Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

“MARY MAGDALENE”: The 13th disciple

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on April 19, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus, Rooney Mara as Mary Magdalene

“MARY MAGDALENE” My rating: B

120 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Less iconoclastic than earnest, “Mary Magdalene” is an art-film Bible movie that more resembles Pasolini’s pared-down “The Gospel According to St. Matthew” than your typical Hollywood sword-and-sandal epic.

It is, in fact, far better than one would expect upon learning that the title character is played by Rooney Mara and that Jesus Christ is portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix.

The screenplay (by Helen Edmunson and Philippa Goslett)) and direction (by Garth Davis of “Lion” fame)  observes Jesus’ ministry through the experiences of Mary Magdalene, who is depicted not as a prostitute (that whole scenario was the invention of a sixth-century pope) but as an ahead-of-her-time woman  as important to the Christian faith as any of the male disciples.

Early on we find Mary serving as a midwife to the women of her village. She’s no shrinking violet; she rejects the attempts of her father (Tcheky Karyo) to find her a husband and outrages the menfolk by praying in the synagogue whenever she feels the need. At one point her family attempts an exorcism to rid her of proto-feminist demons.

So when Jesus and his disciples pass through, Mary is ready to drop everything and follow. Jesus so trusts Mary that  he sends her and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) on a mission to spread the Gospel to Sumeria.

A lot of the usual trappings and incidents of a typical Jesus movie are ignored in this rendition.  There’s no Sermon on the Mount or miracle of the bread and fishes, no trial before Pontius Pilate or the Sanhedrin, no Herod. We experience only what Mary experiences.

This makes for a less flashy, more intimate retelling of the Gospels. “Mary Magdalene” is about relationships. One of the more interesting characters is Tahar Rahim’s Judas, played not as a skulking villain but as an baby-faced enthusiast who betrays Jesus not for money but to force him to show his true powers.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“PETERLOO”: Eloquent pageantry

Posted in Art house fare, Uncategorized, tagged , , , on April 18, 2019| Leave a Comment »

“PETERLOO” My rating: C

154 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo” is less a film drama than it is an illustrated history lesson.

That’s a problem.

Leigh, who always has had a thing for life’s underdogs, here turns his attention to a notorious bit of British history. The 1819 massacre at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, found His Majesty’s sword-waving cavalry riding into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators protesting for political reform.

The violence doesn’t rear its ugly head until late in this 2-hour, 33-minute effort.  Most of Leigh’s screenplay is devoted to eavesdropping on  a dozen or so characters who represent various attitudes and political viewpoints in the months before the bloody incident.

Thus we follow a shellshocked trumpeter from the Battle of Waterloo (David Moorst) who returns home to Manchester to find jobs are scare and respect for a former soldier nonexistent. We sit in on long, talky meetings in which various agitators rail against miserable working conditions, low pay, and  a political/economic system designed to grind the country’s have-nots into the ground while enriching the altready-haves.

(Karl Marx was only a year old at the time, but he undoubtedly grew up aware of the the Manchester massacre.)

We witness a mother and wife haggling over the price of a few eggs with which to feed her family. We observe men slaving in a steam-driven textile factory where one misstep can mean a crushed limb. And  journalists debating how to convey to the common reader what the government’s suspension of habeas corpus means to the individual.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“STORM BOY”: Coastal conscience

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on April 12, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Finn Little and friend

“STORM BOY” My rating : C+

98 minutes | MPAA ratingL

Some children’s films — “The Black Stallion,” say, or “Fly Away Home” — are too good for children.  They entertain the small fry, sure, but they appeal to adults on an even deeper, more resonant level.

And then there are films like “The Storm Boy,” an Australian effort that should keeps the youngsters diverted but which felt too contrived and deliberately constructed to keep this mature viewer enthralled.

