Movie Review: After The Hunt (2025)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Luca Guadagnino  

Starring: Julia Roberts, Ayo Edibiri, Andrew Garfield, Michael Stuhlbarg, Chloe Sevigny  

Running Time: 139 minutes  

Synopsis: Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) is a well-respected philosophy professor at Yale University. Married to Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg), she is in a friendly competition with fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) to secure a tenured position, and their relationship is at least flirtatious. Black post-graduate student Maggie (Ayo Edibiri) is the daughter of important donors, and harbours a crush on Alma. When Maggie reveals that Hank sexually assaulted her, careers are threatened, generational fissures are exposed, and long-held secrets re-emerge.

What Works Well: This drama dives into the deep end of the campus cesspool, where multiple culture clashes encompass the generational divide, racial tension, sexual misconduct, faculty rivalries, and plagiarism. The overlapping crises disrupt a pretention-packed intellectual salon, and Julia Roberts allows Alma to navigate an uncharted path with a mixture of courage, fumbles, and outspokenness.

What Does Not Work As Well: The intentionally dark and muddy visual aesthetic reflects moral murkiness, but is nevertheless suffocating. Within an already odious liberal arts academic milieu, misguided self-obsession combines with false entitlement to classify all the characters as insufferable. The music score is gimmicky, the running time 30 minutes too long, and even within the frame of no easy answers, plenty of loose plot ends are left hanging.

Key Quote:

Maggie: I don't feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.

Alma: Not everything is supposed to make you comfortable, Maggie. 

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Movie Review: Shattered Glass (2003)

A biographical drama, Shattered Glass explores the high-stress world of deadline-driven journalism and the perils of hyper-charisma.

It's 1998 in Washington DC, and Stephen Glass (Hayden Christensen) is a cocky young reporter at the prestigious New Republic magazine. He is an invited celebrity guest at a college journalism class, advising starry-eyed students on career success. Affable and good natured, Stephen is popular among his work colleagues, including fact checkers Caitlin (Chloë Sevigny) and Amy (Melanie Lynskey), and well-liked by respected editor Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria).

But Glass has a tense relationship with Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), who takes over as editor when Kelly is fired. Glass then writes an entertaining piece about the antics of a young hacker at a recent convention. Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn), a reporter at fledgling online publication Forbes Digital, wonders how he missed the event and starts fact checking, finding many holes in Glass' story. The errors are brought to Lane's attention, who initiates his own probing and starts to doubt Stephen's credibility.

The unveiling of Stephen Glass as a fraudster with a flair for writing fiction and passing it off as journalism shook the haughty world of the esteemed but small-circulation New Republic (established: 1914), a photo-free publication targeting world leaders and fully invested in the power of truthful words. His downfall was also an early reputational boost for start-up online publications, and exposed the hazards of relying on easily fabricated "reporter's notes" for fact checking. 

With misinformation at the core of the Glass controversy, director and writer Billy Ray meticulously researched the facts and assembled Shattered Glass as a close-to-the-truth drama, with fairness to actual people a prime objective. Ray resists the temptation to delve into Glass' childhood and upbringing in search of character-shaping clues. While the context is notably absent, the young man is presented as others saw him, a charming, full of life, natural storyteller and entertainer garnering immediate likeability. He is also an expert at self-deprecation and cleverly positions himself as a victim when needed to elicit sympathy and support.

The film gains strength from the contrast with Charles Lane. Dour, humourless and saddled with taking over as editor from the popular Michael Kelly, the relatively inexperienced Lane finds a potentially explosive controversy ticking in his lap when the Forbes Digital journalists start asking questions Glass cannot answer. Gradually Lane takes over the heart of the film and Ray deftly steers the narrative towards a reluctant and unpopular leader grappling with a toxic crisis.

Hayden Christensen is adequate in the showy lead role but stays close to the few notes between seeking the centre of attention and whining when challenged. Peter Sarsgaard is more stoic, his performance appropriately subdued but with gathering strength behind watchful eyes.

Within the remarkably efficient 94 minutes Ray creates an energetic milieu, the timeline-driven vigorous magazine culture providing a crackling, always-on-the-move dynamism. Despite the high pressure job Glass also insists on pursuing a law degree, the burn-both-ends-of-the-candle mentality either an excuse for sloppiness or a corroboration of recklessness. Unchecked and misdirected, the zest of youth can upend legacies.

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Movie Review: Beatriz At Dinner (2017)

A social drama, Beatriz At Dinner sets up interesting conversational pieces but leaves them dangling.

