Tag Archives: Matt Weiner

New In Theaters

Putting on a Brave Babyface

Leave a comment

The Iron Claw

by Matt Weiner

For the Von Erich professional wrestling family, success in the ring—starting in the freewheeling territory days and continuing into the present—has existed uneasily alongside the “family curse.”

Writer/director Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene and The Nest) brings together his lifelong love of wrestling with a keen ability to heighten psychological tension to the breaking point and then see what fills the void that comes after that break.

The Iron Claw charts these harrowing ups and downs starting with family patriarch Fritz (Holt McCallany), whose overbearing presence dominates every aspect of his children’s lives. The athletic Von Erich children unquestioningly glide into the path Fritz lays out for them, the family business of wrestling.

The series of events that ultimately spin out of this fateful choice gives rise to the legend of the curse, which the brothers deal with in their own (mostly taciturn) ways. Kevin (Zac Efron) is the genial audience stand-in, who wants nothing more than to please his father and have fun in and out of the ring with his brothers.

This includes the charismatic David (Harris Dickinson), golden boy Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) and the sensitive aspiring artist Mike (Stanley Simons). Fritz and the boys are given varying degrees of personality and dialogue that at times sacrifices depth for quick characterizations.

But with so much biopic ground to cover, Durkin narrows in on Kevin as the one bearing witness to all the inexplicable tragedy. It’s a difficult role to serve, and Efron delivers a commanding performance. As the family’s Job-like suffering grinds down his stoicism and filial loyalty, he remains tethered to hope and the possibility of a different life thanks to his stalwart wife Pam (Lily James, matching Efron with a vibrant performance that elevates her otherwise dutiful lines).

The result is a mesmerizing sports movie with more echoes of Malick than Aronofksy. Call it a curse or call it bad luck, but Durkin’s deft handling of these events turns public tragedy into a searing meditation on familial bonds and the limits of a certain type of masculinity.

New In Theaters

The Seaweed is Greener on the Other Side

Leave a comment

Deep Sea

by Matt Weiner

Stormy seas are among the less pressing problems for a troubled young girl trying to find her way in the world, according to Deep Sea, the new animated film from writer-director Tian Xiaopeng (Monkey King: Hero Is Back).

Quiet and withdrawn Shenxiu (Tingwen Wang) dreams of finding the mother that abandoned her as a child. Her father and stepmother take the family on a cruise over Shenxiu’s birthday, but it’s not much of a mental distraction when a late-night storm throws her overboard.

She manages to find her way to a fantasy version of the world, where the cruise ship has been replaced by a floating restaurant called the Deep Sea. Its proprietor and captain is Nanhe (Xin Su), a mischievous and somewhat unscrupulous man who is more interested in getting rich quick than serving as a good steward of both ship and restaurant.

While Nanhe tries to find the right recipe to keep his patrons happy, Shenxiu’s gloomy moods are tied mysteriously to the presence of a Red Phantom, a surging mass of tendrils that threatens to engulf Shenxiu and anything in her way.

While Deep Sea at times lacks the polish and subtle charm of a Studio Ghibli tale, the film succeeds at its own version of the unique blend of terror, wonder and melancholy that comes with growing up. It’s hard not to root for Shenxiu, and that’s helped along by the expressive animation of the intrepid sea creature crew of Nanhe’s floating restaurant.

The film also trusts adolescents to handle content that can at times border on true horror, with more drowning panic than you’re likely to see in the average Disney film. The identity of the metaphorical phantom that pursues Shenxiu throughout the film might be quickly apparent to older viewers, but the emotional climax is no less moving.

And for all the ocean setpieces—which are stunning—it’s often the small touches that cut the deepest. Like Shenxiu’s lone birthday message from her cell phone provider, rather than friends or family. Or the image of a small girl lost in a storm, crying out to her mother.

The sea might be a cruel mistress, but in Xiaopeng’s coming of age tale it’s nothing compared to the pain of embracing life and growing up in the face of hardship.

New In Theaters

Let’s Go Bowling

Leave a comment

Saturn Bowling

by Matt Weiner

The sins of the father might be laid upon the children. But it’s the women who suffer the most in Saturn Bowling, a tight and gripping French noir from director Patricia Mazuy (Paul Sanchez Is Back!).

