Drama Archives - Page 13 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Richard Jewell (2019) – Blu-ray + Digital

March 16, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Crime, Drama

***/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Sam Rockwell, Kathy Bates, Jon Hamm, Paul Walter Hauser
written by Billy Ray, based on the article “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell” by Marie Brenner
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Angelo Muredda You’d be hard-pressed to think of a more fateful intersection between director and biographical subject than Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell, which crystallizes the venerable American filmmaker’s aesthetic and thematic interests of late. The infamous minimalist and chair-scolder–hyped to godly proportions in some corners of Film Twitter for his cool efficiency, scorned as a conservative propagandist by others–has been charged since the film’s AFI Fest debut last month with cranking out ill-timed “Trumpian talking points” about the FBI and smearing a journalist’s good name after her death. While some of the callouts are fairer than others, the uproar has distracted from the quiet dignity and formal strangeness of the work, which deepens Eastwood’s recent interest in unlikely American newsmakers with asterisks beside their names and their acts of heroism by grounding itself in the awkward humanity of an even less immediately palatable figure than the inarticulate, gelato-eating Euro travellers who saved lives in The 15:17 to Paris.

Run This Town (2020)

March 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Theatrical

½*/****
starring Ben Platt, Mena Massoud, Nina Dobrev, Damian Lewis
written and directed by Ricky Tollman

by Walter Chaw Ricky Tollman's Run This Town is a neo-Sorkin, fast-talking, "ripped from the headlines" potboiler that is really just one of those plucky underdog-makes-good melodramas wherein a cub reporter breaks the Story of the Century™. Said story this time around is that Toronto mayor Rob Ford is a grotesque fucking idiot. (Ford has since had the good fortune to be posthumously outdone and overshadowed in his cheap-mobster, bully-bro incompetence by the worst human being on the planet, Donald "POTUS" Trump.) Playing Ford in this hip little photoplay is the great Damian Lewis; it bears mention that the fat-suit makeup makes him look a lot like David Lynch's Baron Harkonnen (or Mike Myers's Fat Bastard) as he stumbles around calling a staff member "Jew" and sexually harassing his aide, Ashley (Nina Dobrev). The bright-eyed stringer looking to break into the big-time is schlubby Bram (Ben Platt), who, when first pitching the story to his tough editor (Jennifer Ehle), is scolded for not having much of an opinion about anything. Are you rooting for him yet? It's hard not to.

Swallow (2020)

March 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Horror, Theatrical, Thriller, VOD

**½/****
starring Haley Bennett, Austin Stowell, Elizabeth Marvel, Denis O’Hare
written and directed by Carlo Mirabella-Davis

by Walter Chaw Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller ends with our Mrs. Miller on an opium trip, absorbed in close contemplation of the smooth, alien landscape of a trinket that’s caught her eye. We go on that trip with her, zooming in as she zooms out, skating along the polished curve of some uncharted dimension in an undiscovered country. Meanwhile, out in a snowstorm, the idiot who loves her dies alone. In Carlo Mirabella-Davis’s debut feature Swallow, lonesome, abused young wife Hunter (Haley Bennett), because she’s trapped, isolated, and miserable, swallows a small glass marble that is the colour of Mrs. Miller’s bauble and, as it happens, serves a similar function of distraction, providing a similar illusion of control. Hunter has “pica,” a medical/psychiatric condition that causes its sufferers to swallow items that are not edible–in many cases, not even biological. I don’t know anything about this disorder beyond what the Internet tells me, but how it functions as the outward expression of Hunter’s loss of agency is fascinating and on point.

Le Samouraï (1967) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

March 4, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, France, Italy, Mystery, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Le samouraï
****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Alain Delon, François Périer, Nathalie Delon, Michel Boisrond
written and directed by Jean-Pierre Melville

by Walter Chaw Jef (Alain Delon) is an assassin, and while he’s objectively terrible at it, he seems to be sought-after for his services. Maybe there’s a shortage of killers; maybe he lives in that bubble where handsome people exist without knowledge of the advantages they’re given for the fact of their attractiveness. Hired to assassinate some guy who owns a nightclub in Paris, Jef steals a car by trying out a lot of keys on this giant key ring he has and goes to the club to do just that. Everyone sees him: the guests, the bartender, and most notably the club’s unnamed, featured chanteuse (Caty Rosier), who catches him walking out of her boss’s office after hearing gunshots. Jef pauses when he sees her, and for a second you wonder if he’s going to kill her to eliminate any witnesses. I mean, that’s what a hardened criminal would do–but he doesn’t. It’s not that Jef isn’t smart, exactly, it’s that Jef is a cipher, and Le samouraï is less noir than it is a commentary on American genre films and, along the way, a satire of them, too. Jef’s affect is blank and pretty, perfectly turned-out in his neat suit and overcoat, a fedora perched on his head just so. Melville spends a lot of time watching Jef look at himself in the mirror, fiddling with his collar and smoothing down the crease in his pants. Not unlike a Robert Bresson film, Le samouraï is obsessed with gestures. It’s a story told by hands at rest and in motion.

Blood On Her Name (2020)

February 26, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, VOD

***½/****
starring Bethany Anne Lind, Will Patton, Elisabeth Rohm, Jared Ivers
written by Don M. Thompson, Matthew Pope
directed by Matthew Pope

by Walter Chaw As assured and compulsive a feature debut as the Coen Brothers’ Blood Simple, Matthew Pope’s Blood On Her Name does a fair job of simulating what it’s like to be inside a panic attack. A rural noir that has its roots in the bonds of family and the economic terror that threatens at every moment to destroy those bonds, the film’s hero is small-business owner Leigh (Bethany Anne Lind), abandoned by a no-account husband and left with a failing automotive business and a son who has to meet periodically with a parole officer. The kid, Ryan (Jared Ivers), is a high-school student who blinded a classmate in one eye for teasing him about his missing dad. But he’s a “good kid,” Leigh says. She believes it so much that she says it a few times to different people throughout the film. Ryan’s parole officer (Tony Vaughan) says he’s been in the business a long time and good kids don’t end up sitting in a booth at some small-town diner across from him. We may think he’s a dick for saying so, but he’s been doing this for a long time and probably knows something we don’t.

Knives Out (2019) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

February 25, 20202019, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD disc

***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B+
starring Daniel Craig, Chris Evans, Ana de Armas, Christopher Plummer
written and directed by Rian Johnson

by Bryant Frazer Knives Out, a cleverly plotted and star-studded whodunit, is both comfortingly familiar and surprisingly novel–a loving homage to classic English drawing-room mysteries that celebrates its sources while updating their assumptions about class and politics. It might seem strange that, having scaled the filmmaking Everest that is a Star Wars movie with The Last Jedi, writer-director Rian Johnson would immediately retreat into the comfort of an Agatha Christie pastiche. But Knives Out plays directly to Johnson’s strengths: his knack for putting a new spin on old tropes and clichés, his facility with actors, and his apparent capacity for empathy. It’s a comedy of manners with a marvellously dry wit, exceptionally broad appeal, and a satisfyingly complex (though not convoluted) narrative. No wonder this thing made bank at the box office.

A Brighter Summer Day (1991) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 24, 2020****/****, 1990s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Taiwan, The Criterion Collection

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Lisa Yang, Chang Chen, Chang Kuo-Chu, Elaine Jin
script and dialogue by Edward Yang, Yan Hong-Ya, Alex Yang, Lai Ming-Tang
directed by Edward Yang

by Walter Chaw My family fled mainland China to Taiwan in 1949, just ahead of the communist takeover. My grandfather on my mother’s side, a member of the Chinese military, asked his aide to fill out the paperwork necessary for their emigration. In his haste, the kids were given sequential birth dates (1, 2, 3, 4, 5…) to expedite completion of the forms so they could get on with their flight. My uncle, Fu Kun-Ning, was born on January 7, 1941, though his official identification documents say something different. I think he probably liked the chaos, the mystery represented by that discrepancy–he was nobody’s man but his own. He died on March 1, 2007, when I was 33. I hadn’t spent much time with him over the course of my life. I was quickly and irrevocably estranged from my family and my heritage, as are many Chinese-Americans born here to immigrant parents. I barely said anything to my own parents for thirty years. There was one visit, though, where I had a formative conversation with said uncle. He asked me what I was interested in and, ashamed to tell him the truth, I told him I wanted to be a biochemical engineer, the major I went into my first semester of college having declared.

The Night Clerk (2020)

February 23, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

½*/****
starring Tye Sheridan, Ana de Armas, John Leguizamo, Helen Hunt
written and directed by Michael Cristofer

by Walter Chaw Asking the never-asked question of whether Rain Man would fly in 2020, Michael Cristofer’s excrescent The Night Clerk answers with a fairly-resounding, “It would not.” The Night Clerk also asks if a “Rain Man + Sliver” mash-up is a good idea (it isn’t) and if it’s time, finally, for a redux of Mercury Rising (no again). Still, it does provide Helen Hunt her best role in ages despite seeming to confirm that a great cast giving it their all can’t salvage a high-concept this retrograde and gleefully offensive. Tye Sheridan plays superhero-named Bart Bromley, the night clerk at a two-star hotel who, he tells anyone who will listen, has Asperger’s Syndrome–which in this iteration means he’s a collection of twitches and vocal affectations. Pair Bart with Edward Norton’s Tourette’s-afflicted hero from Motherless Brooklyn for an almost-deadly megadose of ACTING. To get better at mimicking “normal” human interaction, Bart has placed various spy cameras in a guest’s room. It’s not a sex crime; it’s a kid with some social issues addressing his disadvantage. Really, it’s inspirational if you think about it.

The Call of the Wild (2020)

February 22, 20202020, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Family, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Karen Gillan, Cara Gee, Dan Stevens
screenplay by Michael Green, based on the book by Jack London
directed by Chris Sanders

by Walter Chaw Chris Sanders’s The Call of the Wild shares a few character names and a setting with the Jack London novella upon which it’s ostensibly based but exists in a perverse fantasia of its own that has more in common with Lars Von Trier’s surreal Zentropa (or Tom Schiller’s Nothing Lasts Forever, to which Zentropa owes more than a little) than it does with London’s critique of capitalism. Scenes of the Alaskan Gold Rush herein have about them the crazed Uncanny Valley effect of The Polar Express, which is only slightly less distracting than The Call of the Wild‘s imagining of an egalitarian utopia free of racism, sexism, even classism. The final triumph of dog-kind in the film recalls, of all things, Matt Reeves’s superlative Planet of the Apes trilogy, postulating a future in which hyper-intelligent, non-human mammals inherit the earth. Spearheading this new species of hyper-intelligent freak dog is Buck (shades of Corey Haim’s experimental super-dog in Watchers), who in classic Red Scare-agitprop fashion embodies all the best traits of the Old Hollywood Man of Action archetype: being kind to his fellow sled dogs like some canine Babe handing out jellybeans before saving human maidens from drowning.

Seberg (2019)

February 19, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

*/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Jack O’Connell, Margaret Qualley, Anthony Mackie
written by Joe Shrapnel & Anna Waterhouse
directed by Benedict Andrews

by Walter Chaw Benedict Andrews aspires to Alan J. Pakula with his paranoid biopic of martyred Nouvelle Vague sensation Jean Seberg but approaches it like Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can instead. His Seberg is a handsome, even slick production with a great cast and a bright period production design where something rougher-hewn, something grainier and consistently darker, might have given it a more appropriately claustrophobic feel. Shot as a prestige movie trying very hard to be About Something, Seberg has the effect of making Iowa-born Jean Seberg (Kristen Stewart) seem shallow and silly, every bit the accidental activist and media-diagnosed hysteric she was portrayed as during her lifetime. Andrews often obscures her with foreground objects to suggest a voyeuristic perspective, allows a lot of repetitive dialogue from Jean about how she knows she’s being bugged, and goes so far as to invent a sympathetic FBI agent named Jack Solomon (Jack O’Connell) to confess to his wife (Margaret Qualley) that his agency is engaged in ratfucking Seberg for her support of the Black Panthers. But when your film looks this clean and expensive, the feeling is one of a privileged perspective acting like a tourist for some borrowed righteousness.

