Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

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Rear Window

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Butt Boy

by Matt Weiner

A killer fixated on jamming people, animals and any other object not nailed down into his rectum. The grieving detective haunted by loss and obsessed with hunting him down. Every now and then a movie comes along that seems to exist as much as an inside dare as it does to mock the complaint that there’s no original IP anymore.

If the title wasn’t ample enough warning, Butt Boy is that kind of movie. And just about every demented minute of it is a heady joy to watch. Add this to the list of sentences I wasn’t really expecting to write before going into the Butt Boy movie, but beneath the high-concept plot and anal absurdity you’ll find a pretty decent send-up of a “tortured detective” action film.

Detective Russel Fox (Tyler Rice) gets assigned the case of a missing child, his main suspect seems to have made his victim disappear into thin air in a public, crowded place. That’s because mild-mannered IT drone Chip Gutchell (Tyler Cornack, who also co-wrote and directed) does have a way of making his victims – also remote controls, beloved family pets, you name it ­– vanish without a trace. Up his butt.

In focusing on Russel and a cop noir send-up, Cornack’s script ends up being more satirical than disturbing. If anything, it would’ve been an interesting experiment to see the movie fully embrace the horror of its conceit rather than leavening it with self-referential absurdity.

Or maybe not – Butt Boy is likely a hard enough sell. The cast all do a fine job helping to sell it with deadpan line deliveries. And Cornack pulls out all the stops for a conclusion that trades on all the detective noir clichés while still managing to be truly shocking.

There’s a cosmic irony that it’s been quite a year for delirious, genre-bending movies, including Joe Begos’s VFW, and Richard Stanley’s Color Out of Space. Now, we’re all stuck home for yet another uninhibited midnight movie that begs to be seen with a crowd of stoned fellow travelers who know this was made with love for people like them.

The fact that life had a different kind of horror planned shouldn’t keep you from the giddy escapism of Butt Boy, no matter how much smaller that ass will now loom on the home screen.

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Grade A Entertainment

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Selah and the Spades

by Brandon Thomas

High school has always been ripe for depiction on the silver screen. The drama, comedy, absurdness and horror of social structures and adolescence has gifted us classics like Carrie, The Breakfast Club and Heathers. While Selah and the Spades might not exist in the upper echelon of high school cinema, it is a strong newcomer in its own right.

At Haldwell School, five factions run the elicit world of parties, alcohol and drugs. The most powerful of them, The Spades, is led by Queen Bee, Selah (Lovie Simone). Selah and her second in command, Maxxie (Jharrel Jerome of Moonlight), rule Haldwell’s underground with an iron first. Selah’s facade of cool, calm and collected begins to wane as she tests a potential replacement (Celeste O’Connor), and as she hears rumblings of a potential snitch.

Writer-director Tayarisha Poe jams a lot of style into her debut feature. The camera work is methodical and at times dreamy. The soundtrack, like any good high school mix, is wonderfully eclectic: jazz band cuts to modern pop sounds with a dash of Bing Crosby. Tonally, the film is reminiscent of Rian Johnson’s Brick. While that film did deal with life or death through a delightfully hip noir tale, Selah is content to revel in the cool without being bothered by plot. 

Dangling story threads of “What if…” pepper throughout Selah and the Spades. Most interesting being the almost brushed aside story of Selah’s former protege, and the incident she vehemently refuses to discuss. The brief glimpse of vulnerability in Selah’s character comes in a singular scene where we see her home life, and the pressure from her mother that has undoubtedly molded her into the emotional grifter she is now.

When the main character’s name is in the title, you better make sure that character delivers, and Simone commands the screen with a kaleidoscope of emotions. Selah’s power comes from the ability to adapt her behavior for each situation. She can be cunning, trustworthy or vulnerable – depending on her need at that particular moment. The complexities of the character threaten to overshadow her humanity at times, but Poe’s terrific script and Simone’s complicated performance help maintain a line of empathy for Selah.

Through an ambitious and original sense of style and character, Selah and the Spades positions itself as a high school movie for more than just a high school audience.

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Strings Attached

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Trolls World Tour

by George Wolf

They may sing songs we already know in a sequel that’s often thematically simple, but to quarantined families longing for an escape from re-runs, these new Trolls will feel like a cool blast of freedom.

