It’s generally a good bet that if Jared Harris is in your film, it will be worth watching.
This is certainly the case for writer/director Virginia Gilbert’s Reawakening, and the cast surrounding Harris help elevate the entire film.
On the tenth anniversary of their daughter Clare’s disappearance, John (Harris) and Mary (Juliet Stevenson) make a renewed plea to the public to help them in their search for their daughter. It’s made known through subtle pieces of conversation that Clare wasn’t kidnapped but ran away from home at the age of 14.
Brief flashbacks show pieces from the past that help to explain the events leading up to Clare’s departure, but these moments never overshadow the present narrative. We frequently see how her disappearance continues to affect her parents. Mary’s grief is overwhelming. John looks for his daughter in the faces of every young woman he passes. Both have continued with their lives, but it’s clear they will never move on from their loss.
This is a subtle thriller, as the twists and turns play second fiddle to a poignant character study. Harris takes center stage as first a grieving father, then a skeptical one as a woman claiming to be Clare (Erin Doherty) enters their lives. It’s not hard to understand why Mary and John have such divergent reactions to the return of their daughter. Their reactions underscore both blind hope and stunning disbelief.
The film’s subtlety sometimes works against it. There are small moments that are easy to miss even though they play an important role in the overall narrative.
But what works for this film is the veracity of this small family as they seek answers and struggle to reconnect. Harris, especially, sells his role as a father who just wants to know what really happened to his beloved daughter.
It’s a moving analysis of family trauma that resonates long after the credits roll.
The idea of being kidnapped is one of those primal fears, one of the first worries we have as children. No doubt those fears have inspired many of these horror movies, and our own connection to those same anxieties the reason why so many of them hit home. From Hounds of Love to Split, Don’t Breathe to Misery,Last House on the Left to Prisoners and so many more, movies centered on kidnapping can leave you breathless and scarred. That must be why we had such a tough time landing on our five favorites. But here they are, live from the Gateway Film Center on Ohio State University campus.
5. The Woman (2011)
There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a feral woman (an awesome Pollyanna McIntosh), chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.
The film rethinks family – well, patriarchy, anyway. You know from the opening, sunshiny segment that nothing is as lovely as it seems, but what lurks underneath this wholesome facade begins with some obvious ugliness—abuse, incest—but where it leads is diabolical.
Nothing happens in this film by accident – not even the innocent seeming baking of cookies – nor does it ever happen solely to titillate. It’s a dark and disturbing adventure that finds something unsavory in our primal nature and even worse in our quest to civilize. Don’t even ask about what it finds in the dog pen.
4. The Loved Ones (2009)
Writer/director/Tasmanian Sean Byrne upends high school clichés and deftly maneuvers between gritty drama and glittery carnage in a story that borrows from other horror flicks but absolutely tells its own story.
Brent (Xavier Samuel) is dealing with guilt and tragedy in his own way, and his girlfriend Holly tries to be patient with him. Oblivious to all this, Lola (a gloriously wrong-minded Robin McLeavy) asks Brent to the end of school dance. He politely declines, which proves to be probably a poor decision.
Inside Lola’s house, we’re privy to the weirdest, darkest image of a spoiled princess and her daddy. The daddy/daughter bonding over power tool related tasks is – well – I’m not sure touching is the right word for it.
The Loved Ones is a cleverly written, unique piece of filmmaking that benefits from McLeavy’s inspired performance as much as it does its filmmaker’s sly handling of subject matter.
3. I’m Not Scared (2003)
Director Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo) crafts a perfect, gripping, breathless thriller with his Italian period piece. In a tiny Southern Italian town, kids run through lushly photographed fields on the hottest day of the year. They’re playing, and also establishing a hierarchy, and with their game Salvatores introduces a tension that will not let up until the last gasping breaths of his film.
Michele (Giuseppe Cristiano) sees a boy down a deep hole on a neighboring farm. The boy, Filippo (Mattia Di Pierro), believes he is dead and Michele is an angel. But the truth is far more sinister. I’m Not Scared is a masterpiece of a thriller.
2. Oldboy (2003)
A guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that this guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.
The guy is Dae-su Oh (Min-sik Choi). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.
Choi is unforgettable as the film’s anti-hero, and his disheveled explosion of emotion is perfectly balanced by the elegantly evil Ji-tae Yu.
Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.
1. The Vanishing (Spoorloos) (1988)
Back in ’88, filmmaker George Sluizer and novelist Tim Krabbe adapted his novel about curiosity killing a cat. The result is a spare, grim mystery that works the nerves.
An unnervingly convincing Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu takes us through the steps, the embarrassing trial and error, of executing his plan. His Raymond is a simple person, really, and one fully aware of who he is: a psychopath and a claustrophobe.
Three years ago, Raymond abducted Saskia (Johanna ter Steege), and her boyfriend Rex (Gene Bervoets) has gone a bit mad with the mystery of what happened to her. So mad, in fact, that when Raymond offers to clue him in as long as he’s willing to suffer the same fate, Rex bites. Do not make the mistake of watching Sluizer’s neutered 1993 American remake.
Hope & George review this week’s new releases: The Running Man, Keeper, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, In Your Dreams, The Carpenter’s Son, and Being Eddie.
And since 1987, which way have the original film’s stakes of weaponized disinformation, competitive cruelty and strategic class warfare been trending?
So enter director/co-writer Edgar Wright and star Glen Powell to get down to some dirty business in a pretty familiar dystopian future.
Powell is our new Ben Richards, who winds up on the The Running Man game show trying to win enough “new dollars” to pay for the care of his sick daughter and maybe even spring her and his wife Sheila (Jayme Lawson) out of the Co-Op City slums.
Producer Killian (Josh Brolin) likes the feisty cut of Ben’s jib, and is only too happy to start manipulating the game so Richards can become an engaging “final dude” for the cheering, bloodlusty hoards.
And this time, those common folk are joining the star “hunters” while the runners rely on underground friends and old, untraceable tech in trying to stay alive for 30 days.
In the Stephen King library, this material has always seemed like a more overt, in-your-face take on the themes he explored in The Long Walk. And while Wright avoids the high cheese factor of Arnold’s Running Man film, he keeps the lighter, glitzy tone that seems right for a game show aesthetic. Wright leans less on the trademark swipe cuts and wink-wink edits this time, but provides plenty of color splashes and engaging action set pieces to keep those eyeballs entertained.
Powell brings more than enough rogue-ish charm to make Ben a winning hero/anti-hero, Brolin is a perfect show biz menace and Colman Domingo is gloriously over-the-top as show host Bobby T. Both Michael Cera and CODA‘s Emilia Jones drive thru for some fun cameos, and the entire ensemble has no trouble keeping Wright’s vibe cooking.
Don’t expect subtlety. The moral lessons are clearly stated and the last act pulls in some explanatory (but nicely organic) speechifying before the crowd-pleasing finale. But hey, it’s telling us that those things we were worrying about almost 40 years ago have only gotten worse.
We already knew that. Might as well have some fun running with that fact for two hours.
Osgood Perkins is the gift that keeps on giving. In just 16 months he’s turned out three wildly different gems and a fourth is filming now. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves because we’d run the risk of under appreciating his latest, Keeper.
Tatiana Maslany (She-Hulk) is Liz, a New York City artist anxiously headed to her first ever cabin in the woods style excursion. She’s not really a country person, and she thinks maybe the fact that her soft-spoken doctor boyfriend Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) gifted her a beige cardigan for their first big trip together might be a red flag. She’s afraid he’s married and she’s a side piece.
There’s something melancholy and broken and beautiful in the way these two actors play characters playing roles. Malcolm hangs Liz’s painting in his home and cooks and behaves romantically while looking as if he’s crushed under some sorrowful weight. Meanwhile Liz’s words and expressions never match, one cheerful while the other is tearful or vice versa. It’s an exquisite performance of two people pretending to be a happy couple when, indeed, perhaps their romance is a fraud.
This doleful charade nurtures an atmosphere of paranoia gorgeously amplified by Perkins’s hypnotically creepy aesthetic. The architecture of dark magic recalls his underseen Gretel & Hansel and show-don’t-tell exposition occasionally conjures I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.
Perkins did not write Keeper, and there are times when his unsettling direction can’t quite overcome screenwriter Nick Lepard’s haphazard mythology. There’s a disquieting relationship analogy at work that does work, much thanks to Maslany’s gripping turn. Her commitment to this character’s experience elevates scenes that could otherwise have nearly felt unintentionally funny. But you never doubt Liz.
