Joe Leydon: Last News

Joe Leydon Film Critic Despite some ambitious efforts by director Jessica M. Thompson and screenwriter Blair Butler to revitalize hoary horror movie tropes with allegorical commentary on race, class and male privilege, “The Invitation” is too wearyingly hackneyed for too much of its running time, and too often laugh-out-loud funny as its plot relies on the age-old convention of a smart yet naive heroine who makes one bad decision after another. It would not be at all surprising if, at some screenings, exasperated members of the audience shout rude things at the screen each time the endangered protagonist fails to act in her own self-interest. Evelyn (Nathalie Emmanuel of “Game of Thrones”) is a free-spirited twentysomething New Yorker who insists that everyone, even total strangers, call her Evie — and she insists quite frequently, just so we don’t miss the fact that she is indeed a free spirit — and scrapes by as wait staff at catered affairs while trying to fulfill her artistic ambitions creating ceramics. When she helps herself to a swag bag at a swanky affair for Find Yourself (evidently an upscale version of Ancestry.com), she finds a DNA test among the goodies and opts to investigate her family tree. This, of course, is the first of many mistakes.

Joe Leydon Film Critic The thin line between cheating death and chasing it appears to have been smudged, repeatedly, by maverick video journalist Margaret Moth, the subject of first-time filmmaker Lucy Lawless’ fascinating documentary “Never Look Away.” At least, that’s the impression we’re left with at the end of this compact yet complex portrait of a singularly and aggressively unconventional war correspondent who inspired equal measures of admiration and anxiety among her friends, colleagues and lovers throughout her 20 years of assignments in the world’s trouble spots — Baghdad, Sarajevo, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Zaire, you name it, she was there — for CNN. Something of an enigma even to those closest to her — “I never fully understood what was ticking inside of her” is a comment typical of responses by interviewees questioned by an off-camera Lawless — Moth was fond of proudly proclaiming, “I live life to the fullest.” But it was a life she repeatedly risked by going places, doing things and recording wartime horrors with such little regard for her own safety that a CNN teammate warned her: “There’s only so much Russian Roulette you can play.” It was also a life that she more or less reinvented herself to portray.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Winner of an audience award at the 2023 SXSW film fest, “The Long Game” is an utterly predictable yet thoroughly engaging period drama. Set in 1950s Texas, the film focuses on the true-life story of five Mexican-American youths who triumph against all odds while overcoming adversity, prejudice and periodic self-doubts in their pursuit of a Texas State High School Golf Championship trophy.

Joe Leydon Film Critic For audiences of a certain age, it might be amusing, or maybe even disappointing, when, early in “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” the eponymous hero skins a raccoon to fashion a bandage for a serious leg wound, rather than to make a hat of the sort famously worn by Fess Parker when he played the character in enduringly popular Disney miniseries and movie spin-offs. Maybe this is writer-director Derek Estlin Purvis’ way of winking at the audience.

Joe Leydon Film Critic The next time you hear someone complain that they sure don’t make them like they used to, point them in the direction of “Accidental Texan,” an unapologetically old-fashioned feel-good dramedy that, with a few minor tweaks, could pass as a newly rediscovered family-friendly feature from the mid-1970s. Back then, the lead roles probably would have been filled by the likes of, say, Brian Keith and Kurt Russell.

Joe Leydon Film Critic If Sergio Leone had ever signed on to make one of those ‘70s Blaxploitation oaters that once provided steady employment for Fred Williamson, it likely would have looked and sounded much like “Outlaw Posse,” a wildly uneven but cumulatively entertaining shoot-‘em-up that finds Mario Van Peebles doing triple duty as director, screenwriter and star. Quadruple duty, actually, if you count his credit as an executive producer.

Joe Leydon Film Critic How far will you go to deny your identity in order to be a somebody? What happens when you make a deal with a devil whom you might normally despise, but has transfixed much of an entire nation’s population? And how long can you will yourself to ignore evidence of the intolerable? These are just a few of the questions raised — sometimes with allusive finesse, sometimes with blunt-force impact — during “The Performance,” an enthralling period drama with often disquieting contemporary relevance. If you have roamed through this cinematic territory before, you may discern in Shira Piven’s exceptional film traces of “Cabaret,” “Mephisto” and other tales of ambitious entertainers striving for the spotlight as Adolf Hitler’s shadow spreads over 1930s Germany.

Joe Leydon Film Critic You have to give the makers of “Race for Glory: Audi vs. Lancia” credit for their honesty in describing their “inspired by true events” drama.

