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Uneasy Money

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The Instigators

by George Wolf

Go ahead, Affleck, Damon and company. Say those words I like to hear.

“It’s a heist movie.”

Apple TV’s The Instigators is indeed a heist movie. There’s a plan, a snag, a hostage, a manhunt, and plenty of interesting characters well played by plenty of veteran talents. Director Doug Liman, coming off the rollicking good ride that was Road House, assembles all the parts with precision.

The sum just needs to be a little more fun.

Casey Affleck and Chuck MacLean provide a script that finds former Marine, Rory (Matt Damon), confiding in his therapist, Dr. Donna (Hong Chau), about his downward spiral and desperation for cash.

Rory finds an opportunity for acquiring exactly the $32, 400 he needs by teaming with alcoholic ex-con Cobby (Affleck) to pull a job for local goon Mr. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg). The guys simply need to rob the Boston mayor’s (Ron Perlman) big election night soiree at the yacht club, and they’ll get a slice of the take.

Not so fast, Massholes. Things go haywire, which sends the boys running from Besegai’s henchmen (Alfred Molina, Paul Walter Hauser), the cops and the mayor’s enforcer (Ving Rhames) while Rory reaches out to Dr. Donna for some affirmations.

Damon and Affleck create a nice pair of contrasting criminals. Damon’s forthright, note-taking approach to the heist often runs afoul of Affleck’s jaded pro, while Chau’s Dr. Donna won’t let any active felonies derail her from working on Rory’s emotional growth.

The stellar ensemble also gets plenty of room to sharpen the edges of their respective supporting characters. But even with witty dialog inside an ever-evolving fugitive journey, nothing ever becomes as outright funny as you’re hoping it would.

Like Rory, The Instigators seems most interested in getting the job done in a timely and competent manner. That’s fine, and you could find plenty of worse ways to spend 90 minutes. But if might have been nice to take Cobby’s approach and get a little reckless once in a while.

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Lonely in Your Nightmare

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Ganymede

by Hope Madden

Have you ever seen A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge? Because you should, especially if you find yourself intrigued by the plot synopsis for Colby Holt and Sam Probst’s LGBTQ+ horror Ganymede.

In the Nightmare sequel, everything young Jesse Walsh sees around him—his gym teacher’s S&M outfit, the neighborhood bar where men make out with other men in the stairwell, shirtless frenemy Ron Grady—all seem to be pointing him toward his own homosexuality. Meanwhile, a shadowy menace stalks his nightmares, clearly a representation of the terror and horror he associates with the sexual orientation he’s unwilling to recognize.

If that’s not how you read that film, rewatch it because it’s clearly there in every frame.

Holt and Probst are not hiding their agenda behind slasher antics to maximize audience size. High school wrestler Lee Fletcher (Jordan Doww) buries his feelings and repeats the mantra I’m neither gay nor bisexual, I’m straight and heterosexual. But he knows the truth, and his parents—the honorable Big Lee Fletcher (veteran talent Joe Chrest) and tradwife Floy (Robyn Lively)—suspect it. But they all know that the fear of God is enough to turn the boy straight.

Except, of course, that it’s not. And when Lee finds himself drawn to sweet, out-and-proud Kyle (Pablo Castelblanco, the dearest kid), a repugnant, demonic image begins to stalk him. Seriously fundamentalist preacher Pastor Royer (David Koechner, solid) comes to the rescue with his own recipe for salvation.

The filmmakers, working from Holt’s script, juggle societal pressure, family trauma and damaging fundamentalist beliefs with a genuine tenderness for adolescence. A film that sometimes bares its budget gets a boost from Koechner, and the vulnerability Castelblanco brings to his darling character keeps tensions very high.

Doww, on the other hand, struggles to find a whole human inside this smothered, denied young man. Chrest is wasted with an underwritten cliché of a role and Lively’s character arc needed more development, particularly as it relates to Paster Royer.

But there is a refreshing boldness in Ganymede. The conflict between Kyle and Lee parallels those between the ordinary high school students and Carrie White. The idea that homosexuality is somehow abnormal is now the utterly backwards and ridiculous notion and those who cling to it are hypocrites and bullies.

So, give Ganymede a chance. And then, if you like it even a little bit, give yourself the gift of Freddy’s Revenge, no matter how many times you’ve already seen it. That movie was ahead of its time.

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Killer Concert

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Trap

by Hope Madden

You have to feel for a guy who’s built his career on trick endings. If he delivers another twist, he’s nothing but a gimmick. What if he just makes a thriller, no tricks, no twist, no gimmick? It can be done, right? Other filmmakers do it.