Police detective Guillaume (Arieh Worthalter) inherits a bowling alley from his late father. Too busy to run the business himself, he allows his estranged half-brother Armand (Achille Reggiani) to oversee the alley’s operations.

While Guillaume tracks a brutal serial killer who is violently attacking and murdering young women, he must also juggle a new relationship with animal rights activist Xuan Do (Y-Lan Lucas) while keeping his father’s rowdy hunting buddies happy at the bowling alley.

It’s not a murder mystery—we know right away who the killer is, even if it takes Guillaume too long to realize the suspect is someone close to home. But it’s the killer’s motivations (as well as the unflinching misogynistic rage) that makes Mazuy’s thriller so deeply discomfiting.

Saturn Bowling is also sumptuously filmed, with the bowling alley’s seedy nighttime scenes bathed in deep blacks, reds and blues. And the daytime offers little respite. As befits this neo-noir, there are no heroes to be found.

Worthalter and Reggiani are well-matched to fill in the blanks in the brothers’ long-estranged relationship with their demeanors. The grizzled detective is a familiar character, but it falls to Reggiani to turn the cryptic Armand into a fully absorbing (if detestable) person. The film plays it coy at times with just what is haunting Armand, natural or otherwise. Which makes it incredibly effective and hard to watch when Reggiani unleashes the full extent of Armand’s perversity. The brothers’ fates take on almost Shakespearean proportions in the shadow of their dead father. Mazuy and co-writer Yves Thomas construct a seamy world where predators are constantly on the hunt, driven by almost supernatural forces that are beyond their grasp to understand, let alone stop and imagine what a less hateful existence may look like.

New In Theaters

Remembrance of Things Past

Leave a comment

Our Father, the Devil

by Matt Weiner

Much of contemporary horror and thrillers have found chilling but abstract ways to exorcise trauma. Ellie Foumbi’s feature debut Our Father, the Devil is a haunting and welcome twist on the formula, with its all-too-human demons and a direct confrontation of the horrors of the past.

Marie (Babetida Sadjo) enjoys her work as a chef for a retirement home in southern France. She treats the elderly residents humanely, to the extent that she is gifted a family cottage from the kindly Jeanne (Marine Amisse), a former chef who also happened to get Marie the job as her star pupil.

It’s a slow burn in the bucolic countryside until the arrival of Father Patrick (Souléymane Sy Savané). The mere sound of the priest’s voice causes Marie to panic, a feeling that is later confirmed during a taut exchange alone between the two that triggers a distinct memory for Marie.

This tension is broken with a fateful outburst from Marie, who knocks the priest out and ties him up at her new cabin. She suspects that Father Patrick is actually Sogo, a supposedly dead warlord who murdered Marie’s family in Guinea and abducted her into his army of child soldiers.

The rest of the film is a tense, unblinking interrogation of what this reality means for Marie and the life she has left behind. The escaped war criminal hiding in plain sight has been fodder for plenty of films and procedurals, but Foumbi’s humane script and deft direction quickly elevate the uncertainty from material to spiritual doubt.

The horror of what Marie—and perhaps Father Patrick—have witnessed and done to others points to a deep, existential rot. Foumbi does not shy away from the moral complexity of Marie’s pursuit of vengeance.

And while the “Is he / isn’t he” part of the suspense is cleared up surprisingly early, electric performances from Sadjo and Savané and their interplay together keep the tension at almost unbearable levels for most of the film. Foumbi’s script eschews condemnation and easy answers in equal measure, and it wouldn’t work without the nuanced turns from the leads. Our Father, the Devil throws up a lot of weighty questions around forgiveness and salvation. The film is less concerned with answering those questions, but then that’s also the point. Escaping a cycle of trauma and abuse is hard. But not as hard as forgiveness.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Meg 2, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Shortcomings, Final Cut, Night of the 12th & More

Leave a comment
TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Meg 2 The Trench, Shortcomings, Final Cut, The Night of the 12th, Rub, Mob Land, Bad City

New In Theaters

Land of Old Tropes

Leave a comment

Mob Land

by Matt Weiner

Stop if you’ve heard this one before… good-hearted, small-time criminals get caught up in a web of violence and forces far beyond their control, with a dash of social commentary and vague nods toward the senselessness of the universe and fate.

