New In Theaters

Secret Santa

Leave a comment

Dear Santa

by Rachel Willis

Director Dana Nachman’s feature documentary, Dear Santa, is delightful.

Highlighting the 100-year-old United States Postal Service program, Operation Santa, the film captures the spirit of the season as ‘adopter elves’ make Christmas special for children and families across the United States.

When children post their letters to Santa every year, USPS makes those letters – hundreds of thousands of them – available to the public to ‘adopt.’ This is a chance for individuals, families, schools, and non-profit organizations to read through the letters, select one (or several), and do what they can to fulfill the wishes of the children penning them.

Starting three weeks from Christmas and working forward to the big day, we see how the letters move through the system – starting with the children writing them, to their delivery to the postal service, then on to the adopter elves. Two locations in the US – Chicago and New York – allow the adopters to physically read through the letters, while the rest are available online for those around the country who want to participate.

Nachman (Pick of the Litter) interviews several ‘elves’ in the postal service who work with Santa to read, sort, and deliver the letters received every year. She also follows several adopter elves who help Santa distribute gifts to ‘nice’ children across the country. Then, there are the children themselves, so eager to have their deepest wants and desires met by Santa. One child is particularly keen on receiving a moose for Christmas.

Interspersed throughout is a highlight reel of kids of all ages talking about Santa, who he is, what he does, where he lives, and it’s charming to watch the children explain what makes Santa so special.

This is a family-oriented treat, with the filmmakers and ‘elves’ doing their best to keep the Santa myth alive for any believers. However, older kids who might be starting to question whether the man with the bag is ‘real’, might see through the illusion. Some of those interviewed are more convincing than others when it comes to their work with Santa.

The film is an ode to the United States Postal Service, the hard work they do each year to make Operation Santa a success, as well as to the adopters who make it possible for children to have the merriest of Christmases.

If you’re feeling Grinchy this Christmas, Dear Santa might be just what you need to remember what makes the season so special.

New In Theaters

Beneath Was Taken

Leave a comment

What Lies Below

by George Wolf

Eeewww – no 16 year-old girl wants to hear about her Mom’s sexcapades with the new boyfriend!

John (Trey Tucker) is kinda hot, though, and young Liberty (Ema Horvath) has caught herself staring when he traipses around the Adirondacks lake house with his shirt off – which is often.

Mom Michelle (Mena Suvari) is 42 but has told John she’s 35 – and she’s desperate for “Libs” to keep her secret so he doesn’t run off. But John seems like he’s strangely attached to Michelle – or at least to the lake. In fact, as Libs looks closer, there’s plenty about John that’s strange.

He says he’s an “aquatic geneticist” working to preserve fresh water supplies. But man, he’s really interested in parasites, especially ones that can adapt to any host available.

Writer/director Braden R. Duemmler’s feature debut unfolds like a minor league Under the Skin. There’s simmering sexual tension here – some of it metaphorical – amid dreamlike atmospherics and a few glimpses of a creature on the hunt.

Horvath (The Mortuary Collection) is great. Her mix of teenage disgust, confusion and curiosity hits just the right pitch, as does her panicked courage when Lib has to fight for her life (and her Mom’s).

Not every logical building block is water tight, and the sci-fi/horror combo sometimes feels desperately earnest. But the creep factor in What Lies Below holds steady, with Duemmler earning some water-logged points for not copping out at the finish.

New In Theaters

18 and Life

Leave a comment

18 to Party

by Hope Madden

Does every crappy small town in America have a dive called Polo’s where mangey kids—many of them well, well under age—line up to try to get in?

Well, if not, writer/director Jeff Roda’s 18 to Party makes that and just about everything else seem universal. His Linklater-esque exploration of near-adolescence runs its course in a single evening, but that doesn’t make it any easier to forget.

Sure, the high schoolers are all lined up out front waiting for the sun to go down and the bouncer to start letting people in. But Missy, Kira and James, Shel and Brad, Peter and Dean are stuck out behind the club, wasting time and hoping against hope that night manager Rizzo is cool enough to let them in.

