The week in film: Thanksgiving's gory feast, and what's wrong with Marvel

Thanksgiving review: Eli Roth serves up a gory feast

Horror fans have been waiting more than a decade for Thanksgiving, director Eli Roth’s holiday slasher about a killer in a pilgrim mask terrorizing a small Massachusetts town. Ever since Roth’s fake trailer for the film showed up in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse, we’ve been wondering what the finished version could look like, and how much Roth might lean on the vintage slasher feel of the fake trailer when it came time to make the real movie. That trailer, of course, is now the stuff of legend, with fan-favorite moments that just have to have an homage point in the movie itself. Read More

Saltburn review: Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi seek racy thrills

The darkly comedic and corrupt whims of the wealthy are on full display in filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s racy thriller Saltburn. The cheeky provocateur’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning directorial debut, Promising Young Woman, Saltburn wages war on the stuffy British elite by way of a lower-class scholarship student, who charms and smarms his way into an aristocratic classmate’s life. If this premise sounds familiar, it’s because it parallels that of The Talented Mr. Ripley, not solely with a similar overarching plot, but also within its sentiments. However, unlike that aforementioned film, Fennell’s feature all-too-frequently fumbles, misunderstanding character construction and misjudging the audience’s intellect in sussing out her anti-hero’s deviant actions. Read More

May December review: An intoxicating portrait of an emotional predator

From its very first shot Todd Haynes’ May December announces itself as a wildly intoxicating, intentionally strident provocation. Close-up images of Monarch butterflies and their surrounding manicured flower gardens are scored by the theme from Joseph Losey’s 1971 film The Go-Between. The archly dramatic music lends a discomfiting feeling to the scenes of domesticity (a cookout for friends and family in Savannah, Georgia) that soon follow. Such a jarring juxtaposition, best encapsulated by said music leading into a character complaining about not having enough hot dogs, sets up a film that wants to suture the lurid and the mundane, creating in the process a masterful meditation on performance and predation. Read More

Next Goal Wins review: Taika Waititi returns to his roots

The marketing for Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins promotes the film as an underdog sports comedy about an ill-fated South Pacific soccer team, full of the highs and mostly lows of a struggling squad trying to make good. Revisiting the fallout from the worst loss in World Cup history—when Australia defeated American Samoa 31-0 in a 2001 qualifying match—provides Waititi with plenty of predictably amusing opportunities to good-naturedly skewer the ineptitude of the Polynesian team, but he also has a parallel agenda. Read More