Mob Land, the feature film debut from Nicholas Maggio, could at a distance be mistaken for any number of neo-noirs it borrows heavily from. Strong, silent Shelby Conners (Shiloh Fernandez) relies on what work he can get—legal and otherwise—to support his family in rural Alabama. When his brother-in-law Trey (Kevin Dillon) comes up with a plan to rob a local pill mill, Shelby tags along as wheelman.

Both men of course end up over their heads and soon have to tangle with the ruthless New Orleans mob outfit that runs the clinic, as well as local law enforcement, headed up by a sheriff who exudes “too old for this” with each gruff word.

When it comes to showing its influences on screen, Mob Land is as unlucky as Shelby and Trey. The movie has the guts to take from more incisive forebears, and it’s hard not to make running comparisons. It’s also hampered by a script from Maggio that always feels right on the cusp of making a point about its characters and the hands they are dealt. But here again, it lacks the follow-through to turn its stars into more than the slightly off-discount versions of the brand name version.

The dialogue and character choices are likely too great for any ensemble to overcome, but Mob Land has brief flashes of a world where a less restrained pastiche might have worked. John Travolta’s performance as the tired sheriff is reserved to the point of redundancy. It serves mainly as a reminder that he deserves to find the right vehicle for this stage of his career.

But it falls to Stephen Dorff’s mob hitman Clayton as the prime example of how Mob Land stretches out the seams of the influences it wants to inhabit. Clayton is the AI output of an Anton Chigurh text generator. An unstoppable force with questionable morals who speaks almost entirely in empty aphorisms for the whole movie, Dorff tries valiantly to add dimensionality to the part. That it almost works is a testament to the actor, whose eclectic filmography belies how good he is in the right part.

Story aside, credit to Maggio as a director. Along with cinematographer Nick Matthews, Maggio elevates the film’s limited settings to deliver a believably lived-in southern noir. As by-the-numbers as much else seems, Mob Land takes an effective approach to the creeping dread and violence that tear apart Shelby’s world.

These touches aren’t enough to salvage the film, but they do keep it from being outright bad. Worse, Mob Land is mostly forgettable, perhaps the greater sin for a noir. There are echoes of the poverty porn of Hell or High Water, and more than a few heaping doses of the Coen brothers.

It’s all thrown together too haphazardly, and with little room left for Mob Land to have something to say of its own that we haven’t already heard before.

New In Theaters

Recalled to Life

Leave a comment

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future

by Matt Weiner

A family haunted by the unexplained resurrection of their dead mother from a nearby river sounds like a good setup to a horror movie. But it works even better as a sparse, lushly filmed parable about environmental destruction and humanity’s relationship to the world that sustains us.

Chilean director Francisca Alegria’s feature film The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future sounds a clarion call to repair the destruction humans are doing to the world before it’s too late. It’s a message delivered urgently and unsubtly, but with moments of great beauty that make the warnings that much more stark.

When Magdalena (Mía Maestro) returns to life and walks from the polluted Cruces River to her family dairy farm, she shocks her now-aged husband Pablo (Benjamin Soto) so much that he ends up in the hospital. Magdalena’s extended family returns to the farm, and soon everyone has to confront the long-dead specter of Magdalena as they reckon with the holes her absence left on their lives.

And while the eco parable stays repetitively on message, the heart of the film is a more intimate examination of the inseparable connection between the environment and ourselves. The sense of loss that Magdalena left behind across generations of her family—and the trauma that continues to reverberate for her daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela) as she carries this forward to her own children—mirrors the broader fight for environmental justice that we owe to people who come after us.

Grounding the film’s flights into magical realism is a riveting silent performance from Maestro as Magdalena. Maestro channels grief, wonder and even moments of sublime joy into the resurrected Magdalena.

The family’s initial response to seeing their reanimated matriarch ranges from love and excitement to the (perfectly understandable) horror, a note that Alegria brings out to great effect. In a different movie, Magdalena’s eerie wet footsteps through the house and across town would dog Cecilia and her father relentlessly.

It’s a confrontation that seems equally likely to end in catharsis or carnage. Alegria ratchets up the tension, as well as the environmental devastation, until the metaphorical dam breaks for Cecilia.

