Every week, Larry Mantle, who hosts our newsroom's longtime public affairs show AirTalk, and KPCC film critics spend an hour talking about new films.
This week, Christy Lemire, Wade Major and Charles Solomon join Larry to review this weekend’s new movie releases and share some of their recommendations:
"This is one of those crazy quilt films that are stitched together out of pieces of other things. For a lot of Gen-Xers, Scooby Doo is really an iconic show -- it’s got all those wonderful childhood memories -- but I don’t understand why, if you want to do a remake of it, you don’t do a remake of it. Scooby Doo was always about the gang solving mysteries... and in this case they’re on this enormous adventure trying to stop Dick Dastardly from releasing Cerberus from the underworld, and it’s not what you watch Scooby Doo for.”
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"It is so watchably unwatchable it is magnificent. These come around every so often, and it’s really true when great actors make bad movies, they give the best terrible performances. Tom Hardy is such a good actor that when you stick him in a part that’s this badly written and a movie that’s this bad, he just takes it to the nth degree, and I couldn’t help but think that Al Pacino was watching this in awe. It is really, truly a spectacular trainwreck to behold.”
"This is a very familiar kind of genre but it has surprises over and over again. There is a real emotional authenticity going on here, and Kestrin Pantera came up with the story based on some experiences in her own life, and all the other actors playing the siblings contributed to the script, so each character feels very well-defined and distinct. I like the way this is shot with sort of a gauze-y, nostalgic look to some of the flashbacks that gives it a vivid sense of place. It’s a really nice little indie.”
“These are the fruits of the next generation after Jordan Peele. [He] did something with ‘Get Out’ that really lit a fuse, which was to say you can take social issues and horror and put them together in an artful way. That’s exactly what this is doing, and it’s spinning a story that’s fairly simple, but in an incredibly tense way. The suspense here is so thick you could cut it with a knife.”
“It is moody and suspenseful and kinda strange and really, really gory, so if you’re not good with extreme blood and gore, you’re gonna have a problem here. Especially with teeth ... if you have a problem with teeth, you might have difficulty watching this. But I was surprised at how much I liked it.”
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