In the case of Trap, M. Night Shyamalan trades in twists and surprises for contrivance and predictability.

Josh Hartnett is Cooper, the awesome dad who sprung for floor seats to take his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her hero, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). But—you’ve seen the trailers—the whole concert is a trap. Cooper’s a serial killer and the Feds know he’ll be there, so they’ve descended on the show to smoke him out.

It is a compelling idea—sort of like the sting operation at the beginning of the 1989 Al Pacino/Ellen Barkin thriller Sea of Love. Except on a larger scale, with twenty thousand innocent lives at stake. I mean, cinematically it’s not a bad scheme, but in terms of law enforcement, feels sketchy.

Still, with a premise like that, the real star is the writing. How on earth is Shyamalan going to get his characters out of this?

With a lot of convenient opportunities for exposition, unreasonably handy opportunities for possible escape, and a heavy reliance on the idea that the moviegoing audience has not been to a lot of concerts.

Hartnett’s great. He’s an excellent choice for a serial killer: physically imposing but somehow bland, likeable without being memorable. Shyamalan’s camera emphasizes his height one moment, his Good Guy Jim smile the next.

Donoghue’s believable as the star struck pre-teen and Alison Pill shines late in the movie as her mother. Marnie McPhail feels unsettling real as that mom who will not drop it, and Jonathan Langdon charms as the vendor who talks to much and doesn’t have to work that hard.

Saleka Shyamalan struggles. She writes and performs all the Lady Raven songs, which seem reasonable enough as pop hits to me but, let’s be honest, I would have no idea. She comes up lacking in stage presence as the pop diva, though, and even more so as an actor.

But it’s the writing that lets you down the most. He can’t nail it every time, and when M. Night hits—The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Visit, Split—it’s worth all the misses. Trap is a miss. It’s not his worst, just middle of the pack, but a disappointment nonetheless.

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Rebel Rebel

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Kneecap

by Hope Madden

There’s a reason Richard Peppiatt’s Kneecap was nominated for Sundance’s Innovator Award, and it’s not just the way scribbles, illustrations and on-screen text mirror the film’s bold, bird-flipping tone. It’s the way the director—co-writing with his leads—fictionalizes the Irish band’s origin story to embrace Ireland’s rebellious, bird-flipping history.

“Every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”

It’s 2019 and activists in the North of Ireland are hard at work making the Irish language an official national tongue. But there’s nothing official, nothing hard working about the way two hedonistic youths put it to use in their hip hop.

Less than Orange v Green, less even than the familial tensions that drive a great deal of the story, the conflict between respectability and the anarchic spirit of the Irish is what fuels Peppiatt’s film.

Móglaí Bap (playing himself), along with best pal Mo Chara (also as himself), learned the language at the knee of his father (Michael Fassbender), who happened to be an IRA bomber that would disappear or die—no one’s sure which—not too many years into those lessons.

Here lies the fiction, no doubt. But it’s a brilliant way to layer in the history of a land’s volatile spirit. Peppiatt and his co-conspirators have no interest in sanitizing this hero’s journey. Before Kneecap could become the hip hop revolutionaries that galvanized the island’s youth around the native language by rapping only in Irish, they had to become a trio. And that couldn’t happen until Mo Chara could meet disinterested music teacher JJ (actual bandmate DJ Próval), an Irish translator sent to his aid after his drug arrest.

It merits remarking that all three bandmates make fine actors. Mo Chara is mischievously charming and DJ Próval comes off as a veteran. Their unlikely camaraderie is infectious, amplified by the audacious energy that propels the film.

Peppiatt takes a band’s origin story, wraps it in cultural trauma, globalizes it and creates a rebel song the North of Ireland can be proud of.

Winner of the audience award at Sundance this year, Kneecap is a hard film not to like. As utterly and unapologetically Irish as the film is, it is also blisteringly universal. Every culture is built on our stories. Every story needs a language.

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Madame Robinson

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Last Summer

by Matt Weiner

The word “provocative” gets thrown around a lot in art, but French director Catherine Breillat has at least earned it over her storied career.

Last Summer, Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness, lives up to the label with an age-gap stepmother/stepson romance that dispenses with titillation to become a sharp, complicated and morally fluid examination of its leading lovers.

Anne (Léa Drucker, without whom none of this would work) is a successful middle-aged lawyer with a comfortable bourgeois life—business owner husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), two adorable young children who enjoy their horseback riding and trips to the cabin—just the sort of luxurious ennui that’s ripe to be upended.

