Want to watch something at home? Wow – there’s one thing this week. One. But rest easy – there are like a million things next week, so we’ll just fixate on this one today and then next Tuesday, we’ll have the energy.
Here’s what you can find in new home entertainment. Click the title for a complete review. And as always, please use this information for good, not evil.
by Hope Madden
I did not have high expectations for this one, I’m not going to lie. Though the raunchy trailer offered a couple chuckles, I couldn’t help but think two things.
1) What is Scarlett Johansson doing in a “girls weekend” movie?
2) Isn’t this the same premise as Peter Berg’s 1998 black comedy Very Bad Things?
That first one is tough to answer, but the second is a very loud yes.
ScarJo plays Jess, wholesome politician lured into a bachelorette weekend with her college besties. She’s hoping for a quiet night, but she’s quickly guilted into binge drinking, casual drug use and, of course, a stripper.
Things get dark after that.
Yes, cinematic bachelor/bachelorette party zaniness is beyond tired. Still, there’s reason for hope. This cast, for instance.
Johansson is among the most talented and versatile actors working, as at ease with comedy as she is drama. Zoe Kravitz is strong as well, but the real reason for optimism is the rest of the party.
Kate McKinnon – flat out hilarious and able to steal scenes at will from anybody.
Ilana Glazer (Broad City) – effortlessly wrong-minded and hilarious.
Jillian Bell (Workaholics) – maybe the wrong-mindedest of them all.
The trio delivers, McKinnon in particular. Boasting that crazy-eye thing she does, as well as a ridiculous Aussie accent, her every moment on screen brings with it a “what exactly is she doing” quality that can’t help but infuse even flat scenes with a little electricity.
And there are flat scenes. Lucia Aniello makes her feature directing debut, working from a script she co-wrote with fellow Broad City alum Paul W. Downs (who also co-stars as Jess’s fiancé). Too much feels borrowed and several of the longer bits go nowhere.
But she and DownS are blessed with performers who know what to do with the material. Each creates a distinct and memorable personality. And the whole film has some fun at the expense of the state of Florida’s questionable laws.
There’s nothing new here. Honestly, nothing. But What Aniello and her talented cast do with a variety of set-ups is sometimes inspired and often very funny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYkgQuqvaBg
by Hope Madden
Lean, mean futuristic science fiction that feels unsettlingly like reality, The Survivalist ranks among the best dystopian films in recent memory. And as writer/director Stephen Fingleton creates an utterly plausible and devastatingly grim future, the film marks a first time filmmaker with an awful lot to say.
A solitary figure (Martin McCann – amazing) ekes out an existence in a shack hidden in the woods of Northern Ireland. His small field of crops is fertilized by the bodies of interlopers who happen upon him. He spends his days tending his vegetables and reinforcing his traps, but a haunted past and his own isolation are starting to wear at him.
Enter two hungry women: Kathryn (Olwen Fouere) and her daughter, Milja (Mia Goth).
His first inclination is to do with them what we’ve seen him do with others who come too close to his holdout. But he’s tempted, made an offer for something not necessary for survival. Something he wants more than he needs.
For Milja and her mother, this is still nothing more than survival, which is what puts the three people on different planes of existence. The survivalist (for we never do know his name) has entered the treacherous and vulnerable area of want, and then the even more dangerous ground of hope.
The shifting power and landscape of the relationships is fascinating, made all the more powerful for lack of dialog. Who is in control? The answer varies scene by scene.
The title could stand for any of the three, and this trio of performances consistently impresses.
Fingleton lingers on glances and body language to reinforce the pitiless practicality that has taken the place of civilization. McCann’s silent chemistry with each character offers more insight into his character than pages of dialog could, and he’s matched in his efforts – particularly by Fouere.
The film, like its protagonists, is unapologetically efficient. But Fingleton and his director of photography Damien Elliott occasionally offer a glimpse of the beauty left in this dystopia – a beauty that existed long before and will persist long after man’s involvement.
Together, cast and crew trap you in slow-boil of primal instincts with an explosion the inevitable consequence.
by Hope Madden
One special girl + a solitary, attentive, very cute boy + contrivance that keeps them apart = every single adolescent drama made in the last decade.
