In Review Online

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[In Review Online @InRO]

The @InRO Substack is officially live! This is a labor of love by the estimable @CCassingham, so we hope you join us. Subscribe now for bi-weekly newsletters of curated writing from our amazing critics, as well as Substack-exclusive features and essays throughout the week! https://t.co/gdywB5JXtQ

[In Review Online @InRO]

'ideology is the backbone of cinema. Or, at least that is what Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni posited nearly 60 years ago in their joint manifesto, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” wherein the two critics brazenly wrote “every film is political.” Political, meaning a product of politics, of a political ideology, and hence, of a political system. Their words presupposed a link between apolitical and hyper-political as enmeshed, one and the same, insofar as they both reflect political ideology, but what of cinema now? What of contemporary political cinema? What of the “eat the rich” satire, which has proliferated endlessly, it seems, in the wake of Bong Joon Ho’s ultra-successful Parasite?' https://t.co/fH4TQMxCcK

[In Review Online @InRO]

'Halloween movies may be an oversaturated market, but for writer/director Ben Sottak’s feature-length debut, he’s looking to deliver a love letter to the holiday, backed with some haunting ambience and gory encounters. Small-scale, brisk, and unassuming, Hallowarrior nevertheless makes for a very satisfying watch, offering just the perfect amount of diverting entertainment for those who stumble upon in on streaming' https://t.co/TR61gjjKBV

[In Review Online @InRO]

'director James Nunn and frequent leading man Scott Adkins are back together again with One Last Shot, the (presumably) final entry in their elaborately staged, single-take tactical action trilogy. It’s difficult to convey just how hard these guys work: this is Nunn’s sixth film in three years, while Adkins has already starred in three films this year (with two more still on the way). For all the pleasures of the DTV genre, there’s a lot of effort going on in front of and behind the camera — this is blood, sweat, and tears cinema.' https://t.co/T7w5TdhCD0

[In Review Online @InRO]

'This shying away from the author’s true-to-life nastiness turns her into a kind of stock character, a curmudgeonly grandma type, and sinks any sense that the film intends to really grapple with Highsmith’s complexities. This lack of genuine darkness infects the narrative, too. Highsmith’s work is reduced to little more than big specs and social climbing. It’s an overall approach that strips the film of any real idiosyncrasy, leaving simply a genre experience in the wake, a hollow film that can only really observe, “Boy, aren’t thrillers good?” Well, unfortunately, not this one.' https://t.co/0K17Ifaz4S

[In Review Online @InRO]

'The social imagination is also murky on the details of what Cohen is attempting to do with this revival film. The original Channel 4/HBO series was certainly a product of the early aughts, replete with linguistic and cultural appropriation that he does, to be fair, tackle head-on in this reunion — Ali G acknowledges the systemic reckoning amplified by COVID and infuses the narrative with montages of TikTok influencers and other public figures comically issuing statements about this fictitious character’s racially misguided history. Had this thread been unraveled further, perhaps Who Iz I? could have achieved something worthwhile, but instead we’re given other threads. Too many threads.' https://t.co/dVpeCe5alv

[In Review Online @InRO]

'in Noah Segan’s slinky, elegiac neo-noir The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, Harry (John Turturro) is still plying his Bressonian trade in a world that’s left him behind. Living now in the Bronx after years in Manhattan, the pickpocket gets by on the old ways, selling his takes to his pawn shop-operating friend (Steve Buscemi) while taking care of his completely paralyzed wife at home. Harry’s relationship to technology is (nearly unbelievably) that of a caveman freshly chiseled out of the ice and thrust into the modern world; he doesn’t understand any of it and would rather not use anything newer than a flip phone. He’s the type of guy who would call a DVD a “tape.”' https://t.co/UINbTHlUu5

[Brandy Jensen @BrandyLJensen]

strange situation https://t.co/8h3mP3uz1F

[Chris Cassingham @CCassingham]

anyways, support independent writing like @InRO's on the platform that cannot be named here

[In Review Online @InRO]

