Reviews of Ballad of a Small Player, Eden, House of Dynamite, and The Roses

Don’t shoot the messenger when I proclaim the downfall of movies, but the vast majority of films of great films I saw this year was over streaming. I still visited the movie theater my fair share, but here’s my top 15 and where I watched them:

1. Ballad of a Small Player (Netflix) 2. Eden (Netflix) 3. House of Dynamite (Netflix) 4. Phonecian Scheme (Movie Theater) 5. The Roses (Netflix) 6. Nonnas (Netflix) 7. Life of Chuck (Hulu) 8. Mickey 17 (Movie) 9. Knives Out: Wake Up Dead Man (Netflix) 10. Now You See Me 2 (Movie Theater) 11. Gorge (Apple) 12. Oh Hi (Movie Theater) 13. Fountain of Youth (Apple) 14. Bad Shabbos (Netflix) 15. Novicaine (Movie Theater).

So 5 of my top 9 were on Netflix and a 6th is streaming on Hulu.

Here are some of them reviewed:

Ballad of a Small Player (Dir. Edwin Berger) Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton, Falan Chen, Deanie Ep, Alex Jennings

If there was any doubt that Colin Farrell wasn’t one of the most intense actors of his generation, this is Marlon Brando level territory here. Farrell plays a hopeless gambler attempting to turn his fortune around in Macao whose desperation borders between cringe and poetic.

Macao is a sister city of sorts to Hong Kong — both came out of the same socio-political stew of Chinese and European colonial confluence — but it’s filled with significantly more opportunities for excess, and greater depths if one fails. At least that’s the way the city is filmed (and full credit goes to the cinematographer). The backdrops look like they could fit in with a spruced-up Mortal Kombat reboot.

Colin Farrell’s character meets his gambling foil in a local known as grandma (Deanie Ip). His savior of sorts is a beautiful waitress but the film is too realistic and the material too precious to make this a love story. While Fala Chen is charming as hell, there’s a lot to be said for how often Colin Farrell chooses scripts for avenues of the human experience other than love.

Perhaps the best thing about the film — what stays with you long after the credits — is how slyly it transforms from the psychological to the supernatural and philosophical realms.

Eden (dir. Ron Howard) starring Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, Jude Law, Daniel Bruhl, Sidney Sweeney

My friend Pepe Lustig (a friend of legendary Czech director Milos Forman who I’ve featured in my film club and on my channel) once said Ron Howard never made a bad film.

Ron Howard is a strange sort of figure: He’s the symbol of 50s squareness as Richie Cunningham on Happy Days and in press interviews he still seems to have that “hunky dory” life view. He’s never made a horrible film as one of my film mentors (Pepe Lustig, he’s been featured on my channel and film club) has said, but he’s also been seen as a middle-of-the-road populist whose ownership of an Oscar for directing is inexplicable in retrospect.

With the exception of a couple films I hold in extremely high regard — Apollo 13 and Frost/Nixon — I don’t think he’s taken particularly big risks, and I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code trilogy as delightfully intellectual popcorn fare.

So imagine my surprise when I chanced upon this Ron Howard film that felt like a cross between the naturalism of Werner Herzog and the psychological intensity of Darren Aronofsky.

This true tale of three conflicting parties settling an untamed island (within the Galapagos chain) following World War I is killer. The score, the claustrophobia, the intensity in the performances, what can I say.

House of Dynamite (dir. Kathryn Bigelow) starring Rebecca Ferguson, Idris Elba, Gabriel Basso, Jason Clarke, Anthony Ramos, Tracey Letts, Rene Goldsbury

Kathryn Bigelow has a penchant for exploring war and war adjacent issues in the vast majority of her filmography. She favors a visceral style similar to a first-person shooter video game, but she’s never deployed this effect to such gravity and scale.

This political thriller explores the hypothetical of a nuclear strike from a rogue nation. It’s comforting to know that in real life, one rogue nuke wouldn’t necessitate us to start World War III. Within the confines of this film universe, nuclear war is a much more fragile proposition and we can vicariously enjoy watching the world implode from a safe distance here.

The main gimmick is that the film explores the same incident from three different perspectives: The president (Idris Elba), the deputy national security advisor (Gabriel Basso), and a top brass at the Pentagon (Rebecca Furgeson).

Aside from the occasional bit of stilted camaraderie, the dialogue is very down-to-business with a careful avoidance of horrible Sorkinist cliches that drive these kinds of pieces: Part of what makes the film work so well is that three protagonists have distinct voices that shine through in their spur-of-the-moment actions.

The film mirrors the plot of the 1964 Sidney Lumet classic Fail Safe and is significantly

The Roses (dir. Jay Roach), based on the 1989 film, starring Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Zoe Chao

This domestic melodramedy starts en media res with Belinda Bromolow (side note: loved her as Auntie Elizabeth in The Great) putting our star couple of Olivia and Benedict through a couples therapy session that they refuse to take seriously. At the end of the session, the pair playfully blames the therapist for a subpar job and laughs it off as they exit.

If that opening scene doesn’t grab you, I’m not sure what will.

From there, we are taking them back to the beginning of the story of this couple. It involves Benedict leaving a stuffy professional gathering and wandering into the kitchen where Olivia is working as a mid-level chef of sorts (food porn alert). The pair have one of the most intense flirting bouts in real or imagined history that leads to them having sex within minutes in walk-in closet. If you thought that an age gap would keep Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman from pulling off a romance, these two put those doubts to rest within seconds.

As the movie goes on, the laughs per minute goes down and veers wildly throughout. Most of the violent escalations you see in the trailer (extremely false advertising alert!) happen right at the end and that’s when things get at their craziest.

Between these bookends, pure comedic set pieces give way to pathos-filled scenes that mine the essence of marriage through thick and thin The film cracks through the facade of promises and affirmations that don’t mean much if the partners can’t put action behind them.