Category Archives: New In Theaters

Reviews of what’s out now

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Gridiron Grannies

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80 for Brady

by George Wolf

You’ve seen those close-ups on a movie character pouring out their feelings, right? The ones where the camera pulls back to reveal that the person being spoken to has fallen asleep and missed every word?

If that’s still funny to you, 80 for Brady will deliver some laughs. If not, there’s at least the charm of seeing four legendary ladies coming together for some big screen hi-jinx.

Inspired by the real-life “Over 80 for Brady” fan club, the film follows elderly besties off to see Tom Brady and the New England Patriots take on the Atlanta Falcons back in Super Bowl 51.

Maura (Rita Moreno) is a widow living in a senior center. Betty (Sally Field) is “only 75” and a former M.I.T mathematician, Lou (Lily Tomlin) is a cancer survivor and Trish (Jane Fonda) is a divorcee who writes erotic Rob Gronkowski fan fiction (on one book cover: “football all isn’t the only game of inches!”)

But when Lou gets a new message to call her doctor, she calls an audible instead. Fearing this might be her last chance to see Brady win a title, Lou springs for four Super Bowl tickets, and the gang heads off to Houston.

Thankfully, the film centers on their time actually at the big game. But while this isn’t technically a road movie, writers Emily Halpern and Sarah Jenkins fill it with all the same type of very loosely connected skits that often make that genre so tiresome.

Betty enters a spicy wing-eating contest. Lou throws a football for prizes. They all get invited to a pre-game bash and accidentally take drugs. They get in the coach’s box. And of course there is a dance number. Even the promising cameos from Rob Corddry and Alex Moffat, as a pair of Masshole superfans with a call-in show, come up empty.

It’s all such lazy, old-fish-in-younger-waters humor that’s only mildly amusing at best, which is surprising considering Halpern and Jenkins penned the sly and very funny Booksmart in 2019. They are done no favors by the sitcom-ready treatment from first-time feature director Kyle Marvin, with artificial stadium segments rendered all the more amateurish next to the bounty of actual game film provided by the NFL.

Isn’t it just great to see these icons together, though, in anything? Sure it is, and by the time Brady himself (also a producer here) makes an appearance that manages a nod to his own mother’s cancer battle, you can’t deny the warm fuzzy footballs taking flight.

But as a comedy worthy of this Hall of Fame starting lineup, 80 for Brady feels like a personal foul.

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Campaign Promises

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Little Dixie

by George Wolf

By now, we’ve moved past the “it’s nice to see longtime supporting player Frank Grillo in the lead” phase, haven’t we? He’s established himself as a charismatic actor more than capable of carrying a film.

And while he’s still a reliably galvanizing presence in Little Dixie, the movie itself struggles to carve out its own identity as it vacillates between a generic crime narrative and some seedy sexual underbellies.

Grillo stars as Doc, a no-nonsense intermediary between Texas Gov. Richard Jeffs (Eric Dane) and a ruthless Mexican cartel run by Lalo Prado (Maurice Compte). But when the Gov. goes rogue and ignores the truce that Doc has brokered, Lalo’s bloodthirsty brother Cuco (Beau Knapp) crosses the border looking for payback – and his search starts with Doc’s daughter (Sofia Bryant).

So yes, expect plenty of “If you touch her I swear to God I’ll….,” but also writer/director John Swab’s penchant for hard turns.

This time Swab goes searching for subversion inside a Sicario-like setup, an approach similar to how he attacked truck stop horror in the recent Candy Land. But while that film managed to uncover something surprisingly human amid all the brutality, the persistent posturing and lurid details in Little Dixie do little to raise the resonance of characters or choices – and in at least one instance end up bordering on blood-soaked parody.

But the attempt to firebomb expectations almost works, more evidence that Swab may just need a little more seasoning to find his uniquely compelling voice. Until then, Little Dixie stands as a cluster of eyebrow-raising campaign promises drowned out by a standard stump speech.

