In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

With today’s announcement of the 2016 Independent Spirit Award nominations and now a new official trailer Terrence Malick‘s highly-anticipated Knight Of Cups, you’ll have plenty to talk about over Thanksgiving dinner with the family this year (wait, Malick isn’t a frequent topic around your table?). Our first glimpse of the film came in the form of a rather cryptic trailer ahead of its world premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. And surprise, this new trailer doesn’t offer a whole lot of new information (this is a Malick film after all). Though that doesn’t make us any less excited for the film, which features performances from Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Teresa Palmer, and Natalie Portman.

Knight of Cups opens in theaters on March 4, 2016.

It was 24 years ago that Kathryn Bigelow‘s Point Break helped cement the rise of the future Oscar-winning director (for The Hurt Locker). The film starred a young Keanu Reeves playing it straight and tough after hamming it up for a few years as the time traveling goof Ted Logan and a long-haired Patrick Swayze as the surfer he was born to inhabit. All in all it’s a good crime flick—though today certain things ring a bit ridiculously: Reeves’ character being named Johnny Utah, the whole “we steal so we can surf” motivation–but it wasn’t ever a mega hit. Of course, to Warner Bros. none of that seems to matter. What matters is name recognition. So, later this year the world will get a glossy and very expensive new Point Break.

The remake has at least been updated a bit—hopefully enough to justify the remake. Point Break 2015 finds Johnny Utah (Luke Bracey) infiltrating a team of extreme sports athletes who he suspects of being behind a string of fancy corporate heists (the big changes here being the international setting and that they are no longer just bank robbers).

The film is directed by Ericson Core (Invincible), who also acts as his own cinematographer. Bracey—a mostly untested newcomer, his biggest credit so far being G.I. Joe: Retaliation—is joined by Edgar Ramirez (The Counselor, Deliver Us From Evil) as Bodhi the baddie. Support is given by Teresa Palmer, Ray Winstone, Delroy Lindo.

The big question here is whether anyone cares. It’s been a while since anyone has taken Point Break seriously, and this one looks to be pretty self-serious and unaware. Either way, we’ll try to stay optimistic—it’s always nice to be surprised. Point Break surfs into theaters Christmas day. Check out the first trailer below.

Kriv Stenders’ Kill Me Three Times, isn’t just a movie, it’s a state of mind. By which I mean, in watching the film one rather starts to hope not once but at least three times, that either the film or the viewer will be allowed the release of death. Ok, I’m being melodramatic. But Kill Me Three Times is melocomedic, so I think I’m justified. Stenders claims in his press notes to have wanted to create a popcorn film, and his hitman comedy of errors starts out on the right track, intriguingly telling its story backwards, but its inside-out layers quickly spiral out of control in a bloody frenzy that will cause most viewers to leave any appetite for popcorn on the floor of the theater.

Starting at the end, Simon Pegg (who must have owed someone a favor in between Mission: Impossible and Star Trek films) is hitman Charlie Wolfe, and he’s in rather a pickle. A rare scenario we come to see for this ruthless and self-assured criminal, who we see adeptly taking out a dude as he backtracks how he came to be in his current bind. Charlie starts following a woman, Alice (Alice Braga), who is clearly his next target. But before he can carry out the job, she makes a stop at the office of dentist Nathan (Sullivan Stapleton) and his wife Lucy (Teresa Palmer). Charlie watches as Nathan and Lucy surprisingly knock out Alice and put her in the trunk of their car. As Charlie follows he watches as the amateur husband and wife team enact a scheme to collect life insurance on Lucy by mixing up their dental records, putting the unconscious Alice in the driver’s seat of Lucy’s car before setting it on fire, and sending it off a cliff. Charlie leaves, satisfied his job was just done for him, but in the next segment we flash further back to learn the motivations behind Charlie’s hiring by Alice’s abusive husband—who rightly suspects her of cheating with gas station attendant Dylan (Luke Hemsworth)—and the financial troubles that have led to Lucy and Nathan’s fumbled murderous plans.

When the film goes in for its third, and most convoluted, layer of the story it starts to arc back to the present and just how out of control everyone’s master plans go. In this sort of film a certain level of double-crossing is a given, and yes it can be funny when the double-crossing borders on the ridiculous, but the levels of treachery revealed in the last 15 or so minutes of the film aren’t at all driven by plot and appear to be thrown in for the sake of blood and gore. It’s one thing to be Quentin Tarantino and start off a film at gore levels around 8, quickly elevating to 10 to show he means business, and then escalating to levels around 15 to prove he’s discovered blood-thresholds you didn’t know possible. But starting and maintaining about a 2 and then suddenly erupting into an 8 is just confusing, and like I said earlier, a real appetite suppressant.

