Some exceptional films coming home this week, so if you like true life, brutally devastating historical dramas, this is your week! No, seriously, watch them.
Detroit
Viceroy’s House
The Trip to Spain
Kingsman: The Golden Circle
Home Again
Tag Archives: movie reviews
The Screening Room: Master of Disaster
We have one full week to wait until the new Star Wars. What will we do? Well, there are a couple of great movies you can see in the meantime. We talk through The Disaster Artist and Thelma, plus hip you to what’s new in home entertainment.
Listen to the full podcast HERE.
Free Bird
Thelma
by Hope Madden
A surprising, gorgeously filmed prologue creates a mood: a little girl, bundled in a red coat, follows her shotgun-toting father across a frozen pond into the snowy woods. She looks periodically through the ice at the fish moving beneath the ice. In the quiet woods, the two spy a deer. The girl holds her breath, staring silently at the animal while her father prepares to shoot.
The film never again rises to the exquisite, icy tension of its opening scene, but it does work your nerves and keep you guessing. As we follow that little girl, Thelma (Eili Harboe), through the uncomfortable, lonely first weeks of college we gather that her parents are very Christian and very over-protective.
Things could have gone all predictable and preachy from there, but co-writer/director Joachim Trier knows what you’re thinking and he plans to use it against you.
Thelma is a coming-of-age film at its cold, dark heart. The horror here lies in the destructive nature of trying to be something you are not, but here again, nothing in Thelma is as simple or cleanly cut as the beautiful framing and crystal clear camera work suggest.
As familiar as many of the conflicts feel, Trier never lets you forget that something’s not entirely right about Thelma. She seems normal, maybe just sheltered, but that opening scene nags at you.
Like Julia Ducournau’s magnificent coming-of-age horror Raw, Thelma dives into the issues swirling around post-adolescent freedoms and taboos in daring and insightful ways. Trier also fills the screen with metaphorical dangers of indulgence and self-acceptance, although his protagonist’s inner conflicts lead to different results. Where Raw’s horror is corporeal, Thelma’s is psychological.
Thelma takes its time and lets its lead unveil a fully realized, deeply complex character full of contradictions—inconsistencies that make more sense as the mystery unravels. Though the result never terrifies, it offers an unsettling vision of self-discovery that’s simultaneously familiar and unique.
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of December 4
Well, not a ton coming to home entertainment this week. Hope you like little yellow blobs and twins. Who doesn’t, though?!
Despicable Me 3
The Screening Room: Honor and Inspiration
This week in The Screening Room we talk about new releases Last Flag Flying, BPM, Sweet Virginia plus all that’s worth watching in home entertainment.
Listen HERE.
Heart and Soul
BPM (120 Beats Per Minute)
by George Wolf
Transitioning slowly from a sweeping, outrage-fueled political drama to a hushed and intimate personal study, BPM becomes a deeply emotional portrait of hope and love.
It is France in the early 1990s, when Act Up/Paris is becoming increasingly confrontational in their protests, demanding an official AIDS prevention policy from the state, and an end to the indifference of the population.
Early on, director/co-writer Robin Campillo (Eastern Boys) skillfully uses Act Up’s regular meetings to bring us up to speed on procedures and strategies. Through the group’s infighting and organized protests, the film speaks to the often fragile power of activism, especially when some of the activists are dying.
The confusion caused by the AIDS epidemic is heavy in the air, and Campillo effectively pairs it with the desperation of those most personally effected, eventually settling on two in particular.
Sean (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) is HIV-positive and a veteran Act Up member, full of a passion that draws in the shy newcomer Nathan (Arnaud Valois). As the two draw closer, Campillo narrows his focus to the touching, slice-of-life glimpses that lie at the very heart of the cause.
BPM builds an earnest base through faithfully re-creating an era while reinforcing that era’s continued relevance to the present. But the film reveals its purpose through the smaller moments that inspire, reminding us of the courage needed to take a stand, and just what’s at stake if we don’t.
Scrape it Off your Shoes
Sweet Virginia
by Hope Madden
Which is a better death—a bullet, or a broken heart? Aah, the neo-noir, always trodding that lonesome, masculine road.
Director Jamie Dagg’s latest effort, the brooding Sweet Virginia, contemplates many of the same bruised musings in many of the old, familiar ways. But between Benjamin and Paul China’s taut script and an ensemble’s powerful performances, you won’t mind.
