Wasting an exceptional if oddly miscast ensemble, Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club has something important on its mind. It just can’t quite articulate it.
Two Americans and a Brit lead the cast as scrappy Irish folk. Chrissie (Laura Linney) is the prodigal daughter returned for her mother’s funeral. Eileen (Kathy Bates) is her childhood friend who cannot believe Chrissie had the gall to return after what she did. The deceased’s best friend Lily (Maggie Smith) is disappointed the girl didn’t come sooner to comfort her mother during her time of need.
Chrissie’s timing is actually amazing. The whole parish is taking part in a talent show in honor of her mother. The winners get a trip to Lourdes to ask for a miracle. One contrivance follows another and next thing you know, Chrissie, Eileen and Lily are all en route to the holy city in France, begrudgingly together.
The Miracle Club is frustratingly evasive when it comes to Chrissie’s backstory. We get a sense but no real clarity, but it seemed to have been something quite dire. And yet, all is forgiven without much a do.
What O’Sullivan – working from a script by Joshua D. Maurer, Timothy Prager and Jimmy Smallhorne – tries to bring to the surface is an image of systemic oppression relieved only when women support each other.
There is one moment – a climactic confession – where the film’s themes resonate, thanks mostly to Linney’s quietly desperate performance. Dolly (Agnes O’Casey) is hoping that, with the help of the Blessed Virgin, her son will finally speak. But she has a secret, and she believes she’s to blame for whatever ails little Daniel (Eric D. Smith, adorable).
In this moment, O’Sullivan’s film seems to find its miracle, as four women recognize the burden their faith and the patriarchy have put on them. But we must rely on the weighty stares from one talented actor to the next because the film has no intention of pinpointing its deeper concerns.
Worse still, O’Sullivan’s film is so entirely forgiving of both the church and the patriarchy that these themes feel as artificial as the leads’ accents.
O’Sullivan’s tone is forever uplifting, sometimes comically so, but the underlying peril these women have faced and forced is anything but light. He and his writers (men, all) honor these put-upon women who manage. God bless them for managing. God forbid they revolt.
As James Earl Jones so eloquently told us in Field of Dreams., you can’t tell the story of America without baseball. And in The League, acclaimed documentarian Sam Pollard builds a gracefully powerful reminder about how important the Negro Leagues were to both game and country.
Pollard (Mr. Soul!, MLK/FBI, Oscar nominee for 4 Little Girls) weaves together the interviews, archival footage and re-enactments with the care of a master craftsman. He builds a timeline that informs and inspires, introducing us to professional players – such as Moses Fleetwood Walker – who came before Jackie Robinson but were left behind once the Supreme Court endorsed “separate but equal” in 1896.
And when the Black community “only had themselves to rely on,” we see how a new path to success was forged, thanks to the visionaries such as Rube Foster and a litany of players who got the attention of white sports writers with their athletic, fast-paced style of play.
Of course, all of this is a baseball fan’s dream, but Pollard (with Executive Producer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson) also achieves compelling resonance through socioeconomic lessons. The film illustrates how symbiotic relationships developed between the Negro Leagues and the social, political and geographical movements of the day, creating a fascinating push and pull that continued through the integration of Major League Baseball.
And speaking of integration, the story doesn’t end once Robinson and Larry Doby debuted in the National and American Leagues, respectively. In fact, the film is ready with some lesser known receipts from a less-than-admirable side of Branch Rickey’s decision to add Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Certainly, the story of the Negro Leagues is worthy of a multi-part mini series, but The League lands as both a satisfying overview and an enticing invitation to dig deeper. There is a wonderful sense of joy here. It’s a feeling born from a community that loved the game, players that lived to make it their own, and a movement that never backed down from the challenge of “finding other ways to succeed.”
A family haunted by the unexplained resurrection of their dead mother from a nearby river sounds like a good setup to a horror movie. But it works even better as a sparse, lushly filmed parable about environmental destruction and humanity’s relationship to the world that sustains us.
