Tag Archives: movie reviews
Speak No Evil
Resistance
by George Wolf
In the opening minutes of Resistance, a young Jewish girl asks her parents, “Why do they hate us?”
Then, just before the end credits, stark onscreen text reminds us of the magnitude of Nazi atrocities, and just how much of that was inflicted on children.
And during the nearly two hours in between, writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz tells an incredible story you probably don’t know about an iconic figure you most likely do.
Legendary mime Marcel Marceau was born Marcel Mangel. And while taking a stage name is hardly unusual, Mangel’s motivation was: joining the French Resistance and helping save thousands of children orphaned by the Nazis in WWII.
Jesse Eisenberg stars as Marceau, and it’s a perfect vehicle for his offbeat strengths as an actor. Though Eisenberg’s French accent is shaky (he’s not alone), he nails the layers most important to making Marceau’s astonishing arc an authentic one.
Early on, Marceau is afraid of his father’s reaction to his ambitions on the stage, and seems most interested in entertaining children as a way to impress the lovely Emma (Clemence Poesy).
Eisenberg may never be an action hero, but his delicate, appeasing nature is a valuable tool for Jakubowicz to subtly reinforce how the Nazi threat was (and still is?) underestimated. Marceau’s hardening edges are never overplayed by Eisenberg, just as Jakubowicz wisely steers clear of any overt, Life is Beautiful sentimentality between Marceau and the children he is trying to shield from the horrors of war.
Indeed, the film is at its most gripping when juxtaposing the touching and the profane. Gentle moments appear and are quickly countered, never betraying the ever-present threat often personified by the sadistic Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighofer). Marceau and Barbie’s face to face meeting – historically accurate or not – is played with fine cinematic tension, demonstrating a passion and assured vision often lacking in Jakubowicz’s 2016 feature debut, Hands of Stone.
Marceau ultimately gave his first major performance in front of thousands of WWII troops. And although framing his story around a speech from General George S. Patton (Ed Harris) seems a bit misplaced, it also feels born of the sincere desire to convey the depth of Marceau’s heroism.
Resistance is a film built with passion and sincerity, employing a story that will be new for most of us to deliver a timely reminder meant for all of us.
I Am Luke’s Broken Heart
Daniel Isn’t Real
by Hope Madden
Director Adam Egypt Mortimer’s stylish image of mental illness takes a kind of demonic Fight Club angle, hits some mildly homoerotic notes (like Fight Club didn’t?), and offers a quick and absorbing- if hardly new- horror show.
Co-writing with Brian DeLeeuw an adaptation of DeLeeuw’s novel In This Way I Was Saved, Mortimer drops us mid-mom scream into an average afternoon in the life of poor little Luke (Griffin Robert Faulkner, painfully adorable).
As Luke wanders away from home to avoid his mother’s psychotic episode, he witnesses the aftermath of a gruesome murder, but finds a new friend: Daniel.
Quickly enough, Daniel is helping Luke cope with his personal trauma, taking his mind off his problems, and maybe encouraging some truly evil behavior.
From here Mortimer directs us to an effectively creepy doll house (such a great prop in nearly any terrifying film or terrifying child’s bedroom), which will become (as it does in Hereditary and The Lodge) a fine symbol for the madness of the mind.
Mortimer’s film looks great and benefits from a trio of strong performances.
Mary Stuart Masterson, playing Luke’s paranoid schizophrenic mother, gives a brave and believable performance in a role that can easily be overdone.
More importantly, Mortimer’s besties/worsties Luke and Daniel (Miles Robbins and Patrick Schwarzenegger, respectively) create complete characters and offer an uneasy chemistry that keeps the film intriguing.
As Luke’s life spins inevitably out of control, Daniel’s clothing takes on a more and more Tyler Durden style, and I can get behind that. And a certain point near Act 3, Daniel Isn’t Real takes a weird and welcome Clive Barker turn, which is when elements stop being so stylishly predictable and become sloppily fascinating.
The unfortunate Magical Negro trope that will not die surfaces here. It doesn’t entirely sink the film, but it does its damndest to do just that.
Even so, Daniel Isn’t Real is an Olympic-sized leap forward from Mortimer’s previous feature, Some Kind of Hate, the director here showcasing an unpredicted visual flair and storytelling finesse. Though his film treads some well-worn ground, the way Mortimer and team balance the supernatural and psychological push and pull creates an unnerving atmosphere.
