Armageddon Time, James Gray’s (Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z) 1980 take on the pursuit of the American Dream, is a film with good intentions but one that feels plagued by a plot we’ve seen hundreds of times in cinema. Even more detrimental to its predictable story was its attempt to impart wisdom to its audience, which we were already keenly aware of, especially given its release year of 2022. Unfortunately, the United States of America has been notorious for its class privileges, inequalities, and injustices. While we all have the opportunity to pursue the American Dream, some paths present far more obstacles than others. Gray successfully showcases this, but it’s hardly a discovery, and its overarching story has become quite a cliche.
Category Archives: Genre
Causeway (2022)
Apple TV+ continues its string of movies that should be better than they are with the Jennifer Lawrence-led (mother!, Silver Linings Playbook) Causeway. Like many of its predecessors (Swan Song, Palmer, Cherry, Greyhound, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Finch, On the Rocks), first-time director Lila Neugebauer’s Causeway benefited from a successful marketing campaign, only to leave viewers to wonder what the original hype was about. However, I’d be remiss if I left off CODA, the Best Picture winner of 2021. The streaming service has potential as a movie distributor but has laid its fair share of duds. Causeway is no exception. It’s a mediocre movie at best.
TÁR (2022)
Cate Blanchett is the female actor version of Daniel Day-Lewis. Daniel Day-Lewis is the male actor version of Cate Blanchett. Tomato Tomahto. While Day-Lewis may be a little more selective in his roles than Blanchett, resulting in fewer Oscar nominations (six – all in leading roles) than Blanchett’s seven (four in a leading role, three in a supporting role). Day-Lewis has won three Oscars, while Blanchett has won two (The Aviator and Blue Jasmine). Day-Lewis (65 years old at the time of this post) has said he is retired, finishing his career in 2016, carrying an Oscar nomination for Phantom Thread with him. However, Blanchett is anything but finished. In the discussion for the best in her craft, Blanchett is a sure-fire lock for her eighth Oscar nomination and the early leader for her role as Lydia Tar in Todd Field’s (Little Children, In the Bedroom) meticulously crafted and timely TÁR.
The Good Nurse (2022)
While Netflix offered its Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, a ten-part mini-series on, perhaps, America’s most notorious serial killer, the same company also brought to its streaming service, as well as to the big screen, a feature-length film on a lesser-known, albeit more prolific serial killer in Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse. This review will undoubtedly contain spoilers. If you have yet to see The Good Nurse, I recommend a viewing, though I’ll caution that it operates more slowly than you both wish and expect. I am uncertain if I would have invested in The Good Nurse had I watched it at home rather than at the theater. This is all to say that it deserves the attention the director, the writers, and the actors put into it.’
On the Count of Three (2021)
The opening sequence of Jerrod Carmichael’s feature-length debut, On the Count of Three, shows a revolver being pointed inches from the face of Kevin (Christopher Abbott – It Comes At Night, First Man), a thirty-something man with swollen eyes and a twitching mouth that suggests that something terrible is about to happen to him. Then, the camera shifts to Val (Carmichael – Neighbors, The Disaster Artist), who has a similar firearm in his hand, pointing it at Kevin. Are these two men adversaries, attempting to make the other lower their gun with the threat to shoot?