Chilean director Francisca Alegria’s feature film The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future sounds a clarion call to repair the destruction humans are doing to the world before it’s too late. It’s a message delivered urgently and unsubtly, but with moments of great beauty that make the warnings that much more stark.
When Magdalena (Mía Maestro) returns to life and walks from the polluted Cruces River to her family dairy farm, she shocks her now-aged husband Pablo (Benjamin Soto) so much that he ends up in the hospital. Magdalena’s extended family returns to the farm, and soon everyone has to confront the long-dead specter of Magdalena as they reckon with the holes her absence left on their lives.
And while the eco parable stays repetitively on message, the heart of the film is a more intimate examination of the inseparable connection between the environment and ourselves. The sense of loss that Magdalena left behind across generations of her family—and the trauma that continues to reverberate for her daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) as she carries this forward to her own children—mirrors the broader fight for environmental justice that we owe to people who come after us.
Grounding the film’s flights into magical realism is a riveting silent performance from Maestro as Magdalena. Maestro channels grief, wonder and even moments of sublime joy into the resurrected Magdalena.
The family’s initial response to seeing their reanimated matriarch ranges from love and excitement to the (perfectly understandable) horror, a note that Alegria brings out to great effect. In a different movie, Magdalena’s eerie wet footsteps through the house and across town would dog Cecilia and her father relentlessly.
It’s a confrontation that seems equally likely to end in catharsis or carnage. Alegria ratchets up the tension, as well as the environmental devastation, until the metaphorical dam breaks for Cecilia.
For a film whose songs into the future traffic in death and “the end” being here, the movie also holds out hope for an ending that has yet to be written. The film is agnostic on whether civilization writ large has earned our reprieve. But if a more connected world starts with just one family—then that’s a start.
Adele Lim’s Joy Ride puts the R in raunchy comedy, but beneath a by-the-numbers R-rated roadtrip is a smart, irreverent, confident tale about owning your identity.
The film opens on Day 1 of the friendship between Audrey & Lolo in the funniest comeuppance scene since the 1993 Thanksgiving pageant at Wednesday Addams’s summer camp. The two are fast friends, even though Audrey (Ashley Park) is ambitious, applied, and constantly proving herself while Lolo (Sherry Cola) makes sex positive art instead of working in her parents’ Chinese restaurant.
But Audrey is about to make partner and move to LA, while Lolo is still living in Audrey’s garage, getting high, making art and enjoying dick.
It’s a phrase you should definitely get used to.
Though Lolo is not the film’s centerpiece, the way the character upends stereotypes about women generally and about Asian women specifically is part of the film’s success. Lim and co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao use the beats of a familiar story to undermine its relatively misogynistic history. Joy Ride is more than just smart, racially savvy, sexually open and foul mouthed.
It’s funny.
Park is an excellent vehicle for both the core idea of claiming your identity and the necessary schmaltz at the heart of any raunchy comedy. But she is not carrying the comedic burden. Leave that to Cola and Audrey’s other two travel companions, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu, hilarious) and Kat (Stephanie Hsu, hello glorious!).
The commentary on microaggressions, aggressive aggression, all manner of racism, and glass ceilings feels honest, sometimes brave, often borderline (and joyously) lewd.
Don’t be confused. The plot itself is dumb as hell. It’s a roadtrip (well, it’s more of a globe trot) as the four pals travel through China to support Audrey as she lands the big client that will mean a big promotion. Hijinks do what they do best, they ensue.
Not every wild situation lands. Each emotional climax feels destined, obvious. But somehow, even well-worn tropes feel revolutionary when claimed by a filmmaking team (director, all writers, all leads) of nothing but Asian women.
As the pandemic raged a few years back, all of us had to adapt. For filmmakers, that meant getting creative to remain creative: small casts, limited settings and remote locations.
One of the better films to meet these challenges was Language Lessons, a two-hander co-written by Mark Duplass and Natalie Morales that also served as one of Morales’s first projects as a feature director.
Biosphere follows a similar blueprint, but with a much higher concept that ultimately hampers its chance at real poignancy.
