Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Marathon Man

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Runner

by Seth Troyer

I am basically still on the verge of tears as I write this. Bill Gallagher’s emotional documentary Runner opens with sports coverage of a marathon and slowly zooms in on one man in particular. “Now this particular runner,” says a dorky sportscaster, “has an unbelievable story.”

He doesn’t know the half of it. This is the story of Guor Marial, a Sudanese refugee who went on a journey to become an Olympian. 

As a young boy, Marial runs from hardship to hardship, eventually getting separated from his family, and ultimately finding himself in America. It’s wild to hear Marial’s initial confusion at the absurdity of it all, that something he did to survive in Sudan is something westerners do as a sport. Marial hits the high school track field and metamorphosizes. From there we watch the harsh juxtaposition of this high school dream athlete winning medals while simultaneously struggling with the fact that his family members in Sudan are dying. 

My reservations about macho corporate sports went out the window as I watched this boy running in the name of his faraway home. It’s also a wonderful thing to see journalists, coaches and politicians (mostly white, privileged Americans) one by one lay down their false crowns in awe before this kid who has gone through actual hell and is using his power to reach for nothing less than the Olympic games. 

This is the rare documentary that truly does justice to its incredible hero. It is cinematic to the point where your first reaction might be to think you are watching staged reenactments, but no, this is all real. They have footage of seemingly every moment of Marial’s journey, as well as animation and news footage depicting the hell of war and starvation in Sudan. 

Arguably the film’s most emotional moment occurs when Mrial returns to South Sudan to be reunited with his parents, who he has not seen in years. The moment when his mother, who lost so many of her children, collapses to the ground at the sight of her long lost son is one of the most powerful moments I have ever seen captured by a camera.

This is still only the beginning of the story of the first Olympian from South Sudan: a beautifully human story that is about nothing less than what makes us go, what makes us try, and what makes us run. 

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Irregular Checkup

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Babyteeth

by George Wolf

Why would a first-time feature director make sure her camera lingers a few extra beats on one of those old karaoke videos where the visuals bear no relation to the lyrics being sung?

Because it’s a sly reinforcement of the abrupt, defiant way that Shannon Murphy is telling the story of Babyteeth, and of the unconventional soul at the heart of the film.

That soul would be Milla (Eliza Scanlen), a seriously ill Australian teen who literally bumps into the 23 year-old Moses (Toby Wallace) while waiting for a tram.

She likes his hair, so he gives her a haircut. She brings him home, and suddenly Milla’s parents (Ben Mendelsohn and Essie Davis) have something new to worry about.

“That boy has problems!” Mom shouts.

Milla answers, “So do I!”

True enough, and Rita Kalnejais delivers a debut screenplay that embraces the tough and the tender while taking us inside a fraying family dynamic.

Mom Anna used to be a impressive pianist, but she struggles to stay off pills and keep her tears at bay. Dad Henry is a psychiatrist who handles Milla’s illness in a more pragmatic fashion while he develops a strange fixation on the pregnant neighbor (Emily Barclay).

Mendelsohn and Davis are customarily excellent, each reinforcing the different ways that grief can manifest itself, often pulling them closer and increasing their distance in equal measure. In lesser hands, the eccentricities of these characters could have dissolved into caricature or misguided comic relief, but Mendelsohn and Davis each bring a weary stoicism that keeps both parents grounded.

Scanlen, fresh off playing Beth in last year’s glorious revision of Little Women, is completely transfixing as a girl impatient to experience life. The more Milla is reminded of her sickness, the more she rebels, and Scanlen finds a mix of courage and fear that never feels false.

The whiff of death in coming-of-age dramas has often been reduced to manipulative claptrap, but Murphy takes a bulldozer to that notion with an ambitious narrative that does not allow you to get comfortable.

She introduces themes using chapter titles (some generic, some genuinely touching), transitions very abruptly and leaves some matters unexplained. Murphy’s approach is uniquely assured, requiring our attention but rewarding our emotional investment, as the few mawkish leanings are swept away by the film’s wickedly perverse sense of humor.

