Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Senior Moments

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Senior Love Triangle

by Hope Madden

Co-writer/director Kelly Blatz announces his presence with authority, creating a minor cinematic miracle with his feature debut, Senior Love Triangle.

Inspired by co-writer Isadora Kosofsky’s remarkable longterm photo essay of the same name, the film delivers a candid look into the intimate relationship among three elderly characters: William (Tom Bower), Adina (Anne Gee Byrd) and Jeanie (Marlyn Mason).

The film is equal parts charming, frustrating and heartbreaking. More importantly, it takes its characters seriously. In an era where veteran actors entertain us via “those crazy old people!” vehicles (watching Diane Keaton become a cheerleader in Poms sapped my will to live), Senior Love Triangle feels gloriously anarchic. The magic of Blatz’s film is that it offers a character study of the sort we simply never see.

Thanks to thoughtful writing and breathtaking performances—neither of which rely for a moment on shorthand—we get to know three unique individuals. William is an irascible, arrogant, 84-year-old charmer. His sophisticated lady love Adina indulges his ego, but when her son has him kicked out of Adina’s posh retirement high rise, William finds himself in a lower-quality establishment.

Not to worry! He’s just finishing a lucrative deal that will set him up so he can buy a mansion and get Adele away from those Nazis in her building. (That is to say, he’s being routinely scammed.) In the meantime, over at his new digs he meets exuberant flirt Jeanie. (Mason’s performance is a particular triumph.)  

Blatz, with an incredible assist from Kosofsky’s work, sees the characters’ humanity, their sexuality, their courage and weakness. He sees their loneliness, their vulnerability to outside forces and to each other, their need. These are complicated characters, vibrant and alive.

Senior Love Triangle offers an underseen perspective on aging (the perspective of the aged themselves) without romanticizing. Dangerous misconceptions about masculinity weigh as heavily on their safety and happiness as their own physical deterioration.

The film is a heartbreaker that just does what it wants to do. Just like William.

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They Are Us

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Waiting for the Barbarians

by George Wolf

In the forty years since J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was first published, world events have continued to re-frame its thematic relevance.

Now, the novel finally has a big screen adaptation, amid a tumultuous political climate that again makes Coetzee’s tale feel especially prescient.

In a vaguely historical era within an unnamed “Empire,” the Magistrate (Mark Rylance) governs his desert outpost population through moral conviction and a delicate harmony with the land’s indigenous peoples.

Conversely, Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp) – the soft spoken and sadistic head of state security – believes “pain is truth.” Joll arrives at the outpost to carry out random interrogations of the nomadic “barbarians” and learn the truth about an attack that he feels is imminent.

The Magistrate protests this view of the natives and the Empire’s directives, drawing the ire of Joll and later, his more overtly cruel lieutenant, officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson).

Coetzee’s debut screenplay adapts his own novel with delicate grace and an understated foreboding. But as relevant as the theme of creeping fascism remains, its bite is dulled by ambiguity and broadly-drawn metaphors.

The urge to speak more universally via an unspecified name, time and place is understandable, but it hampers the intimacy required to feel this warning in your gut.

The Oscar-winning Rylance (Bridge of Spies) almost makes up for this by himself, with a tremendous performance of quiet soul-searching. The film’s summer-to-the-following-autumn chapter headings paint the Magistrate as an obvious man for all seasons, and Rylance makes the Magistrate’s journey of fortitude and redemption feel almost biblical.

Depp and Pattinson provide worthy adversarial bookends. As Joll, Depp’s only eccentricity is a pair of sunglasses, but again he requires minimal screen time to carve an indelible figure.

Mandel is an even smaller role, but Pattinson makes him the eager realization of the ugliness Joll keeps bottled up. It’s another interesting choice for the gifted Pattinson, and another film that’s better for it.

Director Ciro Guerra utilizes exquisite cinematography from Chris Menges for a wonderful array of visuals, from beautifully expansive landscapes to artfully orchestrated interior stills. Though the film’s first act feels particularly forced, Guerra (Birds of Passage, Embrace of the Serpent) gives the remaining narrative – especially the Magistrate’s attempts at penance with the tortured Girl (Gana Bayarsaikhan) – the room to effectively breathe.

