Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

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Fantasy V Reality

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The Latent Image

by Christie Robb

When thriller author Ben rents a remote, isolated cabin so he can get away and focus on writing his latest manuscript, his writing time is interrupted by the arrival of a mysterious stranger. Fascinated and a little attracted to the tall, dark, and brutally handsome man, Ben begins collaborating with him on the plot. Really trying to get in the head of the villain. Trying to figure out how he might get away with murder. Eventually, the lines between fantasy and reality start to blur.

Director Alexander McGregor Birrell, in collaboration with co-writer Joshua Tonks (who also plays Ben), creates an unnerving tale based on his 2019 short of the same name.  At the start, the movie drags at bit, but once it gets going, this new Latent Image keeps the audience guessing all the way until the end. It’s a movie of creeping unease rather than jump scares or gore.

The evolving relationship between Ben and “the Man” is the heart of the film. Jay Clift’s performance as the Man is unsettling in all the best ways. Tonks and Clift are both theatre performers, so you might assume that they would skew into the more broad style of acting that plays well even to the cheap seats in the back. But, except for the very occasional misstep, they really deliver on the subtleties necessitated by film.

If you are planning on a cabin trip this spooky season, consider adding this one to your watch list. Just make sure to lock the doors and windows at night and try to avoid any drifters.

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Mucha Lucha

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Cassandro

by Hope Madden

There’s rarely a good reason to miss a performance from Gael García Bernal. Even when the material around him doesn’t exactly work, he always does. His performances tend to be marked with a quietly observant, charming resilience.

In Cassandro, the narrative feature debut from documentarian Roger Ross Williams, Bernal amplifies that charm and resilience with an energy and magnetism that dares you to look away.

Bernal plays Saúl Armendáriz, a real life El Paso amateur lucha librador. Saúl loves wrestling, loves his mother, quietly loves another closeted librador, but wants more. Because of his size, he’s been pegged a “runt” which means, in the pre-determined and choreographed matches, he must always lose.

He doesn’t want to lose.

What Williams and Bernal channel is lucha libre – this unusual and rarely represented world – as a microcosm for society. The odds are stacked against Saúl. He cannot win. It’s not allowed. It’s not the role he gets to play.

So, he decides 1) to find a really good trainer (Roberta Colindrez, understated and excellent), and 2) play the “exotico” – that is, a wrestler who performs in drag.

Exoticos never, ever get to win.

And yet, the persona allows Saúl to be a little bolder, a little louder, a more vivid version of himself. It’s empowering. Cassandro still has to lose to the likes of El Gigántico because “lucha libre is a fairy tale and good must always triumph over evil.” But as his skill and charisma earn him fans, suddenly that old fairy tale feels less important to the promoters who decide match outcomes.

Ross’s documentarian instincts serve the film beautifully, as the world of lucha libre is never treated as a sideshow. There’s humor here, but we laugh with characters rather than at them. And though Cassandro hits the beats you’d expect from a dramatic biopic journey, moments feel authentic rather than manipulated for dramatic effect.

The entire ensemble shines, but Bernal owns the screen, his ever present smile a heartbreaking and beautiful image of the resilience and determination that fueled an icon of wrestling and LGBTQ culture.

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Going Home Again

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Amerikatsi

by Rachel Willis

With the historical drama Amerikatsi, writer, director and star Michael Goorjian explores the harsh, sometimes funny, reality of life in Soviet Armenia during the 1930s.

During the Armenian Genocide, four-year-old Charlie is smuggled out of Armenia and sent to the United States. He returns to his homeland as an adult (Goorjian) after Joseph Stalin offers survivors of the genocide scattered around the world a chance to return to Soviet Armenia.

However, after saving a young boy from a mob, Charlie runs afoul of a soldier who doesn’t like his public displays of religiosity or his Americanism. Accused of spying for the United States, Charlie is sentenced to ten years hard labor.

Charlie finds comfort in the view from the window of his cell: a glimpse into the lives of an Armenian couple. This unexpected view allows him the chance to form a connection with the outside world. It’s this link that sustains him during his imprisonment.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, Goorjian elicits humor where he can find it. There’s an absurdity to Charlie’s circumstances that skirts the line between the comedy and the tragedy. The score often emphasizes the irrationality of both Soviet hypocrisy and the day-to-day realities of life in a gulag.

At times the humor almost undermines the historical tragedies on which the film is based. But there are also moments when we truly feel for Charlie and his plight. The tightrope Goorjian walks between humor and heartache emphasizes his skills as both an actor and a director. The supporting cast, particularly Hovik Keuchkerian, helps the film strike the right balance.

There is also genuine feeling for Armenia and its people peppered throughout the film. Despite Charlie’s treatment at the hands of the Soviets, he can’t ignore the overwhelming pull he feels for the country of his origin.