This time out, Duplass co-writes with first-time feature director Mel Eslyn, and also co-stars as Billy, one of the two men left on Earth. The other survivor is Billy’s old friend Ray (Sterling K. Brown), and the pair spends the days inside a self-sustaining biosphere of Ray’s design.
The two actors share a wonderful and warm rapport, and through their conversations we learn that Billy was President and Ray his lead advisor when the unthinkable went down.
Was Billy to blame? Well, Ray has superior intellect and Billy’s middle initial might as well be “dubya,” so maybe. But that was then and this is now, and now “Diane,” the last female fish in their pond is dead, leaving “Sam” and “Woody” behind.
Ray knows that could mean the end of the “self-sustaining” part of their setup, so the conversations start to get a lot heavier.
To say any more would be saying too much, but the “once upon a time…” message that opens the film readies us for the attempted parable on hope and human evolution.
And this is an extremely talky parable. That might be hard to avoid in a two-character, one-room setting, but the hour and forty-five minute run time becomes excessive despite the mixing of wry humor with Duplass and Brown’s commitment to the exercise.
The bigger problem is that once the film goes where it goes, it feels like the end of a great short film that never was. The main point then becomes the pitch, and not so much about where it ends up. Give Duplass and Eslyn credit for the ambition, and Eslyn some props for making the treatment more cinema than sit-com, but the end is satisfying only if the mean was to be a conversation-starter.
And Biosphere should indeed start some, just not about the big issues it has in mind. Those end up getting caught in a narrative corner that’s covered in too much paint.
There is something elegantly old school about the slow burn literary mystery afoot in Alice Troughton’s feature directorial debut, The Lesson. Its overt, unyielding structure suggests a familiar, even predictable thriller.
However zealously screenwriter Alex MacKeith subscribes to the traditional three act story, theme stated on page 5 and all that, Troughton and a superb cast still manage to mesmerize you. You’re given every piece of evidence you will need, and yet you’ll wonder ceaselessly where it will all lead.
Troughton’s direction evokes a tense thriller, even though the story itself never feels as if danger’s around the corner. Still, the camera angles and shot choices – gorgeous though they are – leave you on edge. With her creeping camera and gorgeous location Troughton blurs the line between intellectual drama and mystery thriller.
Her stellar cast helps. Richard E. Grant plays renowned writer J.M. Sinclair, whose son Bertie (Stephen McMillan) is in the market for a tutor to help prepare him for Oxford’s entrance exams. Aspiring writer and massive Sinclair fan Liam (Daryl McCormack, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande) gets the job.
Julie Delpy also stars as family matriarch Hélène, whose aloof demeanor strikes the perfect chord against Grant’s vibrance. It would be wrong to say Grant chews scenery, but you certainly can’t look away from him. A charming narcissist, viciously insecure and competitive, his Sinclair is a big presence, which allows the balance of characters to quietly observe, connive even.
McCormack, who was so impressive in the two-person revelation of Leo Grande, delivers another introspective and surprising performance. At times Liam seems to mirror Sinclair’s insecurity and artist’s fragility, but this is not that story.
The conclusion feels a little tidy, but the intricate ballet of character study and mystery that precedes it is so tight you’ll forgive the minor misstep.
Adolescent boys flex, fight, and run feral in Leo Milano’s high school comedy, The Crusades.
In a world devoid of parents, three friends—Leo (Rudy Pankow, Netflix’s Outer Banks), Sean (Khalil Everage, Netflix’s Cobra Kai), and Jack (Ryan Ashton, School for Boys) – are eager to establish themselves in the social hierarchy at their all-boys Catholic high school before the institution merges with the school from the inner city. The city boys are rumored to be bigger, stronger, and faster.
As the merger grows closer and with a school social mixer with the local all-girls school on the horizon, the main three boys are determined to have one last epic weekend together before the social landscape changes forever.