Eventually.

Roda understands small town socializing and boredom enough to know that most of the evening’s intrigue, and most of its memories, will take place in those hours before Rizzo makes up his mind.

It’s 1984 and Generation X is, as happened to usually be the case, unsupervised. Well, Shel (a standout Tanner Flood) is supposed to be at Brad’s (Oliver Gifford). Everyone else’s parents are at the town meeting about the UFO sighting.

Thoughts of extra-terrestrials, worries about getting in, general social anxiety and inevitable personality clashes take a back seat to the realization that Lanky (James Freedson-Jackson, really excellent) is back.

No one’s seen him since that thing with his brother.

Roda’s approach is lackadaisical, although the energy that comes naturally off a gaggle of 14-year-olds is enough to deliver regular explosions. Why doesn’t Shel want to fool around with Amy? What is Brad so mad about? Why is Kira so weird?

The film and the evening are loosely structured, allowing for plenty of riffs that occasionally provide a wink to the times (“U2 ripped off The Alarm,” Kira claims. “Check back with me in 5 years and we’ll see who’s still aroud.”)

More often, though, Roda develops darker threads that suggest the kind of doom that can dog you even before you start high school, kiss a girl or get into your first party.

Roda has a light, meandering touch, far more interested in a slice of mid-Eighties life than in the specificity of a John Hughes retread. Characters are familiar, the situation feels authentic, and the mixture of nostalgia, dread and optimism paint a fascinating if unfinished picture.

New In Theaters

No More Words

Leave a comment

Girl with No Mouth

by Hope Madden

If you haven’t seen writer/director Can Evrenol’s 2015 feature debut Baskin, you really must. Watch it right now.

Unless you’re squeamish. Then maybe don’t. But there is another film you might like, Evrenol’s surprisingly good natured post-apocalyptic kid adventure, Girl with No Mouth.

A little bit Goonies, a little bit Mad Max (you know, the one with the kids with the mullets), a little bit Peter Pan, and a lot of deformed children. He is Can Evrenol, after all.

His film is set ten years after The Corporation’s big disaster. Ten-year-old Peri (Elif Sevinc, an effective hero regardless of the fact that she has no dialog) bears the evidence of that disaster. When The Corporation sends goons around to finish cleaning up any remaining evidence, Peri is on the run in the woods, where she finds three friends with similar birth defects.

They believe they’re pirates.

You have to give it to Evrenol, who flavors the film with childlike innocence and fantasy without soft peddling the horror of their situation. It’s a wildly unusual tone the film hits, but it never misses.

Girl has a sense of humor entirely lacking in Baskin, as well as a feeling of optimism. There is blood and death, maggots and burning flesh, but there’s real joy in this film, however weird that is to say.

The four children—Denizhan Akbaba, Ozgur Civelek and Kaan Alpdayi, alongside Sevinc—utterly captivate. Their performances are not showy, but they are vibrant and sometimes giddy. It’s the liveliest post-apocalypse you’re likely to see.

It may never live up to the sheer WTF nastiness of Baskin, nor is it likely to haunt your nightmares the way that descent into hell would. Girl with No Mouth is an adventure film more than a horror movie, and its hopeful resolution may seem out of place in a landscape devoid of such whimsy.

It’s also the second excellent film I’ve seen this week (along with Adrian Panek’s Werewolf) that realizes adults ruin everything and there’s really only one way to fix it.

New In Theaters, Slider

Tilting At Windmills

2 Comments

Mank

by George Wolf

Since its release in 1941, Citizen Kane has earned such a prodigious place in film and popular culture that the utterance of merely one word can summon it.

And as much as Orson Welles’s masterwork has been dissected over the years, Mank reveals its essence in unique and wondrous ways.