Waiting for the Barbarians is not a film that will leave you guessing. But the decades-old message remains painfully vital, and in its quietest moments of subtlety, the film gives that message sufficient power.

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No Rest for the Weary

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The Fight

by Matt Weiner

No disrespect to taut legal thrillers, but after watching The Fight it’s safe to say nothing will stack up to the real thing during the Trump administration. What began outside a New York court just days after the inauguration in 2017—the night the ACLU scored an early victory against the administration’s first version of what would become the “Muslim ban”—inspired documentary filmmaker Elyse Steinberg (Weiner) to follow the legal organization’s urgent and frequent races against the clock to challenge the administration’s advances on just about every key issue the group defends.

Surprisingly, given the marquee cases the group has been involved in over the years, this is the first time they allowed access inside their offices. Much less surprisingly, that turned out to be a smart move under this administration: the filmmakers (Steinberg, along with co-directors Eli Despres and Josh Kriegman) have no shortage of legal battles to follow.

Steinberg knows how to humanize her subjects. (She made Anthony Weiner almost sympathetic, after all.) The ACLU lawyers followed in the film are big names in their practice area, and recognizable faces to cable news watchers or the kind of person who has a favorite vice president. But it’s the less guarded moments that reveal the full gravity of this work: Dale Ho flubbing the lines in front of a mirror that he’ll later deliver to the Supreme Court, or Brigitte Amiri celebrating a major win with “train wine” on the Northeast Corridor. It’s equal parts grim and joyful.

To both the filmmakers’ and the ACLU’s credit, there’s acknowledgement that the headline wins are tempered by the reality of the American legal system. Even the wins might only be temporary, as the administration endlessly finds ways to retool the laws in ways that pass muster with a sympathetic Supreme Court.

In these moments, the film’s main players seem to tiptoe up to a line of nihilism. But only just up to that line. We hear lawyers sigh that arguing the merits of a case doesn’t always matter in front of the nation’s highest court. And then there’s the criticism from those within the organization itself over their role in Charlottesville, and what free speech and democracy look like in this era.

Ultimately though, this cri de coeur isn’t looking to dismantle the entire system… yet. (Let’s see how disheveled they look if there’s another four years of this.) The film’s subjects refuse to jettison small-d democratic values, or a belief in the foundation on which these laws are built. It’s inspiring, in the way that Charlie Brown thinking he’s going to get that football this time is also a testament to the human spirit or something.

The filmmakers are aware of this contradiction too, though. It’s why the most powerful moments don’t take place in august courtrooms like the generic biopics these cases are bound to spawn some day. Instead, it’s with the individual people at the heart of the cases—the lawyers, eschewing private practice to go from airport to airport forever in search of a phone charger, but especially the anonymous people who found themselves in life or death situations with their fate hanging on the decision of a handful of judges.

For one of these cases, “Ms. L” v. ICE, the camera crew is present when the asylum-seeking mother reunites with her daughter after being separated by the government. She sheds tears of joy, but also lets out a shocking, endless wail. These cases might have good endings, but not happy ones.

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Legend

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Marley

by Seth Troyer

In our current era of memes and wikipedia summaries, the true power of a figure like Bob Marley can become diminished. To many in the US, Marley is simply known as “that reggae guy, who smoked weed and thought peace was cool.” Dorm room posters, white kids with dreadlocks, and Marley related drug paraphernalia can sometimes threaten to make us forget what it was that made Marley a legend in the first place.

Kevin Macdonald’s in-depth documentary from 2012 seeks to jog the world’s memory about the revolutionary king of reggae. Marley is epic in scale and creates an experience that will be eye opening for long time fans and newcomers alike.

Re-released for what would have been Marley’s 75th birthday, the film has a two and a half hour runtime, but I can’t stress enough for audiences to not be daunted by the film’s length. The story here feels instantly essential and engrossing. It simply opts for a thoughtful, methodical pace that seems perfectly in sync with the reggae movement.

Even the editing of the film seems to be in reverence of its subject. For instance, a scene that introduces a popular song like “Natty Dread” in less mature hands may have been used as an excuse to showcase wild camera work and the ADD rapid cut editing. Instead we are given a slow motion aerial shot of Marley’s home country of Jamaica. We are granted a quiet moment where we listen to the music and gaze out at the beauty that helped inspire it.

