Monthly Archives: January 2025

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A Friend Indeed

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Brave the Dark

by George Wolf

In just four years, Angel Studios has become a leader in the faith-based entertainment market. TV’s The Chosen and the feature films Cabrini and Sound of Freedom were target audience favorites, and garnered at least some critical acclaim.

Angel’s latest production, Brave the Dark, lightens the hands and the editorializing for a generically successful crowd-pleaser about the power of belief for a troubled soul.

Co-written and directed by Damien Harris, the film is based on the life of Nathan Williams, who overcame a traumatic childhood thanks to the mentorship of his teacher, Stan Deen.

In and out of Pennsylvania foster homes after the death of his parents, Williams (Nicholas Hamilton, It, It Chapter Two) robs a store with some friends and is convicted of burglary. He’s saved from jail under the guardianship of Mr. Deen (Jared Harris, Damian’s brother), who is seemingly a favorite of everyone in the community.

But Nate continues to act out at nearly every turn, and the message that he doesn’t believe in his own worth is delivered as clearly as Deen’s need to soothe his loneliness after the painful death of his wife. Hamilton echos the film’s struggles with nuance, while the veteran Harris brings enough endearing authenticity to help smooth the rough edges in their many scenes together.

The film is another blunt, save-the-children instrument for Angel Studios. And it’s needlessly overlong as it slogs through multiple flashbacks on its way to a fairly obvious reveal and an “it’s not your fault” breakthrough that should have tried harder to distance itself from Good Will Hunting.

But there is heart here, and the real Nathan’s closing credits plea to “pay it forward” is sweetly schmalzy. Even better, the sincere attempts at storytelling are just competent enough to reach beyond the choir.

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The Born Identity

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The Inheritance

by Adam Barney

Reconnecting with an absentee parent later in life brings plenty of challenges and emotional work. This would only be magnified if your missing father happens to be a spy on the run from Interpol and the CIA.

Co-writer and director Neil Burger (The Illusionist, Limitless) wastes no time with the setup in Inheritance. Maya (Phoebe Dynevor from Bridgerton) has been taking care of her sick mother and hasn’t had any contact with her father, Sam (genre treasure Rhys Ifans, The Amazing Spider-Man, Notting Hill) in years. Unexpectedly, Sam shows up at her mother’s funeral and offers to take Maya on a business trip while she figures out life after caring for her mom. He’s sorry for abandoning the family and wants to start making it up to her.

Things go sideways almost immediately. Sam gets a call while they are at lunch and bolts out of the restaurant just before Interpol and local authorities show up looking for him. Maya ducks out of the restaurant only to get a call from her dad that he got away from the authorities, but he’s been kidnapped by someone much worse. He needs Maya to finish the job he was on – pick up a package from a safety deposit box and deliver it to his contact.

Maybe Maya takes after her dad more than she thinks. Now, she must learn on the job as she outwits and outruns all the parties hunting her and the package. Every stranger that approaches seems to have an ulterior motive and she doesn’t know who to trust, including her own dad.

Inheritance is a fast-paced globetrotter that rarely pauses to catch its breath. Shot on an iPhone and without permission in a lot of locations, the film has a grounded and realistic vibe to it. Because of these limitations, there are no big action set pieces. However, there is an impressive motorcycle chase.

Despite the brief 100-minute runtime and frantic pace, Inheritance does not shortchange the relationship drama between Maya and her dad. Their interactions are limited to brief phone calls but she is also doing her own research along the way to try and understand who he is. Both performances are quite good throughout and especially in a moment when they expose some raw nerves when their time is up.

Inheritance excels as a low budget spy thriller that works in some unique family drama. It does not try to reach beyond its limits to put the world at stake or to showcase a bunch of thrilling stunts. Instead, it delivers a smart and enjoyable chase around the globe with small, personal stakes that feel refreshing in a well-worn genre.

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City Hands

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Into the Deep

by George Wolf

In the category of shark movie stunt casting, Into the Deep may have bagged the great white whale. Because for the first time since Jaws set the standard fifty years ago, Richard Dreyfuss is sharkin’ again (note: piranha movies don’t count).

Well, he’s not actively sharkin’, as Dreyfuss plays Seamus, whom we mainly see schooling his granddaughter Cassidy on how important it is to respect the ocean and everything in it.

“It’s their kingdom. You’re a guest.”

Young Cassidy (Quinn P. Hensley) learns that the hard way when a shark attack kills her father. Years later, adult Cassidy (Scout Taylor-Compton) is an oceanographer still haunted by the nightmares of her father’s death, but willing to put fears aside for a pleasure trip with her new husband, Gregg (Callum McGowan).

