Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Just the Two of Us

Leave a comment

The Two Popes

by Hope Madden

How funny is it that Hannibal Lecter is playing Pope Benedict XVI?

That’s not the only sly jab Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (City of God) takes at the pomp and scandal of the papacy in his latest, but the punches come early and make way quickly for a tone of reconciliation.

Indeed, The Two Popes may be more forgiving than many people will appreciate. Or accept.

But it’s hard to fault the casting.

Anthony Hopkins is better here than he’s been since his Oscar turn as the flesh eater. Frail and humorless (but trying!), Pope Benedict becomes a recognizable figure, one whose solitude and study have isolated him from the people he’s meant to protect and lead.

Jonathan Pryce is perhaps better than he has ever been. An ever reliable “that guy,” Pryce has built a career on versatility, never so showy he outshines the lead, never so unfussy as to be easily ignored. That facility with chemistry elevates his performance here, and as the “everyman’s” pope, Pryce becomes the vehicle for the audience.

Together the two banter back and forth, easily turning Anthony McCarten’s lofty theological and spiritual dialog into passionate conversations between two peers.

The Two Popes offers considerably more nuance than The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour or Bohemian Rhapsody, although McCarten will never be chastened for writing an unforgiving screenplay.

What he’s done with this script is imagine what the dialog between these two men might have been like as Catholicism moved headlong toward a pivotal event unseen for 600ish years. A bit like The Two of Us, Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s 2000 fictional conversation between Lennon and McCartney (a pair the popes mention more than once), this film is a smartly crafted fantasy of the behind closed stained glass meetings that might have led to the changeover.

The humor is undoubtedly the brightest surprise the film has in store, but Meirelles keeps the film quick and interesting, his filmmaking simultaneously intimate and elegant. The missteps come as he refocuses attention on the future Pope Francis’s rocky past. These sequences drag, boasting neither the visual flair nor the vibrancy of the modern footage.

It’s hard not to also mark as a weakness the way the film simultaneously admonishes and reflects the Church’s tendency to be too forgiving of clergy.

Still, The Two Popes is hard to resist. In the end – especially at the end – the film is almost criminally charming.

New In Theaters

Parentification

Leave a comment

Mickey and the Bear

by Christie Robb

In a nuanced coming-of-age story, writer/director Annabelle Attanasio delicately maps the rocky emotional landscape of  high-school student Mickey Peck (Camila Morrone).

Mickey balances school and work, and endures the clumsy advances of a needy boyfriend, all while running the household and performing the emotional labor for her widowed, oxy-addicted, veteran dad (James Badge Dale).

It’s mostly a thankless job. For every tender moment Mikey and her dad Hank share, there’s a real fear that any moment he’ll lob a bowl of beef-a-roni at her head (or worse). And there’s no hope of it ever getting better.

As her high school graduation approaches, Mikey grapples with which path to take toward her future. Continue to parent her dad? Get pregnant and engaged like her friend Beth? Strike out for California and college with the cute British new kid?

Morrone and Dale are excellent in their roles as daughter and dad. The actors are able to keep up with each other as they shift from emotional vulnerability to volatility and back again. The pair could have easily wandered into stereotype or melodrama, but between the actors’ subtle skill and Attanasio’s writing, the characters present a multifaceted realism that is riveting.

There’s no unnecessary exposition and little dialogue that could be paired away.  The final act has all the more impact for the understated matter-of-fact way that it is treated.

An impressive film, I anticipate great things to come from Attanasio, Morrone and Dale.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ6fDHro3Rk

New In Theaters

Lady in Red

Leave a comment

In Fabric

by Hope Madden

My last note after watching In Fabric: “Well, that was weird.”

Weird in a good way.

Nobody blends giallo’s surrealistic seduction with dry British wit (two elements that, to be honest, should not fit together at all) like Peter Strickland. Subversive and playful while boasting a meticulous obsession with the exploitation films of the Seventies, Strickland creates vintage-futuristic fantasies that live outside of time and evoke both nostalgia and wonder.

His latest follows a red Ambassadorial Function Dress and the havoc it wreaks on its wearers.

This sounds like Yong-gyun Kim’s 2005 Japanese horror The Red Shoes, but Strickland has something far less sensible, less predictable, and more memorable in store for you.  (Quick PSA: If you can be less sensible than a Japanese ghost story horror and still make a watchable, even fascinating, film, you are at the top of your game.)

We meet Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), lonely fiftysomething bank teller just finding her way back into the dating pool and in need of a new dress. She heads, during sales season, to Dentley & Soper, where a coven of sales women led by Strickland favorite Fatma Mohamed (she owns this movie) will do what they can to usher clients toward a “transaction of ecstasy.”

