‘Dead for a Dollar’ Review: Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe Are Rival Cutthroats in Walter Hill’s Avid, Talky, But Remote Western

In what has been a tempestuous and emotional few weeks for the House of Windsor, it appears as though the storm has not yet subsided for the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. Despite King Charles expressing his love for his estranged son and daughter-in-law during his first official speech as monarch, and claims that the Prince and Princess of Wales offered them an “olive branch”, royal commentator Duncan Larcombe is sceptical that the “royal reunion” will happen.

Millie Mackintosh was a fan favourite on Made in Chelsea. And while the star, who departed the reality show in 2013, wouldn't rule out a return to TV, the mum of two fears that gruelling challenge show Celebrity SAS may not be the right fit for her. During an interview for OK! , she said of the popular military style show: “I’ve actually been meaning to watch that.

Prince Harry has been accused of always "hiding in the back" of photos with his wife Meghan Markle, after a controversially-timed portrait of the couple was released. A stunning portrait of the pair was taken by Misan Harriman, a veteran photographer and activist, just days after one was released of the new King, his Queen Consort and the new Prince and Princess of Wales.Posting his work on Instagram, Mr Harriman said: “The Duke & Duchess of Sussex moments before attending the opening ceremony of @OneYoungWorld last month."READ MORE: Meghan Markle and Harry's 'powerful' portrait released days after Royal Family photoHis post included a side-on black and white snap of the pair also, and comes just days after Buckingham Palace released a joint portrait with King Charles, Queen Consort Camilla and William and Kate, the Prince and Princess of Wales.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Like an ice-cream shop that offers you the choice of pistachio or strawberry and nothing else, the movies Tyler Perry has been churning out for 20 years come in just two flavors: comedy and soap opera. It’s worth noting, in this case, how the flavors blend. Most often, they’re stacked right next to each other, as when Perry’s great sass-mouth frump Madea suddenly plops into the middle of a dramatic scene. Yet there’s a way that the antic, ribald broadness of Perry’s comedy bends the drama into being more over-the-top. That’s why his movies are all of a piece even when they’re all over the place. They feed you pistachio and strawberry, and by the time that’s all melted together you’re tasting one flavor. Call it Tyler Perry with Nuts.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic “Causeway,” starring Jennifer Lawrence as a U.S. Army soldier recovering from injuries that are physical, mental, and spiritual, is the furthest thing from a genre film. Yet it belongs to what I’ve come to think of as a genre: the slow-burn non-verbal indie gloomfest. In saying that, I don’t mean to make light of the subject. Lawrence plays Lynsey, a member of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who returns from Afghanistan after riding in a vehicle that was struck by a bomb, which caused her to have a cerebral hemorrhage. At the start, she’s seated in a wheelchair, waiting for the home health-care worker (Jayne Houdyshell) who’s going to look after her as she undergoes rehab. Tentatively, Lynsey starts to walk, but for a while she struggles to bathe, drive, remember things. The brain injury has smashed and weakened her; she’s a person in fragments.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic It’s in the nature of cinema that when a hugely popular and beloved movie is grand enough, the sequel to it almost has to try to top it in a go-big-or-go-home way. For a long time, each new James Bond adventure was more lavishly scaled, baroque, and stunt-tastic than the last. “The Godfather Part II” was darker and longer than “The Godfather,” “The Empire Strikes Back” enlarged the awesomeness of “Star Wars,” and “Terminator 2: Judgement Day” made the first “Terminator” look like a minimalist trinket. So how does that apply to “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”? Three years ago, Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” was a seamlessly debonair retro whodunit, set in the mansion of a murdered mystery novelist, that not only evoked the edge-of-your-brain storytelling panache of Agatha Christie but expanded the Christie genre into something delectable in its meta cleverness. At a time when comic-book films, action films, and other forms of kinetic fantasy appeared to be in the final stages of killing off everything else, “Knives Out” was a cathartic reminder that a movie mode we associate with vintage Hollywood — dialogue of airy density and wit, characters who pop with all-too-human flaws and foibles, a plot that zigs and zags until you’ll follow it anywhere — could still make a righteous stand at the megaplex. Holding it all together was Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc, the film’s Southern-gentleman re-imagining of a Hercule Poirot/Sherlock Holmes sleuth, whose wryly deceptive genius made him, for some of us, more super than any superhero.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic If you’re a fan of “The Trip” and its sequels, those semi-improvised road comedies in which Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play slightly exaggerated versions of their real-life selves, you’ll know that they’re about more than just two men driving through the European countryside, eating fabulous food, trying to top each other with their Al Pacino impersonations. Coogan, in particular, comes off as a fellow who, for all his larkish narcissism, is so steeped in history that it’s literally alive for him. And that’s the feeling that courses through “The Lost King,” the new movie written by Coogan and Jeff Pope and directed by Stephen Frears. They’re the team that gave us “Philomena” (2013), the sharp-tongued heart-tugger that cast Judi Dench as a real-life Irishwoman tracking down the son she’d been forced to give up for adoption 50 years before. That movie was fine (a tad too sentimental in my book), but “The Lost King” is a growth ring, a richer, stronger, and more moving piece of work, a historical detective story that carries the kick of a true-life “Da Vinci Code.”