This is the second film adaptation of Australian novelist Colin Thiele’s 1963 best seller about a boy and his pet pelican, and for modern audiences screenwriter/star Jai Courtney has provided a rather unwieldy framing story that finds the child hero of the original now an older man looking back on his past as he faces a big decision.

In the present retired businessman Mike Kingley (Geoffrey Rush) is called back for a family powwow about what to do with a strip of beach that was Mike’s boyhood home. The real estate is now hugely valuable and  Mike’s son-in-law, the current head of the business, has plans that, well, aren’t particularly environmentally friendly.

Mike must wrestle with his conscience over how he’ll vote in a board-of-directors showdown; part of that process is relating to his sullen granddaughter (Morgana Davies) — who doesn’t share the rest of her family’s rape-the-earth attitude — the story of how he grew up on that scenic bit of coastline.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“WOMAN AT WAR”: Eco-whimsy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , on April 6, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir

“WOMAN AT WAR” My rating: B

101 minutes | No MPAA rating

A middle-aged choir director maintains a double life as an eco-terrorist in “Woman at War,” an Icelandic film that despite its heavyweight themes maintains a surprisingly airy tone.

At 49 Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) lives what appears to be an unremarkable life in Reykjavik.  On her weekends, though, she loads up a backpack and heads deep into the country’s rugged, treeless interior where she wreaks havoc on the electrical grid.

Halla’s motives and how she came by them are never fully explained in the screenplay by director Benedikt Erlingsson and Olafur Emilsson.

Apparently she opposes an Icelandic/Chinese consortium dedicated to beefing up heavy industry, which Hanna believes will destroy the environment. She employs technology as basic as a bow and arrow and as sophisticated as military-grade explosives to bring down high-tension transmission towers, cutting off the juice to a large foundry she regards as a particularly odious polluter.

She’s a one-woman wrecking crew and the authorities employ everything from satellites to heat sensors, drones and flying squads of military commandos in an effort to put an end to Hanna’s activities.  She is surprisingly good at avoiding detection, though it’s pretty clear her days are numbered.

Now a yarn like this could be played for polemic drama, but director Erlingsson instead opts for whimsy.

There is, for instance, the musical score, performed by six musicians (pianist/accordianist, drummer, tuba player, and three women singers) not just on the soundtrack but in the film itself.  Thus as Hanna treks across a volcanic landscape she passes the musicians, who have set up their instruments in the wide open spaces. Occasionally the players — invisible to everyone save the audience — will react (wordlessly) to the scenes being played out in front of them.

Then there’s a semi-comic subplot about a bicycle-riding South American tourist (Juan Camillo Roman Estrada) who is always at the wrong place at the wrong time and is arrested repeatedly on suspicion of being the terrorist. Worst vacation ever.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“THE WIND”: Little house of horror on the prairie

Posted in Uncategorized on April 4, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Caitlin Gerard

“THE WIND” My rating: C+ (Opens April 5 at the Screenland Tapcade)

86 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“The Wind” is plenty ambitious.  It’s part Western, part horror flick, part feminist parable.

Thing is, it doesn’t fully work on any of those levels.

When we first see our heroine, Lizzy (Caitlin Gerard) she is covered head to foot in blood and holding a dead baby. Talk about making an entrance.

We later learn that the blood is that of her best friend and the only other woman living within a day’s walk of the struggling ranch run by Lizzy and her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman).  Apparently the woman, who was pregnant, developed a killer case of cabin fever and blew out her brains with Lizzy’s shotgun.  Out of desperation Lizzy then cut open her friend in an effort  to save the child.  No luck.

Needless to say, Lizzie is rocked by this desperate act.  But things will get worse. Director Emma Tammi and screen writer Teresa Sutherland (adapting Dorothy Scarborough’s 1925 novel) will see to that.

