No matter how familiar you are with Alice Walker’s original novel, or Spielberg’s 1985 film, director Blitz Bazawule’s adaptation of The Color Purple Broadway musical comes to the big screen as a heartfelt and joyous experience.
Yes, it is the same, often heartbreaking story. Young sisters Celie (Phylicia Pearl Mpasi) and Nettie (Halle Bailey) are separated in early 1900s Georgia, and adult Celie (an Oscar-worthy Fantasia Barrino, reprising her Broadway role) endures decades of heartache and abuse before proudly reclaiming her dignity.
Memorable characters and story beats surround Celie in the first two acts. Celie’s abusive husband Mister (Colman Domingo) pines for the famous singer Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson), while son Harpo (Corey Hawkins) opens a juke joint and Harpo’s proud and defiant wife Sofia (Danielle Brooks, reprising her role from the 2015 Broadway revival) suffers repercussions from standing up to a white mayor and his condescending wife.
Through all the engaging drama and jubilant musical set pieces, Miss Celie bides her time, slowly inching closer to when both character and star step into the stoplight.
And when that third act hits, it is a glorious exhibition of pride, music and love. With Fantasia’s show-stopping rendition of “I’m Here,” Miss Celie begins to stand on her own as a successful business woman, and the film delivers her some well-earned flowers.
Have those tissues handy, but rest assured they will all be tears of joy. Because as much suffering as Miss Celie and her family endure, that pain is not what drives this vision. Bazawule, Barrino and a top flight ensemble make this The Color Purple an uplifting celebration of heritage and family, and an exhilarating film experience.
We last heard from director George Clooney two years ago, when a fine supporting turn from Ben Affleck was the only thing saving The Tender Bar. That film was so obvious and rote that any interest it inspired in the source novel was only to see what Clooney found so special about it.
He’s back behind the camera for The Boys in the Boat, and unfortunately, none of those boys is Ben Affleck. Because again, we get an inspiring true-life tale presented with none of the humanity, tension or freshness it needs to be inspirational.
It does look good, though.
Clooney leans on screenwriter Mark L. Smith (The Revenant, Clooney’s own The Midnight Sky) to adapt Daniel J Brown’s biography of The University of Washington’s 1936 rowing team. Leading up to that year’s Olympics in Berlin, the group of young rowers hoped to vanquish Hitler’s prized athletes in a contest we’re told is “more poetry than sport.”
Smith’s script tells us a lot of things, but Clooney never manages to make us feel much of anything.
Young Joe Rantz (Callum Turner, fairly lifeless) needs money for shoes, a roof and tuition, so he tries out for the rowing team when he learns team members get a job and a room. He endures coach Al Ulbrickson’s (Joel Edgerton) grueling boot camp to make the squad, and the victories start piling up, right alongside the cliches (hey, that old man tending the boats might have wisdom to share!)
Joe’s romance with the spunky Joyce (Hadley Robinson) comes just as easily, while Joe’s awkward reunion with his alcoholic father lands as a lazy attempt to rekindle memories of Hoosiers without the same investment in character development. Possible avenues for tension – such as a mysterious illness for one team member – are conjured up and then resolved with more regard for convenience than effect.
Remember, George Clooney is an Oscar-nominated director, and that 2005 nod for Good Night, and Good Luck was well-deserved. Since he’s stepped away from co-writing his projects (2012’s The Ides of March earned him a writing nom), though, the results have leaned more and more toward shallow formula.
Here, Clooney does prove adept with some gorgeous shot-making around the water, but even then you wish Martin Ruhe’s cinematography could linger just a beat or two longer each time.
The Boys in the Boat might already be a full two hours, but a few more seconds of beauty could help ease the sting of so much time spent showing us so little that’s truly interesting.
Frankenstein was a breathing, bleeding act of feminism, not because Mary Shelly’s masterpiece illuminated or elevated women’s discourse, but because Mary Shelly – an 18-year-old girl – created science fiction.
Naturally, her husband took credit.
Many, many writers and filmmakers have taken a stab at reimagining Shelly’s ideas. None is as astonishing as Yorgos Lanthimos and the triumph that is Poor Things.
Working from a script by Tony McNamara and Alasdair Gray, Lanthimos creates a luscious world that is difficult to pin down. It’s part Victorian England, part Blade Runner 2049, and it is where Bella Baxter evolves to challenge the patriarchal notions that surround her.