Jon Bernthal leads the cast as Sam, former rodeo star and current proprietor of small town motel Sweet Virginia. It’s the kind of place where a drifter (Christopher Abbott) might stay, a high school kid (Odessa Young) might take a part-time job, a new widow (Rosemary DeWitt) might find comfort or a femme fatale (Imogen Poots) might find danger.
Bernthal charms playing against type and spilling over with tenderness. His every moment onscreen is abundant with warmth, a curious choice for a hillbilly noir’s male lead, but it pays off immeasurably.
Abbott is his fascinating opposite. Both dark and imposing, Abbott’s Elwood festers and stews, a pot of simmering violence waiting to bubble over. Like Bernthal, Abbott chooses an approach to his character that is nonstandard and, in both instances, carving such believable and unusual men in such a familiar environment gives Sweet Virginia more staying power than it probably deserves.
DeWitt reminds us again of her skill with a character, embracing Bernie’s brittleness and resilience to craft an authentic presence. More impressive, though, is Poots in an aching performance.
Daggs shows confidence in his script and his performers, siding with atmosphere over exposition and letting scenes breathe. His string-heavy score and fixation with reflections and the spare light cast by a lonely street lamp create a mood that is familiar, yes, but fitting and welcome.
This is Coen territory, and where the Brothers can always find texture in even the most threadbare of material, Daggs’s film feels superficial. It holds your attention and repays you for the effort with a series of finely drawn and beautifully delivered characters, not to mention a script that invests in clever callbacks as well as character.
It’s a gripping film that lacks substance, a well-told reiteration on the same theme.
I Don’t Want to Go Out – Week of November 28
This week it’s quality, not quantity. Three movies to pick through, and if box office numbers are to be believed, you probably haven’t seen any of them. Remedy that! And let us help.
Click the film title for the full review.
Logan Lucky
Super Dark Times
Woodshock
The Screening Room: Holidays, Lawyers and Billboards
Welcome to The Screening Room. This week we take a look at new theatrical releases Coco, Three Billboards Outside Billing, Missouri, Roman J. Israel, Esq., Novitiate and I Remember You. Plus, we’ll help you pick through new home entertainment.
Listen HERE.
Chilly Memories
I Remember You
by Hope Madden
“Children just don’t disappear in Iceland.”
This line, slyly delivered shortly into co-writer/director Óskar Thór Axelsson’s
film I Remember You, let’s you know that you are not really watching the movie you think you are.
Indeed, the Icelandic thriller weaves two separate stories together using this missing child as the thread.
As the line is delivered, Freyr (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson 0, a psychiatrist, is filling in for a medical doctor at the site of a suicide. An elderly woman hung herself in an old church, writing the word “unclean” on the wall and vandalizing the building before taking her own life.
Though he’s only a fill-in, Freyr begins working with local authorities on the case, which begins as an apparent suicide but quickly turns into something sinister, perhaps supernatural.
Meanwhile, the film spends time with a trio—a man, his wife and her friend—refinishing a would-be bed and breakfast on an isolated Icelandic island.
What does Freyr’s son Benni, who vanished three years ago, have to do with all of it?
To be honest, Axelsson has trouble really clarifying that point. It takes a medium (who also happens to be a lawyer for no reason I can discern) to begin to explain Benni’s connection, but the truth is that these three tales of human misery—the suicide, the DIY trio and the mourning father— are spinning disconnected around us and no amount of spiritual mumbo jumbo can truly bring them all together
Still, I Remember You offers plenty of fine performances. Though Freyr behaves in ways no psychiatrist would (having his ex-wife point that out does little to remedy the problem), Jóhannesson’s caring but distrusting turn gives the film a center of gravity.
The three fixer-uppers (Anna Gunndís Guðmundsdóttir, Thor Kristjansson and Ágústa Eva Erlendsdóttir) offer the most tender and believable performances, and the ghost story itself sits best with them on that secluded island.
There’s also an effectively foreboding score and the endlessly imposing if beautiful Icelandic backdrop. The biggest issue is that Axelsson, working with Ottó Geir Borg to adapt Yrsa Sigurðardóttir’s novel, can’t bring the most intriguing threads to the surface and tie them together.
It’s a movie that refuses to stay with you. The final image is provocative, but even that won’t help you remember I Remember You.
