Drama Archives - Page 17 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

November 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Streaming, Theatrical, Western

****/****
starring Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck
written and directed by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw The Coen Brothers’ one-shot revival-in-spirit of DC’s “Weird Western Tales,” The Ballad of Buster Scruggs features six narratively-unrelated Old West challenges to genre mythology that are so practically effortless, so technically perfect, that the typical Coen payload of misanthropy and, yes, nihilism lands as particularly caustic. Binding each episode in this, a short-story anthology from our most literary filmmakers, is a conversation about how the American myth of self-actualization is indelibly stained by westward expansion, self-justified by the amoral equivocations of Manifest Destiny. It’s about the lie of American exceptionalism, riffing on and shading stock hero archetypes like the gunfighter, the outlaw, the travelling troubadour, the prospector, the settlers of course, and the bounty hunter. The presentation is all a bit too much: it’s too handsome (Inside Llewyn Davis cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel returns to the fold), too exquisitely choreographed, too…tricky? The moment the brothers frame a POV shot from the inside of a guitar, complete with suddenly-muffled singing and strumming, you realize the movie is maybe having some fun at your expense–that it is maybe, in fact, an asshole. “Misanthrope?” asks Buster (Tim Blake Nelson), reading his crimes off a wanted poster, “I don’t hate my fellow man!” Dressed all in “white duds and pleasant demeanour,” Buster may not be a misanthrope, but he’s definitely an asshole, as well as a psychopath. It’s an efficient, devastating dissection of the Gene Autry/Roy Rogers subgenre of western, in which cherub-faced, potato-bloated cowpokes settle land and cattle disputes, woo big-eyed women, and punctuate their acts of questionable heroism with a nice, wholesome tune. Howard Hawks had something to say about this in his brilliant, subversive Rio Bravo. Now the Coens are having a go.

The New Romantic (2018)

November 16, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Jessica Barden, Hayley Law, Brett Dier, Camila Mendes
written and directed by Carly Stone

by Alice Stoehr Sex columnist Carrie Bradshaw wakes up in a hotel room after a fling with a Frenchman to find a thousand dollars on the nightstand. This is midway through "The Power of Female Sex," episode five of HBO's "Sex and the City". She summons her friends, sensualist Samantha and hard-headed Miranda, to ask them, "What exactly about me screams 'whore'?" Samantha counsels keeping the money; Miranda tosses around the word "hooker"; and Carrie weighs the gesture as either "an incredible compliment or an incredible insult." The episode has little to say about sex work and the attendant stigma beyond articulating some knee-jerk squeamishness. Twenty years have passed since then in the realms of feminism and pop culture. Twenty years, yet here's The New Romantic, a romcom with the same level of nuance on the subject of sex for money. Its heroine is Blake (Jessica Barden), a college senior who writes about her sparse sex life for the school paper. With the editor poised to take her column away, she tries to spice it up by interviewing a local "sugar baby"–a young woman who barters dates for luxury. It's not long before Blake herself is sipping wine opposite Ian (Timm Sharp), a well-off professor twice her age. Nor is it long before she, as a Nora Ephron devotee, starts to worry she might be sacrificing romance for the sake of journalistic material.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

November 16, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Jane Curtin
screenplay by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty, based on the book by Lee Israel
directed by Marielle Heller

by Walter Chaw Can You Ever Forgive Me? is about Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), a gifted biographer who has achieved some small measure of success but lately finds herself unemployable, unloved, maybe unlovable. Her best friend calls her a "horrid cunt" and it's the nicest thing anyone says to her. Her agent, Marjorie (Jane Curtin), tells her that she needs to be nicer. Only successful people are allowed to display the full measure of Lee's misanthropy, she says; the full wrath of her lacerating wit and intimidating intelligence; the full portion of her knowledge and impatience with your lack of it. It's essentially the speech Crash gives Nuke in Bull Durham about fungus in his shower slippers. You get to be a slob when you're famous. When you're a slob and you're not, you're just pathetic and disgusting. I spent 36 hours in New York City once several years ago in circumstances very much like the one I'm in now: wondering what I want to do with the rest of my life, worrying that I'll never find it, worrying that I'll never get to do it if I do. It's frightening to think you won't achieve your goals. It's worse when you've achieved every single one of them and it means nothing to you, and so you're back at square one-ish. Luckily, though (well, maybe luckily), you do have this one skill…

