![]() When we meet them, they're already in the grips of fertility mania, willing to try almost anything to secure the offspring they think they desire. Richard (Paul Giamatti) and Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) are a Manhattan-dwelling couple who have spent the last few years attempting to have a baby with little success. Over a decade since the release of her last dark comedy, The Savages, writer and director Tamara Jenkins is back with a sprawling movie in the same vein: more hyper-verbal jerks you can't help but love. Unlike Netflix's futuristic action slog The Last Days of American Crime, which tripped over its own convoluted premise and failed to spark genuine suspense, Time to Hunt uses its elongated runtime to build sequences in a meticulous, considerate way that should appeal to viewers who have seen Heat, Collateral, and Miami Vice too many times to count. There are dystopian elements to the world-protests play out in the streets, the police wage a tech-savvy war on citizens, automatic rifles are readily available to all potential buyers-but they all serve the simmering tension and elevate the pounding set-pieces instead of feeling like unnecessary allegorical padding. A group of four friends, including Parasite and Train to Busan break-out Choi Woo-shik, knock over a gambling house, stealing a hefty bag of money and a set of even more valuable hard-drives, and then find themselves targeted by a ruthless contract killer (Park Hae-soo) who moves like the T-1000 and shoots like a henchmen in a Michael Mann movie. Unrelenting in its pursuit of scenarios where guys point big guns at each other in sparsely lit empty hallways, Time to Hunt is a South Korean thriller that knows exactly what stylistic register it's playing in. But with a careful touch, Meirelles and his two popes bring humanity to the inscrutably holy figureheads. While these sequences are well done, any time the film strays from Pryce and Hopkins, it slows down. Focused more on the Argentinean-born Francis, née Jorge Mario Bergoglio, than Benedict, The Two Popes finds time for lengthy flashbacks of Bergolio's pre-papal life in South America. That isn't to say the film ignores the controversial topics orbiting its protagonists, though it is certainly not a condemnation of the Catholic church by any means. Who knows if Benedict and Francis actually had charming discussions about The Beatles, pizza, and the Austrian TV show about a crime-solving dog called ( Kommissar Rex), but The Two Popes imagines they do. The two elderly actors are at their peaks as these ideologically different men of the cloth, but Andrew McCarten's script is less about bickering than it is about shared faith and sin, while also being incredibly playful. Fernando Meirelles' The Two Popes, about conversations between Pope Benedict XVI and the future Pope Francis, will win you over thanks largely to the performances of Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce as the titular Bishops of Rome. ![]()
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