Theatrical Archives - Page 17 of 65

The Huntsman: Winter’s War (2016)

April 22, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Theatrical

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Charlize Theron, Emily Blunt, Jessica Chastain
written by Evan Spiliotopoulos and Craig Mazin
directed by Cedric Nicolas-Troyan

by Walter Chaw It’s not offensive, or provocative, or particularly funny, or especially exciting. It doesn’t do anything very well, but neither does it do anything very poorly. It has a ridiculously overqualified cast game for anything in the way that good sports are when engaged in a losing battle against poor pacing and essential silliness; frankly, I don’t have anything against silliness per se. In that spirit, Cedric Nicolas-Troyan’s The Huntsman: Winter’s War (hereafter Huntsman 2) reminds a lot of pleasant disasters like Ladyhawke and Krull, with its biggest crime maybe being that it’s not ridiculous enough, given how the fantastic commitment of Charlize Theron, reprising her role from the previous film (which I’m sure I saw and probably reviewed), seems ultimately squandered. A shame that she’s in the movie for about five minutes, spending some of that as a CGI phantom and a lot of that screaming. It’s telling that she still manages to be the most interesting thing in it.

Midnight Special (2016)

April 15, 20162016, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Sam Shepard
written and directed by Jeff Nichols

by Walter Chaw Jeff Nichols’s Midnight Special is beautiful. It’s a film about aspiration and sacrifice. It believes that the world is still a mysterious place anchored by love and hope and devotion to simple ideas about how hard it is to be a parent–and how important. It’s about nurturing a thing with all your heart and letting it go when it’s strong enough. It’s about listening when it’s the last thing you want to hear; it’s about believing there’s a future for your kids even if all evidence seems to suggest the opposite. It’s like Tomorrowland in many ways, but mostly in its suggestion that there’s a place maybe where things feel like they used to feel when you were a kid and everything was still possible. Even though nothing made sense, things would make sense one day when you were big. Midnight Special deserves its comparisons to films like E.T. and Starman and especially Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It works in the same small places with ordinary characters who grow to fill larger, echoing spaces. Nichols puts us in medias res with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his best friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) on the run from cult leader Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), having fled at some point before the movie starts with Roy’s son, Alton (Jaeden Lieberher). We learn it was around Alton’s oddities that the cult largely formed. We learn that Alton’s oddities are perhaps supernatural, or extraterrestrial, or interdimensional. It doesn’t really matter. They’re profoundly strange, and there are times it appears that he’s able to tell a little of the future.

Everybody Wants Some!! (2016)

April 1, 20162016, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Directors: Richard Linklater, Theatrical

**/****
starring Will Brittain, Zoey Deutch, Ryan Guzman, Tyler Hoechlin
written and directed by Richard Linklater

by Angelo Muredda It’s easy to underestimate Richard Linklater, America’s nice-guy filmmaker par excellence. If his chill aura more or less kept him out of the prestige-film sweepstakes until Boyhood, it also made the formal dice rolls of Waking Life and the Before trilogy land more impressively–and contrary to expectations–than they might have coming from a more bullish director. But Linklater’s genial Texas cool proves a liability in Everybody Wants Some!!, a calculated, unambitious return to the rhythms of Dazed and Confused that picks up with a new crew in the next decade. Riding a wave of good vibes from cinephiles clamouring for another shaggy-dog hangout movie, Everybody Wants Some!! never quite earns either its Van Halen-cribbed exclamation or its status as a presumptive critical and audience favourite, settling for aw-shucks likeability and shopworn familiarity where Linklater’s best work sneaks anthropology in through the backdoor.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