Screening Room: What’s New and Good to Watch at Home?
Zombie Eat World
The Night Eats the World
by Hope Madden
People like to make lists. For some people, it’s a bucket list. Some like to keep track of the celebrities they are allowed to sleep with if the opportunity arises. Not me.
Years ago I put together my zombie survival team. And though I know plenty of people with varied and worthy skills, making my team mainly came down to two things. Are you smart? Are you quiet? Because it is the introverts of the world who will survive the zombie apocalypse.
Director Dominique Rocher’s unusually titled The Night Eats the World understands this.
Sam (Anders Danielsen Lie) reluctantly stops by his ex’s party to collect his things. It is a loud, raucous event and Sam is in no mood. He stands moping alone until finally he wanders into a quiet back office, locks the door to the partygoers and waits.
By morning, Sam may be the only living human left in Paris.
The majority of the film quietly follows Sam through the apartment building as he fortifies his position, spends his time, survives. It’s a pleasantly pragmatic approach to the zombie film, although it asks many of the same questions Romero asked in Dawn of the Dead.
In fact, TNETW sometimes bears an amazing resemblance to the underseen German zombie flick Rammbock: Berlin Undead. (It’s great. You should see it.)
There’s a lot going on here that’s fresh, though. Rarely is a zombie film this introspective or a horror hero this thoughtful. More than that, though, Rocher’s horror is a meditation on loneliness.
Not only is that an unusual topic for horror, it’s delivered with the kind of touching restraint that’s almost inconceivable in this genre.
Danielsen Lie, in what nearly amounts to a one-man-show, never lets you down and never feels showy. Sam is a man who is maybe too at home with the situation in a film that quietly asks, just what has to happen before a true introvert longs for human companionship?
That’s why they’ll outlast us. It’ll just be a few dozen socially uncomfortable loners skilled at closing themselves off from the chaos around them. Plus Keith Richards.
Blood on the Tracks
Saint Frances
by Hope Madden
Candid. Messy. Bloody, even. There are a number of adjectives you could use to describe Saint Francis, an indie dramedy from director Alex Thompson and writer/star Kelly O’Sullivan. Precious is not one of them.
That fact in itself is maybe victory enough given that the film concerns a lost, underachieving millennial (“I’m on the cusp!”) who finds her way with the help of the 5-year-old (Ramona Edith Williams, unreasonably cute) she nannies over the summer.
That could have been a recipe for precocious, heartstring-tugging disaster. I can say without reservation that Saint Frances is not that. There’s definitely too much menstrual blood and abortion humor, first of all.
For the bulk of the film, Bridget (O’Sullivan) is a terrible person, a selfish fuck up, which makes Saint Frances groundbreaking in its own way. It’s so uncommon, the Peter Pan effect as embodied by a female. They always make us Wendys.
O’Sullivan’s version is never the uproarious riot of Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck, or the introspective yet raucous Obvious Child. And while comparisons to those two crowd pleasing genre busters are clear, Saint Frances really is its own beast—one that abandons formula in favor of often unpleasant reality and a sometimes delightful mean streak.
O’Sullivan—both as writer and as lead—brings a kind of deadpan wisdom to the already well-worn idea of directionless adult forced to face adulthood by a spunky youngster. Part of the film’s glory is its very untidiness, both structural and visual.
Thompson, showing solid instincts with his feature debut, does cave once or twice to overt convention (let’s call it “the juice box montage”), and the unstoppably supportive Jace (Max Lipchitz) is less a character than he is a vehicle for growth.
Still, for raw, sloppy honesty, you’re not likely to find a better candidate.
I’m (Not) a Believer
I Still Believe
by Cat McAlpine
Jeremy Camp is a good big brother, loves to play guitar, and is headed to college. His first day on campus he meets one of his Christian rock idols and locks eyes with a girl who captures his undivided attention. We follow his resulting journey through young adulthood in I Still Believe.
There are two important things you should know going into this film. First, it is based on a true story. And second, the final screen shows a hotline that you can call if you have questions about your faith or God. Being tied to a specific sequence of events and having a specific agenda limit the story, and ultimately deny it any true depth.