The dress, a “a double dream, diamond wrapped,” says the catalog, is “body sensual, captivating, candlelight glances, canape conversations.”

This heightened perfume-ad speak also spills from the department store sales women—each a cross between a Victorian witch and a mannequin—hinting at the fetishistic nature of the entire film.

Strickland, apparently, is about as fond of consumerism as Romero or Cronenberg. He’s also as fond of the color red as Argento. Unlike the giallo films that clearly inform Strickland’s aesthetic, here commerce, not violence itself, is the seductive, sexualized element.

Sheila is a good egg waiting to crack played with working class grace by Jean-Baptiste (Secrets and Lies). In the tradition of the genre, we root that good egg Sheila will somehow outwit the killer dress her saleswitch conned her into purchasing.

Sheila’s story represents the first half of In Fabric, a peculiar but somewhat straightforward horror film. At the film’s halfway mark, Strickland makes a quick left turn into full blown absurdity, which awaits you in the second half.

Not a frame, not a glance, not a bizarre line of dialog is wasted or misplaced in a bold vision that’s stylized nearly to death. In a good way. Strickland’s audacious anti-consumerism fantasy must be seen to be believed.

New In Theaters, Slider

High Tension

Leave a comment

The Aeronauts

by George Wolf

Director Tom Harper wastes little time in taking The Aeronauts into the wild blue, but I’m not complaining. Once we’re up there, I didn’t want to come down, no matter how many knots my stomach was twisting into.

Based on some of the true-life events outlined in Richard Holmes’ book Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air, screenwriter Jack Thorne imagines how a spunky daredevil balloon pilot heroine might have helped pioneering London meteorologist James Glaisher break the world altitude record in 1862.

Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne crafts Glaisher as a politely determined man out to prove to his shirt-stuffed, muttoned-chopped colleagues that it just might be possible to predict the weather.

What Glaisher needed was to take temperature and humidity readings at the highest level of the atmosphere. If he failed, the ribbings from the boys at the Royal Society would be fierce. But if he prevailed, he would take the first step toward scaring the shit out of your mom on the 6 o’clock news.

And yeah, also make a huge scientific advancement.

While history remembers Glaisher’s partner was actually balloonist Henry Coxwell (hello, ladies), for these narrative purposes it is defiant aeronaut Amelia Wren (Felicity Jones). She’s haunted by a tragic memory from the past, but won’t let that – or the usual boys club baffoonery – deny her destiny as a “creature of the sky.”

I take no issue with the liberties taken. This isn’t a documentary, Jones is an Oscar nominee who shares a sweet brother/sisterly chemistry with Redmayne, and her character adds a welcome layer of mischief to a backstory that badly needs it.

Most importantly, as the focus quickly settles on two people in a balloon gondola, Amelia brings a sharp contrast to James that just makes the ride more fun and – thanks to the breathless visual gymnastics – sometimes downright terrifying.

Seriously, this film should come with a trigger warning for acrophobics, because Harper (Wild Rose, TV’s Peaky Blinders) and cinematographer George Steel unveil some truly awe-inspiring, anxiety-inducing set pieces begging for IMAX, or 70mm, whatever you can find.

The Aeronauts may give gentle reminders about the importance of science, but it pounds a visual fist in defense of the big screen. The film’s ultimate calling card is not the story but the ride (in real time, no less!), and a smaller canvas just will not do it justice.

Strap in tight, and enjoy the thrill.

New In Theaters

Time and Tide

1 Comment

Waves

by Hope Madden

“Seize the day,” Tyler’s (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) literature teacher reminds each student as they leave her classroom.

In a constant loop during weight training, Tyler’s wrestling coach barks,
“There are no second chances and there is no fucking second place!”

Even at home, Tyler’s relaxing moment alone with his loving stepmother Catharine (Renee Elise Golsberry) is interrupted by a very stern father (Sterling K. Brown, remarkable as always) reminding him that if he expects to achieve all that has been set out for him – wrestling at state championship level, securing a scholarship – he’d better get back to work.

Trey Edward Schults’s Waves is quick to show us that Tyler has it all: a loving and financially comfortable family, grades, talent, friends, and a gorgeous girlfriend (Alexa Demie). If there is time to enjoy it, there’s certainly no time to live it, to give into it, or to give anything without the clear expectation that it is forwarding something for himself. High expectations, high demands, high rewards, everything focused on Tyler, everyone focused on Tyler, Tyler focused on Tyler.