At its heart, Amerikatsi requires the audience believe in the power of both human connection and hope. To weary the audience with too much focus on the tragedy of life while ignoring the joy would hamper the film’s message.

In the end, Goorjian delivers a heartfelt love letter to Armenia and the resilience of its people. 

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Nightmares in a Damaged Subgenre

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Megalomaniac

by Daniel Baldwin

Martha (Eline Schumacher) and Felix (Benjamin Ramon) are the children of the legendary uncaught serial killer The Butcher of Mons. Each of these siblings contends with their family legacy in different ways. Martha works as a janitor amongst coworkers who treat her with contempt. Meanwhile, Felix has taken up his deceased patriarch’s monstrous profession: kidnapping, torturing, killing, and dismembering women.

Their home life is not great. Neither talks to the other much, with Felix insisting on living in near total seclusion from his sister, despite residing in the same home. Both have frequent hallucinations tailored to their individual fractured psyches as they live out their own private hells. That is, until things go south at Martha’s job. A violent encounter forces Martha and Felix together, sending them down an even more vicious and crazed path.

If any of that sounds cliched, it’s because it very much is. What we have here in Megalomaniac is a film homaging both violent ‘70s exploitation and ‘00s New French Extremity cinema. The latter in particular. The fingerprints of modern classics such Martyrs, Frontier(s), and High Tension are on full display here, as well as doses of older influences like Lustig’s Maniac and Scavolini’s Nightmares. Brutal, broken killers take out their rage on unsuspecting women. We’ve seen it countless times before and we have seen it done better.

From a filmmaking standpoint, the craft on display here is sound. There are some striking images to be found, particularly during the film’s more hallucinatory sequences. Unfortunately, the tone and color palette are both so grim and dour that any enticement within those images is immediately sapped away. What we are left with is yet another in a long line of torture & kill flicks. If there’s any solace to be had here, it is in Eline Schumacher’s performance in the first two acts. While the writing for her character ultimately becomes a lump of cliches in the final stretch, Schumacher gives a nuanced take on the degradation of a tortured psyche for the first two thirds of the film.

If this is a subgenre that you’re fond of, you might find some engagement within. All others would be better off seeking out one of the other films I mentioned above. This is a fans-only affair.

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Vitruvian Man

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The Inventor

by Hope Madden

The Inventor, a beautifully animated lesson on the life and times of Leonardo da Vinci (voiced by Stephen Fry), offers a lot to digest, and I’m not sure who they think is eating.

Writer/co-director Jim Capobianco (directing here with Pierre-Luc Granjon) draws inspiration from his 2009 hand-drawn short, Leonardo. A delightful sketch about trying to fly, the film ran just 9 minutes and celebrated Da Vinci’s genius in the most charming way possible.

The feature looks into da Vinci’s curiosity about the existence of the human soul. This gets him into trouble with Pope Leo X (Matt Berry), so da Vinci moves from Rome to France, where he thinks he can follow his curiosity in peace.

He cannot.

Capobianco and Granjon land on a lovely mixture media. The tale is told primarily using a stop motion Claymation style that recalls the old Rankin/Bass Christmas specials of the Sixties and Seventies. (This is especially true of the pope, who’s the spitting image of Burgermeister Meisterburger.)

Scenes are often punctuated with the same hand-drawn sketch style used in Leonardo, and together the result is lovely. But that doesn’t help the storytelling as much as it should.

Even with a great cast – Daisy Ridley and Marion Cotillard co-star alongside Fry and Berry – Capobianco can’t maintain interest. He delivers so much information so superficially that it’s equally hard to keep up and care what happens.

The story takes too big a bite. Is our focus the soul? The perfect city? Weapons? Flying machines? Because each of those has its own background, implications, experiments and host of characters. Skimming over all of it gives us too much and too little at the same time.

It’s hard to determine the intended audience for The Inventor. The humor and political intrigue are a little sophisticated for children, and the history lesson is far too long and involves far too many characters to keep a child’s attention.

And though the animation is reason enough for an adult to give The Inventor a go, the simplistic storytelling and characterization will likely leave them cold.    

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Spirits in the Material World

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A Haunting in Venice

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

If we’re going to congratulate Rian Johnson for reviving the murder mystery, save a backslap for Kenneth Branagh. His Murder on the Orient Express came two years before 2019’s Knives Out, and though Branagh may be adapting decades-old Agatha Christie classics, he’s proven adept at giving them a stylish and star-studded new sheen.

Branagh also stars again as Hercule Poirot, the legendary Belgian detective who showed a friskier side (probably thanks to Johnson’s sublime Benoit Blanc character) in last year’s Death on the Nile. Now for the third in their mystery series, Branagh and screenwriter Michael Green embrace the season with a gorgeous and frequently engaging update of Christie’s 1969 novel “Halloween Party.”

