Drama Archives - Page 22 of 120 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Sand Castle (2017) – Netflix

April 25, 20172017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Streaming, UK, War

**/****
starring Nicholas Hoult, Logan Marshall-Green, Glen Powell, Henry Cavill
screenplay by Chris Roessner
directed by Fernando Coimbra

by Alice Stoehr Nicholas Hoult’s signature expression requires that his lips be ajar and his buckteeth be visible. The English actor then furrows or flattens his brow; narrows or widens his limpid blue eyes. It’s a concise look, one that makes the most of his open, boyish face. He affects it whether flirting with his professor in A Single Man or playing the bashful Beast in the X-Men movies. That barely-open mouth can suggest uncertainty and impotence. It admits that he can neither understand nor control the world around him. Hoult assumes this expression throughout his performance as PFC Matt Ocre in Sand Castle. Ocre is fresh-faced fresh meat, too tender to handle the theatre of war in which he’s abruptly immersed. (“I joined the Reserves for the college money,” he explains in voiceover, a detail that screenwriter Chris Roessner plucked from his own life.) The Jordanian desert stands in for Iraq in 2003 as Ocre’s platoon plows through the aftermath of the American-led invasion. Hoult’s joined by hunky rising stars like Glen Powell as the macho Falvy–a far cry from his work as a pretentious ladies’ man in Everybody Wants Some!!–and Logan Marshall-Green as the no-nonsense sergeant. The film follows these men as they drive from one makeshift base to another. It emphasizes their scruff, their sweat, and their loud-mouthed braggadocio. The dialogue, which oozes naturalistic profanity, is thoroughly plausible, if increasingly monotonous.

Hidden Figures (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 19, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD

*/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B+
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

by Walter Chaw Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures is so inextricably bonded to the rote motions of awards-season biographical uplift melodrama that it functions as proof of a template studios give to directors who won’t kick too much about art and individuality and expression and all that high-falutin’ stuff. Better, it’s proof of an attachment that fits onto the Studio sausage press ensuring that all the mashed and salted discards are extruded in the proper proportion into the collective cow gut. Hidden Figures is the story of three African-American women in the 1960s who go to work for NASA’s Mercury program in the days after the Sputnik launch. It talks about how they’re brilliant but forced to pee in segregated bathrooms; how they’re proud family women but treated like second-class citizens or worse. It positions a white man of power who sees their value all the way through to letting one of the ladies be a co-author on a report she seems to have written herself. It has the end-credits thing where pictures of the real women whose stories the movie ostensibly tells are shown with titles detailing the horrific shit they endured to get their names on a building. Well, one of them anyway. It even has that thing in movies about numbers where there’s a lot of running to try to make math exciting to watch. What it doesn’t have is any lingering impact whatsoever: no gravitas, no surprise, no interest, nothing. The only thing to say about Hidden Figures, really, is that if you spend time praising it, you’re being patronizing–and that is the very definition of irony.

Collateral Beauty (2016) – Blu-ray Disc

April 9, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, Esoterica, Will Smith, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras F
starring Will Smith, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Helen Mirren
written by Allan Loeb
directed by David Frankel

by Walter Chaw Collateral Beauty is the conversation you had that one time with the stupidest person you’ve ever met, in that it’s so stupid it poses an existential problem for you. It happened to me once when, as a bartender, one of the waitresses asked me with concern how she could transform the Coke float she’d ordered into the Sprite float the customer had ordered. I didn’t know. I still don’t. And not having the answer to a question posed by the stupidest person you’ve ever met is horrifying. It’s like you come home one day and your guinea pig greets you with a zen kōan. It’s Kafka’s great unwritten tale. It’s Collateral Beauty: a question with no answer posed by the stupidest movie ever made. Really, the only solution is to dump it out and start from scratch. Collateral Beauty is about grief, sort of, and gaslighting, and it’s shot like a visit to Whole Foods in the sense that it’s burnished with a classy patina and full of pretty people you’d like to be. Then you get to the checkout lane and it’s too much, but you’re too embarrassed to put anything back. Also, the food tastes like ass.

