Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Plane Crazy

Leave a comment

American Made

by George Wolf

In the late 1970s, Barry Seal traded in his gig as a TWA pilot for something more colorful. What began as missions taking aerial photographs of “enemies of democracy” in Central America turned into money laundering, arming the Contras, and cocaine smuggling for Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel. Among other things.

Seal’s is a resume that stands out, and American Made tells his story with just enough charm and swagger to keep it from being totally bogged down in the swamp of exposition necessary to sort it all out.

Much of that charm belongs to Tom Cruise, digging into a role perfectly suited to that roguish charisma he can deliver on autopilot. Whether keeping his CIA boss (an excellent Domhnall Gleeson) in the dark about his side hustles, spoiling his family with cash or buddying up to murderous drug lords, Cruise effortlessly carries the film.

Director Doug Liman (Edge of Tomorrow, Go, Swingers) brings the swagger, surrounding his star with enough lively pacing and entertaining presentation to avoid the usual trappings of Cruise vanity projects.

Landing somewhere between Wolf of War Street and War Dogs, American Made is a film that certainly could have dug for a deeper message, but delivers plenty of fun while it romps in the shallow end.

 

New In Theaters

Separation Anxiety

Leave a comment

Super Dark Times

by Hope Madden

Super Dark Times opens ominously enough: a broken schoolroom window, a trail of blood running through empty classrooms and into a cafeteria. Though the outcome is not what you may expect, it sets an eerie stage for the 90s-set coming of age thriller.

Zach (Owen Campbell) and Josh (Charlie Tahan) are best friends, not yet driving, not yet dating, not yet determined if they are permanently dorks or just “awkward stage” dorks. They both like Allison (Elizabeth Cappuccino), both tolerate Daryl (Max Talisman).

Thanks in large part to a weirdly believable cast, writing that dances past clichés and confident direction, Super Dark Times creates the kind of charming but clumsy authenticity rarely seen in a coming-of-age indie.

Eighties high school flicks, mainly of the John Hughes variety, focused on right- versus wrong-side-of-the-tracks, popularity and the pressures parents can put on us. That is to say, they focused in most ways on the same worries that had plagued adolescent-focused films since the Fifties.

Contemporary films dealing with high schoolers require the ubiquitous presence of social media. But there is a particular darkness that entered the global consciousness about adolescents in the 90s, and Super Dark Times tries to tap that, using it to color the tone of its nostalgia and cusp-of-adulthood energy.

Kevin Phillips, making his feature debut, leans on his experience as a cinematographer to ensure the film looks as appealing and authentically nostalgic-90s-coming-of-age as possible. Writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski are unafraid to drop contextual clues without burdening characters with too much backstory, just to go on to upend expectations now and again to keep you on your toes.

Super Dark Times develops a thriller atmosphere fueled by the paranoid, confused logic of an adolescent. It’s all a fascinating and realistic journey—until it isn’t.

At a certain point in Super Dark Times, the film settles. It becomes something it didn’t have to become—like the teen who’s cool to hang onto that Subway job when he really needs to ditch town and make something of himself.

It’s an enormous credit to Philips and his young cast that this unnecessary cop-out doesn’t ruin the film. Together they have drawn so much investment in these characters and their futures that you can’t help but stay tuned and attentive.

But they could have done more.

New In Theaters, Slider

Anyone For Tennis?

Leave a comment

Battle of the Sexes

by George Wolf

A fight for equality playing out inside sports arenas. Sound familiar? Battle of the Sexes isn’t just an effortlessly engaging piece of entertainment, it’s a compelling reminder that the sporting world has long been intertwined with the social and political movements of the day.

In 1973, Billie Jean King was 29 years old and the leading name in women’s tennis. Bobby Riggs was a 55 year-old former champion who missed the spotlight. As the “women’s lib” movement grew, they met for three sets of tennis that was watched by ninety million people.

Directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (Little Miss Sunshine, Ruby Sparks) choose wisely in running the soul of the film through King. Bolstered by Emma Stone’s gracefully layered performance, the film’s emotional connection comes from King’s dueling inner conflicts: the responsibility of carrying the women’s game forward and her growing attraction to the tour hairdresser (an excellent Andrea Riseborough).

A taut script from the Oscar-winning Simon Beaufoy finds marks that often speak directly to today’s “stick to sports” crowd. In one particularly biting scene, a defiant King argues for equal prize money on the women’s circuit, telling the condescending director of the tour (Bill Pullman) that he’s a constant gentleman “until we want a bit of what you’ve got.”

As he was in the actual ’73 event, Riggs is the film’s camera-loving ringmaster, a born huckster who tells a recovery group they don’t need to stop gambling – they just need to get better at it. Steve Carell nails the role, and not just because he has the look and the attitude. In the quieter moments away from the cheering crowds, Carell gives us a faded star in search of purpose, finding the authenticity that Riggs leaned on to remain endearing.

The period details are just right and, thanks to some nifty work by two athletic body doubles, so is the tennis. Faulting only with some fleeting moments of flippancy, Battle of the Sexes wins by serving up both a crowd-pleasing spectacle and the human drama than ultimately made it so much more.

 

 

New In Theaters

Dream Baby Dream

Leave a comment

Woodshock

by Hope Madden

Do you know the Suicide song Dream Baby Dream?

For some, it’s a profound and moving meditation. For others, it is the longest, most unendurably boring song on earth. It figures prominently in one scene in the film Woodshock, becoming maybe the strongest (perhaps unintentionally as well as intentionally) metaphor in the picture.

The film, written and directed by Kate and Laura Mulleavy—better known as fashion icons Rodarte than as filmmakers—follows one woman as she descends from melancholy to full-blown madness.

Theresa (Kirsten Dunst, doing much with very little) works part-time at a legal pot dispenser somewhere in California’s logging country. Marijuana is legal; assisted suicide is not, but many of the shop’s clients are suffering greatly—including Theresa’s terminally ill mother.

The film opens on Theresa dripping some kind of liquid into the contents of a joint, then holding her mother as she passes painlessly from this life.

Painless hardly describes the future Theresa has found.

Hers is a slow—very slow—downward spiral. Woodshock is a character study. Unfortunately, Theresa’s conflict and chaos happen internally, so we spend an enormous amount of time watching her do basically nothing. At the one hour 29 minute mark, she does something. That’s a long wait.

The Mulleavys attempt to offer glimpses into Theresa’s psyche with dreamlike imagery. Their lawless style is equal parts mesmerizing and frustrating. For the power they infuse in their visual presentation they deserve praise. They need to stop ignoring story, though.

Terrence Malick films can sometimes become a confoundingly beautiful amalgam of free-form imagery, episodes disguised as story providing the whisper of a plot. The reason Woodshock doesn’t hold together as well is that the few plot points provided are each of profound importance to character development. Rather than a meditation, the film becomes a highlights reel padded with hallucinatory imagery.

The sisters’ work is formally confident, and rightfully so, but their investment in story is too weak to hold attention. Woodshock offers style to spare, but it’s too shy with substance.

New In Theaters

Needs More Politics and Candy Crush

Leave a comment

Friend Request

by Rachel Willis

With a film like Friend Request, the task becomes creating fear out of something benign. In this case, how can a friend request on Facebook be scary? Director Simon Verhoeven tries to answer that question.

College student Laura (Alycia Debnam-Carey) has a perfect life. Instead of opening credits, the film begins with a montage of scenes from Laura’s Facebook page: pictures with friends, comments from her adoring 800+ Facebook friends, even hints of a love triangle. While there could be an element of not everything is as it seems on social media, the movie doesn’t tackle this. What we see is what we get.

Into this mix comes Marina (Liesl Ahlers), a shy, lonely woman in Laura’s 200-level psychology class. Because Laura is a nice person, when Marina sends her a friend request on Facebook, she accepts. Not only does she accept the request, she takes the time to try to get to know Marina. But because this is a horror movie, in less than two weeks, Laura regrets her decision.