Director Stella Meghie can do that math. For Everything, Everything, she works from the YA novel by Nicola Yoon, adapted for the screen by the adequate emotional manipulator J. Mills Goodloe (Best of Me, The Age of Adaline).
The film updates that Boy in a Plastic Bubble TV movie John Travolta made back in the day, here with a perky adolescent girl named Maddy (Amandla Stenberg) whose rare immune deficiency keeps her locked away inside her sterile home.
Then Dreamboat Olly (Nick Robinson) moves in next door.
Meghie and her cast deserve credit because their film has a sweet if utterly artificial charm to it. The handful of fantasy sequences set inside Maddy’s architecture models are appealing, as is the awkward and innocent chemistry between the leads.
Not one human being on earth has ever been this wholesome and adorable, but as YA lit flicks go, it could be much worse.
Tragedy looms darkly over most young adult romances – like a watered down Nicolas Sparks movie. Maddy’s ailment keeps death always in the periphery, but the film zigs when you think it will zag.
Meghie keeps almost everything restrained, which is both the film’s blessing and curse. Too often in movies of this ilk, the drama becomes so soapy as to be intolerable. Maddy’s coming-of-age choices feel more self-empowering than love struck, and her easygoing, forgiving nature keeps the tone just this side of angsty.
Thank you.
On the other hand, when the narrative takes a bizarre – almost diabolical – turn, that laid back approach feels neutered. Real rage is called for. Police intervention. A good slap, anyway.
But Meghie doesn’t indulge our lust for drama, which would be admirable if her film weren’t so bland.
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
“Do you want to serve in heaven or reign in hell?”
That’s just one of the big, existential questions Alien: Covenant has on its mind, though there’s plenty of blood as well, for those who thought Prometheus was a bit too head-trippy.
Director Ridley Scott returns to the helm of the iconic franchise he started, proving the years have done little to erode his skills at crafting tension or delivering visceral thrills.
Covenant picks up roughly ten years after the events of Prometheus, and this many sequels in, its inevitable that the franchise would fall victim to formula: a crew, most of whom we get to know only through intercom banter, lands somewhere, picks up an alien (or several), tries to get it off the ship. Quarantine protocol is rarely followed. (It is there for a reason, people!) Folks die in a most unpleasant way.
When Scott made Alien back in ’79, he made a straight genre flick, working from a script by horror go-to Dan O’Bannon. It gave Scott a career, though he didn’t return to the horror game for more than another two decades.
Meanwhile, the franchise took the action path, devolving eventually into the modern day equivalent of Werewolf Versus the Mummy.
Scott redirected that ship in 2012 when he regained control of the series, throwing off any ugliness in the sequel universe by making a prequel – one less interested in monsters than in gods. Prometheus may have been a mixed bag, but if there’s one thing this franchise delivers, it’s a great synthetic. Hello, Michael Fassbender.
Fassbender returns in Scott’s latest, bloodiest Alien effort, and he’s a lunatic genius. Playing both David, the synthetic from Prometheus, and a newer model named Walter, Fassbender delivers weighty lines with tearful panache, becoming more colorful, layered and interesting than anything else onscreen.
Strange then, that his charismatic performance almost hurts the film.
Why? Because we’re here for the aliens!
Yes, it is tough to keep a good xenomorph fresh for eight episodes, and Scott gives it a shot with new alien forms that wade into Guillermo del Toro territory . But there are too many variations, the incubation and bursting process is too expedited, the sources are too numerous – basically, there’s too much going on here and it’s diluting the terror.
And it is terror Scott is going for. There’s more carnage in Covenant than in Scott’s previous two Alien films combined, but he hasn’t entirely thrown the existential crisis overboard. Suffice it to say that we’re lead to a crossroads where a dying species is “grasping for resurrection.”
Scott wants us to ponder those themes of death and creation while we’re running from bloodthirsty monsters. It’s not always a perfect fit, but Alien: Covenant combats the overreach with enough primal thrills to be satisfying.
by Charlotte Orr
A ten foot tall demon, devil possessed mistresses, and lizard-like aliens. All promise a terrifying movie experience, but does The Dark Tapes succeed?
Vincent Guastani and Michael McQuown’s film is a found-footage anthology documenting “transdimensional entities.” The first couple stories are enjoyable – I’m glad they reserved the better actors for these sections.
