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Family Matters

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Blackbird

by Darren Tilby

Based on his own Danish-language film Silent Heart, writer Christian Torpe partners with director Roger Michell for the Anglo-American remake, Blackbird. You likely know the story already: an ailing matriarch invites her fractured family around to stay for one last weekend of joy and festivities before she plans to end her life through euthanasia. But, as is so often the case in films like this, everyone’s a long way from even pretending to play happy family.

Susan Sarandon stars as Lily, the head of the family unit. Sam Neill puts in a career-high as Paul, Lily’s husband, who proceeds with a stoic, removed air about his wife’s illness and impending self-death.

Kate Winslet’s Jennifer is the first to arrive, early, along with husband Michael (Rainn Wilson) and son Johnathan (Anson Boon). Straight-laced and proud, Jennifer is the polar opposite of her younger sister, Anna (Mia Wasikowska); a flighty young woman who traipses in late, “looking like shit,” with girlfriend Chris (Bex Taylor-Klaus) in tow.

Completing the family unit is Liz (Lindsay Duncan), Lily’s oldest and dearest friend.

As you can probably tell, the film’s main attraction is its star-studded cast. A sea of riveting performances is what awaits us and Torpe’s well-written, character-establishing (and building) dialogue make these people come alive and feel genuine—even if some of their actions don’t. Indeed, Michell relies heavily on the strength of his actors to deliver the emotional clout the movie promises. There’s no denying the cast is up to the task, although other aspects of the film feeling like an afterthought.

The plot mechanics are hackneyed and unoriginal, while Peter Gregson’s score feels generic and uninspired. Mike Ely’s crystalline visuals, though, are an absolute delight, and effortlessly reflect the beauty and tragedy of both life and death.

It’s unoriginal, and it’s certainly not perfect, but this is a beautiful piece of filmmaking about the celebration of life, love and family, rather than the sadness of death and loss. And it brought tears to my eyes on more than one occasion.

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Hope Floats

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Buoyancy

by Hope Madden

Hey, it’s been a pretty easy going year. Feel like a movie?

Well, first time feature filmmaker Rodd Rathjen has one for you and you’re not going to like it, but you should watch it anyway. Buoyancy shadows a 14-year-old Cambodian boy sold into slave labor on a Thai fishing trawler.

I know, but stay with me.

In his feature debut behind the camera, Rathjen wisely relies on naturalistic performances from mainly non-professional actors to recreate the circumstances rather than dramatize them.

Sarm Heng is Chakra, a put upon adolescent bristling at the limitations of his life. There’s the universal element of adolescent rebellion, here tied to far more than angst. Chakra does manual labor rather than going to school, and as kids in uniform whiz by him on bicycles, and cars on the nearby highway come and go, his stagnancy and the back breaking monotony awaiting him in adulthood press down on him.

He follows an opportunity to sneak away from home and get a ride out of the country, where he’ll make real money working in a factory. It’s OK if he doesn’t have the $500 fare to leave the country, he can work that off in his first month.

That’s not how it actually works, and we spend the rest of the film watching as Chaka’s realization comes to him in bits and pieces that he will probably never leave this rickety fishing boat.

Rathjen’s film ends with sobering facts concerning the modern slave trade in Southeast Asia, with as many as 200,000 boys and men currently missing and believed to be held in bondage on fishing boats. The filmmaker’s verité style helps us understand how this happens. There’s no boisterous villain detailing the scheme, no, “Ha! You belong to me now!” No one tells you you’re never being paid, never going home. You simply adjust to your circumstances or you die.

There’s little dialog once Chakra leaves the boys in the village behind, but Heng doesn’t need it. The evolution of this character hangs on his face. It’s a remarkable performance, especially from a kid who’s never acted before.

Heng gets an assist from two actors with some experience. An utterly heartbreaking Mony Ros is the middle aged man who falls prey to the scheme in the hopes of providing for his family. The camaraderie between these two characters is powerful, and it’s a theme Rathjen mirrors in Chakra’s relationship with the ship’s captain, played with menacing relish by Thenawut Ketsaro.

What they create together is harrowing, but it’s also a brilliant piece of filmmaking that needs to be seen.