There are a number of ways Friend Request could go, (Marina is perfect Single White Female material) but it takes a supernatural turn. After a falling out between Laura and Marina, Laura and all of her closest friends start having nightmares. Most of the dreams are comprised of jump scares. It works the first few times, but after the third or fourth one, they stop being effective.

At times the film is unintentionally funny. It’s hard to maintain a level of horror around Facebook. If the film had embraced the silliness of its premise, the audience could have been treated to a horror comedy that warns against the danger of too much screen time, but sadly, the film tries to maintain the scares beyond what is reasonable. The suspension of disbelief is often non-existent, as a slowly loading screen generally inspires more irrational rage than outright terror.

Friend Request does follow some interesting ideas, and the actors are mostly up to the task of carrying the film’s weaker elements, but too often there’s a sense that no one’s quite sure how to make Facebook scary. Perhaps if they’d shown the real ways Facebook sucks the life out of its users, they could have had a truly horrifying tale.

New In Theaters, Slider

Whisky Dicks

Leave a comment

Kingsman: The Golden Circle

by Matt Weiner

There was a fleeting moment early in Kingsman: The Golden Circle when I thought that the new film might be atoning for the biggest misfire in the first one. One hour and one novel use of an inside-the-body POV shot later, I realized I should have known better.

Just like first movie, Kingsman: The Golden Circle (again directed by Matthew Vaughn, and written by Vaughn and Jane Goldman) delights in its attempts to set up the familiar contours of a spy movie and then gleefully take the piss out of them, to hell with audience expectations.

Unfortunately, the film also doubles down on everything—the good, the bad and the truly repulsive—from the first one.

We barely have time to be reunited with Eggsy aka “Galahad” (Taron Egerton), Merlin (Mark Strong) and the rest of Kingsman before the two men find themselves all alone against a worldwide threat yet again. (This would be a good time to point out that for a super-secret highly trained spy agency, it sure seems easy to wipe them out every few years.) Following the only lifeline they’ve got, Galahad and Merlin head to America to revive a special relationship with Statesman, their booze-swilling, Southern-drawling counterparts.

The Statesman universe is an American funhouse of Kingsman, complete with a lone Q-type (Halle Berry) somehow serving the entire agency. While the Statesman introduction gets in a few digs at us bumpkins across the pond, it’s hard not to sense that the main purpose is to tease some big names for future installments. That, and also—spoiler—to explain the resurrection of Eggsy’s mentor, Harry Hart (Colin Firth).

Working together, Kingsman and Statesman cut, shoot and lasso a swath of carnage across the globe in pursuit of drug lord and big-time Elton John fan Poppy (Julianne Moore) attempting to murder hundreds of millions.

I want to like the world of Kingsman. I really do. The first film was fresh, briskly shot and gave its characters enough room and heart to make you overlook the script’s shortcomings. And despite the runtime bloat in The Golden Circle, the kinetic violence and over-the-top parody keeps the action moving.

But for a pastiche that has no reservations transcending its source material when it comes to sending up action and plotting, it’s impossible to ignore how the same can’t be said for the movie’s treatment of women.

This is, after all, a film where dogs play a more emotional role in the narrative arc than most of the female leads, and a running bit about reluctant anal sex is no longer the grossest punchline in the franchise. So congrats on that distinction, I guess.

But that’s not cheeky. It’s just dull. And it’s unforgivable in any film—but especially in one that so desperately wants to be seen as clever.

New In Theaters, Slider

Fathers and Sons

Leave a comment

The LEGO Ninjago Movie

by Christie Robb

A spin-off movie of the LEGO Ninjago television show, the new LEGO movie once again centers on the relationship of a dude and his boy.

Like the first LEGO Movie, the main story is nestled within the frame of events happening in the human world. A live-action sequence starts Ninjago when a young boy wanders into a Gremlins-esque antiques shop run by Mr. Liu (Jackie Chan). The lad seems a bit lost, possibly bullied, so Mr. Liu lets him hang out and spins a yarn about another troubled boy. Chan’s story comes to life, portrayed by LEGO minifigures, set in the island city of Ninjago.

