VOD Archives - Page 2 of 2 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Catching Up (2020) – VOD

December 5, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Comedy, Coming of Age, Disability, Drama, Romance, VOD

**½/****
starring Bill Crossland, Francesca Carpanini, Isabella Pisacane, Johnathan Fernandez
screenplay by Bill Crossland & Patrick Morris
directed by Bill Crossland

by Angelo Muredda Disabled men finally get that ’80s-tinged coming-of-age dramedy they ordered in Bill Crossland’s Catching Up, which feels at once like a hyper-niche genre exercise and something a bit too user-friendly for the masses to really say what it needs to say about its subjects’ sexual hang-ups. Appropriately, given the light representational twist of the premise and the title’s suggestion of something overdue, the film’s protagonist, Frank (played by Crossland, who also co-wrote the script with Patrick Morris and co-conceived the project with Mindy Beach), isn’t a high-school student on the verge of adulthood but rather a teacher, albeit one who still lives at home with his parents, who relate to him as both caretakers and friends. Along with Crossland’s uniquely specific casting–to the chagrin of this disabled writer and probably the filmmaker, too, it’s still a novelty to see a physically disabled actor playing a physically disabled character, let alone one they’ve written and directed–that quirk in the narrative trajectory makes Catching Up pretty novel despite its less convincing efforts to court a wider audience.

The Rental (2020)

July 29, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Thriller, VOD

**/****
starring Dan Stevens, Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, Jeremy Allen White
screenplay by Dave Franco & Joe Swanberg
directed by Dave Franco

by Walter Chaw The good version of The Rental, Dave Franco’s directorial debut (which he co-wrote with Joe Swanberg), reminds a lot of Paul Etheredge-Ouzts’s exceptional Hellbent in how it addresses prejudice through the application of genre conventions. The bad version of The Rental is the one that isn’t about any of that and is maybe a little bit racist in that well-intended way people who would be horrified to be thought of as racist are a little bit racist. The good version finds a quartet of friends, lovers, and brothers away for a weekend of privileged R&R at an extravagant Airbnb to celebrate the closing of some big deal that will make them richer with more time and disposable income than they already have. The brothers are unctuous Charlie (Dan Stevens) and pugnacious Josh (Jeremy Allen White). Charlie is married to irritating Michelle (Alison Brie) and business partners with Iranian-American Mina (Sheila Vand), whose main character trait is that she is obviously Iranian-American. That part is from the bad version of The Rental. The good version finds them away on their weekend holiday, met at their rental destination by creepy good ol’ boy Taylor (an exceptional Toby Huss), who has apparently rejected Mina’s attempt to rent–only to go with the white applicant immediately.

Guest of Honour (2020)

July 10, 20202020, Authors: Angelo Muredda, Canada, Directors: Atom Egoyan, Drama, VOD

**½/****
starring David Thewlis, Laysla De Oliveira, Rossif Sutherland, Luke Wilson
written and directed by Atom Egoyan

by Angelo Muredda “He sounds like one of those people you hear about but don’t see,” Luke Wilson’s pastor Greg tells bereaved daughter Veronica (Laysla De Oliveira) early on in Atom Egoyan’s Guest of Honour, laconically cutting through an exposition dump as only Luke Wilson can. Greg is drafting his eulogy for Veronica’s father, the recently departed health inspector Jim (David Thewlis), for whom the film itself is a kind of prickly eulogy. A cold fish with inscrutable motives (he claims he’s just working to protect the public from contamination, even as he wields his badge with extreme prejudice), Jim is the quintessential Egoyan protagonist. He’s a moral question mark in a suit, like the tax auditors and insurance adjusters who have served the somewhat dimmed star of English-Canadian cinema so well in The Adjuster and Exotica. Imbued with a puckish meanness by Thewlis, Jim is the lynchpin to a modestly successful exercise that epitomizes Egoyan’s annoyingly self-serious puzzle-box style, as well as, thankfully, his playfulness.

Irresistible (2020)

June 24, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Drama, VOD, ZERO STARS

ZERO STARS/****
starring Steve Carell, Chris Cooper, Mackenzie Davis, Rose Byrne
written and directed by Jon Stewart

by Walter Chaw Jon Stewart’s Irresistible hates you, absolutely loathes you. It can’t believe it has to talk to you and so it’s smug and dismissive, and then at the end of it all, it offers up three different but equally repugnant endings that give the viewer a variety of shit sandwiches to choose from, though you do have to pick one. As a metaphor for what’s going on in the world right now, it’s on-the-nose. As a movie, it’s an assault more objectionable than any Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke miserabilist exercise, because it clothes itself in an affable sheaf of menial, liberal equivocation–but underneath it’s this boiling, nihilistic condemnation of every single one of you fucking idiots who let it get so bad. It brings to mind nothing so much as George Sanders’s suicide note expressing boredom with the very notion of you to the very last. Everything is terrible. The experiment is over. We failed. There’s no hope. And Irresistible is precisely the kind of asshole who offers a utopian social solution he clearly thinks is a hopeless fantasy but pretends is advice given earnestly so you don’t think he’s the other kind of asshole who just complains about how stupid people are all the time. It’s a film about the mortal tone-deafness of liberals that is itself mortally tone-deaf.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

