Theatrical Archives - Page 21 of 68

Mississippi Grind (2015)

October 2, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Mendelsohn, Sienna Miller, Analeigh Tipton
written and directed by Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden

by Walter Chaw Completely adequate from start to finish, Anna Boden & Ryan Fleck's Mississippi Grind is essentially California Split without the stylistic innovation or sense of sadness and danger. In it, down-on-his luck gambling addict and self-proclaimed "not a good guy" Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn) runs into bon vivant gambling addict Curtis (Ryan Reynolds), who Cheap Thrills Gerry into a series of escalating gambles before whisking him away on a journey to the Big Game. There's a tremendous scene right in the middle with a loan shark played by the great Alfre Woodard that showcases both her immense warmth and her sudden steel. There's also a whore with a heart of gold (Sienna Miller) and a winsome epilogue that suggests, The Wrestler-like, that this big, lovable, broken-down lug just can't get out of his own way, gosh darn it–isn't that a shame? It is. It's a terrible shame.

Sleeping with Other People (2015)

September 30, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Romance, Theatrical, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Jason Sudeikis, Alison Brie, Adam Scott, Amanda Peet
written and directed by Leslye Headland

by Walter Chaw Massively over-written, smug, baselessly self-assured, and world-weary in the way that people who watch a lot of "Sex and the City" and "Girls" are world-weary, Leslye Headlund's rank, unwatchable Sleeping with Other People is like that date that Death goes on "Family Guy" with the girl who tells Him you can't hug your kids with nuclear arms. To say it's awful is unfair; better to say it's tedious as shit. It's a chronicle of insufferable, half-wit narcissists and, given the success of stuff like Obvious Child, hell, it's worth a try, right? Honestly, though…and no one's asking, but…wouldn't it be better to not have a career than be tied to great white albatrosses like this? Sleeping with Other People is like Diablo Cody on steroids, complete with an entire album's worth of soft-alt rock and Lilith Fair covers on the soundtrack. And much like Cody's script for Juno that has references to Soupy Sales flying from the mouths of babes, this gem has a college girl in 2002 warning a prospective beau not to reference The Graduate on learning that her name is "Elaine" when, you know, "Seinfeld". Jesus, c'mon.

The Martian (2015)

September 22, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**/****
starring Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Kristin Wiig, Chiwetel Ejiofor
screenplay by Drew Goddard, based on the novel by Andy Weir
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw The riposte, and it’s a fair one, is: What would make you happy? And the frustrating response is, “I don’t know.” The problem is this (and in a movie about solving problems, it’s germane to raise one): The Martian, Ridley Scott and Drew Goddard’s faithful adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestseller, is essentially a bwana story in which smart and resourceful black and Chinese people band together to save a white explorer who declares himself both “colonizer” and “pirate” at various points in the movie. It’s a summary of a certain kind of film, too, the space opera that used to be all the rage in the 1950s–a decade actually interested in exploration rather than defunding NASA and rabid anti-intellectualism. The only thing missing is a spacechimp and a space lady with rockets in her brassiere. I confess that I probably wouldn’t have even been thinking much, or perhaps as quickly, about the racial politics of this film had Matt Damon, the bwana in question, not “whitesplained” to a black producer (a female black producer) what diversity means as regards his wish-fulfillment reality series “Project Greenlight”. Or if it weren’t directed by Ridley Scott, whose last film, Exodus: Gods and Kings, required volumes of whitesplaining itself as to why the principals of his Middle Eastern/African tale were white.

American Ultra (2015)

August 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Theatrical

*½/****
starring Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart, Topher Grace, Connie Britton
written by Max Landis
directed by Nima Nourizadeh

by Walter Chaw A lot of thoughts crossed my mind during the Max Landis-scripted, Nima Nourizadeh-directed American Ultra, most of them having something to do with trying to figure out in which movie I'd seen something before. I also spent some time thinking that if this thing were made in the early-'90s, like it seems like it could have been or at least wants to have been, that it would have starred Drew Barrymore and James LeGros. Because I'm 42 and grew up in an era loving movies that were not very good but were very violent and had the sort of appeal that would make me want a poster for Guncrazy twenty-five years later, I'm still working through whether or not that's a recommendation.