Set in the mid-1800s somewhere out West, “The Wind” examines how isolation and wide open spaces work on a woman’s mind.  Like Henry James The Turn of the Screw, we can never be sure if the horrors Lizzy must cope with — a pack of ravenous wolves, noises in the night, an eviscerated goat, the certainty that some hideous creature is lurking just outside her door — are real or the products of her tortured psyche.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“THE MUSTANG”: Animals

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on March 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

“THE MUSTANG”  My rating: B+ 

96 minutes | MPAA rating: R

A violent, alienated man and an equally angry horse form an unexpected bond in “The Mustang,” an understated effort that often plays like documentary but carries the emotional weight of a classic drama.

Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s film opens with a roundup of wild mustangs in a vast Western landscape. The animals are herded by  helicopters into stock pens. From there they are loaded onto trucks.

Cut to a Nevada prison where Roman Coleman (Matthias Schoenaerts) has just joined the general population after  months in solitary confinement.  We never learn what he did to merit that treatment; all he’ll say is that he’s not good with people.

The prison psychologist (Connie Britton) struggles to get a word out of the sullen, withdrawn inmate. She’s trying to find a prison job or activity that will interest him. Finally she settles on the horse-training program, which takes recently captured wild mustangs and turns them into well-behaved riding horses that can be sold at auction.

Not that Roman overnight becomes a cowboy.  His main job involves shoveling shit. But he’s intrigued by the violent horse that occupies a metal shed on the prison grounds. The animal inside spends all day banging on the walls and shrieking its defiance. It’s a kindred spirit.

The old hand who runs the program (Bruce Dern) believes the horse is too mean to be domesticated, but gives Roman — who has absolutely no background with these animals — a chance to train the beast. If it doesn’t kill him first.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT”: Race against (and for) time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on March 28, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard

“THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT” My rating: C+ 
110 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“The Hummingbird Project” could be described as a race-against-time movie.

Two cousins risk everything to build a high-speed internet “highway” between Kansas and the East Coast, all to shave a few microseconds off the time required to send the latest stock market updates halfway across the continent.

Why bother? Because a microsecond head start on the competition — the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings just once — could mean millions in profits.

Kim Nguyen’s drama is acceptable if unremarkable in most respects. It  features a vintage Jesse Eisenberg performance (i.e., arrogant nerd) and an atypical one from Salma Hayek (here toning down the sexuality to play a Wall Street shark).

Where “Hummingbird…” really shines, though, is in the work of Alexander Skarsgard, an actor who mostly has been seen as a hunky type (a charismatic vampire in “True Blood,” a predatory stepdad in “Diary of a Teenage Girl,” an abusive husband in “Big Little Lies,” a muscled tree swinger in “The Legend of Tarzan”).

Here Skarsgard plays an antisocial dweeb, a bald, soft-bellied algorithm cruncher more comfortable with his computer screen than other human beings. It’s such a startling transformation that initially he’s unrecognizable. It’s a classic case of an actor getting lost in his role.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“GLORIA BELL”: Dancer from the dance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Julianne Moore, John Turturro

“GLORIA BELL” My rating: B-

102 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Julianne Moore elevates every film she’s in, and she’s pretty much the reason to see “Gloria Bell,” an American remake by Sebastian Lelio of his 2013 Chilean drama “Gloria.”

As the title character — a middle-aged divorcee whose main pleasure is hanging around L.A.’s retro disco dance clubs with other folk her age   — Moore hides behind outsized glasses and a semi-mousey makeup job…neither of which begin to hide her star quality.

Gloria’s fixation on ’80s dance music — she’s in constant singalong mode whenever cruising with the car radio — softens the hard edges of her life.

She’s been single for a dozen years. Her son (Michael Cera) is currently a solo dad (his wife apparently has abandoned the family);  her daughter (Caren Pistorius) is in a long-distance romance with an extreme surfer from Sweden.  Neither offspring seems particularly warm toward her.

She works at an insurance company where her specialty is coddling customers shaken by auto accidents.