Just as Branch (Justin Timberlake) is working up the courage to break out of the friend zone with Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick), trouble invades the Pop Troll world of endless singing, dancing and regular hug appointments.

Queen Barb (Rachel Bloom) of the Rock Trolls, daughter of King Thrash (Ozzy Osbourne!), has set out on a Mad Max-style rampage through Troll Kingdom, collecting the magic strings from each of 6 different musical villages in a quest to make everyone bow to power chords and devil horns.

Poppy makes a pinky promise (a pinky promise!) not to let that happen, so she heads out with Branch and Biggie (James Corden) on a shuffle through the Troll playlist.

Like the first film, World Tour brings exuberant splashes of sound, color and enthusiasm. But while this latest adventure salutes more types of music, it somehow makes all them feel more bland on the way to its evergreen moral of appreciating differences.

What elevates these Trolls, though, is their funny bone. One of the directors and two of the writers return from part one, but this film is much funnier, especially for the parents sitting down for movie night.

From the struggle to grasp “Hammer time” to the deviousness of yodeling and the futility of fighting smooth jazz, this script-by-committee lands several solid gags. A new group of all star voices (especially a scene-stealing Sam Rockwell as Hickory the cowboy) helps, too.

And really, where else are you gonna hear Ozzy mumble through “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun?”

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Hot in the City

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The Hottest August

by Hope Madden

It’s August, 2016 – the hottest August in history – and Brett Story (The Prison in Twelve Landscapes) is taking the temperature of New York City. Armed with open-ended questions, she travels borough to borough gauging different New Yorkers’ sensibilities concerning climate, race, capitalism, robotics, gentrification, unions.

As the world sweats and readies itself for a total solar eclipse, Story gets people talking.

Her subjects are not tongue tied, and their soliloquies are loosely linked one to the other by their in-the-moment nature. You can’t talk about this moment, it seems, without waxing nostalgic about the past and worrying about the future.

How do they feel about the future?

Some are compelled to take action, to exert some control over their present to claim their own future. Others prepare. Some take note of what’s going on around them and that’s enough. Some don’t even do that.

The film is equally fascinating whether it’s digging into grand ideas or sitting in a sidewalk lawn chair chit chatting about the nastier, day-to-day consequences of gentrification.

It’s best, though, when it walks alongside Afronaut – New York artist or man from the future who’s come back to make notes on the present and offer sage advice?

Multiply the probability of a harm by the magnitude of the harm.

All directors manipulate the message, especially documentarians, and Story is no different. Story’s unshowy curiosity proves an amicable though not passive guide. She doesn’t judge, neither does she excuse.

Story talks with big thinkers in their spacious, impressive apartments. She follows activists to the streets as they practice to effect change. She sits on a barstool with Yankee fans who’d like to reframe racism as “resentment.“

Is the future controllable, inevitable, or both? Are we preparing for it, or will it eat us whole like the moon ate the sun that August? The answer is ultimately surreal – just ask Afronaut.

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Other Side of the Pillow

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Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool

by George Wolf

Miles Davis, the original cool? Well, at the very least, he’s in the team picture.

And part of that iconic allure, along with groundbreaking talent, was his elusiveness. Until that unexpected 1980s stretch of pop collaborations, art exhibitions and Miami Vice appearances, Davis was the prickly genius you could not pin down.

Enough talk, his every glance seemed to sneer (behind the coolest of sunglasses, of course). Just stand back and let me play.

With Birth of the Cool, director Stanley Nelson weaves archival footage, first-person interviews and Davis’s own words (read by actor Carl Lumbly) into a captivating career retrospective buoyed by important historical context.

Longtime aficionados will relish the dive into early stints with Dizzy, Bird and Coltrane as much as the later mentorships of Shorter and Hancock. The amount of respect and adoration here is healthy, indeed, but the darker layers of Davis’s drug use and abusive relationships are treated as part of his human complexity rather than mere whispers on a scandal sheet.

Birth of the Cool is an obvious must for any Davis fans wanting to feel as close to the legend as they’ve ever been. And for anyone using the film as intro to Miles 101, it’s a fine primer on road to Bitches Brew and beyond.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34r017yYNa0

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See Me, Feel Me

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Invisible Life

by George Wolf

Invisible Life (A Vida Invisvel) is one of the few films that earns its melodrama status in only positive ways. Director/co-writer Karim Ainouz attacks our sentimentality in such a loving, dreamlike manner you easily fall under his spell of family strife in 1950s Brazil.