March 23, 20162016, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Jesse Eisenberg
written by Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw This is what I know: that the first time I saw Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale, a friend had to acquire it from some disreputable dealer and send it to me, unmarked, in a brown box. When I watched it, I thought to myself that the United States would never suffer something like this in the popular conversation. Not long after 9/11, The Hunger Games became a YA phenomenon capped with a run of blockbuster adaptations. I know that immediately after 9/11, witnesses on the scene could only compare it to something they would have seen in a movie. I know that the United States started remaking the nihilistic horror films that Japan had been churning out for decades, and I know that this is because after 9/11, we became the second modern, industrialized nation to experience the effects of weapons of mass destruction detonated over a civilian area. The other thing we had in common is the arrogance to believe that something about our island status left us immune to that type of offense; I know that most other nations on the planet don’t live under any such illusions. If we accept the premise that film, as all art, is sociology and history, then 9/11 is the inciting event that brought us closer as a culture, cinematically, to Japan. The myth of indomitability, whether it be that your Emperor is the descendant of the “living god” (rescinded in 1946 at the request of Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur) or that you are the island “nation” of Manhattan and your priapic symbols of financial power stood as gatekeepers to the world, suddenly dispelled by an alien power. Poof. Justlikethat. And suddenly you’re a citizen of a different place where gods are capricious and maybe not on your side, and terrible things happen for no reason. The world didn’t get more dangerous, the mainland just lost its virginity.

Allegiant (2016)

March 18, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Teen, Theatrical, Thriller

The Divergent Series: Allegiant
½*/****
starring Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Jeff Daniels, Naomi Watts
screenplay by Noah Oppenheim and Adam Cooper & Bill Collage
directed by Robert Schwentke

by Walter Chaw Remember those gauzy, halcyon days of youth spent playing “imagination” with your buddies on the schoolyard? Starting nowhere, ending nowhere, structureless? Child-development gurus would say something about how formless mucking-about is the way we first begin to socialize. Dungeons & Dragons made it into something like a communal form of spontaneous storytelling while offering a degree of gameplay and structure. Now Allegiant–the third or fourth (who knows?) film in the Divergent series, based on the third- or fourth-generation YA spin-off trying to capitalize on the Hunger Games-cum-Twilight phenomenon of smushing sci-fi/fantasy together with tween angst–has arrived to make manifest the endless exposition of developmental social psychology. In this one, Tris (Shailene Woodley, with her constantly-surprised blankness) and Four (Theo James) find themselves in a dystopian Chicago, I think, except that later they’re taken to a place I believe is also Chicago, or at least Future O’Hare, thus as the characters repeatedly referred to “going to” Chicago, I was never for a moment not confused. I even checked Wikipedia, which confirmed for me that O’Hare is in Chicago. It is. Over the last few movies, which I’ve seen but don’t remember except as a confusion of several franchises identical in my mind, Tris and Four have apparently discovered they’re pawns in a game–A GAME, I tell you–involving their genes. THEIR GENES. It’s Aldous Huxley, don’t you get it?

Knight of Cups (2016)

March 11, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Terrence Malick, Drama, Esoterica, Romance, Theatrical

****/****
starring Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Wes Bentley
written and directed by Terrence Malick

by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere and Fellini’s 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens’ Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse’s All That Jazz. Its most direct influence is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, with Malick borrowing phrases entire from its text along with its sense of wandering, seeking, and the pilgrim meeting various incarnations of sin and redemption on the road to salvation. Malick, as has become his hallmark, places people against images of eternity. In Los Angeles, the only external nature he can find is the ocean, and so he sends his “Christian” (Bale), playing a film director named “Rick,” to the shore repeatedly with a succession of women who are incarnations of Bunyan’s “Evangelical” and “Faithful” and “Mercy,” including his wife (Cate Blanchett), whom he rejects and, if Malick follows form, who will be the centre of another story all her own. Rick wanders through streets, studio lots, highrise suites that are Bunyan’s City of Destruction and Vanity Fair and, in a sequence where one guide (Natalie Portman) reveals that she’s pregnant with either Rick’s child or her husband’s, Slough of Despond, before finally discovering peace of sorts alone in the Delectable Mountains of Joshua Tree.

