If you’re looking for a quick Halloween costume for your kid and don’t have any skills, fling ‘em in the car and go see the Boxtrolls immediately. Even if you’ve achieved the Martha Stewart merit badge for craftiness, buckle them in the booster seat. This movie is adorable.
The town of Cheesebridge comes to life after curfew. The Boxtrolls, a group of cavorting wee beasties who wear boxes like turtle shells, roam the streets in search of mechanical doodads to drag back to their underground lair. These guys upsycle trash into musical instruments and fantastical inventions.
But they have a bad rep—accused of binging on babies, they are rounded up by a red-hatted crew whose leader, Archibald Snatcher (voiced by Ben Kingsley), hopes to be promoted to a white hat once he captures the last of the trolls.
The trolls are harboring a small boy they’ve dressed in an egg carton (Isaac Hempstead Wright). Raised to think he’s a troll, Eggs realizes he’s a boy when confronted by the daughter of the city’s big cheese and head white hat Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris). Together Eggs and Winnifred (Elle Fanning) quest to discover Eggs’s true identity and prove to the townsfolk who the real bad guys are.
The stop-motion animation from the creators of Coraline and ParaNorman is glorious and filled with bug-eating gross out humor and pratfalls that will delight the younger members of the audience. But there are enough cheese-based puns and ruminations on the nature of good and evil to please the adults.
Certain scenes might be a bit too scary for the very small.
Aussie filmmaker David Michod proves his mettle with his second effort, The Rover, releasing today for home viewing. A spare, brutal, deliberately paced dystopian adventure, the film marks another in a string of fine performances from Guy Pearce, and more interestingly, a worthwhile turn from Robert Pattinson. Michod knows how to get under your skin, how to make the desolate landscape work, and apparently, how to draw strong performances.
An excellent pairing would be Michod’s phenomenal first effort, Animal Kingdom. This 2010 export follows a newly orphaned teen welcomed into his estranged grandmother’s criminal family. Unsettlingly naturalistic, boasting exceptional performances all around – including the Oscar nominated Jacki Weaver – and impeccably written, it’s a gem worth seeking.
In 2010, I had the chance to interview writer/director Kevin Smith. The proposed subject was Smith’s SModcasts – comic podcasts co-hosted by Smith and his buddy Scott Mosier – but I had other ideas. I knew Smith, a filmmaker most known for his juvenile comedies, was putting the finishing touches on his first horror film, Red State, and I was giddy to find out more about that.
Smith told me, “For years I’ve called myself a filmmaker, but it’s not really true. Really I just make Kevin Smith Movies. I’m at that stage where I could make a Kevin Smith Movie with my eyes closed. Let me see if I can make another movie.”
Too few people saw Red State, a flawed but fascinating film that boasted an absolutely mesmerizing performance by Tarantino favorite Michael Parks, but Smith knew he had something great in this actor. Wisely, when the filmmaker returned to horror with this year’s Tusk, he did so with Parks in tow.
Though Tusk is a surreal, utterly bizarre horror comedy, it is without question Smith’s most personal work as a filmmaker. The film follows a podcaster (Justin Long) who travels to an isolated cabin in Canada to record conversations with a recluse (Parks). The podcaster hopes to bring a good story of a weirdo back for the next show, but this story proves a little too weird.
The basic idea, in fact, comes from one of Smith’s actual SModcasts. He found online a letter from a man seeking a lodger, and he and Mosier read it aloud and mocked the man and giggled – the general MO for the show. But somewhere in all that, Smith found the story of man losing his humanity.
Yes, Tusk is a comic riff on The Human Centipede. It’s also an insightful kind of stress dream, so close to home for Smith that, even with all its utter ludicrousness, it feels almost confessional.
Once again, the greatest strength in the film is a hypnotic performance by Parks as the old seafarer with nefarious motives. He’s magnificent, and Long’s work is strongest when the two share the screen.
Smith’s tone shifts wildly from absurd comedy to real terror, but given the film’s insane premise, the approach works because nothing is ever what you expect. Like Johnny Depp as a French Canadian Inspector Clouseau.
There is no film quite like Tusk, certainly not in Smith’s arsenal, which, I suppose, means this is not a Kevin Smith Movie. And yet, there’s more Smith in this film than in anything else he’s made.
You’ve probably seen it before: a broken man forced by circumstance to return to his family home and reconnect with the life he had before, somehow, it all went awry. But you probably haven’t seen it with such enormous fake tits.