Sisters Euridice and Guida (Carol Duarte and Julia Stockler, both exceptional) grew up inseparable but have begun to follow different paths. While Guida dreams of finding love, Euridice has aspirations as a classical pianist.

A dramatic turn leads to one of the women being disowned by their father, and the two sisters begin living disconnected lives, each believing the other’s circumstances are very different than reality.

The “invisibility” of the sisters to each other, and of the lives of all women in a patriarchal society, is a thread Ainouz weaves skillfully and repeatedly throughout. The result is a lush and emotional period piece that dives into its genre with no apologies, tugging at your heart with broken dreams and familial bonds until you’re nothing but thankful for it.

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Shout at the Devil

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We Summon the Darkness

by Hope Madden

The year was 1988, and as far as you know, metal bands shouted “hail Satan” and evangelicals took to the airwaves warning their flocks about cults driven to spill virtuous blood.

Marc Meyers (My Friend Dahmer) jumps in the way back machine to road trip with three besties headed to a rock show. Alexis (Alexandra Daddario), Val (Maddie Hasson) and Bev (Amy Forsyth) are rockin’ like Dokken with those bare midriff black tees and upside down cross dangles, but something’s amiss.

For one thing, their hair is not nearly obnoxious enough. No way they’re en route to a rock concert in ’88. No one’s hair even grazes the car ceiling.

Also, that trio of dudes they’re flirting with (at least one of them is mulleted, so there is a whiff of authenticity) is clearly beneath them. Plus, with this nationwide ritualistic Satanic killing spree going on…

Here’s the thing, though. I was actually alive in rural Ohio in the late Eighties, and there honestly were people—like, people in authority—who believed our corn fields were lousy with covens. They believed metal music transmitted the words of the dark lord to the eager ears of teens.

It wasn’t true. It’s just that all rock bands in 1988 sucked.

Nonetheless, Meyers creates a nearly believable atmosphere for his spare, occasionally comical dive into Ozzy-inspires Satanism.

Hasson charms as the hot friend with a weak bladder. While the banter never feels quite fresh enough to be improvisational, the dialog among the three girls is random, comfortable fun.

Daddario and Hasson share a silly chemistry that keeps scenes bright and engaging, even when the slight plot begins to wear through.

In its best moments, We Summon the Darkness conjures Kevin Smith’s Red State (an underseen and under-appreciated horror gem). Johnny Knoxville plays intriguingly against type as the Midwestern pastor warning youngsters about the lures of the devil, and Daddario has enough screen presence to anchor the movie.

There’s just not a lot to see here. Pretty girls. Terrible music. Worse clothes. Religious zealots. Backwards thinking. Friends who drive you crazy on a road trip because they have to stop every ten minutes to pee.

Yes, that does sound like 1988 to me, actually. It’s just too bad Meyers couldn’t deliver the kind of inspired, memorable scares born of high school relationships, weirdos and misfits he shared in My Friend Dahmer. Instead the camaraderie and atmosphere become entertaining distractions from a forgettable story.

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Veni Vidi Amavi

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Vitalina Varela

by Cat McAlpine

Vitalina Varela travels to Portugal to sift through the ashes of the life her husband led there.

“There is nothing for you here.” Someone on the tarmac whispers upon her arrival, gripping her by the shoulders with a robotic intensity.

But Vitalina marches forward.

Varela plays herself, in a re-enactment of her journey to Libson in the days following her husband’s death. After more than two decades apart, Vitalina no longer recognizes the man she once knew. She navigates an impoverished neighborhood shrouded in darkness, searching for clues as to the man Joaquim had become.

Director Pedro Costa (Horse Money) co-wrote the script with Varela. Together they weave a tale that asks both “How do we forgive others?” and “How do we forgive ourselves?”

Varela delivers a stoic but moving performance as she seeks a kind of redemption for the years spent waiting for her husband. Costa knows where to place Varela, leaving her constantly teetering on the edge of something, in perfectly lit doorways and windows.

This film is largely about the emotion of light and shadow, both on screen and in our own lives. With minimal dialogue and a cast of non-professional actors, Costa must work harder to visually manipulate his tale. To his aid comes a realistic and heavily layered sound design that pairs the low rumble of a crowded neighborhood with the high-pitched notes of spoons in bowls and the yips of dogs.

