Tag Archives: MaddWolf

New In Theaters

The Woman in the Gorge

Leave a comment

The Seeding

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Barnaby Clay reimagines Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Oscar nominated 1964 classic The Woman in the Dunes as a Pacific Northwestern horror in The Seeding.

A man (Scott Haze, What Josiah Saw, Antlers) drives out to the desert for the best possible photos of a solar eclipse. He leaves his car, hikes a good way, gets the photos, and heads back to his car, but he’s sidetracked by a boy crying that he’s lost. The boy then gets the man lost. Eventually, alone and thirsty, the man climbs down a rope ladder into a gorge to ask a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil, She Dies Tomorrow) in the lone house for aid.

Next thing you know, the rope ladder is gone.

Like Teshigahara’s film, The Seeding examines the existential crisis of purposelessness and lack of freedom. But Clay’s film is definitely American in that the roots of the entrapment speak more of something monstrous and primal in the wilds of the nation’s last unconquered spaces.

This works to an extent. Haze is solid, if not particularly sympathetic, as frustration turns to terror, then to horror. Sheil’s enigmatic performance suits a character whose motivation and perspective are concealed.

The couple’s story is complicated by the taunts from a gaggle of sadistic boys roaming the rim of the gorge. Here Clay veers from Teshigahara’s path and into something closer to The Hills Have Eyes and declares the film horror. There’s also some vaguely Lovecraftian imagery, as if these feral desert dwellers worship something far older and more cosmic than this man could understand.

It sounds like an interesting meshing of ideas, but if comes off as a bit of a sloppy mess.

Clay, known primarily for directing music videos, nabs a handful of really impressive shots. And both leads benefit from a single opportunity to outright break down, which both do quite impressively.

But the film is too impatient. Clay reexamines an existential nightmare addressed many times (I’m Not Scared, John and the Hole) and turns to a mixed bag of horror tropes to limit its impact.

New In Theaters

Fire Down Below

Leave a comment

I.S.S.

by Hope Madden

When you watch a Gabriela Cowperthwaite movie, you never fully forget her background in documentary. And while none of her narrative films possess the same vitality of her 2013 doc Blackfish, each film’s lived-in detail gives it authenticity that serves a purpose.

Her latest seals you up inside the International Space Station with three Russian cosmonauts and three American astronauts as the world below devolves into a nuclear battle between the two nations.

I.S.S. introduces new science officer Dr. Kira Foster (Ariana DeBose) to a close-knit group who’s shared cramped quarters for years. First Officer of the American unit Gordon (Chris Messina) is levelheaded and caring. Weronika (Masha Mashkova) and Gordon move quickly to help Kira feel at home.

Until word comes from below. Each side has been ordered to “take I.S.S. under any circumstances.” In cramped confines and awkward conditions, a handful of people hide and seek and figure out who can and can’t be trusted.

Tight space, small group, big stakes – it seems like an excellent premise, but Cowperthwaite, from a script by Nick Shafir, doesn’t have a lot of spare parts to work with.

She makes up for much of what’s missing with camera work. She and cinematographer Nick Remy Matthews (Hotel Mumbai) employ simple but effective tricks to ramp up tension.

Matthews’s camera floats in and around the zero-gravity quarters while security footage – stable and in b/w – makes you feel as if you’re sneaking a peek at something that you’re not supposed to see. The two styles collaborate to generate dread and a sense of helplessness.

Footage of the brief adventure outside the craft is generally quite impressive – it’s no Cuarón, but it does look good.

Messina and Pilou Asbæk (as conflicted cosmonaut Alexey) deliver the most complete performances, full of regret and humanity.

DeBose is hamstrung between heroism and naivete. Her dialog is often less logical than it is convenient. Jim Gallagher Jr. telegraphs his position in the shifting drama from his first moment onscreen.

Worse still, somehow the whole film feels anticlimactic. The danger never feels real, and the pointlessness of success is never even addressed. It’s a misfire from a reliable filmmaker and a middling effort in the “terror in space” subgenre.

New In Theaters

Meeting of Minds

Leave a comment

Freud’s Last Session

by Christie Robb

Freud’s Last Session imagines the lengthy conversation that might have taken place had a young C.S. Lewis (author of the Chronicles of Narnia) taken a train down from Oxford to meet up with a dying Sigmund Freud to debate the existence of God.

It could have happened. An anonymous Oxford don did apparently chat with Freud toward the end of his life in 1939, right as England was declaring war on Hitler’s Germany. But history didn’t record the identity of the scholar.