Blow-Up (1966) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 17, 2020****/****, 1960s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, FFC Must-Own, Italy, Mystery, Palme d'Or Winner, The Criterion Collection, Thriller, UK

Blowup
****/**** Image B Sound A Extras A
starring Vanessa Redgrave, Sarah Miles, David Hemmings, John Castle
screenplay by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra (English dialogue in collaboration with Edward Bond), inspired by a short story by Julio Cortazar
directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

by Walter Chaw Michelango Antonioni’s Blowup, when it appeared at the end of 1966, marked the confluence of a great many cultural throughlines. Sanctified by the grace of a long theatrical run on the rep circuit in the United States, it all but ensured (with an assist from Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and that film’s gleeful use of the term “hump the hostess”) the final death of the antiquated Production Code when audiences disregarded the promise of eternal hellfire and went to see the damn thing anyway. There were other foreign arthouse sensations before it, of course (notably Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with which Blowup shares some surface similarity), but it was Blowup that felt like the revolutionary bellwether for the rise of the foreign arthouse as something of a genre unto itself. The picture’s success was of a moment with the peak of the British Mod period and right there with the birth of America’s version of it: namely, the Summer of Love and the concurrent season of assassination. We never quite recovered from that whiplash between love and death. Similarly, film language has never recovered from the teleological disruption of Blowup.

Shutter Island (2010) [10th Anniversary Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray

February 14, 20202000s, 2010, 2020, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

**/****
BD – Image A Sound B Extras B-
4K UHD – Image A- Sound A-
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Max Von Sydow
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw The first thirty minutes of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island left me breathless with delight. The rack-focus through mess-hall implements; swaying along a ceiling as we peer beyond the door to the head, where our hero, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), is losing his lunch; the way a ferry blows through a fog bank like Travis Bickle’s cab through the steam escaping a New York sewer cap. When it snows, it snows up like in the dream sequences from Bringing Out the Dead (there’s even a moment when the smoke from Teddy’s cigarette retreats into the butt)–and when a shadowy figure named Laeddis (Elias Koteas) finally materializes in the midst of Teddy’s fugue, he bears a striking resemblance to Travis Bickle. (It’s not until later that we understand the full extent of this self-reference.) Shutter Island is among the director’s handsomest films, and moments of it suggest there’s a masterpiece here–as a WWII Holocaust drama, or a ghost story, or a period Red Menace piece, or a 1960s Manchurian Candidate manqué, or a 1940s Freud clinic, or a G-Man noir, or a straight procedural, or a modernist existential piece–if he wants it. But it’s less than the sum of its tantalizing parts, providing instead a hackneyed climax that proves just another votive lit in Dennis Lehane’s church of dead children.

The Rhythm Section (2020)

February 12, 20202020, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Espionage, Revenge, UK

***½/****
starring Blake Lively, Jude Law, Sterling K. Brown, Daniel Mays
screenplay by Mark Burnell, based on his novel
directed by Reed Morano

by Walter Chaw Over a black screen at the start of Reed Morano’s The Rhythm Section, we’re invited to think of the heartbeat as drums and breathing as the bass accompanying it. I would have swapped them, but either way it works as a symbolic framework to marry film to music, and perhaps the process of making a film to a collaborative endeavour like the frisson between musicians in a band–or the autonomous functions of the body that keep you going even when you’re unconscious. When I think about “rhythm” as a metaphor, I think of the various breathing methods and strategies devised to help women through labour. Blame Stephen King’s The Breathing Method, the only one of the four novellas from his Different Seasons anthology yet to be adapted for the screen. In it, a young woman has so prepared herself for the birthing process that her head goes through the motions of it even after being separated from her body. The thing to which The Rhythm Section aspires, then, appears to be to create something, or to indeed be something, so drilled and efficient that it operates purely on impulse and instinct.