10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)

March 11, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Gallagher Jr.
screenplay by Josh Campbell & Matt Stuecken and Damien Chazelle
directed by Dan Trachtenberg

by Walter Chaw I don't believe that art ever occurs in a vacuum. I believe that movies, no matter their relative quality, speak to the time in which they were created, eloquently or accidentally–sometimes both. In that context, Dan Trachtenberg's 10 Cloverfield Lane, the follow-up to Matt Reeves's badly-underestimated Cloverfield (which itself pairs with Spike Lee's 25^th Hour as the best elegies for 9/11 New York (Reeves's film even more in some ways, in its emulation of Japan's kaiju cycle)), is about the way the frightening underbelly of paranoid American fanaticism has suddenly gained legitimacy and voice in the mainstream. When speaking mournfully of his estranged daughter and how his wife has taken her away from him, survivalist Howard (John Goodman) mutters that some people just can't understand what's in the best interest of their survival. He's shut himself in an underground bunker with the bunker's architect, Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.), like some Egyptian Pharaoh, girding himself against an apocalypse that may or may not be personal. He's also "abducted" a young woman passing by, Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), though Howard would say he saved her from the end of the world. His plan, see, is that the three of them wait out the fallout from whatever seismic event did or didn't happen, as a makeshift family. No touching.

Zootopia (2016)

March 5, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disney, Theatrical

***/****
screenplay by Jared Bush & Phil Johnston
directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush

by Walter Chaw Early on in Disney’s Zootopia, directed somehow by a triumvirate (Byron Howard, Rich Moore, Jared Bush) from a screenplay by Bush and Phil Johnston, a baby fox declares that it would like to grow up to be an elephant. It even has an elephant hoodie; the creature idolizes, it appears, elephant culture. It gets a laugh. It’s worth the conversation to wonder what about this is funny. At its essence, the idea that something could grow to be something else is funny. It’s also funny because it knowingly, gently pokes fun at our culture of “you can be anything you want to be,” the source of more sometimes-murderous disappointment than any other child-rearing strategy endemic to the West. Astronaut? No problem. And Zootopia opens on a children’s pageant where a little animal solemnly declares that where in primordial times he would have been predator or prey, in civilized times, he has the choice to maybe be an astronaut, or an accountant. The third way this is funny is harsher, in that it begins to touch on the truism that there are certain traits you’re born with, and while that’s a no-brainer when it comes to the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s a tough thing for most proud Judeo-Christians to accept. We have hardwiring, see, and accepting that means there are a lot of other things we need to accept as well, almost none of them politically correct and all of them fraught with delicate dancing around the issue. Zootopia is complicated as hell.

The Witch (2016)

February 19, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Theatrical

The VVitch
****/****
starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Ralph Nelson, Kate Dickie, Harvey Scrimshaw
written and directed by Robert Eggers

by Walter Chaw Robert Eggers’s The Witch details a young woman’s coming-of-age as a thing of wonder and, to her Puritanical community, an incalculable and infernal threat. It has analogs in any number of films dealing with female sexuality, unlocking avenues for critical dissection. It parallels Osgood Perkins’s extraordinary February, rhyming it in not just tone but denouement, too, as young girls dance with the devil literally and metaphorically, and find it good. It parallels Jaromil Jireš’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders in its tale of budding sex and the surreal phantasmagoria that explodes in the imagination around such a thing. It parallels Park Chan-wook’s Stoker, which shares a scene of illicit bliss and similarly decodes the incestuous loathing coiled in the belly of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt. Speaking of Hitchcock, The Witch parallels The Birds, where the intrusion of a woman’s heat makes things odd. There’s a moment in The Birds where heroine Melanie Daniels is confronted by a group of women who accuse her of causing Nature to go weird, while in The Witch, a family alone in the American pre-colonial wilderness blames eldest daughter Tomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) for the same thing. In both cases, they’re right. The misfortune generally begins with menstruation or codes for the same–a blot of red on white cloth, a mention in The Witch that Tomasin has begun her period and thus should probably be sent to live with a different family as a servant in order to protect…well, not herself, anyway.