Freud, the man behind the field of psychoanalysis, is a committed atheist and he’s keen to talk to Lewis (already a published author and famous Christian about town) about the origins and inner workings of a faith he’d come to as an adult.

Freud is played by Anthony Hopkins (who once played C.S. Lewis beautifully in 1993’s Shadowlands). He delivers the layered and nuanced performance you’d expect from someone as talented as Hopkins. Still, it manages to feel that he’s giving you Freud’s greatest hits instead of plumbing the depth of this controversial and legendary figure. (He’s shown chomping a cigar talking about regressing to his oral stage of development and absentmindedly fiddling with a pair of scissors after discussing the fear of castration.) But that’s not Hopkins’ fault. Hopkins finds both the fear and the playfulness sprinkled amidst the theory.

Matthew Goode plays Lewis and he is good. He manages to hold his own with Hopkins. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have nearly as much material to work with. He doesn’t expand much about Lewis’s philosophy. Hopkins gets all the best lines.

Freud’s Last Session is adapted from a stage play and you can feel the director/co-writer Matt Brown (The Man Who Knew Infinity) struggling with that legacy.

The film is beautifully set, almost a Pinterest board of all things Dark Academia. It’s shot in chiaroscuro—a high contrast technique that sets off a highlighted subject against a dark background. Perfect lighting for weighty discussions about the legacy of war, why bad things happen to good people, and why one’s daughter feels compelled to tell one about her genderbending S&M fantasies.

To adapt the material to film, Brown makes use of cutaways to what is happening elsewhere while the men chat—whether that is what is happening on the same day but elsewhere or flashbacks.

We see an overburdened Anna Freud (the doctor’s daughter, not his wife, although you’d certainly be forgiven for mistaking her for a spouse given the way the old man treats her) and flashbacks to the two central men’s formative years. However, the cutaways interrupt the flow of the debate. Although sometimes beautiful, they seem like a deflection and distraction from what might have been weightier revelations—like the subject was changed right as we were getting to the good stuff. 

In the end, the film seems like a beautifully composed thought experiment, but it doesn’t exactly make for a satisfying story.

New In Theaters

When You’re Alone

Leave a comment

All of Us Strangers

by Hope Madden

Loneliness can be self-imposed, but that doesn’t make it any easier to overcome.

Adam (Andrew Scott) is alone. A writer living in a London high rise that’s still under construction, his solitary days bleed into his solitary nights, 80s hits on video and vinyl his main companions.

Adam is trying to write about his parents, so he decides to leave his flat, take a train, and revisit his old neighborhood. And soon his solitary days turn into afternoons spent with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell) and nights spent with his only neighbor, Harry (Paul Mescal).

What follows is a beautiful, melancholy meditation on reconciling your love for someone who has failed you, recognizing their love for you and their failure.

Scott doesn’t anchor the film as much as he haunts it with a turn that’s achingly tender and forgiving. Meanwhile, Mescal delivers another beautifully wounded performance, raw with emotion and sensuality.

Foy is a delightful change of pace, conflicted and unsure, and Bell stands out as the dad you really want him to be: honest, culpable, sorry, deeply loving.

Writer/director Andrew Haigh (45 Years) expertly weaves the lonesomeness of childhood traumas, as misunderstood and overwhelming as they can be, with personal identity. What of your traumas created who you are? What of who you are created your traumas?

Though never illogical, logic itself is far from the driving principle in Haigh’s storytelling. Emotional honesty, perhaps. Desire, certainly.

All of Us Strangers is a tough film to summarize and even tougher to categorize. It exists in a dream state bound by loss and isolation. Naturally, the only way to puncture that atmosphere is with love.

In many ways, this film should not work. Genre elements litter the script that, told by any other filmmaker, would run either maudlin or cheesy. But Haigh’s hypnotic touch creates a tone equally honest and obscure yet full of wonder. It’s also utterly devastating.

New In Theaters

Hiding in Plain Sight

Leave a comment

Origin

by George Wolf

Origin is so loaded with theories, facts and history, you may wonder why writer/director Ava DuVernay didn’t just make the film a documentary. After all, 2016’s 13th showed DuVernay can certainly command the genre.

I’m guessing she gives us the answer with a telling line of dialog: “Real people, real things.”

The main character, Isabel Wilkerson, is a real, extraordinary person, and author of the source book, “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent.” And the film works as well as it does because of how well DuVernay unveils both the results of Wilkerson’s work and the personal journey that made it possible.

