The effing holidays are upon us. If you have plenty of lounge-about time this week and zero gumption to go out into the cold, here are some lazy day movie suggestions. Here is what’s out this week on VOD, DVD, BluRay and streaming.
Click the movie title for the full review.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN9PDOoLAfg
by Alex Edeburn
To simply label Richard Turner a “blind magician” would be to insult a man whose pursuit of perfection is all the more admirable considering his impairment. Turner, the subject of Dealt, is much more than a spell-binding “card mechanic.” He is also a father, a husband and an all-around legend within the magic community.
The film, directed by Luke Korem, introduces Turner and what he is best known for: his card tricks. Or, rather his card mechanics. Turner specifies that he is a card mechanic which means he can “fix” a card game—something he can without any vision at all.
Korem pulls TV spots featuring Turner dating back to the late 1970s. From these television appearances, we witness how one man has managed to capture our attention over the years with his impeccable abilities.
His jovial attitude is disarming, even as he explains how he will bend the card game. He uses his mechanics to cheat you, yet all the while explaining how he is doing so. You can’t help but smile while he succeeds.
The film really shines, though, when it shifts focus from the mesmerizing card tricks to Turner’s family. We get a glimpse of a man who relies so much on his wife and child to assist him throughout the journey of his life.
Turner also shares a strong bond with his younger sister, who is also visually impaired. She proves to be a point of strength for him, helping him begin to shed the stigma of his blindness.
The film is a brief look into a rather compelling and friendly character. Richard Turner and his family definitely stick around with you once the film is over—a film that will have you buying a deck of cards and trying out some tricks on your friends and family, just like Richard did when he started.
by Hope Madden
You know that nice lady at work who gets bronchitis every time she flies, then she coughs and hacks and spews DNA all over the office?
Let’s say you have issues with that kind of office contamination. And with office politics. And with your boss, her boss, and the way you’ve basically given up everything that makes you feel alive and happy for this stupid job you hate where germs are everywhere…
Wouldn’t it be cathartic to explode, right there, in the middle of everything, righteously and with no repercussions?
Mayhem, the new film from director Joe Lynch, is just that emotional release.
Steven Yeun (The Walking Dead) plays Derek, mid-level white-collar prick in a law office. Just mid-level, though—there’s some conscience left in him. Still, he got where he is by finding the loophole that got a broad-daylight-surrounded-by-witnesses murderer off the hook.
The murderer had a virus—the Red Eye virus—which disrupts your ability to manage your emotions. You might weep uncontrollably, masturbate during a conference call, or stab your boss in the throat with a pen.
Here’s what’s important: we like Derek, his building is contaminated, his court case set the precedent allowing public murder and mayhem while under the 8-hour-ish influence of the virus.
Let’s just quarantine this building and see what happens.
The film is an exercise in workplace catharsis, and a pretty fun one. It’s far superior to other recent attempts at office-bound carnage The Belko Experiment and Bloodsucking Bastards, partly because Lynch has a crisp sense of pace and knack for comedy.
Matias Caruso’s script doesn’t hurt. Though it never mines deeply enough for the film to resonate beyond the “I hate my job and wouldn’t mind killing my boss” level, it’s clever fun from start to finish.
Yeun makes an excellent everyman and his enjoyable performance is matched by those of many of his evil colleagues. Dallas Roberts (also The Walking Dead) is exceptional as the head of HR, also known as The Reaper.
The film is little more than an id explosion in service of workplace fantasy. It keeps a light heart despite the carnage, doesn’t dig deep and doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. But it’s fun. Especially if you’ve ever wanted to kill your boss.
by Hope Madden
Kenneth Branagh likes a big room.
The thespian and Shakespearean master often feels ill-suited to film, as if he cannot help but play to the back row. Whether Branagh is in front of or behind the camera, subtlety and subtext don’t appear to come easily.
How about Agatha Christie? Branagh gambles that a 20th-century crime novelist whose prose created the architecture for a genre of books, movies, stage and television will still thrill modern audience.
A stacked ensemble for Murder on the Orient Express makes the same wager.
Branagh plays Christie’s brusque genius, Belgian Inspector Hercule Poirot.
Branagh the director is so preoccupied with Branagh the actor that his talent-laden cast is offered little more to do than to quickly hash out one-dimension. The waste of talent is the real crime afoot.
Those underused? A wide array of A-listers, from immediate hot properties Daisy Ridley (The Last Jedi) and Marwan Kenzari (Aladdin) to cinematic icons (Judi Dench, Willem Dafoe, Derek Jacobi) to true movie stars (Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp)—and that’s not even half the cast.
Josh Gad appears in his second period-piece of the season (after last month’s Marshall), here playing a shady, drunken lawyer-turned-secretary who just might have killed a man.
Leslie Odom Jr. (Broadway’s Hamilton) plays a problem-solving doctor and former sharpshooter who just might have killed a man.
