Every year, the stretch between the Oscars and the onslaught of early summer blockbusters becomes a sort of dumping ground for movies that can’t cut it during Hollywood’s peak seasons. They reside in that nebulous and fallow grey area, where not much exciting is expected to happen at the multiplex. They are Tinseltown’s stepchildren—its less-beloved castoffs. Still, if you’re willing to do a little digging, there’s always some hidden gems to be found. We’ll save you the trouble of getting your hands dirty and just suggest checking out these titles that manage to rise well above the low expectations of spring.
Over the past five or six years, the boutique studio A24 has become the coolest kid on the Hollywood block, cranking out a combo platter of challenging indies and horror flicks that don’t insult your intelligence. Its latest, X, actually manages to be both simultaneously. A tip of the cap to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 meatlover’s masterpiece, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, X is set in the Lone Star state in the ‘70s and you can almost feel the dust and sweat and pheromones coming off the screen. The small cast and crew of a Debbie Does Dallas-style porno rent a barn from a creepy old coot where they plan to shoot their latest skin-flick opus. But they quickly learn that the grizzled old farmer and his wife aren’t exactly gracious hosts—or film lovers. Directed by next-gen horror maestro Ti West (The House of the Devil), X takes a pretty standard exploitation formula and it elevates it into a bone-chilling, anxiety-inducing freakout. X is an artful horror film that doesn’t bludgeon you with its artiness. It just serves up maximum joy-buzzer mayhem.
If you’re looking to double down on horror, this creepy Hulu offering makes a solid bottom half on a double-bill with X. Although not quite as clever as that film, Mimi Cave, making her promising feature directing debut, delivers the fright-night goods and them some, especially if your sweet tooth in the genre runs toward Eli Roth’s Hostel films. Fresh is far less misogynistic than Roth’s oeuvre, but gender studies majors and dating-app junkies will still have plenty to discuss after the end credits roll. Normal People’s Daisy Edgar-Jones plays a young single woman tired of the artifice and theater of modern dating. That is, until she meets Sebastian Stan’s Steve—a handsome, funny surgeon who seems too good to be true. And wouldn’t you know it, he is! It would be churlish to spill too much about the film’s gruesome plot (I didn’t know anything about it going in, and I’m glad), so I’ll jut say this: Steve takes surgery very seriously (especially in his chic home’s designer dungeon basement) and Edgar-Jones isn’t the first woman to fall for his sadistic ruse. Warning: Not for vegans.
Pixar has been the gold standard for animation for so long it’s hard to remember what we watched with our kids BTS (Before Toy Story). The studio’s latest, Domee Shi’s Turning Red, is as delightful and deep as anything it’s cranked out in the past five years. Adorably dorky Chinese-Canadian 13-year-old Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chang) is a model student and has a tight group of girlfriends. But she’s also getting to that awkward age when she’s crushing on boys and bristling at her helicopter mom’s stern authority. She’s a teen pressure cooker and something’s gotta give. Acne? Panic attacks? Nope. Instead, she transforms into a giant red panda whenever emotions run too high. That’s right, it’s an innocuous movie metaphor for puberty! Teen Wolf already did that, you say? Well, you’re not wrong. Pixar certainly deserves some credit for embracing a non-blonde, non-blue-eyed heroine at a time when representation is so lacking on the big screen. But it deserves a lot more credit for making Meilin’s situation feel so universal.
Ahed’s Knee (In Theaters)
Israeli director Nadav Lapid has made three must-see imports over the past eight years—2014’s The Kindergarten Teacher, 2019’s Synonyms, and now this caustic meditation on the limits of artistic freedom in his homeland. The jaw-droppingly good actor Avshalom Pollak plays a filmmaker from the Tel Aviv who travels out to a remote desert village to present his latest movie. He’s greeted there by an unlikely censor—a friendly young woman (Nur Fibak) who works for the Ministry of Culture who says she cannot pay him until he signs a routine form. But the form isn’t exactly routine. It’s a promise to steer clear from talking about anything potentially controversial. The director takes a stand that’s not just defiant, it’s emotionally sadistic. Ahed’s Knee is a rant, but it never feels didactic or one-note. Lapid is too sly for that. Let’s call it a very entertaining act of protest.
No doubt you’ve already heard about this Ben Affleck-Ana de Armas erotic thriller that’s currently playing on Hulu. And let me guess, you’ve either heard that’s absolute steaming garbage or that it’s absolute steaming garbage that’s amazing, right? I personally not believe in the idea of “guilty pleasures.” If something brings you joy then why should you feel any remorse? That said, I can see why people would call Deep Water one. It tapdances on the fine line between cheese and fromage. I’m not ashamed to say that I enjoyed the hell out of it. Based on a kinky Patricia Highsmith story, director Adrian Lyne’s return to his ‘80s erotic-thriller pinnacle (9 ½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction) stars Affleck as a filthy rich dude who made his fortune dealing death as a designer of military drones who now spends his early retirement riding his mountain bike, tending to his collection of snails, and fuming with jealousy while his wife (de Armas) flirts and has affairs with a string of young studs in plain sight. Lyne is a maestro of this kind of softcore skinemax stuff, and he ratchets up the heat like the old horndog that he is, but it’s the two stars who turn Deep Water into such naughty fun. Is Affleck behind the disappearances and deaths of his wife’s lovers? Is de Armas bedding these guys just because it gets a rise out of him? And what exactly is with the snails? Watch Deep Water and come to your own conclusions. Just don’t let anyone give you any shit about it.
