Tag Archives: Madd at the Movies

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Empire of Light

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

There are certain actors – you know the ones – who seem to put out a film every year right at awards season. The people who somehow never have a straight-to-VOD indie or a summer romp, just yearly Oscar vehicles.

For at least one of these people it is a welcome return visit, year after year.

Hello, Olivia Colman.

Seriously, is there anyone who does not love her? Any filmmaker, any actor, any moviegoer? Her performances are shamelessly, giddily human, authentic to a chilling degree. Her force of nature in Sam Mendes’s ode to the cinema, Empire of Light, is no different.

Mendes’s 2019 epic 1917 showed him a master of pacing, understated emotion and visceral thrill. Back in 2012, he made an almost Shakespearean Bond film, easily the strongest in the entire franchise with Skyfall. For Empire of Light, the filmmaker ­– who also wrote the script ­ – returns to the more sentimental content of his earlier career.

Colman is Hilary, the troubled, often melancholy manager of a coastal England cinema in the very early 1980s. A wonderful supporting cast – from the kindly Toby Jones to the prickly Colin Firth, the tender Michael Ward to surprising Tom Brooke ­– surrounds Colman with sparring partners up to the challenge.

Mendes’s tale, at its heart, revels not just in the magic of the movies, but of the movie house itself. Most of the patrons seem to come to the screenings alone, looking to escape the loneliness, the mundane, or the rising tide of extremism right outside those glass doors.

And though the crowds aren’t as large as they once were, the theater still has something to offer – as does Hilary. Her dutiful existence is shaken by the younger Stephen (Ward, outstanding) joining the crew, and together they start exploring some forgotten areas of the once majestic cinema.

The metaphor isn’t subtle, and the film’s tone is overtly nostalgic, but because Colman’s character is anything but typical, Mendes punctures his own sentimentality before it can become overbearing. Gorgeous framing from the great Roger Deakins doesn’t hurt, bathing it all in a grand beauty that reinforces what power can come from that certain beam of light.

The pandemic has drawn out no shortage of filmmakers who’ve been understandably inspired to assess their life’s work. With Empire of Light, Mendes is wearing his heart on his cupholder, imploring us to value what the theater has to offer.

This film can offer the exquisite Colman and a stellar ensemble, and that’s just enough. Through them, Mendes finds impact in his sweetness, rising above the moments that seem engineered for an ad that runs right before the one telling you not to talk or text.

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And the Tissue Goes To

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Spoiler Alert

by Hope Madden

In 2017, Michael Showalter directed the best romantic comedy of the modern age, The Big Sick. So, even though the majority of his filmography feels like a near miss – The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Lovebirds, Hello My Name Is Doris – whatever he delivers, I want to open. Even an avowed tear-jerker, even the same week I see The Whale. I loved The Big Sick so much, I gladly signed up for two public displays of bawling.

And yet…

Spoiler Alert is Michael Ausiello’s (Jim Parsons) true tale of romance, loss and sitcom love. A TV Guide writer, Michael tended to look back on his tragic childhood as if it were an 80s sitcom, replete with life lessons and a laugh track.

Showalter stages these moments like they are right out of Gimme a Break or any of that era’s centrally located couch-and-hijinks programs. They stand out, not because they’re clever or funny, but because they don’t fit in a film that is otherwise a tender if traditionally structured tragedy.

The socially awkward Ausiello meets and quickly falls for gorgeous, fun-loving Kit Cowan (Ben Aldridge). This ushers us into the sweet and odd moments (Ausiello has an extreme Smurf collection) that mark the couple’s development.

Showalter works from Dan Savage and David Marshall Grant’s adaptation of Ausiello’s book. The writers have primarily done TV – a medium clearly suited to Parsons. And here’s where the film really stumbles. Spoiler Alert is, of course, not a TV show and only feels like a TV show on occasions that pull you out of an emotional moment. Rather than creating a narrative thread or even an interesting gimmick, the TV angle distracts – sometimes quite frustratingly – from what otherwise feels like a very honest and necessary look at love.

Showalter alum and all-American gem Sally Field brings needed authenticity to the film, and Aldridge often excels as the hot Oscar to Parsons’s Felix. Plus, the sometimes frank sexuality is more than welcome.