'Where do you start with a group as vast and with such a complex network of relationships? It’s like trying to carpet Escher’s staircase. Perhaps the way in is through one of the group’s outer members, one of the myriad figures that has at some point nestled in the Wu-Tang family tree, which is itself somewhere between a four-dimensional shape and a magic eye painting — an incomprehensible, ever-shifting landscape of changeable quality, infighting, and commercial double-crossing. It’s this approach that Joanna Natasegara takes with The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable, and it makes for patchy results.' https://t.co/D7vWSyGcBi

[In Review Online @InRO]

'Apatow’s justification for this approach is that Macdonald is such an enigmatic subject, in his winking, invulnerable insincerity, that there’s no way to truly comprehend, let alone relate, an honest interiority, so why try? Let him serve as his own unreliable narrator, and let the viewer draw their conclusions from the man in his own words — or so the director has said. So what you get is a fairly uninspired, paint-by-numbers “Best of Norm” clipshow not really befitting the brilliant subversive subject.' https://t.co/TVAFi5sGQE

[In Review Online @InRO]

'Director Georgia Oakley’s adaptation of Jane Austen is without doubt a cinematic one, sacrificing the narrative balance of novelistic form in favor of the newer medium. Oakley’s Sense and Sensibility prioritizes texture — that oftentimes ineffable literary quality — much more than Jane Austen herself does. Austen’s works prioritize the texture of life, the flavor found in human speech, the inner workings of family relationships, and the cast of character “types” one meets in genteel late-18th century English society. Cinematic texture begins with a different set of priorities.' https://t.co/FJVnBDHzMC

[Four Stars: A Chicago Film Podcast @chicagpodfilm]

On our newest episode, Four Stars Special Correspondent Daniella Mazzio @DaniellaMazzio interviewed Kelly O'Sullivan and Alex Thompson, directors of Mouse (2026), which is screening tonight as part of the Chicago International Film Festival @chifilmfest: https://t.co/rXVGFRDYr8

[Peter Raleigh @PetreRaleigh]

Vouch

[Alex F 🇵🇸 @alexcfields]

To the extent these categories hold up usefully it’s as functional ones of how works ask to be engaged with. But even then the question doesn’t resolve itself into two categories called “narrative fiction” and “documentary film”

[Daniel Gorman @DanielGorman20]

fantastic new Sicinski piece on Structural Cinema and the MoMA “Long Live the Underground!” series:

[alex lei @alexL_E_I]

new column, on becoming completely uninterested in the moviegoing zeitgeist https://t.co/gHBtvXEb1P

[Chris Cassingham @CCassingham]

I'm excited to continue @InRO's coverage of the recent Long Live the Underground! program @MoMAFilm with an essay by Michael Sicinski on their strand of structural film from the 1970s. This was a pleasure to read and edit. Subscribe! https://t.co/Xef1UaV4wG

[Padaí Ó Maolchalann @screenonscreen]

Manuela Martelli's The Meltdown is mysterious, but the mystery itself is mid. Me for @InRO at #LFF https://t.co/djoyqVmdbj

[In Review Online @InRO]

'the cinema of Clio Barnard takes place in corners of the world familiar to those living in, or near, them, but invisible to those living further afield. For many moviegoers around the world, the idea of British cinema surely conjures up pictures of romantic lifestyles of corsets and bustles, horse-drawn carriages, royalty and nobility. But everyday British life is, for most, as far from those pictures as anyone’s life is, anywhere in the world. Barnard’s kitchen sink dramas, mostly set in working class urban areas, are romantic about their characters, not their lifestyles. They have the unmistakable, humble patina of realism about them.' https://t.co/rcGN2s4rjj

[In Review Online @InRO]

'As Báthory takes to the city’s surface, traveling through its ornate, cobbled central streets on a horse-drawn carriage, the gargantuan train of her coat heaved in behind her, tourists stop in amazement. They’ve come to Vienna for the history but, like the audience, they’re seduced by the glamor of this magnificent, idiosyncratic stranger. Throughout The Blood Countess, camp precedes plot and, while it may be to the detriment of flow and cohesion, it’s quite the delight to watch. In the age of drab naturalism and grey-sludge CGI backdrops, both Ottinger and Báthory are a blast from the past, a joyous return to opulence in cinema.' https://t.co/Ff7mh5tURB