Substream Magazine • October 10 2024

Unstoppable Hits All The Same Sports Inspirational Notes

Despite a genre that is often crowded and borrows from itself frequently, there’s no resisting a sports story of someone beating the odds. You may have never played an ounce of football in your life, but I’ll be damned if Rudy doesn’t make you want to do the impossible. The real-life story of Anthony Robles is incredible, and William Goldenberg’s ‘Unstoppable’ wants to make sure you know it. Despite being born with one leg, he became the 2011 125-pound NCAA wrestling Champion, capping off a 36-0...

Substream Magazine • October 1 2024

'Megalopolis' Is Francis Ford Coppola's 40-Year Lively Thesis

This post was first published at Capitalize the B Newsletter
If I were to attempt to somewhat accurately describe the experience of seeing Francis Ford Coppola‘s “Megalopolis” to somehow going in cold, it would be something like this. Imagine if, one day, your grandfather gave you an older, leather-bound journal. This journal has 40 years of hopes, observations, worries, horrors, advice…you name it. Sometimes, all of these themes bleed within each other. Other times, it feels like one completely...

MovieWeb • October 1 2024

Friendship Review: Tim Robinson Will Make You Laugh (And Get Uncomfortable)

We often talk about how hard it is to forge new friendships as we get older. Our routines lock us into specific spaces where meeting new people and trying new things is hard. With that being said, have you ever met someone who's a little too eager to be friends, or maybe even uncomfortably overzealous? You hit it off, hang out, and as you get to know them, alarm bells go off. Andrew DeYoung’s new film Friendship takes this premise, turns it up to the highest degree, and utilizes cringe connoisse...

Substream Magazine • September 25 2024

'Went Up The Hill' Review: Samuel Van Grinsven's Ghostly Allegory

We know the English nursery rhyme, ‘Jack and Jill,’ in its straightforward form from 1765’s John Newbery‘s Mother Goose’s Melody. They go up the hill to get water and fall all the way down. Have you got all that? Cool. New versions have added verses to give the story a little more depth. With Samuel Van Grinsven’s feature, “Went Up The Hill,” the goal is to deepen these characters with a ghost story that leans heavily on its leads and a gothic, melancholy aesthetic that blankets everything. Ther...

MovieWeb • September 25 2024

Nightbitch Review: Amy Adams Gets Weird but Not Weird Enough in Horror Comedy

It would be a waste of this review's time to convince anybody that parenting (and motherhood specifically) is hard. Spoiler alert: it is. For all the beauty and joy of seeing a child grow up, being a mother can sometimes be thankless and isolating. A certain number of expectations (primarily rooted in patriarchy) are set, with little to no gratitude in return. Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s best-selling novel, Nightbitch, summarizes those points. The film doesn’t serve as some ap...

MovieWeb • September 25 2024

Piece by Piece Review: A Creative Biopic About Pharrell That Fails to Look Beneath the LEGOs [TIFF 2024]

When you think about it, the combination of the world of LEGOs and a music biopic makes a lot of sense. They both share a relationship where imagination is at the core, and some stacking of colorful blocks and soundscapes is involved in making something into a distinguishable picture. Sometimes, you make a replica of the cover on the box; other times (like frequently in my case), you create something entirely different.
In that respect, you can see why Pharell Williams and director Morgan Nevill...

MovieWeb • September 23 2024

Eden Review: Ron Howard's Star-Studded Island Thriller Is a Chaotic Venture Into a Crappy Utopia

Have you heard a true story so crazy that you think there is no rational way it could have happened? Ron Howard has shown an affinity for translating these kinds of real-life stories to the silver screen with Apollo 13, In the Heart of the Sea, and Thirteen Lives. But Eden is different — it’s an unruly, feral animal set free upon a Lord of the Flies-like situation where supplies dwindle and motivations change out of strategic convenience.
Howard's new film is set on a deserted island in the Galá...

MovieWeb • September 22 2024

The Fire Inside Review: A Slight & Smart Subversion of the Common Boxing Film

Sports films and biopics (boxing ones in particular) tend to follow a specific formula — overcoming the odds. After all, there's little drama or inspiration in watching a guaranteed winner crush all the competition as predicted. Unless those films get a sequel, though, we rarely get to see what happens when the applause goes away and the prize is won. In her directorial debut, The Fire Inside, Rachel Morrison tells the real-life story of Claressa Shields, the only boxer to win back-to-back gold...