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Show Me Your Junk

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The Broken Hearts Gallery

by George Wolf

I have no problem at all with scary movies, I love them. But I gotta be honest, I can’t think of many things more frightening than the prospect of dating in today’s social climate.

So kudos to writer/director Natalie Krinsky for squeezing so much feel-goodiness out of the dating tribulations of twenty-something New Yorkers in The Broken Hearts Gallery.

Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), a gallery assistant, is smarting from a painful breakup. Her roommate besties Amanda (Molly Gordon from Booksmart, Good Boys, Life of the Party) and Nadine (Hamilton‘s Phillipa Soo) are helping her cope.

First lesson in letting go: get rid of all that junk you’ve saved as souvenirs from past relationships!

But a chance meeting with Nick (Dacre Montgomery from Stranger Things), a budding hotel owner, spawns an idea. If Lucy will help get the hotel ready for opening day, Nick will give her space to open a gallery showcasing trinkets donated by lovers left behind.

Krinsky, a TV vet helming her first feature, leans on plenty of familiar rom-com tropes, but gives them all just the right amount of unabashed enthusiasm to feel more comfortable than cheesy.

The dance montages are numerous, the dialog less like real conversations and more like people waiting for their next turn to quip, and the ladies’ Big Apple cynicism as biting as a sugar-coated fantasy.

But Viswanathan (Blockers, Bad Education) is bursting with bubbly charm, Montgomery brings a welcome, dialed-down authenticity, and Krinsky is able to mine some contemporary laughs from recycled ideas (the actual Museum of Broken Relationships, When Harry Met Sally-styled interviews with the trinket owners).

The Broken Hearts Gallery is often as awkward and messy as it is breezy and spirited. You know where it’s going and it goes there, pushed buttons blazing.

And for 108 minutes, dating in this world seems like it isn’t that scary at all, and could maybe even be fun. Maybe.

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Artful Escape

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A Step Without Feet

by Hope Madden

“People want to know about the road, if it was hard getting here. That’s not the question.”

A Step Without Feet, the first documentary from Jeremy Glaholt and Lydia Schamschula, spends 90 minutes in snowy Berlin with a handful of refugees from the Syrian war. The filmmakers’ first question: What do you think of the word “refugee”?

They don’t see the word the same way you do.

It’s actually a fascinating way to get into a story that looks sideways at a topic so often portrayed in documentaries. The bloody, lengthy, horrific war in Syria has launched more documentaries than I can count, many of them brilliant, most of them brutal.

Glaholt and Schamschula pull us out of all that brutality, mercifully, and drop us into the newly created lives of those who’ve escaped it: a dancer and a dentist, a musician and a cook, a writer and a student. Their resilience, nostalgia, trauma and optimism are on screen in a film that recognizes salvation—however profound—as just another transition in life.

Though life in Germany has been seemingly peaceful for the group and each has many happy moments to discuss, the anxieties of the past and the longing for what is lost give their peaceful existence a bittersweet flavor.

Many bridge the past and the present, their old home and new, with art. One writes, one dances, one sings, each of them tapping into something that gives creative outlet to their fear and yearning.

The film’s biggest drawback is its lack of context. We’re 15 minutes or more into the film before anyone utters the word Syria. The reasons each one left is never clearly articulated. While those familiar with the conflict would certainly have a sense, the reasons that these individuals needed to flee while their parents or siblings were OK to stay is never addressed.

With the clear and mostly fulfilled goal of casting these human beings in the present tense, the filmmakers likely made the conscious decision not to dig too deeply in this painful terrain. Still, the magnitude of the subjects’ sorrow, longing and trauma is tied to that specific conflict. To do their present justice we need more of their past.

The film—almost exclusively talking head footage of interviews with the seven refugees—remains strangely captivating throughout. Because of the music, the dance, the poetry and the candor, a deeply human and powerfully universal story emerges.

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Anguish for Anguish

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Measure for Measure

by Cat McAlpine

In this modern adaptation of Shakespeare’s play by the same name, Measure for Measure follows a large cast of characters all tied to the same horrific event. A man high on meth goes on a racially charged shooting spree in a housing commission tower. Angelo sold him the drugs. Farouk might have sold him the gun. Claudio and Jaiwara were simply lucky enough to survive. What really connects the tenants of the dreary flats is not a single act violence, but the fact that their lives are rife with it.

