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Nothing to Rave About

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Dreamcatcher

by Brandon Thomas

The music world and the horror world have a simpatico relationship. The Rocky Horror Picture Show and The Phantom of the Paradise are quintessential cool horror rock operas. More recently, Deathgasm – the New Zealand love letter to metal – has gained momentum as a cult classic with its fun mix of gory carnage and shredding guitars.

Where does the world of underground DJing fit into this legacy? Well, if Dreamcatcher is any indication, any legacy might be over before it starts.

Pierce (Niki Koss) and her friend, Jake (Zachary Gordon), tag along to a hot-ticket underground music fest with Pierce’s sister, Ivy (Elizabeth Posey), and her friend, Brecken (Emrhys Cooper). As the show winds down, tragedy strikes and the friends are thrust into a world of deceit and violence.

It’s hard to get excited about slasher flicks these days. Heck, it was hard to get excited about them by the mid-80s. These are movies built on tropes – it’s what the fans expect – and Dreamcatcher is no exception, despite a few clumsy attempts to be something different. The film swings big, trying to be more character-focused. This approach does nothing but put a spotlight on the incredibly weak script, and pad the running time to an excruciating hour and 48 minutes.

The parts of the movie that are your standard stalk-and-slash clash with the other side that wants to be something more akin to a 90s thriller (think Kiss the Girls or other Silence of the Lambs wannabes). Director Jacob Johnston handles the slasher elements well. These scenes are shot in a more grounded and brutal fashion. When the story starts to dip its toe into character motivation or anything resembling drama, the suspense falls apart.

The characters in Dreamcatcher run the gamut from unlikeable to downright loathsome. Scene after scene of Pierce, Jake, and Ivy airing their petty grievances wear out fast. Dreamcatcher lacks even one character for the audience to latch onto as a surrogate. This ends up making the horror shallow and meaningless. 

Dreamcatcher might satisfy die hard fans of the slasher genre, but those looking for something a little more challenging will find themselves checking their watches on more than a few occasions. 

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Just Add Warrior

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Raya and the Last Dragon

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Disney was looking to do something different.

Well, it’s still a princess, unfortunately, so not that different. But Raya and the Last Dragon marks an impressive step forward in a number of ways.

Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) opens the film Mad Max style, riding some alien vehicle through a post-apocalyptic landscape, her face covered, her eyes darting to and fro in search of something–predator? Prey?

The apocalypse itself happened just six years earlier, and Raya had a hand in the world’s undoing. Now here she is, at the beginning of the journey that could put the pieces back together.

Tran delivers a heroine you can genuinely understand. She is logical, and when she tends to lean toward head and away from heart to make decisions, it’s hard to fault her.

Her sidekick, in grand Disney fashion, is the shapeshifting but fantastically colorful dragon Sisu, voiced by Awkwafina. The comic’s brand of endearingly self-effacing humor punctures the film’s preciousness at all the right moments.

There is a central emotion, a powerfully executed conflict in Raya and the Last Dragon that never feels as if it’s been watered down or softened for younger viewers. The conflict speaks of the courage to believe in people even when they have proven themselves untrustworthy.

It’s a notion that flies in the face of logic, really, but the point of the film—and possibly of life—is that you cannot build a whole community if all you have are fractured segments unwilling to take that leap.

There’s just so much stuff here.

The film runs a full two hours, and you feel it. The first twenty minutes is burdened with piles of exposition, and the mostly magical second act journey is overstuffed as well. Too many characters to keep track of, let along get attached to, muddy the overall picture. Losing maybe half a dozen characters and trimming 20 minutes from the film would have done wonders for it.

There are problems with the execution, but not with the animation. Raya and the Last Dragon is breathtaking, its world building as gorgeous as it is meticulous. Animators deliver each South Asian-inspired community with its own unique look and feel—from a glinting desert wasteland to a torchlit floating city to a lushly forested community and more. The film is simply stunning and should be viewed on the biggest screen available.

But for all the Raya puts in the win column, it can’t shake the feeling that all four directors and the team of ten (10!) that built its script and story were culling from plenty of pre-owned parts. The Disney formula still has princesses, they’re just warrior princesses now.

That evolution may have been overdue, but it’s already starting to show some age.

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My Sister’s Keeper

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Dementer

by Hope Madden

Authenticity is certainly the main differentiator between Chad Crawford Kinkle’s latest horror and others of the genre.