This Is Where I Leave You is as familiar and unchallenging as a bowl of chicken soup. Shawn Levy’s adaptation of the book by Jonathan Tropper places the spotlight on Jason Bateman’s Judd, a sad-sack who actually sits down for a breath and watches while his boss bones his wife on their marital bed. While couch surfing and growing out his obligatory beard of depression, he receives a phone call from his sister (Tina Fey) informing him that his father has died. His last request: that the kids sit shiva together for a week.
The family gathers with attendant significant others and kidlets and are encouraged by their oversharing, breast-enhanced mom (Jane Fonda), to let it all hang out and really get into the grief.
Like the bowl of chicken soup, you know exactly what you are going to get when you start. Family brawls. Run-ins with old loves. Finding dad’s secret stash of weed… You can ease into a nap worry-free. You’ll be able to figure out what happened before you dig the sleep crusties out of your eye creases.
The ensemble cast works to provide a little spice to an otherwise bland dramedy. Adam Driver (Girls) is great as the black sheep baby of the family and steals every scene that he’s in with a manic, fresh delivery and moments of puppy dog eyed sincerity. His interactions with the rabbi (Ben Schwartz from Parks and Recreation) who cannot shake his childhood nickname, Boner, are particularly delightful. But the talent mostly drowns in the soppy sentimentality and same-ness of it all.
I’m not saying the flick isn’t worth seeing. Just watch it at home nestled in a blanket, coughing out a lung with a bottle of NyQuil at your side.
Director Terry Gilliam questions the meaning of life in The Zero Theorem, but instead of exploring the idea via Monty Python antics, Gilliam approaches the topic in a more Brazil-like satire.
Imagine Times Square having a three-way with CNN’s scrolling text and Facebook ads– a colorful chaos of noise, both aural and visual.
This is the world inhabited by Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a monkish data cruncher who speaks in the royal we. Qohen longs to escape the life of a cubical drone and work from home. He doesn’t want to miss a call-back. Years ago, someone cold called him dangling his personal reason for being. But Qohen dropped the receiver and the line disconnected.
Management, embodied by Matt Damon, grants his request, putting him on a notorious burnout project, the Zero Theorem, its goal to prove that everything adds up to nothing. If Qohen’s project succeeds, Management will help him get his call.
Sidetracked by Management’s constant, unrealistic deadlines, his former supervisor-turned-computer-repairman (David Thewlis), a company-provided AI shrink (Tilda Swinton), Management’s teenage hacker son Bob (Lucas Hedges), and a manic pixie call girl (Mélanie Thierry), Qohen is wooed back toward the little pleasures he’d abandoned.
Zero Theorem is an often beautiful, somewhat heavy-handed film that explores the extremes of hedonism and asceticism, the consequences of living among scads of information and the distractions of virtual reality. Studded with allegory and stuffed with zany Gilliam details that can only be fully explored in subsequent viewings (including a delightful ad for the Church of Batman the Redeemer), it derails a bit in the last act, but fans of Gilliam’s dystopian flicks will find much to enjoy.
Errol Flynn was a bad dude, but charming and rich enough to get away with it. Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s accounting of his scandalous last days, The Last of Robin Hood, sidesteps the tawdry details and tries to shed some light on how it all could have happened.
For the unenlightened, Flynn is best known for his Hollywood swashbuckling films of the 30s and 40s and just slightly less known for his wicked ways. He died at 50 in the arms of his teenaged lover, whose mother was later charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor for her involvement in the affair.
The film avoids lurid antics, mercifully, and treats young Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning) with respect throughout. Fanning’s performance is an understated wonder, animating a person who accepted people at face value, refused to be a victim, and managed to respect herself though everyone else saw her as a lovable pawn.
Equally wonderful is Susan Sarandon as Beverly’s scheming mother. Layered with desperation, naiveté, cynicism and star-struck gullibility, the performance reminds you of just how talented the veteran is.
As Flynn, Kevin Kline looks surprisingly like the old swashbuckler, but his performance skirts caricature. Worse still, though he certainly manages to showcase Flynn’s charisma and oily charm, he isn’t able to find the ugliness inside. His performance is too generous, which is the film’s greatest weakness. Glazer and Westmoreland seem to hold all involved relatively blameless. For that reason, their film has no teeth.