Ghost in the Shell (2017)

April 1, 20172017, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano, Michael Carmen Pitt, Juliette Binoche
screenplay by Jamie Moss and William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger, based on the comic “The Ghost in the Shell” by Shirow Masamune
directed by Rupert Sanders

by Walter Chaw Emily Yoshida, in an article for THE VERGE addressing the outcry over the casting of Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, has the last word on the topic as it pertains to anime in general and Mamoru Oshii’s seminal original in particular (an adaptation of a popular manga to which most casual fans in the West won’t have been exposed). She provides a stunning, succinct historical context for Japanese self-denial and the country’s post-bellum relationship with technology, then writes a review of this film in which she systematically destroys it for its essential misunderstanding of the source material. I agree with every word. I learned a lot. And I still like the new film, anyway. I think Ghost in the Shell is probably fascinating in spite of itself and because the environment has made it dangerous for pretty much anyone to discuss what its critics (not Yoshida, per se) wish it did. I like it because its production design is beautiful and I like it even though it’s basically a RoboCop port that takes the American attitude of being horrified by technology rather than the Japanese one of being largely defined by it. It’s puritanical. It was interpreted, after all, by a country founded by Pilgrims. Ghost in the Shell often doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s appropriating, and when push comes to shove, the dialogue falls somewhere between noodling and empty exposition. Still, there’s something worth excavating here.

20th Century Women (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

March 27, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, FFC Must-Own

20thcenturywomen2

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

by Walter Chaw Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women is beautiful for the way that it listens. It hears how people talk, and it lets them. It watches the way people interact and allows that to speak volumes for them. It’s a film, like so many lately, about communication. There’s a moment, late, where a young man–a boy, really–says to his mother that he’s an individual: “I’m not all men, I’m just me.” And she says, “Well… yes and no.” It’s a beautiful exchange, performed exquisitely, timed perfectly. It’s sublime, not the least for being smart and dead-on. Kind and pointed and impossibly eloquent about certain uncomfortable truths, 20th Century Women is an invitation to have ultimate conversations about how we ruin our children with our best intentions and how that has always been so and will always be so. In multiple interludes, Mills speeds up the film, blurring the action with lighting effects and throwing in archival images while including narration like “the world is very big.” It is. The picture holds to the idea that the world is incomprehensible and that we’re acted on by forces we cannot control–and at the end of it, after we’re gone, it goes on without having known we were there. There’s a certain piquancy to that that needs to be earned, and is earned.

Personal Shopper (2016)

March 24, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There’s a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called “Every Little Bit” that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric “I still don’t blame you for leaving, baby, it’s called living with ghosts.” At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. “And then?” he asks. “I guess I’ll live my life and let it go.” Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother’s “widowed” girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen’s a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums–a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She’ll suffer both before the end.

Allied (2016) – Blu-ray + Digital HD

March 22, 20172016, 2017, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: Robert Zemeckis, Drama, Mystery, Romance, Thriller, War

**/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring Brad Pitt, Marion Cotillard, Jared Harris, Simon McBurney
screenplay by Steven Knight
directed by Robert Zemeckis

by Bill Chambers

“Back in those days I was much more of a taskmaster. I would make my actors hit those marks and always be in their light, and now I’ve kind of–I don’t care as much anymore. I wouldn’t allow there to be a camera bobble in any of those films. If the camera jiggled one frame, I’d have to do the take again. But nowadays, audiences are so different. I don’t think they appreciate the attention to detail. Maybe subconsciously they feel it, maybe they don’t. Having a perfectly composed shot doesn’t matter if you are watching it on an iPhone, does it? You wouldn’t see it.”

That’s Robert Zemeckis, speaking to We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy author Caseen Gaines. When I first read those words, I have to admit I had a little moment of “Dylan goes electric” heartbreak, because the precision craftsmanship of Zemeckis’s films had always been a comfort. Then I reread them, taking into account the resounding shrug that greeted both his lengthy detour into motion-capture animation and his subsequent return to live-action (Flight), and his sour grapes became considerably more pungent. Many filmmakers relax their standards as they get older; few make a point of announcing it. Fewer still do so with spite. If the prolific Zemeckis is fatigued, he shouldn’t pass the buck: it’s hard-won–I can’t begin to imagine the intensity of effort it took to pull off, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or Death Becomes Her. When he belittles the iPhone he gives away his age (62 at the time), but he also sells himself out, as someone who’s been at the forefront of the digital revolution for decades. Of course, between his waffling commitment to 3-D and MoCap and his punking of a nation’s kids in a 1989 TV special in which he claimed that Back to the Future Part II‘s hoverboards were a real technology suppressed by parents’ groups, it’s hard to take Zemeckis at his word.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