It’s been eight years since the filmmaker released his underseen backwoods gem Jug Face. He once again pits a tenacious female against the unrelenting pressure of an unholy presence, but Kinkle has a more personal kind of dread in store with Dementer.

Katie (Katie Groshong), looking for a fresh start, applies for a job at a skills training facility that works with adults who have special needs. She’s hired, working with clients two days a week in the facility, then spending two nights in a group home with three of them.

Katie is especially concerned with Stephanie (Stephanie Kinkle, the filmmaker’s sister).

Kinkle’s sister is an adult with Down Syndrome, which not only elevates the reality of the situation but also the tenderness and anxiety around the character’s safety. You can almost feel the filmmaker’s own personal dread over his sister’s vulnerability in an untrustworthy world.

Aside from Larry Fessenden, who appears briefly, Groshong is the only professional actor in the film. Kinkle, working with a skeleton crew, films in an actual skill center. The majority of the staff and clients represented in the film are, indeed, staff and clients.

The approach gives the film a verité style often seen in horror films, rarely if ever seen in a horror film with a main character who has special needs. Dementer lacks any of the sheen or noble heroism you often find in films centered around a character with a disability. The realism adds a level of discomfort, a sense that vulnerable adults who need care could easily find themselves in a precarious situation.

Dementer also offers an uncomfortably realistic look at working poverty.

Kinkle mines these anxieties as Groshong begins to see and hear signs that suggest Stephanie may be in real danger. As she races against the clock to save her, Kinkle slyly upends plenty of horror tropes.

It’s an often fascinating deconstruction of a particular subgenre of horror, an approach that usually benefits from the verité style. But too much of the loose narrative feels like filler. We watch Katie buckle her seat belt no fewer than five times.

Unanswered questions can strengthen a film, but Dementer feels underwritten. Still, you get the sense that Kinkle made the best of what he had on hand and told a deeply personal story in the most authentic way he could.

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Truth Bombs

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Stealing School

by Cat McAlpine

Senior April Chen (Celine Tsai) is days away from graduating from DuPont University, and she already has a lucrative job waiting for her in Silicon Valley. All she has to do is get through her academic misconduct hearing. But her TA, Keith Ward (Jonathan Keltz), is determined to pin her for plagiarism and as the hearing wears on tensions rise and secrets are unearthed.

In a mockery of a courtroom, Stealing School analyzes the personalities and egos that run rampant in academia, criticizing its self-importance, bureaucracy and institutional racism. A particularly good running gag is various character’s introduction of their thesis titles. If you’ve ever had a brush with higher education, you’ll recognize all the archetypes that writer and director Li Dong cross-examines.

Particularly brutal is the Canadian school’s PR policy which seems to rely entirely on “being better than American schools.” Their only answer to accusations of racism and misconduct is that at least they aren’t like the institutions to their south.

Stealing School has good pacing, and a delicious unfurling of tensions between various characters during breaks and in flashbacks. The film analyzes how important it is to be likable, rather than right or good. Keltz is absolutely loathsome and delivers the best performance of the film, being too eager, too righteous, too vindictive. Tsai matches him with a subtler performance, walking a moral gray area that has you unsure of her innocence until the final moments of the film.

The rest of the supporting cast matches their archetype well, all either jaded by the academic world or still obsessed with its ability to give them better opportunities. But Stealing School’s criticisms don’t stop at academia. Dong also explores racism in broad strokes and the toxic culture of tech that only asks that you provide good code.

Stealing School is a tight hour and 14 minutes, which keeps its mostly single setting from feeling claustrophobic. With good pacing and a satisfying end, this is a great watch for your evening, especially if you regret your degree.

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War Torn

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Cherry

by Hope Madden

Ohio is trying to kill Tom Holland.

Last year we lured this sweety pie to Knockemstiff with the sole purpose of, well, knocking him stiff in Antonio Campos’s big screen adaptation of Donald Pollack’s novel The Devil All the Time.

And now Cleveland.

Filmmakers and brothers Joe and Anthony Russo—both fans of The Land, having filmed many of their Marvel films there—bring Nico Walker’s Cleveland-based semi-autobiographical novel to the screen. Cherry sees a young man, nameless through most of the film, make a bad decision and then pay for it dearly for the rest of his life.

That young man is played with as much humanity and tenderness as you’ve come to expect from Holland. You cannot root against this kid.

