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Rough Justice

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The Mauritanian

by George Wolf

In the face of the highest of ideals, America is capable of horrible things. According to his own writings, Mohamedou Ould Salahi believed in those ideals, until he was held without charge in Guantanamo Bay for over 14 years.

Oscar-winning director Kevin Macdonald and a cast full of veteran talent tell the story of The Mauritanian with impressive craftsmanship, a proud conscience and a narrative cluttered with good intentions.

Not long after 9/11, Salahi (Tahar Rahim from A Prophet and The Past) was apprehended with suspicions of being a Bin Ladin confidant and the “Al-Qaeda Forrest Gump.” His was to be the first death penalty prosecution of The Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld response, until human rights attorney Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster) took up Salahi’s case pro bono.

The script, adapted from Salahi’s book by M.B. Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani, picks the emotional teams early. Salahi is a sympathetic character, and quickly charms Hollander’s assistant Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley) while Hollander herself remains unmoved, committed only to the rule of law.

This commitment serves her well, especially against Marine lawyer Stu Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), who has a personal and professional stake in seeing Salahi put to death.

Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play, One Day in September) breaks from the pack of similarly-themed films with a tone that shifts between self-congratulations and tearful apology. The “rough justice” abuse Salahi suffers is clearly barbaric but still feels sanitized, and part of a larger question the film eschews in favor of heavy hearted hindsight.

But there isn’t a false note in this cast. Even when their character arcs may feel predetermined, every player – from principals to supporting – delivers enough heart and humanity to keep the lessons of Salahi’s ordeal resonating.

Landing at a time when the conscience of the country is literally being voted on, The Mauritanian is a committed if somewhat unwieldy reminder of the stakes.

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Avenging Fred Hampton

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Judas and the Black Messiah

by Hope Madden

Daniel Kaluuya’s range is simply unreal. From the vulnerable hero of Get Out to the chilling sociopath of Widows, he’s prepared us for quite a gamut of characters. I’m not sure he’s prepared us for his Chairman, though.

Kaluuya plays Fred Hampton, Chairman of the Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party circa 1969, in Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah. A feeling of mortality permeates his performance, and with it a melancholy sense of urgency. His quiet moments swell with tenderness and turmoil, and his speeches burn through the screen. We’ve seen some great performances this year, but we’d give Kaluuya the Oscar right now.

That’s a lot to live up to, but the balance of King’s cast meets the task. LaKeith Stanfield, as police informant Bill O’Neal, strikes the right balance between cowardice and regret. He doesn’t try to make us pity O’Neal and the deal he’s struck with the devil, but he gives the character an energy that suggests more emotional and psychological layers than what’s found on the page.

As FBI Agent Roy Mitchell, Jesse Plemons is as solid as ever, delivering lines with enough genuineness that Mitchell doesn’t become an outright villain until he, along with O’Neal, have gone too far to pretend they’re anything else.

Their performances draw support from an understated Dominique Fishback as a firmly but not blindly committed comrade—Hampton’s girlfriend Deborah Johnson. Meanwhile, Dominique Thorne has badassedness to burn as part of a deep ensemble that impresses in most every turn.  

The film never feels like a biopic. The rendering is far more crime thriller, and had this been a simple fictional account of a mole in a political organization, King’s film would have been riveting. Performances alone would have elevated the genre beats.

The real star may be King’s script, co-written with Will Berson and Keith and Kenneth Lucas. There’s no placating. There’s no playing to the masses. King doesn’t water down Hampton’s message of unifying the poor or throwing off the oppression of a police state. In fact, this is a film that means to show the difference between revolution and the “candy coated façade of gradual reform.”

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The Wrong Contractor

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Paradise Cove

by Hope Madden

What’s that network that plays movies round the clock with titles like Cheerleader Murderer and Sultry Stepmom or Deadly Realtor? Because Paradise Cove is three F-bombs and an on-the-nose title away from fitting right in.

Martin Guigui directs Sherry Klein’s script. Either he did not read it first, or he did read it and simply didn’t understand it. I can think of no third option to explain this mess.

Knox (Todd Grinnell, henceforth to be known as “Cardboard Paul Rudd”) and Tracey (Mena Suvari) move into the beachfront Malibu property Knox’s mom left him after she died in a fire onsite. It needs a lot of work, but Knox is a contractor, and he’s certain that he sees a 6-million-dollar view.

With a little help from Griff (Eddie Goines) and a blind eye from the zoning department, maybe he and Tracey can flip this, build a home of their dreams far from Malibu, and start that family they’re already using fertility treatments to conceive.

