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A Real Pain (Disney+)
Kieran Culkin, right, and Jesse Eisenberg in A Real Pain, which sees two cousins trace their Jewish grandmother’s roots in Poland.The Associated Press
Fresh off of Kieran Culkin’s Golden Globe win last week and just in time for Oscars voting, the actor’s sharp and poignant dramedy A Real Pain makes its way to streaming. Playing a pothead ne’er-do-well who reconnects with his uptight cousin (Jesse Eisenberg) while tracing their Jewish grandmother’s roots in Poland, Culkin edges close to his Succession jerk while finding something a little more tolerable, a little more sweet in the character. And, for the record, Culkin is definitely not playing my good friend (and Globe contributor) Ben Kaplan – even though his character is named Benji Kaplan, has a similar affection for cannabis (though his steers more business-oriented – he just published the book Catch a Fire: The Blaze and Bust of the Canadian Cannabis Industry) and is real-life friends with Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed the film).
Here (Hoopla)
A de-aged Tom Hanks, left, and a de-aged Robin Wright in Here.The Associated Press
To some, director Robert Zemeckis is a CGI-obsessed madman who must be stopped. To others, he’s a bold and misunderstood innovator. I’m still not sure where his latest experiment, Here, lands on that spectrum, but it’s certainly worth watching if only to plunk yourself directly in the filmmaker’s brain. A mixture of the time-travel aspects of his best film (Back to the Future) with the goopy sentimentality of his most acclaimed (Forrest Gump), Here uses AI-enhanced de-aging visual effects to follow a single space across centuries. Mostly, the story – captured in a single static shot – follows a couple (Forrest Gump’s Tom Hanks and Robin Wright) as they grow old together in the living room of their suburban home. But in between, Zemeckis keeps flashing back and forward in time to show the space’s previous inhabitants, including the parents of Hanks’s character, the family who will move in much later and even the dinosaurs who once roamed the land. Almost wholly ignored or derided upon its brief theatrical release this past fall, Zemeckis’s film deserves at the very least some well-paid attention on the small screen.
Back in Action (Netflix)
Jamie Foxx, left, plays Matt and Cameron Diaz plays Emily in Back In Action, in which a couple is pulled back into their shared CIA past.Netflix
More than 25 years after first sharing the screen in Oliver Stone’s football drama Any Given Sunday (and a decade after they reunited for the 2014 remake of musical Annie), Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx are back together in this Mr. & Mrs. Smith-esque comedy about a couple pulled back into their shared CIA past. The Seth Gordon-directed film wasn’t available for review before its Netflix release this Friday, so the verdict is out as to whether it’s any good, but it earns curiosity points right off the bat thanks to not only the Diaz-Foxx reunion, but because both stars have been absent from the screen for some time now. While Foxx had the under-loved vampire flick Day Shift back in 2022, plus a few supporting roles/cameos, he hasn’t had a true star vehicle since 2019′s Just Mercy. Diaz, meanwhile, has been on a self-imposed decade-long sabbatical all the way back to Annie. Back in action, indeed.
Unstoppable (Prime Video)
Jharrel Jerome stars as Anthony Robles, an NCAA wrestling champ born with only one leg, in Unstoppable.Ana Carballosa/The Associated Press
There was a moment during this past September’s Toronto International Film Festival in which I really thought that long-time editor and first-time director William Goldenberg (Argo) had a hit on his hands with the underdog sports drama Unstoppable. The film checked all the right biopic boxes: It boasted a fantastic lead performance from Jharrel Jerome (Moonlight) as Anthony Robles, the NCAA wrestling champ who took on all comers despite being born with only one leg. Plus there were starry supporting turns from Jennifer Lopez as Robles’s tough-as-nails mom, Don Cheadle as his sometimes skeptical coach and Bobby Cannavale playing one of his trademark jerks (in this case, Robles’s stepfather). And then there are the film’s truly remarkable visual effects, which digitally erase Jerome’s real right leg – proof that the best VFX work often goes totally unnoticed. Yet after Unstoppable left TIFF empty-handed, Amazon MGM seemed to forget about the movie entirely and neglected to give it even the smallest of theatrical releases in Canada to goose any awards chances it might have. Don’t make the same mistake, with the film hitting Prime Video this week.
My Internship in Canada (Prime Video)
Is Québécois director Philippe Falardeau secretly Canada’s answer to Nostradamus? Back in 2015, the filmmaker, coming off a brief flirtation with Hollywood thanks to his Reese Witherspoon drama The Good Lie, went back to his Canadian roots with this broad but sweet political comedy about a schism within Parliament as the country faced a severe diplomatic row with the United States. Huh, sounds familiar. Focusing on the last honest man in office, a rural MP (Patrick Huard) named Steve Guibord, Falardeau’s film wrings laughs out of all the expected corners of the Canadian political psyche. (His Stephen Harper stand-in is a particular riot, right down to his cat-loving wife and penchant for piano solos.) Although the film slips into a few questionable ruts of poor taste – one villain’s stutter is played for laughs, while the entire population of Haiti can be viewed as the butt of a democracy-for-dummies joke – the performances are lived-in and the tone is refreshingly light. A genuine crowd-pleaser, no matter what colour that sign on your lawn might be this year.