Walker himself, whose novel was adapted for the screen by Angela Russo-Otstot and Jessica Goldberg, apparently wrote what he knew. The Russos take his tale and, in their best moments, inject a cynical visual commentary to offset Holland’s earnest good nature.

The star draws support from some impressive ensemble work. Forrest Goodluck (The Revenant) and Jack Raynor (Midsommar) deliver an excellent mix of tragedy and comedy, while Ciara Bravo gives love interest Emily a believably bruised soul.

The combination, when it works, generates a knowing story about a screwup who paid too high a price for one mistake but never lost his humanity.

It doesn’t always work, though.

Cherry clocks in at a hefty 2:20 and it feels for all the world like the Russos and their writers simply didn’t know how or where to cut Walker’s story down. The movie lacks focus.

And while there are clever stylistic choices made—the names of the banks as written on walls and other nods toward a subversive side commentary—the structure is far, far too standard. This should feel like no other movie you’ve ever seen because Walker’s story is really unusual.

Instead, Cherry seems too much like a string of broken person meets terrible consequences before facing personal demons thrillers.

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Role Playing

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The Father

by George Wolf

How much you’re moved by The Father will likely depend on how you see the central narrative device employed by director/co-writer Florian Zeller.

Is it a gimmick that cheapens the very subject he’s digging into, or is it an effective – even logical – new frame for a familiar picture?

Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman star as father and daughter Anthony and Anne. Now, with these Oscar winners as your leads, your device could be the mail-in offer from the back of a cereal box and it would most likely be riveting, but Zeller has more lofty ambitions.

Anthony’s memory is fading fast, forcing Anne to navigate his mood swings and growing combativeness while she looks for an in-home caregiver who can handle him. Young Laura (Imogen Poots) looks promising, but Anthony’s initial charm at their meeting gives way to insults and accusations about a plan to force him from his well-appointed flat.

But is it his flat? And who is the man in the living room (Mark Gatiss) who says he lives there?

Is Anne really planning to move to Paris with a new boyfriend, or is she still married to the impatient and angry Paul (Rufus Sewell)? And just who is that other woman who looks like Anne (Olivia Williams)? Zeller adapts his own stage play with a profound intimacy that feeds the intentional confusion.

In the last several years, movies such as Away From Her and Amour have mined their greatness through the effect of dementia on the longtime spouse of the afflicted.

But here, not only does Zeller make a sympathetic pivot to the adult child of an ailing parent, but his chamber piece finds its greatest resonance through the heartbreaking empathy that comes from giving us Anthony’s point of view.

And even if the whole affair does strike you as gimmicky, the transcendent heights hit by Hopkins and Colman (and indeed, the entire ensemble) make spending time with The Father more than worthwhile.

As artistic as it is nuanced, as lyrical as it is devastating, it’s a film with not only something to say, but a welcome new approach to saying it.

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Best Served Cold

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Rage

by Brandon Thomas

Revenge tales are a messy affair. Forget the buckets of blood you’re liable to wade through (metaphorically – of course). No, vengeance cinema revels in discomfort – the more emotionally taxing, the better. Put all of that together in a two-and-a-half-hour movie, and you’ve got something that’s pretty hard to sit through.

That’s what director John Balazs’s film Rage delivers.

Noah (Matt Theo) and Madeline’s (Hayley Beveridge) marriage is already on shaky ground when we meet them. Petty grievances populate their interactions, and the physical component of their relationship is all but forgotten. Their bond is forever fractured when a violent home invasion leaves Noah comatose, Madeline traumatized, and another family member dead. As the two begin to pick up the pieces, the realization that one of their attackers is still out there spurs them into irrational action. 

There’s no shying away from the brutality of violence here. There’s no celebration of it either. Gratuitous isn’t quite the right a word to describe anything in Rage. The violence is meant to make us wince and squirm, not cheer and pump our fists. 

While the ferocity comes in short bursts, the emotional impact is given far more time to breathe. The trauma suffered by Noah and Madeline takes up the bulk of the film’s running time, and it’s here where the real pain is inflicted. Madeline’s near-catatonic state in the latter half of the film is more disturbing than any physical scar could be. 

