With Kimi, director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp have dazzlingly updated Rear Window for the work-from-home age: their film puts a thrillingly contemporary spin on a vintage paranoia-drenched premise.
KIMI was a thrilling and intense thriller that explored mental health struggles with a beautifully sensitive and realistic touch. Zoë Kravitz gave an exceptional and powerful performance. Also Alex Dobrenko and Devin Ratray gave good performances. The writing was outstanding. It was just a great movie and my favorite movie I've seen this year so far.
Zoë Kravitz gives a career defining performance. Her character Angela Childs is one you get annoyed with in the beginning as she is pompous, self-centered, egotistical and just a pain in the rear. As the story progresses, you begin to understand why she carries these traits and not only so you understand her well-being but you then begin to sympathize for what she has to endure. The story itself is well crafted with some minor characters not really pulling their weight but don't really drag the film's overall objective. KIMI is the answer to all those superhero movies you don't want to see. OOPS, I forgot - there's a BAT coming.
Soderbergh, shooting and editing under his usual pseudonyms (Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard, respectively), has a gift for satirizing corporate mundanity, and for making everyday minutiae mesmerizing. He can turn typing fingers and blinking cursors into the stuff of quietly engrossing drama.
It’s a snack of a movie, not so much a full meal, and that’s OK. There’s a lot of energy in this film; more than enough to get you through your afternoon.
The most glaring problem here, and the one hardest to explain, is Soderbergh’s failure to elicit any warmth or charm from Zoë Kravitz, who has been consistently appealing in her every other screen performance, from blockbusters like the “Divergent” series to little independents like “The Road Within.”
For close to thirty minutes, Kimi is a clever, in-the-now show... until it devolves into a cliche chase-movie with heaps of eye-rolling convenience and stupid bad guys.
An uneven film with lots of undeveloped pieces. Like about everything by Soderbergh. The soundtrack echoes an earlier time. The first third or more is in the apartment, at first thought it may be a single set kind of film.
"Kimi" (HBO Max) stars Zoe Kravitz as a social shut-in juxtaposed against her job as a machine learning assistant for improvement of the Alexa-like product "Kimi". She overhears an assault on a woman via someone's Kimi and decides to get involved, regardless of what others signal or tell her, regardless of her phobias, regardless of everything, she sacrifices her life and others for an assumption of what she hears for a 5-sec span on a stranger's Kimi. I went through all that to show why you don't really care about her, she's acting outside the bounds of a realistic character and where does that usually lead? Right, disappointment. Oh and she does the "Home Alone" bit on some assassins so that's plausible, right? And she's in a mixed race relationship so Hollywood gets their we're-so-progressive bonus. It's another of many, many Covid-era wastes of our time.