It is 1947, when the now-retired and war weary Poirot meets up with his old friend Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) in Venice. Oliver is a famous writer who considers herself quite the smarty, but she needs Poirot’s help to debunk the work of Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), a medium whose talks with the dead are pretty damn convincing.

The setting is a Gothic manor with a disturbing past, where Poirot agrees to attend a seance on Halloween night. There, after a children’s party, Mrs. Reynolds will attempt to give Rowena Drake (Kelly Reilly) the answers she seeks about the murder of her daughter, Alicia (Rowan Robinson).

But another murder soon steals the show, with even Poirot himself questioning his own eyes as things in the night go plenty bumpy.

Branagh again teams with cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos (Belfast, Death on the Nile), enveloping the film in a haunted house vibe that is wonderfully foreboding. The camera explores the confines of the manor via angles that are often extreme and disorienting, while lingering on cloaks, masks and other various other articles of creep.

Poirot is a changed man since last we met. He’s seen too much evil, and believes in “no God, no ghosts,” as a cloud of trauma and grief that fits the film’s mood hangs over him. Branagh and his stellar ensemble (including Jamie Dornan, Camille Cottin and Belfast‘s Jude Hill) work their character edges well, making sure no one is ever quite above suspicion.

And those suspicions are easier to play with when the source material isn’t as well known. But while revamping a deeper cut is welcome, the chance for creepy surprise does come at a price.

The core mystery just isn’t as compelling. Branagh and Green make alterations that prolong the chill factor, but result in moments that seem more like a Christie disguise than the face of the master herself.

A Haunting in Venice‘s lingering impression is as a slice of well-dressed fun. It’s a Spooky Season movie for those who don’t like things too scary, and an Agatha Christie tale for those who’d rather not think so hard.

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Ave Satán

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Satanic Hispanics

by Hope Madden

For genre fans, a well-made anthology can be a delight. Sometimes, like Michael Dougherty’s classic Trick ‘r Treat, one filmmaker pieces together a set of related short works. More often, though, a framing story connects the tales of many different filmmakers. The Mortuary Collection is an example of a recent gem.

Satanic Hispanics falls into the second category. It’s a collection of shorts made by Latinx filmmakers. Like, really good filmmakers. Eduardo Sánchez instigated the entire found footage phenomenon with his genre classic The Blair Witch Project. Gigi Saul Guerrero delivered geriatric fun in her 2021 film Bingo Hell. Demián Rugna’s Terrified is a haunting and effective flick, and Alejandro Brugués’s Juan of the Dead is the most underseen and brilliant film of the lot.

There’s good reason to be excited about the potential of the shorts assembled for Satanic Hispanics. And, on the whole, these filmmakers deliver on that promise.

Mike Mendez (Gravedancers) starts us out with the framing story, “The Traveler.” It introduces the titular character (Efren Ramirez, Napoleon Dynamite’s Pedro), the last man standing at a crime scene where 27 are dead. As he’s interrogated by two well-meaning detectives, he shares tales meant to persuade them that a great evil is coming.

Those stories range from Rugna’s creepy and trippy “También Lo Vi” to Sánchez’s comedic “El Vampiro” to Guerrero’s creature feature, “Nahuales”, to the Brugués insanity, “Hammer of Zanzibar.” Each has its charms, and every genre fan will find at least one or two films to take their fancy.

Rugna’s mindbender about light refraction, algorithms and inadvertently opening a portal to something sinister is the standout. Brugués delivers a stylized comedic adventure – part Tarantino, part Evil Dead. And if you can get past the troubling fact that a jilted boyfriend beats his ex-girlfriend with a giant penis for laughs, you might like it. 

But the collection absolutely boasts some inspired talent having a blast, and when is that ever a bad thing to witness?

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Doing His Research

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Canary

by George Wolf

“Science can only advance when you do things that other people say can’t be done.”

So says climate scientist Lonnie Thompson, PhD, and he should know. He’s been walking the walk for decades, and Canary finds him finally ready to start talking the talk.

And yes, the title does refer to the “canary in a coal mine” metaphor, but directors Danny O’Malley and Alex Rivest wisely spend half of the film’s running time on an extended introduction to a man who’s been described as “the closest living thing to Indiana Jones.”

Growing up poor in West Virginia mining county, Lonnie took his scientific mind to Ohio State University to explore coal geology. But a research job studying glaciers changed the course of his life, and ultimately, the very nature of climate research.

Since 1989, Lonnie and his wife Ellen Mosely-Thompson, PhD, have run OSU’s Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, spearheading groundbreaking work that earned Lonnie a National Medal of Science.

