Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

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The Fire Inside

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Only the Brave

by George Wolf

As wildfires continue to devastate areas of California, it seems incredibly timely for the debut of a populist firefighter tribute full of bombast and manipulation.

Thankfully, Only the Brave is not that movie.

Director Joseph Kosinski seems well aware of overwrought pitfalls so easily indulged, taking care to deepen our connection to major players as events build to a terrifying, true-life conclusion.

Based on the GQ article “No Exit,” co-writers Ken Nolan and Eric Warren Singer deftly adapt the story of Arizona’s Granite Mountain Hotshots, the first group of municipal firefighters to achieve elite “Hotshot” status.

Josh Brolin stars as supervisor Eric Marsh, a firefighting vet trying to ready his seasoned pros and new recruits for both the upcoming season and the essential state evaluations. Rookie Brendan McDonough (Miles Teller) is the team’s biggest question mark, a recovering drug addict and new father who’s determined to turn his life around.

While filmmaker Peter Berg has perfected a successful formula of quick character intros, then frenetic action for his “unsung hero” films (Deepwater Horizon, Patriots Day), Kosinski (Oblivion) is committed to a separate but equally effective path.

There are cliches here, such as a frequent “lost cause” metaphor and the obligatory stoic women standing by their men, but Kosinki and his writers are able to keep them in the background through an emphasis on intimate storytelling. We see the fires battled in often spectacular fashion, but we also come to feel the toll the job takes on family life. We learn firefighting tactics along with the newbies, and as Brendan fights to prove his worth to the mother of his child (Natalie Hall), Teller finds a nicely subtle groove to get us on Brendan’s side as well.

Even better are Brolin’s scenes with Jennifer Connelly as Marsh’s wife Amanda. Through these two skilled actors and some pointed dialogue, a couple’s fight to hold on to each other feels authentic, and the film finds an emotional core that will pay later dividends.

Often powerfully gripping and thrilling to watch, Only the Brave is a fitting salute to real people that deserve one.

 

 

 

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Bring a Shovel

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The Snowman

by Hope Madden

The Snowman, a Norway-set serial killer thriller, runs like a 3-hour flick that someone gutted for time without regard to sensibility, leaving a disemboweled and incoherent pile in the snow for audiences to puzzle over.

Not what I had expected.

I love director Tomas Alfredson. Well, I love his 2008 gem Let the Right One In and so, by extension, I love him. His writing team, adapting Jo Nesbø’s novel, includes the scribes behind such bits of brilliance as Drive (Hossein Amini) and Frank (Peter Straughan), and Michael Fassbender is the lead. Rock solid, that’s what that is.

And yet, The Snowman went horribly, embarrassingly, head-scratchingly wrong.

Fassbender plays Detective Harry Hole. (I swear to God, that’s his name.) He’s a blackout drunk in need of a case to straighten him out. He finds it in one misogynistic mess of a serial killer plot.

All he and his new partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) know is that the killer leaves snowmen at the crime scene and has complicated issues with women. What follows is convoluted, needlessly complicated with erratic and unexplained behavior, ludicrous red herrings and a completely unexplained plot point about prescription pills.

The Snowman is not the first in Nesbø’s Harry Hole series, so a lot of “catch us up on this guy” exposition gets wedged in. From there, the writing team took a buzzsaw to Nesbø’s prose, leaving none of the connective tissue necessary to pull the many, varied and needlessly lurid details together into a sensible mystery plot.

It all leads ploddingly, frustratingly to an unearned climax heavy with needless flashbacks and convenient turns.

Everybody smokes, so it almost works as a cigarette ad, but as an actual story? No.

Fassbender, an inarguable talent, offers little to a clichéd character whose tics are predetermined—a shame because this is an actor who can dig deep when it comes to character tics. Ferguson and Charlotte Gainsbourg, as Hole’s ex, fare even worse. And an entire slew of heavy hitters gets wasted completely, including J.K. Simmons, Toby Jones and a weirdly dubbed Val Kilmer.

Alfredson films snowcapped carnage with a grotesque beauty few directors can touch, but that’s hardly reason enough to sit through this muddled mess.

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Welcome

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Jungle

by Hope Madden

It is hard to go wrong with a story as viscerally affecting as that of Yossi Ghinsberg, an Israeli who took a year off from his life to seek adventure. He found it in the Jungle.

Beautifully portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe, Yossi heads to Bolivia where he befriends Swiss schoolteacher Marcus (Joel Jackson) and American photographer Kevin (Alex Russell).