After years of directing shorts and TV episodes, Murphy lands on the big screen as a vibrant new voice. Like Milla, she is setting her own pace in the search for the beauty in life, and Babyteeth finds that beauty in unexpected places.

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You’ve Got a Friend in Me

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Jack & Yaya

by Brandon Thomas

LGBTQ youth often find themselves at the receiving end of family and friend abandonment. The people who are supposed to support them through the coming out simply walk away. The story at the heart of Jack & Yaya is about what happens when two childhood friends go through the same life-changing events, and how those closest to them stick around to champion their lives.

Jack and Yaya grew up as next-door neighbors in south New Jersey. From early on, they both saw who the other truly was, a girl and a boy, even if the rest of their family and friends did not. 

In her directorial debut, Jennifer Bagley wisely lets the film’s two subjects be front and center. Jack and Yaya share a genuine openness about their lives. Absent is any kind of hubris when the two of them talk about their struggles or their successes. This honest, matter-of-fact nature feels immediately welcoming.

The focus on day-to-day struggles for transgender people is real and evident even in this sunnier-than-normal documentary. Jack struggles with running into discrimination even in a city as large as Boston. Yaya worries about the constant financial stress around obtaining hormones. It’s a needed dash of reality. 

As the colorful cast of characters who revolve around Jack and Yaya are introduced, it’s not hard to see how these two became the people they are. Bagley naturally captures the warmth and love that flows between all of them. Amidst the alcohol and ‘70s rock, Yaya’s uncle Eddie spills to the camera how much love he has for both Yaya and Jack. “All you need is frickin’ love!” bellows Eddie. 

Jack & Yaya works exceptionally well at being a celebration of these two people as they figure out their ever-changing lives. This isn’t a film interested in making a grand social statement. Bagley lets these two tell their story, and show us who they really are through their own words and actions.

Jack & Yaya beautifully shows how good we all can be when we prop each other up. Jack and Yaya’s lives could’ve gone so much differently. But they had each other and a support system that evolved into a deep friendship of genuine acceptance and caring. 

“All you need is frickin’ love!” indeed.

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Only One Star

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Queen of Lapa

by Rachel Willis

In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the neighborhood of Lapa is home to Luana Muniz, the focus of directors Theodore Collatos and Carolina Monnerat’s documentary, Queen of Lapa.  

A photoshoot of Muniz opens the film. She is elegant in black lingerie, holding a cigarette; the audience learns that she has been a sex worker since the age of eleven and is now one of the most recognized transgender (Luana prefers the term transvestite) activists in Brazil.

A hostel run by Muniz for over two decades provides a safe haven for transgender sex workers. It is this world that Collatos and Monnerat are privy to. They are given a level of access that allows the audience to experience these women’s lives as they live them.

Muniz is a bit of a mother hen to the women, many of them even call her Mother Luana. She scolds them for not cleaning up after themselves, expresses concern over injuries, and fights to ensure the house remains a place where transgender men and women can live and work safely.

It’s an important concern. Transgender men and women, and sex workers, experience violence at alarming rates. One of the women speaks of having gasoline poured on her before she escapes her attacker. The same woman is beaten and robbed one night, showing her injuries to her Facebook Live audience. Another woman is nearly raped but manages to flee.

However, the film focuses on more than one aspect of these women’s lives. It allows us a chance to spend time with the housemates and get to know them. There is a familial atmosphere as the roommates watch TV, do each other’s nails, eat meals together, and argue.

Some of the conversations are more interesting than others, but the filmmakers play a critical role with their lack of presence. They allow the group to share their own stories, to let their voices be heard at a time when it is essential that those who have been silenced in the past are allowed to speak. 