March 3, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Action, Drama, Horror, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps–or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I’ve long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They’re the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they’re the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele’s sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley’s “dead thoughts… Like wither’d leaves” carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It’s a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold’s Logan and Colm McCarthy’s more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way–proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless, to me, evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

March 2, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, DVD, Romance

Rulesdontapply3

*/**** Image A+ Sound A+ Extras C+
starring Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Matthew Broderick, Lily Collins
screenplay by Warren Beatty
directed by Warren Beatty

by Walter Chaw The title refers to Howard Hughes, I think, and becomes a song its ingénue sings a couple of times over the course of the film. Moreover, it refers to Warren Beatty at this point in an extraordinary career that began in the New American Cinema and that wave of Method actors filling in the spaces left behind by the Golden Age. He was impossibly beautiful, and played against it whenever he could. He was whip-smart. Unabashedly political. Unapologetically a legendary philanderer who made perhaps his greatest single impression on my generation with a surprise cameo in then-girlfriend Madonna’s documentary monument to herself, Truth or Dare. Any investigation, though, finds that Beatty is a definitive voice of a definitive moment in the cinematic history of the United States. It’s been fifteen years since his last film as an actor, twenty as a director. In the meantime: rumours and speculation about this long-gestating production–his dream project, the culmination of a storied career behind and in front of the camera. And now here it is, Rules Don’t Apply, and it’s exceedingly uncomfortable, a film that leaves Beatty, acting here as co-star, director, producer, and credited screenwriter, exceptionally vulnerable. As capstones go, it’s an interesting one.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 28, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Drama, Esoterica, The Criterion Collection

El Ángel Exterminador
****/**** Image B+ Sound B+ Extras B
starring Silvia Pinal, Jacqueline Andere, José Baviera, Augusto Benedico
screenplay by Luis Buñuel, based on the story “Los Náufragos de la Calle de la Providencia” by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buñuel
directed by Luis Buñuel

by Bryant Frazer The first scene of The Exterminating Angel takes place at the gate outside a stately mansion where the house’s butler, Julio (Claudio Brook), confronts Lucas (Ángel Merino), a servant trying to sneak off the grounds just as the staff is preparing a dinner party for twenty. The worker hesitates for a moment, then continues on his way, the butler calling angrily after him: “Never set foot in this house again.” It’s the beginning of a very long night for the steward, who is vexed as his waiters and kitchen staff, one by one or in pairs, desert their posts for the evening at the worst possible time. The servants know something’s wrong, and though they’re not sure what it is, none of them–save the unflappable Julio, who keeps the gears turning smoothly–are willing to stick around to find out. When Lucia (Lucy Gallardo), the frustrated lady of the house, barks her offense at this betrayal, Julio is there to reassure her. “Domestic help grows more impertinent by the day, madam,” he declares.

Manchester by the Sea (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

February 20, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, DVD, FFC Must-Own

Manchesterbythesea

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras B-
starring Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler, Lucas Hedges
written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan

by Walter Chaw Kenneth Lonergan is a brilliant writer who specializes in small interpersonal moments. His plays are extraordinary. The two previous films he directed, You Can Count on Me and Margaret, are masterful portraits of human failure and weakness. He is a poet of imperfection and imperfect resolution. Margaret gained attention for the lengths to which Lonergan fought for a cut that exceeded a contracted-upon two-and-a-half-hour running time. Martin Scorsese, with whom Lonergan collaborated on the script for Gangs of New York, helped facilitate a 165-minute cut that, to my knowledge, has never been screened. When Margaret finally hit home video after a swell of support from online advocates, the long version had inflated to 186 minutes. I’ve only seen the theatrical and extended cuts of the film. I love them both. I rarely wish movies were longer; Lonergan’s are the exception. That has something to do with his writing, of course, and something to do with his casts, who, to a one, have contributed extraordinary work–perhaps the best work of their careers. Crucially, Lonergan trusts them to deliver his words. He doesn’t garnish them with gaudy camera angles, or underscore them with expository soundtrack cues. Mark Ruffalo once said of Lonergan, affectionately, that the playwright was only playing at being humble. For me, however Lonergan is with other people, his humility comes through in the extent to which he allows his actors to do their job.

