Michael B. Jordan is a bona fide movie star, a butts-in-seats celebrity ready to front his own spy thriller franchise. He’s ready to Harrison Ford.
He definitely is ready, there’s no doubt he has the talent, charisma, looks and mass appeal to bring a Tom Clancy story to the big screen. But should he do it?
Jordan’s John Kelly finds himself in an unexpected operation in Aleppo. He loses a friend and nearly loses his commanding officer (Queen & Slim’s Jodie Turner-Smith, wasted), much thanks to a cagey CIA operative (Jamie Bell) who’s hiding something from the team. Something Russian.
Well, those Russian secrets keep resurfacing, and they rack
up a heavy body count. Next thing you know, Jordan has to take off his shirt
and splash water on his bare chest because…I don’t know. It might honestly just
be a contractual thing now.
I’m not saying I’m sorry it happened.
Stefano Sollima directs this espionage thriller, and he has even less luck than he did with his last feature, Sicario: Day of the Soldado. The problem this time around is not that his film suffers terribly by comparison. (Man, that was the problem last time.) The problem is that writers Will Staples and Taylor Sheridan just don’t seem to be trying very hard.
And Sheridan can be one of the finest writers working in film (Sicario, Hell or High Water). But you would not know that here.
The thrills are mediocre, the shootouts and fights are middling, and the only thing more obvious than the plot points are the performances. Worse still, the writing is sloppy and convenient. There’s an unmanned, unlocked, running vehicle right when John Kelly needs one, and don’t even ask how he gets unconscious villains from point A to point B. I guess that’s confidential.
It’s not that Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse is a terrible movie. It isn’t. But there’s no excuse for it to be utterly mediocre, which it is. The director’s proven to be competent and the co-writer has proven to be genius. Plus there’s a bona fide movie star at the height of his wattage leading the effort.
Even the title The Outside Story sounds like a
children’s book. It’s a vibe writer/director Casimir Nozkowski conjures
intentionally. His film is about a man who really never leaves his Brooklyn
apartment because, why bother?
That man, Charles, is portrayed with real tenderness and charm by Brian Tyree Henry. An actor of absolutely stunning range, Henry has delivered stellar supporting turns as every type of character in every genre of film over the last few years (Widows, If Beal Street Could Talk, Godzilla v Kong and about a dozen more). The dude works a lot, and he has yet to hit a false note. It’s high time he leads a movie.
The film Nozkowski builds around him feels like Sesame
Street for adults. Once Charles finds himself locked out of his apartment,
he (and we) gets to learn Who are the people in his neighborhood?
There’s an angry traffic cop (Sunita Mani, Save
Yourselves!), brats with water balloons, an incredibly pregnant
woman having a stoop sale, a young girl (Olivia Edward) with a problematic
mother and so many more.
Nozkowski creates a series of harmless, even sweet mini-adventures for Charles to fall into, each one helping him recognize that maybe he’s closed himself off a bit too much.
It’s not entirely Sesame Street, though. There are
plenty of f-bombs, a congenial threesome, and that problematic mom thing. But
the darker elements feel downright wholesome in the bright sunshine of
Charles’s street.
For the most part, that cheery disposition really aids in
the film, and Henry’s wildly compassionate performance is the soft gooey center
inside Nozkowski’s brightly colored candy shell.
The Outside Story nearly derails in a late-act scene during which local police mistake Charles for a stocking-footed burglar who’s been breaking into apartments in the neighborhood. Played for good-natured laughs, the scene feels instantly and uncomfortably tone-deaf.
There are other storyline missteps, as well, but The Outside
Story is so refreshingly uncynical, so huggable, and often so funny that
those misses are easily forgiven. It’s very rare that you see a film this
dissimilar to anything else in recent memory.
I may have to think as far back as the last time I watched Sesame Street.
In many ways, Four Good Days feels like a Rodrigo
Garcia film. The co-writer/director frequently spins tales of women, often
mothers and daughters whose own pain keeps them from clearly seeing and
addressing the pain they inflict.
His films (Nine Lives, Mother and Child, Albert Knobbs) routinely examine relationships built as much on survival as on love, and the strain that puts on people.
Glenn Close, a frequent Garcia collaborator, stars as Deb,
put-upon mother of a drug addict. That addict, Molly, is played by Mila Kunis as
you’ve never seen her. Kunis’s trademark big eyes swim in a gaunt face marked
by the scars of the life of an addict, the actress’s million-dollar smile
replaced with rotten nubs.
Kunis clearly lost a substantial amount of weight to complete
the transformation from Hollywood sweetheart to hopeless addict. Her performance
is not simply skin deep, either.