Muniz says of herself, “the only star here is me,” and in some ways, she is the sun to a community of people who need an advocate like her. One of the women recalls seeing Muniz on TV as a child, never expecting to know her as an adult, but it’s an example of the impact she has had on the community. She teaches the women how to be safe, how to not be ashamed of who they are, and that they are loved.

The world could use more people like Luana Muniz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfBAz26dZnY

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Mercy, Mercy Me

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Da 5 Bloods

by Hope Madden

Leave it to Spike Lee to follow up the socially searing masterwork in direction BlackKklansman with something bigger, badder and even more immediately relevant.

Da 5 Bloods follows four Vietnam Vets (Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis) back to the jungle where they left so much. They left a lot more than most, actually, including a beloved brother and a lot of gold.

Chadwick Boseman haunts the frames and the buddies as Stormin’ Norm, the young platoon leader and inspiration that didn’t make it home. If he represents past tragedies, Jonathan Majors represents the way those pains echo into today.

A heist movie on the surface, Da 5 Bloods is clearly about a great deal more than making it rich. Lee has a lot to say about how those in power tell us what we want to hear so we will do what they want us to do.

As is always the case with Lee’s films, even the most overtly political, deeply felt performances give the message meaning. The entire cast is excellent, but Delroy Lindo is transcendent.

Lindo’s never given a bad performance in his 45 years on screen. As commanding a presence as ever at 68 playing Paul, Lindo again blends vulnerability into every action, whether funny, menacing or melancholy. His MAGA hat-wearing, self-loathing, dangerously conflicted character gives Lee’s themes a pulse. This may finally be the performance to get Lindo the Oscar he’s deserved for ages.

Staggeringly equal to the effort is Majors (The Last Black Man in San Francisco) as Paul’s son David. His performance illustrates a resilience as well as a tenderness that is utterly heartbreaking.

Even so, here Lee avoids the sentimentality that undermined his 2008 war film Miracle at St. Anna. In its place is a clear-eyed look at the many, insidious effects of not just war but systemic oppression.

It should surprise no one that Lee’s latest happens to hit the exact nerve that throbs so loudly and painfully right now, given that he’s been telling this exact story in minor variations for 30+ years.

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Unto Others

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For They Know Not What They Do

by Hope Madden

“If a lot of people have just a little bit of courage, then nobody has to be a hero.”

If we can’t see the truth in that statement right now, we are truly lost. It’s a call to action, and an argument that For They Know Not What They Do patiently articulates.

A sequel of sorts to director Daniel G. Karslake’s 2007 doc For the Bible Tells Me So, For They Know Not What They Do revisits the Christian church after more than a decade to gauge its movement on LGBTQ rights.

The film drops you into the lives of four families navigating the complex world of faith and sexual identity.

Elliott is about to leave for his freshman year at Vassar, and he and his parents walk us through what it’s like to trust your adolescent enough to begin the irreversible. Ryan, with the help of his genuinely loving if deeply misdirected parents, commits to praying the gay away. Sarah is as committed to the political career she started as a middle school class president as she is in fully transitioning. Victor survived a tragedy thanks in part to the unflinching support of his Catholic parents.

In and around all of these stories, Karslake examines the political backlash to marriage equality, particularly the way the religious right has targeted the especially vulnerable transgender population and what that has meant in terms of violence.

All of the parents involved display their courageous human frailty, owning their immediate and long-term responses to knowledge of their children’s sexuality or gender identification.

Their continued reliance on faith to help them see where religious dogma had become poisonous is among the loveliest elements of the film. These parents lean on their scripture’s concept of forgiveness (mainly to forgive themselves for having harmed their children), love, and acceptance to help them see beyond their own fear.

It’s a path Karslake takes as well. This is a forgiving documentary. It never turns a blind eye toward the way the religious right uses organized religion as a tool to oppress. But FTKNWTD is more interested in how faith does not have to be tainted by this noxious hate. It’s a bold vision for a documentary on Christianity and LGBTQ suffering.

It is also perhaps the film’s strongest selling point. Karslake doesn’t preach at, condescend to or even vilify the audience most in need of the film’s message.

