With his most assured film to date, The Hummingbird Project, Canadian filmmaker Kim Nguyen takes a potentially numbing, dull, and inscrutable premise and mines it for a great amount of drama and tension.
Salma Hayek
A passably entertaining bit of late summer fluff, the action comedy The Hitman’s Bodyguard is exactly what you probably think it’s going to be going in: two charismatic actors riffing on each other while dodging bullets, fists, and bombs. A comedy firmly steeped in the traditions set forth by Midnight Run and Lethal Weapon, The Hitman’s Bodyguard doesn’t earn too many points for originality or style, but it achieves every modest goal it sets out to make. If you’re in the mood for an action comedy, this is an action comedy that won’t wow you, but it won’t let you down, either.
Given its timely release, the deadpan, coal black comedy Beatriz at Dinner could easily be read as a trenchant metaphor for American political and social values under the Donald Trump regime, but it really gets to the icy heart of problems that have plagued America for longer than the orange tinted leader of the free world has been in power. The third collaboration between director Miguel Arteta and writer Mike White (following Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl) is a balanced human drama so painfully close to the bone that the only option to avoid crying about the situation at hand is to uncomfortably laugh at it.
This week on DVD and Blu-ray, Matt Damon stars in Steven Soderbergh‘s corporate drama, The Informant!; Cameron Diaz and James Marsden play a troubled couple in the sci-fi film, The Box; plus a look at Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant and Sorority Row.
Photos from the press conference for Frida at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival, featuring Salma Hayek.