A totally fun horror film, with just the right amount of sci-fi mumbo-jumbo and tension-breaking humor. Allison Williams is charming, until she isn’t; Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford are wonderfully debonair parents, until hell breaks loose. The racially charged setup – white girl bringing black boyfriend home for the weekend – adds tension and a bit of misdirection. And the ending couldn’t be more gratifying.
A little Sam Elliot is a delight to watch. An entire movie with nothing but closeups of Sam Elliot is rather too much. The story – an aging cowboy movie star given new life by a young girlfriend and a viral video – is neither deep nor plausible, and the secondary characters don’t do much with what little they’re given. In short, a film for Sam Elliot devotees only. (San Francisco Film Festival)
A not terribly well made documentary about a not terribly interesting man engaged, not terribly successfully, in mixed martial arts – something I’m not terribly interested in and certainly don’t enjoy watching. The filmmaker took life as he found it – and the access he achieved was remarkable; not every life, however, is worth a film. (San Francisco Film Festival)
(fuller review TK). Real-world cinema, in this case from Iran: no special effects, no histrionics, just real people facing real situations, making choices that the viewer can admire or criticize. In other words, we are drawn into director TK’s vision and made to question our own feelings and reactions. Here, notably, we admire the lead male for his sensitivity, forbearance, skill with his pupils and ability to hold it all together; while we lose sympathy with his wife, despite her rape, as she is unable to move on and stop burdening those around her. And then our sympathies shift. For every character we see the good and the bad. And we recognize that here, as in life, there is no black and white, only many shades of grey that blend into one another, for better and worse.
As much a success of style as of content: telling James Baldwin’s story through his own words, both recorded live and read posthumously, with video from the day mixed with later interviews, gave us an unusually rounded and real picture of a man we know more as a reputation.
If not the worst movie of the year, it will take something to beat it. I had read it was that rare thing, a German comedy. We waited 85 minutes for the comedy, but by then the characters were so unpleasant to watch that we gave up. The lead woman was not just unhappy below the surface, she was a mess above. The lead man was supposedly the comic character, but his eccentricity was never explained, nor was his presence in the Bucharest scenes, and you just felt sorry for him when not squirming at the awkwardness of it all. The secondary characters were no better – not a recognizable human person among them – and the business situations were equally caricatured. Finally, the hand-held camerawork was unnecessarily annoying. In short, I can’t think of one redeeming aspect, although we did miss the final 80 minutes.
Here was a film to think and talk about: how many themes did you detect, and what were they? An Argentine writer, winner of the Nobel in literature, returns to his small home town in the country – why? to bask in his glory, to refresh his imagination, to experience nostalgia? – or does he? (As an introduction to Argentine cinema, this was a nice companion to Neruda.) People greet him on the surface, then turn petty and hostile. They don’t understand him, but does he understand them? He bumbles along in his world of fiction (Oscar Martinez won the Argentine Oscar for Best Actor), finding that he can’t go home anymore – or can he?
No director working today portrays women as well and as beautifully as the Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. Penelope Cruz has been perhaps his most famous muse (in five Almodovar films), but in Julieta he works with Emma Suarez and Adriana Ugarte (the young Julieta) to stunning effect. One or the other is almost always on screen, framed artistically, with blond hair that denotes their age or their psychological condition. Based, somehow, on three stories by Alice Munro, the plot is never frothy, nor so melodramatic that you lose touch with the reality of the people and their feelings, albeit little that is recounted is personally familiar. By going back and forth between the two characters – Julieta is writing her daughter about her past – we never tire of either one, and long to see how engagingly beautiful Almodovar will make her next. The ending lacked conviction and left me hanging, but life doesn’t neatly wrap itself up, either.
There’s nothing wrong with making a feel-good movie, in which 37 consecutive scenes end with a moment that brings a smile or a tear, in which every child is perfectly behaved, in which every injustice is overcome, in which even the allegedly hard-hearted gruff boss is played by Kevin Costner. Nothing wrong, but you might as well be watching a fairy tale, instead of a supposedly true-life story about America’s space program. Then again, most fairy tales have more suspense and produce more dread that something might go wrong. See Loving for a more realistic picture of life in Virginia in 1961.
Not as bad as the reviews and a meticulous adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel, but both book and movie had more incident than soul. We moved from one gangland killing to another with admiration for the machinery but little emotional involvement. Part may be due to Ben Affleck’s constant on-screen presence, with hair and designer clothes ever in place, more the Hollywood movie star than credible human being.
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