Tag Archives: movie reviews

Desperately Seeking…

Hunter Gatherer

by Rachel Willis

Writer/director Joshua Locy has crafted a unique, poignant drama with Hunter Gatherer.

The film succeeds in part due to Andre Royo’s stunning portrayal of Ashley, a man recently released from prison who wants to re-establish himself in his former girlfriend’s life. Fully inhabiting his character, Royo has chemistry with everyone he shares the screen with. His chemistry with George Sample III is especially winning – Sample’s Jeremy/“Germs” as the straight man to Royo’s boisterous Ashley.

Sample brings a sweetness to his character – especially apparent in Jeremy’s interactions with Dr. Merton (Jeannetta Arnette), a doctor involved in the medical science research for which Jeremy is a paid volunteer.

The film’s subtle comedy is quirky, but it works well alongside the more dramatic moments. A scene in which Ashley searches for a backpack could be mundane, but is enlivened by the funny interaction with the store clerk. The comedy is necessary, as the film quietly moves toward darker moments.

Though Ashley appears the eternal optimist, it’s clear as the film moves forward he is struggling to find his way – a depression lurks underneath the surface. Ashley jokes to hide the pain he feels as he tries to find connections with the people in his life.

It would be remiss not to mention Kellee Stewart’s noteworthy performance as Nat, the woman with whom Ashley spends most of his time. Her character’s sensitivity is much needed in Ashley’s life, but he takes her for granted as he continues to focus on rekindling his relationship with his ex, Linda (Ashley Wilkerson).

As a directorial debut, Locy’s film is not without problems, but as a moving character study, this is a film that will stick with viewers for its touching take on love and friendship.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

Her

Elle

by Hope Madden

Elle is a flummoxing, aggravating, possibly masterful piece of filmmaking that will leave you reeling.

A misanthropic tale with a complex – even befuddling – moral core, the film explores the aftermath of a brutal rape.

It opens – before we even see an image – on the sounds of the assault. Michele Leblanc (a beyond-magnificent Isabelle Huppert), a prosperous video game developer, is being attacked by a masked figure who’s broken in.

No matter what you expect to happen next, the only thing you can predict is that clichés will be upended.

The storyline offers an almost endless look at complicated gender politics, systemic misogyny and rape culture. As Michele goads the mostly-male team working on the firm’s latest beta game that the tentacle penetration of a medieval maiden is not orgasmic enough, the film further complicates – well – everything.

Another element tangling the viewing experience is the fact that the creative team behind the film is entirely male: director Paul Verhoeven, novelist Philippe Djian, and screenwriter David Burke – who, interestingly, specializes in true-life horror films, often succeeding in humanizing the serial killer (Dahmer, Gacy).

To articulate the film’s frustrating turns would be to give away far more than is appropriate. Suffice it to say, the deeply flawed heroine makes baffling choices in a story chastising a culture that promotes rape while simultaneously encouraging rape fantasy.

Or does it?

Verhoeven’s resume may taint this perception. A provocateur always, his latest effort is his most dialed down and intelligent. And yet, this same director managed to turn a Holocaust interrogation into a scene from Flashdance in his 2016 film Black Book.

There is basically nothing he cannot reframe to objectify women – and yet, there is not one sexual act in this film that is played for titillation.

It is quite possible that Huppert is the entire reason Elle works – and God help me, it does.

Huppert understands this character’s damaging backstory – information allowed the audience in slow bursts – and captures the icy resilience it instilled. Her Michele is a restrained narcissist, a pragmatic survivor at odds with expectations – unlikeable but hard to root against. Above all things, she is unpredictable, but in Huppert’s hands, every decision – no matter how bizarre or offensive – feels utterly natural.

I cannot imagine this film surviving without Huppert in the lead role, but with her as the central conundrum in Verhoeven’s indecipherable set of intentions, Elle leaves a mark.

Verdict-3-5-Stars

A Poignant Beauty

A Monster Calls

by Hope Madden

There is something deeply brave in A Monster Calls, director JA Bayona’s cinematic presentation of Patrick Ness’s understandably praised young adult book.