It’s a curious approach, partly because of the way Lolita – both the book and Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 film – is worked into the narrative. It would appear that Flynn recognized the similarities between his situation and that of Nabakov’s lead. While many would use this fact as an avenue into Flynn’s twisted perception, the film and Kline convey it as almost sadly self congratulatory. The tone is of melancholy rather than repulsion, or even indignation.
Perhaps the filmmakers saw no real villainy in a story where a mother passes her 15-year-old daughter off as 18 and a lecherous old perv takes advantage of the situation. There are certainly those who believe Nabakov dismissed the repugnant behavior of his character. But perhaps Nabakov had faith in a reader who could recognize an unreliable narrator, and he used that device to explore the mind of a predator who can barely recognize his own criminality.
The Last of Robin Hood could have benefitted from the same wry, weary wisdom. Instead, it chooses to point its finger nowhere in particular, leaving us with a villainless tale of a by-gone era where things were less wholesome than we’d imagined.
If you somehow missed one of Marvel’s very best superhero flicks, Captain America: The Winter Soldier is available today. Check it out. But for the rest of you, there’s a little seen movie from Netherlands we’d like to recommend.
Borgman updates a Dutch folktale, pitting a vagrant against a wealthy couple in a trippy, mind bending nightmare. Remarkable cinematography, assured direction and wonderful performances help make this frightening trip truly compelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bg65TbeHtCE
Make it a mysterious stranger double feature by taking in the woefully underseen Stoker. Chan-wook Park’s first English language feature follows a wealthy family rocked by the patriarch’s sudden death, the surprising presence of his brother, and his adolescent daughter’s truly unusual behavior. It’s a fascinating twist on Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, marked by subtly eerie performances, gorgeous cinematography and strange turns.
What has director David Lynch been up to, you ask? That bastion of all things weird and wonderful nabbed his 4th Oscar nomination for 2001’s dreamy Mulholland Drive, then kind of disappeared.
Well, weep not for David Lynch, for he is living the dream – my dream, anyway. He’s been hanging out with Duran Duran, piecing together a documentary of the best looking boy band ever. Their collaboration, Duran Duran: Unstaged, is a concert doc like no other.
Lynch filmed the band’s live show at the Mayan Theater in Los Angeles, a gig that kicked off their world tour in support of the 2010 album All You Need is Now. Now years removed from the arena tours of the Eighties, the band put together an intimate, strong stage set for this club tour. Lynch later retooled the footage for the theatrical release.
The gig itself – quite unlike the tour that followed – relies heavily on songs from the current album at the expense of many of the band’s sing-a-long Eighties tunes. But frontman Simon LeBon is in excellent voice, and luckily, All You Need is Now is quite a strong effort. While the group does launch into the biggest fan favorites – Rio, Hungry Like the Wolf, Girls on Film – they also fall back on some album cut gems that should thrill longtime Durannies. They also pull out their more underappreciated later hits Come Undone and Ordinary World to beautiful effect.
The event boasts a handful of cool guest appearances, including My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way on a fun version of Planet Earth, and Gossip’s Beth Ditto, with a lively duet for Notorious. These join four of the band’s original five: LeBon, Nick Rhodes on keyboards, Roger Taylor on drums, and John Taylor on bass.
But the 5th member of the band is clearly Lynch.
Directing a concert documentary can be a thankless, mostly anonymous task. Did you really notice Hal Ashby’s presence during the Stones’ doc Let’s Spend the Night Together? Did even the great Scorsese leave his fingerprints on the same band’s 2008 doc Shine the Light?
Well, you notice Lynch. The auteur overlays tangentially connected images on concert footage in a fashion truly his own. The images range from the absolutely literal to the wildly random, either way lending an air of absurdity to the otherwise straightforward set.
In a press release, Simon LeBon says, “I was particularly delighted with the sausage barbeque sequence during the song Come Undone – something I would never have expected but it works superbly!”
A dreamlike dissonance marks Lynch’s entire film career (with the possible exception of his utterly lovely ’99 effort The Straight Story), and that’s certainly at work here. Sometimes it seems to gel, other times it stands out as almost needlessly bizarre and silly, but who’s to question the inspiration of David Lynch?
It’s certainly a different way to appreciate Duran Duran.
The Drop opens this week, another of Dennis Lehane’s gritty crime dramas, this time starring the great Tom Hardy alongside the late, great James Gandolfini in his final performance. We’re eager to screen the film about a botched heist later this week, and thought we’d prepare for it with some of cinema’s best robberies gone wrong.
