Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Much Ado About Nature

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Entwined

by Hope Madden

Aah, the woods. It is almost overwhelming in its defiance of civilization, its sheer magnitude of just plain nature. Shakespeare set his magic there, but a lot of horror filmmakers lean closer to Lars Von Trier’s proclamation: Nature is Satan’s church.

Making his feature debut as both director and co-writer, Minos Nikolakakis conjures a spooky fairy tale that makes much ado about nature.

Panos (Prometheus Aleifer), a city doctor looking for a simpler, more isolated existence, moves to a remote Greek village to become the town’s only (and apparently first) doctor. Winding through wooded, mountainous roads on his way to his new home he nearly runs down a lovely young woman, who promptly disappears back into the woods.

Once in the village, Panos discovers tight-lipped locals, superstition and boredom—all of which leads him on a quest to figure out who that girl in the woods might be.

It’s to Nikolakakis’s credit as a visual storyteller that so many familiar elements still work to cast a spell. The film explains very little. It sprinkles clues about, but relies on your familiarity with the way folk tales work to lead you into an unusual take on the genre. There’s nothing overstated or campy about Nikolakakis’s fairy tale trappings.

Aleifer’s understated charisma—his penetrating stare, his abiding sadness—creates a strong center for the story. A melancholy mixture of logic and longing, his bearing articulates the dizzying, frustrating mixture of emotions and circumstances that trap Panos.

Anastasia Rafaella Konidi’s earthy version of the succubus intrigues consistently. She vacillates between demanding and imploring, but never feels genuinely sinister. And we’re never entirely sure whether the doctor sees his plight in the woods as a dream or a nightmare, and that shifting reality generates dizzying dread.

The film’s weakest element is the presence of co-writer John De Holland in the role of Panos’s protective half-brother, George. The performance is shaky enough that the first act suffers badly—the first impression is of a movie not worth your time.

Luckily De Holland has considerably less screen time through the remainder of the film. Still, when George does appear intermittently he punctures the spell Nikolakakis and the remainder of the cast has conjured and it takes a while to recreate the mood.

The way the story resolves itself is a puzzle, and not an especially satisfying one. With Entwined, Nikolakakis boasts some impressive storytelling instincts, but there’s still room for growth.

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All Sword, No Play

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Mulan

by Hope Madden

The first tale of Mulan—a story that’s has been told and retold for centuries—dates to an epic poem written more than 1500 years ago in China. Back in 1998, Disney made its first attempt to capitalize on the girl power message of the daughter who hides her identity to take her father’s place in battle.

As part of the company’s live action re-imaginings of those old animated films, Mulan comes back today.

Yifei Liu plays the young warrior in a version that takes its material seriously. Don’t expect a wisecracking little dragon this go-round. With the PG-13 rating and the multiple and violent battle sequences, this one wasn’t made with the youngest fans in mind.

Director Niki Caro is not Asian, which makes her an unusual and potentially inappropriate choice to helm a story so entrenched in Chinese folklore. She hasn’t made as impressive a film as Mulan since her 2002 coming of age tale, Whale Rider, and it is no doubt on that film’s account that the New Zealander got the call from Disney.

She certainly does justice to the message of empowerment, as expected. What you might not expect given her previous films is her virtuosity in filming beautiful, elegant and eye-popping action.

The fight choreography is wonderous, as are the gorgeous vistas. Caro’s Mulan is a spectacle and it’s too bad it won’t be shared across big screens.

There’s a simplicity to the storyline that allows Caro and her cast to create wonder with the visuals, and Liu’s earnest portrayal suits that aim. The screenplay remains true to the folktale’s message in spots where ’98 animated version betrayed its more conventional view of female power.

There are no songs and dances here, but there is magic nonetheless.

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Artful Escape

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A Step Without Feet

by Hope Madden

“People want to know about the road, if it was hard getting here. That’s not the question.”