Deadpool (2016)

February 12, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Morena Baccarin, T.J. Miller, Gina Carano
screenplay by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Tim Miller

by Walter Chaw I get it. Deadpool is post-modern. It's absolutely aware of itself. It's The Cabin in the Woods. The primogenitor of Deadpool is Dennis Miller's '90s standup: sneering, smarmy, arch, and peppered with pop-culture references running the gamut from Ferris Bueller to Limp Bizkit to the fact that there are two Professor X's in Fox's X-Men franchise. Carted off to stand before the beloved X-Man, Deadpool (Ryan Reynolds) asks, "McAvoy or Stewart?" And an audience of savvy comic-book/film fans cheers because they've been recognized. It's the button rock stars push when they say, "Hello (wherever they are)!" at the beginning of a set. It announces that they are aware of the space they occupy, and legions of concertgoers make the devil horns and light their lighters in appreciation: "Yeah, man, you're here. In that you are correct." Deadpool is about recognizing itself for what it is and recognizing its audience for recognizing where they are (which is there, recognizing that their hero recognizes where he is). When Deadpool's alter ego, being wheeled into the place where he's going to be turned into Deadpool, begs them not to give him an animated green suit, well, you knew that Reynolds was disastrously the hero in Green Lantern, right? It's only the second time it's referenced. He also calls a little bald girl Sinead O'Connor twice, because it's hard to write jokes. He could have called her "Blue Sunshine," except the only thing Deadpool can't afford to be is smarter than its audience. Relax–it never is.

Hail, Caesar! (2015)

February 6, 2016****/****, 2016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Coen Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Musical, Mystery, Scarlett Johansson, Theatrical

Hail, Caesar!: A Tale of the Christ
****/****
starring Josh Brolin, George Clooney, Alden Ehrenreich, Ralph Fiennes
written and directed by Joel & Ethan Coen

by Walter Chaw Halfway through the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar!, studio head/fixer Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin playing Jon Polito) stands against the opulent, grand entrance to his golden-age Hollywood movie studio and talks about the coming of the future. There’s a scene in a Chinese restaurant where someone pulls out a photograph of a mushroom cloud taken at a freshly-nuked Bikini Atoll and declares, solemnly, that it’s a picture of the future. There’s another scene where waves crash against a pair of rocks in a direct callback to Barton Fink, the Coens’ other golden-age Hollywood homage, outside the bachelor-pad mansion of Gene Kelly-type Burt Gurney (Channing Tatum), who happens to be the head of an enclave of Communists (are there ten?) calling themselves “The Future.” The Coens at their best describe spiritual blight. They do it in a lot of ways, across multiple genres. Hail, Caesar! opens with Mannix, a real-life figure in Hollywood tangentially connected to George Reeves’s death (murder? Suicide? Who knows?), in a confessional just a day after his last confession and a day before his next. (“Really, it’s too much Eddie. You’re not that bad.”) Mannix–more fictional than actual, it should be noted, in exactly the same way that O Brother, Where Art Thou? is the most faithful adaptation of The Odyssey there ever was despite having almost no relationship to the literal text–indeed doesn’t seem all that bad when most of what he confesses is lying to his wife (Alison Pill) about quitting cigarettes. “It’s hard, Father.” And he cries. The movie is about spiritual blight, and the sin that Mannix is constantly trying to confess is that he doesn’t know what he believes. For me, the Coens are at their best when they tackle this spiritual blight through the prism of artists and their attempts to create. Every artist is a Frankenstein. Every work is a monster.

The Finest Hours (2016)

January 30, 20162016, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Chris Pine, Casey Affleck, Ben Foster, Eric Bana
screenplay by Scott Silver and Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson, based on the book by Casey Sherman and Michael J. Tougias
directed by Craig Gillespie

by Walter Chaw Craig Gillespie makes a play to be the new Ron Howard by not only following up Ron Howard’s waterlogged maritime tale of dashing Captain Handsome and his feats of historical derring-do with his own, but also studiously crafting bland, empty, crowd-pleasing, middlebrow gruel for the sedate appreciation of people who are almost dead. Gillespie’s is The Finest Hours, the tale of a heroic small-boat Coast Guard rescue in 1951 off the coast of Nantucket that sees four really boring white guys putting out during a storm to save thirty waterlogged oil-tanker guys. The Finest Hours never for a moment made me not think of that SNL sketch where Mark Wahlberg asks a goat if it’s seen A Perfect Storm–which admittedly is not the worst thing that a film hasn’t been able to make me not think about.