Characteristic of Garcia’s strongest films, the friction and flaws in these women leave the biggest impression. Kunis lands on the button-pushing most effective in manipulating her mother: chaos and accusation. In her hands, Molly is profoundly unlikable because why would she need anybody to like her? What does that get her? She shoots rapid-fire guilt and shame bullets at her mother and sees what hits.
Molly’s defenses and manipulations blend together so
believably that when she does hit a note of emotional depth and sincerity, it’s
heartbreaking.
Close’s performance is no less commendable, though her character
is frustrating. The writing here has some trouble creating the natural if infuriating
behaviors of a woman torn between protecting herself and believing in her
daughter. Too often, the situations and behaviors feel like what they are: plot
points meant to increase tension as we rush toward the inevitable climax.
Here is where Four Good Days (co-written with Eli
Saslow) does not feel like a Rodrigo Garcia film.
The movie mainly makes up for these missteps. It’s a difficult film to watch in that it doesn’t tread on your sympathies, doesn’t create tragic and noble characters, doesn’t even ask you to like either lead. Instead, it insinuates itself in the battle between the shrill, ugly survival tactics a mother and daughter wield like daggers as they claw their way toward sobriety.
So dumb! But—and this is the important thing—it’s R-rated.
And not just regular old R-rated. This third attempt to bring the notorious
Midway video game to the big screen is Aussie Rules R-rated.
As it should be. The video game inspired by Jean-Claude Van
Damme and boasting fights-to-the-death can hardly be done justice with PG-13
movies and animated TV shows. I mean, sure, they did that and made an insane
amount of money, but none of it was any good.
So, is this any good?
No! It’s idiotic. Insufferable, really, until Josh Lawson
enters the scene, chained up and cursing a blue streak as Kano. The writing is
awful and the acting is worse – except for Lawson, who’s a stitch.
But damn is this movie violent!
Again, as it should be.
Australian director Simon McQuoid has made commercials up to
this point. He’s very good at stylized, 90 second, conspicuous drama. He’s also
very good with a fight sequence and he’s not shy when it comes to glorying in
fatalities. He includes plenty of nods to the most notorious moves from the
video game franchise, fresh kill ideas, and even a well-placed Story of
Ricky homage.
Nice.
McQuoid delivers less inspiration when dealing with actors,
not that his screenplay (co-written with Dave Callaham and Oren Uziel, based on
Ed Boon and John Tobias’s original characters) gave them anything to work with.
Lewis Tan (Netflix’s Wu Assassins) is our bland-as-cottage-cheese hero Cole, unmemorable in every way. The film outright wastes Tadanobu Asano. (He’s done a lot of amazing work over his 30+ years in film, but he’ll always be Ichi the Killer’s Kakihara to me.)
No one—not Jessica McNamee, Joe Taslim, Mehcad Brooks, Hiroyuki Sanada or anyone else—has much opportunity to create a real character. The arcs are telegraphed, the fight pairings obvious, and a lot of the villainous roles are tossed in and disposed of without fanfare toward the end of Act 2.
Why? Because Mortal Kombat is a big, dumb movie. So big and so dumb.
And so much gory stupid fun, I just might watch it again.
That’s Eugene’s (Jack Rowan) line. He’s done working for his Dad (Nigel O ‘Neill), the meanest bastard ever to run a construction crew. Eugene’s happy to waste his youth drinking with his mates in The Stoker and ushering naive tourists to that pile of stones they come out to see – not that there’s really a vampire under there. Certainly not the one, true vampire that inspired Bram Stoker in the first place.
Right! So, many pints and backhoes and buddies later we find
out whether ol’ Abhartach under those stones is a myth or not.
As writer/director Chris Baugh adapts his 2013 short into a fun, effective monster flick, he begins by tossing out vampire tradition. Ireland’s own Bram Stoker had written a piece of fiction, after all, and this is reality. The new mythology is a little muddier and more monstrous than Dracula, but never less than fun.
Baugh taps into the same kind of smalltown boredom that situates
the nation’s most memorable monster movies, from Grabbers to Rawhead
Rex. He does a lot with a small budget, suggesting the monster more than showing
it until the final act, but there’s plenty of blood to make up for the
subtlety.
A couple of veterans (O’Neill, as well as John Lynch, also
on Shudder right now in Christopher Smith’s The
Banishing) give the cast a strong backbone. A solid group of young ne’er
do wells (Louise Harland, Michael Hough and Fra Fee joining Rowan) create a lived-in
camaraderie. The charm and familiarity among the ensemble are undoubtedly the
reasons the film works as well as it does.
Boys from County Hell is a horror/comedy, but it’s rarely laugh-out-loud funny. It’s actually a good deal more tender in its own endearingly bull-headed way, with a narrative more focused on the father/son dynamic than on coming of age or bloodshed. Baugh’s deep sense of these characters and this terrain benefit the relationship building and give the film a nice throughline.
