Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

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Running for Her Life

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Brittany Runs a Marathon

by George Wolf

In a surprisingly touching circle of art and life and imitating, Brittany Runs a Marathon charts its main narrative course with humor, charm and insight, while solid doses of humanity are never out of sight.

It may be the based-on-truth story of a woman taking control of her life, but in the process, it’s also the story of longtime supporting actor not only taking the lead, but literally transforming before our eyes.

Writer/director Paul Downs Colaizzo, a playwright and TV director making his feature debut, drew inspiration from close friend Brittany O’Neil, who got her messy affairs in order by making some big changes.

One of those was a commitment to running, and a goal to complete the New York City marathon.

The film version finds Brittany Folger (Jillian Bell) out of shape and out of sorts. Allowing herself to be used by friends and randos, Brittany is the fat, funny sidekick who uses her quick, caustic wit as a suit of armor.

Early on, Brittany is just the sort of vessel Bell has used to steal big and small screen scenes for years. She nails the setup with hilarity, which isn’t surprising. But the most impressive layer in Bell’s performance is how she ups her game when the laughs don’t come as often, dodging any false notes in Brittany’s wake up call.

We knew Bell could do funny, but this is a performance full of drama that’s equally impressive (if not more).

Credit Colaizzo for some equally deft maneuvering, making sure this is more complex that the standard “get hot to get happy” makeover fantasy you could hardly be blamed for expecting.

Brittany may joke about people who “missed the point of those Dove ads,” but when she tells her attractive friend that “my life is just harder than yours,” it rings with the capital that Colaizzo’s script has earned.

The in-the-moment nods are numerous but not overdone, contrasting Brittany’s self-loathing with the emptiness of comparing real life to social media staging or quick assumptions from afar.

As hard as it is for Brittany to stick with running, dropping the pounds is the easy part. She has to grow emotionally, starting with accepting the fact that she’s worthy of the friendship her running pals (Michaela Watkins, Micah Stock) are offering.

And what’s up with Jern (Utkarsh Ambudkar- terrific), who pulls the night housesitting shift the same place Brittany handles the daytime? Is he stuck in the friend zone? Is she?

Sure, the film has a convenient plot turn or two, but this is some sneaky good crowd-pleasing. Brittany Runs a Marathon ropes you with the comfort of formula, then dopes you with emotional complexities, warm sincerity and a knockout lead performance.

Winner winner sensible dinner.

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Hello Cleveland!

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Haunt

by Hope Madden

Have you ever noticed how adorable Browns fans are during pre-season every year? Every year! There is always reason for optimism.

That’s how I feel about filmmakers with the “haunted house attraction that’ll really kill you” premise. Year after year (The Houses October Built, 2014; 31, 2016; The Houses October Built 2, 2017; Hell Fest, 2018) somebody wheels out the stinky old corpse of an idea and says, “This year, we’ll get it right!”

The 2019 attempt belongs to writers/directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who struck silent film gold last year with the screenplay for A Quiet Place. (In retrospect, maybe we didn’t give co-writer/director John Krasinski enough credit for that one.)

Haunt follows a handful of college students seeking thrills on Halloween. They stumble upon an isolated haunted house attraction—with not one single visitor. On Halloween night. Kids! Come on! Clearly it’s either the lamest thing on earth or it will kill you. This isn’t rocket science.

And yet, they give up their cell phones, sign some waivers and enter.

Katie Stevens is Harper, damaged but mainly wholesome brunette and center of gravity for the group. Will Brittain is Nathan, pre-requisite “will they or won’t they” nice fella who sees past Harper’s prickly exterior.

In truth, the actors playing the six gullible youths all perform above expectation and, mercifully, Beck and Woods choose not to subject us to the couple that just can’t keep their hands to themselves.

Made sensibly and economically, Haunt sticks to what it knows and focuses on what it came to do. Gaps in logic are few (they’re there, but they’re not distracting). One or two of the kills offer intrigue and the villains are, if not especially impressive, at least kind of fun.

