There are so many movies being made available for our pajama-wearing asses this week, it’s as if the fates are begging us to be lazy. So let’s do it! We’ll help you decide what to view.
Click the title below for the full review.
Busy week! Loads covered on this week’s podcast: 12 Strong, Den of Thieves, Phantom Thread, Call Me By Your Name, Mom and Dad, The Road Movie, The Final Year and Mary and the Witch’s Flower, plus a quick look at what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen in HERE.
by Hope Madden
Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) sews little treasures into the gowns he makes for the most upper of crusts in 1950s London: little notes, wishes, secrets. It is a connection between the creator and the creation, existing regardless of the audience.
In many ways, Woodcock could be a stand-in for writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson, a filmmaker whose work is genius (few would argue) even if there are things about each creation we may not entirely grasp.
Phantom Thread may be his most exquisite and least accessible film. Every frame, every elegant sweep of the camera, every jaunty note from Johnny Greenwood’s score says classic glamour. And at the center of this controlled, rhythmic beauty is Daniel Day-Lewis.
Hard to go wrong there.
Day-Lewis entirely inhabits this character, as you, of course, expect. His Woodcock oscillates between childlike charm and parental dismissiveness, and it’s a beguiling creation: narcissistic but tender, spoiled and selfish but dignified, the epicenter of his universe and yet frighteningly dependent.
The conflict here is subtle. While your eyes will not leave Woodcock and his glorious gowns, the remarkable Lesley Manville refuses to escape your notice. Manville plays Woodcock’s sister Cyril, the business brains to balance Reynolds’s creative genius, yin to his yang, Alpha to his Omega.
Manville is chilly perfection, her every gesture and expression a conundrum of thoughts and emotions. She keeps this man, this art, this world working. There is one scene in particular—Reynolds loses his temper when his breakfast solitude is broken and Cyril reminds him with clarity and authority exactly who is in charge here.
Which brings us, slowly and quietly, to the film’s actual conflict. Woodcock tires of the muse/model/girlfriend living with him, leaves Cyril to remove the problem and heads into the country for a rest. There he meets his next muse, the lovely German waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps).
What follows is an interesting, deeply human, beautifully acted and quite surprising battle for Alpha. And of course, it’s a great deal more than that. Namely, it is a meditation on creation and recreation, on the tricky nature of inspiration, on an artist’s obsession, on the surprising intimacy between creator and creation.
by Hope Madden
It’s a languid Italian summer circa 1983 and everything is just so ripe.
Call Me by Your Name, the coming-of-age drama from Luca Guadagnino (I Am Love, A Bigger Splash), swoons. Precocious seventeen-year-old Elio (an utterly astonishing Timothée Chalamet) is surrounded with luscious fruit from the trees, lovely girls from the village, books and music to fill the hours spent with his parents (Amira Casar, Michael Stuhlbarg) in the rural villa where they research Greco-Roman culture.
Then their seasonal research assistant Oliver (Armie Hammer) arrives.
Awash in sensuality, Guadagnino’s love story is unafraid to explore, circling Oliver and Elio as they irritate each other, then test each other, and finally submit to and fully embrace their feelings for one another. Theirs is a remarkable dance, intimately told and flawlessly performed.
Enough cannot be said for Chalamet’s work. He is astonishingly in control of this character, and were that not the case, the age difference between the two characters (Oliver is meant to be 24, though Hammer is 31 which makes the gap seem more disturbing) would have left things feeling too predatory.
Hammer has never been better. Though the young Chalamet’s performance is Oscar-caliber, Hammer matches him step for step, creating a character both vulnerable and authoritative.
A standout in a solid ensemble, Stuhlbarg, looking almost alarmingly like Robin Williams, brings a quiet tenderness to the proceedings, a tone he elevates in a late-film monologue that could not have been delivered with more compassion or love. It’s breathtaking, perfectly punctuating the themes of acceptance and self-acceptance that permeate the film.