We never get to truly know the characters in I Still Believe. What they like, what they want, what their hopes or dreams are… When asked what she wants to do when she graduates college, Melissa (Britt Robertson) responds “I don’t know…everything?” We never learn what anyone, even Jeremy, has enrolled in school to do.
Jeremy never seems to make any other friends at college, and instead aggressively pursues Melissa in a way so straightforward that even the charming KJ Apa (Riverdale, The Last Summer) can’t hide all the red flags. Every character is wholly defined by their relationship with God. Either they believe, and events continue to happen to them, or they feel doubt, in which case they break some things in emotional torment before events continue to happen to them. The narrative plays out like a toddler retelling a long story “And then, and then, and then, and then….”
The original story is heartbreaking, filled with devotion to your loved ones, the power of faith, and how to continue being the person you want to be when your questions go unanswered. But that story never has an opportunity to develop because so little of this film focuses on character or relationship. And then, and then, and then…
The film is shot in the the visual style of other Hallmark and faith-inspo productions, all over-saturated golden hour shots. The style is very reminiscent of the “A Dog’s…” series, and coincidentally, Apa and Robertson last acted opposite each other in A Dog’s Purpose.
While Apa and Robertson are both masters of the recent “realism” acting style that comes with pauses, repeats, and “ums,” neither has an opportunity to deliver a great performance because of how hard they have to work against the script. Robertson most excels when she gets to interact with more emotional content and her turns in faith and fear anchor the middle third of the film.
Directed by Andrew Erwin and Jon Erwin (The Erwin Brothers), there’s little offensive about the visual style of the film but also very little inspired. The strangest choice was to not update the film to modern time, and instead keep it in what looks like the early 2000s. The time and setting is never explained. I assume the setting is based on the real events, but the story doesn’t need a time-preserved setting, and the presence of flip phones and landlines pull you out of the viewing experience immediately.
I Still Believe is a guilty pleasure film for a specific audience. It doesn’t require any thought, it takes limp stabs at being profound, it sets up easy moments to sneak in a cry, and its real-life roots will make believers feel vaguely inspired. But, you’d be hard pressed to find any critical merit in the production.
Honorable Mentions
The Traitor (Il traditore)
by George Wolf
If you think Scorsese set the bar for three and a half hour mob epics, well, you may have a point.
But, although it clocks in at one hour south of The Irishman, Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor also uses one man’s true-life experience to frame an expansive reflection on a life in the mob.
Tommaso Buscetta, the youngest of 17 children in a poverty-stricken Sicilian family, found his ticket out through organized crime. Rising to the rank of “Don Masino” in Sicily’s Costa Nostra, he eventually lost many family members and allies to the mafia wars. Disillusioned, Buscetta became one of the very first to break the mob’s strict code of silence and turn “pentito,” or informant.
Pierfrancisco Favino, who probably gets women pregnant just from introducing himself, is tremendous as the “Boss of Two Worlds.” Unlike DeNiro’s Frank Sheeran, Buscetta is looking back with defiance, secure in his standing as the only man “honorable” enough to call out the less honorable. Favino brings a quiet intensity to this inner strength that comes to define Buscetta after personal loss drives him to the depths of despair.
The moral complexities of honor among killers is Bellocchio’s strongest play. Early in the film, he sets the stakes effectively through sustained tension and stylish violence (a set piece inside a window factory is especially impressive) offset with familiar loyalties. Bellocchio invites our sympathies for a career criminal, and Favino rewards them.
But once Buscetta starts singing to anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), the film gets bogged down in the minutiae of courtroom testimony. Though American audiences may be intrigued by some of the differences in Italian trial procedure, Bellocchio’s prolonged attention to these details makes us long for the pace of the film’s first two acts.
The scope of Buscetta’s story is grand and Bellocchio’s ambitions noteworthy, but even at 145 minutes the film ultimately feels like a finely-crafted overview. Favino has the goods to give us the The Traitor‘s soul, but not the freedom.
Maybe another hour or so would have done it.
Beastly Children
Wendy
by Hope Madden
Earlier this year, Oz Perkins retold the old Grimm Fairy Tale Hansel and Gretel from the perspective of the newly adolescent sister. It was a fascinating way to reexamine folklore and coming of age.
Likewise, director and co-writer Ben Zeitlin reimagines the old Peter Pan tale, this time through the eyes of Wendy.