It’s adequate. Unlike the Browns. The Browns are going all the way this year. No doubt. No doubt about it.

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Urban Jungle

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Tigers Are Not Afraid

by Hope Madden

Comparing most films to Pan’s Labyrinth would be setting a bar too high. Guillermo del Toro’s macabre fable of war and childhood delivers more magic, humanity and tragedy than any one film should be allowed.

And yet, it’s hard to watch Issa Lopez’s Tigers Are Not Afraid without thinking about little Ofelia, the fairies and the Pale Man.

Lopez’s fable of children and war brandishes the same themes as del Toro’s masterpiece, but grounds the magic with a rugged street style.

Tigers follows Estrella, a child studying fairy tales—or, she was until her school is temporarily closed due to the stray bullets that make it unsafe for students. As Estrella and her classmates hide beneath desks to avoid gunfire, her teacher hands her three broken pieces of chalk and tells her these are her three wishes.

But wishes never turn out the way you want them to.

There is an echo through Latin American horror that speaks to the idea of a disposable population. You find it in Jorge Michel Grau’s brilliant 2010 cannibal horror We Are What We Are and again in Emiliano Rocha Minter’s 2016 taboo-buster, We Are the Flesh.

Lopez amplifies that voice with a film that feels horrifying in its currency and devastating in the way it travels with the most vulnerable of those discarded people.

Estrella is befriended by other orphans in her city, each aching with the loss of parents and each on the move to escape the dangers facing the powerless.

Though Tigers bears the mark of a del Toro – Labyrinth as well as The Devi’s Backbone – it can’t quite reach his level of sorrowful lyricism. It makes up for that with the gut punch of modernity. Though this ghost story with tiny dragons and stuffed tigers is darkly fanciful, it’s also surprisingly clear-eyed in its view of the toll the drug war takes on the innocent.

It’s Latin American horror at its best.

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Born Again

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Depraved

by Hope Madden

It is tough to find a fresh direction to take fiction published 201 years ago, let alone a tale already made into countless films. Is there a new way—or reason—to look at the Frankenstein fable?

Writer/director/horror favorite Larry Fessenden thinks so. He tackles the myth, as well as a culture of greed and toxic masculinity, with his latest, Depraved.

Adam (a deeply sympathetic Alex Breaux) is kind of an act of catharsis for Henry (David Call). A PTSD-suffering combat medic, Henry is so interested in finding a way to bring battlefield fatalities back to life that he doesn’t even question where his Big Pharma partner Polidori (Joshua Leonard, in another excellent genre turn) gets his pieces and parts.

Here’s a question that’s plagued me since I read Shelley’s text in 8th grade. Why take parts of cadavers? Why not bring one whole dude back and save all that time and stitching effort? Frank  Henenlotter (Frankenhooker) and Lucky McKee (May) found answers to that question. Fessenden isn’t worried about it.

He’s more interested in illuminating the way a culture is represented in its offspring. Pour all your own ugly tendencies, insecurities and selfish behaviors into your creation and see what that gets you.

Fessenden isn’t subtle about the problems he sees in society, nor vague about their causes. Depraved is the latest in a host of genre films pointing fingers at the specific folks who have had the power to cause all the problems that are now coming back to bite us in the ass.

It’s the white guys with money because, well, because it is.

Along with Leonard’s oily approach and Breaux’s tenderness, the film boasts solid supporting work from Chloe Levine (The Transfiguration, Ranger) and especially Addison Timlin, who is great in a very small role.

There is a sloppy subtext here, charming in its refusal to be tidy, about the man Adam used to be (or one of them), the girl he didn’t really appreciate, and the way, deep down, a mildly douchy guy can learn a lesson about self-sacrifice.

In its own cynical way, Depraved does offer a glimmer of hope for mankind. Fessenden doesn’t revolutionize the genre or say anything new, though, but you won’t leave the film wishing Shelley’s beast would just stay dead.