In Los Angeles, Beatriz (Salma Hayek) is a natural healer and massage therapist, working at a cancer treatment clinic. She is depressed because her pet goat was recently killed by a neighbour. One afternoon Beatriz drive to the swanky home of her client Kathy (Connie Britton) to provide a massage ahead of Kathy's small dinner party. Beatriz's car fails to restart and she is invited to stay for dinner, where the guest of honour is business tycoon Doug Strutt (John Lithgow). 

Beatriz and Doug immediately clash. He looks down on her immigrant roots, and she senses that he is a heartless developer with little regard for the wellbeing of the communities where he builds his hotels and shopping centres. When Beatriz learns that Doug also enjoys big-game hunting she snaps, and the evening takes a turn towards open hostility.

Directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White, Beatriz At Dinner fearlessly takes a seat at the table where societal divisions are laid bare. The front lines where tensions simmer between poor and rich, Hispanics and whites, recent immigrants and less recent colonialists, animal loving vegetarians and animal killing meat eaters, spiritualists and capitalists are all represented by Beatriz's reluctant invasion of Kathy's party. Doug embodies the source of all the ills Beatriz struggles daily to heal, and this is one dinner party where she will call out her demons, pleasantries be damned.

Despite an intense Salma Hayek performance and a suitably smug turn by John Lithgow, the film stalls once it makes its points. Arteta and White struggle to steer the film towards a satisfying ending, and indeed they try a few different iterations on for size. Eventually Beatriz At Dinner settles for abstract visuals and pretty pictures of floating lanterns and water, where meaning is imagined rather than conveyed.

The brief 83 minutes of running time betray an inability to flesh out any of the supporting characters, with Connie Britton, Chloë Sevigny, Jay Duplass, Amy Landecker and David Warshofsky sacrificed to make up the numbers and confined to the shallowest of backgrounds.

Beatriz At Dinner serves up a few deliciously awkward moments of social tension, but the desert is no more than mediocre.

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Movie Review: Love And Friendship (2016)

An adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Lady Susan, Love And Friendship rattles off long passages of dialogue in a series of confined settings as the protagonist tries to steer her life towards comfortable money. The film is static, stagey and unconvincing.

England, in the 1790s. Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale) is widowed and penniless. She is also conniving and desperate to find monied husbands for herself and her daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark). Susan, whose one friend is transplanted American Alicia Johnson (Chloë Sevigny), sets about winning the heart of her sister-in-law's younger brother Reginald DeCourcy (Xavier Samuel), while trying to convince Frederica to accept the wedding proposal of the rich but stupid Sir James Martin (Tom Bennett). The real prize, however, is the wealthy and powerful Mr. Manwaring, but he is already married to the increasingly frantic Lucy (Jenn Murray).

Directed and written by Whit Stillman, Love And Friendship gets bogged down with too many stuffy characters who have little to do except be victimized by Lady Susan's sharp wit. The film's comedy stems from the inherent, and sometimes explicit, stupidity of everyone except Susan, and once the pattern is set, the film sinks into a predictable downward spiral of Susan moving the chess pieces to checkmate all around her.

Some of the dialogue exchanges are witty, there are a few laughs, the costumes and hairstyles are lavish and Beckinsale radiates confidence. But the material is extremely thin, the various settings in London and the countryside estates are excuses to continue the same conversations within different indoor sets, and too often the scenes resemble readings of Austen's prose rather than acting. The film fundamentally fails to shift from a clever book to an engaging visual experience.

When it comes to Lady Susan, Love And Friendship are irrelevant; instead, her world is all about convenience and manipulation, and unfortunately her gamesmanship is also a crushing bore.

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Movie Review: Boys Don't Cry (1999)

A harrowing film recounting the events leading up to the 1993 murder of Brandon Teena, a Nebraska transgendered man, Boys Don't Cry is an unblinking story of personal struggle, love, and society's inability to deal with what is different.

In Lincoln, Nebraska, Brandon (Hilary Swank) is a young man trapped in a woman's body. A petty criminal with a chequered record and an inability to hold down a job, Brandon has transformed his outward physical appearance into a man and is trying to save money for a sex change operation, but the goal seems out of reach. He travels to the rural Falls City region, and makes friends with a group of four locals: John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard), Tom Nissen (Brendan Sexton III), Candace (Alicia Goranson) and Lana (Chloë Sevigny). They are all drifting sideways in a life dominated by poverty and alcohol, and remain unaware that Brandon is a trans man.

