Mia Goth Steals The Show Again With Infinity Pools — But It’s More Heartbreaking Than The Story

infinity pool

(18) 118 minutes

★★★☆☆

A horror movie starring Mia Goth is like a bus.

Bouncing straight off last week’s excellent Pearl, Goth’s occasionally maddened eyes and twitchy smile are back on the big screen to terrify us all.

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This time, she’s on vacation from hell in Brandon Cronenberg’s ludicrous thriller, a tale that warns against never leaving a hotel-resort complex.

Former author James (Alexander Skarsgard) and his wealthy wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman) are vacationing at the beach and have a lot of passive-aggressive conversation.

wild depravity

James wrote a book six years ago and hasn’t worked since. Em, on the other hand, is funding an infinite writer’s block.

Soon, he meets flirtatious actress Gabi (Goss) and her French architect husband Alban (Jalil Lespert).

The pair regularly visit a fictional island, and insist on taking the pair out for a drink and a picnic on a deserted beach far from the resort.

It’s a deeply disturbing occasion, ending in a shocking DUI case in which James and Em are arrested for murder.

According to the scary cops, the punishment for this crime is execution.

But if you have the money, you have the option to “double” yourself. That means you can clone yourself and kill yourself.

A graphic and gory scene shows James watching his alter ego be brutally stabbed to death.

Em was deeply traumatized by seeing her clone husband violently murdered, but James felt nothing.

This leaves him on a mission to meet like-minded tourists who are also recipients of the cloning.

They lead drug-taking to wild levels of depravity, some of which are stomach-churningly grotesque, such as promiscuity and terrifying hallucinations.

Things all turn a clockwork orange as drugged gangsters wear terrifying masks and break into homes causing terror and pain.

Goth is again the center of attention, giving an unbelievable performance.

Skarsgard is also great, and the first half of the movie left me intrigued as to how the idea of ​​this clone nightmare would play out.

Sadly, the film has lost direction and has become more harrowing than the story.

good person

(15) 129 minutes

★★☆☆☆

I like to imagine that this is a movie that started as a very different idea.

My hope is that director Zach Braff wanted it to be a poignant drama about the horrors of the OxyContin painkiller epidemic that’s infected Central America.

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But along the way, others got involved and suggested casting Morgan Freeman to do the Shawshank-esque narration, making the film an odd mix of gritty drama and sloppy nonsense.

Alison (Florence Pugh) is living a great life. She has a handsome fiancée, a great career and great friends.

But all this changes when she is involved in a car accident that kills her fiancée’s sister and her husband.

A year later, Allison is living with her alcoholic mother (Molly Shannon) and coping with an opioid addiction that began after surgery following her crash.

To get clean, she forms an unlikely friendship with her father-to-be Danielle (Freeman), who tries to help guide her. But he restores himself.

Pugh makes this chaotic script bearable, but bad casting and an unnecessary injection of schmaltz make the good guys less good.

John Wick: Chapter 4

(15) 169 minutes

★★★☆☆

Keanu Reeves returns as an assassin trying to break out of the underworld.

John Wick has come a long way since the first film sought revenge against the criminal who killed his puppy.

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In this outing, he attempts to defeat Bill Skarsgård’s Marquis Vincent de Gramont. He is the leader of a crime syndicate and keeps growing the bounty on his head.

The plot structure of “John Wick vs. The World” is essentially the same as the last two films, designed to give the fight sequences purpose beyond watching Reeves fight henchmen and eccentric foes. It has been.

The addition of Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada as Wick’s old companions adds some martial arts rigor and flare, but most of the new character introductions remain superficial and unresolved.

Still, you can’t help but be sucked in and blown away by the formidable, highly stylized World Director that Chad Stahelski has crafted for the relentless but lovable Reeves.

They may be fighting for the sake of fighting, but they certainly make it look majestic.

Hannah Flint