But none of it fits. The framework – Ausiello delivering his life story as if he’s recounting a favorite TV show – is distracting at best. It robs the film of its passion and guarantees the feeling of inauthenticity. It has its moments, but it never delivers any honest laughter or tears.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Violent Night, Eternal Daughter, The Inspection, A Wounded Fawn, Salvatore & More

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Violent Night, The Eternal Daughter, The Inspection, Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams, Nanny, The Harbinger, Amigo, A Wounded Fawn, Hunt, Four Samosas

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Lonely in Your Nightmare

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The Harbinger

by Hope Madden

What Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger does well is remind you how desperate the early days of lockdown were. How scary. How lonely. This was especially true for anyone quarantining alone. It must have felt like the world would just go on without you. You’d be forgotten entirely.

Mavis (Emily Davis) is alone, and she is not taking to lockdown well. Her dreams are terrifying and almost unending. When Mavis falls asleep, she doesn’t wake up, sometimes for days, trapped the entire time in a horrifying nightmare. Her friend Mo (Gabby Beans) leaves the comfort and relative safety of the home she shares with her father and brother because Mavis has no one else to call.

Mitton’s film combines collective trauma with existential dread, mirroring the kind of terror that caves in on you when you don’t work, don’t leave home, and fear everything: surfaces, people, the air in your building. It’s a true nightmare, and one you can’t wake up from.

The isolation, the stench of death, it all inspired any number of horror films. Mitton animates that collective ordeal as effectively as anyone working in the genre. He marries the graphic reality of the pandemic with an internal descent, reflecting more than a society’s fear of death. What he sees is the way lockdown, hivemind, misinformation and isolation made people forget who they were.

Davis delivers a solid turn as one wearied to the point of death by quarantine, but it’s Beans’s resilient, naturalistic performance that grounds the unreality in uneasy truth. Mitton’s script sometimes relies on tropes that feel too obvious for his unusual story, and in the end, it’s an overreliance on genre mechanisms that keeps the film from really cutting free from expectations and saying something truly fresh.

But there’s no question he hits a nerve because very few changes need to be made to the reality of 2020 for it to be a nerve-wracking horror show.

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Mirror Mirror

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The Eternal Daughter

by Hope Madden

Joanna Hogg makes movies about making movies about her life. This should not be confused with making movies about her life, that would be too straightforward. What she captures is the act of creating something from the strands of her experience. But somehow, in her hands, this added layer of artifice allows for increased intimacy, or at least introspection.

Hogg’s latest follows a middle-aged filmmaker named Julie (Tilda Swinton) who, with her mother (Swinton again), revisits a grand old English manor that was once a family estate but is now a lovely if mysteriously empty inn.

Hogg draws attention to The Eternal Daughter’s movie-ness from the opening shot of headlights in rolling fog, a score reminiscent of classic British hillside horror drawing attention to itself. Here are the genre tropes, Hogg seems to say. This will be a ghost story.

The Eternal Daughter reunites the filmmaker and Swinton, who played mother opposite her own daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne, in Hogg’s The Souvenir, parts 1 and 2. Byrne’s character, a filmmaker named Julie, was a clear stand-in for Hogg. An actual mother and daughter played mother and daughter, although the daughter was simultaneously playing the film’s director as a budding film director. That’s a lot of overlapping whatnot. But it worked, partly because Julie’s relationship with her mother – perhaps reflecting Byrne’s relationship with Swinton – brimmed with tenderness.

In The Eternal Daughter, Swinton plays the Hogg stand-in as she reprises her role as Julie’s now aged mother. It sounds like a lot to keep track of, but there’s really no need. The film boils down to an opportunity to watch Tilda Swinton play multiple roles, which – as Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria proved – is always a good idea. Here she delivers two distinct characters, each spilling with love and bristling with disappointment for the other.

All of it sounds like a gimmick: Swinton playing two roles, Swinton playing the director, the director working out issues with her own mother in a film about a filmmaker working out issues with her mother. But none of it feels gimmicky. Rather, it all creates the space for Hogg to rework facts in order to tell difficult, universal truths.