John, Tom and Candace welcome Brandon into their lives and families, while Brandon and Lana develop a mutual attraction that progresses to physical intimacy. Brandon has hopes of moving to a better life in Memphis, while Lana dreams of a career as a barroom karaoke singer. John and Tom have violent tendencies and intermittent scrapes with the law. When Brandon again falls foul of the authorities, his struggles with sexual identity are revealed, with tragic consequences.

An independent production directed by Kimberly Peirce at a cost of $2 million, Boys Don't Cry cuts to the core. This is a remarkably tragic love story that addresses the human spirit outside the confines of the human body, and find the emotions of longing, love and hate transcending gender. Social norms force Brandon into a life that is misconstrued as deceitful, and social conditioning tips John Lotter and Tom Nissen into a pre-wired response of drunken brutality because their world was not designed to accommodate an outlier. Rarely has a film stared so uncomfortably at the failings of the human condition.

Peirce jumps in at the deep end of the pool and creates an unrelenting experience. Boys Don't Cry reveals a forgotten and depressing rural America ruled by the tyranny of poverty, alcohol, crime, a lack of education and dead-end jobs. In a grim exercise of communal calculus, life for Brandon would be tough anywhere. In the rural hinterlands, how Brandon presents himself is literally a matter of life and death, and the moments of tender affection between Brandon and Lana stand out like a unique river of purity running through a toxic wasteland.

But the other side of genuine desperation is unintended deception. Brandon just wants to fit in, carve a place in life, pursue a dream, make friends and fall in love. That he has the body of a woman is an embarrassing inconvenience that he has to cover up and circumvent. And if Brandon can overcome his own body's incongruity with his self, he expects others who love him to be able to as well. His struggle for acceptance is wrongly perceived as a massive betrayal, leading to horrific violence.

Relatively unknown at the time of the film's release, Hilary Swank delivers a seminal performance as Brandon Teena. Swank won the first of her Best Actress Academy Awards for embodying the heart and soul of a tentative man. She nails the mannerisms and attitude of vulnerable uncertainty, with the smiles and gestures of a man perilously close to the edge but trying hard all the time to be one of the guys.

Chloë Sevigny is also excellent as Lana, the intended lover and unintended emotional victim. The film takes liberties with Lana's actions late in the drama, but Sevigny nevertheless portrays her as the sensitive and yet shining beacon of hope. Even when surrounded by hate and ignorance, Lana fights for love and tolerance, in a demonstration not of what society is, but what we it can be. Boys Don't Cry is painful, and painfully essential.

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Movie Review: American Psycho (2000)

An edgy societal satire, American Psycho takes a cold look at the destructive impacts of an insular culture dominated by avarice and egotism. Laced with cynicism and sly humour, the film creates a surreal world where twisted extremes are the jaded normal in damaged minds.

It's the late 1980s in Manhattan, and the me decade has transformed a generation of young men into soulless, greedy, narcissistic and shallow coke-snorting machines. Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale) is an investment banker at a mergers and acquisitions firm, one of many vice presidents interchangeable to the point that their own superiors cannot tell them apart. The VPs compete with each other by boasting about the most arcane details of their business cards.

Patrick lives in a spotless apartment, hangs out at the trendiest restaurants and clubs, goes out with his fiancee Evelyn (Reese Witherspoon), and murders people for sport. He has slipped from detached to purely psychotic, killing for the thrill because nothing else excites him. His victims include a homeless man and a conceited banker called Paul Allen (Jared Leto). Detective Donald Kimball (Willem Dafoe) starts to investigate the Allen murder and suspects Patrick of hiding something. Meanwhile, Patrick enjoys a threesome with two prostitutes before turning violent and bruising them both. His assistant Jean (Chloë Sevigny) knows nothing of Patrick's violent tendencies and seems to have a crush on him; he takes her out on a date, and her life hangs in the balance. With Kimball closing in, Patrick's carefully protected secret life threatens to break into the open and out of control.

American Psycho shocks with its detached violence and sex, human emotions truncated to nothingness within the cold soul of a man reduced to the equivalent of roboticism. When Patrick is engaged in sex he is focussed only on admiring his own image in the mirror, and he sets the mood for murder by boasting about his music knowledge, relaying canned commentary about the likes of Huey Lewis and the News and Peter Gabriel. In short Patrick cares for nothing and no one, but is fully obsessed with himself. It's a chilling vision of psychosis, and the frostiness permeates every aspect of the film.

Director Mary Harron creates a sanitized aesthetic where the men look alike, sound the same, dress in the similar clothes and are generally indistinguishable from each other. It's an environment where everyone is rich and there are no individuals. Patrick's quest to carve out an identity and find genuine feelings leads him to the darkest corners of his damaged brain, where threesomes with prostitutes and the casual murder of the poor and the rich, men and women, acquaintances and strangers are the only remaining acts that promise satisfaction.