The length also allows interviews with Marley’s band mates and family members to be more than just cut up sound bites. Macdonald is in no hurry and his patience elevates the film. The interviewees are given time to articulate their thoughts, and have genuine moments of joy and heartbreak as they offer their recollections.

The film is clearly a love letter to the man and his music, but unlike many celebrity documentaries, it does not shy away from some of the more difficult truths about its subject. Those who were closest to him are often painfully honest in the film when it comes to his egotistical tendencies and shortcomings as a family man.

Its comprehensive honesty makes Marley much more than a simple fan rock doc. It is an honest portrait, a celebration of a man who helped open the eyes of the world to a new era of music.

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Do Dream It, Be It

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The Secret: Dare to Dream

by George Wolf

It might be a different type of faith-based flick, but Dare to Dream most definitely earns my usual disclaimer: judging these films is less about what they are preaching, and more about how well they tell a story.

Here, the gospel is the Law of Attraction, and the storytelling is unattractively dreadful.

The Secret first arrived nearly 15 years ago as a documentary and self-help book, both written by Rhonda Byrne, and each detailing how positive thinking can directly influence your life and bring you whatever it is you visualize.

Director/co-writer Andy Tennant (Hitch, Fool’s Gold) visualizes a narrative treatment that finds Vanderbilt professor Bray Johnson (Josh Lucas) ignoring hurricane warnings and driving down to New Orleans with an important message for one Miranda Wells (Katie Holmes).

Miranda is a widow with three kids, a boyfriend (Jerry O’Connell), and character development consisting of a succession of old graphic tees. She finds Bray before he finds her, by rear-ending him in traffic. Bray’s original mission is quickly sidetracked, and soon he’s fixing Miranda’s car, the hole in her roof, and whatever else his laid-back, dimpled philosophizing can help with.

Even before this handsome stranger effortlessly fascinates the wide-eyed Wells children with an example of how magnets work, not a lick of this bears any resemblance to real life.

Paper-thin characters recite banal dialogue carrying all the depth of a pop-up greeting card. Family strife about storm damage and money trouble is only dire enough to be a manufactured setup for Holmes to give a cute sigh and wonder, “What now??” while her kids pine for a computer or a pony.

Bray’s mission is never in doubt, and the film’s ultimate resolution becomes a tidy, manipulative pinch from the Nicholas Sparks playbook, right down to the throwing of a shameless trump card.

Whether you think The Secret is nothing but entitlement masquerading as feel good drivel, or a truly uplifting approach to finding happiness, a resonant film needs an attraction beyond preaching to the converted.

Or does it? Dare to Dream doesn’t really seem interested in finding out.

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Rising from the Ashes 

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Rebuilding Paradise

by Brandon Thomas

It’s an indisputable truth that we’re living at a time when the effects of human civilization are having a massive impact on the environment. Climate change is all around us. From stronger hurricanes and cyclones in our oceans, to half of Australia burning, the catastrophic change we’ve caused is something that’s become impossible to ignore. 

While climate change and humans’ impact on it continues to be a political lightning rod, there are real people all over the world suffering the effects. Rebuilding Paradise tells the story of one such town and its residents. 

On November 8th, 2018, an enormous wildfire overtook the small northern California town of Paradise. The Camp Fire, as it became known, destroyed most of Paradise and much of the surrounding area. Many residents were left without homes and jobs. Most of the city’s schools were either destroyed entirely or severely damaged. Eighty-five residents lost their lives that day.

A lot of people would’ve left and never looked back. For many of the residents of Paradise, turning their backs on their community wasn’t an option.

Finding Paradise opens with a harrowing series of videos shot by Paradise residents. As they flee, the footage shows nothing short of an absolute hellscape. Propane tanks explode in the distance as panicked families try to decide the safest route. At one point a resident asks another, “Are we going to die?” As a viewer, this devastating footage makes it all the easier to understand the PTSD that residents felt in the weeks and months following. 

In the last decade, director Ron Howard (Apollo 13, A Beautiful Mind) has started to dabble more and more in the documentary field. His first two efforts, Made In America and Pavarotti, showed an already confident filmmaker finding his groove in a new genre. With Rebuilding Paradise, Howard’s confidence is solidified. 