Pegg does his best to keep the comedy playful, though Charlie is written like most cocksure hitman, and rather plays into expectations with his bravado and hardness. He’s clearly the most underutilized asset the film has and it’s a tragedy watching him adhere to a script hardly worth his notice. Nathan and Lucy’s storyline is the easiest to laugh at as the mismatched couple fight over their ambitious plan to make some quick money, but their mutual animosity rather ensures their destruction, so there’s no real surprises in their storyline. Braga is the most compelling to watch, fighting for her life and seeking revenge. Hemsworth’s role is minimal, but like all the Hemsworth men, whether by muscle or emotion, makes his presence known. If there is a star of the film it ends up being the Australian coastline, present in almost every scene and rather distracting in how much more appealing it is to everything else happening. And while the bright and airy atmosphere may have played off interestingly against a black comedy, this comedy isn’t nearly dark enough to contrast.

With its layered backwards style, the film moves along at a rather stop-and-go pace; like a student driver using a little too much gas and a little too much pressure on the break. But instead of whiplash, the more likely result of Kill Me Three Times is a general sense of nausea and a lingering feeling that Stenders missed an exit somewhere along the line.

Director Matt Shakman has worked a lot in television, most recently on FX’s television adaptation of the Coen brothers’ film Fargo, which is no surprise when watching his first foray into filmmaking, Cut Bank. Walking the line between thriller and dark comedy, the film boasts an all-star cast who can’t completely make-up for some misdirection and whose side characters completely outshine the film’s star, Liam Hemsworth.

Literally using the words “if I have to stay another day in this town,” discontented Dwayne (Hemsworth) dreams of a life outside Cut Bank, Montana (the “coldest spot in the nation”) with his girlfriend Cassandra (Teresa Palmer). One evening, when filming an amateur tourist video with Cassandra in a field outside of town, Dwayne accidentally captures the murder of a postal worker, Georgie Wits (Bruce Dern), on camera. Immediately taking the video to Cassandra’s father, and Dwayne’s boss, Mr. Steeley (Billy Bob Thornton) calmly calls in Sheriff Vogel (John Malkovich) to determine what to do next. The weak-stomached Sheriff starts his investigation as Dwayne looks into the huge reward he is apparently eligible for now that he’s provided information on the untimely death of a U.S. postal worker. Twists abound and are revealed in turn as we discover that not all participants in this crime are as innocent, or dead, as they first appeared. Turns out that providing the mailman’s dead body to a U.S. postal investigator (Oliver Platt) is the least of these small-time crooks’ worries as they unforeseeably piss off local recluse Derby Milton (Michael Stuhlbarg), who was expecting a package from the mailman that he’s bound and determined to track down.

Cut Bank clearly strives for the same dark comedic energy that Fargo has in abundance, but its inability to balance its dark situations with its humorous characters makes it hard to comfortably enjoy. The plot is fantastic, its actors equally so, but they are too reined in, with not enough vitality to engage. John Malkovich is especially unbelievable, his timid Sheriff played with too much subtlety. In fact, the only actors allowed to effectively shine are Oliver Platt’s fast-talking suit-wearing Inspector Barrett, Dern’s sassy “dead” man, and Stuhlbarg’s stuttering and intriguingly-motivated murderous outsider. Hemsworth just isn’t able to build sympathy, and Palmer is incredibly abused as the only character who is actually as shallow as she appears.

A sharply written script by Robert Patino, featured on 2009’s Black List, where all the elements exist but just aren’t quite fully realized. Seeing James Newton Howard’s name in the end’s musical credits was surprising as the muted music of the film did nothing to heighten tension or encourage the edge it’s sorely lacking in. While Fargo takes advantage of its snowy location, allowing it to serve as an instrumental element of the film’s themes and mood, the bleakness of Cut Bank is never explored, nor the wide expanses or back woods of Montana. Cut Bank is a mimicry of better films, which begs the question that if put into the hands of a more capable filmmaker, could it have lived up to the script’s potential?

A version of this review was first published in our 2014 Los Angeles Film Festival coverage. Cut Bank is out in limited release Friday, April 3.