Almost every scene seems to be lit with a single spotlight, which brings to your attention how dark the spaces really are.

While this technique illuminates every frame like a luxurious renaissance painting, highlighting the sharp turns of hollowed cheeks and shrouding the crumbling backdrop, after two hours your eyes tire from the strain. Vitalina Varela’s strength is also its weakness.

The film is so slow and so hyper-focused on the silence between emotional revelations, it seems largely detached from anything other than its own dark places.

There is a triumphant return to the daylight, beautifully shot like the rest, but it comes long after the movie should have ended. 120 minutes is simply too indulgent for the pacing and sparse narrative offered.

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Crooked Lines

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Slay the Dragon

by George Wolf

Before hitting play on Slay the Dragon, make sure you’re a good social distance away from Grandma’s fine china.

Because you’re going to want to break something.

Directors Chris Durrance and Barak Goodman open their deep dive into political gerrymandering with a quote from Founding Father John Adams about democracies and suicide. They then spend almost two hours making the case that time is running short for America to prove Adams wrong.

The film’s historical context of gerrymandering – or drawing Congressional districts in a hyper-partisan manner – is informative and even entertaining in spots. Who knew the practice got its name from pairing an old Massachusetts governor with a salamander?

But once it digs into the deep pockets and advanced metrics behind “packing,” “stacking” and “bleaching,” the film’s view that this a fight between voters picking winners and winners picking voters does not seem hyperbolic.

The direct, measured approach pushes hardest when reminding us that new district maps are drawn every ten years, so elections in a year that ends in zero – LIKE THIS YEAR – are especially important.

But to make their film a rallying cry for passionate turnout, Durrance and Goodman know that beneath the dirty tricks, blatant hypocrisy, systemic oppression, corporate greed and Supreme Court setbacks, there has to be hope.

We get it via Katie Fahey and Voters Not Politicians, a grassroots movement fighting gerrymandering in Michigan that began with a Facebook post. Fahey, a total neophyte diving into vicious waters, is instantly relatable and easy to root for, creating a narrative contrast that’s a bit simplistic but naturally effective.

It does get a bit long-winded in spots, but Slay the Dragon makes its case with enough info, passion and persistence to make it necessary, especially in a year that ends in zero.

Like this year. 2020. An election year.

Did we mention that?

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Sugar and Spice

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Never Rarely Sometimes Always

by George Wolf

With her 2013 debut It Felt Like Love, Eliza Hittman brought a refreshing honesty to the teen drama. Zeroing in on the summer days when two girls began their sexual lives, the film was an exciting introduction to a writer/director with a quietly defiant voice.

At its core, Never Rarely Sometimes Always could be seen as Hittman’s kindred sequel to her first feature, as two friends navigate a cold, sometimes cruel world that lies just beyond the hopeful romanticism of first love.

Autumn (Sidney Flanagan) is a talented 17 year-old in Pennsylvania whose crude father berates her for an ever-present foul mood. She’s worried, and when a visit to her local health clinic confirms her fears, Autumn confides only in her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) as she weighs her options.

In Autumn’s home state, those options are severely limited, so the girls scrape together as much money as they can and hop a bus to New York, encountering more hard realities along the way.

The over-reliance on metaphor that sometimes hampered It Felt Like Love now feels like that awkward school picture from just a few grades back. NRSA shows Hittman in full command of her blunt truth-telling, demanding we accept this reality of women fighting to control their own bodies amid constant waves of marginalization.

Flanagan, a New York musician making her acting debut, is simply a revelation. There isn’t a hint of angsty teen caricature in Autumn’s dour moodiness, just a beaten down worldview born from all that is revealed in her beautifully brutal interview at the New York clinic.

As an off-camera social worker asks Autumn to give the titular response to a series of questions, Hittman holds tight on Flanagan and she never shrinks from the moment. It’s a devastatingly long take full of hushed experience that may easily shake you.

Just three films in, Hittman has established herself as a filmmaker of few words, intimate details and searing perspective. NRSW is a sensitive portrayal of female friendship and courage, equal parts understated and confrontational as it speaks truths that remain commonly ignored.

Given the subject matter, the film’s PG-13 rating is surprising, but hopeful. This film deserves an audience, much like the conversations it will undoubtedly spark.