Bella (Emma Stone, sheer perfection) is brought back from the dead by Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a scientist with no romantic notions about polite society – or about Bella, for that matter. Dr. Baxter reanimates Bella’s adult body with the brain of a small child, and under his watch, Bella develops sans the outside pressures of conformity to societal expectations. Which is to say, she thrives.
Imagine a woman’s sense of self forming without shame, without the stifling existence of it. Lanthimos, McNamara and Gray have done just that, and the result is exhilarating.
Still, “God” (as Bella calls him) wishes to keep her safe, as does God’s beguiled assistant, Max (Remy Youssef). But Bella must experience life, and the adventure she fearlessly attacks is simultaneously hilarious, daring, lewd, ingenious and completely intoxicating.
The arc of Bella’s character is as satisfying as anything put to screen, and Stone revels in every unexpected, delightful, brash moment. And though it’s tough to pull your eyes away from Stone, along comes Mark Ruffalo to commit grand larceny with every scene of his hysterical cad Duncan Wedderburn, who indulges his ego teaching Bella about “furious jumping” (take a wild guess) but is reduced to mush when she moves past him without mercy or apology.
Expect Oscar nods for both, and they won’t be alone here.
Lanthimos’s direction is again nimble and ambitious, dipping back into his bag of angles and staging for a feast of ambitious panache. The result is a perfect visual complement to Bella’s journey of intellectual and philosophical wonder, one always buoyed by vivid cinematography from Robbie Ryan (The Favourite), and Holly Waddington’s wonderful costuming.
Poor Things may find longtime Yorgos fans spotting thematic terrain that’s similar to 2009’s Dogtooth, but these latest questions he’s pondering are even more pointed and brilliantly satirical.
What if someone could navigate the world anew, armed with the benefit of physical independence, but with a complete social naïveté that came merely from inexperience rather than isolation? And what if that someone was a woman in a man’s man’s man’s man’s world?
That someone is Bella Baxter, and Poor Things makes her gloriously alive, in ways you’ll probably wish you could be.
Whether they’re merrymakers (Grabbers), comic relief (Mrs. MacHenry, Black Christmas), tempted heroes (Dan Torrance, Doctor Sleep), or outright villains (Jane, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane), the drunk is a staple of horror. They can generate a laugh to help offset tension, or develop dread along with their temptation. They can add tragedy, comedy, lunacy and even terror. Here are our favorite horror movie alcoholics.
5. John Grant (Gary Bond), Wake in Fright (1971)
An unrelenting work of tension and sweat, Ted Kotcheff’s Outback thriller follows an aggrieved school teacher who stops over for a single night in the Yabba on his way from his consripted teaching post to Sydney for Christmas.
One bad decision later, and he (John Grant) and we are trapped, possibly forever, in drunken, mad, dangerous, almost sadistic debauchery. Donald Pleasence co stars as part of a merry band of utter lunatics whose sold purpose seems to be to trap this man in their depravity with them.
4. Sam (Larry Fessenden), Habit (1995)
Writer/director/star Larry Fessenden explores alcoholism via vampire symbolism in this NY indie. Fessenden plays Sam, a longtime drunk bohemian type in the city. He’s recently lost his father, his longtime girlfriend finally cut bait, and he runs into a woman who is undoubtedly out of his league at a party.
And then he wakes up naked and bleeding in a park.
The whole film works beautifully as an analogy for alcoholism without crumbling under the weight of metaphor. Fessenden crafts a wise, sad vampiric tale here and also shines as its lead.
3. John Marshall (Jim Cummings), The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)
Writer/director/star Jim Cummings is officer John Marshall of the Snow Hollow sheriff’s department. John’s father (Robert Forster, in his final role) is the longtime sheriff of the small ski resort town, but Dad’s reached the age and condition where John feels he’s really the one in charge.
John’s also a recovering alcoholic with a hot temper, a bitter ex-wife and a teen daughter who doesn’t like him much. But when a young ski bunny gets slaughtered near the hot tub under a full moon, suddenly John’s got a much bigger, much bloodier problem.