BlacKkKlansman (2018) – Blu-ray + Digital

November 13, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Crime, Directors: Spike Lee, Drama, FFC Must-Own

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C-
starring John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace
written by Charlie Wachtel & David Rabinowitz and Kevin Willmott & Spike Lee, based on the book by Ron Stallworth
directed by Spike Lee

by Walter Chaw Colorado Springs is a big, modern, beautiful city. It's home to natural wonders like the Tolkien-sounding Garden of the Gods and the Cave of the Winds. Its zoo, perched on the slopes of Cheyenne Mountain, is world class. Spencer Penrose built a shrine to his friend Will Rogers on that same mountain when Rogers died in a plane crash. Cheyenne Mountain is also where NORAD is housed, and Colorado Springs is also host to the United States Air Force Academy and, once upon a time, Focus on the Family. It's an ultra-conservative city just south of blue Denver, which is itself south of the trust-fund hippie commune of Boulder. And for a few years starting around 1925, there was no greater stronghold for the Klan in the United States than in Denver. In 1978, Ron Stallworth became the first African-American police officer hired by the Colorado Springs Police Department, and then the first detective when he went undercover to infiltrate a Kwame Ture speech at a black nightclub. In 1979, he answered an ad hoping to establish a chapter of the KKK in the Springs, posing over the telephone as a man who hated every non-white race, but especially "those blacks." A white counterpart attended meetings while Stallworth eventually gained the trust of then-Grand Wizard David Duke. Duke reached out to Stallworth recently because he was concerned he was going to be portrayed as a buffoon in Spike Lee's adaptation of Stallworth's memoir, BlacKkKlansman. I mean, if the hood fits… If there is one indicator of involvement with cults like this, it's deep-seated insecurity. It bears mentioning that Denver's old airport, Stapleton International Airport, is the namesake of five-time Denver Mayor Ben Stapleton, who was a high-ranking member and, until the end of his reign, vocal supporter of the Klan. The airport is gone, but the neighbourhood that replaced it still carries his name.

FrightFest ’18: Short Film Showcases 1-3 + Miscellany|7 Questions with Filmmaker Chris McInroy

November 7, 2018****/****, 2018, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, FrightFest, Horror, Interviews, Lebanon, New Zealand, Revenge, Short Films, South Korea, Spain, Thriller, UK, Vampire

This is a nearly complete overview of FrightFest '18's short-films lineup, though technical issues unfortunately prevented us from screening Catcalls, Puppet Master, and Right Place Wrong Tim.-Ed.

by Walter Chaw

SHORT FILM SHOWCASE 1

We Summoned a Demon ***/**** (d. Chris McInroy)
Funny how the coolest '80s throwback film that isn't It happens to be this short by Chris McInroy, which channels the light ethos of that era, with VHS nasties shock-effects scattered across its brisk, five-minute runtime. Idiots Kirk (Kirk Johnson) and Carlos (Carlos Larotta) attempt a little witchcraft by sacrificing a rooster and playing a record backwards on a plastic portable turntable. They're trying to make Kirk cool so he can ask out "Brenda" for tacos, but it doesn't work. Instead, they summon a demon (John Orr) from a neon-smoked Hell portal they can't control. Or can they? With its crackerjack timing, its tight script, and the effortless control and camaraderie of its leads, We Summoned a Demon works wonders in a short span. DP E.J. Enriquez's lighting schemes make the whole thing look like Michael Mann's The Keep, and, sometimes rare for shorts, the movie knows its length and absolutely murders its landing. Listen for composer Bird Peterson's smooth sax riff when Kirk finds his inner cool. Comedy is hard, guys; We Summoned A Demon is butter. (Scroll down to the end of these capsule reviews for an interview with Chris McInroy.)

