Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

Does the Sex Part Always Get in the Way?

Sleeping with Other People

By Christie Robb

The latest rom-com to follow in the footsteps of 1989’s classic When Harry Met Sally is Leslye Headland’s Sleeping with Other People (which was originally pitched as “When Harry Met Sally for Assholes.” It also examines the question of whether heterosexual men and women can be friends.

Like When Harry Met Sally, SWOP starts with a relatively unrealistic flashback scene to college days where unfortunate period clothing choices and bad bangs are supposed to provide sufficient suspension of disbelief for us to see two folks knocking on middle age as dorm inhabitants. Here we meet our romantic leads, Lainey (Alison Brie) and Jake (Jason Sudeikis), two old virgins aching to give it up. He’s waiting for the right person. She’s been scorned by her person. They decide to bone each other.

Flash forward 12 years and Lainey and Jake meet for the second time at a sex addicts meeting. He, having been abandoned by Lainey after one night, only sleeps with women he is comfortable being left by. She’s still addicted to the love of the dude who rejected her in college and is furtively banging him.

Jake and Lainey rekindle their collegiate spark, but because of their issues, decide to keep things platonic, employing a safe word whenever the sex part rears its head. Of course, things get complicated.

Perhaps SWOP doesn’t break new ground in rom-commery, but it’s delightful nonetheless. The aspirational dialogue, reminiscent of Gilmore Girls in its sweeping references, is brainy but also captivatingly nasty. (There’s a whole rant about “juices” and a masturbation demo that some college kids probably should be taking notes on.)

The raunch helps balance out the more saccharine moments. The casting helps as well. Natasha Lyonne (Orange is the New Black) is great, if somewhat underutilized, as Lainey’s gay best friend. Andrea Savage (Dinner for Schmucks) and Jason Mantzoukas (Neighbors) shine as the cool married couple with kids. Billy Eichner (Difficult People/Parks and Recreation) has an amazing little monologue as a sex addict. The only thing really missing is LeBron, who I believe should now be contractually obligated to appear at least once in every rom-com.

Brie and Sudeikis also really work. Their chemistry is believable and they pull off both the smutty repartee and the longing equally well.

Stick around for the end credits.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

 

 

 

Gonna Fly Hopefully Sometime in the Future

Sons of Ben

by George Wolf

What if they didn’t give a sports team…and fans cheered anyway?

And what if they kept cheering, long and loud until they couldn’t be ignored?

Find the answers in Sons of Ben, a passionate, and ultimately inspiring documentary on how an unlikely dream came true for a bunch of crazed soccer fans.

When Major League Soccer announced their list of teams for the league’s inaugural season in 1996, Philly native Bryan James and his buddies were pretty disappointed they were not getting a home team to cheer. The disappointment only grew, leading to the realization that there might be “no better way to land a team, than to be fans of a team that doesn’t exist.”

Once that lightbulb came on, the guys got inspired, and someone pitched the name “Sons of Ben,” for their new fan club. It worked not just because of the Ben Franklin angle, but it could easily be shortened to the “S.O.B’s” and that seemed pretty appropriate for the nuisance these guys were committed to becoming.

Armed with a really sweet logo, these guys showed up at as many soccer events as possible, cheering for their non-existent team, until, in James’s words, “sheer luck” got them press coverage, and then the ball started rolling.

Writer/director Jeffrey C. Bell sets a confident, entertaining pace for the fan club’s formation, wisely making it personal when he can. We see the toll that James’s duties as S.O.B president take on his home life, and how easily group members get choked up when talking about the grass roots movement and the meaning it holds in their lives.

Even better, Bell takes us inside the plans to build Philly’s soccer stadium in the downtrodden suburb of Chester. Without getting too heavy-handed, Bell reminds us that in the big business of sports stadiums, promises made are not always promises kept.

The 75 minute running time does feel a bit slight, leaving a few questions unexplored (like who did that logo), but Sons of Ben is an underdog sports story with a unique twist, and a Rocky-sized heart.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

 

Twitter- @sonsofbenmovie

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/SoBmovie

Website- www.sonsofbenmovie.com

Not Easy Being Green

The Green Inferno

by Hope Madden

Filmmakers often use their work to pay homage to other filmmakers. Sometimes this looks like a direct rip off, but when done well – as it was earlier this year in David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows – it can elevate a picture while generating nostalgia and paying tribute.

It works better if the films you homage were good in the first place, though.

Love him or hate him (and it appears most everyone does one or the other), Eli Roth is one such filmmaker. His latest, The Green Inferno, takes inspiration from a very particular style of film. These cannibal flicks, mostly made by Italians in the late Seventies and early Eighties, dropped naïve Westerners in jungles populated by flesh hungry head hunters.