The remaining stories, however, couldn’t keep my attention. Unfortunately, the acting quality distracted greatly from their plots.
It’s a good thing there isn’t much to miss out on anyway. The installment “cam girls” has some of the worst acting in the whole film. I have to give the actors some slack though, seeing as they didn’t have much to work with. The script was unbelievably bland and predictable.
Same goes for “Amanda’s Revenge,” which gives little explanation as to what exactly is going on. This would normally be fine as long as enough is given to allow the viewer to run free with their own conclusions, but there just isn’t enough substance to formulate one’s own theories.
Each storyline in this film goes for the unexpected twist at the end, and these two simply fail to surprise.
With that aside, not every short in the anthology is lacking. The complex science behind the “To Catch a Demon” storyline required all my attention, and the eerily convincing demon was able to keep it. Kudos goes to Guastani for special effects and creature design.
The end of “The Hunters and the Hunted” left me pleasantly surprised. Initially my notes read, “not unlike every other ghost hunting film.” Which I subsequently had to cross out after a major twist.
The Dark Tapes proudly states that it’s the found-footage horror movie with the second most awards and nominations, coming in at 61. As a whole, this film failed to be up to par with others in the genre, such as Paranormal Activity.
It certainly was a valiant effort, but they should have focused on those couple storylines with potential and ditched the rest.
by Rachel Willis
When you think of a city, what is the first image that comes to mind? Great buildings rising into the sky or masses of people living, working and playing on the streets and sidewalks?
These two ideas form the diametrically opposing viewpoints of city planning and urban development at the heart of the documentary, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.
The focus of Matt Tyrnauer’s doc is Jane Jacobs, a writer who studied urban development and the negative effects of urban renewal on formerly vibrant city centers. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, highlighted the ways the “top-down” approach to urban development ruined cities. Jacobs’s observations were based on her own experiences living in Greenwich Village, and on the large urban planning projects helmed by New York’s city planner, Robert Moses.
Using extensive archival footage, Tyrnauer paints the history of New York’s reconstruction starting at the end of World War II. Coming out of the Great Depression, the leaders of New York were eager to revive the city. For them, Moses was the man to undertake the massive project.
Citizen Jane highlights the detriment Moses’s plans brought to the people living and working in New York. Unfortunately, New York wasn’t the only city affected. Across the United States and the world, Moses’s vision was replicated.
Jacobs believed in a “bottom-up” approach to city development. Rather than taking a macro view, she advocated talking to the people who made up the city’s neighborhoods and using their input to move forward.
The documentary’s many interviews with architects, city planners, and historians back Jacobs’s views. Scenes of empty apartment buildings, desolate streets, and cities dissected by sprawling highways underscore the failure of Moses’s plans. On paper, the cities look vibrant, but in reality, they’re empty shells.
The cinematography blends well with the story Tyrnauer tells. Cities are portrayed as living, breathing ecosystems, emphasizing Jacobs’s writing. It’s clear that Tyrnauer understands the city as Jacobs saw it.
For both, the city isn’t a lifeless collection of buildings; it’s the vibrant heart that beats in the people who live there.
by Cat McAlpine
Writer/director Terence Davies (The Deep Blue Sea) delivers a film on Emily Dickinson that is visually brilliant (for the most part) and textually weak. Ironic.
The struggle, surely, with writing a historically rooted film is that certain events must happen, in a certain order, and you’re responsible for the connective tissue. Unfortunately, A Quiet Passion doesn’t have much connective tissue, and it is grating as a result.
There are brilliantly tense moments between family members, witty retorts, a blatant rejection of organized religion, and even a saucily smashed dinner plate, but none of these aggressions fester into anything larger. At one point, sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle, fantastic) chastises “Now things will be tense for days.” We don’t see any of those days.
Cynthia Nixon (Sex in the City) is perfectly awful as the aging Emily, but in earlier scenes she grins her way through acerbic words with the most bizarre delivery.
This isn’t the film’s only stylistic disparity. Visually, A Quiet Passion is a treat. The lighting is gorgeous, with equal time spent on sunny lawns and in shaded bedrooms. The color is rich too, especially for a film of its type.
