Ask anyone in the movie world when the worst time for new releases is and they’ll all have the same answer: January.
The first month of the year has long been regarded as a dumping ground for studios to drop their worst, least-hyped movies into theaters. Their reasoning is sound, if also a bit circular: attendance is historically low in January, so why release anything worthwhile if no one is going to see it? Awards season plays a factor as well. After receiving obligatory qualifying runs in December, a slew of Oscar hopefuls expand their release nationwide in January. Those movies receive most of the attention, which seems to work out for everyone.
But while picking just one movie to write about each week is easier in January than it is most other months, some (note)worthy titles still slip through the cracks. That’s why I’ve decided to start a monthly feature in which I write brief reviews of a handful of movies that didn’t initially make the cut. Sometimes that’ll be because they aren’t worth recommending, sometimes it’ll be because I didn’t get to them in time, and other times it’ll be because I simply felt compelled to write about them. I hope you’ll want to read about them, too.
Pamela Anderson has always been celebrated and objectified for her body, but her greatest asset as an actor is her voice. Breathy, friendly, and a little sad, every word her character Shelly speaks in The Last Showgirl makes it sound as though she’s desperate for a friend. She has a good heart, but she’s also a mess — especially since Le Razzle Dazzle, her professional home for three decades and the last revue of its kind on the Las Vegas Strip, is about to close. She’s surprised by this development, but probably shouldn’t be. Its time has passed, and maybe hers has too. Gia Coppola’s third film might be thought of as a kind of gender-swapped The Wrestler in its portrayal of a has-been performer realizing she has more yesterdays than tomorrows. The film was shot in 16 mm by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, adding to the out-of-the-past feeling evinced by Anderson’s aging starlet. It feels like, if not a love letter, then at least an elegy to the Vegas of yesteryear.
In her acceptance speech at last month’s Golden Globes, where she deservedly won the first award of her career for her performance in The Substance, Demi Moore said that a producer once told her she was a “popcorn actress” who was ill-suited to serious work. Also nominated that night was Anderson, whose talent has gone even more underseen and unrecognized until now. That’s finally changed thanks to The Last Showgirl, who deserves the encore she’s receiving. It’s also reason enough to celebrate an otherwise shaky film.
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It seems that anyone left reeling after the Dark Universe failed to materialize — there are dozens of us! — will have to make do with Leigh Whannell’s standalone updates to the Universal Monsters roster, which feels less promising than it did after his far superior Invisible Man. This new Wolf Man is a meditation on fatherhood in which an overbearing paterfamilias is just as frightening as a werewolf, not to mention more likely to pass on generational trauma. The harder Blake (Christopher Abbott) struggles not to become his father, the more helpless he is against an inevitable transformation, both literal and figurative. In trying not to repeat our parents’ mistakes and traumatize our children, we usually just traumatize them in a new, different way; unfortunately for young Ginger (Matilda Firth), that entails watching dear old dad turn into the eponymous creature one long, sad night in Oregon while her mother (Julia Garner) tries in vain to stop it. If that sounds exciting, it really isn’t. Wolf Man is almost unaccountably boring, moving along at a deliberate pace that couldn’t be less apropos of the material. Too bad it couldn’t transform into a better movie.
The premise is clever enough: the pilot escorting a US Marshall (Michelle Dockery) and her witness (Topher Grace) is actually an assassin sent by the mobsters said witness is going to testify against. Mark Wahlberg, as the high-altitude hitman, plays it happy-go-lucky before the first-act reveal and then mostly recedes to the background as the Marshall tries to land the plane. Every choice that went into Wahlberg’s character is, well, a choice: male-pattern baldness, an affinity for singing New Order, and ominously intoning “I’m gonna enjoy this!” in what sounds like a demented impression of Bob from Twin Peaks.
Flight Risk seems an oddly unambitious project for Mel Gibson, whose prior directorial efforts — most notably Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Apocalypto — are only sometimes worth the while but almost always big swings. This is more like wiffle ball, and he still manages to miss. A bit of frivolity never hurt anyone, but it’s curious that Gibson handles large-scale projects better than he does the kind of mid-range genre exercise that usually goes to Jaume Collet-Serra (who, as fate would have it, just directed a superior aviation thriller in Carry-On). There are some moments of levity along the way, as when one of the characters, when asked how they’re doing shortly after being stabbed, responds, “Like, in general?” Gibson does eventually land the plane in one piece, but the ride is so bumpy that it’s hard to imagine any passengers clapping.
As is often the case, the first 30 minutes of Companion would be a lot more compelling if the promotional materials didn’t give away a crucial plot detail — namely, the fact that its protagonist is a robot. Not that she knows it. Iris (Sophie Thatcher) doesn’t become aware of her true nature until after committing a violent act that, per her programming, she shouldn’t have been able to. By the time how and why come into focus, it’s also made clear that her human boyfriend Josh (Jack Quaid) has faulty wiring of his own. His treatment of her isn’t especially different from how a lot of men treat their significant others, the difference being that she has no choice but to love him unconditionally: “I’m not real,” she tells him, “but I’m still yours.” How many other nice-guy misogynists would jump at the opportunity to have a partner as obsequious as she is?
Companion shares three producers with 2022’s Barbarian, and it shows — not always in a good way. Here, too, a slow build to abrupt violence is treated as a virtue in and of itself, with director Drew Hancock reveling in it just a little too much. As part of her settings, Iris has an intelligence slider that Josh can adjust on a scale from 0-100 anytime he pleases. The filmmakers treat their movie the same way, jumping from witty to gory at will, but there’s a key difference between them and their heroine: she’s every bit as clever as she thinks she is.
On the off chance you need more artificial intelligence in your life, Love Me is here with a tale of two lovers who are literally star-crossed. SB350 (Kristen Stewart), a smart buoy that wakes up a few centuries after the apocalypse, has an important question the first time it gains access to a search engine: “Who is me?” She gets to ask it thanks to a satellite in orbit (Steven Yeun) that introduces itself as “the helper here to connect with any lifeform who encounters the planet once known as Earth.” There’s just one problem: SB350 isn’t a lifeform. She develops her personality the same way a lot of other people do: by mimicking an influencer she finds online. In this case it’s Deja (also Stewart), whose lifestyle videos feature her boyfriend Liam (also Yeun) in a supporting role. Because it’s all she knows, the life they lead together is an endless loop of making the same Blue Apron dinner for the camera and getting frustrated when it inevitably feels inauthentic.
Since they aren’t mimicking real life, just the idealized social-media version of it, Me and Iam (as they call themselves) can never experience what they so desperately want to. That isn’t entirely unmoving as a concept, but neither does it make for compelling viewing. Love Me captures the vapidity of the social media age a little too well, just as it lives up to one of its own lines a little too well: “For a lifeform, you’re not very lively.”