Roth’s flick does likewise with a set of idealistic college students, including Justine (Lorenza Izzo – Roth’s real life wife). They just want to stop developers in Peru from destroying tribal villages, but when their plane crashes deep in the jungle, they go from activists to appetizers.

The films that inspired Roth’s picture – Ruggero Deodato’s infamous Cannibal Holocaust, in particular – are known for their goretastic imagery, exuberant violence, ethnocentrism, and general taboo-shattering.

Though it’s a slog getting to the action, when Inferno finally does pit student youth group against Peruvian cannibal tribe, blood, limbs, and entrails go flying.

Like most of Roth’s work, there’s a dark and cynical sense of humor underlying the melee. As with his Hostel films, beneath the concussive violence and body part slurry there lies an attempt at political insight. But with Inferno, the traditional heroine arc and confused jabs at political correctness undermine any relevant statement.

Plus, the acting is abysmal, the writing clichéd, and the comic moments are so poorly executed you get the feeling the filmmaker and his writing partners felt equal contempt for characters and audience alike.

For true fans of this particular genre, though, solid performances and stellar writing are hardly the point, but here’s the rub. The Green Inferno feels like nothing more than a neutered Cannibal Holocaust.

Not that we need another Cannibal Holocaust, nor do we probably need to resurrect a genre that died out for reasons as extreme as those associated with the jungle cannibal movie, but if you can’t improve on its weaknesses and you can’t match its bombast, what is the point, exactly?

Verdict-1-0-Star

Beautiful, but Boring

Wildlike

By Christie Robb

The movie Wildlike has the pace and emotional warmth of a glacier grinding down the slopes of Denali.

The first full-length feature from writer/director Frank Hall Green, the film follows Mackenzie (Ella Purnell, Maleficent), a 14-year-old girl sent to live with her uncle in Juneau while her widowed mother makes a stint at recovery.

The relationship, at first tender, soon becomes creepy and emotionally manipulative and Mackenzie flees. She spends the remainder of the movie stoically trying to get herself back to her mom in the lower 48. Ultimately, she ends up more or less stalking this poor widower (Bruce Greenwood, Star Trek) who’s on a solo hiking trip to mourn his ex wife. Mackenzie spots his return ferry ticket to Seattle, and after that adheres herself to him like a tick, and they wander about the – admittedly beautifully shot – Alaskan wilderness.

Although at first determined to get rid of her, the dude ultimately becomes a kind of surrogate dad. At least he rejects her awkward attempt to sleep with him, anyway.

The two bond for some reason—he tells her about his regrets and she…looks at him with watery, mascara-rimmed eyes.

The film has been praised for its minimalism and Purnell’s nuanced performance, but without seemingly necessary dialogue to flesh out Mackenzie, Purnell’s emotional restraint suppresses the character development necessary to understand why her travelling companion doesn’t simply turn her over to child protective services at the first available opportunity.

Verdict-1-0-Star

Get Coffee? You Talkin’ to Me?

The Intern

by George Wolf

If you need a feel-good romantic comedy about rich white people aging friskily, Nancy Meyers would be a safe bet to bring it.

With both Something’s Gotta Give and It’s Complicated, writer and director Meyers leaned on veteran talent (Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin) to get the most out of amusing scripts that were fun first, feeling later.

She tries to bring the same formula to The Intern, but ends up pushing much too hard to manufacture something that just isn’t there.

Again, her A-listers aren’t too shabby. Robert DeNiro is Ben, a retired widower who needs something to do. Anne Hathaway plays Jules, the founder of an online clothing company that’s growing like a weed. Jules forgets giving the green light to a senior internship program (“Seniors in high school? No, seniors in life!”) and isn’t really thrilled when the 70 year-old Ben is assigned to assist her personally.

Not a thing wrong with pointing out how much older citizens still have to offer, but Meyers never wants her films to make you think too much. The Intern gets buried under shallow contrivance and outright silliness.

You don’t for one second believe Jules is the tough-as-nails workaholic taskmaster we’re told she is, and the entire workplace smacks of an overly rehearsed training video for hipster boss dot com. Ben? He might as well be Santa Claus, gifting life lessons to all he encounters, as his co-workers pose like department store mannequins and look on in amazement.

It all hits an embarrassing low point when Ben takes three of them on a needless adventure that leads to calling each other “Clooney” and “Affleck’s brother” while pretending they’re in Ocean’s Eleven. With a running time of two full hours, this 20 minutes would be welcome on the cutting room floor.

DeNiro and Hathaway give it their all, but like the rest of us, they seem to be waiting for the human moments that Jack or Meryl got to work with. They never come, replaced instead with empty speeches about “getting lost” while finding out “who I am.”

Rene Russo’s small part is a much-needed boost, and her scenes with DeNiro suggest where Meyers could have built a better movie, forgoing the younger generation that she can’t write nearly as well. As it stands, most everything about The Intern feels fake, and considering the resumes involved, that’s a big letdown.

Verdict-2-5-Stars

 

Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?

Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh)

by Hope Madden

There is something eerily beautiful about Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz’s rural Austrian horror Goodnight Mommy (Ich seh, Ich seh).

During one languid summer, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await their mother’s return from the hospital. They spend their time bouncing on a trampoline, floating in a pond, or exploring the fields and woods around the house. But when their mom comes home, bandaged from the cosmetic surgery she underwent, the brothers fear more has changed than just her face.

Franz and Fiala owe a great debt to an older American film, but to name it would be to give far too much away, and the less you know about Goodnight Mommy, the better.

Inside this elegantly filmed environment, where sun dappled fields lead to leafy forests, the filmmakers mine a kind of primal childhood fear. There’s a subtle lack of compassion that works the nerves beautifully, because it’s hard to feel too badly for the boys or for their mother. You don’t wish harm on any of them, but at the same time, their flaws make all three a bit terrifying.

The filmmakers’ graceful storytelling leads you down one path before utterly upending everything you think you know. They never spoon feed you information, depending instead on your astute observation – a refreshing approach in this genre.

Performances by young brothers Lukas and Elias Schwarz compel interest, while Susanne Wuest’s cagey turn as the boys’ mother propels the mystery. It’s a hypnotic, bucolic adventure as visually arresting as it is utterly creepy.

The film is going to go where you don’t expect it to go, even if you expect you’ve uncovered its secrets.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hisSd7qyY40

There’s No Vaccine for This

Cooties

by Hope Madden

Welcome to the dog eat dog and child eat child world of elementary school.

Kids are nasty bags of germs. We all know it. It is universal truths like this that make the film Cooties as effective as it is.

What are some others? Chicken nuggets are repulsive. Playground dynamics sometimes take on the plotline of LORD OF THE FLIES. To an adult eye, children en masse can resemble a seething pack of feral beasts.

Directing team Jonathan Milott and Cary Murnion harness those truths and more – each pointed out in a script penned by a Leigh Whannell-led team of writers – to satirize the tensions to be found in an American elementary school.

Whannell – co-creator of both the Saw and Insidious franchises – co-stars as the socially impaired science teacher on staff. He’s joined by a PE teacher (Rainn Wilson), an art teacher (Jack McBrayer), two classroom teachers (Alison Pill, Nasim Pedrad), and the new sub, Clint (Elijah Wood), in a fight for survival once an aggressive virus hits the student population of Fort Chicken.

School-based horror abounds – even Wood’s done it previously, having starred in Robert Rodriguez’s 1998 alien invasion fantasy The Faculty.

Cooties is also not the first horror film to mine tensions from the image of monstrous children turned against us. Come Out and Play (both the 2013 American version and its Spanish predecessor Who Can Kill a Child?) generate tensions based on the presumed difficulty an adult would have in slaughtering children.

Two things set Cooties apart. One: It is often laugh out loud funny. Two: It is willing to indulge the subversive fantasy of (possibly all) school teachers.

They kill a lot of children in this movie.

If Murnion and Milott couldn’t find the comedic tone to offset the seriously messed up violence, the film would be a distasteful, even offensive failure. But, thanks in part to a very game cast, as well as an insightful screenplay, Cooties comes off instead as a cathartic (if bloody) metaphor and an energetic burst of nasty fun. It might be welcome after school viewing in the teacher’s lounge.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

Up Where We Don’t Belong

Everest

by George Wolf

First and foremost, the film account of a legendarily tragic Mt. Everest expedition has to look the part. By that measure, Everest is a masterpiece.

Director Baltasar Kormakur displays pristine craftsmanship and finely-tuned instincts in displaying both the awe-inspiring enormity of the mountain – and the folly of believing you are not at its mercy. Blessed with Salvatore Totino’s breathtaking cinematography, Kormakur (Contraband, 2 Guns) effectively translates the punishing nature of an Everest climb, using a gracefully fluid camera to build set pieces of wonder and true gut-wrenching tension.

You will feel cold, tired, and small.

Based on the deadly 1996 Everest trek chronicled in the best-seller Into Thin Air, the more intimate aspects of the story present some inherent disadvantages for acclaimed screenwriters Simon Beaufoy (127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) and William Nicholson (Les Miserables, Gladiator).

The sheer number of real people and unique personal angles involved makes it much more difficult to establish the deep connection of a more singular experience such as 127 Hours. Add in the hoods, hats and masks that cover many faces on the climb, and those not familiar with the book may find it hard to keep track of just who is who.