And upended it is, when Pierre’s wayward son from a first wife comes to stay with the family after troubles at his boarding school. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is a stranger to his father almost as much as he is to Anne, but it falls to her to integrate the rebellious 17-year-old into the family.

Casual secrets and moments of raw openness between Anne and Théo quickly progress from emotional intimacy to a passionate affair. It’s a salacious premise, and the adaptation, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, is a natural fit for Breillat’s boundary-pushing explorations of sexuality.

Breillat’s rewrite of the Danish original takes almost sadistic pleasure in the unresolved ambiguity and hypocrisy on display from Anne. Drucker gives a performance that credibly swings from feminist advocate to abuser to… well, something Breillat leaves up to the audience to decide.

Last Summer is also a far more artful way of grappling with complex subjects like abuse and agency than Breillat’s blunt interviews on Harvey Weinstein in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Anne is a compelling subject, and Last Summer refuses to condemn her as a one-note monster. In many ways, she is all the more fascinating for the way she seems unable to come to terms with her own deeply flawed behavior and actions toward Théo.

It can be an intense artistic exercise to bear the full force of Breillat’s provocations with none of the pitch-black humor of the similarly confrontational May December. There’s no clear-cut legal satisfaction here, by design. Breillat’s unsettling study of Anne and her motivations is ultimately an artistic one—and all the wallowing in moral uncertainty that goes along with that.

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Purple Haze

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Harold and the Purple Crayon

by Rachel Willis

Director Carlos Saldanha gets a lot of mileage from a children’s picture book about a boy whose drawings come to life. In his live-action adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon, a now-grown Harold becomes concerned when the narrator, also known as Old Man (Alfred Molina), suddenly disappears from his story.

Knowing that Old Man comes from the “real world,” Harold (Zachary Levi) draws a door which acts as a gateway into our world. His two best friends, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds), join him on his adventure.

Upon entering the real world, Moose and Porcupine become inexplicably human. Of course, logic is not necessary in a kid’s movie and it’s fun watching both characters learn to adjust to their new human forms.

Harold meets single mom Terry (Zooey Deschanel) and her son Mel (Benjamin Bottani), and finds in Mel a friend willing to help him in his search for Old Man. With an imagination just as big as Harold’s, Mel is the perfect companion for our creative hero.

The best part of Harold is the reminder that imagination is a doorway to an inspired, joyous life. Levi imbues Harold with a marvelous sweetness and naivety. Often, naïve characters feel clownish, but the film treats Harold more gently. His innocence is what opens him up to the pleasures of the “real world.” Though it has its challenges (such as the soul-sucking reality of working in retail). the world around Harold offers him plenty of possibilities.

That’s not to say the film doesn’t see a potential downside to unbridled creativity. The movie’s villain, Library Gary (played with wicked charm by Jemaine Clement), seeks to steal Harold’s magical crayon for selfish reasons. It’s a bit of a mixed message that may fly over the heads of many kids. Or perhaps, I’m just reading too much into it.

The movie has a few weaker moments. Certain scenes are a bit too long, dragging down the film’s overall fast pace. But on the whole, Saldanha captures the spirit of the original story. Creativity is a magical gift that should be embraced, nurtured, and enjoyed. A message worth repeating.

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The Snoozual Suspects

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Detained

by Daniel Baldwin

Midbudget movies used to be Hollywood’s bread and butter for decades, especially procedural thrillers. They were all the rage in the ‘90s and ‘00s in particular. The Silence of the Lambs. Kiss the Girls. The Usual Suspects. Double Jeopardy. Primal Fear. The Firm. Twisted. If it involved Thomas Harris, John Grisham, and/or Ashley Judd, it was practically a guaranteed smash.

At some point in the 2010s, studios drifted away from such fare, in favor of a core focus on blockbuster franchises. Fans of such films were forced to get their fix almost exclusively from network television and low budget independent features. They filled the void that Hollywood left behind and one of the latest entries taking up residence in that gap is Detained.

Co-writer/director Felipe Mucci’s Detained centers around a confused and disoriented woman (Abbie Cornish) who awakens in a rundown police station. She doesn’t know why she is there and cannot remember what has happened to her recently. The two detectives (Laz Alonso, Moon Bloodgood) that are interrogating her are not much help. They’re more interested in beating around the bush and playing mind games with her to see if they can luck into a confession. What follows is a conversational game of cat & mouse between not only our lead and the detectives, but the other denizens of the dilapidated jail as well. Who will come out ahead as secrets are revealed and alliances are shifted? Well, you’ll have to watch it for yourself to find that out.

