212 Movies Like Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) (Page 13)

Yu Katayama lives in a remote village with a garbage disposal business that's slowly turning into a landfill. When his childhood friend Misaki Nakai returns to the village, she encourages Yu to make a better life for himself despite his mother's gambling and the village ostracizing him. The Village is a slow-burning film interested in Yu's struggles as an outcast and in discussing the takeover of small villages for capitalistic industrial motives. The film is shot beautifully with dark, brooding visuals and lingering shots of Yu's quiet intensity throughout the film. Unfortunately, secondary characters are not fully developed outside of their interactions with Yu, causing the film to feel flat outside of pivotal moments. An evocative idea with parts more memorable than the whole.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Arata Furuta, Daiken Okudaira, Hana Kino, Haru Kuroki, Naomi Nishida, Ryusei Yokohama, Ryūto Sakuma, Sakuma Ryuto, Shidô Nakamura, Tetta Sugimoto, Wataru Ichinose

Director: Michihito Fujii

Rating: R, TV-MA

Loss can be straightforwardly heartwrenching, but it could also be bewildering, cryptic, and too sudden to even process. New Religion depicts a grieving mother, whose loss of her daughter, and her meet up with an eccentric photographer, causes her to behave strangely. The film goes through the events in a surreal, existential haze, with a skin-crawling scene that reveals the photographer’s nefarious reasons, but the sequences remain inscrutable and the themes and certain characters don’t mesh as well as they could have. New Religion might befuddle viewers just looking for a casual watch, but it’s definitely a thought provoking and promising debut from Keishi Kondo.

Genre: Drama, Horror

Actor: Daiki Nunami, Kaho Seto, Ryuseigun Saionji, Satoshi Oka, Yuki Nagata

Director: Keishi Kondo

The atmosphere communicated within the title Hurricane Season comes off incredibly clearly on screen: this is a film that just feels humid and full of foreboding for a coming storm, with people feeling all manner of guilt while secluded in their own homes. Cinematographer María Secco's gorgeous colors and brown tones fill the 4:3 aspect ratio nicely, and director Elisa Miller lets events unfold with the stately pace of a long novel. There's something fascinating here about how each new "chapter" or perspective doesn't really lead to more answers, but simply to more anguish closing in from all sides.

So it would be understandable if some may be put off by how unrelentingly dark Hurricane Season is, especially as the trans woman whose death becomes the central event never enjoys the kind of characterization everybody around her gets. Apart from how the film illustrates that discrimination against women, against repressed "taboo" sexuality, and against access to proper reproductive health only threatens to grow under poverty, it can be difficult to grasp what point the movie is trying to make. Social realism certainly has its place in cinema, but the different perspective in this particular film still don't add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller

Actor: Andrés Cordaz, Edgar Treviño, Flor Eduarda Gurrola, Guss Morales, Kat Rigoni, Mónica Martínez​, Norma Reyna, Paloma Alvamar, Rodrigo Corea, Said Sandoval

Director: Elisa Miller

Rating: R

What seems like The Good Mother's biggest asset is actually its downfall. Yes, the three main actors (Swank, Cooke, and Jack Reynor as the civil servant son, Toby) are all good at what they do, but they're incapable of resuscitating a script that's never truly come to life. These casting choices, obviously made to give some clout to a very mediocre project, feel even more disappointing because the disconnect between actor and character is way too big. For example, Swank is not the alcoholic, fed-up mother we need her to be in this case, and its hard to see this as something else than a derogatory take on her previous more tender and glam roles. Director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte's Sundance-winning As You Are carried a whiff of fresh air, The Good Mother is drained out of all its energy, avoiding reflective depth at all costs, not to mention skirting around the ambivalences of motherhood. 

Genre: Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Cliff Ware, Dilone, Frank Alfano, Hilary Swank, Hopper Penn, Jack Reynor, Karen Aldridge, Larry Fessenden, Laurent Rejto, Norm Lewis, Olivia Cooke

Director: Miles Joris-Peyrafitte

Rating: R

Painfully intimate and told with very, very little dialogue, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt resembles the experience of flipping through a photo book and pausing to admire every page. Which is to say that this is a film that requires not only one's complete attention but—like many other arthouse dramas—a willingness to sit with the mundane until it reveals something more profound. The nearly silent nature of its storytelling can be a little awkward, given how lifelike the rest of the movie is, but one should hopefully get used to the idea that this is an attempt to represent something closer to memory than reality. Whether or not the experience sticks or strikes an emotional chord, it's all beautifully put together, with lush cinematography, impeccably detailed sound design, and thoughtful sequencing of one image after another.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Charleen McClure, Chris Chalk, Kaylee Nicole Johnson, Moses Ingram, Reginald Helms Jr., Sheila Atim, Zainab Jah