But, somewhere near the middle, the narrative encounters the Civil War. In this moment real photographs of the event are shown on screen as voiceovers float in with disconnected commentary on the war. A few of the pictures are oriented horizontally, leaving the rest of the screen black. It looks like, and I hate to say this, at worst a PowerPoint Presentation and at best a History Channel special.
A Quiet Passion has drawn praise as a solidly feminist film. If the latest definition of feminism is a main character who doesn’t marry, I hazard to say we can ask for more. Emily doesn’t seem to put off marriage for art, but rather has little romantic interests to begin with. There’s one failed attempt at adultery, one briefly interested party, but she is never more than bitter. Emily wails that she’s simply too ugly.
No man ever tells her she can’t write. In fact, Emily politely asks her father’s permission if she could please write during the early morning hours while everyone else is still sleeping.
This film is carried by its beautiful cinematography and its smart camera work, but even that leaves something to be desired.
Like Emily Dickenson’s own poetry, with its characteristic dashes, A Quiet Passion is disjointed and a bit difficult to interpret.
by Hope Madden
Bo (Jacob Latimore) is the world’s most wholesome drug dealer. And that’s fine, because apparently, dealing drugs in LA mainly means picking up harmless partygoers and throwing some stash to a club manager with a demanding clientele.
But Bo doesn’t want to be a dealer at all. He’s really a magician and a huge science buff who could have gone to college on scholarship (science, not magic). But when his mom died unexpectedly, he needed to take care of his little sister. And that meant making more than you can pull in by entertaining tourists with – literally the most spectacular set of street magic tricks you’ll ever see.
He’d definitely have a show by now – good looking kid like him, performing feats like these? He’d at least be making enough in tips to cover rent.
Just as things take off with a new girlfriend, ol’ drug kingpin Angelo (a seriously miscast Dulé Hill) pushes Bo into more dangerous territory, things escalate, there’s this electromagnet in his arm – wait, what?
Yes, Bo has fitted himself with an electromagnet. It’s a little like that cool glowy thing in Iron Man’s chest, except it’s more like a festering, infected thing in Bo’s shoulder.
Sleight is basically a superhero’s origin story wrapped inside a toothless crime drama bubble-wrapped with magic.
Co-writer/director JD Dillard has his hands full trying to pull that trick off. The pace is too slow for action, the characters too one-dimensional and (aside from this one meat cleaver scene) innocuous for a crime thriller.
And that whole magic thing – well, the movie’s a bit of a mess.
Plot holes, missed opportunities and a toothless approach to conflict leave you wondering whether this could have been – it certainly should have been – a stronger film.
by Hope Madden
The first notes I took, about ten minutes into the screening for Ben Wheatley’s latest Free Fire, read like so: This is a ballsy first act.
Indeed. Co-written with his wife and frequent collaborator Amy Jump, the Seventies crime thriller wastes little time on backstory, context or exposition. None, really.
You gather that two Irishmen (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley) wait in a warehouse parking lot with their liaison (Brie Larson) to a gun runner. They’re always waiting for their own henchmen, as well as the gunrunner’s liaison (Armie Hammer).
I love Ben Wheatley. In 2011, he and Jump brought forth the utterly brilliant horror show Kill List, and I have waited breathlessly for every collaboration since. Free Fire included.
And while each of Wheatley’s films is decidedly different from each other, Free Fire is very different from most films altogether.
Imagine if the entire 93 minutes of Reservoir Dogs took place in that last act shootout among the pack.
The noteworthy fact about Free Fire is not that it has a ballsy first act, but that the entire film is a third act. With scarcely a word of context, we’re rolled into an empty warehouse just in time for a shootout to begin, and there we will stay until the film concludes.
It’s pretty brilliant, really. Character development happens under fire. Hammer’s “Ord” (yep, that’s his name) brings a lot of laid back comedy. Brie Larson is characteristically spot on, as is the always welcome Cillian Murphy. The two infuse characters and the proceedings with some authentic humanity.
Also working the comedy angle is Sharlto Copley – always reliable for some scenery-chewing, here working those mandibles as a South African imbecile/arms dealer once misdiagnosed as a child genius.
Jump and Wheatley rob the gang meeting of any of the slick romance or brutal gravitas usually bestowed on such events by cinema. There is a barely controlled, very funny, incredibly bloody chaos afoot here, and it is a wild and entertaining sight to behold.