Cumming’s script, like his writing for Thunder Road, is full of life, and has hin again juggling random outbursts of absurd non-sequiturs and hilarious anger with real human issues of struggle and loss. John’s afraid of losing his father, women are being preyed upon, and a drink would sure hit the spot.
2. Wake (Willem Dafoe) & Winslow (Robert Pattinson), The Lighthouse (2019)
Robert Eggars has gone to sea. The Lighthouse strands you, along with two wickies, on the unforgiving island home of one lonely 1890s New England lighthouse.
Salty sea dog Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) keeps the light, mind ye. He also handles among the most impressive briny soliloquies delivered on screen in a lifetime. Joining him as second is one Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson)—aimless, prone to self-abuse, disinclined to appreciate a man’s cooking. Both enjoy a bit of drink.
This is thrilling cinema. Let it in, and it will consume you to the point of nearly missing the deft gothic storytelling at work. The film is other-worldly, surreal, meticulous and consistently creepy.
And we’ll tell you what The Lighthouse is not. It is not a film ye will soon forget.
1. Jack Torrence (Jack Nicholson), The Shining (1980)
It’s isolated, it’s haunted, you’re trapped, but somehow nothing feels derivative and you’re never able to predict what happens next. It’s Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece rendition of Stephen King’s The Shining.
Jack Nicholson outdoes himself. His early, veiled contempt blossoms into pure homicidal mania, and there’s something so wonderful about watching Nicholson slowly lose his mind. Between writer’s block, isolation, ghosts, alcohol withdrawal, midlife crisis, and “a momentary loss of muscular coordination,” the playfully sadistic creature lurking inside this husband and father emerges.
In the last couple decades, documentaries such as Standing in the Shadows of Motown and the Oscar-winning 20 Feet from Stardom have given just due to the unknown musicians and singers who have long backed up our idols.
Director Denny Tedesco may have been first with the idea, though his debut doc The Wrecking Crew! endured years of delays until its 2008 release. Tedesco is back with Immediate Family, and while he’s still looking behind the musical scenes, his second feature boasts some important distinctions.
To start, it’s much more contemporary. This one features a trove of interviews that are not only recent, but feature musicians that are still highly relevant, such as Stevie Nicks, Don Henley, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, Keith Richards, Lyle Lovett and more.
And secondly, for serious music fans (and even casual fans of a certain age), the names Leland Sklar, Russ Kunkel, Waddy Wachtel and Danny “Kooch” Kortchmar may already be plenty familiar. As the film points out, that’s largely thanks to producers Peter Asher and Lou Adler, who in the 1970s decided to start featuring the names and faces of these longtime sidemen in the liner notes of the many albums they played on.
But even if you recognize these players, it’s still a kick to hear the superstars go into detail about how valuable they are, and to watch their specific grooves morph into fully produced classics.
It all follows a formula very similar to the one that made The Wrecking Crew! so irresistible, but with greatly improved production values that increase the immediacy along with the timeline.
Immediate Family ends up feeling like the next logical step in Tedesco’s musical journey. We get more great tunes, witness more important stages in the evolution of popular music, and spend some quality time with four more unique talents that are well worth getting to know better.
You need an “easy on the eyes” vamp for your nourish thriller? Anne Hathaway’s on your short list, for sure.
Soft-spoken, sheltered waif with eyes that long for a new life? Get me Thomasin McKenzie!
The casting in Eileen may be no surprise, but there are big surprises in store. And the way the two leads slowly draw their characters toward a deadly intersection keeps William Oldroyd’s second feature engaging throughout.
McKenzie is the put-upon Eileen, who quietly spends her days fantasizing about sex and violence and stashing away all the money she makes doing secretarial work at a boys correction facility in early 1960s Massachusetts. Eileen is also the daughter of the town’s former police chief (Shea Whigham), currently a paranoid, drunk widower with a penchant for verbal abuse and gun waving.
Eileen’s world is rocked when the facility’s staff psychologist retires, and Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) shows up to replace her. Tall, Ivy League-schooled with a sarcastic wit and a smoldering sensuality, Rebecca stands out plenty in the little New England ‘burg.
They meet for a couple drinks at the local bar and hit the dance floor while Rebecca belittles the leering regulars. Eileen is transfixed.
So she jumps at the invitation to visit over the holiday break, where Rebecca (and screenwriter Luke Goebel, Causeway) have a big bomb to drop.