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s tremendous turn as Wilkerson doesn’t hurt, either.

We first meet Wilkerson shortly after the news of Trayvon Martin’s murder first breaks. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is looking to take some time off to care for her elderly mother, but her colleagues (Blair Underwood, Vera Farmiga) are hoping she can address the issue in print.

Even Wilkerson’s husband Brett (a wonderful Jon Bernthal) thinks she’s happier working, but Isabel is hesitant.

“I don’t write questions, I write answers,” she explains. And Isabel finds many lingering questions in the Martin murder, the Charlottesville tragedy, and the increasing drumbeat of fascism in America. Her mind is restless, because while racism is a symptom, using it as “a primary language to understand everything isn’t sufficient.”

But as Isabel suffers heartache and loss in her personal life, she researches history in Germany, India, and America’s Deep South to find the connective tissue she sought – caste systems perpetuated through unending violence until they’re accepted as the natural order.

DuVernay utilizes Wilkerson’s classroom presentations, conversations with her cousin Marion (Niecy Nash, terrific) and fact-finding interviews as sufficiently organic vehicles for flashback. The history lessons are rife with discovery and heartbreak, and compelling enough to keep a firm grip on your attention.

There are flashbacks to Isabel’s personal history as well, including a look at her relationship with Brett that is tender, funny and poignant, buoyed by the sweet chemistry between Ellis-Taylor and Bernthal.

And though the third act can get especially lecture heavy, the material works as a narrative whole because DuVernay finds her own layer of tissue that connects us to both the real people and the real things.

The cycle of trauma -be it personal or systemic – can only be broken by confronting it. Origin confronts it with questions and answers, humanity and inhumanity, in ways compelling enough to change the very way we look at the world around us.

New In Theaters

OK Google, Start Apocalypse

Leave a comment

Project Dorothy

by Christie Robb

When small-time crooks James (Tim DeZarn, the Cabin in the Woods) and Blake (Adam Budron, Special Ops: Lioness) need a place to hunker down and evade the police, they pick the absolute worst location. They’ve stolen a laptop with a Wi-Fi dongle that enables internet access. And they are hiding out in an abandoned research facility where a rogue AI named Dorothy has been lying dormant since killing off its human overlords.

All Dorothy needs to enact its plan for world domination is, you guessed it, access to the internet.

In Project Dorothy, director George Henry Horton (co-writing with with Ryan Scaringe) tries to make the most out of an abandoned factory and a handful of actors. The use of security camera footage and the saccharinely menacing voice of Danielle Harris (genre staple and the voice behind Nickelodeon classic The Wild Thornberrys Debbie Thornberry) as Dorothy is surprisingly effective in conveying the oppressive sense of constant surveillance.  And the use of forklifts as Dorothy’s robotic enforcers is amusing.

But many of the shots seem repetitive and there is not enough in the script to make the viewer care much about the fate of the world or the two men. It’s like the set up for a Doctor Who episode without the lived-in charming characters and would have, perhaps, made a better short film than a feature.

But, hey, forklift henchmen are fun.

Fright Club

Fright Club: Unexpected Guests in Horror

Leave a comment

It’s one of the oldest tropes in horror: an unexpected knock at the door. Maybe the visitors are in danger: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Human Centipede, The Old Dark House and countless others. Or, maybe it’s the folks inside who should be afraid: Knock, Knock; Brimstone and Treacle. For our 10th anniversary special, we count down the best “unexpected guest” horror.

5. The Eyes of My Mother (2016)

The Eyes of My Mother will remind you of many other films, and yet there truly is no film quite like this one.

First time feature writer/director Nicolas Pesce, with a hell of an assist from cinematographer Zach Kuperstein, casts an eerie spell of lonesome bucolic horror.

Shot in ideal-for-the-project black and white, an Act 1 event could come from any number of horror films. A mother looks out her window to see her young daughter, playing alone in the front lawn, talking with a stranger. There is something clearly wrong with the stranger, and things take a bad turn. But for Pesce, this simple, well-worn set-up offers endless unexplored possibilities. Because this bad man doesn’t realize that the isolated farm family he’s come to harm is very comfortable with dissection.

4. The Strangers (2008)

“Is Tamara home?”

Writer/director Bryan Bertino creates an awful lot of terror beginning with that line.

A couple heads to an isolated summer home after a wedding. It was meant to be the first stop on their life together, or so we gather, but not all worked out as James (Scott Speedman) had planned. As he and what he’d hoped would be his fiancé, Kristen (Liv Tyler), sit awkwardly and dance around the issue, their very late night is interrupted by a knock and that immediately suspicious question.

