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The Good Mother

by George Wolf

As a thriller, The Good Mother is an odd bird. But then, I can’t really say for sure it wants to be a thriller. Maybe it’s a character study, or a cautionary tale. There’s nothing here to seal any of those deals, which means the possibilities for engagement are always just out of reach.

The cast is solid, led by two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as Marissa, a top reporter for a newspaper in Albany, NY circa 2016. Her paper is struggling with the digital revolution and could use her writing skills, but Marissa can’t be bothered. She’s been in a spiral since her husband Frank’s death and her son Michael became a junkie, and now Marissa only wants to drink, smoke, and mindlessly edit other people’s work.

Things only get worse when her older son Toby (Jack Reynor), an Albany cop, gives her the news that Michael has been shot and killed. And though Marissa blames Michael’s pregnant wife Paige (Olivia Cooke) for introducing him to drugs, the two join forces in hopes of tracking down Michael’s killer.

Swank (also an executive producer) is on cruise control with a righteous determination arc, but director/co-writer Miles Joris-Peyrafitte never lets her truly dig in to Marissa’s edges. Instead, she moves through a succession of steely eyes and furrowed brows as an unlikely duo has even more unlikely success uncovering secrets of the drug trade.

There are good intentions here, mainly aimed at how the opioid epidemic can devastate lives. But the story beats are often overwrought amid an aesthetic of heavy-handed grit, while Joris-Peyrafitte mutes any dramatic tension with flashbacks and quick cutaways. And when he does introduce a promising new direction (like a scene-stealing Karin Aldridge as another grief-stricken mother), it is too soon abandoned for the comfort of well-traveled paths.

Take away this cast, and there’s just enough here for a made-for-cable time waster. But some big league talent got The Good Mother bumped up to the big screen, and earning its place there is a mystery the film just can’t figure out.

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Shipping Up to Sligo

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Pixie

by Matt Weiner

There was a time in the late 90s when you couldn’t go six months without a quippy crime comedy that was obviously pitched as “Pulp Fiction, but this time you get to be the studio making a boatload of money.” Some of these, like Doug Liman’s Go, were quite good. Others, like The Boondock Saints, belong in the Hague. Most of them, though, were simply reliable—reliably watchable, and equally forgettable.

Thankfully, the new action comedy Pixie takes as many cues from its distinct local sensibilities as it does from forebears like Tarantino and especially Guy Ritchie, the capo di tutti capi of British gangster cinema.

It all starts, naturally, with a drug deal gone bad—and things just get worse from there. Pixie has all the convenient plot twists and beyond belief interconnectedness you’d expect in this sort of crime thriller. But it also has heart, anchored by Olivia Cooke (Ready Player One) as the title moll.

A nonstop series of crosses, double crosses and double-double crosses take Pixie and her inept partners in crime on a scenic if slightly murderous tour through the West of Ireland as they attempt to make their big score without getting snared by misfit hitmen, killer priests and country gangsters hot on their heels. This includes Pixie’s own family (with the great Colm Meaney as patriarch, who seems to be thoroughly enjoying this “teddy bear who might also kill you” stage of his career).

For all the contrivances of the genre, director Barnaby Thompson, working off a script by his son Preston Thompson, imbues the film with an archness that keeps the action entertaining even at its most improbable. So much of this falls to Cooke, who switches effortlessly from femme fatale to agent of pure chaos, a beguiling anti-heroine who has figured out how to entice others to clean up the carnage she leaves in her wake.

And if the bawdy jokes, nun-related gunplay and jaw-dropping vistas still aren’t enough, perhaps Alec Baldwin chewing through his scenes and an Irish accent with equal aplomb will seal the deal.

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Bring the Noise

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Sound of Metal

by Hope Madden

Riz Ahmed is a guy who can do anything.

He can be funny (Four Lions), pathetic (Nightcrawler), tragic (Sisters Brothers), villainous (Venom). He’s soon to be Hamlet. But in Sound of Metal, playing a recovering addict heavy metal drummer who’s hearing suddenly deteriorates, he’s more than all of these put together.

Ahmed is Ruben, in a performance that brings this man to life with so many layers and such nuance and power it requires your attention.

Ruben’s traveling the country in an airstream with his girlfriend Lou (the always welcome Olivia Cooke). She sings/wails/screams and plays guitar, he bangs on the drums, and they keep each other safe, sane and sober. This is how they do it, one day at a time.

But Ruben’s sudden deafness is more than he can take and as he spirals out of control, Lou and his sponsor find him a place. It’s secluded, nestled on a big piece of land near a school for the deaf—a spot for recovering addicts who are deaf. No one else.

No Lou.

Even before you begin to appreciate Ahmed’s remarkable performance, you’ll likely notice writer/director Darius Marder’s choices when it comes to sound design.

Also, Sound of Metal is captioned, but not all the time. If Ruben can’t understand what’s being said, neither can you.

The sound design evokes the same sensation: of being in Ruben’s head. What he can’t really hear it, you can’t, either. Marder mimics the humming, echoing, and blurring together of sounds to create an immersive sensation that never feels like a gimmick.

