Weekend Film Reviews

In How to Rob a Bank, criminals sell their heists for clicks, streaming their smash-and-grabs for adoring fans. They’re bitter millennials, would-be Luigi Mangiones lashing out at an America that didn’t keep the promises it made to their generation. According to film critic Dave White, the film doesn’t keep its promises either. It drops its anti-authoritarian posture to become “an FBI public service announcement about how crime doesn’t pay and about how you should just behave,” White says, “The fact that it comes from Amazon Content Services LLC is its own spoiler.”



How to Rob a Bank is about “economic inequality and predatory lending and insurance fraud from the company owned by Jeff Bezos,” adds critic Alonso Duralde. “This movie couldn’t be phonier.”



Duralde and White also review Ebenezer, Bitter Christmas and Paper Tiger.

In I Play Rocky, Anthony Ippolito plays Sylvester Stallone as the struggling actor tries to write America’s favorite boxing movie and book the leading role for himself. According to film critic Witney Seibold, Ippolito nails his impression, but the story falls flat. “It feels like a dramatization of a special features documentary you might find on a Rocky DVD,” he says. Critic Shawn Edwards says the “fluffy” film made him want to star in his own triumphant training montage. “Right after walking out of the theater,” Edwards says, “I went looking for the nearest stairwell.”

Seibold and Edwards also review Godzilla Minus Zero, Wild Horse Nine and Soul Patrol.

Forty-one years ago, a pipe bomb went off at the office of a Palestinian-American activist named Alex Odeh. Odeh, a father of three, was killed in the seemingly targeted assasination. Decades later, the FBI still has not determined who was behind the attack. In Who Killed Alex Odeh?, two filmmakers take viewers on a journey from Orange County to Israel to investigate why. “It doesn’t feel like a true crime film that would be tied up in a nice little bow in the end,” says Alissa Wilkinson, film critic for The New York Times.



“If people don’t know enough about this particular person, about this particular historical incident, and the way that this fits into the entire tapestry we’re living in now, the filmmakers do an excellent job making that case,” says William Bibbiani, film critic for The Wrap, and co-host of the Critically Acclaimed Network podcast.



Bibbiani and Wilkinson also review the film Queen at Sea, and because Halloween is just days away, discuss how everything is basically a horror movie now.

In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s townhouse for cocktails and debate. They reminisced about the movement they built and argued over its meaning as Greaves recorded everything. It was never released — Greaves died in 2014 without completing the film — but now his son, David Greaves, has finished the job, editing the footage into the new documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem. “You have this once-in-a-lifetime gathering of all these extraordinary people, and [you get] to see them remember things, and remember things differently,” says film critic Alonso Duralde.

“The very texture of the film itself transports you physically through just the color grading, and the grain of it,” says critic Dave White. “We don’t think about that much as viewers until we are bathing in the technique and formal qualities of another era.”

Duralde and White also review Wicker, Possible Love and Fatherland.

Disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes has made a few curious decisions throughout her life. The most perplexing may be inviting absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder to make a documentary about her in the 34 days before she went to prison for defrauding investors. Film critic Tim Grierson says the result is “a kind of standoff” between Fielder and Holmes, who have something in common: neither are reliable. Holmes “is someone who is playing with reality and truth in ways that are akin to what Nathan Fielder does” in his own work, Grierson says.

Critic Alison Willmore says You Can See Everything is the movie of the year. “It also becomes a film about the nature of documentary,” Willmore says. “And about how you get to know someone, and whether you can — by asking them questions and pointing a camera at them — get to a truth.”

Grierson and Willmore also review Street Fighter, La Bola Negra and Whalefall.