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Day for Night of the Living Dead

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One Cut of the Dead

by Hope Madden

For about 37 minutes, you may feel like Shin’ichirô Ueda’s One Cut of the Dead delivers, cleverly enough, on a very familiar promise.

One Cut opens as a micro-budget zombie movie, which soon reveals itself to be a film within a film when real zombies show up on set. As the bullying egomaniac director continues filming, ecstatic over the authenticity, Ueda appears to deconstruct cinema.

And though that may sound intriguing on the surface, the truth is that what transpires after that 37 minute mark officially defines Ueda as an inventive, gleeful master of chaos and lover of the magic of nuts and bolts filmmaking.

To detail any additional plot points—as tempting as that is—would spoil the enjoyable lunacy One Cut has in store.

Suffice it to say, Ueda improves upon that opening act without really losing the themes he introduces. Everything that feels like a misstep blossoms into an inspired bit, all of it highlighting Ueda’s true love for what he’s doing.

Likable and silly, One Cut is brightly economical, embracing rather than hiding its shoestring – in fact, Ueda’s camera jubilantly closes in on shoestrings. His movie giddily exposes the neuroses, dangers, tribulations and mistakes—he really, deeply loves the mistakes—inherent in genre filmmaking. If nothing else, this movie is a mash note to artistic compromise.

The manic comedy proves as infectious as the zombiism on the screen, and much of the reason is the committed cast. Ueda allows each performer the opportunity to grow and discover, and every actor at one point or another takes full advantage of his or her moment to shine.

Harumi Shuhama particularly impresses as, well, let’s just say she’s the make up artist and self defense hobbyist. Yuzuki Akiyama delivers the most layered performance, but, playing the director, Takayuki Hamatsu steals every scene. He’s hilarious, adorable, compassionate, and incredibly easy to root for.

Like this movie.

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Even the Losers

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It Chapter 2

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Two years ago, director Andy Muschietti and writer Gary Dauberman accomplished quite a magic act. They made the film It, not only improving upon Part 1 of the beloved 1990 TV miniseries, but cleaning up some of Stephen King’s most audacious, thrilling and sloppy work.

Their second outing together closes the book on Pennywise, the scariest of all scary clowns. But this sequel faces inherent obstacles that loom even larger because the second half of King’s novel and the ’90 adaptation are both worse than weak. They’re massive let downs, and it’s pretty tough to make a great film with poor source material.

How bad is the King ending? So bad that it’s actually a running gag in It Chapter Two, a tale that sees a bunch of losers returning to their hometown 27 years after they last battled town bullies, abusive fathers, low self-esteem and that psychotic, shape-shifting clown.

The outstanding young cast from chapter one returns for flashback sequences and sometimes awkward de-aging effects. Their adult counterparts are, to a one, impressive. Jessica Chastain is reliably solid, as is James McAvoy. Isaiah Mustafa (hey, it’s the Old Spice guy!) and James Ransone (Tangerine – see it!) make fine additions to the cast, but it’s Bill Hader who owns this movie. He’s funny, heartbreaking and more than actor enough to lead this ensemble.

But Muschietti runs into serious problems early and often. He’s at a disadvantage in the thrills department in that children in peril generate a far more palpable sense of terror than what you can get by threatening adults. We’re just not nearly as invested in the survival of the grown up Losers Club.

The filmmaker flashes some style with his scene transitions, but betrays a serious lack of inspiration when it comes to both CGI and practical effects. If the scare doesn’t come directly from Bill Skarsgård’s committed performance as Pennywise, it doesn’t come at all.

And even then, set piece after set piece seems constructed with only one aim: a clearly telegraphed jump scare. The slog of a second act is where the film is at its most undisciplined -and where the nearly three hour running time feels more than unnecessary.

When the Losers strike out alone to face their long repressed demons, the narrative loses its grip on any sustained, cohesive tension.

Then, like a conquering hero, act three arrives with guns blazing, blood spurting and the emotional weight to give this bloated clown show a proper send off.

