This six-chapter horror film had me alternately cringing in my seat and laughing out loud. Writer/director Zach Cregger adroitly handled the mashup of quotidian and supernatural with a style that was engaging and captivating and kept you from questioning the absurdity of it all, right up to the explosive ending. Josh Brolin and Julia Garner made their characters real, while Amy Madigan handled the other.
Silly. Not a lot of laughs (one chuckle) and the rest was ridiculous.
A stunningly well made biopic that not only captures Billy Joel, it explains. The filmmakers weave together archival footage, contemporary interviews, talking heads, studio sessions, concert performances and critical comments, all with the nonpareil soundtrack of Joel’s first six albums. His first wife Elizabeth emerges as the hero of his career amid struggles that were never evident to the fan. Best is the revelation, to me at least, of how directly Joel’s songs related to his life experiences. Part 2 is also watchable (6.8), but lacks the novelty of watching Part 1 and, “Uptown Girl” aside, covers drearier material and music.
The first film I’ve seen to baldly tackle the political dysfunction/divide/disaster that is the American fringe today, hitting bang-bang-bang on Covid masks, Black Lives Matter, gun culture, cults, indigenous rights, political distortion–what have I left out? Perhaps in trying to do too much, the plot is full of unresolved red herrings and relies on mysterious forces to reach its conclusion. It also would have helped if we could have understood anything Joaquin Phoenix’s lead character was mumbling.
A thoroughly charming cinematic representation of Alexandra Fuller’s riveting 2001 memoir about the 1980 transfer of white to Black power as Rhodesia was reborn as Zimbabwe. The story is told through the eyes and actions of seven-year-old actress Lexi Venter in an astonishing performance, while her innocence is matched by her psychologically fierce and tormented mother, played by Embeth Davidtz, who also wrote and directed. The story has a documentary truth as well.
Less a story than a scrapbook account of moving one’s mother to a memory-care facility. Kathleen Chalfant is superb as the regal 80-year-old who has retained her culinary skills but has no inkling of who the people around her are. Sympathetic, not maudlin, the picture it presents of a stage in life we have experienced with our own parents is touching if inevitably sad, if not scary.
After time spent watching streamers it felt good to sit in a theater and see characters on a big screen with lush scenery behind them. Beyond that, this film was largely forgettable, although it left me wondering what its title meant. Camille Rutherford was fine as the Austen-besotted would-be writer, but the main attraction, for us as well as her, were the blue eyes of Charlie Anson in the Mr. Darcy role.
One powerful movie. Ryan Coogler keeps us on the edge of our seats, guessing where the story is going before it explodes in our faces. There’s a lot about music, especially the blues, Southern culture, power, magic, sex (romance?) and race (the good guys are Native American, the bad guys white, and everyone in between in Black). I only wish I had closed-captioning, and maybe if Michael B. Jordan hadn’t played both brothers I could’ve told them apart.
A minute-by-minute recreation of Navy Seals under attack in Ramadi, Iraq, remarkably devoid of a point-of-view, unless it’s that war is, if not hell, not a lot of fun. Why the American soldiers are holed up in this building, who is attacking them, or even why America is in this war are not even hinted at, which makes watching this film a somewhat clinical exercise. This happened, and that seems to be enough for the filmmakers.
Forget the context of the Palestinian-Israeli struggle, as if that were possible, this film succeeds as a wonderful human drama, a gripping story with superb lead performances by Saleh Bakri and Imogen Poots, both easy on the eyes. Then add the context of Palestinian life in the West Bank, even without Israel’s later all-out assault on Gaza, and the movie’s philosophical and political messages hit so much harder. Because it is a story well told and was filmed in comparatively controlled conditions, albeit on site, this is a much stronger and more watchable movie than the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land. Major kudos to British filmmaker Fareh Nabulsi for pulling off a major movie with minimal resources.
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