Old friend “Benz” (Stuart Townsend) runs a weathered charter boat on the coastline, so Cass and Gregg agree to join another couple for some wreck diving. But before you can bid adieu to some fair Spanish ladies, both sharks and pirates come cruising.

The evil – I mean c’mon, look at the scar on his face! – Jordan Devane (Jon Seda) and his gang of former Navy SEALs hijack Benz’s boat, forcing the tourists to dive the shark-infested waters and retrieve their stash of drugs waiting below.

The movie’s tagline is the shameless “under water no one can hear you scream,” which immediately sets a low bar of expectations that director Christian Sesma manages to hit. Flashbacks are juggled awkwardly enough to kneecap any sort of tension, and while the CGI sharks work well enough in dream sequences, the actual attack set pieces are embarrassingly weak. Screenwriters Chad Law and Josh Ridgeway provide plenty of Scooby-Doo style exposition that anyone not named Richard can’t come close to elevating.

It is, of course, a nostalgic treat to see Dreyfuss at least near troubled waters again, even though you can’t help but wonder why he agreed. The answer comes with the extended message on shark conservation he delivers over the closing credits.

Fair enough. At least no real ones died for this bloody mess.

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Life During Wartime

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The Girl with the Needle

by Hope Madden

Were The Girl with the Needle any less gorgeous, less poetically filmed or liltingly told, the misery of 1919 Copenhagen might be too grim to bear. But somehow co-writer/director Magnus von Horn’s hypnotic storytelling bathes the nightmare in beauty, compassion, even hope.

Vic Carmen Sonne’s vacant expression gives Karoline an inscrutable quality that suits the character of a young seamstress coming to terms with more and more dire circumstances as WWI ends. Pregnant when her husband, long presumed dead, returns from the war, she faces difficult choices.

Each choice—always a hopeful step toward the promise of something better—is punished in time. Between the grimness of the wartime sufferings, the unreadable expression of the protagonist, and Michal Dymek’s gorgeous black and white cinematography, The Girl with the Needle conjures Václav Marhoul’s 2019 ordeal, The Painted Bird. But von Horn’s story rings with authenticity, partly because he treats the suffering with some distance and restraint, and partly because the story itself is rooted in true events.

Which, of course, only makes the tale that much more difficult. Bravo to the filmmaker and actor Trine Dryholm for treating Dagmar—the woman who represents Karoline’s biggest leap toward something better—the way they do.

Dryholm’s beautifully tormented, conflicted performance never veers toward cliché, or even toward sinister. Though her acts are unthinkably villainous—the stuff of legend and nightmare—they are rooted in a logic that feels honest to the character.

The dual performances transform this true crime horror story into a fable of mothers and children, of collecting and discarding family. Sonne’s childlike trust and Dryholm’s tortured caregiving further distort an image von Horn’s been twisting since his remarkable opening shots.

Mercifully, he ends his film and its portrait of family on a hopeful note. You won’t find much other mercy here, but alongside these powerful performances and mesmerizing storytelling, just a glimmer is enough.

Shudder Premiere

Face Off

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Grafted

by Hope Madden

Well, Sasha Rainbow knows for sure that there’s an audience for body horror enraged at the pressure to fit a certain standard of beauty. The fact that her feature debut Grafted will face constant comparisons to Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is less of a positive note. (There’s even a scene of someone gorging on shrimp, I swear to God.)

Rainbow introduces us to Wei (played in youth by Mohan Liu) and her father (Sam Wang). Both father and daughter are marked with some kind of red tissue across their faces, and while working on a cure, tragedy strikes, and Wei is left on her own.

Years later, she obtains a scholarship to a university in New Zealand and goes to live with her aunt (Xuai Hu) and cousin, Angela (Jess Hong). Try as she might, Wei (Joyena Sun) cannot fit in with Angela and her beautiful friends (Eden Hart, Sepi To’a), but she has other things on her mind—finishing her father’s research.

Rainbow, who co-wrote the script with Lee Murray and Mia Maramara, wraps social anxiety, assimilation, misogyny, sexual politics, the ludicrous nature of scientific advancement, racism, nationalism and more around Wei’s descent into madness, and it might be just too much to take on in 96 minutes.

Sun, Hong and Hart have fun, making the most of their onscreen personality swapping and Rainbow’s focus is most on target during these sequences. Jared Turner entertains as your typical vain professor, and To’a delivers enough empathy to give the film a touch of humanity.