Dirty Grandpa (2016)

January 23, 20162016, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Road Movie, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Robert De Niro, Zac Efron, Aubrey Plaza, Dermot Mulroney
written by John M. Phillips
directed by Dan Mazer

by Walter Chaw It’s one of those boilerplates about an uptight guy on the eve of marrying a harridan taking a road trip with a free spirit to discover that maybe he doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life (or the few years until he secures a divorce–the subtext of these things is always curiously traditional) selling out to The Man. Jason (Zac Efron) is that potential sell-out. You can tell because he dresses like the villain from an Eighties college sex comedy, is a corporate lawyer, and is engaged to a materialistic bimbo (Julianne Hough) who will justify his unconscionable hedonism by being a secret slut herself in his absence. The best of these films is its prototype, obviously (Capra’s It Happened One Night), but the one I return to most often is Bronwen Hughes’s curiously sticky–if only to me–Forces of Nature. The high concept this time around is that De Niro is the free-spirit road-tripper in a role that asks him to, literally at one point, be rapping grandmother Ellen Dow from The Wedding Singer. The imposition of this masterplot is really the only thing separating the film from “Jackass” spin-off Bad Grandpa, just as one word is the only thing separating the two concepts. De Niro’s Dick (and you do indeed get to see his dick–though admittedly, it’s probably a stunt dick) is a former Green Beret, by the way, which explains/doesn’t explain why he gets a Presidio fight sequence against a bunch of black hoods who’ve been taunting a gay black guy Dick has also recently been taunting.

Concussion (2015)

December 26, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Will Smith

*/****
starring Will Smith, Alec Baldwin, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Albert Brooks
written and directed by Peter Landesman

by Walter Chaw Peter Landesman's deeply compromised Concussion so shockingly exposes and excoriates the negligence of the NFL in protecting its players that it's constantly advertised during NFL games. The whole thing feels like a redacted security document: It's choppy, skips over entire plot points, short-sells the issues, and gives equal time to celebrating the beauty and the glory of football as it does to how football turns a scary percentage of its players into confused, manic, suicidal zombies. Save for a few minutes spent with Pittsburgh Steelers centre Mike Webster (David Morse), living in a truck and gluing his teeth into his head with superglue, we don't get much of a glimpse at the symptomatology of "CTE," the repeated-trauma disease discovered by Nigerian-born Dr. Bennet Omalu (Will Smith), who's introduced listing off his accomplishments to declare himself the "smartest person you've ever probably met or will probably ever meet." Concussion is what Spotlight would have looked like had it been made by Cardinal Law: you know, some stuff happened, but the Catholic Church is MAJESTIC. To be fair, we don't get much of a glimpse of anything–not even the romance between Omalu and his ward-cum-lover-cum-spouse (Gugu Mbatha-Raw, so astonishing in Belle and Beyond the Lights; welcome to the mainstream, Gugu!), which is treated in a curious, epileptic shorthand. She's a homeless refugee. She's very religious. Oh, now they're dancing and, um, fucking, and married and, wait, pregnant and married. Wait, now she's doing that wife-in-Bridge of Spies thing where she's protecting the family and… And Concussion is terrible.

Joy (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Comedy, Drama, Robert De Niro, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Edgar Ramirez, Bradley Cooper
screenplay by David O. Russell
directed by David O. Russell