Burning (2018)

November 3, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, South Korea, Theatrical

****/****
starring Ah-in Yoo, Steven Yeun, Jong-seo Jun
screenplay by Oh Jung-mi & Lee Chang-dong, based on the short story "Barn Burning" by Haruki Murakami
directed by Lee Chang-dong

by Walter Chaw When she was seven, she fell into a dry well and spent a day there, crying up into the round sky until he found her. She's Haemi (Jong-seo Jun), maybe 20 now, working as a live model with a bare midriff, standing on a busy street, dancing next to a prize-wheel and giving out "tacky" things to, predominantly, men buying raffle tickets from the pretty girl. He is Jongsu (Ah-in Yoo), of the perpetually slack expression. He doesn't remember the well, nor rescuing her from it, nor the day he stopped her in the street on the way home from junior high to tell her she was ugly. "It's the only thing you ever said to me," she remembers. "I had plastic surgery. Pretty, right?" she asks him, but it's rhetorical. They fuck in an awkward, desultory way, with him looking at how the sunlight bounces off a tower in downtown Seoul, into her tiny apartment. (She's told him he'd be lucky to see it.) He goes back there to feed her cat while she's in Africa, and masturbates absently to the afterimage of her picture as he stares out the window. When she returns from her trip, it's on the arm of sexy, urbane Ben (Stephen Yeun). Ben likes Haemi because she cries–he doesn't–and can fall asleep whenever and wherever. He enjoys her guilelessness. "What's a metaphor?" Haemi asks Ben. Ben smiles in his empty way and tells her to ask Jongsu. Jongsu is, after all, an aspiring writer. "[Ben]'s the Great Gatsby," Jongsu tells Haemi–young, wealthy, and mysterious. Jay Gatsby is a metaphor. Jongsu says that Korea is full of Gatsbys.

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)

November 2, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

*/****
starring Rami Malek, Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Mike Myers
screenplay by Anthony McCarten
directed by Bryan Singer

by Walter Chaw There's a real tragedy behind Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer's formula biopic of Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) and Queen, and it's not Mercury's rise and fall and rise and fall and posthumous rise. No, it's that a life lived as rebuke to boxed-in functionality is now boxed into a functional, easy-to-parse package. Not the first person to say it but the only good version of this movie is Walk Hard, and there's never been a bad version of this movie, not really. It's oatmeal. It's always okay. I genuinely love Singer's X-Men films. Superman Returns is a masterpiece. There was a time when the idea of Singer doing this would've promised a keen, incisive coming-out melodrama, but even that's been neutered by Singer's defensive posturing against real-life, possibly criminal ugliness and its looming threat of legal repercussions. His well-publicized dismissal from the project in its eleventh hour is the most Mercury moment of the whole thing and it happened behind the scenes. When the most interesting scene in Bohemian Rhapsody is a contentious press conference where Mercury's sexuality is attacked as the movie warps and stutters around him, you get the sense of the On The Waterfront apologia that almost was rather than the sop to popular taste this is.

Mandy (2018) + Suspiria (2018)

October 24, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Belgium, Drama, Esoterica, Horror, Italy, Theatrical, Thriller, UK

MANDY
***/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Andrea Riseborough, Linus Roache, Bill Duke
screenplay by Panos Cosmatos & Aaron Stewart-Ahn
directed by Panos Cosmatos