But even before Hammer or Chalamet can seduce you, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom does, lensing a feast for the senses. Together he and Guadagnino immerse you in this heady love story, developing a dreamy cadence and alluring palette that invites you to taste.
by Hope Madden
I brought you into this world, I can take you out of it.
It’s a joke, of course, an idle threat. Right?
Maybe so, but deep down, it does speak to the unspeakable tumult of emotions and desires that come with parenting. Wisely, a humorous tumult is exactly the approach writer/director Brian Taylor brings to his horror comedy Mom and Dad.
Horror films have been coming up with excuses to exorcise our forbidden desire to kill our own children for decades, mostly with little-seen cult films like It’s Alive or The Children or Cooties. In those films, the children themselves become monsters and the adults have no choice, you see.
Taylor (co-director of the Crank series) has a different take. In what is basically a long and very bloody metaphor for a mid-life crisis, parents the world over simply give in to an unspecified but urgent need to kill their own offspring.
It’s an epidemic picture, a zombie film without the zombies. Which doesn’t sound that funny, I’ll grant you, but Taylor and a game cast indulge in many of the same family tensions that fuel most sitcoms. They just take it one or two or three demented steps further.
So why do you want to see it? Because of the unhinged Nicolas Cage. Not just any Nic Cage—the kind who can convincingly sing the Hokey Pokey while demolishing furniture with a sledge hammer.
This is one of those Nic Cage roles: Face/Off meets Wild at Heart meets Vampire’s Kiss. He’s weird, he’s explosive and he is clearly enjoying himself.
Selma Blair lands the unenviable role of sharing the screen with Cage, but she doesn’t try to match him as much as keep him focused: they do have a job to accomplish, you know. The result is a fascinating picture of marital teamwork, actually. Good for them.
Taylor’s frantic pace and hiccupping camera mirror Cage’s lunatic energy, and clever writing toys with our expectations while delivering a surprisingly transgressive film.
Others have done it better. (I’m looking at you, Babadook.) But this may be the most amusing way to spend 90 minutes watching people try to murder their own children.
A couple of middling horror movies are available this week in home entertainment. Well, one is middling—nothing amazing, but better than expected. The other is a colossal waste of talent in a jumbled mess of a nonsensical plot. Oof!
Click the film title for the full review.
by Hope Madden
This movie is nuts.
Russian documentarian Dmitrii Kalashnikov has gathered dashcam footage and assembled it into something fresh, wild and intriguing.
Dashcams are apparently ubiquitous across Russia and Kalashnikov pulls together a smattering of amazing clips to create an image that’s both universal and deeply Russian. If you worry that you’ll basically be viewing a barrage of YouTube clips, don’t.
This is a thoughtfully made, smartly paced movie—evidence of a filmmaker with style and authority. Kalashnikov creates a fascinating rhythm, expertly flanking longer pieces with thematic montages.
In the lengthier bits we’re privy to the conversation in the car, or maybe the sound of the radio. Both serve to heighten the bat-shit effect of what’s happening onscreen. And while the unbelievably appropriate talk-radio conversation being subtitles onscreen while road rage ensues in front of the windshield is inspired, it’s the often deadpan reactions of drivers that elevate the viewing.
Montages offer bursts of linked images, usually set to a jaunty Russian polka or some other weirdly whimsical piece. Sets of clips focused on natural disasters or animals or pedestrians punctuate the longer drives, allowing Kalashnikov to quicken the pace periodically and maintain an energetic cadence.
The film also has heart. This is not Faces of Death. There is carnage for sure, but don’t expect a grim bloodbath. Kalashnikov is more interested in the amazing, the weird, the insane—comets crashing, bears running in traffic, a guy with an ax.