American Psycho benefits from the cool vibe of the pervasive aloofness and also suffers from it. When nothing matters to Patrick or his colleagues, it's difficult to care for any of them, whether through irony or genuine empathy. Harron and her co-writer Guinevere Turner also leave large voids where Patrick's work resides. A highly-paid vice president must do something worthwhile other than ogle his assistant for a living; the film misses the opportunity to colour in the soul-sucking world where deals are plenty, the money flows and it all means nothing.

Christian Bale delivers a forceful performance, alternating between laid back and murderous, the dichotomy of tidy relaxation and bloody violence creating the chasm sucking Patrick's life into the abyss. The supporting cast members are adequate but not memorable, Willem Dafoe particularly suffering from an underwritten role.

American Psycho delivers its message of lost souls seeking solace in serpentine surroundings with frigid efficiency. The emotionless brutality is effective, but also creates a film that can be admired from afar but hardly embraced.

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Movie Review: The Last Days Of Disco (1998)

A confused look back at the New York club scene in the dying days of disco music, The Last Days Of Disco is an attempt at glossy art that is patchy at best, inhabited by self-indulgent characters keen to demonstrate a faux intellectualism while partying and snorting themselves to waste.

The thin story line centres around Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale), two lowly book readers trying to get a promotion to Associate Editors at a New York publishing house. Alice and Charlotte are not exactly friends, and in fact Charlotte dominates an asymmetrical relationship, but they move into an apartment together. They have fun by regularly going to a disco and hanging out with colleagues and friends from college days.

The men in the movie are plenty, and with quantity comprehensively trumping quality they are utterly lacking in presence and charisma. Des is a womanizer with a healthy drug habit who pretends to be gay when he wants to dump girlfriends. Jimmy is in marketing and is not welcome at the club but always anyway finds a way to gain entry. Tom is a lawyer who has a one night stand with Alice and infects her with sexually transmitted diseases (plural). Josh is with the District Attorney's office, a manic depressive on assignment with a unit investigating tax evasion at the club. Dan is a co-worker with Alice and Charlotte, critical of their lifestyle but nevertheless spending an unhealthy amount of time with them. Bernie is the uncompromising owner of the club. Van works at the club mostly doing Bernie's dirty work. None of them establish any momentum as characters that we could care less about.

Writer and director Whit Stillman is celebrated in some circles, but the The Last Days Of Disco is as interesting as watching a disco ball. Captivating for a few minutes, the experience quickly becomes repetitive, rotational and yes, childish. All that needs to be said about the film's attempt at appearing cerebral is that one of the main conversations centres around the motivations of the characters in Disney's Lady And The Tramp. The Last Days Of Disco is the worst kind of vapid: boredom that is not self-aware.

The film is full of supposedly educated male characters obsessed with entering the right clubs, engaging in tax evasion, snorting coke and passing on sexually transmitted diseases. Yes, the disco era may have been all about that for those sucked into the lifestyle, but The Last Days Of Disco's attempt to cloak the culture with wordy discourse is either failed irony or just a plain fail. It's better, if more painful, to face the facts that chasing the good times on the disco floor on a nightly basis and snorting white powder were somewhat incompatible with the basic intelligence required to achieve success.

Despite the poor material, the two female leads shine, and along with the soundtrack of non-stop disco standards almost succeed in making the movie watchable. Chloe Sevigny acts with head tilts, eye angles and a sceptical mouth; her Alice is unconventionally attractive as an insecure wannabe book editor, easily influenced by her friends. Kate Beckinsale as Charlotte is more familiar and more bewitching as a self-confident, overbearing source of unsolicited advice delivered with utter coquettishness, quick to victimize Alice with a pile of amateur psychoanalysis designed to trample Alice's self-esteem and inflate Charlotte's insatiable ego. The relationship between Alice and Charlotte never seems real, but is nevertheless fascinating to watch as pure theatre.

The clothes, haircuts and volume of noise in the The Last Days Of Disco all seem suspiciously understated. The characters' appearances seem ironically stuck in the corporate world of the late 1990s, when the film was made, rather than the very early 1980s club scene. The conversations in the clubs take place in relaxed tones: in reality, no club worth the name played music at any volume except deafening, requiring conversations to be either shouted at close range or otherwise abandoned out of sheer exasperation.

The Last Days Of Disco ultimately achieves it's objective, although unintentionally: it is as lost as the culture it depicts.

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