April 4, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Teen, VOD

**½/****
starring Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten
written and directed by Eliza Hittman

by Walter Chaw In Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a young woman seeking an abortion finds one. There’s not much controversy in my mind as to whether or not she should have it, since the film suggests, in a lovely, oblique way, that her pregnancy is the product of abuse–maybe probably definitely absolutely through an incestual relationship with her creepy stepfather (Ryan Eggold). Hittman doesn’t say that this is so, but she doesn’t say that it isn’t so, either. From what we glean of the stepfather’s meanness and cruelty to the family dog, and then from the way our hero, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), reacts to questions about the father of the MacGuffin, we, you know, put things together. Mostly, what we put together is that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is less interested in those details than it is in painting a portrait of how terrifying men are, which is utterly true and also not exceptionally revelatory, as revelations go.

Vivarium (2020)

March 27, 20202020, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Horror, Satire, VOD

***½/****
starring Imogen Poots, Jesse Eisenberg, Jonathan Aris, Molly McCann
screenplay by Garret Shanley
directed by Lorcan Finnegan

by Walter Chaw Lorcan Finnegan's Vivarium cues what it's going to be about with a title that could, arguably, also describe movies: artificial, controlled environments constructed for the observation of collected specimens. As the film opens, nature footage of a cuckoo bird pushing baby birds out of their nest to take their place segues into grammar-school teacher Gemma (Imogen Poots) leading a classroom of kids acting out a windstorm. In the next scene, Gemma counsels one of her young charges as the child discovers the dead-bird babies on the ground beneath a tree. A cuckoo could be responsible, she says, and it's terrible, of course, but it's nature. If you were to stop watching Vivarium there, about five minutes in, you'd miss some fun stuff, but the whole film has already been summarized. The picture boils every impulse down to biological impetus, you see. But rather than making Vivarium simplistic, this philosophical determinism makes the behaviours of its subjects extraordinarily complex and interesting.

Swallow (2020)

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

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

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

Blood On Her Name (2020)

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

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

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

The Night Clerk (2020)

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

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

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

Gwen (2019)

August 21, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, UK, VOD

***/****
starring Maxine Peake, Eleanor Worthington-Cox
written and directed by William McGregor

by Alice Stoehr The place is Wales. The time is the past. The subject is a penniless family of three. Mancunian actress Maxine Peake plays the sallow, unsmiling mother of two girls: little Mari (Jodie Innes) and teenage Gwen (Eleanor Worthington-Cox). They live in a ramshackle farmhouse amid mossy boulders and fields of emerald grass. The sky tends to be thickly overcast; particles of soot get everywhere. Wind rasps the valley and pervades the sound design by Anna Bertmark, whose credits include You Were Never Really Here. The soundscape is much like that of Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse, another film about rural privation on an uncaring earth. Snow falls, thunder cracks, and the family's meagre assets dwindle. This is the starting point for Gwen, William McGregor's flinty debut feature. McGregor started in British television, with shows like "Misfits" and the period drama "Poldark", on both of which he collaborated with Gwen's cinematographer Adam Etherington. The two of them put tremendous discipline into the film's style, shooting across the Welsh countryside in early winter. They apply a rich visual lexicon to this desolate space: focus pulls, slow pans and zooms, reflections in sullied glass. Due to the era's lack of electricity, they favour backlighting, with pale sun penetrating the house's gloom. Night scenes rely on the unsteady and audible flames of candles or torches. It's a world of fog and fire and dirt.

Madonna and the Breakfast Club (2019)

March 17, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Documentary, VOD

**/****
written and directed by Guy Guido

by Alice Stoehr Madonna Ciccone was born in 1958. She left Michigan for New York City in 1978. Her debut album “Madonna” saw release in 1983. After that, she rocketed to stardom. But for several years in her early twenties, she paid her dues as a musician, working menial jobs while learning drums and guitar. The semi-documentary Madonna and the Breakfast Club tells the story of that period through a bundle of techniques. The bluntest and most expedient of these is voiceover narration. When Madonna moves to then-boyfriend Dan Gilroy’s home in a former synagogue, a woman’s voice says, with studied neutrality, “It was here that Madonna would begin her journey into music.” More versatile are the talking-head interviews with old friends like Norris Burroughs, who introduced her to Gilroy (no relation to the Nightcrawler director); Stephen Lewicki, who directed her in the no-budget movie A Certain Sacrifice; and Ed Gilroy, Dan’s brother and housemate. These subjects recall those years with some nostalgia and mild disbelief over this woman they used to know. “I had a sense that she was somebody who was gonna do something in the world,” says Burroughs, his stance no doubt bolstered by hindsight. The Gilroys go so far as to display photos and demo tapes from Madonna’s tenure in their band, Breakfast Club. These artifacts, which include an embryonic draft of Like a Virgin‘s “Over and Over,” sketch a portrait of the artist as a young tunesmith.

