Show Notes
Our twenty eighth film at Toronto adapts a celebrated stage play about sexual assault and the justice system, and struggles to translate its power to the screen. We talk about Cynthia Erivo's committed performance, the film's heavy handed visual choices that undercut its most powerful moments, and why a brief, quietly devastating police station scene shows exactly what this film could have been.
More from Stay Through the Credits
Peter Berg’s Netflix WWII drama follows four star college football players who enlist in the Marines after Pearl Harbor and end up in the bloody Battle of Okinawa. It premiered at AFI Fest, and it hits harder than you’d expect. We talk the brutal, immersive combat, the brief game that gives these guys one last taste of boyhood, and why this might be one of the most effective antiwar films in years.
A24’s surprise documentary “You Can See Everything” just posted a record-setting Metacritic score and a $15 million opening weekend, and suddenly the Best Picture race looks wide open. We talk about whether a documentary can finally land a nomination, whether it can topple Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” and which contenders could still shake up the field.
Three movies into the DC Universe, the weirdest one might also be the best. James Watkins turns a shapeshifting actor with a ruined face into an R-rated body horror throwback that needs zero franchise homework. We talk the practical effects, Naomi Ackie’s scientist with a conscience, the plane turbulence scene that will haunt us, and why this one actually feels like its own thing.
Taika Waititi tackles Kazuo Ishiguro’s AI novel with Jenna Ortega as a robot companion praying to the sun to be chosen, and it should have been a perfect match. It wasn’t. We talk the candy colored Friend Store, Natasha Lyonne’s den mother energy, the “Jojo Rabbit” comparison, and why a film about mortality and obsolescence ends up so obvious and tonally confused.
Ti West’s A24 horror comedy drops a crew of scrappy adult filmmakers onto a Texas farm owned by a very unhappy elderly couple, and it’s as wicked as it sounds. We talk Mia Goth in two roles, the 1970s grindhouse spirit, the slow burn tension that West does better than almost anyone, and what the film has to say about youth, sex and getting old.