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter “A Disturbance in the Force,” a comical behind-the-scenes documentary about the ill-fated 1978 “Star Wars Holiday Special,” will arrive from a galaxy far, far away in December. After its premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, “A Disturbance in the Force” will be released on digital and Blu-Ray on Dec. 5.

Joe Leydon Film Critic It’s been a bit more than a year since “Butcher’s Crossing” premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, but the timing of its theatrical release could hardly be more propitious. Director Gabe Polsky’s grimly fatalistic Western has finally arrived at the megaplexes just days after the PBS airing of “The American Buffalo,” Ken Burns’ fascinating (and often infuriating) documentary about how bison were very nearly hunted into extinction in this country before an unlikely group of preservations saved the shaggy beasts.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Tipping their Stetsons to a passel of 1960s Spaghetti Westerns — everything from “A Fistful of Dollars” to “They Call Me Trinity” — and the sort of 1970s Blaxploitation oaters that once provided steady employment for Fred Williamson, director-star Michael Jai White and co-star (and co-writer) Byron Keith Minns have cobbled together “Outlaw Johnny Black,” a fitfully funny but uncomfortably overlong entertainment best appreciated by movie buffs who share the pair’s affection for the genre tropes and stereotypes they seriocomically recycle. Not nearly as free-wheeling and fleet-footed as “Black Dynamite,” the 2009 satirical comedy that cast White as a Shaft-like action hero, the new film nonetheless provides more than a few good laughs, even when it seems to be taking horse opera clichés a tad too respectfully, and showcases a fine cast of actors dedicated to both the silliness and the seriousness of the enterprise.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Writer-director Nicholas Maggio may not have intended to be self-critical when, fairly early in his debut feature “Mob Land,” he has one character observe to another about their failing small Southern town, “This whole place has become a fucking cliché.” But the longer this slackly paced rural noir continues, the more that dialogue seems in retrospect like fair warning. Borrowing freely from “No Country for Old Men,” “Collateral” and maybe a dozen or so other superior films, Maggio has cobbled together a modestly diverting, effectively atmospheric but blatantly derivative crime drama sprinkled with a few joltingly nasty plot twists.

Anna Tingley If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. If Tom Cruises’s latest entry as Ethan Hunt in “Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” has inspired you to re-binge the entire franchise, then you’re in luck. All six previous “Mission Impossible” films are available to stream on Paramount+.

Joe Leydon Film Critic The stunt work was sensationally spectacular and Tom Cruise did much dauntless derring-do. But some may forget that when the “Mission: Impossible” series first began in 1996, there were heated arguments about the franchise’s big screen debut. Some critics were positively incensed that the heroic lead character in the popular 1966-1973 TV series that inspired the film had been reconstituted in Brian De Palma’s big-screen reboot as a treacherous turncoat.

Joe Leydon Film Critic The reaction was always the same. During my high school days, I must have seen “Wait Until Dark” five times during its theatrical release. Audrey Hepburn was appealing, of course, but the main attraction for me was Alan Arkin’s chilling portrayal of a psycho sadist who, in the course of reclaiming a misdirected heroin shipment, terrorizes a blind woman in her apartment. Late in the 1967 thriller, the distressed damsel temporarily gets the upper hand by stabbing her tormentor. But as she walks away, the psycho leaps back into her kitchen and grabs her ankle. And every time he did this, every time I saw “Wait Until Dark,” people in the audience (including me, the first time) screamed. Really, really loudly. Like, louder than the folks around me in a theater seven years later during the first jump-scare in “Jaws.”

Joe Leydon Film Critic With a tip of the hat to Agatha Christie and a nod toward “Twelve Angry Men,” writer-director Ted Geoghegan (“Mohawk”) skillfully sustains suspense and showcases a strong cast in “Brooklyn 45,” a supernatural-themed chamber drama about a small group of World War II vets entangled in a séance where visits from the restless departed are hardly the worst threat to participants. Set for a June 9 premiere on the Shudder streaming service after a sprint on the festival circuit, the film impresses as a well-crafted period piece with some pointed observations about paranoia and xenophobia that feel, discomfortingly, as relevant as recent news reports about over-reactions by stand-your-ground shooters.