This is a “what are you going to do with your life” film, and for some people, it takes a good, old-fashioned bloodletting to help them make up their minds.
With this episode we hit the big 200, so we wanted to celebrate in the most masochistic way possible. No! We wanted a really great topic (George’s choice) and a really great guest – filmmaker and co-founder/programmer of Nightmares Film Festival, Jason Tostevin.
Together we talk through the very best horror movies we could not watch a second time no matter what.
5. A Serbian Film (2010)
This is not a movie we would recommend to basically anyone. That’s not to say it’s a bad film – it’s pretty well directed, acted, and written. It’s just that the co-writer/director Srdjan Spasojevic is trying to articulate the soul-deadening effects of surviving the depravity of war. The film title is no coincidence – the film is meant to reflect the reality of a nation so recently involved in among the most depraved, horrific, unimaginable acts of war. It’s as if he’s saying, after all that, what could still shock us?
Like Pier Paolo Pasolini’s notorious 1975 effort Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom – also a depiction of the depravity left behind after war – A Serbian Film overwhelms you with horrifying imagery.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddwrbcMmzlc
4. An American Crime (2007)
In 1966, Gertrude Baniszewski, along with three of her children and two neighbor boys, was convicted of what’s commonly considered to be the most heinous crime ever committed in the state of Indiana. The senior investigator described the prolonged abuse and murder of 16-year-old Sylvia Likens as the most sadistic case he’d investigated in his 35 years on the force.
In 2007, two films were released depicting the horror. The Jack Ketchum-penned The Girl Next Door found a larger audience, but co-writer/director Tommy O’Haver’s An American Crime is the far superior film.
Elliot Page offers a full, layered performance, making Sylvia a realistic character – someone you might have known in high school. Of course, that makes it even harder to stomach what becomes of her. The entire cast—an impressive ensemble—does stunning work, but the dark magic here is Catherine Keener. Giving one of the best performances of her already stellar career, Keener guarantees that it will be a long time before you recover from this movie.
3. The Painted Bird (2019)
If you paint the wings of a sparrow (or stitch a star to his jacket) the rest of the flock will no longer recognize him. The other birds will swarm and peck him until he plummets back to the earth. This is just one of the horrific lessons a young boy learns as he desperately searches for anywhere or anyone safe in war-torn Eastern Europe.
What follows is a brutal parade of the worst humanity has to offer. Domestic abuse, graphic violence, multiple instances of animal abuse and death, rape, child abuse and rape, and more. Then the war crimes start around hour three.
The Painted Bird is a test of endurance. It’s also a beautifully shot, well-performed, and incredibly moving piece of cinema. You simply have to be willing to go where it wants to take you. And all of those places are dark and darker.
2. Irreversible (2002)
French filmmaker/provocateur Gaspar Noe does not play well with his audience. Every film, no matter how brilliantly put together or gloriously filmed, is a feat in masochism to watch. Later efforts, like Enter the Void, spread the misery out for its full running time, but for Irreversible, he gave it to us in two horrifying scenes. While the head-bashing is tough viewing, the film centers on a rape scene that is all but impossible to watch.
Noe’s general MO is to punish you through sheer duration. The scenes last so long you feel like you cannot endure another minute, and this scene certainly does that. Not shot even momentarily for titillation, and boasting a devastatingly excellent performance from Monica Bellucci, it justifies its own horrific presence. There are other films with necessary and difficult rape scenes – Straw Dogs, I Spit on Your Grave, The Last House on the Left, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – but none is harder to stomach than this.
1. Nothing Bad Can Happen (2013)
This film is tough to watch, and the fact that it is based on a true story only makes the feat of endurance that much harder. But writer-director Katrin Gebbe mines this horrific tale for a peculiar point of view that suits it brilliantly and ensures that it is never simply a gratuitous wallowing in someone else’s suffering.
Tore (Julius Feldmeier) is an awkward teen in Germany. His best friend is Jesus. He means it. In fact, he’s so genuine and pure that when he lays his hands on stranded motorist Benno’s (Sascha Alexander Gersak) car, the engine starts.
Thus begins a relationship that devolves into a sociological exploration of button-pushing evil and submission to your own beliefs. Feldmeier is wondrous—so tender and vulnerable you will ache for him. Gersak is his equal in a role of burgeoning cruelty. The whole film has a, “you’re making me do this,” mentality that is hard to shake. It examines one particular nature of evil and does it so authentically as to leave you truly shaken.
Filmmaker Christopher Smith has repeatedly proven a knack
for horror.
Whether he locks us up in the tunnels beneath London with
Franka Potente (2004’s Creep), transports us to the Dark Ages with Sean
Bean and Eddie Redmayne (2010’s Black Death), or forces us on a weekend
corporate team building of death (the sublime 2006 horror comedy Severance),
Smith takes an audience somewhere we probably shouldn’t go.