Penelope Cruz is a missionary nurse who won’t touch a drink, but she just might have…
You get the point. It’s an Agatha Christie story. At its best, campy, stagey fun. At its worst, stale.
The movie is a bit of both.
In keeping with Branagh’s love of spectacle, Murder on the Orient Express is a gorgeous, larger-than-life adventure. He shot on 65mm, and whether 20th Century Fox decides to release a 70mm print or not, the result is a glorious display, particularly in Act 1.
By the second act, we’re trapped in the train with a murderer. At that point, Branagh’s film starts to smell musty, and no quirky fun performances (Pfeiffer is particularly memorable) or delicately framed dining car treats can freshen things up.
When not doting on his star, Branagh’s camera showcases dazzling locations before luxuriating in the sumptuous appointments of the elegant train cars. It’s big. Very big. Grandiose, you might even say.
Which makes no sense at all for Christie’s close-quarters sleuthing of clues, faces, motives and sleight of hand.
by Hope Madden
Full of the raucous rhythm of an unsupervised childhood, The Florida Project finds power in details and tells an unadorned but potent story.
Co-writer/director Sean Baker follows up his ambitious 2015 film Tangerine with another tale set gleefully along the fringes of society. Where Tangerine used weaves, stilettos and spangles to color the Christmas antics of Hollywood hustlers, here Baker fills the screen with bold colors and enormous, cartoonish images to create a grotesquely oversized playground.
The film begins with as perfect a movie opening as you will ever see.
Six-year-old Moonee (an astonishing Brooklynn Prince) wastes her summer days wandering the Orlando strip surrounding her home, a vivid purple bargain motel catering less to Disney World tourists than to tenants who can’t afford the security deposit world of traditional housing.
When she’s not out finding adventures with her besties Jancey (Valeria Cotto) and Scooty (Christopher Rivera), Moonee’s probably hustling wholesale perfumes to tourists with her mom Halley (Bria Vinaite).
The one true grown up in the mix, motel manager Bobby, is played with charm and tenderness by Willem Dafoe.
Baker’s many talents include an ear for authentic dialog, a knack for letting a story breathe and an eye for visual details that enrich a tale. But maybe what’s most striking is his ability to tell fresh but universal stories. We all remember elements of unbridled recklessness in our childhood, although very few of us grew up the way Moonee does.
Baker creates a bridge into Moonee’s life, revels in her freedom and bravado, but keeps us always aware of the dangerous edges when you’re blurring childhood and adulthood.
It’s the concept of childhood and adulthood that preoccupies Baker and his story, set in this absurd, low-rent amusement park of a world. As Mooney’s mother, Vinaite offers a fierce mixture of childishness all her own as well as street-savviness. Halley keeps the ugliness of the world away with her own whimsy, and Vinaite’s onscreen chemistry with Prince is authentic and full of tenderness.
As much as Tinsel Town was the perfect backdrop for the struggling glamour of Tangerine, the shadow of Disney World is almost too perfect a setting for the grinding poverty and perverted innocence of The Florida Project.
Not a half-bad haul in home entertainment this week. One pretty excellent social satire plus a decent ‘toon, not bad horror flick, nice little indie. And also the wildly disappointing The Glass Castle. But otherwise, not bad!
by Hope Madden
What if God exists and he’s an awkward adolescent boy?
That’s not exactly the point of Yorgos Lanthimos’s latest, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but it’s maybe as close a description as I can muster.
Lanthimos’s work (The Lobster, Dogtooth) does tend to balk at simple summarization, none more so than Sacred Deer. The film offers a look inside the life of a successful surgeon (Colin Farrell), whose opthamologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman) and their two children (Raffey Cassidy and Sunny Suljic) are, well, perfect.
It’s the kind of perfect you might find in a Stanley Kubrick film—cold, clean, sterile. In fact, from the framing to the violently intrusive score to the thematic suspicion of intimacy, Sacred Deer leans heavily Kubrick.
But Lanthimos brings with him a particular type of absurdity all his own. He hints at it with the memorable opening shot and deepens it with the now-characteristic stilted, oddly detached dialog.
But the filmmaker’s unique tone finds its perfect vehicle in Barry Keoghan (also wonderful this year in Dunkirk). Unsettlingly serene as Martin, the teenage son of a patient killed on the surgeon’s table, he controls the film and its events.
With Martin, Lanthimos is able to mine ideas of God, of the God complex, of the potentially ludicrous notion of cosmic justice.
All the while he sends up social norms, dissecting the concept of the nuclear family and wondering at the lengths we will go to avoid accountability.
Sacred Deer, though certainly absurd, lacks the comedic flourish of 2015’s The Lobster. This film’s comedy is ink black and subversive in a way that’s equally likely to break your heart as draw a chuckle. This is particularly true as Anna and her children begin bargaining for their lives in scenes that are astonishing in their insight.
