Tag Archives: Hope Madden

Outtakes

Blue Christmas

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Goodbye June

by Hope Madden

Oscar winner and perennial contender Kate Winslet makes her directorial debut with the Christmastime family drama, Goodbye June. What drew the esteemed thespian behind the camera? A script by her son, Joe Anders.

The film tells the tale of June (Helen Mirren), whose cancer has returned just two weeks before Christmas. Her doting, anxiety riddled son, Connor (Johnny Flynn), and her husband (Timothy Spall) get her to the hospital and wait for the rest of the family to come in and, well, take over.

These are the sisters: Julia (Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough), and Helen (Toni Collette).

Pause to marvel at this cast.

It would be hard to go wrong with any one of those humans, and indeed, Winslet’s ensemble—Riseborough and Spall, in particular—craft lived-in characters, each one’s behavior naturally amplified because of the situation. June is dying.

Winslet captures the chaos, simultaneously merry and discordant, in a big family brimming with little kids all cramped in a hospital room or running wild through its halls. The child actors are quite good, not to mention awfully cute.

Anders’s script doesn’t overexplain, mercifully. The details aren’t terribly necessary if you’ve ever been in or near a family. Molly kind of hates Julia. This hurts Julia, who is also mortified by Molly’s controlling, even bullying behavior with hospital staff. Everyone thinks Helen’s a flake. Likewise, everyone is fed up with Dad and filled with a mixture of tenderness and disappointment in Connor.

Credit Anders, as well, for avoiding the cliché of the sainted, dying mother in the hospital bed. A charmingly mischievous Mirren is unapologetic but loving, still getting in digs here and there that have no doubt worn down her children over the decades. Helen shouldn’t wear yellow. Julia needs to look after everyone, but not in that overbearing way she sometimes has.

The fine-tuned performances are nearly undone by the superficial plot, unfortunately.  Goodbye June is saddled with obviousness bordering on the maudlin that Winslet and her inarguably talented cast can’t quite transcend. Winslet’s crafted a holiday tearjerker with a fine but conspicuous message.

New In Theaters

Naughty

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Silent Night, Deadly Night

by Hope Madden

Not every bad, low-budget, unreasonably beloved Eighties horror movie needs to be rebooted. Do I rewatch Charles Sellier’s 1984 holiday slash fest Silent Night, Deadly Night every holiday season? Maybe.

I don’t rewatch its 1987 sequel every single year. I’m not a masochist. Nor have I watched SNDN 3, 4, or 5 (starring Mickey Rooney!) more than once apiece. Anyway, I’m obviously if begrudgingly the audience for Mike P. Nelson’s new update on the old Santa suit, Silent Night, Deadly Night.

And maybe it benefits from low expectations, but I liked it.

Nelson, who writes and directs, revisits the important beats of the ’84 original but he’s smart about it. Billy (Halloween Ends and The Monkey’s Rohan Campbell) listens to the voice in his head. That voice belongs to the Santa who murdered Billy’s parents when he was 8.

That’s an added layer to the triggered homicidal lunatic that populates every previous installment. It’s a welcome change that the filmmaker, Campbell, and Mark Acheson—as the voice of Shotgun Santa—maneuver for creepy fun.

Nelson does have a good time with the franchise, tossing Easter eggs around like a holiday crossover. But these moments feel more like communal celebration than pandering, a wink from one fan to another.

The casting is on point, even eerie, as Nelson’s tale feels like a Yuletide merging of SNDN and Halloween Ends, once gift store owner Pamela (Ruby Modine) gets involved—again, an inside joke that works better than it has a right to.

The carnage is often quite fun—one party scene, in particular. But even with the humor, Nelson never stoops to camp or spoof. He’s a little hemmed in by the limitations of the franchise itself, breaking no remarkably new ground. But Silent Night, Deadly Night is often clever fun. There are creepy moments, funny moments, bloody moments, but his film hangs together as a solid holiday horror.

Fright Club

Fright Club Bonus: Kurtis David Harder

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Our Christmas gift to you, an extra Fright Club episode! We talk with filmmaker Kurtis David Harder, whose newest feature, Influencers, hits Shudder this weekend. He chats with us about the new film, his Nightmares Film Festival award winning Influencer, making movies, inspirations, and Christmas films. Check it out!

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Hamnet, Oh What Fun & More

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Hope & George review this week’s new releases: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Hamnet, Merrily We Roll Along, Oh What Fun, Man Finds Tape, Pig Hill, Reflections in a Dead Diamond, The Wailing, The Lonely Legend and My Mother the Madam!

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Know Who Your Friends Are

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Five Nights at Freddy’s 2

by Hope Madden

In 2023, Five Nights at Freddy’s—a predictable PG-13 horror built on a video game—delivered a bit of gimmicky fun for fans of the game and little to nothing for the rest of us. So, hooray! There’s a sequel.