Straight Outta Compton (2015)

August 14, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Biopic, Drama, Music, Theatrical

***/****
starring O’Shea Jackson Jr., Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff
directed by F. Gary Gray

by Walter Chaw Exhilarating until it turns into a “Behind the Music” special, F. Gary Gray’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton (hereafter Compton) is most affecting for just how timely are its self-aggrandizing tales of police brutality and racial profiling. Amid a sequence that reprises the Rodney King tape, it occurred to me that we’re talking about something that happened almost 25 years ago; all we’ve done in the time intervening is lengthen the list of martyrs and sites of atrocity. Progress that a movie that deals as directly as Compton does with race and the police exists in any form, I guess, but it’s cold comfort in the face of what feels like a treadmill built on a Moebius strip. Call it a national farce and a tragedy that what is obviously an auto-mythology plays so much like objective, sober documentary and evening newscast. God bless America.

The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015)

August 14, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Drama, Romance, Teen, Theatrical

***/****
starring Bel Powley, Alexander Skarsgård, Christopher Meloni, Kristen Wiig
screenplay by Marielle Heller, based on the book by Phoebe Gloeckner
directed by Marielle Heller

by Angelo Muredda “Everything looks totally different to me now,” announces brand-new, card-carrying adult Minnie (Bel Powley) towards the end of Marielle Heller’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl, based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical graphic novel about her coming-of-age in 1970s San Francisco. It’s an old sentiment, practically a requirement of the bildungsroman, but credit ought to go to both Heller and Powley (in their respective feature debuts) for making it seem relatively new in the context of Minnie’s story. Deservedly lauded at Sundance for its frankness and non-judgemental approach to female and young-adult sexuality, the film impresses on its own terms as a solidly constructed character study of a mercurial, still-forming artist, told with a straight face despite the period eccentricities.

Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation (2015)

July 30, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Espionage, Theatrical, Thriller, Tom Cruise

***½/****
starring Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Alec Baldwin
screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie
directed by Christopher McQuarrie

by Walter Chaw At some point, sneakily, wonderfully, Tom Cruise became our Jackie Chan. It happened when the storyline shifted away from his essential ickiness–the Scientology thing, the Katie Holmes thing, and all the attendant nightmare gossip–and onto his fearlessness and absolute willingness to perform his own stunts wherever possible. (I realize of course that said storyline may never shift for some.) There were murmurs when he did the rock-climbing in the second Mission: Impossible flick–the one where he recruited John Woo, who was at the time the best action director on the planet. Those murmurs turned to grudging admiration once it was revealed that Cruise let himself be suspended for real outside the Burj Khalifa in Brad Bird’s superior Ghost Protocol; and now, with Christopher McQuarrie’s fleet, intelligent, immanently professional Rogue Nation, for which Cruise hung from an airplane in flight and held his breath for six minutes, Cruise’s bravado is a big part of the draw.

Tangerine (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical

***/****
starring Kitana Kiki Rodriguez, Mya Taylor, Karen Karagulian, James Ransone
written by Sean Baker & Chris Bergoch
directed by Sean Baker

by Walter Chaw Tangerine acts like, sometimes even looks like, a Fassbinder film. It's a relational melodrama, a social allegory, an outsider text presented with seriousness and formalism that distinguishes itself with its energy and a willingness to address taboo unadorned. It's not a masterpiece, but it is a rarity: one of those glimpses into another culture obsessed with ordinariness, mendacity, and universality. Tangerine has the urgency of another generation's independent cinema. It doesn't play like a calling card, although there are moments, most of them coming in the final third of the film, arranged with a careful, painterly intentionality. The picture plays for all its narrative looseness (and then conveniences) like an opinion urgently held, urgently shared, but repeated so often that sometimes details are neglected in the retelling. It reminded me a lot of Nir Bergman's little-seen gem Broken Wings, which takes place in a very particular time and place (Haifa during the height of suicide bombings) yet is really just about a family. Broken Wings is not a masterpiece and neither is Tangerine, but both are important in the same way.

Irrational Man (2015)

July 24, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Jamie Blackley, Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey
written and directed by Woody Allen

by Angelo Muredda There’s an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he’s as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest–if not a confession of the director’s real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.