The Worst Person in the World (In theaters)
Granted, it’s only February, but director Joaquim Trier’s wonderfully humane Norwegian import and nominee for this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Oscar is hands-down the best film of 2022. I’ve blown hot and cold on some of Trier’s earlier films, but this one is an instant classic in large part due to Renate Reinsve’s luminous performance as Julie—an aimless Oslo woman on the cusp of 30 who’s trying to figure herself out in ways that are so funny, sad, and realistically messy that it feels like we’re spying on someone we’ve known for years. The title might give you the impression that Julie is trouble, leaving chaos and broken hearts in her wake. But the title actually isn’t about her. (Plus, she’s far more complex than that implies anyway.) Told in 12 chapters plus a prologue and an epilogue, The Worst Person in the World is anything but neat and orderly. Like life, it’s complicated, unpredictable, bittersweet and indecisive. It’s also brimming with so much empathy for Trier’s female lead that you can’t help but fall in love with her even when you know she’s making mistakes. After all, who are we to judge? Trier tracks Julie’s relationships with men, but it’s far more interested in getting inside of her head and figuring out what makes her tick, which is a rarity in Hollywood films. We’ll see if anything in the coming months can match Trier and Reinsve’s masterpiece, but they’ve set an incredibly high bar.
After Yang (In theaters; streaming on Showtime in March)
Five years ago, Kogonada, the Korean-born director of hypnotically insightful video essays for the Criterion Collection and Sight & Sound magazine, made his feature debut with the poignant indie Columbus (if you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor). Now his follow-up, After Yang, is in theaters and while it’s a stranger and more ambitious film, it’s just as intimate and lovely. Colin Farrell, no stranger to working with off-beat, idiosyncratic filmmakers (see Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Lobster), plays as a husband, father, and struggling tea-shop owner in some nameless, placeless future who, along with his wife (Jodie Turner-Smith), has bought a second-hand synthetic human named Yang (Justin H. Min) to serve as a surrogate sibling to their adopted Chinese daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Yang is both a loving companion and a connection to the tyke’s Asian heritage. But then one day Yang goes on the fritz, leaving each member of the household with a void they don’t quite know how to fill. As with Columbus, each frame in After Yang could be paused and hung in a museum—Kogonada is undoubtedly an artist with a capital A. But he’s also a first-rate storyteller who seems to have made a mysterious puzzle box of a movie that feels a bit like Blade Runner as directed by late-period Terrence Malick. After Yang is a lyrical meditation on both what it means to be human and how our connections with technology can seem more real than those we have with other humans.
Jackass Forever (In theaters)
Look, you’re either a fan of the sadistic cinema of Johnny Knoxville and his band of merry pranksters or you’re not. There’s really daylight in between the two poles. But if you’re willing to submit to sheer dumbass joy of their nut-cracking pranks and daredevil stunts, you may find yourself discovering something else along the way: A bunch of aging Evel Knievels who underneath their dim-bulb machismo actually care about one another deeply. Their onscreen camaraderie is as undeniable as it is infectious–and, yes, even kinda touching. If you’ve seen any of the previous Jackass outings then you know what you’re in for. But after two years of soul-grinding political- and pandemic-related heaviosity, watching these jackasses’ exploits feels like a healing balm of idiocy.
God bless Steven Soderbergh for rethinking that whole retirement thing. I can’t say I’ve sparked to many of his movies since his “comeback,” but after five movies in three years, he’s finally come up with a real winner that’s all too easy to overlook on the busy HBO Max homepage. With Kimi, the master of modern malaise channels Hitchcock for the age of Siri and Alexa…or, in this case, Kimi–a cone-shaped personal assistant that emits a soothing pink light as it responds to your at-home cues. Not only does Zoë Kravitz’s Angela Childs have a Kimi device in her spacious Seattle loft, she also works for the about-to-go-public company listening to audio streams that have been flagged for recognition errors. It’s mindless work, but it’s also a good fit for her since she’s a shut-in with major OCD. Then one day she hears a muffled audio file that seems to reveal a sexual assault, possibly even a murder, and she attempts to alert her superiors only to be given the brush-off because of the impending IPO. But Angela won’t let it go. Like Coppola’s The Conversation and De Palma’s Blow Out, Kimi is a tense and paranoia-drenched conspiracy thriller updated for right now. Rear Window is a probably the biggest influence on Soderberg here, right down the melodramatic score, but even though some of his themes may be on layaway, it also feels spot-on for a moment when we invite digital devices into our homes without considering how much they know about us.
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