Waves sometimes feels like a less contrived, more Floridian view of Julius Onah’s Luce, the scab-picking indie in which Harrison proved himself a blistering and commanding lead. Are the demands put upon the brightest and most talented African American high school males too high? Are those supporting these young men deriving too much from their success to actually offer clear-eyed guidance?

Says Dad to an increasingly desperate Tyler, “We are not afforded the luxury of being average.”

While much of the drama leading to this moment could be generalized to most any adolescent male buckling under high expectations, this moment between father and son separates the narrative as one dealing specifically with the black American experience.

In 1968, George Romero famously cast Duane Jones as the lead in his groundbreaking zombie film Night of the Living Dead only, according to the filmmaker, because Jones was the best actor to audition for the part. The film’s enduring success has less to do with Jones’s talent (though that is evident in every frame) and more to do with the political power the film derives from seeing a black hero in this particular effort.

Schultz cast Harrison Jr. as the male lead in Waves because of his work with the remarkable talent in his previous effort, It Comes at Night. The white filmmaker’s script itself is semi-autobiographical, and there’s a superficial tidiness to Schultz’s cultural shift that Romero’s film didn’t suffer.

It’s not enough to topple the film by any means, but the shorthand and stylized moments that remark on the cultural shift from the story of a white adolescent male on a collision course with destiny and the story of a black young man on that same course feel specifically introduced and placed, while much of the rest of the film offers an uneasy authenticity that keeps your attention.

From Schults’s dizzying opening sequence, Tyler’s breathless youth in sunny south Florida is simultaneously exhilarating and reckless, a reality underscored throughout the film by Drew Daniels’s whirligig camera and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s furious score.

What separates Waves from other chronicles of the frenzied fall of an idealized adolescent is his follow-up act, one in which the fallout of Tyler’s destruction implicates everyone who loves him, including his quiet sister Emily (Taylor Russell).

The point of her narrative is the redemptive nature of forgiveness. Here Schults uses the same camera movement and score to note again the hand-in-hand nature of freedom and danger in adolescence. But here, we sense things may not end up as dire.

Like Schults’s first film Krisha, Waves is embroiled in family issues as well as addiction, though this time the issues and the sociological context concern American blackness—questionable territory for a white filmmaker, even one as irrefutably talented as Schults. Perhaps thanks mainly to remarkable performances by Brown, Russell and especially Harrison, Waves rings mainly true.

New In Theaters, Slider

Better Living through Chemistry

Leave a comment

Dark Waters

by Hope Madden

Todd Haynes hasn’t written one of his own films since 2007’s I’m Not There, a biopic that refuses to fit neatly into that genre (making it a perfect fit for its subject).

The director’s collaboration with other writers has been both sublime (Carol) and spotty (Wonderstruck), the content sometimes feeling as if it simply is a mismatch for his own often gorgeously subversive vision.

So, yes, it’s a bit of a shock to witness the filmmaker who depicted Karen Carpenter’s battle with anorexia via Barbie dolls (Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story) tackle the blue collar true story of a corporate defense attorney who grows a conscience and hits DuPont Chemical where it hurts the most.

Shooting again in southern and central Ohio, Haynes turns in the buttery glamour of Carol for a grimmer image of America.

Dark Waters sees Mark Ruffalo as Robert Bilott, a good guy who also happens to be a corporate lawyer. I guess he’s proof those two concepts need not be mutually exclusive.

A keep-your-head-down kind of colleague, Bilott is confronted at work by a friend of his grandmother back home, a curmudgeonly West Virgina farmer (Bill Camp) who is offering VHS proof that his cows are being poisoned.

The corporate lawyer in Bilott wants to ignore this problem. The salt-of-the-earth Midwesterner in him cannot.

Few actors play the scrupulous good guy as reliably or believably as Ruffalo, who leads the film with a quiet, fragile dignity.

Anne Hathaway co-stars as Bilott’s conflicted wife Sarah. It’s a small and somewhat thankless role for the Oscar winner, but she gives it some meat and, better still, a much needed edge that strengthens the film.

She’s not alone. William Jackson Harper (Midsommar) continues to prove that he’s really good at playing a dick. Meanwhile, veteran “that guy” Camp offers a perfectly off-putting, guttural performance. A number of other sharp turns in small roles, including those by Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, Mare Winningham and Victor Garber, help Haynes shade and shadow what could easily have become a paint-by-numbers eco-terror biopic.

He can’t entirely break free, though, and Dark Waters in the end—however stirring, informative and timely the tale—feels far too safe to be a Todd Haynes film.