A Step Without Feet, the first documentary from Jeremy Glaholt and Lydia Schamschula, spends 90 minutes in snowy Berlin with a handful of refugees from the Syrian war. The filmmakers’ first question: What do you think of the word “refugee”?

They don’t see the word the same way you do.

It’s actually a fascinating way to get into a story that looks sideways at a topic so often portrayed in documentaries. The bloody, lengthy, horrific war in Syria has launched more documentaries than I can count, many of them brilliant, most of them brutal.

Glaholt and Schamschula pull us out of all that brutality, mercifully, and drop us into the newly created lives of those who’ve escaped it: a dancer and a dentist, a musician and a cook, a writer and a student. Their resilience, nostalgia, trauma and optimism are on screen in a film that recognizes salvation—however profound—as just another transition in life.

Though life in Germany has been seemingly peaceful for the group and each has many happy moments to discuss, the anxieties of the past and the longing for what is lost give their peaceful existence a bittersweet flavor.

Many bridge the past and the present, their old home and new, with art. One writes, one dances, one sings, each of them tapping into something that gives creative outlet to their fear and yearning.

The film’s biggest drawback is its lack of context. We’re 15 minutes or more into the film before anyone utters the word Syria. The reasons each one left is never clearly articulated. While those familiar with the conflict would certainly have a sense, the reasons that these individuals needed to flee while their parents or siblings were OK to stay is never addressed.

With the clear and mostly fulfilled goal of casting these human beings in the present tense, the filmmakers likely made the conscious decision not to dig too deeply in this painful terrain. Still, the magnitude of the subjects’ sorrow, longing and trauma is tied to that specific conflict. To do their present justice we need more of their past.

The film—almost exclusively talking head footage of interviews with the seven refugees—remains strangely captivating throughout. Because of the music, the dance, the poetry and the candor, a deeply human and powerfully universal story emerges.

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Anguish for Anguish

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Measure for Measure

by Cat McAlpine

In this modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by the same name, Measure for Measure follows a large cast of characters all tied to the same horrific event. A man high on meth goes on a racially charged shooting spree in a housing commission tower. Angelo sold him the drugs. Farouk might have sold him the gun. Claudio and Jaiwara were simply lucky enough to survive. What really connects the tenants of the dreary flats is not a single act violence, but the fact that their lives are rife with it.

Director Paul Ireland uses trauma as connective tissue, highlighting the theme with repeated showings of August Friedrich Schenck’s “Anguish.” The painting shows a ewe crying out over the body of her dead lamb, encircled by waiting crows. It is trauma, and vulnerability, like this that pushes characters together and rips them apart, with carrion birds waiting to swoop in.

The script, penned by Ireland and Damian Hill (to whom the film is dedicated), is strongest when it strays from Shakespeare. The addition of an immigrant family to the story adds dimension to the types of trauma we face and how it shapes the next generation. The love story of Ireland and Hill’s Measure for Measure is much more straightforward than Shakespeare’s. If anything, the film would’ve improved from even further deviation.

What truly carries the production are its strong performances. Hugo Weaving is great as Duke, endlessly watchable. His manic foil Angelo (Mark Leonard Winter) is also fantastic, even when the script doesn’t support him. Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi) starts as a stereotypical baddie, but Bazzi finds complicated depth in him later on. Harrison Gilbertson and Megan Smart build great chemistry together as Claudio and Jaiwara, despite a bit of a montaged love story at the start.

Measure for Measure is a worthy effort to take the endlessly classic nature of Shakespeare and frame it in a modern retelling with new resonance. Its focus on loss, vengeance, and love are undeniably relatable, while still telling a fresh story in an old frame.

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Come with Me and Be Immortal

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Immortal

by Hope Madden

Countless movies over the years have pondered what it might feel like to be immortal. Writer Jon Dabach, in four separate tales with one thread in common, wonders what it would be like not to be able to die.