Director Emma Tammi returns, with video game creator Scott Cawthon handling the sole screenplay credit this go-round. His script sees Mike (Josh Hutcherson) still avoiding therapy for himself or his disturbingly naïve 11-year-old sister Abby (Piper Rubio). And Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail) is so bad off she’s taking psychological advice from Mike.

Naturally, all of them are suffering the trauma of the bloodthirsty animatronics that came to life on night security Mike’s watch last time around, possessed by Vanessa’s evil dad’s. But Mike’s painting a house and Abby’s into robotics, so I’m sure they’re fine!

Wait, they’re not. And through a fairly convoluted storyline that sees one of Seinfeld’s neighbors get The Story of Ricky treatment, the trio not only brings the Country Bear Murder Spree back to life, they set them free to roam the town.

Scenes are slapped together with a gleeful disregard to continuity, and again, the macabre sense of humor that might have kept the film afloat is entirely missing.

Freddy Carter is a fun addition as the villainous Michael. (Who, honestly, names one character Mike and another one Michael?) And there is a Skeet Ulrich sighting. Plus, a new animatronic—kind of a goth Miyazaki styles marionette—is cool. And though I’d predicted McKenna Grace to be a kind of cold open kill, instead she gets a bit of a creepy, if small, character arc.

I realize the film is aimed at a young audience, but Tammi and team could at least pretend to respect them as viewers.

Hutcherson can act, and I’m confident someday he’ll get another film that lets him do that. Until then, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 ends with a clear path to a third installment. Hooray.

Outtakes

Worms, Lies and Videotape

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Man Finds Tape

by Hope Madden

Co-writers/directors Paul Grandersman and Peter S. Hall experiment with concept of found footage in an often unique and puzzling feature, Man Finds Tape.

While there are times that the film feels less than original—an influencer suggests he’s stumbled onto something supernatural only to be believed a fraud—the mystery itself is something I haven’t seen before.

Lynn (Kelsey Pribilski) and her brother Lucas (William Magnuson) are not close. She left their small Texas town shortly after their parents died, while Lucas knocked around the old house, falling slowly into depression, until he came across a MiniDV with his name on it. He shares the find online, creating a big conspiracy that screws up Lynn’s documentary career.

So, when he calls her up asking her to watch another video, she’s understandably, even angrily reluctant. But she’s worried about him, so she watches. And while the footage itself is genuinely intriguing, Lynn’s more unnerved by the affect the footage has when her brother watches it. Turns out, every person living in Larkin, Texas has the same reaction. Only Lynn is unaffected.

So, Lynn sets out to document what’s happening, which is how all the various formats of found footage are stitched together. This gives the film a Shelby Oaks or Strange Harvest vibe that leeches some originality from the concept.

But for a good while, it is an interesting concept. Both Pribilski and Magnuson convince as bickering siblings, and most of the ensemble—primarily playing townies happy to be interviewed for Lynn’s documentary—are a lot of fun. Meanwhile, Brian Villalobos approaches his role as “The Stranger” with a fascinating air of smug disgust.

Man Finds Tape delivers an often-engrossing metaphor about parasitic predation dressed as religion, and its particularly harmful effect on small, Southern towns. But Hall and Gandersman write themselves into a corner and the final solution to the mystery is unsatisfying. It’s too bad, because for a good while, they really had something.

New In Theaters

Passing Through Nature to Eternity

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Hamnet

by Hope Madden

It’s been five years since Chloé Zhao took home two Oscars, one for directing and one for adapting the screenplay for Nomadland. She returns to form in both respects with Hamnet, the cinematic adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel that imagines the way grief may have shaped Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

Zhao’s film opens stunningly on Jessie Buckley, nestled womblike among the roots of a massive tree, her face and hands dirty, her hair tangled with leaves. Buckley is Agnes, believed by those in town to be the daughter of a forest witch. Agnes comes from what is.

Will (Paul Mescal) imagines what can be. The hyper real poetry of Zhao’s camera perfectly articulates their yin/yang balance.

It’s with Will that we first see Agnes’s nurturing side applied to humanity rather than the wild. It’s a trait that will become the backbone of their story. Her love is powerful, messy, and unforgiving, and Buckley’s more than up to the task. Her performance, as is so often the case, feels dangerous and uncensored. And gazing adoringly at her, inspired and nurtured, is Will. If there is a better face in cinema than Mescal’s for earnest yet doomed longing, I don’t know whose it could be.

The young cast more than keeps pace. Jacobi Jupe is particularly amazing and utterly heartbreaking as Will and Agnes’s boy, Hamnet. (His older brother Noah Jupe also impresses later in the film as the actor portraying the great Dane in the first ever stage production.)