New In Theaters

Go Beavers!

Leave a comment

Knives and Skin

by Hope Madden

Falling somewhere between David Lynch and Anna Biller in the under-charted area where the boldly surreal meets the colorfully feminist, writer/director Jennifer Reeder’s Knives and Skin offers a hypnotic look at Midwestern high school life.

When Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) goes missing, carefully erected false fronts start crumbling all over town. Cheerleaders take a harder look at football players. Football players cry in their Mustangs. Goth girls fondle pink dresses. Pregnant waitresses bleed at the kitchen sink.

And everyone sings impossibly appropriate Eighties alt hits acapella. Even the dead.

Knives and Skin’s pulpy noir package lets Reeder explore what it means to navigate the world as a female. As tempting as it is to pigeonhole the film as Lynchian, Reeder’s metaphors, while fluid and eccentric, are far more pointed than anything you’ll find in Twin Peaks.

She looks at relationships between mothers and daughters, as daughters toe the line between acceptable and unacceptable levels of conformity and mothers bear the toll exacted by years of fitting in.

Reeder blurs that line between popularity and ostracism, characters finding common ground as they address the question: Are you a whore or a tease?

The ire is not one-dimensional. Though toxic masculinity requires a price, the males in Middle River, even the worst among them, are as sympathetic and as damaged by expectations as anybody.

Reeder’s peculiar dialogue finds its ideal voice with Grace Smith as Joanna Kitzmiller, a jaded feminist and budding entrepreneur. Likewise, Marika Englehardt and Tim Hopper bring extraordinary nuance and sympathy to what could have been campy characters.

This cockeyed lens for the middle American pressure cooker that is high school suggests exhilarating possibilities, but does so with a melancholy absurdity that recognizes the impossibility of it all.

And in the end, all the Middle River Beavers stare longingly at the highway that leads out of town.

New In Theaters, Slider

Freedom Riders

Leave a comment

Queen & Slim

by George Wolf

“I’m not a criminal.”

“You are now!”

A white cop lies dead on a Cleveland roadside, while a young black couple is processing how a traffic stop escalated to the point of tragedy, and realizing they have a choice to make.

“Slim” (Daniel Kaluuya) is confident his actions were self-defense, but “Queen” (Jodie Turner-Smith) is a lawyer who knows what they’re up against.

They must run. Now.

The feature debut for both director Melina Matsoukas (TV’s Master of None, Insecure) and screenwriter Lena Waithe (Master of None, The Chi) has a righteous outrage that nearly burns through the screen. Working in beautiful tandem, they create a mix of gripping character study and urgent fable that speaks with brutal honesty about being black in America.

In Slim, we see the situation personally, while Queen is always there to remind him, and us, of the big picture, and why from now on, they can only go forward.

And from the moment we meet them – in the opening scene, out on their first date – Queen and Slim are real people we’re drawn to. Through wonderfully authentic dialog, they get to know each other (Who eats too loud? Who prefers “fat Luther?”) and we get to know them, all while they are running for their lives.

But honestly, it might still work if the two just worked in silence, as the chemistry between Kaluuya and Turner-Smith is a natural wonder. Her Queen is a smart, no nonsense woman who admits Slim wasn’t going to get a second date. But Turner-Smith allows Queen’s vulnerability to surface gradually, making her admission that she wants a man who will “cherish her bruises” all the more sympathetic.

Slim’s arc is equally valid with Kaluuya, who shot to Oscar-nominated stardom in Get Out, again flashing an admirable depth. As Slim softens Queen, he in turn absorbs her defiance, ultimately accepting their roles as cultural freedom fighters traveling a modern day underground railroad.

The effective contrasts aren’t limited to the main characters, as Matsoukas and Waithe populate their film with consistently resonant pushes and pulls, from romantic risk to shrinking options in wide open spaces.

A stop or two – such as Slim’s unlikely encounter with a gas station attendant – break the spell, but only for a moment. This is an unapologetic and purposeful first feature, as much a complex story of joy and love as incendiary protest parable.

And like Queen & Slim themselves, it matters.

New In Theaters, Slider

Stranger than Fiction

Leave a comment

Honey Boy

by Hope Madden

“The only thing my father gave me that was of any value was pain, and you want to take that away?”

In other hands, that line could be the beginning and end of a movie, a maudlin attempt to summarize a life of abuse.

In other hands, Honey Boy could have gone really, really wrong.

It did not.