Watch the new trailer for the Liam Hemsworth-helmed film Cut Bank, directed by TV director Matt Shakman. The film involves a cast of characters in the tiny rural town of Cut Bank, Montana, known for its cold winters, the central lead being Hemsworth’s Dwayne, a young man sick of his surroundings and desperate for escape. His lucky break comes in the form of the murder of local postman Georgie (Bruce Dern), which Dwayne happens to catch on his handheld camera. The reward for information around the death of a postal worker? $100,000 dollars.

But Dwayne’s big break may have nothing to do with luck. In the meantime the sheriff, played with uncharacteristic meekness by John Malkovich, is on the hunt for a murderer and a motive, while a local recluse enacts his own violent search for a parcel carried by the “murdered” postal worker.

With Oliver Platt, Billy Bob Thornton, Teresa Palmer and Michael Stuhlbarg rounding out the rest of the star-filled cast, the first trailer reveals a very Coen-like noir feel. The trailer plays up the dramatic over the quirky that we recall when we caught the film at the LA Film Festival, but definitely manages to pique just the right amount of interest.

Read our Los Angeles Film Festival coverage of Cut Bank and look for it on DirecTV on February 26 and in theaters April 3.

Shortly after the announcement that Knight of Cups would have its World Premiere in competition at the upcoming Berlin Film Festival, the latest project written and directed by Terrence Malick has followed up with a first-look trailer. Full of strangely framed shots from renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (who last worked with Malick on The Tree of Life, make sure to watch our video essay on the Screen Poetry of Terrence Malick), several of them upside down, the Knights of Cup trailer gives brief glimpses at the infidelity and celebrity status that the film might ultimately be about.

Starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman, the well-known cast extends well beyond its three leads including names like Brian Dennehy, Antonio Banderas, Freida Pinto, Wes Bentley, Isabel Lucas, Teresa Palmer, Imogen Poots, Armin Mueller-Stahl, the voice of Ben Kingsley and others who may or may not survive the final edit. Knight of Cups’ official synopsis is about as cryptic as the trailer:

Once there was a young prince whose father, the king of the East, sent him down into Egypt to find a pearl. But when the prince arrived, the people poured him a cup. Drinking it, he forgot he was the son of a king, forgot about the pearl and fell into a deep sleep.

Rick’s (Christian Bale) father used to read this story to him as a boy.

The road to the East stretches out before him. Will he set forth?

The Knight of Cups trailer is available online through FilmNation, watch it below:

Writer turned director Mark Webber is only 34 years old, his wife of a few months, Teresa Palmer, is 28. Incredibly young and newlywed for the level of drama they face in Webber’s latest directorial endeavor which involves him playing a photographer, Thomas, and Palmer playing his young actress wife, Ava. Blurring reality’s lines further Ava takes credit for Palmer’s real life films, and the fictional couple have a daughter, albeit older than the baby Webber and Palmer just had together in February. The realistic parallels make one wonder why on earth Webber and Palmer would want to imagine a false future for themselves as bleak as the one they paint in The Ever After. The film follows the young married couple as they face an early marriage slump, doubting each other’s feelings and trading sex for real conversations. The restless Thomas heads off to New York for a photography gig where he walks further down the path of infidelity only to find himself paying an intensely high price for his mistakes. Back in LA, Ava meets a hippy woman (Melissa Leo) who invites her to stitch and bitch in her storefront and starts to force her to address some of her issues, though the inner analysis ends up revealing a deeper problem than just a lukewarm marriage.

Perhaps Webber and Palmer were thirsty for challenging roles and decided the best way to do it would be to write their own. And indeed they’ve given themselves the sort of complicated content even older actors would shy away from. Palmer has an enthralling and expressive face, with exacting control of her emotions. In any given scene she fluctuates between five different moods and has mastered her tear ducts into working overtime for her. She’s inspiring to watch. Webber is equally masterful, having written for himself some truly gritty and horrifying content, and while it’s questionable why he felt it necessary to go quite so far it shows courage and commitment to his craft. I hope (for their sakes) the parallels between Thomas and Ava and Webber and Palmer is mostly confined to their reflections on the narcissism of their industries. The dark picture Webber has painted, while stirring and both beautifully felt and heard (Moby and Daniel Ahearn have put together a great soundtrack), makes for a sometimes difficult watch. The ending is a bit simplistic, boiling down all that heavy content into an easier to swallow broth so no one leaves the theater with suicidal thoughts. The film is sure to evoke mixed impressions, but one that carries across firmly is that this is a film made by immensely talented people.