Southpaw (2015)

July 23, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Sports, Theatrical, Thriller

*½/****
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Rachel McAdams
screenplay by Kurt Sutter
directed by Antoine Fuqua

by Walter Chaw TV-writer Kurt Sutter breaks into feature-screenwriting by amalgamating Taxi Driver with Raging Bull in a movie that has the distinction of being not only the second film of 2015 with Fiddy Cent in it for some inexplicable reason, but also the second film that Jake Gyllenhaal shares with a little slow-motion girl on a trampoline. Southpaw has the distinction, too, of being the second picture in a row following Nightcrawler that is absolutely not the equal of Mr. Gyllenhaal’s performance in it. Antoine Fuqua’s latest is a rote, by-the-numbers sports melodrama that ultimately lacks the courage of its convictions, meaning that although it’s shooting for Rocky and Requiem for a Heavyweight, it ends up as Real Steel. It wants to be gritty like the American ’70s, see, but if Disney made ultra-violent boxing movies, this is exactly what they’d be like: dead mother and all. The real wonder of it all is that Fuqua manages to match every one of Sutter’s overused sports clichés with an overused Scorsese homage. That’s the real toe-to-toe slugfest, sports fans.

Ant-Man (2015)

July 17, 20152015, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas
screenplay by Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd
directed by Peyton Reed

by Walter Chaw You’ve got to feel for director Peyton Reed, the Tobe Hooper to Edgar Wright’s Steven Spielberg in a film, Ant-Man, that will forever be discussed in terms of lingering evidence of Wright’s contribution following his very public divorce from the production. Reed’s like the guy dating the supermodel: everyone’s looking around him to see the main attraction. Indeed, multiple moments are clearly the product of Wright’s sensibility–the flashbacks, in particular, where characters speak in the exact cadence and rhythm of narrator/sidekick Luis (Michael Peña). There are multiple moments, too, where it could be speculated that the movie would have played a lot looser had Wright been allowed to see his vision through to the end. But what’s there is still a pretty good palate cleanser. It’s silly and aware of that without being snarky about it, only once or twice lowering itself to broad slapstick that, here we go again, I don’t believe Wright would have let pass without some kind of edged stinger. At the end of the day, frankly, any film that references The Incredible Shrinking Man so beautifully deserves its moment on the stage.

Terminator Genisys (2015)

July 1, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Schwarzenegger, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Byung-hun Lee
screenplay by Laeta Kalogridis & Patrick Lussier
directed by Alan Taylor

by Walter Chaw Once you come to terms with the fact that there's no internal logic to it (that it's without external logic is a given), once you've accepted that the only way to enjoy something like Terminator Genisys (hereafter T5) is at a great distance, through multiple irony filters and possibly a coma, T5 is still largely unwatchable. Its screenplay is one of those rare disasters generally reserved for a Syfy Channel Original, and indeed, the whole thing plays like the fourth sequel to Sharknado rather than the fourth sequel to James Cameron's The Terminator, which for some reason it replicates shot-for-shot in a series of 1984-set sequences. The premise, see, is that this time around, a Terminator has been sent for Sarah Connor (Emilia Clarke), mother of future resistance leader John Connor (Jason Clarke) and somewhere-in-time consort of heroic soldier Kyle Reese (Jai-Zzzzzzzzzz). What this means is that when Kyle gets sent back into the Cameron film, Sarah is already a badass, has a pet Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) she calls "Pops," and has an adversary in a liquid T-1000 (Lee Byung-hun). I still don't understand how the T-1000 time travels because the rules in this universe are that nothing metal can go through the stargate without a flesh covering. Something else that doesn't make sense, T5 also has a call-out to Chris Marker's La Jetée.

Inside Out (2015)

June 18, 20152015, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, Family, Pixar, Theatrical

**½/****
screenplay by Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley and Pete Docter
directed by Pete Docter

by Walter Chaw Films are objects and their interpretations are subjective. I start this way because there’s a sequence in Pete Docter’s Inside Out that enters an area of, literally, abstract thought–and then later, its characters accidentally spill crates of “facts” and “opinions” and have trouble getting them sorted out again. (“It happens all the time,” they’re reassured.) Someone brilliant once said that the measure of a work is the extent to which it’s examined. Inside Out is destined to be examined a lot and, therefore, deserves a great deal of merit–but for as uncannily perceptive as it is at times, it’s just as often pernicious in its gender stereotyping and establishment of straw situations that betray its core honesty. I’m reminded of Docter’s similarly-flawed, similarly schizophrenic Up, whose prologue is easily among the cinema’s best silent melodramas while the rest of it is missed opportunity, curious under-reaching, and overly dependant on shtick. Docter’s cited Paper Moon as a seminal film in his development. Of his three movies thus far, only his first, Monsters, Inc., deserves mention in the same conversation from start to bittersweet finish.

