Weekend Film Roundup March 16, 2024

Fresh off of his show-stopping performance of “I’m Just Ken” at the Oscars, Ryan Gosling headed to South By Southwest to support his next project, The Fall Guy, where he introduced the film before its world premiere. He noted that he and the filmmaking team, including director David Leitch and co-star Emily Blunt, spent much of their time during production thinking about us. At every turn, they wondered how the audience would feel about a given plot element, a given twist, or a given setpiece, because they wanted to make a movie that would keep us guessing and, most importantly, please us. - Matthew Jackson Read More

Dev Patel did his homework. In front of an eager, humming South By Southwest crowd on Monday night, Patel nervously took the stage at the Paramount Theater in Austin, Texas, where he thoughtfully laid out the many, many influences that went into his directorial debut, Monkey Man. In an earnest monologue, he name-dropped everything from Enter The Dragon to The Raid to the action cinema of Korea and the Bollywood movies his family showed him as a boy. All of this and more, he explained, fueled his first film as a director, which he also co-wrote and stars in. - Matthew Jackson Read More

As part of our coverage of the 2024 South By Southwest film festival, The A.V. Club had an opportunity to screen I Saw The TV Glow for review. This is the first in what will be a series of reviews this week from the festival. - Matthew Jackson Read More

Two years ago, right around the time Everything Everywhere All At Once came out during awards season, we thought it would be a fun and admittedly silly exercise to try and predict which films would be part of an awards season that was still a year away. Our early predictions for 2023 turned out pretty well, even if one of them didn’t actually pan out until this year (yep, that’s how long Martin Scorsese has been waiting to not win an Oscar again for a film with multiple nominations). It went so well we figured we’d try again last year for 2024, and hit on seven of the 10 nominees for Best Picture. - Cindy White Read More

The Chosen’s plot may be mostly familiar, with the story of Jesus Christ being, if not the greatest story ever told, certainly one of the best known. The model, however, is new. Following in the footsteps of sci-fi and fantasy shows like Doctor Who and Game of Thrones showing certain episodes in theaters via Fathom events, The Chosen started with a Christmas special that included a concert, continued with the premiere and finale for season three, another Christmas special, and for season four, released every episode in theaters, in groups of two and three, staggered across several weeks. Thus far, this has been the only way to see them, though one or more streaming homes seem sure to be announced eventually, once all the episodes finish their runs in theaters, churches, and even prisons. - Luke Y. Thompson Read More

Few feature debuts in the last decade have been as memorable and bone-chilling as Rose Glass’ Saint Maud, which opened in 2019 to glowing critical reception. Since then, we (or at least I) have been waiting with bated breath for Glass’ sophomore effort, Love Lies Bleeding. Though the film’s graphic makeup effects and third act twists are holdovers from the horror sensibilities in Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding is a far more intimate Bonnie And Clyde (or, rather, Bonnie and Bonnie) story that soars as a torrid romance rather than a chilling parable. - Lauren Coates Read More

It’s St. Patrick’s Day time again, which means only one thing for a lot of horror movie fans: Mainlining the Leprechaun films for yet another year. Yes, it’s a tradition, and for many viewers that tradition still hasn’t lost its charm, but let’s be real: It’s not all there is. - Matthew Jackson Read More

With influences including Charlie Chaplin, Guy Maddin, Looney Tunes, Trey Parker, Joe Carnahan’s The Grey, and a handful of Nintendo games, Hundreds Of Beavers is one of the most distinctive movies you’ll see all year, and one made for midnight viewings if ever anything was. It’s the sort of movie that if you watched it while high, you’d never believe had actually been a real thing, and is likely to be a mainstay of furry conventions from here on out. (The movie credits prefer the term “mascot,” but we all know what people dressed as fuzzy cartoon animals tend to call themselves when they gather.) - Luke Y. Thompson Read More

What is it with Michael Keaton and hitmen? The first feature he directed—the little-seen The Merry Gentleman (2008)—is about a contract killer, and so is this week’s Knox Goes Away, his sophomore film. Both characters have moral dilemmas that reveal them as good-hearted despite being cold-blooded killers. Is it just a coincidence or something Keaton is obsessed with as an artist? Sadly, Knox Goes Away does not offer any clues as it is a strictly by-the-numbers thriller that does not have much artistic merit. - Murtada Elfadl Read More

It’s hard to know what, exactly, the creative impetus is for Arthur The King. One would think it’s obvious, given how the marketing has placed Arthur the dog front and center. The film is named after the dog. The memoir upon which the film is based is about the transformative meeting with this dog. It seems clear that this should be a story about a dog! So it’s baffling to realize that the dog is almost an afterthought. Instead, it’s yet another star vehicle for Mark Wahlberg to unconvincingly sell himself as a likable everyman. - Leigh Monson Read More