The script by Lelio and Alice Johnson Boher is a love story…sorta.  Alice meets newly divorced Arnold (John Tuturro) at a dance club where he stares at her from afar and defuses her sullen mood by asking if she’s always so happy.

He woos Alice with  paintball (he owns a paintball preserve; she turns out to be a dead shot) and their shared love of boogying down on the dance floor. And he reads funny/romantic poetry to her.

But there’s a problem. Arnold cannot break away from his needy ex and their even more needy daughters.  He’s at their mercy day and night, and it doesn’t take Alice long to figure out she’s always going to be a runner up in the race for his affections.

“Grow a pair,” she tells him.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE”: Bloody knees

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Mel Gibson, Vince Vaughn

“DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE” My rating: B+

159 minutes | MPAA rating: R

With its loquacious cops and crooks and pages of dialogue devoted to the amusingly mundane (Quarter Pounders with cheese, egg salad sandwiches), “Dragged Across Concrete” will remind many of a Quentin Tarantino film, especially “Pulp Fiction.”

But it also bears comparison to Michael Mann’s “Heat,” for this curiously affecting crime epic (nearly three hours) is less about black and white than shades of gray.

Add to the mix Mel Gibson chewing on his best role in ages, and the latest from writer/director S. Craig Zahler (“Bone Tomahawk”) shapes up as an unexpected treat that digs into the viewer’s head and hangs around long after the lights come up.

At the center of this sprawling tale are a couple of police detectives — Ridgeman and Lurasetti (Gibson and Vince Vaughn) — who’ve drawn long unpaid suspensions for brutalizing a suspect.  Desperate for money, Ridgeman talks his reluctant partner into tailing a suave  criminal (Thomas Kretschmann); the hope is that he will lead the pair to some sort of drug deal or robbery that they can interrupt, making off with the cash and contraband.

Ultimately the two cops find themselves wading through the aftermath of a bloody bank heist. Few are left standing.

But around this dramatic core Zahler has introduced a big cast of characters — lawmen, criminals and common citizens caught in the crossfire — and given each enough backstory that we begin to identify with them on a much deeper level.

Gibson’s Ridgeman, for instance, is a tough street cop bitter that his refusal to schmooze has left his career in the dust. Now he’s coping with an ailing wife (Laurie Holden) and a teenage daughter terrified of the only neighborhood they can afford to live in. On the job Ridgeman may seem like semi-racist thug; at home we see a different side of the man.

(more…)

Read Full Post »

“THE WEDDING GUEST”: Love on the run

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on March 21, 2019| Leave a Comment »

Dev Patel

“THE WEDDING GUEST” My rating: B-

97 minutes | MPAA rating: R

Since breaking onto the world cinema scene as a struggling Indian Everyman in “Slumdog Millionaire,” Deval Patel has been methodically expanding his repertoire, from broad comedy (the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” franchise) to straight drama (“Lion”).

With Michael Winterbottom’s “The Wedding Guest” he takes a detour into genre, portraying a ruthlessly efficient man of mystery.

As the film begins Patel’s Jay flies from London to Pakistan.  That’s he’s not your usual tourist quickly becomes apparent: Jay has multiple passports, goes shopping for a small arsenal of handguns and rents two cars.

An anxious pall hangs over the film’s opening sequences.  Is Jay a terrorist bent on mayhem?  A paid assassin on assignment?

Things get a bit clearer when he begins keeping tabs on Samira (Radhika Apte), the daughter of the local gentry preparing for an elaborate arranged marriage. Jay tells people he encounters that he’s one of the wedding guests, but In the dead of night he slips into the family compound and kidnaps the girl, gunning down an armed guard to make his escape.

Samira is at first terrified. Then Jay explains that the kidnapping was arranged by her London-based lover, who hired Jay to spirit her away from her tradition-bound family.

Now the two are on the run, moving across Pakistan and into India toward a rendezvous with Samira’s squeeze. (On one level “Wedding Guest” is practically a travelogue.)

(more…)

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »