“My pain is unexceptional, and I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it.”
It’s a revelation articulated by David Kaplan (Jesse Eisenberg), and just one of countless memorable insights in the screenplay Eisenberg penned for his second feature behind the camera, A Real Pain.
David and cousin Benji (Kieran Culkin) are traveling together to Poland to honor their recently deceased Grandmother Dora, who’d survived the Holocaust by “a thousand little miracles” and left her grandsons funds to make the trip.
David’s been busy with work and family. Benji has not. The odd couple—one reserved and polite, the other charming and wild—join a tour group and embark on their adventure.
Culkin is excellent, delivering a masterful performance that oscillates between charming emotional manipulator and hard-core emotional basket case. The relationship between the cousins is lived-in and fraught. Benji plays Dave, plies him with intimate attention, prods him with tenderness then punishes him the next second. But thanks to Culkin’s raw performance, it’s hard to hold anything against Benji.
Eisenberg’s performance meshes with Culkin’s, reflecting the authentic yin to his yang. In Eisenberg’s hands, Dave’s manipulation is quiet but pointed, his sympathy condescending. The two actors—much thanks to an observant script and delicate direction—carve out the recognizable patterns of family.
Screenwriter Eisenberg complicates characters. The enjoyable verbal sparring between two bright, witty buddies keeps the film entertaining, but the tremendous depth of both performances unearths something surprisingly moving.
Eisenberg’s work as a filmmaker here is very sharp, never taking the cheap shot. Both characters are held to account, but there’s a generosity of spirit in the film that’s equally forgiving. The result is a poignant treasure.
As an actor, Eisenberg has never been better, truly, and one of his many strengths (as an actor and a filmmaker) is to just let Culkin steal this movie. Benji is recognizable and unforgettable in a film that wants badly to embrace the uncomfortable complications of family, if only it could.
I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Teen Wolf. The Craft. Even Carrie. Horror moviemakers have long equated coming-of-age with otherness, monstrosity. Sometimes it’s fun, sometimes it’s tragic, but whatever the result —the witches of The Craft or the mermaid of Blue My Mind, the zombie of Maggie or the werewolf (it’s so often a werewwolf!) of When Animals Dream, it’s a ripe metaphor. Here, recorded live at Gateway Film Center at the heart of The Ohio State University Campus, is our list of the five best teenage monsters in horror movies.
5. Jennifer’s Body (2009)
If Ginger Snaps owes a lot to Carrie (and it does), then Jennifer’s Body finds itself even more indebted to Ginger Snaps.
The central premise: Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them. Better still, lure them to an isolated area and eat them, leaving their carcasses for the crows. This is the surprisingly catchy idea behind this coal-black horror comedy.
In for another surprise? Megan Fox’s performance is spot-on as the high school hottie turned demon. Director Karyn Kusama’s film showcases the actress’s most famous assets, but also mines for comic timing and talent other directors apparently overlooked.
Amanda Seyfried’s performance as the best friend, replete with homely girl glasses and Jan Brady hairstyle, balances Fox’s smolder, and both performers animate Diablo Cody’s screenplay with authority. They take the Snaps conceit and expand it – adolescence sucks for all girls, not just the outcasts.
4. Fright Night (1985)
Fright Night takes that Eighties, Goonies-style adventure (kids on an adult-free quest of life and death) and uses the conceit to create something tense and scary, and a bit giddy as well. The feature debut as both writer and director for Tom Holland, the film has some sly fun with the vampire legend.
Roddy McDowall got much deserved love at the time for his turn as a washed-up actor from horror’s nostalgic past, and Chris Sarandon put his rich baritone to campy, sinister use.
Still, everyone’s favorite character was Evil Ed, the manic, pitiful loser turned bloodsucking minion. Credit Stephen Geoffreys for an electric and, at least in one scene, heartbreaking performance.
3. The Faculty (1998)
The film exaggerates (one hopes) the social order of a typical Ohio high school to propose that it wouldn’t be so terrible if all the teachers and most of the students died violently, or at least underwent such a horrific trauma that a revision of the social order became appealing.
Indeed, in this film, conformity equals a communicable disease. Adults aren’t to be trusted; high school is a sadistic machine grinding us into sausage; outcasts are the only true individuals and, therefore, the only people worth saving. Director Robert Rodriguez pulls the thing off with panache, all the while exploring the terrifying truth that we subject our children to a very real and reinforced helplessness every school day.
Interestingly, the infected teachers and students don’t turn into superficial, Stepford-style versions of themselves. For the most part, they indeed become better, stronger, more self-actualized (ironically enough) versions, which is interestingly creepy. It’s as if humanity – at least the version of it we find in a typical American high school – really isn’t worth saving.
2. Ginger Snaps (2000)
Sisters Ginger and Bridget, outcasts in the wasteland of Canadian suburbia, cling to each other, and reject/loathe high school (a feeling that high school in general returns).
On the evening of Ginger’s first period, she’s bitten by a werewolf. Writer Karen Walton cares not for subtlety: the curse, get it? It turns out, lycanthropy makes for a pretty vivid metaphor for puberty. This turn of events proves especially provocative and appropriate for a film that upends many mainstay female cliches.
Walton’s wickedly humorous script stays in your face with the metaphors, successfully building an entire film on clever turns of phrase, puns and analogies, stirring up the kind of hysteria that surrounds puberty, sex, reputations, body hair and one’s own helplessness to these very elements. It’s as insightful a high school horror film as you’ll find, peppered equally with dark humor and gore.
1. The Transfiguration (2016)
Milo likes vampire movies.
So, it would seem, does writer/director Michael O’Shea, whose confident feature debut shows us the relationship between the folklore and the life of a forlorn high school outcast.
Eric Ruffin plays Milo, a friendless teen who believes he is a vampire. What he is really is a lonely child who finds solace in the romantic idea of this cursed, lone predator. But he’s committed to his misguided belief.
O’Shea’s film borrows ideas from George Romero’s Martin, Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, and openly gushes over Murnau’s Nosferatu. Inside and out, the film draws on the best in vampire cinema to help Milo deal with a world in which he is a freak no matter what he decides to do.
Adam Elliot is an artist of singular vision. His stop-motion plasticine adventures discard whimsy in favor of almost Dickensian storylines told with eccentricity, dark humor, heartbreak and grit.
Memoir of a Snail trails Grace Pudel (voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook). Grace is a twin, an orphan, an introvert, and a lover of snails. And as she ages, each one of these labels takes up a deeper, more complicated, more pathological space in her life. The one reliable bright spot is her best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), the town oddball (and that’s saying something).
The film begins near its end, as Grace shares her life story with Sylvia, her favorite snail. It’s not a particularly happy tale—in fact, it’s marked by genuine tragedy and haunted with loneliness—but there are moments of joy, and Snook delivers every clever, bittersweet line perfectly.
The voice cast shines, top to bottom. Kodi Smit-McPhee, Nick Cave and Eric Bana deliver the perfect vocal personalities to do justice to the endearingly odd inhabitants of Elliot’s charmingly homely little world.
Elliot’s writing is as impressive as his stop-action artistry. Memoir of a Snail delivers poignant insights and clever gags, astonishing depth of character and well-observed idiosyncrasies.
There’s a real sweetness to the film, and the grimmest possible story turns are delivered with a unique blend of tenderness and bleak humor that’s tough to describe. It’s a tone Elliot’s mastered as evidenced by his Oscar winning 2004 short Harvie Krumpet and brilliant 2009 feature Mary and Max.
Elliot treasures time spent with characters ignored and disregarded in their own worlds. His narratives don’t condescend or judge, and the characters are so wonderfully warts-and-all compelling that you hate to see your time with them come to an end.
Adam Elliot’s world is a darker, drearier spot than the neighborhoods populated by Aardman’s characters. (Sidenote: There’s a new Wallace & Gromit movie this year! Woo hoo!!!) His films are not as silly, their homes not as brightly lit, their cheese selections more limited. But the world Elliot creates—this ranch home on a small street in Canberra, Australia, crammed to bursting with ceramic snails, randy novels, Guinea pigs, and longing—is the flip side of the same plasticine coin. It’s ingenious, moving, hilarious and required viewing.
In the spring of this year, the world lost a fearless, vivid and deeply American voice when Faith Ringgold died at 93.
The artist, author and activist who made sure New York understood that art was political shared her talent in 1971 to inspire the women incarcerated on Rikers Island. Her painting “For the Women’s House” depicted, in glorious color and bold images, what their future could be, answering the request from one inmate to “paint me a road out of here.”
Director Catherine Gund catches up with that painting 50 years later, creating a parallel between “For the Women’s House” and those incarcerated women with her documentary Paint Me a Road Out of Here.
Ringgold wanted the women incarcerated on Rikers to be able to see a future for themselves without Rikers, without prison, without cages. Gund wants viewers to see a future without mass incarceration.
Gund fills out the narrative with the perspective of a newer voice in the activism and art worlds, Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter. In many ways, Baxter carries the torch Ringgold lit. But Baxter lived a life much closer to those of the women in Rikers, and the clarity of that insider’s view defines her art and powerfully influences Gund’s film.
The spine of the movie is the painting’s journey from Rikers to freedom. Like those imprisoned on the island off NY, “For the Women’s House” was subject to inexplicable, bureaucratic, sanctioned carelessness and cruelty that seemed meant specifically to damage it, hide it. The masterpiece worth millions was at one point painted white.
Gund surrounds the fight to free the painting and bring it home to the Brooklyn Museum with archival footage of Ringgold over the years, uncovering her struggle to find recognition. We also witness Baxter’s similar challenges, from helping incarcerated women to create their own inspirational murals to finding her own success in the contemporary art world.
The full picture is one of hope in art, of power in challenging institutions, and of women demanding freedom.
At what point did Robert Zemeckis stop making movies and start executing gimmicks? I suppose all of his films have begun with a gimmick—as so many movies must. What if a kid goes back in time and accidentally keeps his parents from meeting? But at some point, the gimmick—often mistaken for artistic experimentation—overtook the story. Was it Polar Express? Was that the tipping point?
Here sees Zemeckis pointing his unmoving camera toward one single spot for one hour and 44 minutes.
That sounds like a stage play, doesn’t it? It’s actually Zemeckis and Eric Roth’s adaptation of Richard McGuire’s graphic novel. Zemeckis breathes some cinema into the static experience with artful cutaways to overlap time with place and spin the story of thousands of years of history taking place in this one single spot.
The bulk of that time is spent in a living room, camera pointed toward the picture window out of which we see the house that once belonged to Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son, of all things.
Though we travel back and forth through time, we sit mainly with one family. Al (Paul Bettany) and Rose (Kelly Reilly) buy the place with what Al received from the GI Bill after his stint in WWII. One moment they’re perching their baby Ricky for a Christmas photo, the next it’s Ricky and his baby sister by the tree, then a baby brother, and so time flies until finally Ricky brings home his high school sweetheart, Margaret.
High school Ricky and Margaret are played by Tom Hanks and Robin Wright (for all those who pined for a Forrest/Jenny reunion). They do not look like high school kids, and their voices are even less convincing.
As Zemeckis takes us forward and back through time, the fact that both leads always look like middle aged people does cause some confusion. But the two veteran actors are reliably great, as is Reilly and sometimes Bettany.
The rest of the ensemble doesn’t fare as well, often because the dialogue is so forced and stilted. Most scenes do little more than ensure that we recognize the important historical moments we’re witnessing: Covid lockdown, the Revolutionary War, the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the comet that killed the dinosaurs (I swear to God). It’s like Zemeckis took the worst part of Forrest Gump and shoehorned it into this movie.
Like nearly everything the filmmaker has made in the last two decades (at least), Here feels hollow and slight, an experiment in technological execution rather than artistic experimentation.
It’s a classic ghost story, complete with a creepy old car, winding English road and a figure in white. But who could be afraid to get in this friendly cab with affable old Nick Frost behind the wheel?
Frost plays Ian, and his fare for the night is a bickering couple: Anne (Synnøve Karlsen) and Patrick (Luke Norris). Ann doesn’t really want Patrick in the cab at all. Honestly, neither does Ian.
Writer Virginia Gilbert takes a very old timey tale—the most haunted road in England, a weeping mother who hitches a ride—and gives it some teeth. This old spook isn’t here just to relive the same ancient trauma across the centuries. She wants something. And Ian aims to give it to her.
Watching Frost (Shaun of the Dead) oscillate between jovial and deranged is a bit of fun. He complicates the character, layering desperation with menace, suggesting the film could take a psychological rather than supernatural road at any moment.
Norris manages to find some depth in the cad character, but even when he’s a one-note narcissistic gaslighter, he does it well. Karlsen struggles with a character lacking in dimension. There are flashes during heated moments with Norris, as one character clings more tightly and the other sees more clearly, but those instances are fleeting. She spends most of the film in a nameless state of unhappiness, an emotion that does not evolve as her circumstances change.