by Walter Chaw After demonstrating with his last few movies that he’s not Martin Scorsese, David O. Russell has decided to kill two birds with one stone by demonstrating that he is neither Wes nor P.T. Anderson, either. In Joy, he proves that marrying Wes Anderson’s whimsical solipsism with P.T. Anderson’s Pynchon-esque biographical sketches is an amazingly stupid thing to do–one of those science experiments in ’50s B-movies that everyone knows is a bad idea except for the idiot doing the splicing. Yes, Joy is that bad. When it’s not being unbearably twee, it’s perving on Jennifer Lawrence like von Sternberg on Dietrich. But Joy ain’t no Blue Angel, and while I like Lawrence fine, I guess, Russell is sure as hell no von Sternberg. What I’m saying is that Russell is a terrible, glitchy director with a thing for Lawrence that he manifests by shooting her walking towards the camera with sunglasses, without sunglasses, with a wig and without a wig, in slow-motion or at normal speed, in daytime, nighttime; he lights her with the sun, with spots, with discretes, from below, and especially from behind–all in a kind of PENTHOUSE glamour. The only part of Joy that isn’t unwatchable is a sequence shot precisely like identical sequences in P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia, where an obviously tense Bradley Cooper, playing QVC programming director Neil Walker, shows the titular domestic goddess Joy (Lawrence) around the studio. I take it back, those were pretty bad, too. The only thing preventing Joy from being the worst movie of the year is that Pixels happened.

The Good Dinosaur (2015); The Revenant (2015); The Hateful Eight (2015)

December 25, 20152015, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Directors: Quentin Tarantino, Disney, Drama, Family, Mystery, Pixar, Revenge, Theatrical, Thriller, Western

THE GOOD DINOSAUR
***/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve
directed by Peter Sohn and Bob Peterson

THE REVENANT
***½/****
starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, a bear, angry junketeers
screenplay by Mark L. Smith & Alejandro G. Iñárritu
directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu

THE HATEFUL EIGHT
**/****
starring Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bruce Dern
written and directed by Quentin Tarantino

by Walter Chaw Arlo (voiced by Raymond Ochoa) is the runt in a frontier family of stylized dinosaur herbivores who struggles to live up to the example of towering Poppa (Jeffrey Wright) on the family farmstead. He’s clumsy, though, and easily frightened, and when he finds himself incapable of killing a mammalian vermin (Jack Bright), he unwittingly causes the death of his father. Arlo joins forces with the vermin, eventually, dubbing him “Spot” (he’s a little orphaned human boy) and relying on him to forage sustenance for him in the wild world outside. Spot, in return, relies upon Arlo for protection in the film’s final set-piece as Spot is set upon by a flock of fundamentalist pterodactyls. Pixar’s The Good Dinosaur is, in other words, a horror western about a frontier bespotted with monsters and monstrous ideologies, set right there at the liminal space–as all great westerns are–between the old ways and the encroaching new. It’s far more disturbing than has generally been acknowledged and, in being disturbing, it offers a tremendous amount of subtext layered onto a deceptively simple story. It posits an Earth where the dinosaur-ending comet misses impact, leading to millions of years of evolved adaptations and ending, as the film begins, with the emergence of homo sapiens on schedule, but skittering around on all fours and howling at their saurian masters. The Good Dinosaur is an existential horrorshow.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

December 16, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Star Wars, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Max Von Sydow
written by Lawrence Kasdan & J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt
directed by J.J. Abrams

by Walter Chaw I was four when I saw Star Wars. It was the first time I’d seen a film in a theatre; it was the first film I’d seen, period. I didn’t speak a word of English. It was overwhelming, and I’m discovering, after watching J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens (hereafter Star Wars 7), that it imprinted itself on my DNA. Thirty-eight years later, I collect the toys my parents couldn’t afford to buy me when I was a kid–the ones I played with at friends’ houses, when I pretended to be Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) as a child of immigrants doing his best to fit into a society that promised blond and blue-eyed messiahs. My office is full of these toys. They are fetishized relics for me. I hold them and they possess a totemic value. The curve of a molded plastic stormtrooper’s helmet reminds me of the department store where I looked at it through the packaging–and of my delight at my mom one day buying me one, which I opened on the way home in the backseat of the family car.