There are a lot of familiar tropes in this one—administrators with personal vendettas against students, kids trying to lose their virginity the night of the big dance, teachers with dubious moral authority, bloodthirsty bullies, Jackass-style pranks, kids fleeing through backyards…
That being said, the slapstick stupidity is sometimes pretty amusing, particularly Pankow’s increasingly broad wince and recoil from perceived attack. Which is good, because the movie is super violent. The main three are throwing punches, getting whacked in the nuts, or trying to stem their bleeding for the majority of the film. And when they aren’t, they are exchanging quips and dispensing dubious sex advice. (“Dong bags” are apparently reversible!)
Although there are girls and women in the cast, like Sean’s Girlfriend (Indiana Massara), Hot Teacher (Anna Maiche), and Girl Run Over by a Bike (Ashley Nicole Williams), they aren’t given much to do or any real character development. But then it’s not like any of the boys get character arcs either, despite the fact that the main three are fictionalized versions of co-writers Milano, Shaun Early, and Jack Hussar. (who also collaborate on the TV series School for Boys, which features many of the same characters from The Crusades.)
The flick is a lot of heteronormative, violent, masculine shenanigans with not much else to offer besides decent fight choreography and some quippy one-liners.
One of our favorite parts of the trauma of accepting that half the year is behind us is our therapy of celebrating so much great horror cinema! Did you forget these treasures? Already?! Well, here are (in alphabetical order) the ten best horror flicks so far this year.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
An awful lot of people have reimagined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in an awful lot of ways. What makes writer/director Bomani J. Story’s take, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, so effective is that it tackles a lot in very little time and handles all of it heartbreakingly well.
To say that Story situates Shelley’s tale in the context of drug violence would be to sell his film short. He’s moved the story from European castles and laboratories to the projects, where Vicaria’s (Laya DeLeon Hayes, stunning) mother fell victim to a drive-by shooting, her brother was shot to death on a drug deal gone wrong, and her father deals with his grief by using. But drugs are just part of the larger problem, the almost escapable, systemic and cyclical nature of violence and poverty.
Story’s chosen genre may feel slight, even campy, but the tropes belie some densely packed ideas, and there’s a current of empathy running through the film that not only separates this from other Frankenstein tales, but deepens the film’s genuine sense of tragedy.
The Blackening
Several friends from college (including Jay Pharaoh, Yvonne Orji, Sinqua Walls, Antoinette Robertson, and the film’s co-writer Dewayne Perkins) are reuniting at a remote cabin for a Juneteenth celebration. It isn’t long before they discover a talking blackface at the center of a board game called The Blackening (“probably runs on racism!”) and fall into a sadistic killer’s plan to pick them off one by one.
The game will test their knowledge of Black history and culture, and demand they sacrifice the friend they deem “the Blackest.” It’s a clever device that Perkins, co-writer Tracy Oliver and director Tim Story use to skewer both well-known horror tropes and well-worn identity politicking.
The old joke about Black people being the first to die in horror films is pretty well-worn, too, but don’t let that poster tagline convince you that the film has nothing new to say. The less “Blacker” these characters seem, the greater chance they have of surviving. That’s some fertile ground for social commentary, and what began as a viral comedy sketch lands on the screen as a refreshing new angle for a horror comedy.
Evil Dead Rise
Deadites hit the big city in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the latest instalment in the old Sam Raimi demon possession franchise. As was true with its predecessors, blood will rain, viscera will spew, chainsaws will bite, and the dead will most definitely rise.
We open, as usual, on a cabin. Despite the top-notch title sequence, though, this episode will not be a cabin-in-the-woods horror. Cronin, who’s credited with the script as well, takes the Necronomicon and all its secrets into an urban high rise to see what hell he can raise.
Cronin uses disorienting angels and shots throughout the film to beautifully bewildering effect. A fisheye-of-death through a peephole is just one of the film’s many horrifying highlights.
Huesera: The Bone Woman
Michelle Garza Cervera’s maternal nightmare is bright and decisive, pulling in common genre tropes only long enough to grant entrance to the territory of a central metaphor before casting them aside for something sinister, honest and honestly terrifying.