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Apples and Trees and All That

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Blood

by Hope Madden

Back in 2001, Brad Anderson scared the living shit out of us with the ingenious institutional horror, Session 9. He followed this up with the utterly remarkable The Machinist, and a few years later, the mind-bending thriller, Transsiberian.

Things began to peter out for Anderson as a filmmaker by 2010’s Vanishing on 7th Street, and as he found more success with episodic programming, he more or less stayed there, popping over to film every few years with routinely middling results.

Such is the case with his latest, the supernatural family drama, Blood.

Michelle Monaghan is Jess, a recently sober, recently divorced, harried nurse settling her pre-teen children into their new home, an isolated farmhouse owned by her aunt before she passed. But Pippin, the golden lab, knows something’s wrong out in them woods.

Whatever’s out there ends up in Pippin and then, shortly, in Jess’s 8-year-old, Owen (Finlay Wojtak-Hissong). The obvious tension is amplified by the fact that Jess is desperately afraid to lose custody of her children, so she is loath to admit there’s anything seriously wrong. But things are seriously, seriously wrong with Owen.

Writer Will Honley hits on a topic that was really popular in the genre maybe five years ago (The Hole, The Prodigy, Brahms: The Boy 2, Z, Brightburn ).  His updates actually recall slightly older films – Grace (2009), It’s Alive (the 2009 remake), even 1990’s nutty Baby Blood to a degree. What Blood is saying is not original at all, so to make it relevant, Anderson will need to mine Honley’s script for some real relevance.

The family dysfunction and addiction angle could be it. There’s an undercooked metaphor here concerning addiction and heredity. Owen’s bratty behavior buoys the film’s darker qualities, and that business down the basement is especially gruesome (as “down the basement business” so often is). But none of it pans out. In fact, some of it – the least forgettable bits – are forgotten entirely as the film delivers a kind of final grace that is wildly unearned.

Had that moral ambiguity felt intentional the film would have been at least provocative. The fact that it does not is alarming, but not in a way that makes the film more enjoyable.

All the performances are solid. Monaghan and June B. Wilde spar beautifully with each other. Meanwhile, Skeet Ulrich (nice to see you!) and young Skylar Morgan Jones fill out the problematic family well. They just won’t help you remember the movie.

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Swim At Your Own Risk

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Infinity Pool

by Hope Madden

Brandon Cronenberg + Mia Goth + Alexander Skarsgård … for a very specific set of people, the sum there is hell yes.

Riding my favorite wave in horror – that rich people are unspeakably diabolical – writer/director Cronenberg takes us on a strange journey through privilege, debauchery, entitlement, boredom, narcissism, psychotropic drugs and more in his trippy new flick, Infinity Pool.

Skarsgård is James Foster, a writer of very little renown who’s vacationing on a fictional island nation with his wealthy wife (Cleopatra Coleman). They’re bored, but as luck would have it, James’s number one fan Gabi (Goth) and her husband have vowed to show them a good time.

Cronenberg’s ultimate concept is clearly, wildly his own, but moments sometimes call to mind ideas from last year’s Speak No Evil, as well as Society, Kill List, Hour of the Wolf, and A Serbian Film (no, not that part). Still, the film never feels borrowed. Uncomfortable, yes. Borrowed? No.

James represents the regular Joe – yes, a very good-looking version, but regular, nonetheless. And no matter how long he plays the part, he’s an outsider. The truly wealthy are alien. Beyond the sci-fi insanity, beyond the outright body horror, this is the most horrific element of the film because feels honest. It touches a nerve.

In 2020, Jeff Bezos racked up more than 16k in parking tickets. Because, why not? He wanted to park there. Once you reach a certain tax bracket – which is the one where you pay no taxes at all – no rules apply. And that does not create better people.  

It’s fascinating and refreshing, this particular approach to the story. These particular villains. And Goth proves once again to be a seductive menace and a force to be reckoned with.

There are certain scenes in this – one in a group holding cell at the island prison, for instance – that are as insightful, impressive and memorably horrific as anything any Cronenberg has filmed.