A boy of 12 – no longer a child, not yet a man, as these tales often go – finds himself trapped in a period of tremendous discomfort. Not adolescence – although that is rarely fun for anyone. Never mind the bullies who routinely beat him, or the balance of his schoolmates who don’t notice him at all.

True, these are real problems that often litter angsty pre-teen dramas. But Bayona and Ness are prepared to more closely examine something far less frequently explored because it is untidy, uncomfortable and hard to look at.

Conor’s mom is going to die, and we spend 108 minutes – brilliant, honest and profoundly sad minutes – with him as he deals with that sad reality.

A monster (Liam Neeson) – in the form of a walking yew tree – visits Conor (Lewis MacDougall) every night and tells him stories. But like everything else about this film – and about life, for that matter – the stories are messy and frustrating. They do not fit the tidy, black-and-white fables Conor wants to hear.

“Your mind will believe comforting lies while also knowing the painful truths that make those lies necessary,” explains the monster.

Simply and beautifully, A Monster Calls articulates so many insights about adolescence and about grief.

What is so startling about A Monster Calls is now true it is to this particular time in life: the baffling behavior of adults, the suffocating aloneness, the disconcerting rage and guilt.

MacDougall steers clear of clichés with a courageous central performance. Though Sigourney Weaver’s accent is noticeably weak, supporting turns are uniformly strong.

Neeson – who narrates one of every three documentaries produced on earth – knows how to employ his voice alone to bring this thrilling beast to life.

But the real stars are Ness, who adapted his novel for the screen, and Bayona.

As he did with his breakout 2007 film The Orphanage, Bayona takes his time and lets his story take its own shape. Of course, part of that shape comes courtesy of a darkly imaginative animation department.

As splendid as the film is, minor faults stand out – the sound is sometimes garbled; sick-bed make up could be stronger; Weaver’s no Brit.

And like Spike Jonze’s underappreciated 2009 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are, A Monster Calls is in many ways a better fit for adults than for children. It is such a refreshing and intelligent departure from traditional family fare that it’s hard to even see it as part of the same category. This poignant beauty is in a class all its own.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvZrnt9b7vU

Cinema Killed the Video Star

Assassin’s Creed

by Hope Madden

What does it take to make a worthwhile movie based on a video game? Because it isn’t just talent – Assassin’s Creed proves that.

Like Warcraft, Creed pits a genuinely gifted director against all that terrible cinematic history – from 1992’s Super Mario Brothers through the Resident Evil series to this year’s Angry Birds Movie – and comes up lacking.

Australian director Justin Kurzel quietly proved his mettle with an astonishing true crime horror film in 2011 called Snowtown. Last year, he teamed up with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard – authentic talents if ever there were – for an imaginative and bloody take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

And now the three re-team, along with time-tested craftsmen Jeremy Irons, Brendan Gleeson and Charlotte Rampling, to adapt the popular time traveling video game.

Fassbender is Cal, a death row convict secretly saved by the Abstergo science lab. There, Dr. Sofia Rikkin (Cotillard) will use him to channel his ancestor Aguilar (also Fassbender) – member of a shadowy team battling the Knights Templar for the freedom of humanity.

So, we bounce back and forth in time between a modern day SciFi story and a dusty Inquisition-era adventure. Cal struggles against his newfound captivity and the after-effects of the experiments; Aguilar parkours his way through ancient Spain, trying to keep the Templar from the apple that started all our troubles back in Eden.

If the problem here is not talent, what, then?

As usual, it begins with the writing. Kurzel works with his Macbeth collaborator Michael Lesslie, as well as ne’er do wells Adam Cooper and Bill Collage (Allegiant, Exodus: Gods and Kings). They put together a story that’s as convoluted and bloated as it is superficial.

The cast gets little opportunity to do anything other than deliver dour lines with stone faces, each one developing less of a sense of character than what you would have actually found in the video game itself.

Kurzel’s no help, his mirthless presentation undermining thrills at every turn. When he isn’t bombarding the action with murky visual effects, he’s pulling the audience from the midst of a climactic battle and back into the lab to watch Cotillar and/or Irons look on with clinical interest.