For a film whose songs into the future traffic in death and “the end” being here, the movie also holds out hope for an ending that has yet to be written. The film is agnostic on whether civilization writ large has earned our reprieve. But if a more connected world starts with just one family—then that’s a start.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Extraction 2, Maggie Moore(s) & More

Leave a comment
The Flash, Elemental, The Blackening, Maggie Moore(s), Extraction 2, Moon Garden, Peppergrass, Persian Lessons, Dry Ground Burning, Aged

New In Theaters

Tomorrow Is Another Day

Leave a comment

Dry Ground Burning

by Matt Weiner

Billing itself as a blend of “documentary and narrative fiction,” Dry Ground Burning succeeds wildly on all fronts, turning the Sol Nascente favela in Brazil into a feminist battleground that mixes light science fiction with immediate real-world consequences.

Léa (Léa Alves da Silva) is just out of prison, and reunites with her half-sister Chitara (Joana Darc Furtado). Chitara has become a local hero as the hardened leader of an all-female gang that makes money refining stolen oil and selling gasoline.

Under Chitara’s leadership, the gang defies local authority, a presence that pervades the characters’ lives even if the direct police response to Chitara is only briefly shown. (The directors make the most of this screentime by giving them and their “state-of-the-art” armored vehicle the full Verhoeven treatment.)

The gang’s ambitions run deeper than just survival, although the film argues that even that is worth celebrating in the face of authoritarian resistance. The women have mounted a political challenge with their People’s Prison Party, advocating a platform that speaks to the needs of the city’s working class and disenfranchised.

Directors and writers Joana Pimenta and Adirley Queirós chose to cast two local women (not actors) to play versions of themselves. The docu side of the docu-drama comes into its sharpest focus when the women are out campaigning. Their voices are sometimes literally drowned out by Bolsonaro supporters. And a political rally for the now former president of Brazil takes on the look of a green and gold descent into the Inferno.

In that scene, and in so many others in Sol Nascente, Pimenta and Queirós allow the narrative part of the story to fade away. Long, uninterrupted shots bring us both the grotesque horrors of a fascist rally and the unbowed joy of a DIY dance party.

There’s also a heartbreaking moment in the story when the narrative suddenly breaks the fourth wall and it is revealed just how many real-life elements from these women have been brought into the film. Despite these setbacks, or in the face of them, Chitara and her gang continue to demand an alternative future for the country that sees them in it.

Speculative documentary, narrative fiction… why not add hopeful dystopia to the genre list?

New In Theaters

Death in the Afternoon

Leave a comment

Everything Went Fine

by Matt Weiner

It feels indecent to call this euthanasia-based film from Francois Ozon “laid back.” But Everything Went Fine pulls off an exceptional character study with cool restraint, grounded performances and an unexpected well of humanity.

With a screenplay by Ozon based on a memoir by frequent collaborator Emmanuèle Bernheim, this dramatized version centers around the loving but complicated relationship between Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) and her father, André (André Dussollier, playing a difficult role with grace—and without sentimentality).

As the favored daughter, Emmanuèle bears the full emotional weight of her father’s request to end his life after a debilitating stroke at age 85. Assisted suicide is not an option for them in France, but the family has the means to maneuver through the quasi-legal (and not inexpensive) hoops for André to travel to a foundation in Switzerland that assists in the process.

The film counts down André’s final months with the matter-of-fact detailing of a documentary. The Bernheim sisters ride waves of false hope alongside “last milestones” together as André’s progress in physical therapy does not diminish his desire to leave the world on his terms.

Ozon presents the fullness of André’s life with a light touch—a mix of pregnant flashbacks, current regrets and the odd row with past lovers. André’s love for his daughters shines through it all, which is shadowed by a masterful cameo from Charlotte Rampling as André’s deeply depressed wife. Brief and reserved as her time is onscreen, Rampling’s detached presence breathes life into the couple’s challenging lifelong relationship.

The film mostly concerns itself with philosophical end-of-life questions. A sudden moment of legal suspense arises toward the end of André’s countdown, but Ozon clearly favors interpersonal drama over legal minutiae. Who are lawyers or the French courts to say what life means, anyway? That’s for the artists to decide. A noble sentiment from the filmmaker, if one that has the effect of blunting the controversial subject. There’s surprisingly little bite here for such a provocative topic from a filmmaker who doesn’t shy away from taboo.

But even that works in the movie’s favor. The family’s various responses to death at first feel soulless, even for a group of wealthy, ultra-cool Parisians. But Ozon allows longstanding tensions to simmer slowly alongside familial bonds. And even if the pot never boils over, this more detached approach ends up being all the more cathartic in the end.