Director Greg McLean (Wolf Creek) invests a good chunk of Jungle in letting us get to know this amiable, romantic trio—searching souls that seek some kind of connection with nature, humanity and life.

They find something that may be too good to be true when Yossi meets the mysterious jungle guide Karl (a wonderful Thomas Kretschmann). Together the foursome head into uncharted territories in search of lost tribes, rivers full of gold and other wonders not found on the typical tourist to-do list.

You know what they say about things that sound too good to be true.

Frustrations run high, mercy runs low, faith in leadership wanes, and eventually, an accident separates Ghinsberg from the group. He is on his own to survive the jungle, starvation, delirium, and one nasty, squirmy head wound.

Adapting Ghinsberg’s autobiography, screenwriter Justin Monjo sticks to highlights, which gives the film an artificiality it never fully shakes. McLean’s camera embraces both the overpowering beauty of the extreme environment as well as its shadowy, jagged, sometimes toothy menace. He just needs to learn when to leave it alone.

Speaking of alone, Radcliffe spends about 1/3 of the film on his own. For anyone still wondering whether Harry Potter can act, this film should set aside all doubt. Radcliffe is a natural fit for deeply decent characters, and his expressive face helps him communicate an enormous amount of unspoken content.

He’s great, as is the story and the balance of the cast. It’s just the writer and director who let us down from time to time.

Jungle is at its worse when McLean shows how little faith he has in his material and his audience, leaning on emotional manipulation and an almost oppressively leading score to ensure we are getting his point.

There are other questionable decisions, like the dream sequences, which offer little to the film besides the opportunity to objectify the few—all lovely, all nameless—women who grace the screen.

Jungle is, if nothing else, a powerful testament to Daniel Radcliffe’s potency as an actor. It’s also an unbelievable story, and Radcliffe’s performance ensures your keen interest regardless of McLean’s antics.

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Stranger in Town

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The Foreigner

by George Wolf

Martial arts legend Jackie Chan jumps back into the action genre feet first with The Foreigner, a film with more depth than you might expect.

Chan plays Quan, a restaurant owner in London who loses his daughter when a rogue faction of the IRA bombs a bank. Quan believes Irish Defense Minister Liam Hennessy (Pierce Brosnan), who rose to power after a violent IRA past, knows the identity of the bombers. After his polite requests for information are rebuffed, Quan resurrects his own bloody roots to get those names by force and have his revenge.

Director Martin Campbell (Casino Royale) knows you’re ready for the latest take on Taken, but mixes some satisfying fight choreography with long stretches of political intrigue that might disappoint those looking for nothing but bad guy beatdowns. There’s nothing overly original here, but Chan provides just enough layers to be mysteriously sympathetic, Brosnan brings the seasoned gravitas, and The Foreigner keeps its head above some gaps in logic to remain interesting.

 

 

 

 

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Super More Than Friends

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Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

by George Wolf

My my, turns out Wonder Woman’s lasso was designed for a little bit more than just truth-telling.

Writer/director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women is the fascinating story of the birth of an iconic superhero, told with enough earnest emotion and sly subversion to craft a captivating, entertaining history lesson with a naughty side.

Anchored in 1945, when Wonder Woman creator William Marston (Luke Evans) is defending his comic against charges of indecency, the film flashes back often to the 1920s, as Marston and his wife Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) were psychologists at Radcliffe college. After taking on a young teaching assistant (Bella Heathcote), the three develop a relationship that launches both scandal and inspiration.

A mix of Saving Mr. Banks and A Dangerous Method, PMATWW boasts excellent performances and a refreshing, if a bit idealized worldview.

Call it Super More Than Friends.

 

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We Are Marshall

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Marshall

by Hope Madden

Thurgood Marshall is among the most fascinating figures in contemporary American history. Too bad his biopic isn’t about him.

Marshall, director Reginald Hudlin’s glimpse at the first black Supreme Court justice’s earlier career as a tireless NAACP lawyer, offers an image of the man by way of one of his court cases.

It’s an interesting case, though probably not the best Marshall case to choose as a focus. It does, however, allow the unearthing of many complex and unfortunately still relevant issues of racism and injustice.

Like a hardboiled detective story turned historical courtroom drama, the film follows the 1941 case of Connecticut Versus Joseph Spell in which a white New England socialite (Kate Hudson) accused her African American chauffeur (Sterling K. Brown) of rape and attempted murder.