It’s not entirely clear why, though.
Zeitlin and writing partner Eliza Zeitlin impressed—more than impressed, they flabbergasted—with their near-perfect 2012 feature debut, Beasts of the Southern Wild. Their sophomore effort delivers a similarly loose narrative structure, another game cast of mostly children and unknowns, and gorgeous visuals that emphasize the chaotic and restless beauty of childhood.
Wendy opens strong. Zeitlin’s impressionistic camera work evokes an intimate if raucous scene of a toddler (Wendy) charming patrons on her mother’s hip at a dodgy diner abutting a train station.
It sets up a thrilling first act that unfortunately settles into thematic confusion once we get to Neverland.
Not that J. M. Barrie’s original text was entirely rational. The underlying theme—being lost without maternal love—remains intact, but for the Zeitlins, that theme takes on an ecological nature. Mother, in the form of a giant glowing fish, represents Mother Nature (and also Tinker Bell—stay with me).
Who would want to grow up when grownups do thoughtless, destructive things that damage, perhaps kill, the mother that sustains them? It’s a heavy-handed idea, but Zeitlin’s clearly Malick-esque style of evocative visuals held together by whispered narration keeps it from feeling like a sermon.
Still, it doesn’t entirely work.
If Tinker Bell/Giant Fish is the mother character, where does that leave Wendy?
What a fascinating question! I wish the Zeitlins had a better answer.
The Zeitlins don’t seem to know. The Peter character, played with mischievous energy by Yashua Mack, is also depicted without real clarity, but that’s OK. Peter is supposed to be an enigma, his relationship with Wendy (Devin France) is meant to provide the backbone that holds the adventure together. But they don’t have much of a relationship.
Not much in the film actually seems to have a clear relationship to anything else, which makes for frustrating, often tedious viewing. Worse still, the Zeitlins’ voice over narration, clearly meant to hold the pieces together and provide some forward momentum, echoes with world-weary wisdom and regret that sounds forced and inauthentic in little Devin France’s voice.
Rather than a reimagining of Peter Pan, Wendy feels like a misguided reworking of Beasts of the Southern Wild, which did not need tampering of any kind.
Money, It’s a Hit
Greed
by George Wolf
Greed is a film with a big, timely target and a handful of well-groomed darts. But as much as it consistently lands shots on the board, it never gets close to the bullseye.
To be fair, landing a knockout satire is no easy trick. That writer/director Michael Winterbottom can’t manage it is one problem, but you’re never quite sure he’s fully committed to trying, which is the bigger issue.
He did land a stellar cast, starting right at the top with Steve Coogan, who plays retail fashion mogul Sir Richard McCreadie to pompous perfection.
McCreadie, Britain’s “Monet of Money,” is ready to celebrate his 60th birthday with a huge, Gladiator-themed blowout on the coast of Greece, complete with a recreated Coliseum, a live lion, and entertainment from Elton and Coldplay.
Those Syrian refugees camped out on the public beach, though? Yeah, they’re ruining the view, so they’ll have to go.
While McCreadie’s mother (Shirley Henderson), his ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher), their son (Hugo‘s Asa Butterfield, all grown up!) and various employees and hangers-on dodge his frequent outbursts, official biographer Nick (David Mitchell) is trying to make sense of it all.
Winterbottom, writer and/or director for all of Coogan’s The Trip franchise, uses Nick’s fact-finding as the catalyst for plenty of time hopping. From a ruthless young McCreadie (Jamie Blackley) building his empire to a well-scripted episode of “reality” television filming alongside the party planning, Greed unveils a surface-level social consciousness in search of a clear direction.
There’s absurdity, clever amusements and some outright laughs (especially McCreadie haggling over the prices for big-ticket entertainers and a financial writer explaining the illusion of money), but Winterbottom doesn’t seem to trust himself – or his audience- enough to get off the pulpit and commit to satire.
The unveiling of shady business deals, the folly of the “self-made man” and the distance between wealth and consequence is all valid terrain, but Greed is content with paths less challenging and more obvious.
And on one occasion, the film’s timing works against it, because as great as this cast is at dry humor and glossy obnoxiousness, hearing someone label McCreadie a “parasite” only underscores how vital this class warfare theme can be with more inspired execution.
