Blackberry
BlackBerry via video on demand
What’s with the glut of corporate origin story movies this year? Air, Tetris, Flamin’ Hot, the forthcoming The Beanie Bubble. As much as I loved Air, Ben Affleck’s Moneyball-lite romp, BlackBerry surpasses all the other tech bros, marketing execs and startup ghouls to take the pole position in the 2023 corporate-origin-story power rankings. As a newcomer to the films of Matt Johnson, I’m as surprised as you are. But as a longstanding member of the Jay Baruchel fan club, I’m proud to see that he finally got The Role with BlackBerry founder Mike Lazaridis. Glenn Howerton (as BlackBerry Co-CEO Jim Balsillie) is also given a fastball right down the middle with a role perfectly suited to his skills (i.e., slimy and angry), and he knocks it out of the park. A few killer garage-rock needle drops give this Social Network B-side the juice it needs to make up for a relatively lower budget than the other corporate movies.
Missing streaming on Netflix
Who would have thought the Aneesh Chaganty Cinematic Universe would be three movies strong in 2023? The director behind 2018’s Searching and 2020’s Runis back with another seat-gripping thriller, Missing, which takes place in the same universe as his previous two films. This time, however, Chaganty has limited himself to a producer-writer role, handing over the directing duties to Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, the editing duo behind his first two films. Like Searching, Missing is a screen-life thriller, meaning it takes place entirely on the screens of computers, phones, tablets, smart watches, Ring cameras and surveillance drones. What is often a gimmicky tactic does add a sense of propulsive urgency to the story. Missing smartly inverts the parent-looking-for-a-child plot of Searching, which makes the screen-life aspect feel more natural, as June (19-year-old Storm Reid) uses every piece of technology at her disposal to try to find her missing mother (Nia Long). The story has about three twists too many, but I can’t lie — I was hooked all the way through.
Boston Strangler on Hulu
Announcing instantly with the vibe and look of your trailer that your movie is heavily indebted to any director — much less David Fincher — is bold. Sometimes it works, like with 2020’s cult object of fascination The Empty Man. Sometimes it turns out to be The Snowman, a laughably bad disaster. Boston Strangler is somewhere between those two. It’s tough to stand out when your movie is basically a straight-to-streaming Zodiac — right down to its style, character beats and even plot points. But a B-version of Zodiac is still pretty damn compelling, especially when Carrie Coon is playing the Robert Downey Jr. role and Keira Knightley slots into the Jake Gyllenhaal spot. Did this movie have to be two-and-a-half hours or more to fully flesh out a story as complex and riveting as that of the real-life reporters (Loretta McLaughlin and Jean Cole) who investigated the Boston Strangler murders? Yes. This is the rare occasion in which a streaming movie needed more run time added. But as a journalist and a crime film enthusiast, I found it easy to be sucked in here. Your mileage may vary.
Reality
Reality on Max
The Euphoria kids continue to give us interesting movie performances, and I’m thankful they’re using their well-earned clout to help worthwhile films get made. Reality, directed and adapted by Tina Satter from her own play centering on NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, doesn’t work without a fully committed Sydney Sweeney performance. Luckily, the burgeoning movie star was ready for the challenge. The majority of Reality is a conversation between Sweeney’s Reality Winner and two FBI agents, played by Josh Hamilton (Eighth Grade) and relative newcomer Marchánt Davis. All of the dialogue is taken directly from transcripts of the FBI agents’ recordings made on June 3, 2017, as the feds searched Winner’s house and questioned her over the leaking of documents to The Intercept involving Russia’s interference with the 2016 election. No matter how realistic a film is, real people simply do not talk like movie characters, making this adapted-directly-from-the-recordings experiment a difficult task for the cast. All three nail the assignment, giving the pauses, stumbles, filler words and coughs an eerie, unnerving feeling.
Sick on Peacock
Most depictions of the COVID pandemic on film so far have been cringeworthy at best. But this slasher directed by a straight-to-VOD auteur that was unceremoniously dumped on Peacock actually deals with the subject matter in a fresh and non-eyeroll-inducing way. I’ve long read about the praise for John Hyams and hisUniversal Soldier sequels but had never seen his work. Let me join in the chorus of hosannas — this man is a hell of an action director. The second act of this movie is one gnarly, breathless set piece after another. I’ve rarely seen anything like it in the slasher universe. I’d love to see what Hyams could do with a bigger budget. Screenwriter Kevin Williamson basically apes his Scream script throughout, but since he wrote the ur-text, it’s fine.