By the time the most famous lines in theatre are uttered, it takes restraint and rawness. The slightest hint of artifice and the previous ninety minutes are ruined, the film a gimmick. But Zhao never skirts artifice, not even when she makes a Marvel movie, and Mescal delivers lines we know by heart as if they were freshly pulled from an open wound.

Zhao has crafted, aided by magnificent performances and hauntingly stunning cinematography from Lukasz Zal (The Zone of Interest, Cold War), a film that is shattering in its articulation that it is the depth of love that deepens and amplifies the pain of grief.

People make movies about grief all the time. We can expect one every Oscar season. But what Chloé Zhao does with Hamnet is ask us to experience that grief, not just witness it, and in experiencing it we understand the power and vital importance of art.

New In Theaters

Happy Holidays, Ya Filthy Animals

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Zootopia 2

by Hope Madden

It’s been a decade since Disney rewrote their longstanding history of rocking no boats when the delightfully fearless Zootopia asked its audience to confront our own biases and recognize the way we are programmed to fear the weak to benefit the powerful.

Animators Jared Bush and Byron Howard maybe looked around and noticed certain themes trending again. Zootopia 2, which both direct and Bush writes solo this time, benefits from the same fantastic casting, same visual splendor, same wit as their 2016 Oscar winner. But Bush’s writing burns a little more brightly with anger this time, however charmingly packaged.

Bunny cop Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and her fox partner, Nick Wilde (Jason Batemen), will not content themselves to sitting on the sidelines as rookies when there are real crimes to investigate. Judy believes the weird material she found at the scene of a smuggling crime is actually the shed skin of a snake—and reptiles are banned from Zootopia! They’re weird and dangerous! Just ask the powerful land baron heirs of generational wealth, the Lynxleys!

Do you know how to immediately convince children and adults alike that Gary the heat-sensitive pit viper is, indeed, no threat all? Besides naming him Gary? Cast Ke Huy Quan, whose performance, even when it’s only vocal, sings of harmlessness.

Is Gary being framed? Can conspiracy-seeking podcasting beaver Nibbles Maplestick (Fortune Feimster, hilarious) help in the investigation? Can Judy and Nick’s friendship survive another big case? Is any of this worth dying for?

Boy, that last one’s a big question for a kid’s movie, but Zootopia 2 is committed to asking big questions. It’s equally committed to hilarious sight gags (Hungry Hungry Hippo and Ratatoullie were battling for my favorite, but then they brought out the hedge maze). So it’s a good balance.

Bush’s plot is a little complicated for the youngest viewers, and the film takes a while to really find its groove. But it’s also shockingly relevant and sometimes powerfully emotional. Plus, Patrick Warburton as a vainglorious blond show horse movie star turned mayor is a hoot.

It’s great to see a family film that reminds kids (and adults) that bullies are often the people with the most money, and that the bully is always the problem. Zootopia 2 may not be the utter revelation of the original, but it is an excellent sequel and a tale worth telling.

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A Murder of Crows

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The Thing with Feathers

by Hope Madden

Novelist Max Porter puts readers into headspaces we might just as well not want to visit, but he creates a territory that’s slyly hopeful. In Shy, beautifully adapted as Steve for Netflix by Tim Mielants with Cillian Murphy, Porter explores form to help us think as a troubled boy.

Porter’s first novel, 2015’s Grief Is a Thing with Feathers, likewise experiments to mimic the overwhelming despair of grief as it visits a man (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his two young sons (Richard and Henry Boxall) in the form of a huge, unsympathetic crow (voice by David Thewlis with Eric Lampaert inside the suit).

That’s right, there is a suit. It’s designed with menacing beauty by Nicola Hicks, and the physical presence, along with the echoing caw and inky shadows in the art design, heighten the chaotic despair haunting writer/director Dylan Southern’s film.

Dad is unable to get past his wife’s sudden death. In fact, he doesn’t want to “come to terms” with anything, can’t even imagine what the terms in this situation could be. He wants her back, and in the face of that impossibility, he just wants to feel the absence as keenly and entirely as possible. Which is wildly irresponsible and selfish for a dad.

So, Crow—terrifying, comforting, confrontational, riotous—settles in with the family to make things worse. Or better. Depends who you ask.

The always reliable Cumberbatch digs deep for this one, offering an unadorned performance that aches with authenticity. A film so darkly fanciful needed this level of unvarnished vulnerability at its core, and what Cumberbatch delivers is fearless and beautiful.

Both boys are likewise beautiful, and Southerland’s dreamy direction waltzes easily in perspective from child to man to crow without losing the melancholy music the film develops.

The plot lacks structure, though, and Cumberbatch’s performance is not anchor enough. In place of beats and form, Southerland inserts poetic analogy, some of which border on cliché.

It’s a funny balance, not dark enough to be folk horror, not story-driven enough to be a satisfying drama. But The Thing with Feathers boasts a darkly beautiful imagination and enough transfixing performances to make it worth a look.