SUSPIRIA
****/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Tilda Swinton, Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz
screenplay by David Kajganich, based on the screenplay by Dario Argento and Daria Nicolodi
directed by Luca Guadagnino

by Walter Chaw Panos Cosmatos's Mandy is an old-fashioned acid trip of a movie–like if Head were directed by Rob Zombie. Indeed, the film it owes the most to is Zombie's exceptional mood piece Lords of Salem. It's already gained a fair deal of cult cachet (as well as a surprising/not-surprising box-office run), not the least for the best use of King Crimson since Children of Men (prog-rock is having a good 2018 between just this and Private Life), for the late Jóhann Jóhannsson's bliss-out score, and for an unhinged Nicolas Cage performance augmented by Viking berserker rage superpowers. Not for nothing is Mandy a period piece opening with Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech, dissolving into a pixie-font title card setting the scene as "The Shadow Mountains" in the year of our lord, 1983. Mandy (Andrea Riseborough) is drawing "kinda like a jungle temple" in the remote home she shares with Red Miller (Cage). In bed, they talk about their favourite planets (hers: Jupiter, for the storms; his: Saturn, probably–no, wait, "Galactus") as Cosmatos bathes them in neon reds, then pans up into the Northern Lights arrayed above them. They canoe and it's so beautiful, the wave patterns and the blue, so blue it's almost lurid. Fire, then, a screen of it. All the elements will be represented here as metaphor for the completeness of their bond. It's not subtle. Now's not the time for subtlety.

Twilight (2008) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

October 22, 20182000s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Romance, Teen, Vampire

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

**/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras B
starring Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Billy Burke, Peter Facinelli
screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
directed by Catherine Hardwicke

by Bryant Frazer Author Stephenie Meyer says she wrote her first novel, Twilight, in three months’ time, after the central idea came to her in a dream. Leaving aside the question of whether the notion of a moody teen vampire love story set in and around a high school in the Pacific Northwest is remarkable enough to require that the Muses mainline it directly into your subconscious, the romance of Bella Swan, a quiet, self-abnegating high-schooler from a broken home, and Edward Cullen, a smoking-hot vampire who sparkles under sunlight and has sworn off human flesh, hit a sweet spot. Teenage girls, especially, responded en masse to Meyer’s vision of a smouldering, beautiful boy with the power to end your life at any moment but the grace and restraint to keep his hands to himself. Can you tame him? These sexual politics feel retrograde–the lovestruck nymphet at the mercy of a man forever struggling to keep his carnal desires at bay–but I try to steer clear of kink-shaming. If a strange relationship makes you swoon, whether it’s molded into Twilight‘s denial-of-desire shtick or 50 Shades‘ bondage spectacle, that’s your business and the movies can give you a way to explore that. Disapproving thinkpieces will blossom; feminism will survive.

BHFF ’18: Knife + Heart

October 21, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Mexico, Romance, Switzerland

Un couteau dans le coeur
***½/****
starring Vanessa Paradis, Nicolas Maury, Kate Moran, Jonathan Genet
screenplay by Yann Gonzalez, Cristiano Mangione
directed by Yann Gonzalez

by Walter Chaw Yann Gonzalez’s Knife + Heart is a smart film by a smart filmmaker. It’s a movie-lover’s fugue, a tribute to the heyday of gay porn and the grindhouse theatres that showed it, a salute to editors, a shrine to multi-cultural myths about birds. It’s a deep well with obvious pleasures, a film with a recognizable structure complete with solution that still manages to avoid the standard exposition and perfunctory resolution. The spiritual brother to Brian De Palma’s Body Double (exploitative and sleazy and also commentary on exploitation and sleaze), it’s a movie about looking that has as its central image a blind grackle–an extinct variety of the common pest that used to bring folks back from the dead by burning off the ever-after as it flew too close to the sun. Its central couple is gay-porn director Anne (Vanessa Paradis) and her editor and former lover Lois (Kate Moran), who churn out the sort of softcore masterpieces of art-film erotica favoured once upon a time by your Kenneth Angers, your Paul Morrisseys and Radley Metzgers. All of her work is autobiographical in some way. There’s no line separating Anne’s reality, nor her dreamlife, from the mindscreen of her movies.