In the animated story within a story, we are introduced to Lloyd (voiced by Dave Franco), the abandoned son of Lord Garmadon (Justin Theroux), a warlord intent on destroying Ninjago. Everyone knows who Lloyd’s dad is and they direct their anger and frustration on the son.

Thankfully, Lloyd does have some friends who happen to be part-time ninjas…just like him, who fight Lord Garmadon in supercool mechs.

Like LEGO Batman, Ninjago is more than willing to take elements of other intellectual properties and play around with them. However, where Batman came off gloriously snarky and peppered with pop culture references, having creatures like Doctor Who’s Daleks’ interact directly with baddies like Lord Voldemort, Ninjago feels like the scriptwriters put their favorite fiction in a blender and hit pulse—Star Wars, Godzilla, Power Rangers, Austin Powers, Captain Planet, Voltron, Team America World Police with a little bit of Sharknado thrown in there, too.

The resulting film is muddled—confused about what it wants to be and derivative. The philosophical frame of the first LEGO Movie and the rapid-fire in-jokes from LEGO Batman are missing, letting the adults in the audience down. There’s a sameness to the supporting characters and a dearth of fun cameos. (Although a troublingly flamboyant “Fuchsia Ninja” does pop up for a moment.)

The action is pretty run of the mill, sacrificing the opportunity for what could have been some truly great physics-defying fight sequences for mech vs mech battles that seem like commercials for (admittedly probably pretty cool) playsets.

The hero’s quest that forces father and son together comes off as somehow both rushed and ponderously slow. And the father/son drama so heavy-handed that you can almost hear Cats in the Cradle playing behind a particularly fraught conversation.

LEGO Ninjago is the weakest offering in Lego’s growing collection of colorful family drama action movies, just serving to remind me that I should probably rent one of the previous two and have a night in instead.

New In Theaters

Written by Victors

Leave a comment

Viceroy’s House

by Rachel Willis

History is written by the victors.

So begins Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House, a film that focuses on the transition of power from England to India and the partition of India into two countries. It’s an interesting sentiment as the film seeks to show that in the transition of power, there are no victors.

With a history such as India’s, Chadha makes the wise decision to focus the bulk of the story within the confines of the viceroy’s house and grounds. The film opens with the arrival of India’s last viceroy from England, Lord Mountbatten, with his family. Because of the intimacy of the setting, the audience is privy to the negotiations between the British and the leaders of India. Many will recognize Mahatma Gandhi, but may not be familiar with the other leaders, including the head of the All-Indian Muslim League Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who led the charge to partition India with the creation of Pakistan.

In addition to the wider story focused on this transition of power, a more personal tale is woven behind the scenes through the love affair of Aalia and Jeet. Aalia is a Muslim woman in love with Jeet, a Hindu. As tensions between Hindu, Sikh, and Muslims rise, the two are pulled in different directions as family and religion come between them. Their story provides the audience with a more personal connection to the conflicts that arise as Lord Mountbatten tries to negotiate a peaceful transition of power.

As Lord Mountbatten, Hugh Bonneville plays a familiar role, as those who have seen him in Downton Abbey will recognize the similarities between characters. Gillian Anderson is his wife Edwina Mountbatten. Flawless as always, Anderson is almost underutilized in her role. However, the scenes in which she does appear are riveting. The two are sympathetic as they try to avoid a violent passage of power.

However, the film truly belongs to Huma Qureshi and Manish Dayal. As Aalia and Jeet, they bring life and hope to a movie racked with conflict. As tensions rise, their love is a light in the dark. Though the history of India may be written by the victors, it’s the stories of the people who live through it that connect us to the past.

As a love story, as a history, Viceroy’s House is a moving examination of a tumultuous moment in India’s history.