While Detained might fill a cinematic void created by bad Hollywood decisionmaking, it does not fill it well. Visually, the film is in line with many of the television procedurals within the genre: well-made, but very paint-by-numbers. It is also punching above its weight in the casting department, which helps smooth over a lot of its dialogue deficiencies.

Unfortunately, not even the likes of Cornish, Alonso, Bloodgood, or the ever-underrated Breeda Wool can overcome a narrative that is chock full of nearly every single twisty-turny mystery cliché imaginable. Even the most dedicated fan of this subgenre is likely to be five steps ahead of the story throughout the film’s running time. What is meant to be an engaging thriller that keeps viewers guessing is far likelier to have them checking the time to see how soon it will wrap-up.

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Medical Malpractice

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Dr. Jekyll

by Hope Madden

You can’t blame a film for not being what you hoped it was going to be. The fact that your goals don’t match the filmmaker’s goals doesn’t mean the film is less than it should be, just that the filmmaker had their own plan and if you want to see the movie you hoped for, it’s up to you to make it.

The idea of Eddie Izzard playing Dr. Jekyll is tantalizing, bursting with possibilities as a statement on being trans—sort of I Saw the TV Glow but goth. This is an amazing idea and a movie I’d like to see. And Dr. Jekyll is a Hammer Horror, which makes it sound like even more fun.

It is not. Not a meditation on being trans—an unfortunate waste of an opportunity, but if that wasn’t in the filmmakers’ plans, so be it. But it’s also not fun, not anything worth your time. What a waste.

Izzard does all she can with the role of reclusive Big Pharma billionaire Dr. Nina Jekyll. Jekyll’s assistant and only connection to the outside world—the always welcome Lindsay Duncan—is looking for a live in caregiver. Somehow, Rob (Scott Chambers) lands an interview. It was a mistake, never meant to happen, can’t imagine how he wasn’t vetted.

Jekyll takes an immediate shine to the goofy ex-con and hires him, against her assistant’s stern warning. But is it really Jekyll at all?

Izzard has a bit of fun with both characters and all’s well enough as long as she’s on screen. But at no time does director Joe Stephenson offer any reason to have revisited Robert Louis Stevenson’s old id/superego story.

First time screenwriter Dan Kelly-Mulhern tosses the source material in the bin but can come up with no relevant or interesting new twist, even though a tantalizing possibility is staring him in the face.

Chambers is certainly likeable enough in the role of doofus caregiver, but ex con with a guilty conscience and dark past? Not buying it for a second, which makes the character’s arc borderline ridiculous and Chambers lacks the chops to elevate the material.

The story itself is nothing but holes. With nary a coherent thread of story line to cling to, Izzard’s charm and wicked humor are in service of nothing. It’s almost offensive that RLS gets a writing credit.   

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Trust the Process

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Sing Sing

by George Wolf

Learn a bit about the genesis of A24’s Sing Sing, and you’d be tempted to view it as some sort of social experiment, a project where success is defined just by completing the assignment.

But to see the film is to witness a filmmaking vision brought to transcendent life by director/co-writer Greg Kwedar, and a tremendous ensemble cast that features many formerly incarcerated members of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing maximum security prison.

Inspired by a 2005 article in Esquire magazine, the film brings us inside the RTA theatre troupe led by drama teacher Brent Buell (Paul Raci, Oscar nominee for Sound of Metal). Buell’s star pupil is John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo), who is serving a 25 years-to-life sentence for manslaughter.

Via another endlessly sympathetic and award-worthy performance from Domingo, Whitfield comes to personify the soul-stirring effects of the RTA. As he meticulously prepares for one clemency hearing to the next, Whitfield throws himself into the work of the RTA troupe, and to mentoring a restless new member.

Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin (Maclin, playing himself in a debut of undeniable power) has his violent guard up at all times, but Whitfield slowly starts chipping away at the anger that consumes him. He urges Maclin to commit, “trust the process,” and allow himself to feel human again.

Whitfield also counsels Maclin on his own quest for parole, creating a compelling dual B story that adds even more resonance to a deeply emotional journey. Colman, Maclin and the stellar supporting players (including former inmate Sean Dino Johnson and Domingo’s longtime creative partner Sean San Jose) fill every scene with a raw authenticity that can be as heartbreaking as it is hopeful.

The film’s surface-level message of healing through the arts is well-played and well-earned, but a more universal subtext is never far from the spotlight. Sing Sing soars from the way it invests in the need for expression and inspiration, and in the very souls who found a path to redemption by stepping onstage.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?