BHFF ’18: Empathy Inc

October 15, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Sci-Fi, Thriller

*½/**** written by Mark Leidnerdirected by Yedidya Gorsetman by Walter Chaw More earnest than truly clever, Yedidya Gorsetman's shoestring Empathy Inc is a competently-made (save for one dialogue sequence where the actors are clearly on different sets) and reasonably efficient take on the Vic Morrow instalment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. If it ends up resembling more the Primer version of "The Prisoner of Benda", well, so be it. The picture starts well enough, as corporate middle-manager Joel (Zack Robidas) finds himself the scapegoat of a start-up's collapse, destitute and forced to move in with wife Jessica's (Kathy Searle) demonic…

BHFF ’18: Boo!

October 14, 20182018, Authors: Walter Chaw, Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, Drama, Film Festivals, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*/****
starring Jaden Piner, Rob Zabrecky, Aurora Perrineau, Charley Palmer Rothwell
written by Luke Jaden & Diane Michelle
directed by Luke Jaden

by Walter Chaw Luke Jaden’s feature-length hyphenate debut (he co-wrote the script with Diane Michelle), Boo! is an insular family drama framed against a chain-letter premise involving one religious family’s decision not to participate in paying a Halloween prank forward. What follows are a lot of jump scares and some on-the-nose dialogue that could have benefited, I think, from more workshopping. The problem is that the picture wants very badly to be about the toll of religious fundamentalism on the development of children (a well-taken point, of course), but it becomes the proselytizer itself with its straw-man of a bible-thumping patriarch, James (Rob Zabrecky), set up to bear the brunt of the film’s sins. His constant references to the “good book” feel unnatural, rehearsed, what a movie evangelical would say. When his wife Elyse (Jill Marie Jones) reveals a tragedy in their past and her unwillingness to go to James at a point of crisis because of what he would say, it raises the question of how it is these people ended up together in the first place and why, exactly, Elyse has fallen from the flock, if in fact she’s done so.

A Star is Born (1976) – Blu-ray Disc (DigiBook)

October 3, 20181970s, 2018, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Music, Romance

***/**** Image A+ Sound B Extras B
starring Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, Gary Busey, Oliver Clark
screenplay by John Gregory Dunne & Joan Didion and Frank Pierson
directed by Frank Pierson

by Sydney Wegner Two-and-a-half hours ago, I didn’t care one bit for Barbra Streisand. As a mega Kris Kristofferson fangirl, I was grudgingly willing to endure her performance alongside him in A Star is Born. I grew up with people who wouldn’t be caught dead listening to her music; I’d never seen any of her movies. All I knew of her besides the larger-than-life fame and cloned dogs was her legendary ego. Diva, control freak, crazy, stuck-up–many of these distasteful adjectives stemming from the troubled production of A Star is Born. Despite its awards and box-office success (it was the third highest-grossing film of 1976), the years have not necessarily been kind, and almost every recent review has mentioned her presence as overwhelming the movie. That is, the lack of chemistry between the leads, the way the movie skips over chunks of badly-needed character development to make room for her songs, and the fashion disasters are frequent complaints with one common target: Babs.

American Psycho (2000) [Uncut Version] – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

September 25, 20182000s, 2018, 4K Ultra HD, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Drama, Horror, Satire

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

***/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas
screenplay by Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner, based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis
directed by Mary Harron

by Bryant Frazer Books are often said to be “unfilmable,” but it’s the rare text that can be described as “unprintable.” That was the fate that nearly befell Bret Easton Ellis’s notoriously graphic first-person serial-killer memoir, American Psycho. Comprising mainly page after page of vacuous conversation among young and moneyed Wall Street types and littered with references to high-end brand names, American Psycho‘s internal monologue reveals the wealth-addled mindset of Patrick Bateman, an investment banker and tasteless sociopath who specializes in mergers and acquisitions and expresses himself through hateful diatribes, hilariously wrong-headed pop-culture critiques, and the occasional torturous homicide, described in sickening detail. As the book neared release, publisher Simon & Schuster faced pressure to drop it from both inside and outside the company. Feminists attacked it as a how-to manual for misogyny, murder, and mutilation. TIME published a passage about a woman being skinned, while SPY excerpted a scene describing oral sex with a severed head. S&S’s own marketing department was reportedly queasy, and even the cover designer assigned to the book balked. Then, in November 1990, barely a month before its planned appearance on bookstore shelves, S&S yanked the book from its schedule. American Psycho survived, of course. Knopf picked it up and issued it as a Vintage paperback original in early 1991. But a number of booksellers declined to stock it, and a preponderance of critics excoriated it. Even so, it was enough of a success to catch the attention of producer Edward R. Pressman, who developed it as a feature project for Lionsgate, then an upstart film distributor based in Vancouver.