In the role of Thurgood Marshall is go-to biopic actor Chadwick Boseman. As you might expect given his string of impressive performances, Boseman has brooding, wise-beyond-his-years charisma to spare.

Josh Gad plays Marshall’s unlikely partner-in-justice Sam Friedman, a Connecticut tax attorney who wants nothing to do with this case. He and Boseman share a sometimes comical odd couple chemistry that often works in the film’s favor but just as often does not.

This speaks to one of Marshall’s two major weaknesses: Hudlin can’t find a tone. Too stylized to be a straight biopic, comical enough to feel tone deaf once the seriousness of the subject matter settles in, Marshall rarely finds its footing.

More problematic, though, is the court case itself.

Don’t get me wrong, this case is rife with cinematic elements and historical significance. The problem is that father and son writers Jacob and Michael Koskoff chose a case in which Thurgood Marshall was voiceless.

The presiding judge, capably played by the always welcome James Cromwell, forbade the out-of-state attorney to speak in court. An amazing piece of racially motivated injustice right there, making it another fascinating detail. It also means that we don’t get to see Thurgood Marshall command this court case.

It’s Gad’s Friedman who handles the courtroom drama—which he does quite well—but it leaves us with only some outside the courtroom mentoring and challenges from Marshall, and not enough else.

It may not totally sink a film built on solid performances and engaging material, but it’s enough to keep Marshall from making the kind of lasting impression it should have.

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And Many More…

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Happy Death Day

by Hope Madden

It’s funny how long it took people to rip off the Groundhog Day conceit—20 years, basically. No one really revisited the “day on repeat” idea (Source Code came close, but it wasn’t a full day) until Tom Cruise’s surprisingly high-quality 2014 flick Edge of Tomorrow.

It took twenty years to redo it once, and yet I’ve seen at least 9 of these this year. OK, I’ve seen two (Happy Death Day, Before I Fall) and am aware of two others (Naked, Premature). Still, that’s a lot. It’s like sitting through the same events over and over and over and over again with no idea why it’s happening or how to make it stop.

Happy Death Day does what it can to make up for its lacking originality with a tight pace and compelling lead performance.

Tree (Jessica Rothe) wakes up on her birthday in some rando’s dorm room with no memory of the night before, a raging hangover and an attitude. She’s murdered that night by a knife-wielding marauder in a plastic baby mask, only to wake up back in that same dorm room under that same They Live poster.

Repeat ad nauseam.

It doesn’t take too many déjà vu mornings before Tree decides there is a mystery to solve here and just like that, we’re off in Phil Connors territory: reliving the same day again and again gives you the chance to become a better person, right?

If, like Tree, you are unaware of Groundhog Day, Phil Connors is the Bill Murray character doomed to relive February 2 until he…well, if you haven’t seen it I don’t want to ruin it for you. But the fact that Happy Death Day addresses the groundhog in the room is part of its self-aware, played-for-comedy charm.

Rothe boasts strong comic timing and a gift for physical comedy, a skill that transitions nicely to the demands of being repeatedly victimized by a slasher.

Director Christopher Landon (Scout’s Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse) wisely mines Scott Lobdell’s screenplay for laughs. Given the repetitive, bloodless nature of the kills, trying to generate scares would have been a tough go.

The mystery absolutely does not hold up, red herrings are silly and fairly pointless, and whatever charm the filmmakers infuse into this recycled premise wears off just a tad before the credits roll. Still, there are funny bits and clever moments peppered throughout what is easily this year’s best Groundhog Day ripoff.

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Strangers on a Plane

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The Mountain Between Us

by George Wolf

The Mountain Between Us is the type of film that wants to reach us by watching two wary characters slowly reach each other. Through talented actors, it wants to speak softly but cut deep.

Well, it nails the talented actors part.

Kate Winslet is Alex, who’s getting married tomorrow in Denver. Idris Elba is Ben, a neurosurgeon who’s also headed to Denver to perform delicate surgery on a ten-year-old. Problem is, they’re both in Idaho and all the flights are canceled due to weather.

They team up to charter a private plane from Walter (Beau Bridges), a local pilot with a lovable pooch, but when he suffers a stroke not long after takeoff, two strangers and a dog are left alone in the snow-covered mountains.

Screenwriters J. Miles Goodloe and Chris Weitz adapt Charles Martin’s novel with enough contrivance and melodrama to render Goodloe’s credit on a Nicholas Sparks film (The Best of Me) anything but surprising.

