfully, though, that’s one of truly tragic things about suicide: people who are clinically depressed, to the point that what they want most is to end the pain, whether it be physical or emotional in nature, do not always present as soneone you could point out in a crowd as suicidal. Often, the pain comes from deep inside, and the individual is either unwilling or, more frequently, unable to deal with the pain on their own and, especially, seek someone else’s help. 

Remaking Hannes Holm’s “shamelessly sentimental” — quoting myself — 2016 Swedish-language adaptation of Fredrik Backman’s popular novel En man som heter Ove, script writer David Magee (Finding Neverland, 2004) carries over the original’s kind-hearted character construction, moving the action to a mid-sized town in Ohio or Pennsylvania (where it was filmed) and changing the new neighbors from Middle Eastern to Mexican. The film spends less time in the past, reducing Otto’s memories to fond and/or bittersweet nostalgic highlights that inform his present, and allowing Tom Hanks to carry the primary emotional baggage to dramatize how Otto moves beyond his decision to end it all. 

Director Marc Forster keeps the shamelessly sentimental tone, however, and how could he not? Tom Hanks is a treasure, and even though the first half of the film requires a minimal investment in The Exceedingly Obvious, the latter half allows the elder Hanks to show, by the merest dampness in his eyes, a stiffening resolve in his face, or an adjustment in his body language, that he is, indeed, a very fine dramatic actor who also wrings every last laugh possible out of his familiar comic persona. 

Truman Hanks does his best to play Otto as a younger man who meets and marries Sonja, who is played by the wonderful Rachel Keller. As she has shown in her other roles, especially on the small screen in recent years (Legion, Fargo, Tokyo Vice), Keller is a vibrant performer who is capable of extreme fire and fury. Here, the role doesn’t call for that; consequently, it’s a much quieter performance that she modulates, probably to match more easily with Truman Hanks’ limited experience as an actor. It’s the relatively rare case in which an actor is called upon to play his real-life father as a younger man, and yes, the resemblance is uncanny. (His mother, Rita Wilson, also serves as one of the producers.)

Mariana Trevino has the rather thankless role of Marisol, pregnant mother of two darling girls and a mother of sorts to her own husband, Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who’s a bit of a lovable fool, but a loving father and a support to Marisol, to the extent that he can be. Marisol carries all the emotional burdens of her family, as well as Otto, which is a big load, but she has a big heart, so it’s all good. 

By reducing the dramatic load on Truman Hanks, the film loses out on creating an Otto who is entirely believable; lost in translation is his brilliance as an engineer and how that impacted his life and his relationship with Sonja. In its place, we have Tom Hanks, which is not a terrible thing to have, even if the film in which he stars ends up being a little bit less than it could have been, and lesser than the original adaptation.