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” the winningly daffy-droll postmodern satirical biopic about the beloved cult song parodist of the MTV era, Al (Daniel Radcliffe), weird but not yet “Weird,” is sitting around with his roommates when lightning strikes — or, at least, bologna. One of the roommates asks Al to name the thing he’d most like to do in the world. Al, speaking with a fervor bigger than mere desire — he’s talking about nothing less than a dream — replies, with stoic conviction, “Make up the words to a song that already exists.” Moments later, the Knack’s “My Sharona” is blasting away on the radio, and just after he’s taken a package of bologna out of the fridge, he has his a-ha moment. The lyrics come to him in a flash: “Oo my little hungry one! Hungry one! Open up a package of MY bologna…” An irresistible parasitical fake star is born.  

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic A good biopic invites the audience to experience, from the inside out, who the subject really was. That’s the level that “Blonde,” Andrew Dominik’s film about Marilyn Monroe, operates on for most of its 2 hours and 46 minutes. Based on Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel, the movie is a hushed and floating psychodramatic Klieg-light fantasia, shot in color and black-and-white, that presents a fusion of reality and fiction. But most of it is torn from reality. In “Blonde,” we glimpse Monroe’s cataclysmic childhood, watch her shoot key scenes from her movies or stare up at them from the audience of a Hollywood premiere (where the red-carpet flashbulbs sound like guns), see her turn the incandescent Marilyn wiggle and pizzazz on and off, see her caught in a maelstrom of drugs, gossip, self-hate, and unfair studio contracts, and watch her melt into the glow of pregnancy only to lose one baby after the next. Mostly, we eavesdrop on her relationships with men (Joe DiMaggio, Arthur Miller, JFK) who become, for Marilyn, a dysfunctional daisy chain of honeymoon-turned-nightmares.

For many years now Venice has been a respectful platform for those big-name directors of the 1970s and early ’80s who are happy to go back into the fray long after those juicy studio budgets dried up: Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter and — to a lesser extent — George Romero all found a home here for their late-period passion projects. Walter Hill, now 80, joins their ranks with an improbably youthful horse opera, and while it shows up the limitations of both writing and shooting a Western in the modern age (concessions to modern sensitivities have to be made, and digital cinematography somehow just doesn’t cut it with the subject matter), it’s nevertheless a wickedly enjoyable genre romp and full of violent surprises.

Willem Dafoe and Christoph Waltz have joined the raft of famous faces making appearances at the Venice International Film Festival. The Hollywood heavyweights were pictured in apparent good spirits, as they arrived for the event on Tuesday evening ahead of the premiere of their film Dead For A Dollar. The pair star in the Western, which is written and directed by Walter Hill, alongside actress Rachel Brosnahan.

Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe buddy up on the red carpet for the premiere of their movie, Dead For A Dollar, during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6) in Venice, Italy.

