Geraldine Viswanathan lends a quiet seriousness to her role that anchors this otherwise flimsy, silly story
Here is a saucy, silly, queer road-movie caper from director Ethan Coen and his partner, co-writer and co-producer Tricia Cooke; it’s Coen’s second film without his brother, Joel, following his Jerry Lee Lewis documentary in 2022. Drive-Away Dolls is a flimsy lark wrapped up smartly and economically in 84 minutes with a perfunctory (and cheerfully nonsensical) MacGuffiny premise that makes it look like a Xerox of Coen brothers classics such as No Country For Old Men or Fargo. Lead player Margaret Qualley’s twangy down-home accent is moreover something that could have been re-thought in rehearsal. But it rattles along watchably enough. Geraldine Viswanathan nicely underplays her part and Beanie Feldstein delivers the gags with resounding gusto. There’s a nice sprinkling of A-lister cameos, including Colman Domingo, who I wished had been in the action a bit more.
Here is a saucy, silly, queer road-movie caper from director Ethan Coen and his partner, co-writer and co-producer Tricia Cooke; it’s Coen’s second film without his brother, Joel, following his Jerry Lee Lewis documentary in 2022. Drive-Away Dolls is a flimsy lark wrapped up smartly and economically in 84 minutes with a perfunctory (and cheerfully nonsensical) MacGuffiny premise that makes it look like a Xerox of Coen brothers classics such as No Country For Old Men or Fargo. Lead player Margaret Qualley’s twangy down-home accent is moreover something that could have been re-thought in rehearsal. But it rattles along watchably enough. Geraldine Viswanathan nicely underplays her part and Beanie Feldstein delivers the gags with resounding gusto. There’s a nice sprinkling of A-lister cameos, including Colman Domingo, who I wished had been in the action a bit more.
- 3/13/2024
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Ondi Timoner’s documentary The New Americans: Gaming a Revolution surely doesn’t lack for ambition.
In a jam-packed 102 minutes, The New Americans aims to explain a string of recent Internet-fueled financial misadventures; to somewhat update the meditations on Internet-connected communities and online social anxiety that were part of her acclaimed 2009 film We Live in Public; and to link those things to a toxicity that culminated in the chaos of January 6, 2021.
The New Americans takes a meme-ified approach to understanding the meme-ified intersection of online culture, the financial sector and the rise of different strains of extremism. But like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, the relationship between the documentary and the information it’s attempting to elucidate becomes a blur.
The film wants to separate the signal from the noise in the public discourse, but it’s so enamored with the sensory madness that it just becomes more cacophony.
In a jam-packed 102 minutes, The New Americans aims to explain a string of recent Internet-fueled financial misadventures; to somewhat update the meditations on Internet-connected communities and online social anxiety that were part of her acclaimed 2009 film We Live in Public; and to link those things to a toxicity that culminated in the chaos of January 6, 2021.
The New Americans takes a meme-ified approach to understanding the meme-ified intersection of online culture, the financial sector and the rise of different strains of extremism. But like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox, the relationship between the documentary and the information it’s attempting to elucidate becomes a blur.
The film wants to separate the signal from the noise in the public discourse, but it’s so enamored with the sensory madness that it just becomes more cacophony.
- 3/16/2023
- by Daniel Fienberg
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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George Lois, the hard-selling, charismatic advertising man and designer who fashioned some of the most daring magazine images of the 1960s and popularized such catchphrases and brand names as “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” has died. He was 91.
Lois’ son, the photographer Luke Lois, said he died “peacefully” Friday at his home in Manhattan.
Nicknamed the “Golden Greek” and later (to his displeasure) an “Original Mad Man,” George Lois was among a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world beyond in the late 1950s and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, willing and able to offend, and was a master of finding just the right image or words to capture a moment or create a demand.
His Esquire magazine covers, from Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian to Andy Warhol sinking...
George Lois, the hard-selling, charismatic advertising man and designer who fashioned some of the most daring magazine images of the 1960s and popularized such catchphrases and brand names as “I Want My MTV” and “Lean Cuisine,” has died. He was 91.
Lois’ son, the photographer Luke Lois, said he died “peacefully” Friday at his home in Manhattan.
Nicknamed the “Golden Greek” and later (to his displeasure) an “Original Mad Man,” George Lois was among a wave of advertisers who launched the “Creative Revolution” that jolted Madison Avenue and the world beyond in the late 1950s and ’60s. He was boastful and provocative, willing and able to offend, and was a master of finding just the right image or words to capture a moment or create a demand.
His Esquire magazine covers, from Muhammad Ali posing as the martyr Saint Sebastian to Andy Warhol sinking...
- 11/20/2022
- by the Associated Press
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Venice film festival: Sigourney Weaver and Joel Edgerton can’t save this stilted, eccentric crime story
Paul Schrader is back with another variation on his signature theme, although now it feels like a fifth-generation Xerox. Here again is the lonely, driven male – derived from the philosopher-hero of Bresson’s Pickpocket – broodingly writing his journal of an evening in conditions of monkish austerity, haunted by the existential revelations of crime and a violent past, trying to transform or subsume his trauma into some new vocational obsession.
Master Gardener has been described as the third film in a trilogy with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), although the resemblances go further back into his cv than that and Schrader is probably unique in that he is not merely an auteur but a genre unto himself. This new iteration is eccentric – an oddity, certainly, with its stately, formal dialogue set-pieces which feel somewhat...
Paul Schrader is back with another variation on his signature theme, although now it feels like a fifth-generation Xerox. Here again is the lonely, driven male – derived from the philosopher-hero of Bresson’s Pickpocket – broodingly writing his journal of an evening in conditions of monkish austerity, haunted by the existential revelations of crime and a violent past, trying to transform or subsume his trauma into some new vocational obsession.
Master Gardener has been described as the third film in a trilogy with First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021), although the resemblances go further back into his cv than that and Schrader is probably unique in that he is not merely an auteur but a genre unto himself. This new iteration is eccentric – an oddity, certainly, with its stately, formal dialogue set-pieces which feel somewhat...
- 9/4/2022
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Director Advait Chandan is too literal in his adaptation of the 90s classic but finds a warmth and political honesty the original lacks
Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan’s “Hanks-ish likability” is tested to the limit by his new project with his Secret Superstar director Advait Chandan: a Hindi remake of Forrest Gump, late 20th-century Hollywood’s pre-eminent Rorschach blot. Sending Gump eastwards opens new channels of history and culture with screenwriter Atul Kulkarni swapping in golgappa for chocolate boxes. Yet the source has largely been swallowed whole: the CG feather, the sappy score, the picaresque storytelling and parkbench philosophy, the running with and without callipers. Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.
Tweaks of emphasis do become apparent. Unloading his frankly exhausting life story onto Chandigarh’s unluckiest commuters,...
Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan’s “Hanks-ish likability” is tested to the limit by his new project with his Secret Superstar director Advait Chandan: a Hindi remake of Forrest Gump, late 20th-century Hollywood’s pre-eminent Rorschach blot. Sending Gump eastwards opens new channels of history and culture with screenwriter Atul Kulkarni swapping in golgappa for chocolate boxes. Yet the source has largely been swallowed whole: the CG feather, the sappy score, the picaresque storytelling and parkbench philosophy, the running with and without callipers. Assiduously replicating its predecessor’s strengths and weaknesses, the one thing it risks is that a three-word summary – Hindi Forrest Gump – would tell you all you ever needed to know about it.
Tweaks of emphasis do become apparent. Unloading his frankly exhausting life story onto Chandigarh’s unluckiest commuters,...
- 8/10/2022
- by Mike McCahill
- The Guardian - Film News
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