To try and catch up, another round of quickie reviews, one of which (Thor Love and Thunder) is quite belated primarily by way of 'if you don't have anything nice to say...' But the other two movies are good so let's get started...
THE SEA BEAST
This marks the fourth animated picture from director Chris Williams (Bolt, Big Hero 6, Moana). Perhaps everyone should start learning his name since his movies have been consistently solid to very good. Some of us critics got an early peek at The Sea Beast showing about 20-25 minutes of the picture a month or two ago. Though visually impressive, it felt a bit disjointed. I mistook it for a few random scenes as tease but as it turns out it was just the first 20 minutes. The structure is a bit odd at first, jumping from a flashback at sea, to story time at an orphanage, to a thwarted sea battle, back to land, and then back out to sea again. But once all five main characters are assembled (three naval hunters, one stowaway orphan girl, and "Red" the titular character) the movie begins to take off. Which is basically where we left off in our "sneak peek". As it turns out the rest of the movie is better (they absolutely should've cut the first 20 minutes by half or more since you could've worked most of the back story and character intros economically into a few lines of dialogue and clever visual asides. Though the story beats once we're at sea and in pursuit of the titular character and the resulting character arcs won't surprise anyone who has ever seen an animated movie, they work and you end up caring for everyone!
Bonus points: A lot of contemporary animated movies mistake "being a celebrity" with "having an interesting or evocative speaking voice". We're pleased to report that The Sea Beast dodges this problem altogether. The quartet of principles including Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jared Harris, are all doing fine voice work and it was especially pleasureable to listen to lead Karl Urban's singular voice all throughout the movie without every fourth word being "c**t" as it is with his starring role on The Boys. B
The Sea Beast is currently streaming on Netflix.
THOR LOVE & THUNDER
What happened here? Taiki Waititi's Thor Ragnarok was such a gleefully colorful course-corrective to the bad films preceeding it that Marvel's worst movie franchise, which had always taken itself too seriously, suddenly had us wishing for a fourth round! The lession: Be careful what you wish for. Thor Love & Thunder commits the frequent sequel sin of doubling up on everything that went over well the last time, which means non-stop goofing (rather than a lighter tone), Thor becoming even more of a himbo buffoon, and even another round of cameos of famous actors playing Asgardian thespians reenacting a previous Thor film. The resulting tone is so sloppily winking and unserious that it feels grotesque given the new story context since this one literally kicks off with child starvation, a denouncement of god, and a fatal cancer diagnosis.
Christian Bale is the only actor who comes out with his dignity intact as the villainous Gorr, the God Butcher. He's such a strong movie star that he can virtually create his own movie within a movie; His is far superior to the one you're actually watching). Natalie Portman, who can be an astonishing actress with good direction, is totally abandoned by Waititi's class clown urges and embarrasses herself trying to marry the tone of her character arc with the constant one-liners and especially her in-movie attempts at a catch phrase. All the while she and Thor himself Chris Hemsworth continue in vain to look for the romantic chemistry they still haven't found after three films together.
More crimes await! Love and Thunder is continually gaudy and cheap looking despite a gargantuan budget. The action sequences (save one which has a strong visual concept) lack any panache or tensio since no rules govern anyone's cosmic powers here, and they change depending on whatever the battle / scene needs. Just about the only things that work, ironically, are the two most riskily obnoxious bits: Russell Crowe's pompous cameo as Zeus, and two magical screaming goats. That animal duo is one of those rare bad jokes that miraculously gets funnier the more times you hear it. D+
Thor Love and Thunder is still in theaters but will come to Disney+ soon (probably by late August or early September)
THE CURSED
Contrary to its SEO unfriendly title, this werewolf movie is not a generic supernatural horror flick. The original title Eight for Silver is a more evocative description of what the film actually proves to be, even if the story does revolve around a curse. In the late 19th century, a group of gypsies curse a town during their own brutal slaughter by the locals who have rejected their very legit claims on the land. The curse is of the lycanthropic variety hence the "silver" in the original title. The film comes from British writer/director/cinematographer Sean Ellis (Anthropoid, Metro Manila) who was Oscar-nominated for his short film Cashback back in 2004.
Boyd Holbrook stars as a pathologist who is brought to the cursed town to investigate when one child goes missing and another turns up dead gruesomely mauled by savage beast. That is, of course, just the beginning of the troubles. Though The Cursed is burdened with a distracting extranneous framing device (which surely reads better on the page), the story beats inside that frame are compelling. There might not be much emotional range given a lack of levity in any sequence (it's all dour and haunted) and a lack of distinct charactizations, but you don't have to be great at everything to make a good film. The Cursed does boast an impressive command of atmosphere and both minor and major scares. It's also very handsomely costumed by Oscar-nominated Madeline Fontaine (Jackie, Amélie). Recommended strongly for horror fans since it offers just enough of a tweak on the werewolf genre to conjure up a couple of unsettling surprises. B
The Cursed, which had a theatrical run in early 2022, began streaming this past weekend on Hulu.