What We Think Will Be Great
Ad Astra
(9/20)
I rarely plunder studio synopses, but this one seems unusually pithy:
“An astronaut travels to the outer edges of the solar system to find his father and unravel a mystery that threatens the survival of our planet. He uncovers secrets which challenge the nature of human existence and our place in the cosmos.” The weird thing is that the director is James Gray (The Yards, The Immigrant,
The Lost City of Z), one of American cinema’s more earthbound directors. But Brad Pitt is a space cadet (in real life and on film), and the otherworldly cast includes Donald Sutherland, Tommy Lee Jones, Ruth Negga, and Liv Tyler. The title could be a
nod to the Latin phrase per
aspera ad astra, which means, roughly, “Through hardships to the stars,” so let’s hope the hardships are the characters’.
Joker
(10/4)
Despite the use of wild man to denote daringly unhinged (or just unhinged) actors, an actor without a hinge is only sporadically effective. An exception is the slurring, tottering, often galvanic Joaquin Phoenix, who gives you the sense that there’s an emotional cost to what he does. His Joker origin story might be godawful, but I’m thrilled by someone giving Phoenix license to test the limits as the mad clown. And a Joker origin story is one of the few DC enterprises
I’m excited about, especially since the studio made a mess of The Killing Joke.
Parasite
(10/11)
The beloved though spotty Korean director Bong Joon-ho
(The Host) stole the thunder from Quentin Tarantino at Cannes, where this scabrous comedy about a poor family that insinuates itself into the home of a rich one made off with the top prize. My colleague Bilge Ebiri called it a “nerve-racking masterpiece,” and though my nerves are too well racked these days, I look forward to the prospect of Bong “making us cheer on depraved behavior and then pulling the rug out from under our sick expectations.” Now, that’s an ad quote!
The Irishman
(11/1)
Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro. Harvey Keitel. Joe Pesci. Before you say “Holy crap,” there’s another star in the cast who didn’t appear in
GoodFellas, Mean Streets, or Taxi Driver: Al Pacino (one hopes on a short leash) as Jimmy Hoffa. Basically, Netflix just threw money at these titans to get them together, which could be a recipe for disaster but not with its who-whacked-Hoffa subject. No, I don’t see De Niro as an Irishman either [Ed.: He
played one in GoodFellas]
[D.E.: Proves my point] [Ed.: You really want to say that?][D.E.: Leave it in], but crackerjack screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s script is based on a mind-blowing memoir by Charles Brandt called I Heard You Paint Houses that makes you think Brandt knows not just who really killed Hoffa but John F. Kennedy, Roger Rabbit, and Jeffrey Epstein, too.
Marriage Story
(11/6)
The undeniably talented Noah Baumbach has been acclaimed for so many smart but sour, emotionally curdled movies that I take the buzz over his latest drama warily. That said, The Squid and
the Whale is an unnervingly incisive portrait of the impact a crumbling marriage has on two kids, and this one features two unpredictable actors, Adam Driver and the perpetually underrated Scarlett Johansson. It also sounds like a close-to-thebone subject: the grueling demise of the marriage between a stage director and his actress wife. Substitute film for stage and consider Baumbach’s ugly breakup with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the prospects are sunny indeed.
Ford v. Ferrari
(11/15)
I hate the title the filmmakers finally settled on, but this is the sort of processoriented, ironic-capitalist, go-for-it movie Americans do well. James Mangold’s drama centers on the ingenious car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and the driven driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who attempt—underwritten by the oft-despicable Henry Ford (Tracy Letts; did you see him in All My Sons? Holy shit)—to best the Italian wizards of Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. What makes it tantalizing: They’re none of them angels.
The Report
(11/15)
As in the CIA “Torture Report.” As in George W.
Bush saying, “This country doesn’t torture,” while people are being waterboarded, starved, sexually humiliated, and beaten. It’s not a documentary: The committed writer and producer Scott Z. Burns makes his directorial debut, focusing not on what he didn’t see (the ghastly Geneva Conventions violations) but on the Senate investigation and the congressional hearings that dragged the horror into the light. Sound dry? Not with
Adam Driver, Corey Stoll, Jon Hamm, and Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Knives Out
(11/27)
Rian Johnson (Brick, Star
Wars: The Last Jedi) isn’t a great original, but he has a talent for doing parodic takes on the works that inspired him without drifting into camp or undermining his passion. Here, he plumbs that most gimmicky of gimmick genres—the all-star houseparty whodunit—with a delectable cast that includes Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee
Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, and Lakeith Stanfield. No, I don’t see how those disparate actors can mesh either, but I hope to be surprised and delighted.
Little Women
(12/25)
Greta Gerwig gathers an astounding, breathtaking, mouthwatering (supply your own adjective!) cast in this version of Louisa May Alcott’s beacon of girlish autonomy (at least in the novel’s first half ) with Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Florence Pugh as Amy, Emma Watson as Meg … I could on, as the casting director did, with Laura Dern and Dame Meryl Streep. (She’s not technically a dame, but I dub her.) Critics’ darling (hell, my darling) Timothée Chalamet, Tracy Letts (did you see him in All My Sons?
Holy shit), and Bob Odenkirk represent heterosexual white males. I just hope that as critics huzzah over Gerwig they also remember the excellent Gillian Armstrong version of 25 years ago.