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) – VOD

February 16, 20172015, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr “You cannot fight,” explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. “Your only chance of survival comes from compliance.” This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron’s prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor’s gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion’s share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film’s greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast–Matt Barber, as Alison’s husband Tom–has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, “Did you touch my wife?” and, “I can’t have anyone else inside you.”

Woman in the Dunes (1964) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

February 5, 2017****/****, 1960s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Japan, The Criterion Collection, Thriller

Womaninthedunes1

****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A
starring Eiji Okada, Kyōko Kishida, Kōji Mitsui, Hiroko Itō
screenplay by Kōbō Abe, based on his novel The Woman in the Dunes
directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara

by Walter Chaw The first morning amateur entomologist Niki (Eiji Okada) wakes in a house at the bottom of a hole carved into a sand dune, he finds his lessor–the titular, nameless Woman (Kyoko Kishida)–asleep in the nude, with sand crusted over her body like a thin, granular mantle. Director Hiroshi Teshigahara sweeps over her body with a sculptor’s attention. It’s intensely erotic, though for all its voyeuristic intention, it’s not prurient. No, there’s a sense of intimacy in this: it’s the attention you give a lover when her skin is near your eye and you love her and desire her: you want to touch her, to taste her, to consume her. There’s much talk of “the flesh” in David Cronenberg’s The Fly; flesh makes you crazy. The way Teshigahara shoots surfaces in Woman in the Dunes makes you crazy. When they finally make love, Niki and the Woman, each individual grain of sand on Niki’s skin stands out like a monument. When the Woman bathes him, rubbing suds between her hands and running them down his legs and back, you can feel her hands play across your own calves, and you can feel him beneath your hands. Not just flesh, but the textures and tides of the dunes over which Niki practices his minor distractions from the day-to-day of whatever it is he does in the city, where he’s nothing, accomplishes nothing of note, and will not be missed but for the missing-person’s report we see at the end as the film’s pithy epilogue. Based on Kōbō Abe’s novel of the same name, Woman in the Dunes is in one way the best, most insightful and evocative adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” there ever was, from Eliot’s winsome protagonist looking to escape regret into experience to, literally, these lines about entomology as a metaphor for being seen clearly and judged wanting:

Dead Ringers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 31, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound D Extras B
starring Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Stephen Lack
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer Dead Ringers begins and ends extraordinarily, with the soft swelling of Howard Shore’s title music. It starts with the slow emergence of strings, which are eventually layered with harp and woodwinds, mining uncommon veins of sadness in a major key. Set against on-screen illustrations of an anatomical and explicitly gynecological nature, the music serves the obvious function of undercutting the film’s pointedly unsettling subject matter with unalloyed lyricism. It’s like a statement of purpose. But Shore’s melody goes farther than that, somehow. It’s remarkably haunting, for one thing–the theme is one of the most potent sensory triggers I know, instantly evoking both beauty and despair. Just the first four bars are enough to set me weeping. And it’s penetrating. More than elegiac, it’s specifically regretful, and bittersweet. According to Royal S. Brown’s liner notes on the first CD release of the movie’s score, the director knew it right away. “That’s suicide music,” Cronenberg told Shore when he first heard the theme. “You’ve got it.”

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) [30th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2017****/****, 1990s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, Tom Towles
written by Richard Fire & John McNaughton
directed by John McNaughton

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (hereafter Henry) is one of the great black comedies. At its heart is the basis of Judd Apatow’s gross-out flicks: body horror, deviant sexuality, deep ignorance-unto-actual stupidity, questionable decisions and their consequences, and brilliant bits of deadpan humour dependent upon timing and situation. Similarly, it derives its effectiveness from a keen observation of male heterosexual relationships and the peril implicit therein. The sole distinction, really, is that Apatow and his followers believe in conservative, family-values resolutions whereas Henry ends in essential, sucking nihilism. It’s a distinction that draws the line between something that’s considered to be a comedy and something that’s widely discussed as possibly the most unpleasant American film ever made. What most have identified as pessimistic, however, I would just call vérité, now more than ever. At least for me, Henry had about it an almost palpable air of taboo. Though shot in 1986, it was released in Denver in 1990, when I was 17. I read Roger Ebert’s cautionary, celebratory review of it, which made me afraid. When I saw it, I saw it alone. For its wisdom, it’s never quite left me.