But there’s this homeless woman (Kristin Bauer van Straten) who lives under their deck. Unfortunately, it appears that folks from Malibu stick up for other folks from Malibu—no matter how dangerous, homeless or insane—and outsiders aren’t welcome. It’s like Maine with Botox.

The script manages to provide opportunities for a genre-specific tension. Knox knows this woman can get inside their house, but an event keeps him from telling his wife. This single event should, if handled properly, create anxiety around whether or not she’s in the house while it develops conflict within the main character.

Instead, Guigui treats every scene as if no other scene has taken place. It doesn’t help that all of this tension non-building is in service of Knox’s character arc.

Is Knox that wholesome Midwesterner we first meet, the one so willing to hand $5 to the homeless vet out his car window? (FYI: The homeless are not treated with much respect by this film. )

Or is he something more, the product of a sketchy background, able to hold his innocent wife’s hormone treatment over her head whenever she thinks she might smell a rat?

Who knows? He’s being played by Cardboard Paul Rudd, who’s better suited to the role of Handsome Carpool Dad.

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Offer It Up

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Saint Maud

by Hope Madden

Never waste your pain.

What a peculiarly Catholic sentiment. Like old school, self-flagellating, “suffering cleanses” kind of Catholic: the agony and the ecstasy. It’s in the eyes of the martyrs. This is how you see God.

This is what Maud wants.

Writer/director Rose Glass knows that Catholicism is one of the most common elements in horror. You see it in the way she shoots down an old staircase in an alley, or up at the high windows of a lovely manor.

There’s been a glut of uninspired, superficial drivel. But there are also great movies: The Devils (1971), The Omen (1976), and the Godfather of them all, The Exorcist (1973). Saint Maud stakes its claim in this unholy ground with a singular vision of loneliness, purpose and martyrdom.

Maud (an astonishing Morfydd Clark) has some undefined blood and shame in her recent past. But she survived it, and she knows God saved her for a reason. She’s still working out what that reason is when she meets Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a former choreographer now crumbling beneath lymphoma.

Maud cannot save Amanda’s body, but because of just the right signs from Amanda, she is determined to save her soul.

Ehle’s performance strikes a perfect image of casual cruelty, her scenes with the clearly delicate Maud a dance of curiosity and unkindness. Ehle’s onscreen chemistry with Clark suggests the bored, almost regretful thrill of manipulation.

Clark’s searching, desperate performance is chilling. Glass routinely frames her in ways to evoke the images of saints and martyrs, giving the film an eerie beauty, one that haunts rather than comforts. The conversations and pathos are so authentic that suddenly the behavior of one mad obsessive feels less lurid and more tragic.

As a horror film, Saint Maud is a slow burn. Glass and crew repay you for your patience, though, with a smart film that believes in its audience. Her film treads the earth between mental illness and religious fervor, but its sights are on the horror of the broken hearted and lonesome.

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Arkansas Dreaming

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Minari

by Hope Madden

Yes, I am a sucker for films containing devastatingly adorable little kids. Sue me.

Minari fits that bill. Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung essentially recreates the story of his own family’s struggles to become farmers when he was 6. The character based on the filmmaker is played by Alan S. Kim (that little face!), and though Minari is not told exclusively from his perspective, his presence—and the innocence and chaos that represents—suits the effort.

Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) were having problems before making the move to a tiny plot of Arkansas farmland. As Jacob struggles to turn their fortunes around, he brings his mother-in-law to live with them to make his wife happy.

Lucky for us all Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung, a treat) is a stitch.

The dynamic within the family is sweetly authentic, and the levity never overtakes a scene. There’s a tenderness here that, along with moments of joy, elevates the seriousness and even desperation of the family’s situation.

Chung’s cinematic style quietly beguiles. There is enormous struggle in nearly every scene, but it’s told with gentleness and grace. It’s the rhythm to a song made up of so much more. Chung’s skill as a storyteller is immense, but he couldn’t have created such nuance without such a game cast.

Yeun proves again the depths of his talent. If you missed his menacingly perfect turn in 2018’s Burning, you should definitely watch that right away. To the same degree that his character there was conniving and calculating, Minari’s Jacob is earnest and warm. You ache for him to succeed, and not just as a farmer.

Likewise, Han hits no false note as an involuntary Arkansan. It would have been so easy to oversell the bitterness or disappointment—as it would have been for Yuh-jung to have gone bigger with her “crazy granny” character. But broad strokes are nowhere to be found in this delicate drama.

Plus Alan Kim is just so damn cute.

Minari offers a close look—optimistic, but not sentimental—at the American Dream. If you feel like that’s been done to death, that just means you haven’t seen this movie yet.