But Grafted bites off more than it can chew. It too often feels unfocused, random, and superficial. It suffers not only in comparison to Fargeat’s film but to New Zealand’s pretty epic history of body horror.

That doesn’t mean it’s bad. There are some great ideas at work here, and every performance, large and small, brings its own weirdness to the screen. It’s certainly enough to keep me interested in seeing what Rainbow does next.

New In Theaters, The Screening Room

Screening Room: Wolf Man, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys and Much More

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Wolf Man, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys, Unstoppable, The Room Next Door, Back In Action, Every Little Thing, Night Call

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Pack Leader

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Wolf Man

by Hope Madden

A lot of people will go into Wolf Man with comparisons to the 1941 Lon Chaney Jr. original on the ready. For Leigh Whannell fans, threads common to his 2020 gem The Invisible Man are easier to connect.

That’s partly because his new lycanthropic adventure is not a reboot, remake, or sequel to the original film, and partly because the underlying metaphor bears a little resemblance to his last movie.

Thirty years ago, young Blake (Zac Chandler) and his frighteningly protective, militia-esque father (Sam Jaeger) go hunting in the deep, isolated, picturesque Oregon woods near their property. They find something, and it isn’t a bear.

Flash forward, and adult Blake (Christopher Abbott)—a doting father to young Ginger (Matilda Firth, named no doubt as nod to Ginger Snaps in an applause worthy move)—gets the paperwork. His dad is finally, officially considered dead. He went into the woods some years back and just never came out. Now Blake, Ginger, and Blake’s wife Charlotte (Julia Garner) need to head back to Oregon to take care of the old farm.

Abbott and Garner hold the film’s insistent metaphor in check even when Whannell’s dialog (co-written with Corbett Tuck) veers a little too close to obvious. Blake is a good man, a kind man, a loving father—could he have enough of his old man in him to mean violence to the women in his life?

Whannell’s instinct for horror set pieces and claustrophobic action wring that metaphor for all the tension it’s worth in the second act. But by Act 3, when the tortured love of a monster feels more akin to Cronenberg’s The Fly (due partly to Whannell’s writing, partly to Arjen Tuiten’s monster design), the allegory begins to crumble under its own weight.

Although many viewers may have already checked out due to that creature design.

There is a tidy little gift of thrills here, very traditionally constructed with limited complications, allowing for a bit more depth of character. But it all feels slight, and outside of some nifty bits of action, overwrought.

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By Design

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The Brutalist

by George Wolf

After a series of memorable supporting roles (including Thirteen, Funny Games, and Melancholia), Brady Corbet took a step toward filmmaking in 2012 as co-writer and star of the creepily effective Antonio Campos thriller Simon Killer. He moved behind the camera for The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and Vox Lux (2018), teaming with his co-writer and wife Mona Fastvold for two captivating features anchored in history.

But as impressive as Corbet’s filmography has been so far, the audacious scope (three and a half hours, with an intermission) and ambitious craftsmanship (Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shoot in 70mm VistaVision – out of date in American since the early 60s) of The Brutalist arrives as an utterly shocking step forward. And even when it teeters on a late, self-indulgent precipice, the film heralds Corbet and Fastvold as filmmakers of impressive vision and skill.

Though their characters are again changed by history, this time they give those characters more of a chance to shape it. We arrive in post-WWII America with László Tóth (an astounding Adrien Brody), a Hungarian who has survived the Nazi concentration camps and come to work with his cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola) in a Pennsylvania furniture store. Corbet’s gorgeous upside-down framing of the Statue of Liberty foreshadows both Tóth’s future in a new land and the nimble camerawork to come, with the memorable scale from Daniel Blumberg’s majestic score signaling the increasing stakes.

László has lost much to wartime trauma, and Brody makes the pain palpable. But as he waits for word as to when his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones, never better) and niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) may join him in America, László holds tight to his pride from working as a celebrated architect in Budapest.

When local tycoon Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce, terrific as the film’s Daniel Day-Lewis) learns of László’s talent, he hires him to design a long desired community center. The project will come to consume László’s very existence.

Corbet assembles the saga in two chapters, and after a fairly straightforward setup in Act One, motives and messaging become more abstract. On the surface is an epic tale of post war America’s give and take relationship with its immigrants, of beauty and art surviving the worst of humanity and of the deep complexities within the American capitalist dream. And if it stopped there, The Brutalist would stand as a grand achievement. But László isn’t the only architect thinking very big here, and Corbet builds up Act Two (and the accompanying epilogue) with grand ideas on personal legacy, Jewish history, sexual repression, power and shame, and ultimately, more questions than he’s intending to answer.