It would’ve been easy to make Rebuilding Paradise an exercise in tragedy porn. Instead, Howard builds the film as a tribute to the strength and the resiliency of the people of Paradise. The utter devastation at the beginning of the film is beautifully bookended by extraordinary acts of kindness. A community bends over backwards to make sure the few graduating Paradise seniors get to walk across the football field at their own high school. People open their doors to estranged family members who lost everything in the conflagration.

Howard’s insistence on focusing on the people of Paradise allows the film to stay deeply personal. Some of the worst that nature has to offer allows us to see just how decent, hardy, and inspiring people can be when pushed.


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Hillbilly Noir

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The Big Ugly

by Hope Madden

When my son was young, we liked to watch Animal Face-Off, an educational program that proposed hypothetical battles between animals that wouldn’t normally fight. Sperm Whale v Colossal Squid, African Lion v Nile Crocodile, Walrus v Polar Bear.

Ohioan Scott Wiper delivers a similar culture clash movie: Brit gangster v hillbillies with money. The filmmaker drops us in the Appalachians along with London mob elite Harris (Malcolm McDowell), his muscle, Neelyn (Vinnie Jones), and Neelyn’s girl, Fiona (Lenora Crichlow).

After decades of hard, dirty work, these men are about to make a deal with an oilman who can’t get legal money to drill. They finance Preston (Ron Perlman) and his son Junior (Brandon Sklenar) now, and it pays off for the rest of their lives.

Bills are exchanged, drinks are drunk, but when the dust clears the next day, Fiona comes up missing.

Even at 55, Jones is still an intimidating presence. He’s looking a bit worse for the wear here, but the effect gives Neelyn a weariness that serves the character well. And while it’s always wonderful to see veterans McDowell and Perlman with real characters to dig into, it’s Sklenar who impresses most.

His entitled sociopath schtick slides fluidly from charming and hateful, and the fact that he and writer/director Wiper offer the character both intelligence and physical prowess makes this a villain who may just stand a chance.

It’s also to the filmmaker’s credit that the West Virginians are rarely the oversimplified hillbilly clichés we’ve come to expect.

Which isn’t to say the film is full of nuance. Though the tone is less laughable, The Big Ugly sometimes takes on a Roadhouse feel about it. Plot contrivances and obvious resolutions mark a film that’s clearly breaking no new ground.

The subplot about the heads of the families carries too little weight and too much screen time. It’s hard to complain about an honor-among-thieves conflict between two such beloved genre veterans as Perlman and McDowell, but Wiper tells of the bond more than he shows it, so the payoff feels unearned.

Still, for a B-movie, The Big Ugly delivers what it needs to. Our favorite Animal Face-Off was Hippopotamus v Bull Shark because we love it when the big, lumbering beast you’d bet against turns out to be the badass. Doesn’t everybody?

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Odd Couple

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Summerland

by Rachel Willis

Irascible Alice Lamb (Gemma Arterton, The Girl with All the Gifts) doesn’t care what anyone thinks of her. Called a witch by local children, pranked by schoolboys, and barely tolerated by the adults in her community, she’s resigned to her routine and to living her life alone.

Writer/director Jessica Swale, with her first feature film, Summerland, examines what it means to be a woman in a world where women had very few choices in life.   

In the early-1940’s, the British countryside of Kent is seemingly removed from the harsher realities of World War II. The residents are asked to do their part for the “war effort,” but none of this affects Alice. At least, not until a trainload of children arrive from London. Fleeing the frequent bombing raids on the city, the children have been separated from their parents and sent to live with strangers.

Conscripted to care for Frank (Lucas Bond), Alice is perturbed by this development in her life. She wants nothing to do with the boy, but with no other options, she’s forced to take him.

Though the film has a warm, light-hearted tone, there are moments that remind the audience about the harsh realities of the time. Frank is on his own with a stranger who treats him with undisguised annoyance. Through flashbacks, we learn that Alice’s past still haunts her. As Frank becomes a part of her life, we come to understand why she is angry with the world.

But it’s past trauma that allows the characters to bond, and Swale conveys this with tenderness. Though Alice doesn’t have the foggiest idea how to care for a child, she finds a companion who accepts her and treats her with kindness even when she doesn’t deserve it.