Nicole Kidman is chilly perfection in a surprisingly unlikeable role. The uneasy chemistry she shares with Farrell helps the film balance its weirdness with moments of authenticity. She and Farrell shared the screen earlier this year in the also engrossing The Beguiled, a fact you may almost forget as they trade in the steamy tension of the first relationship for the frosty, antiseptic nature of this one.
As was true with The Lobster, Farrell comfortably shoulders lead responsibilities in Lanthimos’s weird world. His scenes with Keoghan, at first treated as if some kind of illicit affair, give the film its unsettling power.
Their karmic battle strangely told will be hard to forget.
Ugh! No movies worth watching come out this week for home viewing. Yes, Halle Berry and Idris Elba are lovely, so if you want to just stream these with the volume off, we understand. But you do not want to watch them.
Click the film title for the full review.
by Christie Robb
Imagine the most fun you’ve ever had in your life. Then prepare to watch a dude who is having 100 times more fun Every. Single. Day. That’s Laird Hamilton, pro surfer and quite possibly the luckiest guy alive.
The documentary Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton details the life of the 53-year-old adrenaline addict who, though disdainful of participating in any one-on-one competition with mere mortals, affords an ocean-front, surfing day everyday lifestyle by falling into modeling gigs with Vogue, landing roles in some bodacious surf movies, and nabbing sponsorships from choice beachwear companies.
Nice work if you can get it. (Especially if you refuse to lower yourself to auditions.)
As the movie starts, you are introduced to an aging Poseidon who trains aggressively to combat the injuries sustained in a lifetime of wipe-outs: arthritis in the hip, a fused arch in one foot, numerous shoulder injuries, and an ankle that has been crushed seven separate times. His goal is to ride a foilboard on the biggest waves of his life.
The foilboard is something Hamilton pioneered—a surfboard that hovers several feet above the water, suspended via a strut using hydrofoil technology developed by America’s Cup engineers.
But this isn’t the only novelty that Hamilton’s been into over the years. Over the course of the documentary you get to watch the glint in his eye as Laird recounts how he big-dogged his way through the line-up at some of Hawaii’s top big wave surf spots, figured out how to use industrial strength Velcro to strap himself to his surfboard (allowing for X Game-style tricks), adopted the sport of windsurfing in its infancy, and co-invented tow-in surfing. (You know, when a jet ski tows you improbably far out so you can surf a 40 to 50 foot wave that’s located directly in front of a cliff face.)
You also see the envious and sometimes irritated faces of Laird’s friends and family as they recount his sometimes douchey exploits and marvel at the fact that his body is still basically intact while some of his contemporaries sport gnarly scars and spin yarns about the times they were playing with him and almost died.
Via a mix of vintage footage, interviews, and camerawork worthy of the cover of National Geographic, Take Every Wave provides an epic escape into the radical world of an almost uncomfortably handsome and fortunate top athlete.
by Hope Madden
American Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall moves behind the camera for his thematically similar big screen adaptation, Thank You for Your Service.
Where the Clint Eastwood-helmed Sniper dealt in large part with its hero’s bumpy re-acclimation to civilian life, Thank You deals almost exclusively with veterans’ troubles on the homefront.
Miles Teller is Adam Schumann, returning permanently to his wife and two small children after his third tour in Iraq. He’s joined by buddies and platoon-mates Solo (Beulah Koale) and Will (Joe Cole).
Too earnest for its own good, Thank You for Your Service shadows these three servicemen as the responsibility for and repercussions from their actions overseas haunt their post-war lives.
This is a film about PTSD, but more than that, it’s about a country both ill-equipped to serve those who served, and often disinterested in trying.
Hall’s storytelling can’t rise above cliché, but he manages to tell his painfully heartfelt tale without cloying manipulation or judgment. Though Thank You buzzes with impotent rage—that of the filmmaker as well as that of the protagonists—it never feels preachy or even pessimistic. Hall articulates these veterans’ helplessness and frustration in a way that is genuinely rare in our current glut of flag-waving dramas, big screen and small.
Teller, always strong when playing a likable goof who’s just hanging on, is in his comfort zone as the soldier with the best chance to make it. He and Haley Bennett, playing Schumann’s wife Saskia, share believable, well-worn chemistry and there are moments between them when Hall’s gift for naturalistic writing shines.
At other times, the dialog forces too much explanation at the audience, as if Hall doesn’t trust us to understand the extent of the problems plaguing our veterans. A newcomer to directing, Hall’s unsteady craftsmanship can’t overcome that weakness in the same way that Eastwood was able to.
This is a tough film to criticize, though. Hall and crew do get an awful lot right, and the film surprises with periodic bits of gallows humor, selfishness and other glimpses at human frailty that make the film feel far more authentic than Sniper or most any other veteran-themed film.
The flaws can’t go unseen, though, and Hall either needed a better writer or a director who could take some of the obviousness of this screenplay and find a fresher way to approach it.