The Amityville Murders (2019)

February 9, 20192019, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Horror, Theatrical, VOD

**½/****
starring John Robinson, Chelsea Ricketts, Diane Franklin, Paul Ben-Victor
written and directed by Daniel Farrands

by Alice Stoehr The case of Ronald DeFeo Jr. is a gruesome true-crime tragedy. On November 13, 1974, the 23-year-old shot his parents and four younger siblings to death in their Long Island home. A year later, a jury found him guilty of the murders. He’s been in prison ever since. The family’s house beside the Amityville River now has pride of place in the annals of American haunting. George and Kathy Lutz’s one-month stay there served as the basis for a novel, then a film franchise whose second entry, Amityville II: The Possession (1982), fictionalized the DeFeos as the Montellis, with their son in a demon’s thrall. Decades and many more sequels and reboots later comes The Amityville Murders, which depicts the family under their real name in the last couple weeks of their lives. Though loosely based on actual events, it’s less a docudrama than an extrapolation, sticking to the timeline of the murders while ascribing them to the supernatural. Writer-director Daniel Farrands, whose slasher bona fides include Halloween 6‘s screenplay and a 4-hour Elm Street doc, applies a measure of realism in his retelling. The opening credits feature a faux home movie that surveys a family barbecue. It introduces the teenage sisters and little brothers before turning to worn-out mom Louise (Diane Franklin), abrasive dad Ronnie (Paul Ben-Victor), and lastly Ronald Jr. (John Robinson)–known to all as “Butch”–sporting a shaggy beard. The DeFeos’ home, from the very start, is emphatically middle-class and Italian-American. Recipes for cannoli and marinara are points of pride. Floral blouses and turtlenecks help set the film during the Ford administration, as do a wealth of cultural reference points: Cher, Angie Dickinson, The Exorcist, and the puppet show “New Zoo Revue”.

Night Comes On (2018)

August 5, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

***/****
starring Dominique Fishback, John Jelks, Max Casella, Tatum Marilyn Hill
written by Jordana Spiro and Angelica Nwandu
directed by Jordana Spiro

by Alice Stoehr Social workers reel off exposition: this cagey black girl in their midst is Angel (Dominique Fishback), nearly 18. She has a 10-year-old sister, Abigail, but hasn’t seen her in a couple of years. Since their mother’s death (at their father’s hands), Angel’s been in foster homes and juvenile detention. Now she’s on parole and plans to stay with her girlfriend. These government employees briskly summarize her life while the camera holds her in close-up. It’s efficient filmmaking that establishes both the heroine’s circumstances and the system that’s confined her. Moments later, she’s out on the street, looking for someplace to charge her phone. So begins Night Comes On, the debut feature from white actress-turned-director Jordana Spiro, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Angelica Nwandu. Its 80 minutes will chart Angel’s next 48 hours as she pursues an objective of which her caseworkers are unaware: to acquire both a handgun and her father’s new address. The film extends outwards from this premise in a straight line. First, she meets with the father of her former cellmate, a scumbag dealing in black-market firearms. (Max Casella plays him the same way Harvey Keitel might’ve a few decades earlier.) A phone call interrupts their negotiations, which have involved him groping her; to buy time, he has his wife stop at the store for milk. On Angel’s way out, he hands her a half-gallon jug from the fridge. “Do me a favour,” he says. “Throw this out.” A beat later, she’s outside tossing the jug against a wall with casual disdain.

The Year of Spectacular Men (2018)

June 23, 20182018, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Comedy, Drama, Theatrical, VOD

**½/****
starring Madelyn Deutch, Avian Jogia, Nicholas Braun, Zoey Deutch
written by Madelyn Deutch
directed by Lea Thompson

by Alice Stoehr Movie star Sabrina Klein sits in a bathtub, distraught. She bawls at her companion: “Can you try to be my big sister for one second of your life, please?” Her big sister Izzy is a wannabe actress who relies on Sabrina for housing and cushy work as an assistant; emotional maturity is not her métier. Nonetheless, she tries. “We should do a song,” she says, so they call up their mom and sing her “Give My Regards to Broadway.” They both perform with such gusto that this must be a tradition for them, a holdover from their shared childhood. These may be women in their mid-twenties, yet as they dance around the bathroom they seem momentarily like a couple of kids.

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.”