Swale explores a few themes, but she’s primarily concerned with Alice’s experiences, leaving little room for anything else. Alice is the only character with depth. The ancillary characters round out the main story, but none of them truly live and breathe. We barely scratch the surface of this complex world.

While the theme of Swale’s choosing is worthwhile, the lack of attention to the other details is distracting. Rather than serving as a thematic bookend to Alice, Frank ends up as a crutch for her growth.

The result is a middling film about love and friendship that still has enough appeal to thaw the coldest hearts.

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Domestic Bliss

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Amulet

by Hope Madden

It’s a comforting notion, the idea that we each need to forgive ourselves for the wrongs we’ve done in order to heal and move forward. Everyone deserves to be happy, right?

But is that forgiveness ever really ours to give? Tomaz (a remarkable Alec Secareanu) doesn’t think so.

Making her feature debut as writer/director, Romola Garai delivers an entrancing horror show concerned with sexual politics, cowardice and proper punishment.

Tomaz is living a destitute existence as a day laborer in London, picking up gigs as he can and sheltering at night with others like him—mainly refugees wordlessly sharing space in an abandoned building. He used to live in an unnamed but war torn European nation, and his dreams are still haunted by the experience.

A chance encounter puts Tomaz in the path of Sister Claire (Imelda Staunton, relishing her small role). She introduces Tomaz to Magda (Carla Juri, Wetlands), who needs help with the house that’s falling down around her and her ailing, bedridden mother.

From there, Garai toys with familiar horror elements—the decrepit building as metaphor, the horrifying relative hidden away—but you can never predict Amulet’s secrets.

Juri is hypnotic as the reluctant, wearied, lonesome Magda and her slow growing chemistry with Tomaz creates a quietly seductive force for the film. Clearly Tomaz should leave, there is something powerfully unhealthy happening in this house. But maybe this is his path to happiness? Maybe he can help?

That’s how the film traps you, because Secareanu is terribly empathetic and because it is his point of view we share. His performance is full of understated power and, paired with Juri’s resigned sensuality, it holds your interest.

Garai braids two mysteries together, the one Tomaz is living and the one he’s keeping from us. That second secret haunts his dreams and, little by little, he convinces himself that unraveling the mystery in this house might free him from his past.

The delivery is measured and creepy, and though the final act feels simultaneously tidy and nonsensical, the mysteries themselves—not to mention a trio of excellent performances—more than satisfy.

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Cornish Comfort Food

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Fisherman’s Friends

by Seth Troyer

If you’re looking for a low stakes, feel good film to watch with your family, you could do a lot worse than Fisherman’s Friends.

The film is loosely based on the true story of a men’s a capella group consisting of tough-as-nails men of the sea who were eventually signed to Island Records and became a surprising success.

Witnessing the transformation of a group of old men who like to sing traditional music while drunk at a pub on a Friday night into performers with sold out shows is undeniably interesting. The a cappella performances in the film mix the voices of original members and the actors portraying them, and the results are surprising. Even if it’s not your thing, Fisherman’s Friends will remind you that a cappella music can send shivers down anyone’s spine.

Names have been changed and the story is clearly expanded and fictionalized to better suit the arc of a feel good movie. One of the real events left out is the 2013 stage collapse that resulted in the deaths of member Trevor Grills and promotor Paul McMullen. The film is respectfully dedicated to these men and seems to be an attempt to celebrate the good times before the tragedy rather than letting it define the band.

I can’t help thinking that a more honest and candid portrayal may have made for a more engaging film, but the choice to avoid the tricky task of translating such a painful event into cinematic drama is understandable.

In the end, director Chris Foggin succeeds in doing what he sets out to do. The film is a charming story of friendship and ambition—nothing more, nothing less. It follows all the familiar narrative beats, with a sweet but predictable love story thrown in, and plenty of montages that will make more cynical viewers roll their eyes. But honestly, this simply isn’t the film for a cynical viewer.

If you want Ingmar Bergman, go watch The Seventh Seal (it, of course, rules). But if you want to watch something with your extended family and maybe smile a bit, what you have here is some Cornish cinematic comfort food that will do the trick just fine.