Natasha Lyonne Archives | Deep Focus Review

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Brian Eggert — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:24:40 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. The Fantastic Four: First Steps comes as close to greatness as MCU movies get. Accented by a dazzling retro-futurist style and strong characters played by a pitch-perfect cast, it adheres to the save-the-world formula found in many superhero movies: Planet Earth faces an impossible threat from outer space, and only the titular heroes can save us. However, instead of the flat digital environments and lack of distinct visual flair found in most movies of this ilk, there’s a wonderful alternate reality for audiences to explore, set in a version of the 1960s replete with spaceships, robots, and flying cars. The movie instills an instant desire to investigate this familiar yet unique world, something most MCU movies cannot claim. Rather than feeling like The Fantastic Four is more of the same, it feels alive and new—an inspired variation on a theme that, admittedly, has already been tackled onscreen but to subpar effect. With a terrific cast who embody their iconic characters and a visual energy that presents a refreshing alternative to the Marvel house style, The Fantastic Four is not only immediately engaging but also one of the MCU’s most satisfying offerings yet. […]

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The United States vs. Billie Holiday

Brian Eggert — Wed, 07 Apr 2021 13:05:47 +0000

Lee Daniels took Billie Holiday’s song “All of Me” as a challenge. His biopic, The United States vs. Billie Holiday, attempts to wrap every aspect of Lady Day’s life into a single film. Featuring a convincing performance by musician Andra Day in her first significant screen role, the film gives an account of Holiday’s traumatic childhood, struggle with drug addiction, tumultuous romantic relationships, and persecution by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. It contains the usual narrative blueprint of most biographies about iconic musicians, which has been epitomized (by Walk the Line) and parodied (by Walk Hard) and then reinstated with generic style (by Bohemian Rhapsody). But as the title suggests, there’s a more central focus that Daniels’ film could have and perhaps even intended to take. Instead, it crams too much into just over two hours, giving little of it much depth. Day’s performance and, of course, Holiday’s music remain the center of gravity. Whether they contain enough mass to draw together the meandering story elements depends on how much you’re willing to overlook the package’s overstuffedness. The screenplay by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks was adapted from “The Hunting of Billie Holiday,” an article by the journalist Johann Hari […]

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Irresistible

Brian Eggert — Sun, 28 Jun 2020 22:27:39 +0000

If Jon Stewart’s first film, the severe Rosewater (2014), about the imprisonment of a journalist in Iran, felt like the work of someone else entirely, then his sophomore effort Irresistible feels more attuned to his political comedy sensibilities established on The Daily Show. The story follows a cynical Washington D.C. strategist trying to find the Democratic party a new candidate from the heartland who will present “a redder kind of blue” to voters. The search takes him to rural America, where he becomes invested in a local mayoral election and discovers a microcosm of everything wrong with our political system. Stewart shrewdly identifies the over-emphasis on data analytics and money mongering that drives American politics, just as he skewers the media that perpetuates unproductive rhetoric. However, his many commentaries emerge in an otherwise messy film of unconvincing characters and broad-spectrum comedy. But the biggest error of Irresistible is that it’s more concerned with making a point than telling a good story. Steve Carell plays the self-involved Gary Zimmer, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and is still spinning from her loss to Donald Trump. Searching for a new Democratic candidate who will appeal to the silent majority, he […]

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Honey Boy

Brian Eggert — Fri, 13 Dec 2019 23:40:36 +0000

Shia LaBeouf is central to Honey Boy as both performer and screenwriter. He draws from his experiences as a young chatterbox actor whose coach and mentor was an abusive alcoholic he called “Dad.” In the film, LaBeouf plays his own father in a performance of restless energy, the sort that has defined the actor as an urgently watchable screen presence despite his public instability. After his breakout on the Disney Channel’s Even Stevens, he made the difficult transition into adult roles. He then transitioned again from commercial fare such as Michael Bay’s Transformers series to arthouse performances in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac (2013) and Andrea Arnold’s American Honey (2016), earning himself a reputation for raw emotions and magnetism. But his talent came at a cost, from a mental toll to some very public displays of bad behavior—drunkenness, arrests for disorderly conduct, and use of racial epithets at police officers. He eventually channeled his energy into performance art, which he conceived alongside Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner, further signaling the actor’s need to work through his emotional strain using his talent. By the final frames of Honey Boy, it becomes achingly apparent that the film is at once a work […]

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Ad Astra

Brian Eggert — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 17:39:14 +0000

As the opening shot of James Gray’s Ad Astra pans across an image of the Sun and stars, lens flares in the shape of circles shift in the opposite direction. The effect, accomplished as light bounces and scatters from the camera lens, resembles planets aligning. Inside one of those round light artifacts appears Brad Pitt’s insolated astronaut, a dauntless if emotionally distant professional whose pulse has supposedly never risen above 80 beats per minute during stressful situations. The entire shot lasts only a few seconds, but it evokes the entire journey of Stanley Kubrick’s epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film that carries the viewer beyond the infinite to a place of profound understanding, or confusion. Kubrick’s film begins with a Sun-Moon-Earth alignment and ends with an explorer transmigrating into an ethereal Star Child, an image that comes to mind when we see Pitt reflected in the lens flare, seemingly floating in space. Gray’s film goes on a similar pilgrimage as Kubrick’s, though instead of reaching into our unconscious to achieve existential comprehension, Ad Astra is rooted in a human drama that unravels somewhere between Earth and the rings of Neptune, two stations as distant as the story’s father […]

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Yoga Hosers

Brian Eggert — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:00:43 +0000

Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp are proud parents. So proud, in fact, they gave their teenage offspring small roles in Smith’s last movie, Tusk (2013), a Canadian horror-comedy that costarred Depp as a wacky detective. Their girls did fine, but the proud fathers saw genius and resolved to produce an entire feature around them—another pseudo-horror-comedy set in Canada, entitled Yoga Hosers. Propelled by a degree of admiration only a father could have, the movie provides a showcase for the teenage girls to demonstrate their joy of singing, knack for comedy, and, I suppose, yoga. But rather than inspire the writer-director to elevate his game for the sake of familial pride, Smith delivers the worst effort in his career, largely because of the movie’s other driving force: his callow desire to proclaim his hatred for critics onscreen. We first meet the titular same-named clerks, Colleen C. (Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen M. (Harley Quinn Smith), rehearsing their girl band in the back of the Eh-2-Zed convenience store, alongside their 35-year-old drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody). When these Winnipeg sophomores aren’t rehearsing, they’re dismissing everything as “basic” and texting away on their smartphones—in other words, occupying Smith’s over-exaggerated categorization of modern teenage girls. The […]

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