The Story of Temple Drake (1933) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 11, 20201930s, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Gangster, The Criterion Collection

***½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Miriam Hopkins, Jack La Rue, William Gargan, William Collier, Jr.
screenplay by Oliver H.P. Garrett, from the novel Sanctuary by William Faulkner
directed by Stephen Roberts

by Bryant Frazer In 1933, Paramount Pictures released The Story of Temple Drake, an unusually frank melodrama that depicted a brutal sexual assault and its aftermath, with special attention paid to the reputation of the well-liked party girl named in the title. Released during that brief, free-wheeling period before the industry began enforcing its production code to clamp down on screen sex and violence, The Story of Temple Drake took pains to show how a woman could fall prey to sexual predators through no real fault of her own. It also illustrated in detail her downward psychological spiral, fuelled, in large part, by a well-founded fear of the opprobrium of others. Just last week, in an interview recorded for THE NEW YORK TIMES during Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial, reporter Megan Twohey asked the defense lawyer, Donna Rotunno, whether she had ever been sexually assaulted. “I have not,” Rotunno answered, “because I would never put myself in that position.” Twohey was stunned; the conversation suddenly took on a different tone. Rotunno’s response is a textbook example of the ways that privilege blinds people to reality. It must be comforting to believe that you haven’t been raped because you’re just too darned smart to be raped, but it’s also delusional, not to mention hugely condescending to legions of sexual-assault victims who never requested their trauma.

A Matter of Life and Death (1946) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 9, 2020****/****, 1940s, 2020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Fantasy, FFC Must-Own, Romance, The Criterion Collection, UK, War

Stairway to Heaven
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras A
starring David Niven, Roger Livesey, Raymond Massey, Kim Hunter
written and directed by Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

by Walter Chaw Watching 1946’s A Matter of Life and Death while the end of the American experiment is upon us is an amazingly painful thing. The film was conceived in part by hyphenates Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as a way of cementing the postwar British-American alliance. Accordingly, it ends with a trial in which the United States is celebrated as an inspirational model: a paragon of idealism, humanism, truth. If it ever was those things, it isn’t any of them today. The scales have fallen from my eyes, and the movie now plays as an elegy for everything we’ve lost since 1946–for everything I’ve lost as I bid goodbye to what remains of my innocence and my optimism that there’s anything left in this country that resembles what I had been raised to believe about it. We are divided, hateful, unhealthy, selfish, stupid, and brutal. There’s a line from Graham Baker’s underestimated Alien Nation I think of often nowadays. Alien immigrant Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin), drunk one night, tells his human friend:

Sundance ’20: Luxor

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Egypt, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Sundance, UK

***/****
starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes, Sherine Reda
written and directed by Zeina Durra

by Walter Chaw In Zeina Durra’s Luxor, Andrea Riseborough plays Hana, a British surgeon in Luxor, Egypt on a short leave between horrific assignments first in devastated Syria, then in Yemen. She’s shell-shocked, it’s clear. She spends her days wandering through the ancient city and allows herself one night to be picked up in her hotel’s bar by an unctuous Yank throwing his money around. She lies in her hotel room for hours, trying to nap, and when she does sleep, she wakes to find herself another day closer to some sort of hell. Durra captures her listlessness as a feeling ineffable of being lost but never lost enough. Hana sits by herself at the far left end of a park bench, arms folded across her chest and a baseball cap pulled down low over her stunned expression. She visits a pyramid one day, just another tourist, and overhears a tour guide giving the yokels a taste of the gravid mysticism they’re paying for. It all lands as empty for Hana. Hana, who doesn’t have anything left inside after all this time bearing witness to the absence of God.

Sundance ’20: Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness

February 6, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Iran, Luxembourg, Satire, Sundance, Switzerland

*/****
starring Sadaf Asgari, Behnaz Jafari, Babak Karimi, Fereshteh Sadr Orafaee
written and directed by Massoud Bakhshi

by Walter Chaw About 20 minutes into Massoud Bakhshi’s shrill Yalda, A Night for Forgiveness (hereafter Yalda), I put my hands over my ears to blunt the constant keening. It’s also the point where I started wondering what this film was on about. There’s something brilliant and fascinating at the core of Yalda–a movie about an Iranian variety/game show in which the fate of someone sentenced to death hangs on the forgiveness of one of the people they’ve wronged–that makes its hamfistedness a real pity. Gathered are what we might call the plaintiff and the defendant to sit in an “Ellen”-style talk-show nook to tell their stories and air their grievances and then let the audience deliver a verdict via text message, whether or not a blood-money bounty will be paid to the aggrieved should they decide to exercise some grace. That’s horrible. It’s not more horrible than the U.S. justice system, which offers no such opportunity of recourse for the accused (heaven forbid a Christian nation ever exercise forgiveness and actually value life), but it’s horrible just the same.