His film Immortal strings together these stories, each one directed by a different person (Tom Colley, Danny Isaacs, Rob Margolies and Dabach himself), each one depicting one person’s relationship with deathlessness.

The composite contains a horror short, two thrillers and one anguished romance.

Chelsea, starring the great Dylan Baker, offers a somewhat overwritten first act. Baker is beloved old high school English teacher Mr. Shagis, Chelsea (Lindsay Mushet) is the school’s star athlete, and today’s lesson is symbolism.

Baker’s as nuanced and fascinating as always in a short that starts things off with a solid smack.

Of the balance, Mary and Ted is most effective. Assisted suicide advocates film a video of the longtime married couple played lovingly by Robin Bartlett and Tony Todd. We, along with the crew, get to know them—their love, their suffering—and then the crew leaves them to their task.

I feel like I want to send Dabach a thank you note for this one, just to see Tony Todd this tender. The sub-baritone voiced horror icon (Candyman, Night of the Living Dead) delicately wields emotion and heartbreak here in a way we’ve certainly never seen from this actor. Bartlett offers an outstanding counterpoint, the believable resignation in her delivery weighing down every line.

A hit and run victim exacts precise revenge in Warren, which takes a particularly solitary view: So you just found out you can’t die. What do you do now? The absolute ordinariness, the down-to-earthiness of this one’s delivery—as well as the charmingly odd investigator—give it real appeal.

Even the one that feels most predictable takes a wildly unpredictable turn—one the filmmakers do not shy away from capturing on film. In each, there’s an element of discovery that punctuates the story. Dabach and his team of directors capture a wide range of emotions and attitudes, but leave the audience wondering just enough.

Immortal is essentially an anthology of short films, and in fact, the pieces do not intersect, nor do they clarify much. Instead, they offer four slices of life—well, slices of not death—and an intriguing look at what death means to us.

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Family Ties

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The Shadow of Violence

by George Wolf

Just how Irish is The Shadow of Violence?

Well, it’s got enough of its Irish up that hearing “Whiskey in the Jar” play on a barroom jukebox feels like being part of an inside joke. And that’s about the only funny business in a film that fuses multiple inspirations into one searingly intimate rumination on a life defined by violence.

Douglas “Arm” Armstrong (Cosmo Jarvis) was once a promising Irish boxing champion, but left the gloves behind for the reliable income and familiar treatment offered by the Devers crime family. As their chief enforcer, Arm is feared, which often hampers his relationship with his ex Ursula (Naimh Algar) and their autistic son Jack.

The delicate co-existence of Arm’s two worlds is a constant struggle, but when family patriarch Paudi Devers (Ned Dennehy) finally orders Arm to kill, it becomes clear there is room for only one set of loyalties.

Director Nick Rowland and screenwriter Joseph Murtagh adapt Colin Barrett’s short story “Calm With Horses” with a tightly-wound sense of tension and brutality that propels a fascinating curiosity about the lasting effects of violence on the ones dishing it out.

While recalling films from the classic (On the Watefront) to the underseen (The Drop), Rowland’s feature debut carves out its own rural identity thanks to an instinct for detail (watching two Irish gangsters debate the wisdom of fleeing to Mexico is perfection) and a marvelous cast.

Jarvis makes Arm an endlessly sympathetic brute, providing a needed depth to Arm’s slow awakening about who is and isn’t worth his trust. Much of that trust is given to Paudi’s heir apparent Dympna, an unrepentant manipulator brought to menacing life by Barry Keoghan (The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Dunkirk), who again shows why you don’t want to miss any film with him in it.

But it’s Arm’s time with Ursula and Jack (Kiljan Moroney) that reminds him of the kind of man he wants to be, one that knows the difference “between loyalty and servitude.”