Substream Magazine • September 21 2024

'The Substance' Is A Blunt Force Middle Finger To Ageism

In his 1979 song “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue), “Neil Young says the lyrics, “It is better to burn out than fade away. Within the first moments of writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s blunt body horror critique, The Substance, the camera focuses on one star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. When this accolade is fresh, there’s a celebration and lots of admiration from fans. However, it slowly fades away into the background of the sidewalks like other stars before it. There are cracks and even acci...

Substream Magazine • September 20 2024

The Wasp Proves To Be A Suspenseful Stage Play Translation

Director Guillem Morales and writer Morgan Lloyd Malcolm came together to adapt her 2015 stage play The Wasp for the big screen and brilliantly utilize limitations we normally acclimate to a small Broadway production. The characters and their environments are kept to a minimum, allowing the atmosphere of Adam Janota Bzowski’s eerie and subtle score and the expert camera work of John Sorapure to be players within this story.
Together, these ingredients enable The Wasp to be a tension-filled thril...

MovieWeb • September 18 2024

Nutcrackers Review: Ben Stiller's Feel-Good Family Comedy Is Far From a Christmas Miracle

As we learned from the 1999 Adam Sandler-fronted Big Daddy, there is always a market for stories of unsuspecting adults reluctantly becoming first-time parents or caregivers out of the blue and coming to a heartwarming epiphany. It's the kind of story Hollywood has told for over a century, from Charlie Chaplin's The Kid to the five film adaptations Silas Marner made before 1923 — a man grows by caring for a child. Hell, Michael Keaton's about to do it in the upcoming Goodrich. Director David Gor...

MovieWeb • September 18 2024

The Listeners Review: Rebecca Hall Intrigues in Buzzy Mystery Series

It’s amazing how a cross-section of people can interpret one singular phenomenon with so many different explanations, and how each explanation can create a community, for better or worse. An earthquake, a shooting, a disease, a feeling — most people look to science or common sense, others to political conspiracies, some to God, some to scapegoats. HBO's underrated The Leftovers is a phenomenal example of depicting this, how hubris, power (or the lack thereof), fear, and ignorance can create diff...

MovieWeb • September 16 2024

The Life of Chuck Review: Mike Flanagan's Beautiful New Stephen King Adaptation Will Make You Want to Dance

It’s no secret that Hollywood’s batting average in adapting Stephen King stories for the big and small screen has been very hit or miss. It's been half a century of King films, and the see-saw has dipped down and lifted again like a frenetic yoyo — from Brian De Palma's bar-setting Carrie in 1976 to the diminishing returns of the now 11 Children of the Corn movies. Based on the story of the same name from Stephen King’s 2020 novella If It Bleeds, Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck doesn’t run int...

MovieWeb • September 15 2024

Heretic Review: Enough to Send a Crack Through Your Belief System [TIFF 2024]

Sometimes, the scariest thing isn’t the possibility of a zombie outbreak, a werewolf, or a vampire —it’s being confronted by the flaws in everything you believe, and realizing you may be a pawn in a game you never consented to play. Writer/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods take a big detour from their work on A Quiet Place and 65 with their latest film, Heretic, a far from prototypical horror movie. At least for the bulk of Heretic’s runtime, the narrative is a stage-like, elegant philosophic...

MovieWeb • September 11 2024

We Live in Time Review: You'll Fall in Love with Andrew Garfield & Florence Pugh [TIFF 2024]

The beauty of love stories is that they are a universal language known to us all. It almost doesn’t matter what fashion you present them in if the classic ingredients come together as they should. Director John Crawley’s We Live in Time, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, is aware of its strengths and projects them within a non-linear concoction where actors Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield will both warm your heart in the face of a union that has a definite end date.
E...

Substream Magazine • July 10 2024

'Napkins' Is The Bear's Way Of Fighting Off Runaway Ambition

In a world that feels like a never-ending hamster wheel of ambition, sometimes you want the comfort of routine to get you through the day. You could even argue The Bear itself could use a bit more routine to balance Carmy’s unrelenting need to get a Michelin star. Until ‘Napkins,’ everyone gets caught up in the tornado of Carmy’s anxieties, falling in love with the wrong kind of process. It’s unclear if the partnership between Carmy and Sydney will survive or if Cicero might decide to up and pul...