Keeper turns monster movie perhaps too abruptly and not as convincingly as it might have. For that and a couple of other reasons, the third act feels a bit cheap after such a trippy lead up. But it’s a gorgeous exercise in isolated horror and reason enough to remain excited for Perkins’s next movie.
I remember so clearly, back in 2016 when Now You See Me 2 came out, thinking—hold the phone, Now You See Me made enough money to merit a sequel?
Imagine my surprise a decade on finding that apparently there’s interest enough for a third episode, Now You See Me, Now You Don’t.
Is there reason to hope the third Magician Robin Hood film will be at least a fun spectacle?
Ruben Fleischer directs, which seems fitting because it was on his zom-com masterstroke Zombieland that NYSM co-stars Jesse Eisenberg and Woody Harrelson first teamed up. Both actors return to their tricky ways as egotistical control freak Atlas (Eisenberg) and amiable mentalist Merritt (Harrelson), working this time from a script co-written by Zombieland (and Deadpool) scribe Rhett Reese.
That all looks promising, but magic is nothing if not sleight of hand.
A lot of familiar faces from NYSM 1 & 2, plus three scrappy new magicians—Bosco (Dominic Sessa), Charlie (Justice Smith), and June (Ariana Greenblatt)—join forces to defeat diabolical South African diamond heiress, Veronika Vanderberg (Rosamund Pike).
Pike is perfect, effortlessly cutting the ideal figure as the elegant, narcissistic, ultra-wealthy villain. Smith once again charms as a self-deprecating nerd. Eisenberg seems like he might be in literal pain delivering this dialog.
And there’s a lot! At least 25% of Eisenberg’s lines are delivered as voiceover, while his character explains everything the viewer may not know about the last two episodes, the characters in the current episode, missing characters, the plan for the heist, the mysterious details even he doesn’t understand. If magic or moviemaking is about show over tell, Fleischer doesn’t know it.
What is a Now You See Me movie, really? It’s a heist flick plus magic plus social justice. At least one of those three elements is likely to please any viewer. But Reese’s script, co-written with Seth Grahame-Smith and Michael Lesslie, is nothing but exposition. Worse, Fleischer’s direction (and all that dialog) drains the wonder from every scene.
The film plays more like a Super Friends episode from the 1970s: lots of very colorful, one-dimensional characters and over-the-top villainy lazily packaged for mass consumption. Maybe I’d have enjoyed it more with a big bowl of Sugar Corn Pops.
There are plenty of great reasons to want Nicolas Cage in your movie. Downplaying it alongside a young Jesus probably isn’t one of them.
But writer/director Lotfy Nathan seems undaunted, and he guides The Carpenter’s Son around Cage’s often distracting presence for a Biblical tale rooted in a more historical approach.
Nathan has based his script on “the Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” one of the apocryphal writings by early Christians that describe events missing in the New Testament. Cage is The Carpenter, who smuggles The Mother (FKA Twigs, saddled with an underdeveloped role) and their infant son out of the city before King Herod’s officers can sentence The Boy to death.
The family lays low for years, but by the time The Boy is a teenager (Noah Jupe), whispers are starting to spread about his mysterious powers. How Nic Cage lays low is another mysterious question, with his neatly trimmed beard and distinctly American accent adding to the feeling that he may have wandered in from another set.
And early on, the film seems headed for a disastrous collision of awkward tone and misguided ambition. But slowly, as Nathan focuses more on The Boy’s growing friendship with The Stranger (Isla Johnston), a compelling narrative begins to emerge.
Jupe (Suburbicon, Honey Boy, A Quiet Place, Ford v Ferrari) continues to impress as a now young adult, and Johnston delivers a standout supporting turn of intrigue. With their relationship at the center, the film becomes a unique coming-of-age story that offers both a relatable humanity and a possibility of Divine Providence.
Another part of the curiosity around this film is just what audience Nathan is going after. The faith-based crowd will find moments of blasphemy while the non-believers will scoff at the silliness. Folk horror fans will question how it earned that label, and plenty more will be waiting for a Cage rage that never materializes.