Director: Raven Jackson

Rating: PG

Genre: Action, Comedy, Crime

Actor: Alfred Molina, André De Shields, Billy Smith, Casey Affleck, David Gborie, Don DiPetta, Hong Chau, Jack Harlow, Jason Furlani, Matt Damon, Michael Rodrick, Michael Stuhlbarg, Mike Bash, Natalie Carter, Paul Walter Hauser, Richie Moriarty, Rob Gronkowski, Robert Harvey, Ron Perlman, Shawn Fitzgibbon, Slate Holmgren, Toby Jones, Toby Onwumere, Tom Mariano, Tommy Nohilly, Ving Rhames

Director: Doug Liman

Rating: R

Genre: Comedy, Drama

Actor: Charlotta Björck, Ia Langhammer, Jonatan Rodriguez, Juan Rodríguez, Sanna Sundqvist, Ville Virtanen

Director: Lisa Aschan

Rating: PG-13

As the first original Filipino film on Prime Video, Ten Little Mistresses can often feel stuck as an entertaining pitch for a film rather than a fully fleshed out story. Like many mystery-comedies, this is a movie that relies on its star power and its big twists over any convincing narrative or thematic ideas. But oddly enough, the sooner you accept this, the easier the film goes down. As a loud and proud example of camp comedy, even its most ridiculous and incongruous elements feel like an authentic expression of Filipino humor; it never tries to pander to a Western audience that might be expecting something more familiar to their sensibilities. And with a cast this dedicated to out-chewing the scenery from each other, it's hard not to get swept up in the insanity of it all.

Genre: Comedy, Mystery

Actor: Adrianna So, Agot Isidro, Angie Castrence, Arci Muñoz, Carmi Martin, Cherry Pie Picache, Christian Bables, Dolly Dulu, Donna Cariaga, Eugene Domingo, Iana Bernardez, John Arcilla, Kate Alejandrino, Kris Bernal, Pokwang, Sharlene San Pedro

Director: Jun Robles Lana

Genre: Drama, Romance

Actor: De Ly Luu, Kaity Nguyễn, Ngọc Diệp, Quốc Huy, Thuan Nguyen

Director: Victor Vũ

As a sluggishly paced, three-hour spiritual drama with little dialogue and even less plot, Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell certainly won't convert anybody who isn't already interested in slow cinema. Even those who don't mind these types of films in which "nothing happens" might feel that it doesn't weave its themes of faith and suffering tightly enough. But there's more than enough beauty to contemplate here, courtesy of Dinh Duy Hung's stunning cinematography, which invites us to simply inhabit the world and to stop looking for answers. This may sound like a copout, but it's quite the experience to have a film force you to rethink how you're viewing it, as you're viewing it.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Chi Nguyen, Le Phong Vu, Nguyen Thi Truc Quynh, Nguyen Thinh, Vu Ngoc Manh

Director: Pham Thien An

Susie Searches begins intriguingly for two reasons: first, there’s the strange disappearance of popular college student Jesse Wilcox (Alex Wolff), and then there’s the fact that that mystery is solved in the film's first 20-ish minutes. With over an hour left of its runtime at this point, Susie Searches seems to suggest Jesse’s disappearance was only a red herring, and that we’re in for something juicier now.

Alas, the rest of the movie — which stars Kiersey Clemons as the titular socially awkward student sleuth who finds Jesse — never lives up to this promise. An encouraging cast list is let down by thin characters; this isn’t true just for the supporting parts played by Rachel Sennott, Jim Gaffigan, Ken Marino, Dolly Wells, and Wolff, but, far more detrimentally to the film, Susie herself. Her motivations are complicated by more than just a desire for the truth, but, despite Clemons’ best efforts, this not-quite Nancy Drew is never all that psychologically compelling or believable. In a film that hinges on big twists revolving around its protagonist, that’s a fatal flaw, because we’re only ever half-invested. Though it may play better with younger audiences, anyone else will likely find its promising cast to be the biggest red herring of all.

Genre: Comedy, Mystery, Thriller

Actor: Aaron Costa Ganis, Alex Moffat, Alex Wolff, Ana Cruz Kayne, Ana Kayne, Chris Sheffield, David Walton, Dolly Wells, Ellie Reine, Geoffrey Owens, Isaac Powell, Jammie Patton, Jared Gilman, Jim Gaffigan, Juliette Goglia, Kat Foster, Ken Marino, Kiersey Clemons, Mellanie Hubert, Neal Bledsoe, Rachel Sennott

Director: Sophie Kargman

A remake of the 2018 South Korean film of the same name, Keys to the Heart never really seems like it comes together as a thematic whole. In its bid to be a modest slice of life—as a story that just happens to feature boxing and classical music amid family conflict—its separate parts wind up feeling underdeveloped. So despite admirable work from its cast and big emotional moments that are treated with a surprising level of sensitivity, there's always a sense that the film is constantly trying to be a soap opera instead of simply being a messier, more organic thing.

Genre: Drama

Actor: Althea Pinzon, Apollo Abraham, Bart Guingona, Dolly de Leon, Elijah Canlas, Katya Santos, Lao Rodriguez, Michelle Dee, Rafael Francisco, Tirso Cruz III, Zanjoe Marudo

Director: Kerwin Go