Yawn.

Maybe it’s impossible to capture the visceral thrill of gaming within the comparatively passive experience of cinema. Maybe the rich backstories of modern video games are only rich if you’re used to video game narratives. Hopefully the movies will get it right at some point, or at least they’ll stop wasting such incredible talent on such forgettable nonsense.

Verdict-2-0-Stars

Post By Post

Fences

by Hope Madden

Denzel Washington is an Oscar contender in about one of every three films he makes – Fences is clearly one of those special performances.

As a director, he’s chosen to focus on the African American experience – August Wilson’s Pulitzer and Tony-winning stage play being the strongest effort yet.

Troy Maxson – a 1950s garbage man with a lot to say – is a character that feels custom-made for Washington. Larger than life, full of conflict and bullshit, bravado and stubbornness, Troy is a big presence. He fills up the screen, he fills up a room, but it is Viola Davis as his wife Rose who offers an emotional and gravitational center to the story.

It doesn’t take much effort to pitch Viola Davis a ball she can hit out of the park. Denzel does just that.

As Rose – the force that keeps the family functioning smoothly – Davis quietly astonishes. She delivers every scene – from silly reminiscences to life-altering decisions – with the easy grace of a profound talent.

Together she and Washington boast such chemistry, their glances, smiles and gestures articulating a well-worn, bone-deep love. Their time together on screen – which is a great chunk of the film – is an opportunity to watch two masters riff of each other for the benefit of character and audience alike. The result is in turns heart-warming and devastating.

The two leads benefit from the remarkable support of the ensemble – longtime character actor Stephen Henderson and Russell Hornsby, in particular.

True to the source material, Washington’s direction feels very stage-bound and theatrical. But in most respects, Washington’s delivery – faithful as it is to the idea of the stage from which it leapt – retains what is needed about the sense of confinement allowed by the few sets and locations.

This is a respectful and powerful tribute to the late Wilson, the playwright whose on-stage Fences saw its 2010 revival starring both Washington and Davis. There is no doubting this play’s bonafides, and Washington honors its intimacy and universal themes.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

Lost In Space

Passengers

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from romantic comedies, it’s this: as long as two people are attractive enough and have no entanglements – no jobs, no family, no social obligations to speak of – then only the most ludicrously contrived and easily surmountable of obstacles can keep them apart.

What if we applied this concept to SciFi? Well, if you can cast the two most bankable actors in Hollywood, you might be onto something.

That something is Passengers.

Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt are the pair of stupidly good looking actors playing Aurora and Jim, two of the 5,000 some odd hibernating passengers on a flight to Homestead II – a colony planet about 120 years from Earth. One convenience leads to another and they both wake up a lifetime too early.

To writer Jon Spaihts’s credit, his screenplay opens up many a moral conundrum. Between his existential questions and the film’s needed action sequences, Passengers feels like a good fit for director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters, The Imitation Game).

And yet, there is no easy out these two won’t take.

Big fans of Kubrick (clearly), Tyldum and Spaihts borrow not only from the obvious source of 2001, but even more liberally from The Shining – as well as one certain foreign film that will go unnamed for fear of spoiling the early plot twist.

Intriguing? Not for long.

Passengers also nabs bits and pieces from Gravity, Titanic and Alien (none of the good parts from Alien – although since Spaihts wrote Prometheus, maybe some of this should have been expected).

So it looks good. And the characters are likeable – troublingly likeable, which ends up becoming the anchor this film can’t escape. Potentially fascinating questions are raised, then abandoned, as if it’s too dangerous to risk upsetting some focus group who came to see love at light speed.

Pratt has no problem with likability, but he again finds it hard to veer from his comfort zone of Chris Pratt. This is even more evident next to Lawrence, who can always find small ways to craft a new character, even when hamstrung by a less than challenging script such as this.

You’ll get some how-do-you-do’s to sustainability and corporate greed, but by then the course for Passengers has long been set.

Look at these two! Don’t you like them together?

Verdict-2-5-Stars

American Gothic

The Eyes of My Mother

by Hope Madden

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.