Lonnie’s background and achievements are extraordinary, as O’Malley and Rivest show us a man that none but the most rabid ideologue could ever accuse of grandstanding. His only agenda is scientific fact. But after decades of climbing mountains, drilling into previously unexplored ice caps and collecting indispensable data on the effects of climate change, Lonnie had to face some colder, harder facts.

“What do you not see? Why the disbelief?”

Though he long believed his work would speak for itself, and that the different sides of the political spectrum could “debate solutions, but accept the facts,” Lonnie saw things begin to change in the early 2000s. Canary connects some dots of the misinformation campaign that turned the tide, with evidence of some high-profile politicians quickly shifting their stances.

Lonnie came to accept how hard people will fight back against a forced change in lifestyle, and we see that play out with irony in his own home. Lonnie himself ignored the science of his doctor’s advice and kept climbing until it nearly killed him.

And now, as he sees global CO2 levels still rising, Lonnie realizes his time may best be spent not by collecting another ice core, but by spreading the word of what a lifetime of “doing his research” has revealed.

The film is an awe-inspiring and important step on that journey. Lonnie still believes that if humans can cause a problem, then humans can also solve that problem. And Canary‘s biggest success comes from giving you no reason to doubt the man, even if you want to.

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A Time to Kill

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Aporia

by Brandon Thomas

Most time travel movies don’t get into ethical dilemmas that going into the past – or future – might cause. The plot is usually too confusing anyway so adding moral problems to the mix might send audiences screaming from the theaters. With Aporia, director Jared Moshe makes the ethics of time travel the centerpiece of the movie and to riveting results. 

It’s been 8 months since Sophie (Judy Greer of 13 Going on 30, Ant-Man, and 2018’s Halloween) lost her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi of X-Men: First Class and Gone Baby Gone) to a drunk driver. Mal’s loss has had a devastating impact on Sophie and her daughter Riley (Faithe Herman). As the two try to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives, Mal’s close friend Jabir (Payman Maadi) confides in Sophie that he has been working on a device that could potentially bring Mal back but that it would involve killing someone else in the past. 

Aporia slowly reveals its cards, or genre trappings, if you will. Stylistically the film skews closer to an indie drama than it does sci-fi. This is also the film’s greatest strength. As Sophie and Jabir’s changes to the past take form in the present, it’s not through fancy CGI set-pieces. Clever changes in production design or the cast’s appearance are utilized to showcase the ripple effect in time. These easy gags help keep the film grounded. Moshe refuses to get lost in the complex mechanics of the story, instead leaning into the characters and the roller coaster of emotions they ride through the film. 

The deeper Aporia questions the ethics of changing time, the more interesting the film becomes. Using these characters to ask complex questions about grief and responsibility was clearly where Moshe felt most inspired when making the film. Movies use the scenario of going back in time to kill baby Hitler as the ultimate moral time travel question. Aporia theorizes that this question – and many like it – doesn’t always have simple answers or solutions.

Greer continues to show that she deserves to be seen as more than “Hey, that girl!” Her relatability and charm help keep the character lighter than the subject matter might have allowed. Like the character of Sophie herself, Greer delicately dances between emotions – sometimes in the same scene. Given the small size of the cast, the chemistry between the core three is important and both Gathegi and Maadi also bring a natural gravitas to the film. 

Aporia asks a lot of interesting and important questions but it’s the kind of film that isn’t necessarily interested in following through with answers. Here that isn’t a detriment as the journey through asking those questions makes for one of the smartest time travel films in recent memory.

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On a Journey of Self-Discovery with a Dead Mouse

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Little Jar

by Christie Robb

Cast your mind back to the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. Spring of 2020. When office folks were sent home to hastily assemble a workspace in some relatively unused area of the house. When you figured you might as well open a bottle of wine at two in the afternoon on a Wednesday. When you weren’t entirely sure if you were living in the apocalypse or not.

If you were an introvert, like Ainsley the main character of the movie Little Jar, you may have initially been pleased, especially if you, like her, lived alone. At first, Ainsley is elated to escape her boundary averse co-workers and even rebuffs the offer of a weekly Facetime hang with her brother. She wants to do this two week quarantine thing entirely on her own. Then, the internet goes down, she drops her phone in the bathtub, and the silence thickens.

She’s on her own. In the woods.

What could go wrong?

As the pandemic drags out into months, Ainsley gets creative in her attempts to find companionship and has to confront that sometimes basking in a little well-earned solitude can mutate over time into society forgetting you ever existed and your  being left for dead.

First time feature director Dominic Lopez, in collaboration with his co-writer and star Kelsey Gunn, create a dramatic and whimsical story that is completely absurd yet totally relatable. Primarily shot in one location with one actor and a taxidermy mouse in a beret as the leads, Little Jar really illustrates what independent filmmakers can accomplish with a limited budget (and that we’ve all probably still got a lot of pandemic stuff to deal with).