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sydney Lumet’s excellent Seventies true tale covers what may be the oddest bank hold up ever. Al Pacino’s Sonny and his skuzzy friend Sal (John Cazale) hold up the Chase Manhattan in Brooklyn to pay for Sonny’s boyfriend’s sex reassignment surgery. Excellent writing feeds wonderful performances all around, but be sure to check out the documentary The Dog, proving that the real perpetrator, John Wojtowicz, exceeds all weirdness expectations.
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007)
Thirtysome years later, Lumet returned to the scene of a crime with his magnificent final effort. Family dysfunction has never looked quite like this, when two brothers (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke) decide to rob their parents’ jewelry store. Surprising, devastating, and full of exceptional performances, it was a fitting send off for one of America’s finest filmmakers.
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
In 1992, Quentin Tarantino announced his presence with authority. His directorial debut takes us inside a botched jewel heist, introducing us to a modern filmmaking master, and taking classic rock radio to new and creepy heights.
The Town (2010)
Ben Affleck stars and directs this Boston crime tale about a thief who falls for a bank teller. He shows the ability to orchestrate ensemble drama and action that would mark his Oscar winning Argo, and draws truly excellent performances from Jon Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Chris Cooper, the great Pete Postlethwaite, and even Blake Lively. Who knew?
Animal Kingdom (2010)
This Aussie export of the same year follows a newly orphaned teen welcomed into his estranged grandmother’s criminal family. Unsettlingly naturalistic, boasting exceptional performances all around – including the Oscar nominated Jacki Weaver – and impeccably written, it’s a gem worth seeking.
Football, honey crisp apples, leaves to rake – you know what that means? It means the cinema will turn from alien invasion bombast to thought provoking, character driven awards bait. Hooray! Here are the ten fall movies we are most excited to spend time with between now and the holidays.
10. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1
Sure, it’s another blockbuster and hardly the kind of adult, autumnal fare you’ll find on the balance of the list, but we don’t care. We’re as geeked for Katniss’s next step as any 13-year-old girl. Director Francis Lawrence took the franchise into ingenious new territory with Catching Fire and we are eager to see where JLaw and team can take the political maneuvering next.
9. Fury (October 17)
Brad Pitt returns to Nazi Germany, but don’t expect the dark comedy of Inglourious Basterds. Writer/director David Ayer (End of Watch) is at the helm of what is being described as a brutal but honest look at WWII.
8. Whiplash (October 23)
The always spectacular J. K. Simmons and talented, young Miles Teller join forces in a cymbal-crashing boot camp for musicians. Buzz for this one is great, and we love Simmons, so we’re ready to rock and roll.
7. Men, Women & Children (October 17)
Jason Reitman made his first major misstep this year with the syrupy mess Labor Day, but we are optimistic he will recover with this ensemble drama about how technology is changing our personal landscapes. Co-writer Erin Cressida Wilson (Secretary) should help.
6. Rosewater (November 7)
Jon Stewart writes and directs this true story of a journalist imprisoned and tortured for simply reporting on Iran’s 2009 election. Clearly a topic close to Stewart’s heart, we are eager to see if he can do at the helm of a film what he’s managed to do with his comedy show: articulate the people’s need for unencumbered journalism.
5. Birdman (October 17)
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu takes a break from heady, heartbreaking drama (Biutiful, 21 Grams, Amores Perros) for something lighter and a bit more meta. Onetime Batman, current struggling actor Michael Keaton plays a struggling actor once known for his role as a superhero. We are in.
4. Foxcatcher (November 14)
Steve Carell has gotten notice for an unforgettable and surprising turn in a true crime drama co-starring Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. Director Bennett Miller (Capote, Moneyball) has done no wrong so far in his career, and we are intrigued to see where he takes us next.
3. Interstellar (November 9)
Because Christopher Nolan. If he’s directing, we’re in line for tickets, so this space exploration/wormhole business starring Matthew McConaughey (hey, he’s been a good bet lately, eh?) sounds like time well spent.
2. Gone Girl (October 3)
Who else would we line up to see no matter what? David Fincher, who helms this gritty crime drama about a missing wife and a husband who looks guilty. Ben Affleck stars, which is not always his strongest suit, but we’re betting on Fincher.
1. St. Vincent
Bill Murray plays the aging, boozy whoremonger next door who lends a hand to the neighborhood’s new single mom (Melissa McCarthy) in need of a babysitter. What could go wrong? We will be on hand to find out.