His film is told in three parts. Part 1, with the stranger, sees the young Francisca (Olivia Bond) finding her role in her family. It changes after the stranger’s visit.

Parts 2 and 3 catch up with the family quite a few years later. The now-grown Francisca (Kika Magalhaes) takes some extreme measures to end her loneliness.

There is much power in dropping an audience into a lived-in world – the less we know, the better. Pesce understands this in the same way Tobe Hooper did with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and though The Eyes of My Mother lacks the cynicism, satire and power tools of Hooper’s farmhouse classic, it treads some similar ground.

Where Eyes differs most dramatically from other films is in its restraint. The action is mostly off-screen, leaving us with the sounds of horror and the quiet clean-up of its aftermath to tell us more than we really want to know.

As retrained as it is, The Eyes of My Mother hardly lacks in sensual experience. Stunning, gorgeously lit frames are matched with garish sound editing.

Kuperstein’s cinematography is sometimes almost Malick-like. Pesce focuses that camera on nearly silent moments full of traumatic images. He creates dissonance between the peaceful, idyllic scenes and the pinpoint imagery, the horrifying sounds.

The quiet amplifies Francisca’s isolation. The sounds amplify something else entirely.

Though Eyes of My Mother is reminiscent of several Seventies horrors, its muted telling exposes a patience rarely found in the genre. Pesce repays you for your patience.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

Come Out at Night

Nocturnal Animals

by Hope Madden

Style, elegance and crippling loneliness – though Tom Ford’s two films seem to be wildly different beasts, the same solitude and heartbreak inform both.

Like George (Colin Firth) in Ford’s incandescent 2009 feature debut A Single Man, Susan (Amy Adams) is at a crossroads in life with a future that looks unbearably grim.

Nocturnal Animals follows present-day Susan, a successful gallery owner struggling to keep up appearances in her marriage and finances, who’s surprised to receive a manuscript written by her first husband, Edward. Alone in her austere LA home, she reads through the night.

We flash occasionally to the Susan of 20 years ago (also played by Adams), just settling into a nurturing romance with Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) – the sensitive writer dubbed “too weak” by Susan’s mother (played with bitter relish by Laura Linney).

But most of the film is dedicated to Edward’s novel, Nocturnal Animals.

Unlike the over-the-top style of the film’s “real world,” the novel-come-to-life has its own aesthetic – dusty, sunburnt and chaotic. As the novel’s hero Tony – also played by Gyllenhaal – drives through West Texas with his wife and daughter, he runs afoul of three not-so-good-old-boys.

Adams-lookalike Isla Fisher plays Tony’s wife, which hints at the themes driving the ex-husband’s work. The internal narrative plays like an arthouse twist on a traditional testosterone-laden revenge fable – and the film itself is about revenge, to a degree, just not the kind you might find in Charles Bronson’s Death Wish.

The world Ford creates inside the novel is its own surprising destination, playing with preconceived notions and haunting us with one startling image after another. The always wonderful Michael Shannon, along with a freakishly believable Aaron Taylor-Johnson, give the novel’s screen time a current of authenticity and terror.

Gyllenhaal and Adams – two of the strongest actors in film today – work wonders. Playing the same character caught twenty years apart, Adams reflects both the change the decades have left on Susan, as well as those elements of her personality that remain with her.

Gyllenhaal is likewise nuanced and powerful. While his two characters are separate entities, they are, in many respects, the same person. The strength across the film – and also its weakness – is the way the internal narrative informs and is informed by the real world of the characters.

The structure, the style, the sound – every aesthetic choice – is meticulous, but there’s a tidiness in the manufacturing of the movie that makes the way themes play out feel too orderly.

It’s a minor flaw, but it’s enough to keep Nocturnal Animals from reaching noir/pulp/arthouse mash-up heights of Blue Velvet or Drive. It’s not enough to keep it – particularly its many award-worthy performances – from being remembered at the end of the year, though.

Verdict-4-0-Stars

Beltway Badass

Miss Sloane

by Hope Madden

I’m curious. Is every film going to take on sharper, darker political meaning post-election? Because Miss Sloane definitely does.