Silence (2016)

January 17, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Martin Scorsese, Drama, Mexico, Taiwan, Theatrical

****/****
starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Liam Neeson
screenplay by Jay Cocks & Martin Scorsese, based on the novel by Shusaku Endo
directed by Martin Scorsese

by Walter Chaw Martin Scorsese’s Silence is Martin Scorsese’s Silence. Not Shusaku Endo’s Silence. Not Masahiro Shinoda’s Chinmoku. Rather than a Japanese perspective, it’s told from the perspective of our most notoriously Catholic filmmaker (next to Mel Gibson, but he went to a different church), who, at the end of his life, has found this cap to a trilogy about faith and doubt begun in The Last Temptation of Christ (an adaptation of a novel by Greek author) and Kundun (about the life of the Dalai Lama)–films, each, that explore mystery and land somewhere personal and inherently unknowable, as faith is and should be. It’s an essentially Romanticist text, not Humanist like Endo’s or doom-laden and progressive like Shinoda’s. It’s the closest Scorsese’s come to truly contemplative since Kundun, and it shares with that film a sense of wonder at the Natural: this Romanticist conceit that the first testament of God is, as it always has been, Nature. Silence is almost a Terrence Malick film in that sense. In every other, it’s Scorsese coming to terms with the idea that grace is made manifest only through the actions of its proponents. The title refers not just to the Christian God’s notable state when confronted with the unimaginable suffering of His children, but also to Scorsese’s own idea of what God wants from His followers. It’s not thoughts and prayers in the face of tragedy. Maybe it’s humility. Maybe it’s service. Or maybe it’s just silence..

Live by Night (2016)

January 14, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Gangster, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Elle Fanning, Brendan Gleeson, Chris Cooper
screenplay by Ben Affleck, based on the novel by Dennis Lehane
directed by Ben affleck

by Walter Chaw I like Ben Affleck. I like him better as a director than an actor, but I like him in both roles. Live by Night is his The Postman. I mean that with affection, and I suspect the film will likely gain some critical and cult momentum in a few years’ time–but not too much, because Live by Night is not quite stupid enough, strange enough, rough-around-the-corners enough, to really latch onto. What it is, instead, is a throwback to the kinds of movies Taylor Hackford likes to make: glossy, edgeless, overheated prestige entertainments that are sometimes, as was the case with his Proof of Life, more interesting for the publicity drama they create than for the films themselves. If you doubt the Hackford-ness of it, consider the embarrassing amount of time Affleck devotes to “steamy” ’80s-era sex scenes, which are made unbearable by the soulful softcore thrusting. For Live by Night, the external mess is the hubbub over whether or not Affleck will direct an anticipated standalone Batman movie to rescue DC and Warner Bros. from their own curious tone-deafness. The spectre of Batman tends to distract from whatever’s going on in the film, especially as Affleck continues to evolve physically into a perfect cube. Since you’re asking, Live by Night‘s earnest corniness does suggest that he is probably the right man to guide a rebooted Batman franchise.

Hidden Figures (2016)

January 5, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*/****
starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner
screenplay by Allison Schroeder and Theodore Melfi, based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly
directed by Theodore Melfi

20th Century Women (2016)

January 4, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

****/****
starring Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup
written and directed by Mike Mills

Sully (2016) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

January 4, 20172016, 2017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Blu-ray Disc, Clint Eastwood, Drama, DVD

Sully1

**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Tom Hanks, Aaron Eckhart, Laura Linney
written by Todd Komarnicki, based on the book Highest Duty by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and Jeffrey Zaslow
directed by Clint Eastwood

by Walter Chaw An elderly film by an elderly filmmaker for an elderly audience, everybody’s favourite says-appalling-things old bastard Clint Eastwood directs the guy everyone can agree on, Tom Hanks, in a rah-rah hagiography of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the most uncomplicatedly heroic figure in the United States in the last…how long ago was Abraham Lincoln? 151 years? If you don’t know, Sully landed an airplane with 155 passengers on it in the Hudson River when bird strikes disabled both of the plane’s engines. Multiple dream sequences have Sully imagining what would’ve happened had he turned his plane over populated areas. 9/11 is referenced often–explicitly and obliquely. An applause-geeking closing title card informs that lots of New Yorkers helped rescue the passengers from the water after the splashdown because New Yorkers are good and America is great, raising the question, Mr. Eastwood, if it needs to be “great again.” Maybe it’s all gone to hell since 2009. The timing is interesting. Let’s call it that.