Director Bruce Goodison is at his finest when his three characters are confined to the cab, moving relentlessly away from the bright lights of the city, the squeak and slap of the windshield wipers their road tunes. But a needless side trip to an abandoned motel, coupled with unimpressive CGI creature effects, keep Black Cab from ever really grabbing hold.
Do you ever take one look at the villain in an animated film and know exactly how things will go? I don’t mean the villainy. I mean the comedy.
The second Leapin’ Lord of the Leotard (Rainn Wilson) pranced across the screen in Hitpig, spilling over his thong and tights, I knew. As flamboyant as he is round, Leapin’ Lord is comic relief wrapped in fat jokes veiled thinly beneath homophobia.
That’s just problem #1.
The film pits a bounty hunter pig (Jason Sudeikis) against an eco-criminal (Anitta) who routinely breaks animals out of their involuntary confinement. The latest escapee is Pickles the Elephant (Lilly Singh), the Leapin’ Lord’s dance partner.
The script comes in part from Berkeley Breathed, whose delightful Pete & Pickles picture book series inspires the adventure. Hitpig needs to get Pickles to Vegas for showtime, but Pickles just seems to get them into one misadventure after another.
Directors Cinzia Angelini and Davis Feiss can’t land on a tone (except when they go tone deaf with the fat jokes). The animation, basic plotting and quick scene changes would appeal to the very young. Much of the humor might entertain older kids who’d be put off by the very silly antics. Certain jokes seem aimed at adults, who are no doubt already bored into a fugue state.
Lessons are learned, stakes are low, animation style is bland, jokes go on too long and the slight story is stretched beyond breaking. A solid cast (RuPaul, Hannah Gadsby and Flavor Flav round out the voice talent) and a few charming moments can’t overcome the film’s lack of narrative cohesion or heart.
There is a moment in this film where the nasty villain slams Pickles the Elephant in a train car, only her terrified eyes visible behind the bars. This ode to Dumbo may have seemed necessary in another animated film about a mistreated show elephant. But that particular image—recalling one of the most traumatizing moments in the history of family films—serves as a startling reminder of just how mediocre Hitpig really is.
Nearly 30 years ago, Kevin Smith did what he does best. He made a film so simple, so personal, so deeply human, so profoundly myopic, so densely problematic, so deeply heterosexual-white-dude that it was hard not to simultaneously hate and love it. In fact, of all Smith’s movies, his 1997 straight-boy-falls-for-lesbian romcom Chasing Amy fits that (rather lengthy) bill best.
Hell, just being the indie darling of 1997 – pinnacle Weinstein era – creates additional problems, let alone the way Smith’s script funhouse mirrors his offscreen relationship with the star (Joey Lauren Adams, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her vivid performance).
Whew, that’s a lot to unpack, and it’s not even the primary focus of Chasing Chasing Amy. For documentarian Sav Rodgers, stumbling across Smith’s film in his parents’ stash of Ben Affleck flicks as a kid saved his life. Literally. During his toughest times, Rodgers would watch the film every day. He’d never seen queer people in a film before. And he wanted to believe that one day he would find the kind of love Holden (Affleck) expressed for Alyssa (Adams).
And yet.
For many (most?) in the LGBTQ community, Chasing Amy is nothing if not problematic. So, what begins as Sav’s odyssey through the film’s New Jersey landmarks turns into an investigation into the movie’s queer depictions, then becomes an enduring friendship with Smith himself before turning into a remarkable examination of the seedy state of independent film in 1997. And that alone would be more than worth the price of admission.
Indeed, Rodgers gets better, more insightful talking head interviews for this doc than I’ve seen in any documentary in the last several years. Guinevere Turner (who wrote 1997’s Go Fish and partly inspired the character of Alyssa), in particular, is a treasure.
But even as Rodgers’s film metamorphosizes, so does its filmmaker. Because Rodgers is himself a large part of his film – the film’s impact on his own life did inspire the documentary – the director cannot help but document his own journey. And not his journey as a filmmaker, but as a trans man.
Rodgers possesses sharp storytelling instincts and a cinematic presence so sincere and authentic it could break your heart. You come away from this film hoping genuinely for his happiness and waiting eagerly for his next film.