First time screenwriter Jonathan Perera’s much-lauded screenplay documents Elizabeth Sloane, DC super-lobbyist. Driven and single-minded to a nearly sociopathic degree, Sloane finally finds a line she’s unwilling to cross when the gun lobby wants to hire her to make guns more appealing to women.

She abandons the big time firm that demands she rethink her gun-control stance and goes to work instead for the liberal opposition.

Though far from flawless, Miss Sloane has a lot to offer. Mainly, Jessica Chastain.

Her fierce performance and comfort with ambiguity come together in a turn that mesmerizes. This is an anti-hero, and Chastain gives her enough savvy, contempt, drive, self-loathing and vulnerability to make her fascinating. Not knowable, but forever provocative.

Though no other character in the film is nearly so fleshed out, a game supporting cast – including the welcome Michael Stuhlbarg and a pitch-perfect Mark Strong – help balance Chastain’s blistering presence.

Director John Madden – whose work tends toward the safer and tamer (Shakespeare in Love, Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) – here amplifies Chastain’s fiery delivery with frenetic camera movement and sudden close ups. He creates a pace that keeps attention, even when the screenplay begins to slog.

What’s exceptional about the film, aside from Chastain, is the way its core plotline and its greater themes work together. The us-versus-them battle, with each lobbyist one-upping the other in the most unconscionable (yet clever) ways, commands attention. But beneath all that Miss Sloane clarifies the way in which the American public is never privy to true information.

What we get, in its stead, is the narrative being pushed in increasingly obfuscated ways by different stakeholders.

The film builds to speechifying and heavy moralizing, often feeling too clever for its own good. It settles, while its titular firebrand would not. But before all the self-righteous Aaron Sorkinisms, Madden, Perera and Chastain get an awful lot right.

They push envelopes when it comes to a female anti-hero, answering only as many questions as necessary and leaving room for Chastain’s performance to fill in some gaps.

Together they also unleash an appropriately cynical view of a political system that is rotten.

Verdict-3-0-Stars

 

 

Apologize

Incarnate

by Hope Madden

Aaron Eckhart is a conundrum, isn’t he? He’s talented enough to land any indie gem, granite-jawed and handsome enough to elevate it to mass market appeal. Think Thank You for Smoking.

And yet, for every Rabbit Hole there’s an I, Frankenstein; for every In the Company of Men, an Incarnate.

His latest – his fourth of this calendar year – sees Eckhart as the wheelchair-bound, unshaven, grimacing Dr. Seth Ember. He’s damaged, damn it!

Don’t call him an exorcist. He doesn’t exorcise demons; he evicts supernatural parasites. He has an ability. You see, when he was young, he realized, “When I was asleep I could go into the minds of the possessed.”

How did he figure this out? How often did he get drowsy in the proximity of a possessed person?

No matter – can’t you see he’s damaged?!

When a liaison to the Vatican (Catalina Sandino Moreno) – don’t even get Dr. Seth started on the church! – lures him to a case of a possessed 11-year-old, it isn’t to save the boy. Oh no.

No?

No. It must have something to do with his damage. I’ll bet director Brad Peyton (that genius behind San Andreas) will soap-opera direct some weirdly stilted, flat and extreme-close-up-laden bit of ponderousness explaining the whole thing, but you will have lost the will to live before it’s all clarified.

There is one moment – not a scene, but a single moment – in this film where I believed Peyton might, maybe, possibly do something interesting.

Nope.

Worst thing about Incarnate? It’s not the made-for-SyFy-CGI. Not the superficial storyline, not the flatly uninspired direction. (Honestly, if Peyton had directed from inside a coma the film couldn’t have looked or felt more lifeless.)

It’s not the tedious ensemble performances, not the wildly predictable series of twists. It’s Eckhart. It’s as if he’s angry at us that he took this dog.

We didn’t make you do it, Aaron. We only sat through this festering corpse of a movie because you were in it.

I believe we’re owed an apology.

Verdict-1-0-Star

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUVwbhc0j18