Sundance ’20: This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

February 5, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Esoterica, Italy, Lesotho, South Africa, Sundance

***/****
starring Mary Twala Mhlongo, Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makheta, Makhaola Ndebele, Tseko Monaheng
written and directed by Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese

by Walter Chaw In Lesothan hyphenate Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese's debut film This Is Not a Burial, It's a Resurrection (hereafter Burial/Resurrection), the fate of a village, soon to be drowned as a casualty of a government dam project, weighs heavily on elderly widow Mantoa (Mary Twala Mhlongo). Mantoa's striking visage suggests an octogenarian Beckett photographed by Jane Bown, perhaps, the lines on her face describing a road map of the places she's been. Her sorrows include a lost husband, child, and brother–to a mining accident, illness, and misadventure, respectively. The one thing tethering her to the ground is the village's cemetery, where all her hopes are interred. The film's introduction, a slow crawl through what vibes as a jazz club as an old man (Jerry Mofokeng Wa Makhetha) sits playing his Sotho lesiba (which makes music that sounds a little like a dirty-water trombone) in counterpoint to his slam poetry-like incantatory recitation of the movie's themes, the whole of it working like nothing more than a grand invocation to the muse. Burial/Resurrection is film as epic poem, and it has moments of truly staggering power. Power it only really loses when it cuts too quickly, cleanly, back to the narrative of the film itself. What would it have been like had it leaned harder into being a stream of images?

Honey Boy (2019) + The Lighthouse (2019)|The Lighthouse – Blu-ray + Digital

February 4, 20202019, 2020, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Drama, Horror, Mystery

HONEY BOY
***½/****
starring Shia LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges, Noah Jupe, FKA twigs
written by Shia LaBeouf
directed by Alma Har’el

THE LIGHTHOUSE
***½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw There is a suggestion in Alma Har’el’s haunted, raw Honey Boy that the only knowledge forbidden in the United States is that of the self. The picture aligns in that way with Robert Eggers’s similarly haunted The Lighthouse; both films deal in a sense with the sins of the fathers becoming the secret trauma of the sons. They diverge, though, not in the process of peeling away layers and layers of sedimentary fragments the everymen of these dramas have shored against their ruins, but in what they discover at the end of their excavations. To my depressed hope, the final image of The Lighthouse, which promises this cycle of suffering is evergreen, ever-returning, and inevitable, sounds something like the truth. At the other pole is Honey Boy, which, in the course of one of its fantasy sequences, offers, of all things, reconciliation. It says that there’s hope at the end of all the suffering, that the map actually leads to buried treasure and not just the skeletons of the things left to guard it (their ranks are full but they’re always recruiting). I’m not sure I’m compelled by the case it’s trying to make, particularly as this story has more to tell, but there’s a power to its piquant grace and love and acceptance.

Sundance ’20: The Evening Hour

February 3, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Film Festivals, Sundance

***/****
starring Philip Ettinger, Stacy Martin, Cosmo Jarvis, Lili Taylor
screenplay by Elizabeth Palmore, based on the novel by Carter Sickels
directed by Braden King

by Walter Chaw Everybody likes Cole (Philip Ettinger, the suicidal environmentalist from First Reformed), and for good reason. Cole is young, handsome, pleasingly brawny, appears to genuinely enjoy his job at the old-folks home, and takes care of his grandmother (Tess Harper) and demented-and-fading-fast grandfather (Frank Hoyt Taylor). As it happens, his grandfather looks a little bit like my late father-in-law, who was taken by dementia a couple of years ago at the beginning of one of the more bleak periods of my life. The way Cole reacts when he learns that plans are being made to move his grandfather into more structured care feels familiar and true. When Braden King's The Evening Hour is best, it's for how lived-in everything feels. Elizabeth Palmore's screenplay, an adaptation of a novel by Carter Sickels, sounds good and right in the mouths of these actors. I do wish it had eschewed its criminal subplot in favour of more, well, flavour, but even in its MacGuffin, find embedded modern bogeys like financial desperation, the opioid epidemic, and a broken healthcare state. Weighty stuff, and The Evening Hour handles it with agility and charm.