These moral complexities of a man questioning his sense of the world are what gives The Shadow of Violence its voice, one that speaks most eloquently in the spaces between the bloodshed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlKF1J5XCdI

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Big Love

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Robin’s Wish

by George Wolf

Even as we’re still reeling from the shocking death of Chadwick Boseman this past weekend, Robin’s Wish takes us back to August of 2014, when Robin Williams’s suicide sent similar shockwaves.

In the years since, Robin’s death has often appeared as a testament to the danger of chronic depression. But with this film, director/co-writer Tylor Norwood’s main goal is allowing Robin’s widow to correct the record.

Depression may have touched Robin’s life, but that’s not what ended it.

Susan Schneider Williams explains that an autopsy revealed that Robin suffered from diffuse Lewy body dementia, a buildup of proteins in the brain. Always fatal, the degenerative disease can cause anxiety, self-doubt, delusions, an intense lack of sleep, and drastic paranoia.

As sad as the ending is, Norwood and Schneider Williams make sure we see the genius of Robin’s talent and the “bigness of love” in his soul. The joy he took in bringing smiles to others is touching, as is the Robin and Susan love story that began when one of them (guess) wore camouflage pants to the Apple store.

The film’s overview of Williams’s career is satisfactory but, for the most part, a rehashing of information. The really glaring hole here is the absence of any Williams family member beyond Susan. The reason for this is unclear, but outside voices would certainly have broadened the context.

But Robin’s Wish is indeed worthwhile for a more complete understanding of a legend. The final days of Williams’s life are re-defined with tenderness, clarity and purpose, framing a once-in-a-lifetime talent in an entirely new and tragic light.

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American Narcissist

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#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump

by Seth Troyer

Comparing America and much of the world’s shift toward fascist totalitarian ideals to the rise of dictators in the 1930s may at first seem over the top. Indeed, much of Dan Partland’s new documentary #Unfit may seem heavy handed – until you remember where we are as a nation.

We elected a textbook narcissist whose strategy for gaining followers centers around a self-obsessed “me first” ethos. He vows to bring back the “the good old days” and encourages an inherently nationalistic philosophy. Enter Donald Trump.

Really, it’s hardly shocking when this film reveals that a guy like Trump had affection for the rousing public speaking stylings of Adolf Hitler. Trump has not changed since his billionaire playboy days, his goal is still clear: “win” by any means necessary. Sadly enough, if that’s your only real goal, taking pointers from charismatic fascists continues to be a useful strategy.

Naturally, #Unfit is not saying Trump is Hitler, but that his fits of totalitarian megalomania have the potential to be similarly dangerous.

Until it really sinks in, it may also seem like a cheap shot for this film to compare Trump and his followers’ behavior to that of apes in the wild.

Trump’s mission to be the biggest and the best by any means necessary is as old as animal life on this planet. A leader who pounds his chest the loudest, who rallies followers around self-serving goals and shared hatred for outsiders, unfortunately remains a rather attractive choice in the eyes of many American voters.

Scenes of white nationalist pride and news footage of men screaming “go cook my burrito” to Mexican folks at Trump rallies are juxtaposed with scenes depicting animal “us vs them” mentality. The irony here is of course that the conservatives, who make up the bulk of Trump’s following, who often seem to have the most reservations around ideas of evolution and the link between humanity with the animal kingdom, seem to be themselves clearly emulating primal group dynamics.

Partland’s film is not always eloquent, and at times it stumbles into obvious biases toward the Democratic party. Flashes of former President Obama are shown as folks talk of “better times.” This documentary really shines when it keeps its eye on the bottom line, that Trump is not simply a threat to left wing politics but to American democracy as a whole.

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Time Out Of Mind

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Tenet

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

A not-at-all funny thing happened to the movie calendar this year. And now, instead of kicking off the summer blockbuster season with a bang, the stakes for Tenet are a wee bit higher: rescue movie theaters.

As you may have heard, writer/director Christopher Nolan has been adamant that this film be experienced in theaters. He’s not wrong.

