Weekend Film Reviews

NBC’s hidden camera series, To Catch a Predator, transfixed audiences in the early 2000s. Host Chris Hansen baited suspected child predators with actors playing minors, then intervened at the last second with police. A new film, Primetime, asks whether this was moral. “After the screening, I couldn’t get home fast enough to take a shower,” says Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City. “But Robert Pattinson is excellent” as Hansen. Alison Willmore, film critic for New York magazine, was more impressed by supporting performances from Merritt Wever, as the show’s producer, and Skyler Gisondo, as one of the actors hired to bait potential predators. They’re “terrific as characters who are much more conflicted, and also tragic, in getting swept up in this really nightmarish production.”

Edwards and Willmore also review Heart of the Beast, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty.

What do you know about concrete? Not much, reckons John Wilson, the deliciously awkward filmmaker behind the HBO series How To with John Wilson. That show is an exercise in misdirection: each episode begins as a tutorial, narrated by Wilson, on how to complete a certain task — before meandering into unexpected territory. In keeping with that model, his new film, The History of Concrete, is about more than the building material. “It’s also about the impermanence of things,” says film critic Alonso Duralde. “How nothing lasts forever – certainly not concrete.” Wilson “understands that the mundane isn’t really mundane, it’s part of all our lives,” says film critic Dave White. “His sense of humor sneaks up on you, and before you know it, you’re feeling something.”

Duralde and White also review Resident Evil, The Weight and The Condor Daughter.

There’s no outrunning it. Anyone writing a monster movie must eventually decide whether or not they’re going to show their monster. As Steven Spielberg demonstrated in Jaws, it’s usually more frightening to hide the face of the beast. But if the credits roll and it’s still hidden, the audience is going to be mad. In Hope, an alien movie set just south of the Korean DMZ, director Na Hong-Jin puts off the inevitable for more than 60 minutes as an anonymous force wreaks havoc on a sleepy harbor town. “The first hour of this movie when we don’t see the monster is incredibly intense and incredibly involving,” but “the CG doesn’t hold up” when the monster finally arrives, says William Bibbiani, film critic for The Wrap. Witney Seibold, senior writer at SlashFilm, says the visual effects looked “about 30 years old,” which made it feel like a B movie. “For me, that worked,” Seibold says. “But I could see how it could also be very, very distracting.”

Bibbiani and Seibold also review Practical Magic 2, The Uprising and Black Zombie.

Forget “6-7.” In 1990s Middletown, New York, a high school class figured out how to really drive the adults crazy: exposing a toxic waste scandal in their backyard. A new documentary, Teenage Wasteland, tells the true story of a group of students that stumbled onto a major scoop. To uncover the truth, they followed the money, grilled corrupt local officials and got on the wrong side of the mob. Angelica Jade Bastién, film critic for New York magazine, says the film makes a “beautiful argument” for “civic courage” — that “we should look at the world with curious eyes and not just swallow the mistruths or outright lies of the broken governments we live under.” Katie Walsh, film critic for the Los Angeles Times and the Tribune News Service, says the movie is more 1990s nostalgia trip than heart-pounding thriller. “It is really inspiring to think about how a teacher empowers them to just go out and start asking questions," she says.

Bastién and Walsh also review Onslaught, The Sun Never Sets, and Boorman and the Devil.

After decades of unsuccessful attempts to catch Roadrunner using anvils, jet packs, and rockets strapped to roller skates, Wile E. Coyote (caninus litigious) has a new weapon in his arsenal: #BigLaw. But Mr. Coyote is now directing his ire toward the Acme Corporation, which manufactures said devices that always seem to literally blow up in his face. Shawn Edwards, film critic at Fox4 News in Kansas City, says this movie couldn’t have come out at a better time. “Is this movie about Acme, or is this movie about Amazon? I mean, you really can’t tell the difference,” Edwards says. “It’s fun, it’s lively, the animation works, and it totally pulls you into that world.”



“I think it is okay, but I don’t love it,” says Tim Grierson, senior U.S. critic for Screen International. “The live-action actors, Will Forte, and the evil lawyer for the Acme Corporation who's played by John Cena, they're not quite as fun as their animated co-stars,” Grierson says. “The movie eventually becomes kind of a conspiracy/thriller thing where they try to actually prove that Acme's products are ineffective. I think that plot doesn't work so well.”



Edwards and Grierson also review The Dog Stars, Idiots, Buddy, and remember actor Tim Curry, who died this week at the age of 80.