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Anti-Social

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Infamous

by George Wolf

Arielle (Bella Thorne) is bumming. She’s got a crap waitressing job in a boring Florida town, and she’s way over living with her mom and her mom’s creepy boyfriend. And too many people pronounce her name like the Disney princess! But that’s not the nearly the worst of it.

Her Instagram numbers are pathetic.

Enter a hunky new bad boy in town named Dean (Jake Manley), a gun, and a string of brazen robberies along the route to a new life in Hollywood, and those followers start piling up.

The news reports begin branding the couple as a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, but it’s clear early on that what writer/director Joshua Caldwell has in mind is a Natural Born Killers for the social media set.

While the film’s timing – dropping right when we are seeing social media push overdue social change – isn’t great, its goal is an ambitious one. The internet age still seems ripe for the type of darkly comic and satirical fish eye that Oliver Stone used to frame mass media in 1994. And no matter how well you think that film has aged, you can’t deny the boldness of the vision.

There’s nothing remotely fresh about Infamous, let alone bold. The last straw catalyst for leaving town, the sex while driving, the media obsession and the misplaced adulation of the masses all line up and fall as easily as the next robbery.

About an hour in, Arielle and Dean take a hostage (Glee’s Amber Riley with a nice, understated turn) and it seems Caldwell is finally trying to make his own statement. But it stalls from exposition and generality, leading nowhere close to the intersection where Stone planted his flag, one where the film’s true commentary transcends the style and narrative.

And there is style here. Caldwell gives much of the action an urgent pace and a livestream feel, with texts and comments often darting the frame to remind you where Arielle’s heart is.

But she, and Dean, are more cliche than character, and what they tell us about social media isn’t much deeper. The interchangeable, angst-heavy soundtrack choices only confirm that Infamous isn’t reaching beyond these two outlaw lovers, and the youngest of adult audiences may actually identify with them for all the wrong reasons.

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Flailing in the Dark

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Darkness Falls

by Brandon Thomas

Going into Darkness Falls, I felt upbeat and positive. Gary Cole is the heavy of the film? Sign me up! His track record as a villain (namely A Simple Plan and Pineapple Express) is pretty spotless in my book. 

Then I watched Darkness Falls. 

Cue sound of deflating balloon.

Detective Jeff Anderson (Shawn Ashmore) has become obsessed with his wife’s suicide, convinced that it was actually a murder. As Anderson delves deeper into other similar suicide cases, he finds that a father and son serial killer duo (Gary Cole and Richard Harmon) are stalking his city. 

From the opening scene, Darkness Falls leans heavily into cliche, and, if I’m being painfully honest, laziness. The filmmaking lacks any real type of energy or urgency. Director Julien Seri’s artistic choices come across as inept and amateurish, never really settling on a specific style. Seri tends to stage many shots to look cool instead of helping to tell an engaging story.

Giles Daoist’s script isn’t up to the challenge either. Rather than try something new with the genre, Darkness Falls relies on the same tired detective movie tropes. Anderson is the loose canon detective that the brass just can’t handle. And I’d be ashamed to forget mentioning just how often he slams his palms on counters and/or tables and shouts things like, “Tell me where he is?!” Truly riveting screenwriting.

The “twists” in the film are ones we’ve seen countless times before in much better films. The climax itself was probably done at least three dozen times before 1990. A few genuine “oohs” and “aahs” could’ve helped Darkness Falls be something more than a feature-length Criminal Minds episode.

Performance wise, things don’t improve. Ashmore, who’s notable for playing more squeaky-clean roles, awkwardly tries to embody the tough-as- nails detective. When he’s not chewing up scenes with over-acting, Ashmore’s performance barely registers above bored. Cole, who I usually adore, doesn’t fare much better. His papa bear serial killer lacks any kind of menace. The character is more of a homicidal used car salesman than threatening maniac. 

With its pedestrian writing, cruise control direction, and phoned-in performances, Darkness Falls spectacularly falls on its face. 