It’s hard to believe this is only Brandon Cronenberg’s third feature. It does not pack the visceral punch of 2020’s Possessor, but it is a satisfyingly surreal piece of class warfare and an outstanding way for the genre to kick off 2023.

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Crimes and Punishment

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Kompromat

by Tori Hanes

Two full hours of grit, sweat, and anxiety from all participants, both in the film and out. That’s what you can expect from the latest by director Jerome Salle. 

Kompromat is one of those unnerving instances for reviewers where your technical training and study of film confuses your internal perception. The film excels where it is meant to: it’s tense to the point of unbearable anxiety. It’s forcibly eye-opening, and it’s nauseatingly realistic. Lead actor Gilles Lellouche gives a standout performance as a grounded, gritty, desperate, resourceful anti-hero. The story, while seemingly convenient at times, builds masterfully while swerving down winding thoroughfares. 

The viewing experience itself can be defined as less than pleasant. While Salle succeeds at delivering a hard-to-watch movie, he also creates… a hard-to-watch movie. 

With something so viscerally unsettling, you might expect your worldview to be heightened as a result of the painstaking two hours spent. Kompromat doesn’t exactly succeed in this – it paints the illustration of a wrongly accused straight, white, French man in Russia’s highly unprogressive society. All facts and facades we’ve seen at play before. So it begs the question, what is the point?

The point, quite bluntly, seems to be tension. Building it, releasing it, savoring it. If the film makes you break a sweat, the crew can pat themselves on the back.

Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to this approach. Draping the background with a seemingly pressing political story convolutes the film’s actual intention. If Kompromat could be obvious in its goal, a more palpable connection between audience and film could be forged. Instead, there seems to be some thrashing in the netting Salle creates.

While Kompromat excels at holding a consistent fever pitch, it allows itself too much freedom. The two-hour runtime feels like a dumbbell lowering suffocatingly onto your chest. The film’s consistency in story and performance through the overly long run is a testament to Salle’s command of scene and pace but shows a streak of overindulgence. 

If your New Year’s resolution is to elevate your heart rate for 2 hours at a time, pick this up. If breaking a sweat while sitting on your couch isn’t appealing, you may want to skip out on Kompromat. 

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Mission Impossible

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The Mission

by Christie Robb

Tania Anderson’s documentary The Mission details the lives of four very young adults as they embark on two-year missions to try to spread the word of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to the population of Finland. Finland—a country in northern Europe with a high per-capita income, one of the best educational systems in the world, an extensive social safety net, and one that has ranked number one in every annual report of World Happiness since 2018. Not the kind of place where people are likely to be shopping for a new religious modality.

Barely out of childhood, the two American men and women spend a few weeks in a kind of missionary boot camp in Utah before being thrown into a new country, expected to converse with the locals despite only knowing a few stock phrases (and often stumbling over those) and ultimately convince them to convert. Their lives are regimented. Expected to rise at 6:30 AM each day and begin work, they are assigned a companion—a stranger—who spends all “non-hygiene-related time” with them for nine weeks before the companion is replaced with another. They are only allowed contact with family and friends once per week. And they have to pay for the privilege of doing this. The Church does not subsidize its missionaries.

Anderson emphasizes the loneliness. She lingers on the barren, spare quarters in which the subjects live. She uses long establishing shots of the landscape to show how small they are in this new country. She lingers on conversations that strain the viewer’s ability to handle social awkwardness.

In contrast to the aims of its subjects, the documentary itself is not preachy. It covers enough successful conversions and strengthening of faith to balance out the coverage of those dealing with doubt and existential despair. However, this balance is delivered at the surface level. We don’t really get to know any of the four subjects and what motivates them in any profound way. Their reasons for taking on this task, the logistics of the financial commitments, the cultural differences between Americans and Finns, and the missionaries’ personal struggles are only hinted at or covered at the depth one might expect while making small talk at a church bake sale.

