We Live in Time
The other movie I saw at the Violet Crown in Austin was We Live in Time. This was a solid movie that’s all but guaranteed to ensure nobody leaves the movie with dry eyes. The main cast of Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh are unsurprisingly top notch, and their chemistry is great.
I knew absolutely nothing about this movie going in, but the only warning I will give here is that the movie is described in some places as a romantic comedy and I DEFINITELY think that is misleading. There are some smiles and happy moments but they’re more organic and less about setup and punchlines you’d find in a typical rom-com. If anything, I suppose you could call this a romantic drama, but the subject matter is much more serious than the tag of rom-com would suggest.
It doesn’t do anything new or really unique, but it’s a solid enough movie that definitely will pull at your heartstrings.
Juror #2
Clint Eastwood, who directed Juror #2 is 94 years old, but man, does he still have the sauce. I really liked Juror #2 and I was hooked as soon as I knew the premise. Nicholas Hoult plays Justin Kemp, who, while serving as a juror in a high profile murder trial, realizes that he might actually be the one who committed the crime.
Now this isn’t some weird amnesia tale or something either, but I will let the details come through for you when you watch this movie. Aside from the solid direction, the cast here was great, but especially Nicholas Hoult in the lead role. I’ve seen Hoult in a ton of movies from the X-Men movies to last year’s Renfield with Nic Cage as Dracula, but this was the first time I’ve really thought Hoult was great instead of just serviceable in a role.
This is a complicated role to play that draws a lot of feelings from the audience, and he balances all of them perfectly here. Supporting him in this movie are JK Simmons as a fellow juror, Toni Collette as Faith Killebrew, who is running for District Attorney, and Chris Messina as Collette’s sparring partner and defense attorney.
I really enjoyed the twists and turns of this movie, but I want to highlight just how much I loved the ending of this one. No spoilers here, of course, but this movie is a difficult one to stick the landing on given the complex moral nature of its story, but when the credits hit, I let out an audible gasp because I couldn’t believe how well they ended this movie.
The only issue I have with this movie has nothing to actually do with the movie itself but the awful release it received thanks to the (lack of) brain trust over at Warner Brothers. This could very well be the last movie Clint Eastwood ever makes, it’s incredibly good, and they opted to give it an anemic theatrical run and stick it on Max instead. Clint deserves so much better and I really hope these creatives stop working with Warner Brothers until some massive changes take place because this is shameful.
Heretic
I absolutely love Hugh Grant and I love to see him having so much fun in roles lately and Heretic is no exception. The setup is simple, two Mormon missionaries go to talk to Mr. Reed (Grant) and their conversation about God becomes much more than they bargained for.
I suppose that technically, yes, this is a horror film, but it really isn’t preoccupied with tricking you with lazy jump scares or anything like that. The movie is much more tense, and it’s the simplicity of everything that allows this tension to permeate throughout the movie.
Our two missionaries played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East are incredibly solid, but it’s definitely Grant that gets to shine the most here. If you’ve seen some of his more recent performances, this one will feel similar to you, but he brings such a fun aspect to a character that is menacing because of his words and lack of action. He doesn’t play some brooding man interested in acting out violently; he’s an intellectual, and that feels fresh when so many horror movies are more in the former camp.
The only thing that really held this back for me was that the journey ultimately exceeded the destination and I felt that the questions the movie raised were more interesting than the answers the characters ultimately provided. With that said though, I saw this on the same day as Juror #2, and, like that movie, I really dug the very end of this one and the questions it leaves you with.
Make sure to reach out after you watch this one, so we can discuss that ending!
Small Things Like These
Coming off of his Oscar win for best actor, Cillian Murphy followed up the giant critical and box office success of Oppenheimer with the much smaller Small Things Like These. Taking place in Ireland in 1985, Murphy plays a coal merchant named Bill Furlong. He’s a father of five who is well regarded as a fair and hard-working boss in his small community of New Ross. Furlong makes a startling discovery at the convent and struggles with what to do while coming to terms with his own past.
This movie deals with a different topic than you might expect with such a description, but it’s one that is no less heartbreaking. Unfortunately, though, it’s this grimness that makes it hard for me to really capture my feelings about this movie. It’s incredibly bleak and grim, not just in the content, but with the technical aspects as well. It’s slow, dark, grimy, gray, and depressing. This makes for some incredibly impactful moments surely, but it also makes it hard for me to be enthusiastic about recommending it. Similar to The Zone of Interest from last year, which was incredibly effective as a movie but one I feel I really never want to see again, Small Things Like These left me feeling the same way.