It’s here – when things get most intensely horrific – that the psychological wounds Muschietti had been poking are the most raw and resonant. Nostalgic melodrama finally gives way to graceful metaphor, and we remember why we cared so much about these characters the first time.

Does Chapter Two improve the finales of the novel and TV version? Most definitely.

But can it successfully realize all the promise from the first chapter?

Sadly, that’s a clown question, bro.

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What’s the Frequency, David?

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Don’t Let Go

by Hope Madden

Twenty years ago Jim Caviezel and Dennis Quaid sleuthed across time via a ham radio to solve a serial killer case. But who remembers Frequency?

Jacob Estes might. The writer/director revisits the time loop murder mystery concept with a leaner film in Don’t Let Go.

Estes (Mean Creek – if you haven’t seen it, do so) assembles a shockingly strong ensemble beginning with David Oyelowo (Selma) and Storm Reid (A Wrinkle in Time) and extending through support players Brian Tyree Henry, Alfred Molina and Mykelti Williamson. Together they do what they can to elevate a supernatural thriller too mired in cop movie clichés to take advantage of its unusual premise.

Oyelowo is Detective Radcliff, or Uncle Jack as he’s known to Ashley (Reid), the niece he loves like his own daughter. So when he finds her and both her parents dead, he’s devastated. It isn’t long before he’s receiving phone calls from his dead niece. Together, they try to solve the riddle of her death so they might be able to turn back time.

That’s a tough premise to deliver on without stooping to sentimentality, but Estes rarely makes that misstep. In fact, the film devotes frustratingly little time to the emotional weight of its premise, taking the easy way out repeatedly with cop show shoot outs, ambiguous motives and obvious twists.

Oyelowo (a magnificent actor who needs to choose better projects) commands the screen with a quiet torment that hints at what the film refuses to address: loneliness, guilt, sorrow. Likewise Reid, saddled with far less believable dialog, infuses her character with a believable spunk and charm.

Henry and Molina are criminally underused in a film that’s far too safe and much too rote for its supernatural notes to work. Maybe Estes’s goal was to ground the tale with enough realism to offset the fantasy but he managed to do neither justice.

The result is a blandly forgettable waste of a truly impressive group of actors.

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Spinning Wheels

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Bennett’s War

by George Wolf

After nearly an hour of valiantly struggling to find depth in a character written mainly in cleavage, actress Allison Paige does get to deliver the most truthful moment in Bennett’s War.

“The sponsors are all men and I have boobs!”

Writer/director Alex Ranarivelo may have just been trying for funny, but in this drawerful of ten thousand shallow spoons, the line is a self-aware knife.

Sophie (Paige) needs those sponsors for her husband Bennett’s (Michael Roark) motocross team to finally go pro. Bennett had been a promising young racer before he joined the Army Rangers, but the bum leg he came home with carried a warning Ranarivelo thinks we don’t quite get the first three times we hear it.

“No unnecessary risks, or you’ll never walk again!”

Oh, and Bennett’s dad (country singer Trace Adkins) is going to lose the family farm.

So Bennett has to race again, dammit, it’s who he is!

Ranarivelo has made a career out of what are essentially middle school sports dramas for the big screen. The heroes and villains are drawn in the most easily identifiable colors, with the stakes repeated as often as the dumbed down exposition.

There are issues here (the struggles of veterans and/or family farmers) that have merit, but exploring them is not Ranarivelo’s M.O.

The only real surprise is that no one yells “Put him in a body bag!” before our injured hero takes the bad guy down with a surprise move at the big competition.

Wax off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-wvJY1QIL0

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So Much Drama in the NYC

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After the Wedding

by Brandon Thomas

The adult drama has all but vanished from American multiplexes. Sure, the occasional Oscar-baity title sneaks through around the holidays, but those mom-pleasing, bring your hanky dramas of yesteryear are pretty much a thing of the past. 

Despite the presence of A+ talent and an overall intriguing story, After the Wedding isn’t the shot in the arm the genre was looking for.

