Review: "Bad Times at the El Royale"

by Chris Feil

Drew Goddard has become a Hollywood go-to screenwriters for charging genres with new life, molding The Martian with equal parts brainy science and dopiness and both upholding and subverting the monster movie with Cloverfield. Bad Times at the El Royale is his first return to the director’s chair since the horror spoof-but-also-not-a-spoof The Cabin in The Woods, and again he has perhaps bitten off more than he can narratively chew.

This time Goddard is taking on pulpy pop noir, setting for a showdown at a highway hotel bisected by the California-Nevada border. Checking in are Cynthia Erivo’s quiet lounge singer Darlene, Jon Hamm’s chatterbox vacuum salesman Laramie Sullivan, Dakota Johnson as a mysterious woman named Emily, and Jeff Bridges giving the most Bridges as a suspicious priest named Father Flynn. The writer/director has Tarantino on the brain as Agatha Christie, chaptering the film by the various rooms hosting each guest and slowing revealing the night’s dirty deeds from each of their perspectives. Think of it like a heterosexual Clue mixed with a bisexual Reservoir Dogs, but not as fun.

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NYFF: Happy as Lazzaro

Jason Adams reporting from the New York Film Festival

The surprises that flow out of Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro start like a trickle - an idiosyncratic sound in the forest, a mysterious red light burning in the night sky - and flash to a flood by  the mid-point, washing away what we thought we knew of its retro-future strangenesses. The earth cracks like a shell, piece by piece, and reveals another odd shell underneath.

Lazarro tells the story of an isolated band of sharecroppers in rural Italy, whose Sisyphean work in the tobacco fields only seems to plow them further into debt day after day...

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Catch-Up: A Simple Favor, The Children Act, Colette

by Nathaniel R

So as not to get ANY further behind on reviewing and such -- you wouldn't believe my calendar right now -- here are quick takes on four  movies we barely said anything about, the first of which you should absolutely make time to see.

A Simple Favor (Paul Feig)
Synopsis: Mommy vlogger Stephanie's (Anna Kendrick) new best friend, chic enigmatic Emily (Blake Lively) goes missing then turns up dead... or does she?... in this twisty genre mashup. 
Capsule: Half comic thriller. Half campy mystery. Half bad girl dress-up fantasy. The math doesn't add up, I'm aware, but it's all enjoyable. The leading ladies are deliciously inspired, marrying all the disparate tones with as much ease, flair, and detail as the costumes, chic soundtrack, and aspirational production design. Makes a solid case for itself as the year's most delightful surprise...

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NYFF: Olivia, Rachel, and Emma in "The Favourite"

Nathaniel reporting from the New York Film Festival

"Bunnies aren't just cute like everyone supposes," the vengeance demon Anya famously sang on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you should know straightaway that she would absolutely recoil at The Favourite, which is filled with bunnies, even as she might well relate to the brutal practicalities of the social maneuvering between the servant Abigail (Emma Stone) and her cousin Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) for the Queen's affections. Yet the two things, bunnies and favouritism, are inextricably linked.

Queen Anne's (Olivia Colman) chambers are filled with bunnies, seventeen to be precise, each named after one of her miscarried or stillborn babies. She would very much like her favourite Lady, whoever it is, to fawn on them...

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NYFF: 'Too Late To Die Young' and 'Ray & Liz'

by Murtada Elfadl

Childhood and adolescent memories are the basis for two films playing at this year’s New York Film Festival. Though they come from different parts of the world, both stories use a distinctive visual style to tell an intimate story of growing up. Dominga Sotomayor based Too Late To Die Young on her experiences growing up in a rural bohemian community of artists in Chile in 1990. English photographer and visual artist Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz is a portrait of his childhood focusing on his very neglectful parents (yep the titular characters) in a council estate in London, around the same time (late 80s)...

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