Macbeth (2015)

December 10, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Shakespeare, Theatrical, UK, War

***½/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Marion Cotillard, Paddy Considine, David Thewlis
screenplay by Todd Louiso & Jacob Kokoff and Michael Leslie
directed by Justin Kurzel

by Walter Chaw In a season awash in Terrence Malick shrines, Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth has the temerity to evoke Andrei Tarkovsky instead. Maybe certain moments from Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha, married to the saturated minimalism of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. It’s beautiful, in other words. Stunning enough that its self-consciousness is just another approach to centuries-old material, and a comfortable part of the whole. There are two approaches left to Shakespeare, I think: to acknowledge the centuries of intense scholarship around the canon that has uncovered the archetype (mostly Jungian, sometimes Freudian) mooring the tales, or to ignore them. This Macbeth understands that the Scottish Play is splashed red–all passion and portent and looming storms flashing low on the horizon. Every incident is portent. I mumbled along with the “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” speech that I memorized for extra credit in eighth grade and marvelled at how Kurzel rolled it into a greater thematic conversation about the lust between these two people, Macbeth (Michael Fassbender) and his Lady (Marion Cotillard). It’s as interesting an interpretation as Ethan Hawke’s Melancholy Dane pondering choices in the aisles of Blockbuster Video. Muting the dialogue, swallowing it as Fassbender does here (or burying it, as in the various battleground sequences–Banquo (Paddy Considine) calls out his warning choking on blood and dirt), has the effect of placing the words of the story as secondary to its indelible images. It’s Macbeth as mythology, seeking to explain how eternity metastasizes in the space between a couple who have lost a child.

Krampus (2015)

December 7, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Christmas, Comedy, Horror, Theatrical

**/****
starring Adam Scott, Toni Collette, David Koechner, Krista Stadler
written by Todd Casey & Michael Dougherty & Zach Shields
directed by Michael Dougherty

by Walter Chaw I used to have a collection of short stories edited by Isaac Asimov, The Twelve Frights of Christmas. Ramsey Campbell’s “The Chimney” is anthologized therein, and though it’s not directly a Krampus story, it’s sort of a Krampus story and was, at least, the first time I’d been introduced to the concept of something like an anti-Santa. It’s a great story. Michael Dougherty’s Krampus is not great, but with all the lulls and jokes misfiring, it does give you plenty of time to think about other things. (I didn’t like his Trick ‘r Treat either.) What works about the film are its first twenty minutes or so, where Dougherty seems to be setting up an unpleasant, nasty little commentary on the commodification of Christmas. There’s trouble, though, when the parts of your movie that work are the parts that compare best to Jingle All the Way. I’ll say, too, that there’s genuine delight in the appearance of weird snowmen on the lawn during a blizzard blackout, stranding a shitty family alone with their thoughts while a German alpine demon lurks about outside–as well as hope, however self-deluding and fleet, that Dougherty’s going to pay off the early abduction of the second-most sympathetic child of six. Alas, it’s ultimately as compromised as Trick ‘r Treat. The last five minutes are a masterpiece of playing both sides against the middle and pandering to an intended middlebrow audience. Like its PG-13 rating, Krampus is a devil’s bargain between horror film and family film. It’s the kind of thing that only really worked when it was Gremlins.

Creed (2015)

November 25, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Stallone, Theatrical

***/****
starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad
screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Aaron Covington
directed by Ryan Coogler

by Walter Chaw I love this movie. I do. It’s not perfect. The love interest is underbaked and the fight choreography of the final match is unfortunately disjointed. But I love this movie–unconditionally, I guess. The story goes that Ryan Coogler, the young director of Fruitvale Station, pitched Sylvester Stallone on the idea of rebooting Rocky with Apollo Creed’s son. (Something the Indiana Jones series needs to do with a grown-up Short Round, by the way.) The auto-critical analysis of the film is that it’s essentially a father/son intrigue, which lends some insight into the Rocky/Mickey relationship of the original Rockys, and there are enough references to same to gratify the cultists. What I liked most about Stallone’s willingness to take a shot on a fresh idea from a minority perspective–this is the first instalment of one of his two venerable franchises not to spring from a Stallone-written script–is that it feeds into the idea of Stallone as an auteur maybe, a canny cultural anthropologist definitely. Every Rocky, every Rambo, is distinctly a product of its time. I don’t feel qualified to talk about this, but to the extent that I understand the theory, I’m sold.