The film’s deliberate pace and overtly reflective nature will irritate impatient moviegoers, and its plot turns are sure to disappoint true genre fans. But what Hogg’s crafted is a film that haunts, whether the specter is supernatural or not.

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Semper Fi

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The Inspection

by Hope Madden

We’ve seen it so many times, often very effectively. A sloppy recruit, someone with nothing to lose but himself, does just that during boot camp. Maybe it ends in ambivalence and horror (Full Metal Jacket), maybe it ends in heroism and an unwitting invasion of Czechoslovakia (Stripes), maybe it ends in romance (An Officer and a Gentleman).

While the story that writer/director Elegance Bratton (Pier Kids) tells with The Inspection follows those familiar beats, it’s messier, more frustrating, more honest and more human than all the others together. As it should be, since it is his own story.

Jeremy Pope delivers an astonishing, raw performance as Ellis French, a 25-year-old homeless gay Black man. His mother Inez (Gabrielle Union in the finest performance of her career) cast him out at 16. We meet Ellis on the day he enlists in the Marines.

And you thought Bill Murray was going to have a tough time.

While the steps in the screenplay are familiar – the recruit has much to escape in his day-to-day; he joins and gets to know a group of men of different backgrounds, each of whom will be tested alongside him; he comes out the other side a different man. But Ellis French’s stakes are higher, his difficulties are more dangerous, and the lessons learned along the way probably affect those around him more profoundly than they affect him.

Bratton also pulls away from audience expectation by avoiding the cliché of one-dimensional recruit characters. There’s good and bad, heroism and cowardice, in everyone on the screen. In this way Bratton allows a certain moral ambiguity to seep into the film. That gray area becomes the space for forgiveness to take shape.

What Bratton brings to this well-worn story is an idea perfectly realized by Pope. The Inspection is a showcase for the idea that resilience comes from a balance of strength and forgiveness. French finds ways to forgive what to most would be unforgivable. This is how he perseveres. It’s a beautiful, difficult lesson to learn, even for a viewer. But thanks to that resilience, we have this exceptional film.

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Nanny

by Hope Madden

Senegalese transplant Aisha (a transfixing Anna Diop) cares for a little girl whose mother works too much and whose father is often away. Aisha’s care is tinged with her own deep well of sadness and guilt at handing the care of her own son Lamine over to a friend back in Senegal. But this job will allow her to finally pay for the flight to bring Lamine to NYC, and just in time for his birthday.

Writer/director Nikyatu Jusu’s feature debut employs fantastical elements, but her Nanny is never an outright horror film. Aisha’s visions, though thoroughly spooky and potentially dangerous, speak to the fear, powerlessness and profound sadness facing a woman forever making impossible choices, regardless of the country.

Jusu gives these folklore-rooted images purpose as Aisha awakens to the real nightmare that the American Dream so often becomes. As self-pitying employer Amy (Michelle Monaghan) works long hours to compete in a man’s world, she shorts Aisya’s pay while taking advantage of her time. Reuniting with Lamine feels less and less likely. Helplessness, hopelessness and anger grow.

Jusu’s lighthanded with true horror, a choice that benefits the film because its honesty is horror enough. Diop conveys more with a glance or a sigh than any scaly monster or hairy spider could ever display. Her command of this character’s melancholy and rage is extraordinary.

The addition of Leslie Uggams as Aisha’s love interest Malik’s (Singua Walls) grandmother introduces exposition and explanations that feel slightly forced, particularly compared to the nuance defining the rest of the film. But it’s a slight fault in an otherwise beautiful, devastating movie.

Like Jenna Cato Bass’s Good Madam, Nanny identifies the uneasy social structure that guarantees inequity, and all the accompanying horror it produces. Jusu’s tale sidesteps the true genre punch, though, which may leave some viewers unsatisfied. But, even for its diabolical sirens and eight-legged tricksters, it’s Nanny’s naked honesty that makes it so scary.

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Friends to the End

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Amigo

by Hope Madden

Friends are the family we choose.

Yeah, that’s all well and good until one of them turns into Annie Wilkes from Misery.

But it looks like Javi (Javier Botet) has chosen well in David (David Pareja). Director Óscar Martín’s film Amigo, co-written with both Botet and Pareja, opens on David carrying Javi from his car, across a snowy lawn, into an old farmhouse, and to a comfortable bed. That’s not all. David will sit up all night in the chair next to Javi’s bed, just in case his friend-in-need needs anything. That’s devotion.