Director/co-writer David Fincher (who honors his late father Jack’s script by listing him as the sole writer) takes us into Citizen Kane through the shadowy side entrance of screenwriter Herman “Mank” Mankiewicz. Officially, Mank and Welles shared the Kane writing credit, though just who did the heavy lifting is still a source of debate for film historians.

Fincher’s view is clear. But even the dissenters may feel powerless to the seductive pull of Mank‘s immersion into Kane‘s creation, and to the stupendous lead performance that drives it.

As Mankiewicz (“and then out of nowhere, a ‘Z’!”), Gary Oldman is out-of-this world-good. His Mank is a charmer, a gambler and a frequent drunk, bedridden by injuries from a car accident and under the gun to deliver Welles a script in just 90…no make that 60 days. And no drinking!

Tick. Tock.

The first few pages bring a critique that “none of it sings,” which is funny, because all of this sings.

Fincher’s rapid-fire dialogue is beautifully layered and lyrically precise, more like the final draft of a script than authentic conversations, which only reinforces the film’s commitment to honoring the power of writing. Onscreen typeface and script direction transition the flashbacks to Mank’s years in the Hollywood studio system of the 1930s, running in social circles with power brokers such as Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard), Irving Thalberg (Ferdinand Kingsley), Kane inspiration William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), and Hearst’s not-so-dumb blonde mistress Marion Davies (a terrific Amanda Seyfried).

Oldman expertly sells Mank’s truth-to-power rebellion as a sly reaction to his own feelings of powerlessness. His charm as a “court jester” belies a growing angst about America’s power structure that Welles (Tom Burke) is eager to illustrate.

And though much of Mank‘s power is verbal (just try to catch a breath during Oldman’s drunken Don Quixote speech), Fincher crafts a luscious visual landscape. Buoyed by Erik Messerschmidt’s gorgeous B&W cinematography, Fincher recreates the era with sharp period detail and tips his hat to Welles with Kane-esque uses of shadow, forced perspective and one falling glass of booze.

Talk of “getting people back to the theaters” and manufactured news will feel especially relevant, but Mank provides a nearly endless peeling of satisfying layers. So much more than a story about how a classic story was told, it’s a sweeping ode to the power of courageous art, no matter how flawed the artist.

New In Theaters

Not So Happy Family

Leave a comment

King of Knives

by Brandon Thomas

I think most modern movie-goers would agree that the last thing they want to see is another movie detailing the mid-life crisis of a rich New Yorker. It’s hard to muster even the most sarcastic crocodile tears while watching a sad advertising executive drive his sports car through Manhattan. Cynicism aside, King of Knives might appear to be the king of cliches at first glance, but this is a film that has a few tricks up its sleeve.  

Aforementioned Frank (Gene Pope) is our through-line into a family that, on the surface, looks to be typical, albeit with a few rough edges. The light banter that permeates through a celebratory anniversary dinner early on is quickly smothered as a hint of tragedy manifests itself. As the fractures in Frank and his wife Kathy’s (Mel Harris) marriage begin to show, their daughters (Roxi Pope and Emily Bennett) struggle with their own wants and relationships.

King Of Knives toys with our expectations from the get-go. There’s a whimsical edge that engulfs the early scenes – a tone that doesn’t feel too far off from a winky Julia Roberts movie of the 90s. The tone begins an interesting transition when family tragedy, infidelity, and mental illness enter the fray. It’s in this transition that King of Knives shows its hand. 

Brutal honesty gives King of Knives its power. This isn’t a movie looking for an easy happy ending. Instead, the characters are going through the painful process of finding what truly makes them happy. For Frank, it’s finally owning up to what a terrible father and husband he’s been. It’s not about Frank searching for pity, or the film doing so on Frank’s behalf. Instead, it’s about seeing a character confront the choices that caused so much pain for the people he loves. 

It’s not all blue Mondays, though. King of Knives is genuinely funny. The cast has a natural chemistry that allows them to bounce off one another. The comedy isn’t about bits being paid off but instead comes through its characters. 