J. Kim Murphy “Evil Dead Rise” might not be able to vanquish the soon-to-three-peat box office champion “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” but the horror entry is still chainsawing off its own solid opening on domestic charts. The Warner Bros. release earned $10.3 million from 3,402 locations on Friday, a figure that includes $2.5 million in previews. It’s an auspicious start for the horror entry, which now has a strong chance of outperforming its projections, which had pegged the film with a $15 million to $20 million debut heading into the weekend. That’s not too shabby of a haul for a production originally slated to release directly on HBO Max. “Evil Dead Rise” is the fifth installment in Warner Bros. and New Line’s outlandish horror franchise, as well as the first in 10 years. “Rise” is tracking slightly behind its predecessor, which scored an $11.8 million opening day in April 2013, on its way to a $25.7 million debut.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Winner of SXSW’s narrative grand jury award, “Raging Grace” deserves ample credit both for what it is and what it is not. But it’s difficult to be much more detailed in any appraisal of this cunning thriller without prematurely releasing cats from bags. On the other hand, it is safe to say that Paris Zarcilla, the British-born Filipino writer-director here making his feature debut, does an impressive job of infusing scary movie conventions with the potent urgency of a sharply observed social critique. Right from the start, Zarcilla generates a compelling rooting interest in his protagonist: Joy (Max Eigenmann), a single Filipina mom who’s trying to maintain a low profile while working at various housekeeping jobs — mostly for well-off folks who sound condescending even during the most innocuous conversational gambits — and saving to purchase a gray-market visa so she and Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla), her mischievous young daughter, can remain in London.

Joe Leydon Film Critic Just a skosh more than a decade after Fede Alvarez’s carnage-crammed “Evil Dead” reboot jump-started the horror franchise spawned by Sam Raimi’s low-budget 1981 cult favorite, writer-director Lee Cronin has delivered his own imaginatively scary take on the “Book of the Dead” mythos with “Evil Dead Rise.” A kinda-sorta sequel, it offers incontrovertible evidence that predatory and possessive bogeymen are just as frightful when their hunting ground shifts from a cabin in a dark corner of the woods to a gone-to-seed apartment building in downtown Los Angeles.    Said building — aptly described by one holdout resident as a “condemned dump” — just happens to have been built on the site of a long-closed bank that evidently shuttered before certain mystical merchandise could be retrieved from its vault. Specifically, we’re talking about yet another Book of the Dead: an ancient tome with a binding of human skin that can serve as an entryway for savage supernatural creatures eager to infect and forage in our world. This particular edition was locked away along with some 1923-era vinyl recordings of a clergyman’s warnings about the dangers of even glancing between the covers. Trouble is, all it takes is an earthquake, and a curious adolescent living with his family several stories above the buried material, for all hell to break loose.

Joe Leydon Film Critic There are times when you look back at pop culture phenomena and can’t resist the urge to ask: Can you believe this actually happened? Tackling a notorious fiasco in one of the galaxy’s most popular franchises, Jeremy Coon and Steve Kozak’s amusing and exhaustive documentary ”A Disturbance in the Force” unpacks 1978’s “Star Wars Holiday Special.” You don’t have to be an obsessive “Star Wars” fan to enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at how the special — which premiered Nov. 17, 1978 on CBS, and has never been re-run on any broadcast or cable outlet — came to exist. To be sure, the fans will appreciate it a lot more than casual viewers. But it’s also an irresistible hoot for anyone with fond memories of star-studded 1970s musical/variety TV specials — a specific type of highly popular general audience entertainment that, truth to tell, very often showcased more campy excess than anything in the “Star Wars Holiday Special.”  

Joe Leydon Film Critic The “Rocky” series continues apace, even after Rocky himself has thrown in the towel, as Michael B. Jordan returns as Adonis Creed for “Creed III,” the latest installment in what might best be described as a spinoff franchise.

Joe Leydon Film Critic “Linoleum” starts out as one kind of movie, drops teasing hints that it might be another type of film and ultimately plot-twists into, well, something else. All of which makes it difficult to review, much less describe in detail, without spilling an economy size bag of beans. But wait, there’s more: It’s also a movie that, not unlike “The Usual Suspects” or “Jacob’s Ladder,” likely will drive some viewers to opt for an instant replay after closing credits roll by, to see if that final twist actually does a watertight job of answering and explaining. Why? To quote a line of dialogue repeated almost as a mantra throughout the proceedings: It’s not that simple. Jim Gaffigan impressively manages the tricky task of serving simultaneously as sympathetic protagonist and unreliable narrator while portraying Cameron Edwin, a once promising scientist and astronaut wannabe who’s nearing 50 while weighed down with a multitude of reasons for a full-blown midlife crisis. The “Bill Nye the Science Guy”-style children’s TV show he hosts for a Ohio station has been banished to a midnight timeslot; Erin (Rhea Seehorn), his wife and former co-host, wants a divorce before she moves away to accept an aerospace museum job in another city; Nora (Katelyn Nacon), his teenage daughter, has started addressing him by his first name as she’s caught up with her own identity issues; and Mac (Roger Hendricks Simon), his retired scientist father, is losing ground in his battle against dementia in an elderly care facility, despite the best efforts of his watchful doctor (Tony Shalhoub).