Substream Magazine • July 3 2024

'Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F' Is Here To Erase The 1994 Film

‘Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F’ begins as all of the previous action comedy installments have in the past  — with Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) getting into some trouble going above and beyond to stop crime in Detroit. This time, he’s staking out a gang operation during a Detroit Red Wings game with a fellow detective who is brimming with adulation that THE Axel Foley wants to hang out. In a classic mode of Murphy humor, he hilariously speaks to his partner’s surprise about a Black man wanting to go to...

Substream Magazine • July 3 2024

'Maxxxine' Nails It's 1980s Vibes , But Not A Gratifying Conclusion

When we see a now 33-year-old Maxine Mixx (Mia Goth) approaching an audition for The Puritian II, the sequel to a B-horror film with a cult following, she is resolute living within her pastoral father’s saying, “I will not accept a life I will not deserve.” She was the lone survivor of the “Texas Porn Star Massacre” in writer-director Ti West’s 2022’s ‘X,’ so it’s pretty much uphill from there. When she says her lines confidently (A script? Maxine doesn’t need a script!), her way of transferring...

Substream Magazine • June 29 2024

'The Bear' S3E3 Review: Repetition Ain't All It's Cracked Up To Be - Substream Magazine

With The Bear, you can bank on an episode chronicling the heightened anxiety and anguish of running a restaurant. In the first season, there was the way-too-many-order meltdown of ‘Review,’ last season; it was the family and friends night gone wrong with ‘The Bear,’ and now we have ‘Doors.’ Carmy finds solace in structure because it’s the only thing he seems to have a grip on in his life. This is why he creates the non-negotiable list as a personal set of commandments to abide by. But the funny...

Substream Magazine • June 28 2024

'The Bear' Season 3, Episode 2 Review: A New, Shaky Chapter Is Non-Negotiable

“Take us there, Bear.” That’s a lot of pressure upon the shoulders of someone who is barely holding it all together in the first place. Is it possible Carmy is the capable leader The Bear needs him to be, considering he’s locked inside a routine that doesn’t allow for any malleability to be considerate to the others around him? “Next” perhaps feels like the collective of The Bear is looking to move forward, but not with a sense of identity other than Carmy’s quest to get a Michelin star. There’s...

Substream Magazine • June 28 2024

'The Bear' Season 3, Episode 1 Review: 'Tomorrow'

It’s all about what you can control, which is exactly why Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) finds his home in the kitchen preparing food. In ‘The Bear’s’ season three premiere, ‘Tomorrow,’ Carmy is writing a list of non-negotiables drawn from his previous travels and experiences. They run the gambit of saying “perfect means perfect” and “not about you,” a lot of principles that one would think are pillars of a successful restaurant. One of the very first ones he writes down is “less is more” –  somethi...

Substream Magazine • June 28 2024

'Tuesday Loses It's Grip On It's Interesting Ideas About Death

Death is a terrifying certainty to deal with from many sides of the spectrum — from those who feel it breathing down their necks to the others bracing themselves for feeling the profound sense of absence. For the early part of writer-director Daina O. Pusić’s ‘Tuesday,’ there’s a view from the eyes of Death itself straight from an immortal, growing in size macaw (voiced by Arinzé Kene), once lush with color and now covered with dirt, downtrodden, and inundated by voices calling out to it to help...

Substream Magazine • June 27 2024

Can The 'A Quiet Place' Franchise Be As Effective In A Theater Landscape That Wants To Do the Opposite? - Substream Magazine

It’s April 2018, and I’m heading to the AMC in Kips Bay with a friend to see A Quiet Place. In being a horror fan, you’ve seen every which way a jump scare can and almost every single theme that comes along with it. I was craving something fresh, and that’s precisely what I got. The theater was nearly complete, and you could feel the weight of everyone immersed in this experience collectively. Nobody wanted to make noise as if we were a part of the plot line in which comping on our popcorn would...

Substream Magazine • June 27 2024

'A Quiet Place: Day One' Locks Into the Human Aspect of the Alien Invasion (and It Works) - Substream Magazine

The first words you see upon a wide shot of New York City of director Michael Sarnoski’s ‘A Quiet Place: Day One’ is that noise level averages 90 decibels — which would mirror a constant scream. That’s horrible news when you consider how the ferocious aliens (called Death Angels in canon) operate concerning sound and how densely populated the city is. It’s a recipe for disaster and carnage. In 2021’s ‘A Quiet Place Part II,’ the film slightly looks at the first day of this invasion from the orig...