Director Hany Abu- Assad (Omar) serves up some majestic scenery and a nifty crash sequence, but settles for Sparks meets Castaway. Somehow, Winslet and Elba get us invested throughout the convenient, telegraphed plot turns. It is their seasoned talent and effortless likeability that ultimately saves the film from becoming a complete eye-rolling travesty.

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Skin Trade

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Blade Runner 2049

by Hope Madden

Who’s ready to go back to the future?

No gigawatts necessary. With Blade Runner 2049, director Denis Villeneuve returns us to the hulking, rain-streaked metropolis of another generation’s LA. We ride with K (Ryan Gosling), a blade runner charged, as always, with tracking down rogue replicants and retiring them.

Things get more complicated this time around.

Gosling’s the perfect choice to play dutiful sad sack LAPD blade runner K. Few actors can be simultaneously expressionless and expressive, but Gosling’s blank slate face and long distance stare seem to say something mournful, defeated and rebellious without giving anything away.

It’s no spoiler to mention that Harrison Ford returns. He’s a welcome presence, and not simply for nostalgia. The film toys with the “is he or isn’t he?” debate that has raged for 35 years, and gives the veteran ample opportunity to contribute.

God complexes, sentience and existence, clones – Ridley Scott saw his own longtime preoccupations playing out in Philip K. Dick’s prose and now, with returning screenwriter Hampton Fancher and new teammate Michael Green (Logan), Villeneuve gets his chance.

Their take is engrossing, satisfying and impressive, though the group stumbles over a few of their ideas—particularly those that consider the female in this particular universe.

As enamored of the original as we are, Villeneuve weaves intoxicating threads and callbacks throughout—most welcome is Hans Zimmer’s periodic moaning and sighing echoes of Vangelis’s original score.

In fact, the echoes from the Ridley Scott (now executive producing) ‘82 classic almost threaten to overrun the film. There are plenty of differences, though.

Villeneuve carves out a much larger corner of author Phillip K. Dick’s universe—not quite taking us off-world, but far beyond the teeming streets, towering buildings and oppressive rain of Scott’s retro-futuristic noir. The expansive story fills the screen with breathtaking frames and immediately iconic imagery, thanks in large part to acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins, at the top of his game.

Few if any have delivered the kind of crumbling, dilapidating futurescape Ridley Scott gave us with his original. But between the stunning visual experience and meticulous sound design, Blade Runner 2049 offers an immersive experience perfectly suited to its fantasy.

Picking at ideas of love among the soulless, of souls among the manmade, of unicorns versus sheep, Villeneuve channels Dick by way of Scott as well as a bit of James Cameron and more than a little Spike Jonze. There’s even a splash of Dickens in there.

Sounds like a hot mess, but damn if it doesn’t work.

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Do Not Stop in Willits

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Welcome to Willits

by Alex Edeburn

In their debut feature, Trevor and Tim Ryan welcome us to the backwoods of Northern California where the weed, meth and aliens are bountiful and the yokels are creepy. The town of Willits—known as the Gateway to the Redwoods—attracts a young group of hikers looking to enjoy a weekend in the woods, who only get lost and spend the night near a cabin shared by a pair of strung-out conspiracy theorists.

Brock (Bill Sage) and Peggy (Sabina Gadeki) believe aliens are after the powerful batch of crystal meth the two have been cooking and smoking. “Emerald Ice,” as the locals call it, brings on intense hallucinations, exposing the user to the nefarious creatures visiting Earth, and in some cases, inhabiting human bodies.

Brock has no other option than to stand his ground and fend off the aliens he can only see through meth-tinted glasses. This proves problematic for our unsuspecting hikers when they eventually find themselves in Brock’s crosshairs.

The comedy of the film mainly relies on lazy stoner-humor courtesy of Possum, played by Rory Culkin. A Willits local who tags along with the hikers, Possum also provides the explanation for the UFO sightings and other spooky happenings around the town. Except his “explanation” is more of a half-assed paraphrasing of an Ancient Aliens episode.

The central question of the film: Does “Emerald Ice” actually expose the hidden truth about aliens, or are these visions part of a drug-induced psychosis? The narrative attempts to answer this by setting characters on a collision course with butchery. It’s a nice idea that just doesn’t work out since scenes with lost hikers or a homicidal Brock are too short for us to feel invested.

Given the cavalcade of circumstances, the premise seems promising for a science-fiction/horror romp. But the lack of tension and careless writing cripple a film that could have been frightening and fun.

If you’re looking for something with scares and laughs, try watching conspiracy theories on YouTube before watching this movie.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvhOiwnh5zA