Director Paul Ireland uses trauma as connective tissue, highlighting the theme with repeated showings of August Friedrich Schenck’s “Anguish.” The painting shows a ewe crying out over the body of her dead lamb, encircled by waiting crows. It is trauma, and vulnerability, like this that pushes characters together and rips them apart, with carrion birds waiting to swoop in.

The script, penned by Ireland and Damian Hill (to whom the film is dedicated), is strongest when it strays from Shakespeare. The addition of an immigrant family to the story adds dimension to the types of trauma we face and how it shapes the next generation. The love story of Ireland and Hill’s Measure for Measure is much more straightforward than Shakespeare’s. If anything, the film would’ve improved from even further deviation.

What truly carries the production are its strong performances. Hugo Weaving is great as Duke, endlessly watchable. His manic foil Angelo (Mark Leonard Winter) is also fantastic, even when the script doesn’t support him. Farouk (Fayssal Bazzi) starts as a stereotypical baddie, but Bazzi finds complicated depth in him later on. Harrison Gilbertson and Megan Smart build great chemistry together as Claudio and Jaiwara, despite a bit of a montaged love story at the start.

Measure for Measure is a worthy effort to take the endlessly classic nature of Shakespeare and frame it in a modern retelling with new resonance. Its focus on loss, vengeance, and love are undeniably relatable, while still telling a fresh story in an old frame.

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Come with Me and Be Immortal

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Immortal

by Hope Madden

Countless movies over the years have pondered what it might feel like to be immortal. Writer Jon Dabach, in four separate tales with one thread in common, wonders what it would be like not to be able to die.

His film Immortal strings together these stories, each one directed by a different person (Tom Colley, Danny Isaacs, Rob Margolies and Dabach himself), each one depicting one person’s relationship with deathlessness.

The composite contains a horror short, two thrillers and one anguished romance.

Chelsea, starring the great Dylan Baker, offers a somewhat overwritten first act. Baker is beloved old high school English teacher Mr. Shagis, Chelsea (Lindsay Mushet) is the school’s star athlete, and today’s lesson is symbolism.

Baker’s as nuanced and fascinating as always in a short that starts things off with a solid smack.

Of the balance, Mary and Ted is most effective. Assisted suicide advocates film a video of the longtime married couple played lovingly by Robin Bartlett and Tony Todd. We, along with the crew, get to know them—their love, their suffering—and then the crew leaves them to their task.

I feel like I want to send Dabach a thank you note for this one, just to see Tony Todd this tender. The sub-baritone voiced horror icon (Candyman, Night of the Living Dead) delicately wields emotion and heartbreak here in a way we’ve certainly never seen from this actor. Bartlett offers an outstanding counterpoint, the believable resignation in her delivery weighing down every line.

A hit and run victim exacts precise revenge in Warren, which takes a particularly solitary view: So you just found out you can’t die. What do you do now? The absolute ordinariness, the down-to-earthiness of this one’s delivery—as well as the charmingly odd investigator—give it real appeal.

Even the one that feels most predictable takes a wildly unpredictable turn—one the filmmakers do not shy away from capturing on film. In each, there’s an element of discovery that punctuates the story. Dabach and his team of directors capture a wide range of emotions and attitudes, but leave the audience wondering just enough.

Immortal is essentially an anthology of short films, and in fact, the pieces do not intersect, nor do they clarify much. Instead, they offer four slices of life—well, slices of not death—and an intriguing look at what death means to us.

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Big Love

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Robin’s Wish

by George Wolf

Even as we’re still reeling from the shocking death of Chadwick Boseman this past weekend, Robin’s Wish takes us back to August of 2014, when Robin Williams’s suicide sent similar shockwaves.

In the years since, Robin’s death has often appeared as a testament to the danger of chronic depression. But with this film, director/co-writer Tylor Norwood’s main goal is allowing Robin’s widow to correct the record.

Depression may have touched Robin’s life, but that’s not what ended it.

Susan Schneider Williams explains that an autopsy revealed that Robin suffered from diffuse Lewy body dementia, a buildup of proteins in the brain. Always fatal, the degenerative disease can cause anxiety, self-doubt, delusions, an intense lack of sleep, and drastic paranoia.