Dead For A Dollar stars Christoph Waltz, Rachel Brosnahan, Willem Dafoe and Benjamin Bratt pose with director Walter Hill at the film’s photo call during the 2022 Venice Film Festival on Tuesday (September 6).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling” is a movie that, in recent weeks, has been besieged and consumed by offscreen dramas, none of which I’ll recount here, except to note that when a film’s lead actress seems actively reluctant to publicize the film in question, that’s a sign of some serious discord. Yet it would be hugely unfair to allow this tempest in a teapot of gossipy turmoil to influence one’s feelings about the movie. If you want to talk about problems related to “Don’t Worry Darling,” you need look no further than at what’s onscreen. The film, written by Katie Silberman, with the brilliant production design of Katie Byron, is a kind of candy-colored “Stepford Wives” in the Twilight Zone meets “The Handmaid’s Tale” for the age of torn-at-the-seams democracy. In theory, this should add up to a juicy watch. Wilde, whose first feature was the witty and vivacious 2019 girls-on-a-bender comedy “Booksmart” (this is her second film), is a gifted director who knows how to set a mood. In “Don’t Worry Darling,” she does that to the max, and for a while you get caught up in it (or, at least, I did). Between the pop ambition, the tasty dream visuals, and the presence of Harry Styles in his first lead role, “Don’t Worry Darling” should have no trouble finding an audience. But the movie takes you on a ride that gets progressively less scintillating as it goes along.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic The return of Brendan Fraser — not that he ever really went away — has been a reminder of how much affection so many of us had for him back in the ’90s, when he had his moment in movies like “School Ties” and “Encino Man” and “Gods and Monsters” and “The Mummy.” Yet let’s be honest: This is not the comeback of John Travolta or Mickey Rourke. Fraser was always, in the best way, a lightweight actor: the clear blue eyes, the pin-up sexiness, the shaggy warm boyish innocence. The fact that, at 53, he’s no longer as beautiful as he once was is part of the Brendanaissance. He can no longer hold the screen as a cutie-pie hunk; he has to do it in other ways. And in “The Whale,” directed by Darren Aronofsky (who shepherded Rourke’s return in “The Wrestler”), Fraser is a better actor — slyer, subtler, more haunting — than he has ever been.

“I made a new life for myself from flowers,” marvels the green-thumbed Narvel Roth. “How unexpected is that?” To be fair, it’s about the only plausible thing that happens in Paul Schrader’s Venice Film Festival out of competition entry Master Gardener, an incredibly silly but fitfully entertaining noir-tinged drama that follows so neatly on from First Reformed and The Card Counter that it’s almost as if Schrader has patented his own sui generis subgenre, a mix of the sublime and the ridiculous that just about works if you’re prepared to walk the line with it.

“The Kingdom: Exodus,” lurching unnaturally back to life nearly twenty years since Lars von Trier first plumbed the depths of madness contained within Copenhagen’s Rigethospitalet, has returned, and it is swarming with ghosts. The five new episodes serve as a continuation of the auteur’s ‘90s-era surreal gallows comedy while looking inward, making conversation with its own past as well as the sinister penumbra of history itself.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” the photographer Nan Goldin tells a woeful, revealing, and in its way rather funny anecdote about how in the 1980s, when she first gathered up her photographs — casually transgressive images of her and her friends, who were often drag queens and addicts, along with shots of the assorted other people and situations she experienced as part of the hummingly squalid East Village New York subculture — and tried to shop them around to galleries and museums, they were roundly rejected, because the arbiters of taste, who were inevitably men, favored photographs that were black-and-white and composed in elegant meticulous ways. Goldin’s photographs were in garish verité color, set in environments that were so scruffy (messy bohemian apartments, ordinary people just lolling around) that it looked, to the gallery mavens, like there was no visual organization to them, no art.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In vampire movies, from “Nosferatu” to the “Twilight” films to “Only Lovers Left Alive,” bloodsucking is usually more than just bloodsucking — it’s about sex, addiction, power — and that’s why the main event in a vampire movie doesn’t have to be the literal spectacle of watching fangs tear into human flesh. The elegance of the genre is that it has a built-in metaphorical sweep. “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s YA road movie about a couple of lost souls who happen to be cannibals (it’s adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis), is a film in which the characters behave very much like vampires. They blend into society, but they’re really a breed apart, with the ability to smell fresh meat (and one another) and a consuming desire to “feed.”