First-time feature director Jon Delgado might not have the sharpest visual eye, but he also knows that this material isn’t looking for a flashy approach. Delgado lets the story and performances shine without letting his more technically-focused experience get in the way.  

King of Knives isn’t going to change your mind about rich New Yorkers, but you might approach the fictional kind with a little more empathy next time.  

New In Theaters

Electric Love

Leave a comment

Divine Love

by Cat McAlpine

In the near future, Brazil is under Evangelical leadership. Middle-aged Joana, a devout believer in both Jesus and bureaucracy, is doing the lord’s work as a notary. This gives her plenty of opportunities to convince clients filing for divorce to instead join her couples-only cult and save their marriages.

Writer/Director Gabriel Mascaro paints a visceral picture in Divine Love with long sex scenes, full frontal nudity, and even a graphic hospital scene. But all the flesh we see feels distant and unnatural, illuminated by neon lights, sometimes clouded by haze, and always caught in rituals of necessity.

In 2027, the most important characteristics for women are their marital status and their pregnancy status, brightly displayed on the screens of “detectors” when they pass into buildings. And what Joana (Dira Paes) wants more than anything is to have a child. She and her husband Danilo (Julio Machado) are trying everything they can to conceive, and the process has Joana frequenting her local drive-thru pastor (Emílio de Mello).

Mascaro and co-writer Rachel Daisy Ellis don’t tell you how to feel about religion, even the future’s sexy, club-going, drive-thru version. Instead, they focus on exploring Joana’s own journey of faith.

At one point, her drive-thru pastor urges Joana that he can help her go through the motions of repentance, even if she doesn’t feel guilty. She assures him she regrets nothing, but women’s position seems worse in this new age. The same way that “Divorced” flashes over some heads, “Guilty” seems to flash over Joana’s, despite her protestations. Her faith remains constant.

The biggest conflict of Divine Love is Joana’s interior faith versus the faith of those around her. Everything she does is in complete alignment with her belief system, but it doesn’t save her from being judged or from losing the things most precious to her. “Faith doesn’t need to be tested,” a voiceover muses, but Joana seems to be tested at every turn.

Visually, the film is a marvel. I’m a sucker for lighting and Mascaro delivers from hazy pink rooms to natural light making gorgeous silhouettes. He paints good vignettes too, interspersing the narrative with pretty pictures, like the notary staff lazing on the lawn at lunch-time, tangled up in each other.

Shocking and beautiful, Divine Love is worth the watch even if its conclusion leaves you with more questions than answers.

New In Theaters, Slider

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Bear?

Leave a comment

Black Bear

by George Wolf

As slippery as it is inviting, Lawrence Michael Levine’s Black Bear is an intoxicating trip through the inspirations and indulgences that take root in creative minds.

It feels intensely personal, and yet – once Levine delivers his midstream shape shift – malleable enough to bend to myriad perspectives and interpretations.

We first meet Allison (Aubrey Plaza) as an actress and director facing a crisis of inspiration. She’s hoping to ignite the creative spark at a remote lakeside property overseen by Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and his pregnant girlfriend, Blair (Sarah Gadon).

As the three get to know each other, we learn that Gabe inherited the property from his family. Beyond that, there isn’t much Blair and Gabe seem to agree on. The couple’s little barbs become more intense, as does the attraction between Allison and Gabe, and we think we have a pretty good handle on what’s soon to be up.

And then we don’t.

The opening scene repeats, but Allison and Blair are co-stars on the set of the new film directed by Gabe, who is also married to Allison. The shoot is chaotic, Gabe’s motivational methods are questionable and now Allison is the one jealous of Gabe and Blair’s cozy relationship.

Knowing that Levine’s own history includes films with his wife (actress/director Sophia Takal) adds a layer of intimate intrigue, and knowing even a little about the workings of a movie set will add relatable humor.