Ostensibly the strung together memories of a damaged movie star committed to rehab, the script tells of the insidious relationship between child star Otis (Noah Jupe as the semi-autobiographical avatar for Shia LaBeouf) and his ne’er do well father (LaBeouf, basically playing his own father).

Are we watching LaBeouf work through his own issues with this remarkable act of empathy, or is this, too, just an act? Or is Honey Boy itself a blurring of the line between sincerity and performance? To director Alma Har’el’s credit, Honey Boy does not shy away from that question. In fact, at every turn it embraces it. Just don’t expect an answer.

Har’el weaves between past and present. Modern day (2005) Otis (Lucas Hedges) stomps, blusters and bullies his way through court-appointed confinement where certain triggers send the film back to 1995. There, mainly in a dodgy motel with prostitutes for neighbors, young Otis and his dad struggle.

Hedges and Jupe make for eerily strong choices to play the two younger versions of LaBeouf, each an actor of such remarkable range and talent that super stardom seems inevitable. Hedges’s turn brims with contempt and vulnerability, while Jupe seems to recognize the limits of his own character’s understanding. His performance is heartbreaking.

The showier work comes from LaBeouf, who delivers a truly compassionate if not entirely forgiving performance. Your dad can be a hard guy to understand. If this entire film is simply LaBeouf’s attempt to do that, we’re lucky we get to participate.

LaBeouf’s work as a child actor—his turn as Stanley Yelnats in the utterly charming Holes, for instance—solidified his standing as a talent. His mainly mediocre choices and flat performances in his young adulthood made his off-screen antics more worthy of comment. And though his personal life may not have steadied much (his last arrest was just two years ago), his 2019 cinematic output (including the endlessly delightful The Peanut Butter Falcon) is easily the most impressive of his career.

The feat here is not just the performance, but the script.

In other hands, Honey Boy is another look at the ugly familial dysfunction that both propels and destroys young actors. Instead, through mundane details, we’re offered an unsettling and candid character study and a finely written family tragedy.

New In Theaters, Slider

Being Alive

Leave a comment

Marriage Story

by George Wolf

If plot is what happens and story is how it happens, there’s no better title for Noah Baumbach’s latest than Marriage Story.

For years, Baumbach’s films have probed characters struggling to live up to an image of themselves. It’s what he does, and now Baumbach has written and directed his masterpiece, a bravely personal and beautifully heartbreaking deconstruction of a marriage falling apart.

Adam Driver is Charlie, a New York stage director. Scarlett Johansson is Nicole, an L.A. film actress who made the switch to NYC live theater when she married Charlie and they welcomed son Henry (Azhy Robertson).

We meet Charlie and Nicole in counseling, taking part in an exercise that reminds them why they married and reminds us how skilled Baumbach is at not only writing wonderfully organic dialog, but in bringing it to the screen with layer upon layer of authenticity.

Tremendous performances from Johansson and Driver cement our immersion into the lives of two people valiantly trying to retain some control over the process of splitting up.

Nicole hurts deeply but wears a brave face, unsure of how to approach a future without Charlie, but unable to deny that life with him has meant she “got smaller.” Johannson has never been better, successfully mining Nicole’s mix of pain and defiance with silent tears and impassioned outbursts alike.

Here’s something I’ve said a lot this year: Driver is one the most consistently impressive actors around. His skill at finding the human center of his characters is subtle but unmistakable, and here Driver never lets you abandon Charlie, most importantly when his refusals to face reality seem like cathartic soul-baring from Baumbach himself.

We see the details that make up the work of a marriage, and the subtle cracks that weaken the relationship and begin to pull two people apart. And with the break comes the battle for child custody and the business of divorce.

But even as their two opposing lawyers (Ray Liotta and Laura Dern, Oscar-worthy herself) bleed the couple’s finances and turn the fight dirty, Baumbach never gets petty. When you think the film is taking sides it makes a subtle change in direction, slowly building toward the brilliantly executed emotional tsunami you know is coming.

Will you need tissues? Oh yes. The story of Nicole and Charlie’s marriage will put you through the wringer. And every frame is absolutely worth it.

Late in the film, Charlie’s out with a group of theater friends and ends up joining a pianist to sing Stephen Sondheim’s “Being Alive.” So we have a theater guy going through a tumultuous divorce taking time to sing a Broadway classic about the risk of commitment. It’s a sequence that could have easily devolved into self-indulgent excess, but instead only confirms the depth of Baumbach’s reach.

He lets another writer’s words brilliantly refocus what Charlie and Nicole will always mean to other, and like everything else in Marriage Story, it feels real, true and necessary.

It feels alive.