Damn, a lot of stuff is coming out for home enjoyment this week – much of it is not at all enjoyable, though, so there’s that. What should you watch? Let us help you make that call.
Click the title for a full review. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.
Click HERE to joins us in the Screening Room to break down Atomic Blonde, A Ghost Story, The Emoji Movie, It Stains the Sands Red and what’s new in home entertainment!
Click HERE and join us in The Screening Room this week to break down Dunkirk, Valerian, Fist Kill, The Little Hours, Killing Ground and what’s new on home video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3uNlE7ejO0
by Hope Madden
There is a pleasantly madcap quality to the environments filmmaker Luc Besson creates. His best work combines that untamed world – whether earthbound and criminal or colorfully intergalactic – with unusual characters performing slickly choreographed action.
His lesser efforts don’t. On that note, meet Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Based on France’s beloved comic series about a pair of time and space-hopping agents, Besson’s film looks pretty cool.
Not as good as Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, or Matt Reeves’s War for the Planet of the Apes, or Spider-Man: Homecoming or Baby Driver or about one out of every three movies released so far this summer.
At this point in cinematic history, you have to bring more to the screen than visual flair.
What else you got, Luc?
Because it’s not acting.
Dane DeHaan plays Valerian. Poorly. Wildly miscast as the scoundrel flyboy who might find love with his partner, the often reliable actor cannot make his way through Besson’s stilted, lifeless banter.
DeHaan has a better time of it than Cara Delevingne as Valerian’s strong-willed partner Laureline – perhaps because Delevingne has no discernible talent.
Still, the writing is awful and she’d be in a tough spot even if she did have talent. Just ask Clive Owen. He has talent galore and even he embarrasses himself with this garbage.
To be fair, Valerian is basically a kids’ movie. Except for that extended and utterly needless stripper sequence showcasing Rihanna. But if you cut that out (if only we could – along with at least another 15 minutes, because damn this movie is long!), then you basically have a kids’ movie.
Not a good one. So just don’t set your standards too high. Go in looking for an overly long, addle-brained extra-terrestrial romp that looks great and you’ll be fine.
Unless you really want quality acting. Valerian an’t help you there.
by Hope Madden
Christopher Nolan, one of the biggest imaginations in film, takes on a WWII epic – the truly amazing evacuation of 400,000 British troops from certain death on the beaches of Dunkirk, France.
Nolan = epic, yes. His career is marked by complicated ideas, phenomenal visual style and inventiveness, ever-increasing running times and head-trippery. So, if you’re prepared for a long, bombastic, serpentine, heady adventure, you are not prepared for Dunkirk.
Though the word epic still fits.
Nolan’s storytelling is simultaneously grand and intimate. To do the story justice, he approaches it from three different perspectives and creates, with a disjointed chronology, a lasting impression of the rescue that a more traditional structure might have missed.
The great Mark Rylance brings in the perspective of the courageous Brits who manned their pleasure boats and headed toward the beleaguered troops to ferry them to safety.
From the air, Tom Hardy and Jack Lowden offer the view (literally and figuratively) of the RAF, undermanned and outgunned, maneuvering to end as much of the carnage as possible while the evac takes place.
And on the ground amongst those desperate for removal is young Tommy (Fionn Whitehead), the actor with the most screen time and quite possibly the fewest lines. He’s the reminder that these soldiers were heroes – flawed, brave, terrified and young.
The cast is appropriately huge, including a surprisingly restrained Kenneth Branagh as well as James D’Arcy, Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, Tom Glynn-Carney and, of course, One Direction’s Harry Styles (who commits himself respectably).
Solid performances abound without a single genuine flaw to point out, but the real star of Dunkirk is Nolan.
Talk about restraint. He dials back the score – Hans Zimmer suggesting the constant tick of a time bomb or the incessant roar of a distant plane engine – to emphasize the urgency and peril, and generating almost unbearable tension.
Visually, Nolan’s scope is breathtaking, oscillating between the gorgeous but terrifying open air of the RAF and the claustrophobic confines of a boat’s hull, with the threat of capsize and a watery grave constant.
What the filmmaker has done with Dunkirk – and has not done with any of his previous efforts, however brilliant or flawed – is create a spare, quick and simple film that is equally epic.
Click HERE and join us in The Screening Room this week to break down War for the Planet of the Apes, Wish Upon and what’s new on home video!
by Hope Madden
Painting in his room, the artist Wladyslaw Strzeminski (Boguslaw Linda) suddenly loses his light as an enormous red banner of Stalin is dropped in front of his building. He opens the window, reaches out with his crutch and tears a hole big enough to let in natural light.
It’s a scene heavy with symbolism as well as dread, and one of many that filmmaker Andrzej Wajda uses to evoke a sense of time, place and struggle. It is not how Afterimage opens, though.
In a painterly scene brimming with life and beauty, Strzeminski meets in a meadow with a group of students from his Academy of Fine Arts in Lodz. The WWI veteran missing one arm and leg tucks his crutches and rolls on his side down the hill, followed merrily by his students. A sunny, living painting – the bright spot is meant to give you a comparison as totalitarian post-war Poland crushes every glint of light in the artist’s life.
Wajda’s lean, focused film limits its scope to the days leading up to Strzeninski’s conflict with Poland’s Ministry of Culture and the deterioration of the artist after. His abstract work and outspoken views on “Socialist Realism” – propaganda disguised as art – are deemed counter to public interest.