With its global distribution earlier this year, Warm Bodies seemed to be just another one of Hollywood’s pumped out blockbusters, and I myself skipped it at the cinemas due to this exact reason – “it was just another cliché teenage zombie film, nothing out of the ordinary” and in most places it was. However, what I enjoyed most about this modern take on an “end of the world” narrative is that it rejected the norm for the most part and found itself changing the ending to a zombies ‘life’ by flipping the bird to death.

After the apocalypse many of the zombies that took over a city are shown to congregate mostly at a nearby airport where they spend their days wandering around aimlessly, much like the typical lifeless un-dead…but then we meet, R, (Nicholas Hoult) a zombie with a conscious mind that is almost intact. R finds himself trying to remember what it felt like to be alive and to try and figure out who he was before he turned. Warm Bodies ends up being a story through a zombie’s perspective – a seemingly different and refreshing angle than most apocalyptic storylines.

We’re introduced to Julie (Teresa Palmer) who finds herself trapped and surrounded by zombies whilst on the hunt for survival gear with the rest of her team. R, stops eating part of a brain and realises Julie’s beauty, and feels an incredible rush of ‘aliveness’. He then makes it his priority (the best he can; being a zombie, covered in blood and looking dead) to show Julie he will protect her and that she should follow him to avoid being eaten, without any other alternative Julie agrees.

Their relationship strengthens as the scenes unfold. Julie attempts to escape multiple times but is always rescued by R. Because of this she leans into the idea that this strange, confusing zombie is different from the others she has encountered, and begins to feel safe around him. On the flip side, R becomes increasingly more aware of his feelings and can feel the infection beginning to leave his body. This realisation also affects the other zombies at the airport and unfortunately puts them all in grave danger as zombies are not the only dangerous predator that have risen from the dead. In an effort to show humankind that they are beginning to get better, the zombies join teams with the humans in their ultimate fight for survival.

Towards the end of Warm Bodies the audience can somewhat guess how the final few scenes will play out, as the Hollywood undertone kicks in. Nevertheless, you are not left feeling let down or that the film has led you to an anticlimactic ending. What you feel is actually a little more optimism about what could happen if the world was to someday become what today’s sources of entertainment seem to be preparing the world for; a zombie apocalyptic future. Teaching zombies to love and to feel alive again may just save us all!

Kieran Darcy-Smith makes his feature film debut with his Australian indie drama Wish You Were Here, which first premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film’s non-linear narrative style is slow to reveal itself of the mysteries behind it almost to a fault. There are some intriguing pieces of the story but the film allows too much time to pass for how little of an impact the final punch was. Having said that, Wish You Were Here is one of the most beautifully shot indie films of the year. Darcy-Smith show promise and is a director that you may want to remember in the future.

The film begins as a group of two couples are enjoying themselves for a week in Cambodia during a holiday stay. We see them living it up on the beaches and marvel the local food customs but most of all, we see them dancing and partying. While at a dance club we see them heavily drinking, smoking and consuming illegal drugs. It is not until later when they return back home that all the problems are exposed.

You can see it in the emotions of husband and wife Alice (Felicity Price) and Dave (Joel Edgerton) Flannery upon their return. The original idea for even going on the trip was to get away from their busy lifestyle ahead of their expected third child but they came back with more stress than they left with. One of the friends they went on vacation with went missing on their last day there and never made it back. This is only the beginning of what went wrong on the vacation. There is a strong sense that there is more going on than what they are letting on.

To add more fuel to the fire, Dave has a secret that he has not told his wife about yet. When his wife does find out, it has the potential to rupture their relationship. As you may expect, all of these conundrums are connected with one another as it ultimately becomes much more than just a missing person case. The film takes it’s time to bring out into the open what really went on during that holiday getaway.

Wish You Were Here is simply gorgeous to look at. From the very opening sequence to the final act, the film does a great job of utilizing cinematography. Shot from postcard worthy locations around Cambodia and Sydney, the beauty from these places serve as a sharp contrast to the unsettling story that unfolds.

Wish You Were Here takes an interesting and yet simple plot and overextends itself with too many underdeveloped subplots. These subplots get in the way for the main plot to as effective as it could have been. This leads to an ending that is not predictable but is so underwhelming that what you thought might happen ends up being more interesting than what actually does. Wish You Were Here had all the right elements but did not have the execution down.