A mere 20 years seems too recent to siphon the events through fictional characters (a la Titanic), and Everest aims for as much humanity as each character’s screen time will allow.

These writers are more qualified than most to tackle it, and they are able to make some moments resonate, particularly with long-distance conversations between expedition leader Rob Hall (Jason Clarke) and his pregnant wife back home (Kiera Knightley). Their script also tackles the “why do you climb” question with welcome understatement, never elevating any one individual in the equalizing event that the group is marching into.

Ultimately, Everest feels like an earthbound bookend to Gravity. It’s a magnificent, grand scale achievement – the 3D IMAX version is a must – with a slightly less developed human side.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

 

 

A Bloody Communion

Black Mass

by Hope Madden

Johnny Depp is a remarkable talent whose film choices can be frustrating. Who’s to complain, just because he often buries his unique take on human foibles underneath quirky caricatures in wigs and eyeliner or a handlebar moustache?

I am – but not today. In Scott Cooper’s Black Mass, Depp may undergo a physical transformation, but it’s his skill and authenticity that leave an impression.

In this biopic, Depp plays Southie mob king James “Whitey” Bulger, a “ripened psychopath” who strikes a sweet deal with neighborhood pal turned FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton).

Front to back, Black Mass spills over with reminders of other films – in particular, The Departed and, thanks in part to the outstanding soundtrack, American Hustle. How could it avoid comparisons? How many new ways are there to tell a story about dodgy criminal/FBI alliances or the Irish mob in Boston?

Wisely, Cooper’s focus is on the complex relationship between Bulger and Connolly. Edgerton handles his character arc, from misguided idealist to blindly loyal accomplice, with subtlety, but this is Depp’s movie.

Depp’s nuanced evolution from friendly neighborhood sociopath to cruel monster leaves chills. He can turn on a dime, as he does in the now required Joe Pesci-esque episode. (Just substitute “funny how?” with “family recipe.”) But the more powerful scenes are the ones that sneak up on you – a situation with a colleague’s step daughter, or Bulger’s moments alone with Connolly’s wife.

The balance of the cast manages to keep pace with Depp’s forbidding performance – Rory Cochrane, Corey Stoll, Dakota Johnson, Juno Temple, and Peter Sarsgaard are all particularly impressive in small roles.

For all the truly fine performances, Cooper’s somber effort can’t seem to define itself. There are flashes – frames resembling a cross between a crime scene photo and an old picture postcard; or individual, eerily crafted moments – but the effort on the whole limits itself to by-the-numbers storytelling.

Depp, on the other hand, sporting vampiric blue contacts that emphasize Bulger’s eviscerating contempt and barely restrained violence, excels. Black Mass may not be quite able to separate itself from the pack, but Depp’s performance will leave a mark.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

Royal Pains

Queen of Earth

by George Wolf

Don’t bother trying to guess where Queen of Earth might be going, you’ll miss the beauty of getting there.

It’s a wildly enigmatic take on the dynamics of female friendship, ambitiously (and surprisingly?) told by writer/director Alex Ross Perry, who laces the character studies with descents into madness and subversive humor.

Catherine (Elisabeth Moss) is reeling from a traumatic breakup that hit not long after her father’s death. Her longtime friend Virginia (Katherine Waterston) offers the family lake house for some girl time, much like their getaway a year earlier when it was Virginia who was suffering.

As the women meet at the picturesque setting, it is clear they have grown apart from their days as BFFs, and Perry is no hurry to tell you why. Catherine’s ever-present sketch pad is an apt metaphor for the narrative structure at work here. Perry utilizes extreme closeups, shaky cameras, out of focus shots and quick fades to provide beautiful glimpses into a complicated relationship.

Slowly, the often combative dialogue and the out of sequence flashbacks provide some possible answers, even as more questions are raised. With a Gothic soundtrack and a constant sheen of despair, you begin to wonder if Perry’s vision will ultimately include a murderous rampage. 

But that would be too easy, and a betrayal of all that’s been building. Perry presents a perceptive tableau of emotions, all driven home to perfection through wonderful performances from his leads. Moss is downright electric, rolling through a spectrum of emotional outbursts and withdrawn silences with an authenticity that leaves you nervous to look away. Waterston may have the more “straight woman” role, but she gives Virginia a steely resolve that grounds the film, and invites curiosity into her side of this story.

Perry (The Color Wheel, Listen Up Philip) makes the comedy less overt and the psychological warfare more pointed this time out, but his familiar elements remain. Queen of Earth brings unlikeable characters who struggle with alienation, disenchantment and dangerous depression, and leaves you glad you didn’t pass on the chance to spend time with them.

 

Verdict-4-0-Stars