Rage occasionally abandons Noah and Madeline’s point of view to follow the detective (Richard Norton from Mad Max: Fury Road) working their case. Focusing on the police procedural side of the story takes away some of the urgency around the couple’s crumbling relationship, and, at times, threatens to stop the film dead. As the tension and drama surrounding Noah and Madeline’s actions increase later in the film, it only goes to highlight how unnecessary the police point of view ultimately is. 

Rage isn’t the first film to comment on the never-ending cycle of violence that vengeance can create. It is, however, one of the few films to spend more than a fleeting moment on the emotional ramifications of random brutality. 

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Far From Wonderland

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Alice Fades Away

by Rachel Willis

Watching Alice Fades Away is akin to stepping into a Flannery O’Connor short story (without the overt religiosity). The film crackles with ominous energy as a larger-than-life villain haunts the rural, isolated landscape. As a horror/thriller blend, this one hits the mark.

In his first feature, writer/director Ryan Bliss crafts a film that seamlessly blends genres: horror, drama, mystery. Set in the early 1950’s, the film is reminiscent not only of O’Connor, but films such as The Night of the Hunter. The tradition of the Southern gothic lends itself well to Bliss’s vision.

Seeking refuge on her uncle Bishop’s farm, Alice (Ashley Shelton) is on the run. She is accepted by a group of people suffering from their own terrible pasts, all taken under the wing of her generous uncle. We’re not quite sure of Alice’s story, but we’re given disturbing glimpses as past and present merge on screen.

As Alice’s past catches up with her, we’re held hostage to the increasing dread the situation conjures. The cinematography works wonders at turning the idyllic setting of Bishop’s farm into one of dreadful isolation. Its setup as the ideal hideaway melts beautifully into a desolate trap.

All of the actors in the movie are well cast, but the one to watch is Timothy Sekk as Holden. His performance, along with Bliss’s writing, adds depth to a character that could have easily been a lifeless stereotype. Sekk’s energy adds to the mounting horror of what has followed Alice.

With so many great scenes, the film’s blunders are even more obvious. It performs best when it has minimal dialogue, some lines are melodramatic while others are poorly delivered. Many themes are broached, but only a few are explored. A character disappears, leaving us scratching our heads. And what’s with the rabbits?

However, the few moments that don’t land can’t wholly detract from the film’s overall effect. Bliss knows how to invoke dread, and the moments that take us out of the film are easily ignored considering what works. You’ll care less about some of the details and more about what’s ahead.

Same goes for the filmmaker, as Alice Fades Away is a debut that will make you curious to see what Bliss does next.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBZJCLqUO6c

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Arkansas Dreaming

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Minari

by Hope Madden

Yes, I am a sucker for films containing devastatingly adorable little kids. Sue me.

Minari fits that bill. Writer/director Lee Isaac Chung essentially recreates the story of his own family’s struggles to become farmers when he was 6. The character based on the filmmaker is played by Alan S. Kim (that little face!), and though Minari is not told exclusively from his perspective, his presence—and the innocence and chaos that represents—suits the effort.

Jacob (Steven Yeun) and Monica (Yeri Han) were having problems before making the move to a tiny plot of Arkansas farmland. As Jacob struggles to turn their fortunes around, he brings his mother-in-law to live with them to make his wife happy.

Lucky for us all Grandma (Youn Yuh-jung, a treat) is a stitch.

The dynamic within the family is sweetly authentic, and the levity never overtakes a scene. There’s a tenderness here that, along with moments of joy, elevates the seriousness and even desperation of the family’s situation.

Chung’s cinematic style quietly beguiles. There is enormous struggle in nearly every scene, but it’s told with gentleness and grace. It’s the rhythm to a song made up of so much more. Chung’s skill as a storyteller is immense, but he couldn’t have created such nuance without such a game cast.

Yeun proves again the depths of his talent. If you missed his menacingly perfect turn in 2018’s Burning, you should definitely watch that right away. To the same degree that his character there was conniving and calculating, Minari’s Jacob is earnest and warm. You ache for him to succeed, and not just as a farmer.

Likewise, Han hits no false note as an involuntary Arkansan. It would have been so easy to oversell the bitterness or disappointment—as it would have been for Yuh-jung to have gone bigger with her “crazy granny” character. But broad strokes are nowhere to be found in this delicate drama.

Plus Alan Kim is just so damn cute.

Minari offers a close look—optimistic, but not sentimental—at the American Dream. If you feel like that’s been done to death, that just means you haven’t seen this movie yet.