TIFF ’18: Aniara

September 20, 2018****/****, 2018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Denmark, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, Romance, Sci-Fi, Sweden, TIFF

****/****
written by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja, based on the poem by Harry Martinson
directed by Pella Kågerman & Hugo Lilja

by Bill Chambers The opening credits of Aniara, the debut feature from short-film hyphenates Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, scroll like closing credits over images of earthly disasters, because of course they do: this is the end. Mars is the new West, and what's left of humanity–many of those faces scarred or disfigured without comment–is packed aboard a new Noah's Ark bound for the red planet. It will take three weeks, but in the meantime enjoy all the amenities and luxuries of a high-end spa, and be sure to take advantage of the Mima lounge, where a digital godhead will tap into your memories and provide a soothing mental escape to Earth as you once knew it. Unfortunately for the colonists, a rogue screw strikes the ship's hull and Aniara is forced to empty its fuel tank. The captain, Chefone (Arvin Kananian), claims they just need to catch the orbit of a celestial body to get back on course, something that will take two years, max; the captain lies. MR (Isabelle Huppert-esque Emelie Jonsson) is a "mimarobe," sort of a combination tech support/apostle for Mima, which becomes a very popular attraction over time. So much so that it gets overwhelmed by all the despair it's having to tranquilize, and self-destructs. Although MR warned him of this outcome, Chefone disciplines her for it, because Mima was the opiate for Aniara's masses. Not their god, though–he, in his unchecked power, his command of his own "planet," is God, and he's decided to be the Old Testament kind.

TIFF ’18: High Life

September 19, 20182018, Adventure, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Directors: Claire Denis, Drama, Esoterica, France, Germany, Mystery, Poland, Sci-Fi, TIFF, UK

***½/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, Mia Goth
screenplay by Claire Denis, Jean-Pol Fargeau, Geoff Cox
directed by Claire Denis

by Angelo Muredda If you took Twitter's word for it after the gala premiere of Claire Denis's High Life, which was apparently conceived in an off-the-cuff conversation with Vincent Gallo about life at the end of the world and briefly tinkered-with in the earliest days of its inception by Zadie Smith, you'd think the singular French filmmaker abandoned all her instincts to make an edgy sci-fi sex farce with the dildo chair from Burn After Reading. What a relief, then, to discover that High Life is indeed a Claire Denis film. A step removed from the spoiler-saturated breathlessness of the first hot takes, one finds something every bit as rattled and mournful a late work as Paul Schrader's First Reformed, and, like Trouble Every Day, no less structurally elusive or visceral than the rest of her oeuvre for being a work of genre.

TIFF ’18: Teen Spirit

September 18, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Drama, Film Festivals, Music, Teen, TIFF, UK

**/****
written and directed by Max Minghella

by Bill Chambers Pity about Teen Spirit, since it opens so well. Elle Fanning scrolls through her MP3 player to find the perfect song to start things off. A beat drops, and then we get the usual assortment of corporate logos. There's another great moment early on, where Fanning, having turned down a ride home from a slurring stranger who comes on like a dirty old man, is waiting at a bus stop late at night when she spies a group of young hooligans heading in her direction. The camera swipes across Fanning from one potential threat to the other: a clever visual that shows she's between a rock and a hard place. She chooses the dirty old man, Vlad (Zlatko Buric). He's a bear, but at least she wouldn't be outnumbered. Director Max Minghella clearly inherited some filmmaking chops from his old man, the late Anthony Minghella, though he asserts his individuality by shooting in anamorphic widescreen (something Anthony eschewed despite specializing in epics), and his overall style is relatively spastic; I waited in vain for Minghella to resist a gratuitous edit or camera movement. Fanning, by the way, plays a teenage chanteuse named Violet, forced to hide her passion from her mother (Agnieszka Grochowska), a proud, stern Polish immigrant who just wants her daughter to wait tables with her and stop these pop-star pipe dreams. It's a cold, cruel world out there where men abandon their families, after all, so you need a job you can depend on.