New In Theaters, Slider

Many Mansions

Leave a comment

mother!

by Hope Madden

Darren Aronofsky is grappling with some things.

For those of you who know the writer/director primarily for his streamlined, intimate films like The Wrestler, mother! may come as a bit of a surprise.

For the rest of us, mother! may come as a bit of a surprise.

How do you feel about metaphor?

Jennifer Lawrence stars as the very young wife of a middle-aged poet with writer’s block (Javier Bardem). While he stares at a blank piece of paper, she quietly busies herself restoring every room and detail in his remote, fire-damaged home—now their home.

Their peace is disturbed by a man (Ed Harris) knocking at the door, soon followed by a woman (Michelle Pfieffer—look for her name come Oscar time). The poet is only too happy to offer the strangers a place to stay, and this is bad news for the poet’s wife.

Between Aronofsky’s disorienting camera and his cast’s impeccable performances, he ratchets up tension in a way that is beyond uncomfortable. This is all clearly leading somewhere very wrong and the film develops the atmosphere of a nightmare quickly, descending further and further with each scene.

Many a horror film has been built around writer’s block, but Aronofsky has more on his mind than that. The larger concept of creation and all its complications: male versus female, celebrity, consumption, art and commerce. Also maybe the self-destructive nature of humanity as well as its tendency toward regeneration and rot. And being God.

Aronofsky picks up many of the themes that have run through his work, from Requiem for a Dream to The Fountain through Black Swan and Noah.

God as creator, god as creation. Gender politics and the nature of man.

Or is it all just one man’s frustration at not being able to give birth?

Hard to say, really. It’s a big stew, and it’s equal parts self-indulgent and self-pitying. Aronofsky is a daring filmmaker and an artist that feels no compulsion to hide his preoccupations.

Like most of the filmmaker’s work, mother! will not be for everyone. But if you’re up for an allegorical descent into hell, meticulously crafted and deftly told, and if you like your metaphors heavy and your climaxes absurd, this mother! is for you.

New In Theaters

Neither Holly Nor Jolly

Leave a comment

Red Christmas

by Hope Madden

A holiday celebration of bad taste, Aussie writer/director Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas is a yuletide grab bag of solid performances, provocative subject matter, lazy scripting and gore.

Horror icon and E.T. mom Dee Wallace (who also produces) stars as Diane, the matriarch of a big Australian family gathering for the last holiday at their family home. With all the kids grown, Diane is selling off her large country estate and taking some time for herself.

But first—the best Christmas ever!

She’s joined by a set of squabbling adult children and their spouses, a pot-head uncle, and a stranger bedecked in dirty bandages, black robes and the reek of urine.

That last guest will be trouble.

Anderson has a lot on his mind about family, birth, death, murder, choice and basically every other noun you can associate with abortion. He is neither subtle nor judgmental, honestly, with carnage and questions piling up on both sides of the issue.

His film weaves between the splatter comedy stylings of a young Peter Jackson and the nonsensical decision making of any 80s slasher.

“You stay here while I go do something stupid, leaving you entirely defenseless for no logical reason,” says everyone at one point or another.

I’m paraphrasing.

A great deal about Red Christmas is grotesque yet intriguing. At least as much of it is tedious and hair-brained.

Wallace delivers, regardless of Diane’s routinely questionable decisions in the face of ax-wielding danger. She masters that maternal support-and-shepherd-and-chastise behavior that allows Diane to feel recognizable and human, no matter the increasingly horrific circumstances.

Each member of the cast finds dimension in thinly drawn characters, and the relationships among them feel well-worn.

Whether clever or distasteful, Anderson manages to dispatch characters in manners grossly suited to the subject matter. So, bravo there, I guess.

Not that you see a great deal of the dismemberment—Anderson’s reliance on red and green filters ensures you see very little of anything. His framing and use of sound focus more on reaction and spillage, really, but his is not a film for the squeamish.

I’m not sure who it is for. Red Christmas offers a peculiar, sloppy bit of macabre that manages to be more memorable than it is enjoyable.