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Forest for the Trees

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Land

by George Wolf

After directing one short film and ten episodes of her House of Cards TV series, Robin Wright makes an assured feature debut with Land, mining one shattered life for graceful insight into healing.

Wright also delivers a touching and understated performance as Edee, a woman who clings to grief as her closest connection to the husband and child she has lost, and who can no longer bear any expectations that she will “get better.”

Moving alone to a remote cabin in the Wyoming wilderness, Edee ignores advice to at least keep a vehicle at her disposal and settles in, wanting nothing else to do with anything or anyone.

No surprise, but Wyoming winters are harsh for the inexperienced. Eventually, it is only the aid of a passing hunter named Miguel (Demián Bichir, also terrific) that saves Edee’s life.

Miguel is carrying emotional scars as well, and the two strike a deal. He will teach her the survival skills she needs, and when the lessons are done, she will never see him again.

The screenplay from Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam may not blaze any thematic trails, but it does resist following the roads most expected. Of course Edee begins to feel a human connection again, but this point isn’t exploited for a cheap and easy narrative out.

The performances from Wright and Bichir make you care about pain even when you haven’t glimpsed it, giving director Wright a solid emotional base to lean on while deftly unveiling the different lives Edee and Miguel used to lead.

Edee’s memories of her family are brought to the screen with a tenderness from Wright that is both touching and well-played. Woven through the beautifully framed and intimidating Wyoming landscapes are wonderful sketches of visual storytelling.

Yes, we’ve heard Land‘s lessons before, but Wright’s feature debut behind the camera impresses through her fine instincts for subtle over showy, paring those lessons down to an essence as timeless as the majestic skyline.

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The Forest is Satan’s Church

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Sator

by Hope Madden

There are a lot of films that can be considered a passion project. Sator fits the category, that passion coming from writer/director/producer/cinematographer/composer Jordan Graham.

Graham essentially did everything besides act, and it gives the film a specific vision that’s clearly undiluted by collaboration. That is in the film’s win column, but it’s also a bit of a loss.

Graham’s vision is one of isolation, dysfunction, paranoia, and mental illness—or it’s about the presence of a supernatural being with bad intentions concerning Adam (Gabriel Nicholson) and his family.

The sound design here is as impressive as the way Graham guides us visually. The filmmaker shifts slowly between different aspect ratios, as well as from black and white to color and back. The movement is so gradual as to almost hypnotize.

Meanwhile, somewhere in the background Nani (June Peterson)—Adam’s grandmother—talks on and on. The voice is pre-recorded, and she’s talking about, and sometimes talking for, a presence.

Graham slides in an out of the audio, which often mismatches the visual although all of it blends into a dreamlike horror. The film resembles a nightmare, but it may also simply resemble a form of mental illness that is itself a bit of a nightmare.

Graham’s slow burn unveils trauma as it wallows in its aftermath, and the thick fog of delusion hangs everywhere. But films like this sometimes paint themselves into a corner because there are no real answers, and the audience investment needs to be repaid somehow.

Here’s where Sator comes up slightly short. Though the sudden punctuation of violence startles you from the dream of the film and provides a reasonable and horrific cap to the picture, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the whole adventure took too long. Act 2 feels too often like a slog, and the entirely unresolved images peppered here and there wind up feeling less like spooky ambiguity and more like points of frustration.

It’s not nearly enough to sink this Herculean effort. Graham’s film possesses an artistry that can’t be denied, and it succeeds more than it fails.

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Secret Love

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Two of Us (Deux)

by George Wolf

The plan was to sell each of their neighboring French flats and move to Rome. After decades of living in secret, Nina and Madeleine (“Mado”) would enjoy their twilight years loving each other without hiding.

But after promising to finally come out to her grown son and daughter, Mado (Martine Chevallier) hesitates. Nina (Barbara Sukowa) is furious, and the entire plan is up in the air when fate intervenes.

A sudden stroke leaves Mado unable to speak, which makes Nina an outsider in the world of her longtime love.

The debut feature from director/co-writer Filippo Meneghetti, Two of Us cuts deep with its quiet, well-constructed observations. As Mado’s family and a hired caregiver populate Mado’s apartment, Meneghetti returns often to a tiny peephole in the door, silently amplifying the distance separating the lovers, along with Nina’s yearning to conquer it.

The two leads – no doubt relishing the chance to craft complex, aging females – are simply wonderful. When we meet them, Nina is the proud free spirit, and Mado the reserved, closeted mother and grandmother. The stroke reverses their roles, giving each actor room to redefine their characters, and deepen our connection to them.