But Black Bear isn’t a comedy – except when it’s funny. It’s also dramatic and slightly horrific, depending on your viewpoint.

Most of all, it’s emotional, propelled by career high performances from Abbott, Gadon, and Plaza. The glee each performer takes in upending character expectations is evident, with Plaza seamlessly moving from a cool, casual customer to the emotionally frayed flashpoint of a volatile triangle.

After such fireworks play out, Levine’s payoff may seem a bit underwhelming, but his film is more about the trail than where it ends. Black Bear‘s got plenty to say – about creativity, ego, insecurity, sexual politics and more – but its resonance comes from not demanding you take a side.

Shudder Premiere, Slider

Action Jackson

Leave a comment

Anything for Jackson

by Hope Madden

Writer Keith Cooper and director Justin G. Dyck collaborate often, but nothing either one of them has done will properly prepare you for the reverse-exorcism horror Anything for Jackson.

Not Christmas with a View, or Christmas Catch, or Christmas with a Prince, or A Very Country Christmas, or Hometown Holiday, or Baby in a Manger, or A Christmas Exchange, or Dyck’s forthcoming Christmas in the Rockies and Christmas in the Wild.

It’s as if somewhere in the dead center of all that holiday hoopla, the duo decided they needed to just sit down and write something about the absolute opposite experience. And this is how they made a good movie.

Steeped in grief and boasting a small handful of beautiful performances, the film follows Dr. and Mrs. Walsh (Julian Richings and Sheila McCarthy), grandparents willing to do anything to bring their little Jackson back to them.

The opening sequence beautifully situates you in this particular brand of domestic bliss. The aging couple has a lived-in authenticity about them, even as they are embarking on a very new phase in their relationship.

The details of their little plot cause two simultaneous sets of complications, one legal and one supernatural. Where the filmmakers take this utterly lovely couple making incredibly ugly decisions is fascinating, primarily because of McCarthy and Richings’s performances.

They’re not alone. As their involuntary helpmate,  Konstantina Mantelos creates a character in a role that rarely offers that opportunity.

There’s a clean simplicity in the storytelling that’s appealing, although Act 3 is not nearly as clearly defined or interesting as the balance of the film. But maybe it’s not the resolution the film is after, or really the audience. It’s the story of this sweet couple, mad with grief, that’ll get you.

New In Theaters, Slider

Voice of Rage and Ruin

Leave a comment

Werewolf

by Hope Madden

Liberation isn’t always the good time it’s cracked up to be. In his strangely hopeful tale Werewolf, writer/director Adrian Panek offers a different image of social rebuilding.

His film follows a handful of orphans of the Nazi occupation. Eight children liberated from a concentration camp are dropped off at a makeshift orphanage—really a deserted mansion, long bereft of food, no running water, no electricity. The possibility of aid comes by way of rare visits from Russian guards who may or may not bring rations, may or may not bring their own danger.

Still, little by little the children begin to shake off the horrors of the camp. They explore the woods around them, find berries, even play. But Nazi danger is everywhere—maybe in the bunkers dug deep into the surrounding mountains. Definitely in the woods.

Lurking figures and echoing growls haunt the film from the children’s first steps outside the ruined mansion. Then there’s a body, then more bodies. When Panek reveals the source of the terror, Werewolf could easily turn to pulpy horror. It does not.

At times the film conjures the same magic and dread of Monos, but Panek may see more resilience than Lord of the Flies in children. The filmmaker shows restraint and a forgiving nature when it comes to the barbarity of childhood. He reveals strong instincts with his young cast, understating sentiment and avoiding either the maudlin or the saccharine.

Werewolf is beautifully shot, inside the crumbling castle, out in the woods, even in the early, jarring nonchalance of the concentration camp’s brutality. Panek hints at supernatural elements afoot, but the magic in his film is less metaphorical than that. 

The film is creepy and tense. It speaks of the unspeakable – the level of evil that can only really be understood through images of Nazi horror—but it sees a path back to something unspoiled.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?