Review: Rough Night (2017)

* *
Director: Lucia Aniello
Starring: Scarlett Johansson, Jillian Bell, Kate McKinnon, Ilana Glazer, Zoe Kravitz

As it turns out, it's somewhat difficult to build a comedy around a graphic death and its subsequent cover up. I mean, if it couldn't work with this cast - Scarlett Johansson and Zoe Kravitz aren't known for comedy, but Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, and Ilana Glazer have solid comedy pedigrees - then I'm going to say that it can't work, period. It's not that Rough Night isn't funny at all; many parts of it are genuinely very funny (though it's odd that in a film with so many funny women, it's one of the male actors who ends up stealing the show). The problem is twofold: 1) the dark half of this dark comedy is so brutal that it drags the comedy half down, and 2) despite committing so fully at the beginning, in the end the film pulls back with a magical resolution that renders everything just fine.

Review: Hail, Caesar! (2016)

* * *
Director: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Starring: Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Channing Tatum, Alden Ehrenreich, Scarlett Johansson, Tilda Swinton

Good news and bad news. The good news is that Hail, Caesar!, which finds the Coen brothers in a loosey goosey kind of mood, is a treat for movie nerds, it's such an affectionately crafted paean to 1950s Hollywood and the moment when the old Hollywood started to fall away and make room for the new. The bad news is that, once you see it, you'll find yourself longing for full length versions of the Coen brothers' take on the Esther Williams swim and song movie, the singing cowboy B-movie, the swords and sandals biblical epic, and the Gene Kelly song and dance movie. Hail, Caesar is more a series of fun vignettes than anything, but when it's this entertaining it hardly matters that the plot is all dangling threads held together by the vague notion that the protagonist is experiencing a dark night of the soul.

Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Anthony Russo & Joe Russo
Starring: Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson, Anthony Mackie, Sebastian Stan, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Redford

When many of us think about "grown up" superhero movies dealing with themes that evoke real-world issues, we tend to think first of Christopher Nolan's Batman series, which dealt with many ethical questions and issues which became especially prominent in the post-9/11 decade. With The Winter Soldier, the Captain America series stakes its own claim on being the serious, grown up superhero story by spinning a yarn about national security, the military-industrial complex, and the corruption of institutional power. That it does this so successfully while still managing to tell an entertaining story about superheroes, supervillains, and their allies battling it out in the streets and in the air gives it a pretty strong claim to the title of the Marvel Universe's best film to date.

Review: Under the Skin (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jonathan Glazer
Starring: Scarlett Johansson

Nothing can really prepare you for the hypnotic power of Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin, a science fiction film that is as coldly graceful as it is inaccessible. A film in which none of the characters are named and nothing is explained, full of striking, brutal images, it's a film that starts to unsettle you immediately and keeps you unsettled right up until its final image. I don't think I've ever seen a movie quite like this one; the closest I could think of was 2001: A Space Odyssey, which this film seems to echo in one sequence in particular. While I don't think that Under the Skin possesses the same transcendent power of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, it is a mesmerizing piece of filmmaking from a director completely confident in what he's doing.

Review: Her (2013)

* * * 1/2
Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Amy Adams

Of all the questions that Spike Jonze's Her asks, the most pressing is, what does it mean to be human? It takes more than a body, surely, yet while a body may not define a person's humanity, it would seem to be an essential part of it, giving people the ability to physically connect and physically experience the world. But, as experience and connection increasingly become more virtual than physical, but no less real, our definitions may have to change. In Her the meaning of what it is to be human is expanded, while at the same time the limitations of human beings is acknowledged. Technology advances at an increasingly fast rate, and though humans may consider the attainment of "consciousness" as the end point of technological advancement, it may actually only be the beginning. Her is a charming film with a great deal on its mind, exploring this theme and others, deftly mixing science fiction and romance, comedy and drama, and exploring intellectual themes without sacrificing heart or soul.

Review: Don Jon (2013)

* * *
Director: Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Scarlett Johansson, Julianne Moore

One of the great misconceptions about feminism is that it's something which solely benefits women, and one of the great deceptions about patriarchy is that it's only harmful to women. Patriarchy creates impossible and restrictive standards for men just as it does for women, entrenching in each gender ideas and expectations regarding the other which are unfair at best, and destructive at worst. This is a long way of saying that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's feature directorial debut Don Jon is an uncommonly intelligent film about the ways men and women relate (or fail to do so) and how the culture of "masculinity" and "femininity" determines the confines of that discourse - even if the film ultimately does not quite live up to its thematic ideals.