Though restrained by silence, you can practically hear Mado screaming for Nina, and Meneghetti’s frequent tight shots give Chevallier to chance to break our hearts without saying a word.

Sukowa’s arc is even better, and she makes Nina’s desperation not only palpable, but the understandable product of a love that is simply part of her very being. It is Nina who now must learn to lie, as her only hope for getting close to Mado becomes making up stories that might placate Mado’s slightly suspicious daughter (Léa Drucker).

One of those schemes runs Nina afoul of the caregiver’s adult son, leading to a well-worn and utterly predictable plot device that brings a surprise dent to Meneghetti’s gentle tone.

But by the time Nina and Mado are framed in the sweetest of final shots, all is forgiven. More than a welcome reminder that love is love at any age, Two of Us is a touching testament to how much stronger togetherness can make us.

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Shabbat Shalom

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Happy Times

by Cat McAlpine

Tensions at a Shabbat dinner party turn dangerous when a group of Israeli-American friends, family, and business partners boil over before coffee and dessert. Dangerous egos, backstabbing, cheating in love and money, and a struggle for social power all contribute to a brutal and increasingly absurd crescendo of blood and water.

You know, Happy Times.

Michael Mayer’s unique view as director and writer, with co-writer Guy Ayal, keeps the horror comedy from falling too flat. The stereotypes Mayer introduces don’t just create a thrilling sequence of clashes, but also bring out fun performances from the cast as a whole. A conceited struggling actor is moments away from losing it. A young man’s lust for a married woman is bound to get him in trouble. A shady business deal fails to get off the ground and clogs the works.

The characters in Happy Times are vibrant, and though largely unlikeable, you can’t stop watching their descent into chaos. Michael Aloni bristles with ego and rage as Michael. Liraz Chamami is captivating as Sigal, constantly trying to recorrect the course of the evening with hilarious timing and a casual brutality. Stéfi Celma is a lovely straight man to the madness that unfolds around her as the cultural outsider, Aliyah. The full ensemble brings a delightful sin and indulgence to the scene.

As Happy Times continues it starts to lose the plot a bit, with a snowballing bloodlust carrying the final third of the film. But the absurdity is baked in by the final moments. I was left shaking my head and thinking, “Sure. Why not?”

Though it is missing some sparkle at the end, there can’t always be a winner in a social situation as messy as this one. The slow burn of Happy Times perfectly builds the necessary tensions to support its later rampage.

The true success of this film is in the characters it creates, and those characters are what carry genuine laughter and shock. Whether you love or hate your family, Happy Times is a cathartic release of tensions anyone will recognize.

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Double Trouble

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The Mimic

by Matt Weiner

You can’t say Thomas F. Mazziotti didn’t warn you: his new comedy The Mimic starts with a shaggy dog, and delivers on the format and then some.

Thomas Sadoski stars as the Narrator, a screenwriter who finds himself being shadowed by an overly agreeable new neighbor—who, by the way, might be a violent sociopath. The neighbor goes only by the Kid, and actor Jake Robinson plays up the “is he or isn’t he” thing to delightful effect by holding the same unnerving rictus for the entire movie.

As the two men become more and more wound up in each other’s lives, the Narrator starts a determined quest to find out what might be lurking below the Kid’s clingy surface. But not before turning the Kid into part frenemy, part sounding board. It becomes clear that the Kid isn’t the only one with emotional issues in need of exorcising.

Where the film’s breezy comedy takes flight is in the brief encounters the Narrator has along the way. These interactions bring in everyone from a newspaper editor (Jessica Walter) to an unlucky driver (Austin Pendleton) to M. Emmet Walsh in some always welcome scene stealing.

If anything, the rotating guest cast cuts against the film. It’s a minor tragedy to get the likes of Walter, Walsh and Gina Gershon, and then barely get to see them work their comic chops before the story reverts back to the claustrophobic tug-of-war between the Narrator and the Kid.

For The Mimic to succeed as a comedy, there’s a lot riding on the dynamic between Sadoski and Robinson. Mazziotti keeps their philosophical banter both light and fast enough to make us almost forget those fleeting moments when Robinson lets some of the menace come out from behind his smile.

The two actors play well off one another, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that you’re trapped with them as much as they are with each other. They’ve mastered the cadence of a classic comedy couple, but their meandering dialogue varies wildly in just how much substance backs up their conversations from scene to scene.

That might be the point, but a little goes a long way. The cast manages to pull off some genuinely funny moments, but when you peel away all the winking direction and screwball zingers it’s hard to shake the feeling that, as comedy, The Mimic gets by on doing an off-kilter impression of the real thing.