Jurassic World (2015)

June 11, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spielberg, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins
screenplay by Rick Jaffa & Amanda Silver and Derek Connolly & Colin Trevorrow
directed by Colin Trevorrow

by Walter Chaw Jurassic World is Dada. It is anti-art, anti-sense–wilfully, defiantly, some would say exuberantly, meaningless. In its feckless anarchy, find mute rebellion against narrative convention. You didn’t come for the story, it says, you came for the set-ups and pay-offs. It’s history’s most expensive porno: broad characters in familiar situations and then the fucking and the money shot. There’s a scene in the first third where raptor-wrangler Dirk, or is it Chet? Shane? No, wait…Owen (Chris Pratt), yeah, Owen, tells uptight eventual conquest Claire (Bryce Dallas Howard) that his raptors are driven by eating, hunting, and *grunt–fist-push–grunt*, and surely Claire must be motivated by at least…one…of those things. Cue the throbbing bass and dirty guitar. There are also constant call-outs to the first film, old enough now to be held as totem to a generation of people wanting to recapture that initial experience. Jurassic Park was similarly a bad movie with great set-pieces; what time has taught us is that it hardly even matters if these films have human actors in them as long as they don’t waste too much time on them. It’s fantasy gratification, and the fantasy it’s trying to gratify is that you can lose your virginity again.

Aloha (2015)

May 29, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Drama, Romance, Theatrical

**/****
starring Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Rachel McAdams, Bill Murray
written and directed by Cameron Crowe

by Angelo Muredda Few films have predicted their own failure as adroitly as Cameron Crowe’s Elizabethtown, where Orlando Bloom’s wayward shoe designer foresees his imminent sacking by dubbing his new DOA product–a billion-dollar boondoggle–a “fiasco.” Elizabethtown is a fiasco, all right, but it has little on Aloha, which has to be the quintessential Cameron Crowe film, the one for the time capsule, in its baffling configuration of good intentions and bad execution–and its near-radioactive warmth in spite of it all. Like Elizabethtown, Aloha does us the courtesy of signposting its total structural collapse right in the text; and like Elizabethtown, it’s so earnest that it’s hard to look away even after the warning. This time the tell is in a sloppily-engineered climactic scene that sees the hero hacking into the satellite he’s just helped launch from the Hawaiian base he’s secured for the military, destroying the thing he’s put up in the air himself, for reasons barely known, by blasting it with a sonic cannon composed of all recorded sound in history. (This being a Cameron Crowe film, “all recorded sound in history” consists of sentimental movie moments from Crowe’s youth and snippets of Bob Dylan’s discography.) What better metaphor could there be for Aloha, a bad-idea cannon indiscriminately blasting mawkish sentiment and choice soundbites, and compromising its own structural integrity at every turn?

Saint Laurent (2014)

May 22, 20152014, 2015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Belgium, Biopic, Drama, France, Romance, Theatrical

***/****
starring Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Helmut Berger
screenplay by Bertrand Bonello and Thomas Bidegain
directed by Bertrand Bonello

by Angelo Muredda Bertrand Bonello enters the postmodern biopic sweepstakes with Saint Laurent, no less than the third chronicle of the titular French designer and haute couture icon in as many years. With regrets to Pierre Thoretton’s understated but chilly L‘amour fou, which comes at its subject through the reminiscences of his lifelong professional and personal partner Pierre Berge, Bonello’s project is almost certainly the most fetching (thanks in no small part to costume designer Anais Romand), marrying a contemporary fixation on the limits of biographical storytelling with the sort of impressionist brushstrokes the Matisse devotee might have appreciated. In the wake of filmmakers as disparate as Todd Haynes and Abel Ferrara self-consciously toying with the limits of the biopic form, ostensibly killing dynamic subjects by pinning them to the wall, Saint Laurent isn’t as radical a work of genre subversion as some of its adherents claim, but it sure as hell is beautiful, channelling its subject’s hedonist spirit and delicate aesthetic sensibility in roughly equal measure.