Aside from that, my only gripe is that I think the movie relies on Cillian Murphy, and particularly shots of his face, a little too much. Make no mistake, Cillian is fantastic, but it feels like the movie was really taken with what Oppenheimer did and leans into that a little too much here.
Overall, this is a heavy movie that won’t be for everyone. I also felt the length of it a bit more and think it could’ve been shorter and packed a stronger punch.
A Real Pain
Written, directed, produced, and starring Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain follows two Jewish cousins, played masterfully by Eisenberg and Keiran Culkin, who get together after the death of their grandma to visit Poland to discover more about their family heritage and to visit their grandmother’s old home.
I think it was Adriana who first described this to me as a “happy/sad movie” and that basically sums it up. There’s plenty of levity in this movie, mostly brought on by Culkin, but at the same stroke, a lot of the pain comes from his character too.
Gladiator II
Oh boy. Where do I start with this movie? I guess I will say that when I first heard of this movie being made, I was skeptical because it really did not need a sequel (especially if you know how the original Gladiator ends). But I was encouraged by the cast, which includes Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal, who are both fantastic, and the fact that Ridley Scott was helming the project.
In a recent press interview, Scott commented about how many movies he makes in the same time that Martin Scorsese makes one, and while that’s true, quantity does not equal quality. Nothing Scott has made since The Martian in 2015 has been anything worth remembering and, unfortunately, I think this is still true after watching Gladiator II.
The movie would have been better off if it completely left behind the stuff from the first movie and basically just used the IP to sell a different story. The connections to the first movie were so obvious out of the gate (even though the movie plays it up as a mystery), that I was convinced it was going to swerve at some point and it never does.
The third act also feels pretty ham-fisted, as if at a certain point the movie itself feels pressure to end as soon as possible. So much happens and characters do so much so suddenly after the 2 hours of plodding preceding it.
Denzel is unsurprisingly great, and I had a lot of fun watching him clearly have fun revelling in this role. I also liked Paul Mescal’s performance, but I found it didn’t fit the movie. When compared to the lead performance of Russell Crowe from the original Gladiator, I actually felt Mescal matched that energy well, but this movie seemed more over the top than that. Other characters even talk about this “rage” within Mescal that really is never shown.
When it comes to action, there was definitely some good stuff, particularly some hand-to-hand combat segments that were better than the original (mostly due to the lack of shaky cam). However, I very much didn’t like the CGI. It really takes me out of the movie, and the crazy things that they do in this movie look so artificial that I didn’t even feel the awe of how much more zany some of these moments were.
With all of this said, though, I can’t help but feel I’m perhaps being harsher on this movie because it’s Ridley Scott. Despite a run over the last decade of some okay movies, I will never think of Scott as an unremarkable filmmaker when he has Alien, Bladerunner, and Gladiator under his belt. So when he delivers me something that I think is just fine, that’s not good enough for me, and I can’t help but feel disappointed.
Other people might like this more than I did, but for those reasons, I have to say this was mid for me.
The 4:30 Movie
I was a little long winded in my Gladiator II review, so I will be a bit quicker to close this one out. The 4:30 Movie is a coming-of-age story that was written and directed by Kevin Smith. The movie is about three sixteen-year-old friends who spend their Saturdays sneaking into movies at the local movie theatre. When one of the guys invites the girl of his dreams to see an R-rated film, the world seemingly does all it can to stop it from happening.
As a cinephile, this premise struck a chord with me, even if I never had to sneak my way into R-rated movies because my Gram would take me, or because I had a beard at 16. With that said, though, this movie didn’t blow my socks off or anything. The writing is definitely cheesy, and the cast is green for sure, but goddamn if this movie didn’t have a tenderness and sincerity to it that I really loved.
The lean 88 minute runtime didn’t hurt it, either, as the movie’s shortcomings don’t linger long enough to become bothersome.
Smith’s raw passion for movies is on full display, as we see the power they can hold over a kid and how that passion can shape their future. Smith also shows the tribulations that come with growing up, falling in love, and growing apart with such a sweetness that you’d have to be heartless to not feel something when you watch this one.
If you’re looking for a sweet little movie to put a smile on your face, this should certainly do the trick.
Adriana Wiszniewska