Mini-reviews for Reflection in a Dead Diamond, Springsteen: Delivery Me from Nowhere, Predator: Killer of Killers, The Plague, and The Luckiest Man in America

Reflection in a Dead Diamond

• When 70-year-old former spy John Diman notices that the woman next door has gone missing, he scours the surroundings of his hotel home to find her, as his past collides with the present. This over-the-top send up of the EuroSpy subgenre is packed to bursting with style, and I loved the visual appeal of the film from co-directors Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet. Its biggest fault is that the story is virtually nonexistent, an excuse for eye-popping cinematography and excellently choreographed movement that just explodes off the screen, but I needed something in the narrative department to hold this one together. I’d love to see these directors working with a better screenplay, using their very unique visual style to add to an established tale because they struggle a bit too much with keeping this story in place.

2.5/5

Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere

• Look, we kind of all know what we’re getting here. We’ve seen plenty of music biopics in the past to know how this one will play out, and you know what? We’re not wrong. At the same time, I’m going to celebrate Scott Cooper’s focus on male tenderness instead of big, bombastic moments that usually litter most music biopics. I also think it’s smart to focus on a specific time period in the Boss’s life, centering around the creation of Nebraska, one of his most personal and risky albums. It also tiptoes right past one of the most frustrating tropes of songwriter biopics, which is when the artist looks at picture on the wall or thinks back on a single thing they said and immediately come up with the perfect song, one of their big hits, as if no thought or energy went into it at all. There are whole sequences in Delivery Me from Nowhere that show Bruce as he comes up with the music after becoming enamored with the story of Charles Starkweather after catching Badlands on the television, but the process took him time and research and curiosity and it kind of envelopes the entire movie. It’s not easy to put together a song, and the movie shows that. Also, I know Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but he surprised the hell out of me. Sprinsteen: Delivery Me from Nowhere has its traditional energy, but I was impressed by the moments where it diverted from that.

3.5/5

Predator: Killer of Killers

• When Disney bought Fox, we all knew there would be plans for the immense catalog of IP franchises within the studio, but I was most worried about the R-rated franchises. Many assumed that these would lie dormant or become brought down to a more manageable PG-13 rating, but 20th Century Studios has instead thrived under the new ownership, specifically with the Alien and Predator franchises, the latter of which has been completely revitalized due to director Dan Trachtenberg. Killer of Killers is his second Predator film, an animated anthology set in three distinct time periods with three different protagonists and three vastly different cultures, and it’s great. This Into the Spider-Verse-like animation gives each story its own slightly different flavor, and yet, when the narratives tie together into a unified story (as the best anthologies do), Killer of Killers gives us the most well-realized view of the Yautja mindset yet, not only tying the stories of its film together, but serving to connect and recontextualize the larger Predator franchise into a more cohesive world, something not too easy to do, especially given the anthological nature of most entries.

4/5

The Plague

• In the summer of 2003, young Ben is an awkward preteen at a water polo camp, who discovers the horrors and anxiety that come with trying to fit in when the other kids around him target one young child as having “The Plague,” and bully him. Not a feel-good movie in the slightest, The Plague is ruthlessly cruel as it examines the worst parts of adolescence. Everett Blunck is terrific as Ben, and Joel Edgerton gives a terrific supporting performance as Daddy Wags, an instructor at the camp who can only witness so much. It’s an uncomfortable but completely relatable film, as it had me examining that tight line between bully and bullied from my own youth and how difficult it can be to find a middle ground. One scene feature Daddy Wags explaining in simplest detail how Ben should live, but it’s not so simple when you’re in the middle of it. It’s a tough watch that probably runs a bit too long to get its impact, and it does end in an interesting place, but be warned of what you’re getting yourself into.

3.5/5

The Luckiest Man in America

• Oh, give me more movies just like this. Examining the true story of the man who broke Press Your Luck in 1984, Samir Oliveros’s The Luckiest Man in America features another terrific Paul Walter Hauser performance that almost makes me feel bad for anyone in this movie with him. Michael Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver, discovered a secret to winning an infinite amount of money on Press Your Luck, and Hauser’s performance has a gravitational pull to it, where no one else is on screen seemingly, even though the film is littered with solid work all around. The film almost plays out like a hostage situation where the producers all have to find a way to stop the unraveling and destruction of the show as it plays out in real time before them. I’m not sure there’s enough here for 90 minutes, but I was fully invested, and I’d love to see more Game Show behind-the-scenes stories in the future, as I’m sure the decades of controversies since their inception probably carries a bevy of wild tales.

3.5/5

-Kyle A. Goethe