By: Trevor Chartrand I recently covered 2023’s A Disturbance in the Force, the documentary about the Star Wars Holiday Special. Now, if there’s anything to take away from that doc, it’s that bipedal apes grunting at each other for 90 minutes doesn’t exactly qualify as captivating entertainment. It’s a lesson directors David and Nathan Zellner would have benefited from before making Sasquatch Sunset.
When You Finish Saving the World is about human connectivity and how big personalities are interpreted through alternative perspectives. It checks out that these elements are featured in Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut, an Oscar nominated performer who seems to be attracted to these themes when reflecting on his previous work.
Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Resistance comes at a time of surging interest in more action-oriented films relating to the Holocaust, World War II, anti-Semitism, and Nazism. Unlike recent media like Amazon’s Hunters and HBO’s The Plot Against America, Resistance doesn’t participate in any overt historical or genre revisionism, though it is hard to ignore its slight devotion to the thriller genre.
Vivarium works as jet-black satire about the pressures of fulfilling roles that have been imposed by a seemingly unanimous understanding of tradition. It’s existentially dour, but these dissatisfied emotions from director Lorcan Finnegan and screenwriter Garret Shanley are supposed to identify how normalized expectations are not so much a failsafe plan for people, but actually a suffocating framework.
Oscar nominee Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network) has recently dodged being typecast as timid characters, but he leans back into those traits to headline The Art of Self-Defense.
It’s been three years since audiences flocked to the largely forgettable yet surprising box office hit Now You See Me, a crime thriller about a Robin Hood-esque band of highly skilled magicians who perform elaborate cons to rob the rich of their money. After taking in roughly $350 million worldwide, the film has apparently merited a sequel – the equally forgettable Now You See Me 2.
By: Shannon Page Louder than Bombs’s non-linear plot follows a widower named Gene Reed (Gabriel Byrne) and his sons, Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) and Conrad (Devin Druid), as they navigate life two years after the death of Gene’s wife Isabelle (Isabelle Huppert) who was an acclaimed conflict photographer. Jonah, now a university professor, returns to his childhood home to sort through his mother’s things prior to an upcoming retrospective on her life’s work. Given the subject…
By: Addison Wylie Stylistically, The Double is – so far – the best film I’ve seen all year. Richard Ayoade – an indie filmmaker who you may have recognized as “that random guy with the hair” on posters of 2012’s The Watch – brings a creation that does exactly what a film should do. The Double transports viewers to another world. Ayoade has built industrialized settings that emulate a rigid dream. The filmmaker also uses…