CAT PERSON:  It seems to be necessary to establish one’s bona fides (or lack thereof) before commenting on Susanna Fogel’s Cat Person, so I’ll note that I’ve never read Kristen Roupenian’s celebrated New Yorker short story.  I’m given to understand, however, that the entire third act of Michelle Ashford’s adaptation is an add-on, which […]

  PRESENCE (Neon – TBD):  Steven Soderbergh has always appreciated, and often demanded, a challenge, and in Presence he and screenwriter David Koepp have taken an original approach to the haunted house genre.  The point of view character here is the ghost itself, who we’re told has an inchoate consciousness that can’t distinguish between past […]

  PROMISING YOUNG WOMAN (Focus/Universal – April 17):  Emerald Fennell’s feature-film writing/directing debut has antecedents as old as the 1973 TV-movie The Girl Most Likely To… (co-written by Joan Rivers) and as recent as Killing Eve (for which Fennell served as Season 2 showrunner), with the added frisson of a #MeToo-driven storyline.  Cassie (Carey Mulligan) […]

  FIRST DATE:  Your regard for First Date is likely to directly relate to your nostalgia for the low-rent action comedies and Tarantino imitations of the 1990s and 2000s.  Those comedies were marked by idiot plots that piled on coincidences to justify rampant bloodshed, while no pseudo-Tarantino script would be complete without garrulous gangsters monologuing […]

  THE FAREWELL (A24):  Lulu Wang’s The Farewell is what could be called Sundance Classic, a small, very personal film nurtured by the festival into wide enough attention that A24 paid $6M to release it.  It’s based on Wang’s own life, so much so that it would be a spoiler to reveal the caption to […]

  In a generally depressed indie film market, Netflix shelled out a reported $20M at Sundance for Chloe Domont’s feature writing/directing debut FAIR PLAY.  The splurge made sense:  Fair Play has that combination of strong storytelling and hot-button ideas on its mind that should allow it to temporarily take over the internet when it launches […]

  THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES (Focus/Universal – March 15):  The title of Kobi Libii’s first feature refers to the unfortunately well-established movie trope where a noble Black character exists only as a catalyst to make the white protagonist a better person.  (Think of everything from Driving Miss Daisy to The Green Mile, The Legend of Bagger Vance to Green […]

  Damien Chazelle’s powerhouse WHIPLASH is about the pursuit of not just excellence, but perfection, and on its own deliberately limited terms it doesn’t land far from that mark.  Whiplash won both the Grand Jury and the Audience prizes at this year’s Sundance Film Festival (only the 5th time that’s happened), and for all intents […]