TIFF ’18: The Death and Life of John F. Donovan

September 16, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Drama, TIFF, UK

**/****
starring Kit Harington, Natalie Portman, Jessica Chastain, Michael Gambon
written and directed by Xavier Dolan

by Angelo Muredda Ex-wunderkind, now regular old late-twentysomething Xavier Dolan follows up the Cannes-awarded It's Only the End of the World with his long-awaited English-language debut, The Death and Life of John F. Donovan. Though he has from the start been a confessional filmmaker who, for better or worse, pours himself into his work–revisiting fraught relationships between bratty teen boys and their high-strung mothers and peppering in idiosyncratic song cues from Céline Dion and Oasis–his newest feels even more concretely anchored in his pet interests, telling the story of Rupert Turner, a young, queer child actor (Jacob Tremblay) who strikes up a long-standing epistolary friendship with the eponymous not-out TV star (Kit Harington) that sets the former on a path to adulthood and tanks the latter's career.

TIFF ’18: Boy Erased

September 16, 20182018, Authors: Bill Chambers, Biopic, Drama, Film Festivals, TIFF

*½/****
written by Joel Edgerton, based on the memoir by Garrard Conley
directed by Joel Edgerton

by Bill Chambers Even though it doesn't quite stick the landing, Joel Edgerton's The Gift was one of the more promising directorial debuts from an actor in recent years, but alas his sophomore feature barely ascends to heights from which to fall. Based on the memoir by Garrard "Jared" Conley, Boy Erased opens in the unpleasant dark of dawn as only-child Jared (Lucas Hedges, who either won or lost a coin toss with Timothée Chalamet) shares a deafeningly silent breakfast with his parents, Nancy (Nicole Kidman) and Marshall (Russell Crowe, swollen to the proportions of a Charmin bear), before his first day at the ex-gay ministry Love In Action–a branding that oozes grim irony. Marshall is a Baptist preacher who owns a car dealership in the heartland; he is, in other words, awful, and when Jared returns from college less confident in his heterosexuality than ever, Marshall, scrambling to pre-empt any damage to his standing in the community, invites a couple of snake-oil salesmen into his home in the middle of the night to fix the problem. (As H.L. Mencken put it, "Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.") At this rehab centre, the residents are stripped of their possessions and their identities are tamped down in sexless white shirts. Activities include charting the sinners on one's family tree and, despite the place being co-ed, sorting the boys on a descending scale of manliness. It's all presided over by Victor Sykes (Edgerton himself; what does it say that Jared's three biggest adversaries are played by Australians?), a tacit closet case who strives for avuncular beneath the harsh judgments, leaving the dirty work to the visiting "success story" Flea inhabits with impressive rancour.

TIFF ’18: Climax

September 15, 20182018, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Esoterica, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Musical, Mystery, TIFF

**½/****
starring Sofia Boutella, Kiddy Smile, Romain Guillermic, Souheila Yacoub
written and directed by Gaspar Noé

by Angelo Muredda It's hard out here for a Gaspar Noé hater. The France-based Argentine arthouse trickster surprised even himself at Cannes when his latest, Climax, got positive notices from some who had previously written him off as a snotty provocateur. (Noé has reliably yielded some of the finest mean criticism out there: Consider Mark Peranson likening Enter the Void, in his Cannes dispatch from 2009 for CINEMA SCOPE, to "Entering the void of the cavity that is Gaspar's brain.") Climax, by contrast, was supposed to be as innovative, fun, and watchable as his previous attempts at in-your-face fuckery were punishing.