Tomorrowland (2015)

May 20, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disney, Family, Mystery, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

***/****
starring George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Britt Robertson, Raffey Cassidy
screenplay by Damon Lindelof and Brad Bird
directed by Brad Bird

by Walter Chaw Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland is a mess and it knows it. It’s unruly, barely contained, just this side of completely falling apart. There are many and distracting continuity errors, and though it makes a joke of it, it’s clear immediately that the movie doesn’t know how to start, much less end. It has an engaging, irrepressible heroine it strands at the moment she should be doing something (“Am I supposed to be…doing something?” she actually asks), and it has a visit to a memorabilia/collectibles store run by unusual proprietors that is packed to the girders with Brad Bird ephemera of the Iron Giant and Incredibles variety. Tomorrowland has hanging about it, in other words, all the elements of disaster: winky meta references, lack of narrative cohesion, desperation-born mistakes, bad screenwriter/Nick-Riviera-bad script doctor Damon Lindelof as Bird’s co-author…and yet it’s good somehow. Credit Bird, who knows his way around spatial relationships, and credit a simple, plaintive idea that the world can be better if we believe that it can be better. If the sign of a great filmmaker is his ability to make a bad actor seem good, Bird is a frickin’ genius for making something Lindelof worked on not an utter catastrophe. It’s big and simple and corny in a Lone Ranger, Captain America, Silver Age Superman kind of way–the kind of big and simple and corny I can get behind.

Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

May 14, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

***½/****
starring Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron, Nicholas Hoult, Hugh Keays-Byrne
written by George Miller, Brendan McCarthy, Nico Lathouris
directed by George Miller

by Walter Chaw The best parts of Mad Max: Fury Road (hereafter Fury Road) are, as it happens, those that are most like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The parts about civilization rising from the ruins of an atomic war; the parts about misplaced hope and how unlikely alliances can sometimes speak to the human tendency towards faith and the possibility of eternity. The series was always about the myth of the lone hero, striding into whatever situation and facilitating a return to a prelapsarian (pre-poc-y-clypse?) state before disappearing again. Shane, for instance, where a child’s development–or in the case of Thunderdome, a great many children’s development–has been mythologized as the intervention of a mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere and returns there. Max is a metaphor. For courage, heart, intelligence, the yearning for home; he touches in turn each of The Wizard of Oz‘s quartet of self-actualization while keeping the Wizard behind the curtain. If there’s a specific modern mythology to which this series most obviously hews, it’s the Arthur myth, and in Thunderdome, when asked if he’s the return of the fabled Captain Walker, Max responds that he isn’t. But we know that he is.

Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

April 29, 20152015, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson
written and directed by Joss Whedon

by Walter Chaw It’s pointless to recap this edition of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s endless cycling through decades of storylines, melodramas, loves and blood feuds, deaths and resurrections–this Möbius strip of punching and quipping and punching and quipping and punching and… It’s an ouroborosian worm devouring itself into eternity, if you let it, and the sanction that a few billion dollars confers suggests it’ll keep devouring itself for a while longer. Still, it’s a cripplingly expensive endeavour, meaning that surprise and individuality are crushed in its logarithmic march towards solvency–and the human collateral caught in its gears is the tragedy that the place we get to see Mark Ruffalo and Scarlett Johansson (the two best, most interesting actors in the United States right now) share an emotionally complex scene is in this vacuous light show-cum-cash register, Avengers: Age of Ultron (hereafter Avengers II). You could say that at least it happened–you could also say that you wish it had happened in a vehicle that actually cared about them, and it wouldn’t be too much to ask.

Ex Machina (2015)

April 23, 20152015, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Drama, Sci-Fi, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Angelo Muredda Say this much for Alex Garland: there’s an early stretch in Ex Machina, his auspicious directorial debut, where one wonders if one is seeing something relatively new. That’s meant not as a backhanded compliment but as an acknowledgement that good sci-fi is hard to come by, and that impressive world-building rarely segues into sophisticated storytelling grounded in novel ideas. For probably long enough to give it a decent shelf-life, Ex Machina passes the genre sniff test about as well as its android heroine–an artificially intelligent being with the body of a European rising star–clears her own trial, a personal variation on the Turing test. If the film dips from there into a familiar, smart-alecky noir about bad men and the women they can’t control, at least credit it for deferring the inevitable.