For all its lunacy, The Road Movie is not a novelty or a trifle. It’s a rock-solid documentary, well-paced and informative. And it is nuts.
by Matt Weiner
There’s something about the helpless awkwardness of growing up that guarantees the enduring appeal of magic. Mary and the Witch’s Flower taps into that spirit with appealing grace. And it’s a promising first feature from Studio Ponoc, home to a Studio Ghibli diaspora that formed after the venerable Japanese animation studio announced a production break back in 2014.
When a walk in the woods leads to a chance encounter with special flowers, Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill in the English language version) gains temporary magical powers. Her broomstick whisks her away to the magical college Endor, which looks about like if Hogwarts put down stakes in Spirited Away.
Mistaken for a witch and propped up by the magical flowers (apparently the PEDs of the wizarding world), Mary is deemed a prodigy by the excited school faculty. She soon learns she’s not the only one interested in those flowers, and outsider or not it will be up to her to save magic for everyone.
Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Ghibli veteran and Oscar nominee for When Marnie Was There, keeps the visual charm turned up throughout the film—a good thing, given that his script (co-written by Riko Sakaguchi and based on a children’s novel by Mary Stewart) lacks the heft of a typical Ghibli film.
For adult viewers, Yonebayashi’s light touch can be a bit too light. Mary, with her wild hair and strong will, is a charming stand-in for kids, but her hero’s journey will be instantly familiar. Endor professors Madam Mumblechook and Doctor Dee (Kate Winslet and Jim Broadbent) exude sinister charm, but the rest of the sparse supporting roles don’t have much to add beyond perfunctory plot points.
These are minor complaints though. And the animation, especially the magical set pieces that test Mary’s mettle, makes up the difference. The film offers up a fully-formed magical world with smart visual economy over exposition (cough Fantastic Beasts cough). Mary’s determination is contagious, and even if her saving the day is inevitable it’s impossible not to feel moved by the choices she makes to get there.
For all the magic that infuses Endor, Doctor Dee was on the right track when he told Mary that electricity is just another form of magic. If Mary and the Witch’s Flower doesn’t always have the preternatural spirit that animates the best of Studio Ghibli, it’s a delightful visual successor even when it’s working a little harder to keep the spark alive.
by Hope Madden
Like Man Bites Dog meets The Last Horror Movie, Strawberry Flavored Plastic attempts to document the behavior of a serial killer.
Not to be mistaken for found footage, the film itself is the result of several months’ worth of documentary footage shot principally by Errol (Nicholas Urda) and Ellis (Andres Montejo), two filmmakers eager to finally make a movie.
They believe they’re following a recently-released felon back into society, but in fact, Noel (Aidan Bristow) is a serial killer.
Do they keep filming?
Strawberry Flavored Plastic revolves around a clever conceit, one that’s easy to overlook if you don’t pay attention. But first time feature filmmaker Colin Bemis shows faith in an audience that’s paying attention.
Though the dialog often feels like wildly overwritten musings on the art of filmmaking and the nature of psychosis, the film cleverly creates a reason for the stilt and Bristow handles the script and the focus of the film well.
The actor creates a frightening, volcanic and surprisingly sympathetic central figure for the film. His is a clever, twisty performance nimbly balancing the conflicting purposes his character embodies.
Urda has a tougher time with the the dialog. As he waxes philosophical on the mercenary nature of the documentarian and the limits of complicity, his delivery too often sounds more like film school pretentions.
Aside from a handful of security camera images that beg POV questions, Bemis’s visual style is a great strength of the film. Rarely betraying the film’s shoestring budget, a nice variation of styles helps to fuel the picture’s momentum. More than that, the use of psycho-held camera manages, with smooth, clean precision, to better articulate the main character.
Made for barely 13K, Strawberry Flavored Plastic not only commands your attention, it announces an intriguing new filmmaker worth watching.
Strawberry Flavored Plastic is available on Amazon January 23.
Heavy hitters this week: Oscar contenders and people who just hit hard. We talk through The Post, The Commuter, Jane and what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the podcast HERE.
