The latest film releases include Kraven the Hunter, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, The End, and September 5. Weighing in are Alison Willmore, a film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture, and Witney Seibold, senior staff writer at SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed.
Kraven the Hunter
Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a supervillain and adversary of Spider-Man. His strained relationship with his father makes him become a vengeful and feared hunter. This is J.C. Chandor’s first attempt at directing a superhero movie.
Willmore: “He hunts bad guys, and he has some vaguely-defined superpowers that involve glowing yellow eyes. He's extra strong. And he does a lot of leaping around, often barefoot, like an animal. So he does all fours, and he clambers up walls. It does not look cool, though. They hope it does, clearly in some of the action sequences.
But this is really an elaborate backstory for a character that I think, unless you're a pretty devoted comic book reader, probably have never heard of. So it's really offering you a lot of depth into a character that you don't actually know yet. And it's just a totally inexplicable movie. Yes, it's definitely a lot more violent than the average comic book movie has been, but it's still in [an] almost video gamey way. … I'm not sure why anyone thought this movie would be a good idea. Maybe a time to give the outskirts of the superhero franchise a rest.”
Seibold: “This movie is dumb as a bag of hammers. … It's weirdly edited. There's a lot of exposition delivered with the characters’ backs to the cameras. There's at least one scene where Ariana DeBose had her mouth digitally altered to match new dialogue. It was very strange to watch. I'd say that the film’s saving grace is Aaron Taylor Johnson. He has a little bit of arrogant swagger, but it's a well-deserved arrogance. He is just separate from the rest of the movie. But there's way too many characters. The plot doesn't make any sense. It is just a really, traditionally bad movie.”
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
This is a prequel to the original The Lord of the Rings series. It’s completely animated and directed by Japanese filmmaker Kenji Kamiyama.
Seibold: “I don't need an animated prequel to Lord of the Rings. We've had quite enough prequels. We had the big blockbuster films in the early 2000s. Then, just like Star Wars, there was a trilogy of very disappointing prequel films with those Hobbit films that Peter Jackson made. And now we're watching a studio trying really hard to retain the film rights to this property. And it is cheap and not really exciting to watch.
It takes place a couple centuries before the events of the first Lord of the Rings. It's told from the perspective of his daughter … who they say in opening narration, ‘This is not a character we've ever mentioned before.’ So they can take a little bit of creative license with the Tolkien lore. There's a lot of exposition, there's multiple characters who look identical. And then it breaks out into war, like most of these Lord of the Rings films do, and then it's just a lot of battle sequences, which are typically pretty unengaging. The actual connections to The Lord of the Rings are few and far between.”
The End
Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon star in this musical about the only remaining family in a post-apocalypse world. The family lives in a lavish survival bunker and goes through menial daily tasks until an outsider interrupts their lives.
Willmore: “It's an apocalyptic musical. Everything about that sounds great to me, and it comes from Joshua Oppenheimer, who made two of, I think, the greatest [documentaries] of the last decade plus: The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence. … It's a drag, and I think sometimes it's meant to deliberately be a little punishing. I think the use of the musical is meant to be about the stories people tell themselves as they try and avoid thinking about maybe certain realities of their own complicity in what has happened in the world.”
Seibold: “I was waiting for it to break out into complete chaos or madness or just something to explode, and it never really does. It just gently meanders along, letting these people just be ignorant. And there's a point to that, but it's not very exciting to watch. … I think the songs are a little bit more hummable and approachable than even something Wicked. But they're not delivered with any kind of panache, so they're just gonna pass through your mind.”
September 5
This historical drama shows how ABC News covered September 5, 1972, when terrorists captured and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the Munich Olympics.
Seibold: “It's just thrilling to watch because it takes place more or less in real time. It's about … the ABC Sports news team that was covering the Olympics, all of a sudden having to do what was essentially a big breaking news story. Because they're so inexperienced, they actually get to run into the hallways occasionally, all of these news guys with their craggy skin and their thick glasses, just talking about, ‘What are the ethics to this? What do we actually show?’ This is the early 1970s, and TVs are proliferating throughout the world in ways that they hadn't in the past. So they don't really consider that the terrorists might be watching themselves on television. And it's been really interesting to watch them figure out what journalism is as it's happening to them in real time. The directors are really, really great about showing the actual technology. There's a bit where they have to sneak a 16-millimeter camera out to the site of the hostage situation and then sneak the film back. And there's all these wonderful close-ups of them putting their hands on these gigantic machines and running reels.
By the end, there's this really wonderful scene where everybody breathes a sigh of relief. ‘We were able to cover this. We were able to direct it really well.’ But then, if you know the actual history, you know that it's not going to be a happy ending for anybody.
I feel like this is a great film about journalistic integrity, which is really, really important in the internet age, when media is just proliferating in ways it never has before, and people are choosing the kinds of stories they can watch.”
Willmore: “I love the procedural aspects of this film. … If you are any kind of dork about how people used to run newsrooms and live television coverage, there's just amazing stuff in there about having to fight for who gets the satellite feed. … It's an anti The Newsroom, in that it is not about people, all with the benefit of the writers’ hindsight, getting everything correct. They are making really difficult decisions on the fly, and are in unprecedented territory. I do feel like there is an unavoidable discomfort that comes with watching this film, which was not made in any way to be a commentary.”