Corbet’s direction also becomes more insistent, adding shots that move away from what his characters would naturally notice to stress elements for audience benefit. The gorgeous photography, muscular framing and powerful performances ensure nothing goes to waste, but a road to a grand and profound statement begins to gather some stones.

While the film does feel overlong, it is never boring, as nearly every frame contains something, or someone, intriguing. Zsófia’s arc – that of a girl rendered mute from wartime trauma who grows to reclaim her destiny – could fuel its own feature film, as could Attila’s path to assimilation, and any number of supporting characters adding memorable moments to the landscape.

And The Brutalist is nothing if not memorable. Though the sheer accomplishment may stand a bit taller than the final statement, it cements Corbet as a voice that cannot be ignored.

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Magic in the Air

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Every Little Thing

by Rachel Willis

The life of Terry Masear and the lives of the hummingbirds she cares for are the subject of director Sally Aitken’s documentary, Every Little Thing.

Deep in the heart of Los Angeles, Aitken manages to capture a pastoral beauty in the area as she documents Terry’s efforts to rehabilitate injured hummingbirds. Many of the hummingbirds that come Terry’s way are nestlings who have lost their mothers. Others have suffered an injury of sorts, such as being hit by a car or attacked by another hummingbird.

As we watch Terry’s day-to-day routine – feeding, caring for, and even rehabilitating wing injuries – we get snippets of her past. She talks warmly and lovingly about her late husband and his support for her endeavors to help the birds.

However, there are moments throughout the documentary that speak to deeper trauma, and this is a tough documentary for the tender-hearted. Though Terry’s compassion for the birds comes through in the way she handles and speaks to them, she has a brusqueness that conveys all too well that not every bird brought to her is going to survive.

If you can tough out the harder, more devastating parts of the documentary, though, you’re rewarded with several wonderful moments. Slow-motion video of hummingbirds in flight show that even slowed down, their wings move with remarkable speed and agility. Flowers bloom on screen, showcasing the beauty the natural world has to offer.

And Terry’s empathy for these tiny, magical marvels of nature is a joy to behold. She addresses each bird by name and knows them all. There is something truly beautiful in what Terry does, and Aitken captures it all with warmth and sincerity. Almost as if to balance out the speed with which a hummingbird moves, the film asks the audience to slow down, to appreciate the world around us. Especially when our tiny heroes can disappear in the blink of an eye.

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Wrong Place Wrong Time

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Night Call

by Brandon Thomas

There’s something inherently satisfying when the everyman gets sucked into extraordinary circumstances. We all knew that Rambo wasn’t going to get killed by the bad guy. John Wayne didn’t get offed in a movie until near the end of his movie-making career. Did that necessarily dampen my enjoyment of any of those movies? Nope! However, it’s equally gratifying to see an Average Joe like John McClane drop Hans Gruber off of Nakatomi Tower. 

College student Mady (Jonathan Feltre) spends his nights working as a locksmith to make ends meet. It’s a thankless job that puts him into contact with people in stressful situations and short tempers. Being the nice guy that he is, Mady bends protocol ever so slightly when opening an apartment for Claire (Natacha Krief). As Mady waits in the newly unlocked apartment for Claire to pay him, the real resident arrives and is none too pleased. From that moment on, Mady’s night turns into a break-neck race for survival. 

Action movies are all about energy. The best of the bunch (think Die Hard, First Blood, Hard Boiled) are symphonies of exciting sequences. Even their quieter – character based – moments can get the blood pumping. Night Call director Michiel Blanchart understands this and barely gives the audience any breathing room for 97 minutes. Given that this isn’t a big-budget film, Blanchart leans into character and clever plotting to wring out every ounce of tension that he can. That said, there’s still a pretty gnarly car chase and a few brutal fights.

Mady might be an everyman but he’s not without agency. The character is willing to do whatever it takes to survive. The audience is right there with Mady and his frustration and anger at being sucked into a situation that has nothing to do with him. The script – and Feltre’s performance – never questions Mady’s intelligence or drive. It’s a breath of fresh air in an era where a lot of action movies like to take the piss out of their leading men.

Night Call is Blanchart’s first feature-film and it’s one hell of a debut. From delivering a tight script, to knowing how to shoot and edit action that flows, Blanchart has shown that he understands the nuts and bolts of action cinema. 

While it might not even match the catering budget of the latest Bond film, what Night Call has unquestionably is a copious amount of energy and creativity.