Female Film Critics 24/375
Months after Guillermo del Toro’s retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, here comes The Bride!, a kinetic yet scattershot story reimagining the creature and his beloved as a 1930s couple on the run, a la Bonnie and Clyde. Writer-director Maggie Gyllenhaal has a lot she wants to say in this messy mashup of monsters, mobsters, and even musicals, but it doesn’t all come through loud and clear.
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If you thought we as a society were over trashing big artistic swings by female artists, reaction to writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! will disabuse you of that notion. Though by no means perfect, the new gothic romance centering on and reimagining Frankenstein’s bride is visually stunning, fearlessly kinetic and inventive, and worth celebrating.
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Frankenstein’s monster is lonely. If he’s going to live, he wants to live life to the fullest…in EVERY way…wink, wink. He needs someone who’s like him in mind and body. Abby someone. Abby Normal. Or in this case, Ida, and he wants her to be his (The) Bride! The Bride is a very meta mash up of monsters, mayhem, murder, molls, massive amounts of makeup, meddling men, and the marvelous mind of Maggie Gyllenhaal which all adds up to maniacal movie magic. .
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Two-time Oscar nominee Maggie Gyllenhaal’s long-awaited feature film The Bride, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, arrives in theaters on March 6. The movie is part of the Filmed for IMAX program and will be released in IMAX as well as standard formats. Written and directed by Gyllenhaal, her steampunk take on the 1935 horror classic Bride of Frankenstein is the follow-up to her 2021 Academy Award-nominated Netflix drama The Lost Daughter.
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Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant is an odd title but it serves to differentiate this R-rated, contemporary war actioner from previous horror and/or religious films bearing the same name. It’s also a thematic departure for the British writer/director best known for his glibly gritty, gangster shoot-‘em-ups. Prologue text explains how the U.S. military recruited 50,000 translators/interpreters to assist soldiers on the ground during the 20-year Afghan occupation; in return, the U.S. promised Special Immigrant Visas for them and their families.
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Ambulance is a Michael Bay boilerplate thrill ride throwback to the 1990s that desperately hopes its audience will hang on for the wildly absurd ride. Based on a 2005 Danish film of the same name, Bay’s latest entry into to his explosive filmography is a near two-hour chase scene overstuffed with some quippy one-liners that feel resurrected from the director’s mid-90s action blockbusters The Rock and Bad Boys. Viewers needn’t worry if they forgot about those movies because Chris Fedak’s script will literally remind you they exist with characters referencing and quoting from each of them.
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Jake Gyllenhaal is one of the producers of this remake of the Danish entry as Best Foreign Film of 2018. He gives his character, Joe Baylor, a wide range of hysteria, fright, concern, and frustration. He plays up Nic Pizzolatto’s screenplay, which is more sensational than the original, which felt creepier for being subtler. Still, “The Guilty” is unpredictable, heart-stopping, and, most of all, imaginative.
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Twenty years after his breakthrough film, Training Day, Antoine Fuqua returns to the environs of the Los Angeles Police Department to deliver a very different, more subdued drama. A remake of a 2018 Danish thriller of the same name and shot under COVID protocols, it is a film where interest never flags but one that is hampered by its shaky night-in-the-life-of scenario, delivering a too shallow portrayal of the life of a troubled man.
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“Broken people save broken people.” That’s how Christina Vidal as Sgt Denise Wade explains Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Joe Baylor in Antoine Fuqua’s incredibly tense new film The Guilty. If the movie proves one thing, it’s that nothing is simple, and nothing is what it seems. Here, Fuqua teams up with Gyllenhaal in a pandemic-era story that unfolds in real time, bringing the audience on a gripping 90 minute wild ride, while the cameras stay almost exclusively in one room.
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I endorse the supportive friendship among the three girls, the interracial group of characters, and the condemnation of animal abuse, a positive lesson for all viewers. However, this level of anthropomorphizing animals should have been abandoned long ago.
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