It might, were it not for Ahmed, though. The rest of the cast, most of them non-actors, offer solid support. Cooke is characteristically strong, simultaneously resilient and dependent in a way that feels authentic to the character. The charming and endlessly tender third act arrival of Matthieu Amalric only adds to the emotional heft the film carries.

Sound of Metal is Marder’s first feature. It often benefits from a loose structure, but just as often, this becomes its downfall. There are scenes that amount to little, giving the film a bloated quality. But that’s not enough to defeat it, not nearly. Sound of Metal is a powerful experiment and a star turn for a talented actor.

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Shall We Play a Game?

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Ready Player One

by Hope Madden

Ready Player One may be the most Spielbergian of all Spielberg movies. It’s Spielberg on Spielberg. Meta-Spielberg.

You get the idea.

It’s 2045 in Columbus, Ohio and the world is so miserable for so many that they spend all day, every day inside their video games. OASIS is a virtual world where you can play anything against anybody at any time.

The creator of OASIS and every devoted gamer’s hero, James Halliday (Mark Rylance), died several years ago and has built a challenge into the game. The winner will own OASIS (and its trillion in worth) outright.

And that’s it. A ragtag group of nerds (led by Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke) must learn to work together so they can defeat the megalomaniacal tech firm run by a guy who doesn’t even like gaming (Ben Mendelsohn).

What? Misfit kids teaming up to learn from a master nerd and beat the suits? Smells like Spielberg!

Ready Player One is a celebration of gamer culture in the same way that The Lego Movie indulged in the sheer joy of building with Legos. It is also an 80s pop culture nerd’s wet dream. You want to see a guy wearing Buckaroo Banzai’s while driving Marty McFly’s DeLorean romance a girl on Tron’s bike or run across a bridge made of the Iron Giant? Done.

Want to know what the Zemeckis Cube does? (Bill and Ted know.)

The entire assortment of John Hughesisms is set to righteous beats from Bruce to Blondie.

And that’s where the film could easily have become fluffy nonsense were it not for the genius move of taking an 80s fanboy icon (Spielberg) and allowing him to simply provide an undiluted version of every nostalgic gimmick he has ever hatched.

Every time he borrows from himself or leans on old tendencies—tendencies he’s been trying to shed since 1985’s The Color Purple—it feels like it’s meant to be.

It’s basically a Spielberg movie inside an ode to Spielberg movies.

Plus, oh my God I want a The Shining video game!

Unfortunately, that’s all it really is. The performances are hammy fun but certainly not revelatory. The story is thin enough that it doesn’t get in the way of all the cool FX and callbacks. You’ve seen it all before, you just haven’t seen it quite this unabashed, with frame after frame nearly bursting with the exuberance of some kid whose parents just demanded he put down that homework, crank up the tunes and start gaming already!





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Good Breeding

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Thoroughbreds

by Hope Madden

Directing his first feature, Cory Finley adapts his play about teenage girls planning a murder. It’s a buddy picture, a coming-of-age tale, Superbad, if you will. No, not really.

Finley draws us into the palatial estate where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) reluctantly tutors Amanda (Olivia Cooke). The two were friends in middle school, but that was a lifetime ago. Now seniors, Amanda is an outcast, having personally euthanized her family’s suffering thoroughbred horse.

Lily has her own problems.

Wicked, surprising, unapologetic, cynical and buoyed by flawless performances, Thoroughbreds is a mean little treat.

Amanda doesn’t feel. She’s not a sociopath, exactly. She just doesn’t feel anything—joy, sorrow, regret, fear. Empathy.

Lily, who tears up quickly and is forever retracting statements or pausing to perform the correct social cue at the acceptable time, isn’t sure whether she relates to or envies Amanda’s plight.

Not that Amanda sees it as a plight, exactly. She doesn’t care, does she?

Cooke mystifies, her observant but emotionally disinterested performance a magical thing to witness. Amanda has nearly perfected the art of pretending to be normal, pretending to care.

The fact that Lily can see the advantage of this is what sets this coming-of-age tale apart from others. Because, yes, from her perch inside the mansion, Lily is coming of age. Just not like the rest of us.

If Cooke is great, Taylor-Joy is better. An actor who wears her vulnerability in her every expression, she gives great depth to this character on the precipice of adulthood, learning, as she must, that to prosper in her world you need to rid yourself of human emotions and replace them with acceptably false facsimiles.

In the way that Oliver Stone, by way of Gordon Gecko, proselytized that greed is good, Finley uses Lily and Amanda to suggest that empathy is bad.

Their ultimate foil, the societal underling as disposable to their class as an animal—a horse, even—is Anton Yelchin, in his final role. Digging deep into an underwritten character and turning up more authenticity and personality than Finley can fit onscreen, Yelchin’s pathetic loser offers all the humanity lacking from this pristine world.

It’s a fascinating look at how the other class comes of age, blackly comedic and biting.