Tenet is a sensory battering experience, one not to be paused or downsized. The ideas are big, the visuals are full of wide-eyed wonders, and the persistent mind-bending immediately invites second helpings (maybe more).

An agent known only as The Protagonist (John David Washington) is introduced to technology that has the power to invert time. Time travel? Sorry, that’s Bill & Ted kid stuff. We’re talking the ability to move forward in a space where everything else is moving backward.

Nolan is returning to a familiar playground that manipulates time and reality. From Leonard looping through a constant present tense in Memento to Cobb forever bumping into his own past in his attempts to shift the future in Inception, back to The Prestige, forward to Interstellar and again to the braided timelines of Dunkirk, Nolan is a filmmaker who orchestrates universes by playing with time and consequence.   

In Tenet, the future is talking to the past, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. To put things right, our Protagonist and a mysterious partner named Neil (Robert Pattinson) must gain the trust of a high-end art dealer (Elizabeth Debicki) on the way to taking down her Russian arms dealer husband (Kenneth Branagh) who’s thinking bigger than Thanos.

A dialog heavy first half benefits primarily from the oily charm and sly humor of Pattinson’s character, whose arc is made more fun and more interesting by the way the film loops its realities. As elegant as always, Debicki exists to give the film a truly human character, which is to say, one whose behavior is too often (and too conveniently) impetuous.

The film’s biggest drawbacks are some cliched dialogue and its tendency to present itself as a SciFi James Bond movie with well-dressed characters popping up in gorgeous locales to impressively (and too conveniently) offer well-timed information. (Washington does impress as a potential Bond, though.)

The two and a half hour running time is not a concern, because once we hit the midpoint, Nolan (with a big assist from cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and stunt coordinator George Cottle) decide we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Past and present collide in some of the most interesting, tense and downright fun action sequences Nolan’s ever put together—and fan or not, that’s a feat to acknowledge.

That’s merely a summary that doesn’t require a physics degree, but as Nolan’s own screenplay admits, “Don’t try to understand it.” We’re back to big screens, baby, let’s make it count!

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The Kids Are Not All Right

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The New Mutants

by Hope Madden

Let’s be honest. Logan’s dead, JLaw’s past her contract obligations, Dark Phoenix bombed and the X-Men are in need of some new blood and maybe a new direction.

The franchise does make a big of a zig with its latest offshoot. The New Mutants is essentially a YA horror film. Co-writer/director Josh Boone’s premise may be comic book, but his execution is angst and PG-13 scares.

Dani Moonstar (Blu Hunt) wakes up to find herself in a locked-down, mainly vacant, definitely old and unmistakably spooky asylum of some sort. Here Dani will learn to control her power—whatever that might be—with the help of the sole custodian of Dani and four other special youngsters, Dr. Reyes (Alice Braga).

Focusing exclusively on adolescence allows the film to deliver, undiluted, the main concepts of the franchise: embrace your differences, forgive yourself, accept others for what they are, master your own potential and stick it to the man. Fine ideas, every one of them, and certainly common themes in YA.

As our plucky hero, Hunt struggles to find anything close to authenticity in her dreamy dialog, but the balance of the cast is strong.

The always remarkable Anya Taylor-Joy relishes the wicked girl role while Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams (battling Taylor-Joy for largest eyes in a human face) is a deeply empathetic, awkward girl with a crush.

That the crush is not on one of the two boys in lockdown—played by Charlie Heaton and Henry Zaga—is a refreshing change of pace charmingly underscored by the teens’ apparent fixation with the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Boone, whose 2014 effort The Fault In Our Stars defines angst porn, knows YA. His combination of these two genres is a bit of a misfire, though, particularly when the final, big, giant scare is revealed. Yikes—and I don’t mean that in a good way.

New Mutants is a film trying too hard to cash in on proven youth market formulas, but the concoction fizzles. It doesn’t really work as an angsty romance, misses the mark as a horror movie and never for a minute feels like a superhero flick.