As the next 80 minutes crawl past, we’re alone with the pair in their isolation. They’re far from town. Snow and ice have made the streets impassable. David’s low on his own medication, and that scar on his forehead marks the throbbing pain he can’t control without it. Plus, shouldn’t Javi be in a hospital?

Slowly but surely, Martín’s film descends with its characters into a nightmare, kind of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane without the egos or lipstick.

To develop palpable tension, Martín takes full advantage of Javier Botet’s physical presence. The actor’s made a name for himself playing silent, nightmare images in REC (Nina Medeiros), Mama (Mama), The Conjuring 2 (Crooked Man), Insidious: The Last Key (Key Face), Slender Man (Slender Man) and more. While he put his physical performance to use doing creature work for Guillermo del Toro, Álex de la Iglesia and other filmmakers, Amigo changes that perspective. Botet’s long, gaunt frame is webbed with the scars of an auto accident, his gangle of bones a macabre reminder of his vulnerability.

Botet’s performance, much of it nearly silent, aches with rage, melancholy and helplessness. Javi’s quiet, burning anger could simply be the natural result of his situation. And his best friend David counters the hostility with buoyant, devoted energy and an unflagging smile.

Pareja’s depiction of David’s gradual decline unsettles. Martín rushes nothing, and though he leaves breadcrumbs, you’ll never know for sure where he’s leading you. The result is a somber, unnervingly realistic punch to the gut and a reminder that friendship does not have to be forever.

New In Theaters, Shudder Premiere

Cabin of Curiosities

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A Wounded Fawn

by Hope Madden

In 2019, Travis Stevens directed his first feature, Girl on the Third Floor, a haunted house film in which the house is the protagonist. It not only looked amazing, but the unusual POV shots did more than break up the monotony of a film set almost exclusively inside one building. Those peculiar shots gave the impression of the house’s own point of view – a fresh and beguiling choice.

Stevens’s 2021 film Jakob’s Wife waded more successfully into feminist territory, benefitted from brilliant, veteran performances, and turned out to be one of the best horror shows of the year. In many ways, the filmmaker’s latest, A Wounded Fawn, picks up where those left off – which does not mean you’ll see where it’s heading.

Josh Ruben is Bruce. Marshall Taylor Thurman is the giant Red Owl Bruce sees, a manifestation of that part of Bruce that compels him to murder women. The next in line seems to be Meredith (Sarah Lind). After finally getting past the trauma of a long-term abusive relationship, Meredith is taking a leap with a nice new guy, heading for an intimate weekend at his cabin.

This sort of sounds like Donnie Darko meets about 100 movies you’ve seen, but it is not. Not at all. Bruce bids on high-end art at auctions, Meredith curates a museum, and Stevens’s film is awash in the most gorgeous, surreal imagery – odes to Leonora Carrington, among others. And, like the POV shots from Girl on the Third Floor, these visual choices do more than give the movie its peculiar and effective look.

At the center of Bruce’s personal journey is a sculpture he stole from his last victim, a piece depicting the Furies attacking Orestes, who was driven mad by their torture for his crimes against his mother. It’s a great visual, an excellent metaphor for a serial killer comeuppance movie. It’s also an excellent reminder that art has a millennia-long history of depicting women’s vengeance upon toxic men – in case anyone is tired of this “woke” trend.

Lind more than convinces in the character’s tricky spot of being open to new romance and guarding against red flags. We’ve seen Ruben play the nice guy who’s not really as nice as he thinks, but his sinister streak and sincere narcissism here are startling.

The film does an about-face at nearly its halfway mark, not only changing from Bruce’s perspective to Meredith’s, but evolving from straightforward narrative to something hallucinatory and fascinating.

The final image – unblinking, lengthy, horrible and fantastic – cements A Wounded Fawn as an audacious success.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Glass Onion, Fabelmans, Strange World, Bones & All, White Noise, Devotion, Blood Relatives

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Glass Onion, The Fabelmans, Strange World, Bones and All, Devotion, White Noise, Blood Relatives