A Celebration of Cinema

A father and daughter are reunited in the new action drama series Butterfly, which is set in South Korea and takes place in the world of  international intelligence and espionage.  Daniel Dae Kim plays David Jung, a former operative who faked his own death to give his daughter Rebecca (Reina Hardesty) a chance at a normal life.  However, nine years later, Rebecca is now a deadly assassin, working for the same Caddis operation that David used to work for. Caddis is run by Juno, in who we recognize Piper Perabo, who once used to dance in and on a bar in the cult classic Coyote Ugly (2000), but is now tough-as-nails enough to routinely kill off disloyal employees.  Like Daniel, though, she cares about her offspring, in this case slightly insecure son Oliver (Louis Landau), who doesn’t really know if he’s got what it takes to follow in his mother’s footsteps.  Rebecca, for her part, doesn’t really know whether she wants to hug her father, or kill him. She casually w...

Bob Odenkirk and friends get a well-deserved victory lap with the entertaining Nobody 2, even if the ultra-violent action comedy lacks the urgency of the first movie. Nobody (2021), written by Derek Kolstad  and directed by Ilya Naishuller, was an unexpected success, grossing almost sixty million dollar on a 16 million budget, and that’s before it became a huge hit on video on demand. A sequel made sense, especially in an industry looking for fresh franchises, but if the new movie lacks anything, it’s quite obviously the element of surprise. The first movie made us believe that an ordinary and even somewhat docile family man, Hutch Mansell, could after a simple burglary become an overnight avenging angel with a rage so big he could take on (and out) a complete Russian crime mob.  Halfway through the movie, though, it became clear that Hugh was a former trained operative who had tried to put his violent past behind him to give himself and his family - h...

Mia Wasikowska stars in this Cannes selection from Jessica Hausner, as a conscious eating teacher who wants to introduce her students to the mysterious Club Zero. The Australian actress, who broke through internationally with the titular role in Alice in Wonderland (2010), plays Ms. Novak, who comes to work at an elite boarding school, led by Ms. Dorset (Sidse Babett Knudsen, Borgen).  Having a conscious eating teacher on board, is seen as an added value element to the curriculum. The children can only benefit, as individuals, but also as members of a rapidly changing world, heading into a future in which sustainability is key. Little do the parents know, however, that Ms. Novak, who has no children of her own, brings her own highly peculiar agenda to the (dinner) table. She seems to form a special relationship with her pupils, including Ragna (Florence Baker), Elsa (Ksenia Devriendt), Fred (Luke Barker), Ben (Samuel D. Anderson) and Helen (Gwen Currant), whose individual personali...

Alex Garland’s ‘near fiction’ action epic Civil War  ventures deep into the heart of American darkness. It tells the story of a group of semi-embedded journalists from New York to Washington D.C. to capture one last interview with the President of the United States before he himself may be captured by the Western Forces of Texas and California whose revolution is gaining momentum. That’s basically all you need to know about the plot. And besides, Garland doesn’t tell us much more. Civil War takes place in a future America where words like ‘Democrats’ or ‘Republicans’ seem to have lost all meaning. Or as one soldier puts it halfway through the movie: ‘There are some guys out there trying to kill us. And we are trying to kill them.’ Even though the movie is full of violent war scenes, Garland mainly focuses on our little group of four protagonists: Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a very experienced war photographer, who has seen it all and is nearing the end of her tether. She works f...

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is the mostly fine fifth entry in the long running franchise, that is slowly but surely running out of commercial steam. Directed by Gil Kenan, from a script by Kenan and legacy curator Jason Reitman, it sees the main characters moving back to NYC, after their previous adventures in Summerville, Oklahoma in Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021).  That movie was a perfectly fine way of reigniting a frozen franchise, after the blowout success of the first two movies, from 1984 and 1989, and the false re-start that was Answer The Call (2016). Even though that movie was pretty enjoyable, it showed that the hardcore fans were not ready for an all female Ghostbusters quartet and the studio subsequently caved.  The more readily embraced Afterlife was basically ‘Ghostbusters meets a more lighthearted version of Stranger Things’, with Mckenna Grace (as Phoebe Spengler) in the Millie Bobby Brown role and Finn Wolfhard (as Phoebe’s older brother Trevor) as ‘that guy ...

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, now available on (HBO) Max, isn’t the perfect ending of the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) that we all wished for.  But as a relatively straight forward  Superhero Movie of the Week I think it’s still mostly fine.  Jason Momoa is still immensely appealing as Arthur Curry aka Aquaman, but in this sequel to the (frankly superior) first movie he’s gotten bored with his role as King of Atlantis and the ruler of all he seas. Arthur spends his days playing house with his wife Mera (Amber Heard) and his infant son, but it’s a far cry from the action-filled life he was once used to. Fortunately, for him and also the viewer, he’s called back into action by the return  of presumed dead bad guy David Kane  (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) aka Black Manta, who is now in possession of demonic powers that (among other things) accelerate climate change. Oh, and he also blames Aquaman for killing his father in the first movie. However, to defeat Black Manta an...