‘Kimi’ Review: Zoë Kravitz Excels in Steven Soderbergh’s Thriller for the Age of Isolation
09.02.2022 - 23:09
/ variety.com
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticFor a couple of decades now, Steven Soderbergh’s “little” movies — the lo-fi dramas, often quirky thrillers, that he makes as palette cleansers in between his higher profile projects — have been a pleasurably idiosyncratic, off-on-his-own-cloud thing. Some of them are good (like “Bubble” and “Side Effects”), some are meh (like “Haywire”), and one is great (“The Girlfriend Experience”); none of them make much of an impact in the marketplace.
Yet you feel the pulse of filmmaking fervor in them. You could say they’re Soderbergh’s protest against blockbusterization, a way of reminding his audience, and maybe himself, that a few simple elements — story, actors, camera angles — can still add up to what a movie is.
Only now, at a time of slow-motion crisis in the industry (will audiences come back to theaters?) and seriously over-inflated budgets, Soderbergh’s latest little movie, the nimble and sinister cyber-age corporate thriller “Kimi,” plays as an object lesson in showing us a way forward. It’s a welcome reminder that less, in the movies, can sometimes be more.
It’s also an art-suspense pastiche that’s clever enough to hook us. More than half the film is set in a spacious, second-floor renovated industrial loft condo in Seattle, where Angela Childs (Zoë Kravitz), a waifish millennial in a wavy bob of blue hair, stares out her window, taking in the late-morning sun as she checks out the neighbors in the apartment building across the street (a couple of them look back).
The website popstar.one is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.