The Banishing drops us in rural England, just days before WWII. Marianne (Jessica Brown Findlay, Downton Abbey) and her young daughter arrive at a beautiful-if-creepy estate where Marianne’s husband Linus (John Heffernan) has just been appointed Vicar.
Naturally, the house is haunted. The Church says one thing, but this odd redhead from town (Sean Harris, the picture of subdued weirdness) whispers another.
The Banishing is really the first Smith film to walk
such familiar ground. His screenplay, co-written with David Beton and Ray
Bogdanovich, takes inspiration from England’s infamous Borley Rectory—allegedly
the nation’s most haunted house.
The direction that inspiration leads is rarely in question.
Smith trots out a lot of familiar ideas, though he does package them well. Some
incredibly creepy images accompany Marianne’s deepest fears, and Smith puts
horror’s beloved old mirror prop to exceedingly spooky use.
Performances are solid as well. Findlay, in particular, finds
depth and genuineness in the frequently portrayed role of the woman to be
deemed insane in lieu of dealing with the supernatural.
Smith sometimes crosses over effectively into the inner
working of the mind, and these scenes feel freshest and most engaging. They are
overwhelmed, unfortunately, with stale plot devices.
The result feels very un-Christopher Smith-like (if there is such a thing). He’s been a tough filmmaker to pinpoint because each of his movies varies so wildly from the last. The Banishing looks and feels unlike anything else he’s done. Too bad it feels so much like what everyone else has.
If you have ever wondered what Lord of the Flies
might look like in space, Neil Burger thinks like you.
The generally mediocre director (The Upside, Limitless,
Divergent, etc.) follows a manned vessel in search of the next planet we
can ruin. Or not. Maybe our better natures will win out.
Voyagers is the journey toward that new home. The
crew doesn’t really know Earth—they were the result of specifically engineered
donors, raised indoors so they wouldn’t miss open spaces, and will spend their
whole adult lives on the ship. Their children will, too. But their
grandchildren will be the first generation to see the new planet.
Naturally, this is only going to work if nothing kills them
and they don’t kill each other before future generations can exist.
Scientist and father figure Richard (Colin Farrell) will
shepherd them through as much of the journey as he can, but the future of the
human race is in the hands of these young people.
Essentially a YA space fantasy, Voyagers is not
without its charms. Tye Sheridan and Fionn Whitehead lead a cast of
convincingly naïve geniuses. The conflict is obvious (especially for those who
read Golding), but Burger zigs and zags enough to keep your interest. The director’s
knack for encapsulated action and his sharp cast’s baser instincts create some
B-movie thrills.
The nature versus nurture argument gets a quick nod, but
Burger (who also wrote) isn’t especially preoccupied with the why. The immediacy
of the fact that it just is requires more attention.
Science fiction tends to be heavily allegorical and heavily borrowed—Voyagers is certainly both of these. Although the execution feels a bit like a neutered version of Claire Denis’s brilliant 2018 cosmic horror High Life, the story itself looks to the distant future to illustrate our present (and very, very recent past).
As her camera races down the mountains of Val-d’Isère, writer/director Charlène Favier depicts both thrill and isolation in equal measure.
It’s a tone that fits more than just the competitive Alpine skiing that sits at the center of her latest film Slalom. The breathless and somewhat terrifying imagery is a perfect characterization of wunderkind skier Lyz Lopez’s (Noée Abita) particular coming of age.
At 15, Lyz is in training but on her own. Her mother has
taken work quite a distance away, so Lyz will be looking after herself on
weekends, training at a facility and studying schoolwork on weekdays.
She’s also quite heartbreakingly looking for somebody who
won’t let her down.
Abita’s performance is equally aching and frustrating, which makes her a painfully realistic adolescent. Faviere wisely limits Lyz’s actual dialog, allowing the performance to become more observational. Lyz watches and processes, her awkwardness, stillness, and anger telling us more than words ever could.
There’s a lived-in feel to this film, likely born of the filmmaker’s experience growing up in Val-d’Isère. The training, the experiences of team and competition, the beautiful but frigid landscape create an organic backdrop to the larger drama, a complex and soberingly authentic exploration of abuse.
The sports movie genre is littered with tales of the could-have-been athlete who regains what legitimacy he can by shepherding the next phenom. Jérémie Renier offers nary a false note as charismatic, tough-as-nails trainer Fred, whose moral weaknesses far outweigh any coaching talent.
Faviere’s take on the situation is even-handed. She never stoops to melodrama, never paints Lyz as a faultless innocent. The character’s complexities, particularly given Abita’s assured performance, only ensure that the film leaves more of a mark.