Adapted from Ottessa Mosfegh’s award-winning 2015 novel, the film is a slow boil that leans on mood and atmospherics to lull you, even as you feel the creep of dread.
Both Hathaway and McKenzie are perfection, consistently smoothing the bumps when Oldroyd (Lady Macbeth) seems a bit hesitant to fully embrace the story’s pulpy underbelly. He and Goebel also tweak the novel’s ending, leaving the resolution more open-ended and abstract.
Fans of the book may feel slighted, but Eileen lands on the big screen as its own slippery shape shifter, a simmering throwback with just enough thrills to satisfy.
It’s an old adage, maybe even a cliche. But Godzilla Minus One reminds us it can also be a damn good idea.
Writer/director Takashi Yamazaki returns to themes he explored ten years ago in The Fighter Pilot, tips some unmistakable hats to both Jaws and Dunkirk, and emerges with a completely satisfying Kaiju adventure.
And though Yamazaki makes sure Godzilla wreaks his havoc early and often, Minus One is a film driven by characters with all-too-human complexities.
As Japan is struggling to recover from WWII, pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is suffering from survivor’s guilt, and the taunts of townspeople who feel he is a coward for not “dying with honor.” He’s also suppressing memories of Godzilla, the whispered-about monster he witnessed wipe out an island military base near the end of the war.
Years pass, with Koichi scraping by in the small place he shares with Noriko (Minami Hamabe) and the orphan child she has taken in. In need of money, Koichi accepts a dangerous job clearing old mines from coastal waters. And once out on the boat, Koichi and his shipmates realize they’re going to need a bigger one.
Yamazaki – who’s also credited as the VFX supervisor – gives Godzilla a wonderfully classic look, with imposing and well-defined features like those spiky scales that turn blue when he’s about to spit that fire! Hell yeah!
But back to the roots.
By taking the setting back to post-war Japan, Yamazaki’s script not only revisits the original cautions of the atomic age, but adds some new layers of depth. The clever plan to defeat Godzilla may let Japan rewrite some history, but Yamazaki doesn’t let his homeland’s approach to war off that easy.
The morals are clearly marked, but this is a crowd pleasing and often thrilling adventure, with some well-chosen moments of humor woven into a pace that rarely bogs down, despite a bit of schmaltz and one or two unsurprising surprises that dot the landscape. Yamazaki deftly balances the destruction with the reflection, and Minus One raises up a welcome addition to Godzilla lore.
December is a busy month, so Brian (Joel Kinnaman) has some helpful reminders written on his wall calendar.
“Pick up Mom from the airport?”
“Buy a ham?”
No, no, Brian is thinking bigger this year, especially for his Christmas Eve party plans.
“Kill them all!”
And, if things go really well, “start a gang war?” Yes, he really writes that down.
A year ago, Brian’s son was killed by a stray bullet from a gangland shootout in suburban Texas. Brian himself was shot in the throat during the mayhem, and he’s spent all his silent days and nights since then ignoring his wife (Catalina Sandino Moreno, doing what she can with a thankless role) and planning some very bad tidings of revenge.
Silent Night is director John Woo’s first American film in 20 years, but his considerable skill with an action sequence is never enough to elevate the film beyond a misguided fantasy of bloodlust and wall-building.
And even then, the blood-spilling combat doesn’t begin until nearly halfway in, as we wade through 50 tedious minutes of dialog-free montages with Brian target shooting, reinforcing his ride and making anguished faces.
Despite the title, the Christmas setting feels tacked-on for marketing purposes, becoming the only theme in Robert Archer Lynn’s script that’s soft-pedaled. The “silent” gimmick becomes contrived pretty quickly, there are numerous gaps in logic and you wonder why everyone involved here was so comfortable with an angry, self-righteous white man executing countless Mexicans.
Sure, Brian tips off an African-American cop (Scott Mescudi) about his mission to do what the law won’t, but the film is never hazy about what heroes and villains look like.
Those hand-written calendar notes teased the possibility for some humorous lunacy that is completely ignored, as the only thing over-the-top here is the utter seriousness of tone. Could Nic Cage and a face-off machine have saved this holiday turkey? Tough call. Even Woo’s battle sequences seem uninspired and repetitive, and the most memorable piece of the action in Silent Night becomes how much louder its speaking.