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Word for Word

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Sometimes Always Never

by Hope Madden

Veteran British writer Frank Cottrell Boyce (Welcome to Sarajevo, Millions) adapts his own short story of a grieving if dapper tailor, a not-so-prodigal son, making the best of a sad substitute, and Scrabble.

Thanks to the vision of first time feature director Carl Hunter, Sometimes Always Never enjoys an eccentrically stylish, elegantly odd presentation. Hunter, in turns, finds those exact same characteristic in its sublime lead, Bill Nighy.

The film tags along as dapper Alan (Nighy) and his son Peter (Sam Riley) drive some distance together. They’ve been summoned to an out-of-town morgue to identify a body.

Between Hunter’s deliberate framing and set composition and Nighy’s droll but endearing presence, the film cannot help but charm. But the delightful and eye-catching style belies a grieving heart.

Nighy, of course, is brilliant—and how fun is it to watch him lead a film rather than take the screen as some minor if wonderful character? In his hands, Alan is unknowable but not intimidating. He’s spry and precisely drawn, never sentimental for a beat, and yet endlessly tender. Nighy owes Boyce a great debt for creating such a beautifully layered odd duck, and all of us owe Nighy even more for bringing Alan to life in his inimitable way.

Hunter surrounds his lead with a solid ensemble committed to understatement. Riley’s emotional turmoil has a resigned, lived-in quality that’s both sad and sweet. Jenny Agutter and Tim McInnerny (Severance), likewise, deliver the human contradiction of comedy and tragedy, while Alice Lowe (Prevenge) is just the sweetheart the film needs for balance.

Balance is an excellent word—though it may not net as many points as some more strategic choices, or is it as fun to say as “soap.” But in terms of the visuals versus the dialog, or the emotional versus the comedic, Hunter keeps a grip and never lets the film tip this way or that.

That doesn’t always feel true to the profound tragedy that has befallen this family and has caused, slowly but surely over the many years, the fractures Alan is attempting to mend. This pain too often feels overlooked, becoming a slight that keeps Sometimes Always Never from reaching its own cinematic potential.

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Who Are You, Again?

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Yourself and Yours

by Hope Madden

It’s taken four years, but Hong Sang-soo’s Yourself and Yours is finally screening internationally. The delightfully confusing love story uses inebriation and one well-placed mannequin to illustrate the giddy, identity-demolishing euphoria of love.

Young-soo (Kim Ju-hyuk) decides to believe his friends when they tell him his girlfriend Minjung (Lee Yoo-Young) goes out drinking—and who knows what else?—with other men.

But does she? I mean, it sure looks like she does, but maybe it isn’t her? Or maybe it is her, but there’s some kind of explanation, like mental illness? Or maybe it doesn’t matter, because the filmmaker is less interested in who is (or isn’t) doing what to whom than he is in how others react.

The film is a charming change of pace in at least a dozen ways. Its intentional ambiguity works in its favor because it keeps you from falling into the frustrating trap of seeing Yourself and Yours in the same terms as some kind of American doppelganger erotic thriller noir, which is certainly what the same story could have become.

Instead, the film delivers an entirely off-kilter sensation (as, some would say, does love). Lee’s enigmatic performance is captivating—at times tender, defensive and silly but always engaging. It’s hard to imagine the film working with anyone else in this role because, thanks to her unshowy but convincing portrayal, you are never absolutely certain what the hell is going on.

Supporting performances couldn’t be richer, whether the flatly disgusted female friend, the “sorry I started this whole thing” buddy, the nonchalant bartender or Minjung’s (or is it?) other smitten beaus. With limited screen time and limitless commitment to the concept, the ensemble adds to the confusion and the joy to be found throughout the film.

It may be Kim’s turn and the transformation of his character that elevate Yourself and Yours above quirky love story to truly solid, insightful art. His performance is quite beautiful, as is the film.

As, some would say, is love.