A retread of Susanne Bier’s 2006 Oscar nominee for foreign language film, After the Wedding follows Isabel (Michelle Williams), who is living a fulfilling, productive life running a small orphanage in Kolkata.

After an extremely generous donation offer is made to the orphanage, Isabel travels to New York to meet Theresa (Julianne Moore), the benefactor. Unexpectedly invited to the wedding of Theresa’s daughter, Isabel finds herself face-to-face with a man from her past (Billy Crudup), and a 20-year-old decision that will shake her to her core.

After the Wedding trips up right out of the gate by leaning so heavily into melodrama. Instead of an emotionally weighty dramatic piece anchored by an amazing cast, this film latches on to genre cliches and doesn’t let go.

Deep, dark family secrets? Check. Mystery illness? Check. Sneaky motivations? Double check. The movie is one evil twin away from being a bad episode of General Hospital.

Did I mention the amount of teary-eyed yelling? There is plenty.

The only real sense of urgency comes from the movie being in a rush to get to that next dramatic reveal. The characters, and likewise the audience, are never given the chance to dwell on what just happened. The experience feels cheap and anticlimactic.

Moore and Williams continue to show that they’re national treasures, but even they can only do so much with the material afforded them. The two actresses share multiple scenes together, but any emotional weight is often deflated by the scattershot script—co-written by director Bart Freundlich (Moore’s husband)— jumping from one unearned character beat to the next. These people feel like a blended mix of every character seen in indie dramas instead of being fully-formed individuals.

Despite reeling in a Who’s Who of a cast, After the Wedding never becomes anything more than a Who Cares.


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Identity Theft

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Luce

by Hope Madden

It’s appropriate that so much of the film Luce follows the titular character’s preparation for a debate. The film itself seems to beg for audience argument.

Luce is a bit of an American miracle. A boy soldier rescued from Eritrea at 7 by a wealthy white couple, he’s reinvented himself by the beginning of his senior year in high school, becoming the golden child: debate team captain, cross country captain, speech team captain and eventual valedictorian.

A sternly supportive history teacher (Octavia Spencer) raises questions, her goal to help ensure Luce understands that he “cannot fuck up.” It becomes the catalyst for a tense, borderline terrifying exploration of identity, preconceptions, race, refined society and who gets to take credit for what.

Kelvin Harrison Jr., so wounded and wonderful in It Comes at Night, holds all these puzzle pieces together as the enigma at the center of a mystery. His turn as the charismatic central figure in this highly polite and scholarly debate is fascinating, haunting and, in rare flashes, painfully vulnerable.

His manufactured persona, his carefully studied sincerity, emphasize an image that’s too good to be true. But Harrison Jr. brings so many additional layers—manifestations of survival techniques, an ability to read his environment and predict everyone’s behavior—that give his character needed complexity. Luce is not just a black student everyone can be proud of, or some wonderful example of how our system can work.

And that’s what makes him scary. So when he executes a history assignment too well—writing from the perspective of a historical figure who suggested violence as a moral response to colonialism—he freaks out a teacher (Spencer, wonderfully righteousness) who’d rather he embrace his favored status so she can bask in the glow.

Naomi Watts and Tim Roth play Luce’s socially conscious parents, and the pairing makes it tough to keep your mind from recalling Funny Games, Michael Haneke’s grim picture of affluent familial catastrophe. Whether intentional or not, the casting adds an underlying sense of urgent dread—as does Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s discordant score.

Watts is particularly strong, and the who-knows-what dance she does with Roth as their son plays one off the other adds a queasying rhythm to the mystery.

Julius Onah’s direction sometimes betrays the stagebound nature of the source material. (J.C. Lee adapts his own much lauded play.) Too much is revealed through lengthy monologues and there’s little smooth flow from scene to scene.

But his film teems with provocation and his cast more than meets that challenge. Harrison Jr. in particular is a revelation, an image of a thing that doesn’t exist but is so true you’ll never know if anything else is really there.