Bertino beautifully crafts his first act to ratchet up suspense, with lovely wide shots that allow so much to happen quietly in a frame. This is a home invasion film with an almost unbearable slow burn.

3. Funny Games (1997, 2007)

A family pulls into their vacation lake home, and are quickly bothered by two young men in white gloves. Things, to put it mildly, deteriorate.

Writer/director Michael Haneke begins this nerve wracking exercise by treading tensions created through etiquette, toying with subtle social mores and yet building dread so deftly, so authentically, that you begin to clench your teeth long before the first act of true violence.

But it is the villains who sell the premise. Whether German actors Arno Frisch and Frank Giering or Americans Brady Corbet and Michael Pitt for his 2007 English language remake, the bored sadism that wafts from these kids is seriously unsettling, as, in turn, is the film.

2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

I would like, if I may, to take you on a strange journey.

Two young, ordinary, healthy kids left Denton that fateful evening on a night out. It was a night out they were going to remember for a very long time.

Brad Majors (asshole) and Janet Weiss (slut) get themselves in a bit of a pickle on a rainy night and need to seek a telephone at that castle they past a few miles back. I think you know the rest.

1. The Black Cat (1934)

Rocky Horror owes a tremendous debt to Edgar G. Ulmer’s bizarre horror show. The film – clearly precode – boasts torture, tales of cannibalism, and more than the hint of necromancy.

Plus Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff?! What is not to love?

Loosely based on Poe’s The Black Cat – so loose in fact that it bears not a single moment’s resemblance to the short – the film introduces Lugosi’s Dr. Vitus Werdegast. He’s come to seek vengeance on Karloff’s mysterious Hjalmar Poelzig, if only Werdegast can overcome his all-consuming terror of cats!

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Mean Girls, American Fiction, Beekeeper, Book of Clarence and More

Leave a comment
Mean Girls, American Fiction, The Beekeeper, The Book of Clarence, He Went That Way, Destroy All Neighbors, Reflect, Clearmind

Uncategorized

Stranger Than

Leave a comment

American Fiction

by Hope Madden

Boyz in the Hood is a great movie. In 1991, the same year 23-year-old John Singleton’s feature debut made box office and Oscar history, Julie Dash released the beautiful, generational drama, Daughters of the Dust. No guns, no cops, no real violence to speak of, Dash’s film nabbed a Sundance grand jury prize nomination and cinematography award.

Daughters of the Dust was essentially forgotten upon its release. (It has, thank God, in recent years been rediscovered, restored, and added to the National Film Preservation Registry.) But Boyz in the Hood immediately reshaped movies.

Writer/director Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction takes aim at fiction – print or cinematic – and its problematic relationship with Black trauma. But to say that Cord’s film would like to see movies move beyond Boyz in the Hood and other films that revel in suffering would be to simplify, even miss its point. The filmmaker complicates the discussion with debate over a Black creator’s right to simply pursue success, as any other creator might. Even if that means catering to a white audience’s thirst for Black trauma.

“White people think that they want the truth, but they don’t. They just want to feel absolved.”

You might not expect a film that floats this truth so effortlessly to be a laugh riot, but American Fiction delivers an awful lot of laugh-out-loud moments.

Jeffrey Wright plays cantankerous college professor and literary writer Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. His latest manuscript is not being picked up for publication, his students hate him, and suddenly he needs to look after his mother, who will need round-the-clock care. Which costs money. The kind of money you can make if you pander to exactly the readership he loathes.

Monk does, incognito, and soon he’s pretending to be something he’s not at work and pretending not to be something he is at home. Buried within this are a couple of really lovely, sweetly complex middle-aged romances. Those are rare in films, so they deserve a mention here.

Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown offer remarkable supporting turns as characters you want to dislike but simply cannot – part and parcel of a film that forever asks you to rethink what you believe you know. And maybe laugh bitterly as you do.

Adam Brody is also a hoot as that same smarmy douche he always plays, but he does it so very well. Jon Ortiz and Erika Alexander both bring warmth and humanity to a story essentially about a man who is not quite sure how to be warm and human.

Wright – an underappreciated genius of an actor if ever there was one – does what he always does. He conjures a fully formed human being, flawed but forgivable and endlessly earnest. Buoyed by a delightful ensemble and cuttingly hilarious script, he delivers one of the finest performances of his career.