What to do with an artist?
Linda’s understated performance grieves for hope – a pervasive feeling throughout the film.
Sharply written, lean and efficient, Afterimage engages with an unadorned vision. What emerges is the picture of systematic bullying aimed at breaking a man’s will.
Strzeminski’s story is not so atypical, and as angry a film as Wajda creates, there is no glory in the artist’s martyrdom. There is simply choice. Afterimge doesn’t deify the man. What it does is more honest.
It not only asks after the imperative of personal and artistic choice. It muddies that conversation intentionally with an accusation about the separation of art and commerce.
And it’s not difficult to find modern echoes in totalitarian catch phrases like, “Unfortunately, we have to educate,” and “Those who don’t work won’t eat.”
That’s a lot to cover in a brief run time, but Afterimage is not just an excellent picture of an artist Poland wanted us to forget. It’s a directorial feat to remind us that Wajda, making his last film before his death at 90, was a storyteller of the highest caliber until the end.
Click HERE and join us in The Screening Room this week to break down Baby Driver, The Beguiled, Despicable Me 3, The House, The Bad Batch and what’s new on home video!
by Hope Madden
Start to finish, the soundtrack-driven heist flick Baby Driver has a bright, infectious charm – and you can dance to it.
It needs to be good, though. The third film in as many years about a mixtape, a rag-tag gang and a dead mom, this movie needs to bring something genuinely mesmerizing.
If there is one thing writer/director Edger Wright knows how to do, it’s propel a film’s action. That’s hardly his only talent, but few excel here quite the way he does. Scene to scene, set piece to set piece, he makes sure your eyes and your ears are aware that things are moving at a quick clip.
Never has this been more true than with Baby Driver.
Wright edits in time with his expertly curated mix tape, creating a rhythm that keeps his lead dancing, his film moving, and his audience engaged.
The beats offer more than a gimmick to ensure the flick dances along – the tunes getaway driver Baby (Ansel Elgort) has buzzing through his ear buds give rhythm to his impressive high speed antics.
Baby is the one constant in the teams Doc (Kevin Spacey) assembles to pull off his jobs. A reluctant participant making good on a debt, Baby keeps his distance from the crew – whether it’s the oily Buddy (Jon Hamm, marvelous as ever), his sketchy girlfriend Darling, (Eiza Gonzales), or the straight-up psycho, Bats (Jamie Foxx – glad to see you in something worthwhile again).
Of course, the tension comes in when Baby tries to leave the robbery biz behind, egged on by feelings for the cute waitress at his favorite diner (Lily James).
If you’ve ever seen a movie, you’ll know that getting out is never easy.
Wright’s agile camera keeps tempo with his killer playlist. Whether back-dropping romance at the laundromat with gorgeous color and tongue-in-cheek visual call-backs, or boogying through back alleys, on-ramps and highways, Baby Driver is as tasty a feast for the eyes as it is the ears.
The game cast never drops a beat, playing characters with the right mix of goofiness and malice to be as fun or as terrifying as they need to be. For all its danceability, Wright’s film offers plenty of tension, too.
Like much of the filmmaker’s work, Baby Driver boasts a contagious pop mentality, intelligent wit and sweet heart.
by Hope Madden
Three years ago, Ana Lily Amirpour dazzled moviegoers with her sleek and imaginative vampire fable A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
The film tells of a solitary female figure and the surprising impact of unlikely companionship. Amirpour called the film a “vampire western.”
If you haven’t seen the film (and you should, immediately), but you like the premise, then Amirpour’s follow up The Bad Batch might also appeal to you. It mines a similar vein, although the context is a bit more merciless.
The film’s provocative opening of mostly voiceover under credits introduces the concept of the “bad batch” – unwanteds. Drugs, immigration, petty crime – it’s never clear what this batch has been up to, but we know where they’re going. They’re headed to a quarantined expanse of arid Texas desert no longer considered part of These United States.
Once the images on screen take form, Amirpour creates an atmosphere of dystopian terror that the balance of the film never quite reaches again.
Newest resident Arlen (Suki Waterhouse – very impressive), realizes just how Mad Max this can get moments after gates are locked behind her. In a breathless and brutal piece of cinema, we are introduced to one of two communities thriving in this wasteland.
The Bridge People are hyper-bulked up, ultra-tanned cannibals represented by Miami Man (Jason Momoa). (They may not have access to steroids, but they’re certainly getting a lot of protein.)
The second community of Comfort offers a colorful, almost habitable environment led by charismatic leader The Dream (Keanu Reeves).
With these two communities, Amirpour moves very clearly into metaphorical territory, ideas she underscores nicely with strategic use of the American flag.
One version of America sees the vain, self-centered “winners” literally feeding on the weak. The second may seem more accepting, but it pushes religion, drugs and other “comforts” to encourage passivity.
It’s a clever but unwieldy storyline, and Amirpour has trouble concluding her tale.
She has a great cast, though. Joining Woodhouse, Momoa and Reeves are flashes of Jim Carrey, Giovanni Ribisi, Diego Luna and a host of the freakish and intriguing.
Amirpour has such a facility with creating mood and environment, and though the approach here is different than with her debut, she once again loads the soundtrack and screen with inspired images, sounds and idiosyncrasies.
Her opening sets such a high bar – one she fails to reach again – and her finale feels too conventional for this character and this world. They’re fairly slight criticisms, but with a filmmaker of such amazing talent, they can’t help but be a let-down.