As sad as the ending is, Norwood and Schneider Williams make sure we see the genius of Robin’s talent and the “bigness of love” in his soul. The joy he took in bringing smiles to others is touching, as is the Robin and Susan love story that began when one of them (guess) wore camouflage pants to the Apple store.

The film’s overview of Williams’s career is satisfactory but, for the most part, a rehashing of information. The really glaring hole here is the absence of any Williams family member beyond Susan. The reason for this is unclear, but outside voices would certainly have broadened the context.

But Robin’s Wish is indeed worthwhile for a more complete understanding of a legend. The final days of Williams’s life are re-defined with tenderness, clarity and purpose, framing a once-in-a-lifetime talent in an entirely new and tragic light.

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Dr. Whoa

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Bill & Ted Face the Music

by George Wolf

You know why Death (William Sadler) was really kicked out of Wyld Stallyns?

Well, I’d tell you, but that would take the number of laughs waiting for you in Bill & Ted latest romp down to two…maybe three.

It’s been almost 30 years since their Excellent Adventure gave way to the Bogus Journey, but Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are still best buds. Now living in the suburbs, each has the wife that they brought back from Medieval England (Erinn Hayes, Jayma Mays), plus a daughter (Samara Weaving, Brigette Lundy-Paine) that is the younger version of their most excellent dad.

Though they still rock out, Ted is ready to hang up his guitar until the future comes calling.

It’s Kelly (Kristen Schaal), daughter of their old pal Rufus (George Carlin, thanks to a well-placed hologram), with news from the Great Ones. The boys have exactly 77 minutes to play their song that united the world, or reality will collapse.

Whoa.

While it’s nice to know Bill & Ted will finally achieve musical greatness, the world needs that song right now. So why not go into the future, steal it from themselves, then come back and get quantum physical?

Director Dean Parisot, who helped make Galaxy Quest an underrated cult classic, teams with original franchise writers Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon for a time-traveling ode to living in harmony. This time, the historical figures we meet are mainly musical (Mozart, Satchmo, Grohl), but while the journey is long on sweetness and good-natured stupidity, it just isn’t very funny.

After all these years, Reeves and Winter make an endearing pair of overgrown adolescents, and they do seem genuinely joyful about stepping back into that magical phone booth.

The joy that you get from Face the Music will likely match up perfectly with the amount of nostalgia you have for this franchise. The film’s present isn’t bad, either. Because theaters are opening again, and God knows we’re all longing for a simpler time right now.

For almost 90 minutes, Bill & Ted make sure we get one.

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When I Say Get, You Say…

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Get Duked!

by Hope Madden

What does one homeschooled teen and three high school ne’er do wells in trouble for blowing up a lavatory have in common? Impending doom.

The four boys are making the Duke of Edinburgh Award trek across the Scottish highlands. Dean (Rian Gordon), his daft mate Duncan (Lewis Gribben), and the future of hip hop DJ Beatroot (Viraj Juneja) have no choice after that lav incident, while Ian (Samuel Bottomley) just earnestly wants to complete the challenge and include the award on his college applications.

But it’s a long hike and a lot could go wrong, especially now that Dean’s used the map to roll a joint. Will Ian ever be able to check off the requirements of teamwork, foraging and orienteering?

Writer/director Ninian Doff showcases his background with music videos, infusing this often laugh-out-loud horror comedy with a remarkably catchy, high energy beat that fits no part of the surroundings, which is perfect.

Toss in the always welcome Eddie Izzard as both the informational video voiceover and the uptight, uppercust elitist with a shotgun and expect more laughs. More still from the hopelessly bumpkin police force (The Witch’s wonderful Kate Dickie and the grinningly hilarious Kevin Guthrie). They toss aside their ongoing investigation into the highland bread thief to look into suspicions of a Satan worshipping London gang of hip hop pedophiles.

Doff’s good natured script sometimes echoes of the Cornetto Trilogy in the way its jabs at society land without feeling cynical or bitter. The film is emotionally generous with its juvenile delinquents. The four leads share a lovely chemistry, each actor effortlessly carving out a unique character while developing a level of authenticity in the emotional bonds between them.

This is not the kind of thing you might expect from a comedy where characters routinely—sometimes accidentally, sometimes on purpose—chew on rabbit poo.

The horror is light, the comedy raucous, the fun explosive. Get Duked! may not change you, but it will brighten your mood.