The mission takes place between 2019 and 2021 and, unbelievably, it does not consider COVID-19 and the impact it had on a socially-focused pursuit, at all.  Nothing about the fears these folks had at being stuck in a foreign country when the borders started closing. Nothing about how they reacted when millions of mink that had been culled from fur farms in nearby Denmark started to rise from the grave. There are some shots toward the end where the missionaries are wearing masks, but aside from that, the pandemic is completely erased from existence, much in the same way that you are likely to forget this entirely adequate documentary after you have watched it.

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Parks & Resignation

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Living

by George Wolf

It shouldn’t take a film such as Living to make us realize what a treasure we have in Bill Nighy.

But then it shouldn’t take a grim diagnosis for Rodney Williams to seek true meaning in his life, so maybe Nighy’s long wait for a first Academy Award nomination is somehow cosmically right.

In this adaptation of Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru (To Live), Nighy earns every bit of that Oscar nod as “Mr. Williams,” the humorless manager of a public works office in 1950s London. Various floors full of buttoned-up civil servants pass on projects to other departments until the papers finally come to rest on one desk or another, with piles always kept as high as possible so co-workers won’t “think you have nothing better to do.”

Mr. Williams doesn’t, until a fateful trip to the doctor makes him realize how sad this is. A night out with that rascal Sutherland (Tom Burke) offers some cheap thrills, but it’s the persistence of the local ladies petitioning for a new public playground that give Mr. Williams the chance to leave a legacy.

Nobel prize-winning writer Kazuo Ishiguro adapts Kurosawa (and lands his own Oscar nom) with a script that shaves about 45 minutes off the running time while it adds layers of beauty and sentiment. Mr. Williams’ distance from his son becomes more heartbreaking, while the relationships with his two youngest employees (Alex Sharp and Aimee Lou Wood) are given more arc and resonance.

Director Oliver Hermanus replaces the original film’s clinical narration and B&W palette with gentle grace and the splendidly picturesque cinematography of Jamie Ramsay. Outside the office confines, this is a gorgeous London of crisp lines among detailed color, light and shadow, all in orbit around a lead performance of endless humanity.

Nighy is just the epitome of wonderful, with every sigh, furrowed brow and slight smile conveying so much about Mr. Williams’ journey to contentment. Nighy’s every moment on screen nearly glows with honesty, and provides the film with a unique and dignified identity.

Kurosawa’s take still hits hard, but Living would have been foolish to follow a similar fight plan. These blows may indeed be softer, but don’t think for a second they won’t leave a mark.

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She Said/She Said

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Women Talking

by Hope Madden

“Maybe sometimes people confuse forgiveness with permission.”

With nuanced writing and what may be 2022’s finest ensemble, Women Talking, the latest from filmmaker Sarah Polley, delivers quiet, necessary insight.

Polley invites us to witness a secret gathering of women. A select group from an isolated religious community has been chosen to make a decision for the entire sisterhood: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.

For as long as any of them can remember, the women of the flock have been sexually preyed upon and told that they were wrong – they were lying, imagining it, or in league with demons. And they believed this, more or less, until one attacker was caught in the act. Now, while the men are in town bargaining for the release of the attackers, the women must come to a consensus about what to do next.

Think of it as 12 Angry Men, only not all of them are angry and not one of them is a man.

The entire cast is miraculous. Rooney Mara delivers an unusually gentle performance, while Frances McDormand (who also produces) leaves a heavy weight with her few moments onscreen.

Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy are both on fire, one angry at everyone, the second angry enough at the men for everyone. The way Polley, who adapts Miriam Toews novel with Toews, unveils each individual’s motivations is remarkable. Her camera and script linger over moments of compassion and consideration. Women Talking dwells here, as if to point out that these women will offer each other everything the men they know would not.

Polley shows respect for these women – not just for their bodies, their agency, their humanity. She shows uncommon respect for their faith. This is what every faith-based film should look like.

Though dialog-heavy (as you might expect, given the title), the film never feels stagnant. A languid camera emphasizes the lovely tranquility of the community when the men are absent, but Polley generates palpable tension as time ticks away and the women’s opportunity to make a decision draws to a close.