While it’s not the trainwreck you’re afraid it’s going to be, The Carpenter’s Son can’t build anything that’s truly satisfying. The blueprint may be provocative, but the support system remains plenty wobbly.
The delightfully juvenile humor that propels much of the new Dreamworks animated film In Your Dreams entertains. It also amplifies the tension between tween big sister Stevie (Jolie Hoant-Rappaport) and little brother, Elliot (Elias Janssen).
If the perfectionist eldest sibling is going to somehow get her parents to stay together, the last thing she needs is Elliot and his foul-smelling stuffed animal Baloney Tony (Craig Robinson) getting in the way.
But naturally, when Stevie makes a wish to find Sandman and make her dream of a happy family come true, somehow Elliot gets himself involved. Now Stevie can’t make her way through dreamland to find the Sandman without her pesky little brother.
In that way, In Your Dreams is sort of the Predator: Badlandsof the grade school set.
Though the computer-generated animation is sometimes disappointing, the movie’s chaotic energy and humor while our heroes work toward finding the Sandman—plus a fun, splashy bit of hand drawn animation— are a blast. It’s during these dream montages that co-writers/directors Erik Benson and Alexander Woo (who write with Stanely Moore) are most inspired. It’s also where we get to spend the most time with Baloney Tony, easily the film’s funniest character.
As dreams of life among happily animated breakfast foods turn rancid under the influence of Nightmara (Gia Carides), In Your Dreams runs through a fun, funny, and often insightful set of dream sequences set to appropriate and fun needle drops.
The film’s themes are compelling and often insightfully rendered, and the storyline itself bears originality sometimes lost in family films. But once we finally reach the Sandman, the look, feel, humor and imagination seem to disappear. We build and build to Sandman, but he and his castle are bland and forgettable.
In Your Dreams never fully recovers, most of Act 3 feeling like a quick and easy escape route from the otherwise clever conceits in the plot. There are definitely laughs and fun sequences, but you may forget this one as quickly as last night’s dream.
This week’s new releases in the screening room: Predator: Badlands, Christy, Die My Love, Train Dreams, Lost & Found in Cleveland, Nuremberg, and Down to the Felt.
Whenever anybody ranks the Predator films—or the Alien films, for that matter—most episodes hold up moderately to well, except for those crossovers. Well, it appears filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg, who’s asked us to rethink so much about the Predator franchise, wants us to revisit that as well.
And why not? In 2022, the co-writer/director of Preybrought new life to a fun action thriller series that seemed to have worn itself out. And then, as we all waited patiently for his next sequel, he dazzled us with the bloody fun animated anthology, Predator: Killer of Killers.
Now Trachtenberg betrays a love of this franchise and a seemingly endless inspiration for its universe as he takes us on a trajectory begun when Paul W. S. Anderson first pitted the two most badass alien lifeforms against each other in 2004’s AVP:Alien vs. Predator. Because it was in this installment, weak as it was, that the rogue hunter learned the value of teamwork.
Predator: Badlands introduces Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), runt of his Yautja clan, banished unless he can return with his trophy: the Kalisk of Genna. But do you remember when Tom Hiddleston and his band of misfits landed on Skull Island in search of Kong, only to find out that everything on the island wanted to eat them? Genna is like that, and Dek is so full of rage, daddy issues, and insecurity that all he can think to do is beat his chest and lash out.
Luckily, what’s left of a synthetic being named Thia (Elle Fanning) knows the lay of the land and can help Dek survive the planet and find his trophy, so long as he carries her back to her legs.
Thia’s a bit of a Chatty Cathy, a personality tic that allows Trachtenberg and his co-writers, Patrick Aison and Jim Thomas, to clue viewers in on the planet, its creatures, and her own backstory as the budding frenemy relationship develops the film’s themes.
It’s fun. Fanning’s charmingly garrulous sidekick brings more lightheartedness to this installment than we’ve seen in previous episodes, but the action is fun and frequent. Expect plenty of bloodshed regardless of the PG-13 rating (it’s mostly beasties, some of them green blooded).
The film is often frustratingly dark, limiting the enjoyment of many set pieces, but the score is amazing and the depth of character is an unexpected pleasure. Predator: Badlands is not the best of the franchise, nor is it as ground breaking as Prey, but it’s a ton of fun.