While it toes certain familiar ground – the gaslighting of Rosemary’s Baby, for instance – what sets Huesera apart from other maternal horror is its deliberate untidiness. Cervera refuses to embrace the good mother/bad mother dichotomy and disregards the common cinematic journey of convincing a woman that all she really wants is to be a mom.
Huesera’s metaphor is brave and timely. Brave not only because of its LGBTQ themes but because of its motherhood themes. It’s a melancholy and necessary look at what you give up, what you kill.
Infinity Pool
Brandon Cronenberg + Mia Goth + Alexander Skarsgård … for a very specific set of people, the sum there is hell yes.
Riding our favorite wave in horror – that rich people are unspeakably diabolical – writer/director Cronenberg takes us on a strange journey through privilege, debauchery, entitlement, boredom, narcissism, psychotropic drugs and more in his trippy new flick, Infinity Pool.
Cronenberg’s ultimate concept is clearly, wildly his own, but moments sometimes call to mind ideas from last year’s Speak No Evil, as well as Society, Kill List, Hour of the Wolf, and A Serbian Film (no, not that part). Still, the film never feels borrowed. Uncomfortable, yes. Borrowed? No.
Influencer
Kurtis David Harder’s approach to influencer horror leans Neo-noir thriller as the cold and calculating CW (Cassandra Naud – outstanding) spins a dangerous web for an unsuspecting social butterfly.
Harder and cinematographer David Schuurman create an absolutely gorgeous pot for boiling this mystery. From atop deserted island beaches to below crystal clear waters and inside lavish vacation homes, Harder’s nimble camera and visual aesthetics reinforce the notion that pretty pictures don’t always tell the whole story.
With sharp dialogue, skillful plotting and simmering dread, Influencer is plenty worthy of that “Like” button.
Malum
Equal parts Assault on Precinct 13 and The Shining by way of Charles Manson, Anthony DiBlasi’s Malum is a quick, mean, mad look into the abyss.
DiBlasi is reimagining his own 2014 flick Last Shift, although it feels more like a riff on Carpenter’s 1976 Precinct 13 than anything. Regardless, what the filmmaker does is confine the audience along with our hero in a diabolical funhouse.
Malum gets nuts, exactly as it should. Though it never feels genuinely unique, it manages to avoid feeling derivative because of DiBlasi’s commitment to the grisly madness afoot. The result is a solid, blood soaked bit of genre entertainment fully worthy of your 92 minutes.
M3GAN
Hilarious. Gerard Johnstone – whose 2014 horror gem Housebound is a must see – displays a sly instinct for humor in a film that understands what’s creepy about dolls and toxic relationships.
Allison Williams is solid as the workaholic who just wasn’t cut out to be a parent. That would be fine, except her orphaned niece could really use a parent, not an AI caregiver whose rushed-to-production programming and unseemly backstory make her dangerous in, let’s be honest, a pretty fun way.
You remember that trailer. We could have used more dancing, but when M3GAN plays “Toy Soldiers” on the piano, we were already hooked.
Renfield
They totally made a movie with a very saucy Nic Cage as Dracula. And a saucy Nic Cage is the best Nic Cage.
There’s at least one bloody toe in waters that send up rom-coms, satirize narcissistic relationships and homage a classic horror character while it’s also modernizing the themes that built him.
But experiencing Count Nicula alone is worth it. Plus, Nicholas Hoult is perfect as the put-upon sad boy with access to anti-hero superpowers and Awkwafina can wring plenty of humor from simply telling a guy named Kyle to F-off.
Renfield might be bloodier than you expect, but it’s just as much fun as you’re hoping for. Call it bloody good fun.
Skinamarink
There’s probably some version of this nightmare in your past. You were just a kid, separated from your parents and trying in vain to reach them or call out for help, or maybe just escape.
Remember how scared you were? Director Kyle Edward Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae do, and they twist that knife again and again for 100 minutes of dark, disorienting dread.
Cinematography and sound design are intertwined in an analog, cathode-ray aesthetic that recalls vintage, grainy VHS. Two children whisper to each other (“Where do you think Dad is? I don’t know.”) as they wander from room to room, with Ball’s camera never allowing you one second of relief.