Women Talking is a quietly stunning achievement and a reminder of the power of dialog and respect.

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Control Group

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Alice, Darling

by George Wolf

Remember the palpable tension in the opening moments of 2020’s The Invisible Man ? We didn’t need visual evidence to believe Elisabeth Moss’s character was desperate to flee an abusive relationship. We felt it simply from the strength of Moss’s performance.

Anna Kendrick delivers similar results in Alice, Darling, reaching new career heights as a woman who has lost all sense of self to a controlling, manipulative partner.

Alice (Kendrick) can’t even join her besties Sophie and Tess (Wunmi Mosaku and Kaniehtiio Horn, both terrific) for happy hour without Simon (Charlie Carrick, politley menacing) texting multiple requests aimed at reminding Alice just who she answers to.

When the ladies rent a secluded lake house for a week-long celebration of Tess’s birthday, Alice tells Charlie her time away from him is strictly work-related. But once they’re at the cabin, Alice’s anxious behavior convinces her two friends that everything is not fine at home.

Kendrick – who also serves as an executive producer – has recently opened up about her regret and shame from letting a previous abusive relationship carry on too long. This is an understandably personal project for her, and she channels her own pain into a compelling portrait of a woman nearly suffocating from manipulation, where every message notification and car wheel on gravel serves as a trigger.

An apt underwater metaphor is just one of those skillfully employed by director Mary Nighy in an impressive debut that benefits from subtlety and confident restraint. Alice’s moments of self-harm are evident but not overdone, and her growing interest in the case of a local girl gone missing is understood simply from Kendrick’s quiet fascination.

Alanna Francis’s thoughtful script does eventually reveal Charlie’s gaslighting methods in action, but never to the point where it seems something needs to be proven, because nothing does.

This is no he said/she said. Kendrick has us believing from the start, as Alice, Darling becomes a healing journey back to self, and an intimate reflection on what love is not.

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Far from the Tree

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The Son

by Hope Madden

Two years ago, Florian Zeller reimagined how film could represent perspective, turning his play The Father into a devastating meditation on helplessness, loss and love. Once again Zeller works with Christopher Hampton, this time to adapt the third in his trilogy of stage plays to examine family conflict, The Son.

Hugh Jackman stars as Peter, a dashing and successful lawyer with a lovely young wife (Vanessa Kirby) and a cherubic infant son. He also has a harried ex-wife named Kate (Laura Dern) and a teenage son named Nicholas (Zen McGrath), both of whom feel abandoned by him.

We meet Kate at Peter’s high-high-end doorway. He’s clearly not thrilled to see her – “You can’t just show up here unannounced like this!” – but she’s at her wit’s end. There’s something wrong with Nicholas.

Well, here’s Peter to the rescue. And in the ensuing two hours we learn that, even though appearances suggest that ol’ Pete has it all under control, he does not. No one does.

The dynamic between Kirby and McGrath becomes the most intriguing pairing as neither character is positioned to be fully villain or hero. Both are at odds – with each other, with Peter, with Kate – and yet both make genuine, if thwarted, attempts to bond.

As is her way, Kirby digs to find richness and complexity in a character with limited screen time. Dern is likewise excellent – as is her way. But the film lives and dies with Jackman and McGrath.

Zeller and Hampton’s script does McGrath no favors and he struggles mightily to find a balance between whining entitlement and genuine suffering.

Jackman’s a little bit by the numbers here. Zeller allows the clean, slick surfaces of his home and office and his elegant, never-mussed wardrobe to speak more loudly than they should, stifling a nuanced characterization. Jackman tries, and moments where Peter’s vanity seeps through his “perfect father” demeanor are welcome. But Zeller’s direction is obvious, and the writing wallows more than it enlightens.

Where The Father was a transcendent experience that dared to ask viewers to see as a man with Alzheimer’s sees, The Son takes no such daring leap. Its insights are stale, its twists manipulative. The film delivers a classy melodrama, but nothing more.