It’s like Thomas Hardy crafted two thirds of an epic and let Nicholas Sparks finish the final chapters. Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans (C), itself an adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s popular post-WWI Australian romance, features Michael Fassbender as a former soldier turned lighthouse keeper and Alicia Vikander as his new bride on an isolating island where intrigue about their offspring becomes the stuff of tempestuous melodrama. The presence of veteran Aussie actors Bryan Brown and Jack Thompson and a few verses of “Waltzing Matilda” are basically the clues you’re down under (thankfully no koalas) long before the narrative seeps below sea level. Fassbender and Vikander are wonderfully charming until their character motivations require them to become a bit stupefying. They commit to their craft well after the story strains credulity. A thankless supporting role does Rachel Weisz no favors. What starts out pulpy, electric and suspenseful simply becomes sudsy, irritating and overlong. Add to this mix an inconsistent narration, an overuse of reading letters and an awkward framing device, and you have the formula for a tepid September studio release.
Although many viewers may be feeling “no más” to the prospect of another boxing movie, Jonathan Jakubowicz’s Hands of Stone (A-) turns out to be stunningly good and one of the most unexpected character dramas of the year. The film is a sports biopic about the career of Panamanian former professional boxer Roberto Durán, and he is fiercely portrayed by Édgar Ramírez in one of those performances that defies every expectation. His brute deconstruction of machismo, his hunger for victory and justice and his nationalistic zest for life seeps out of every frame. The character is often hard to like, and that makes it even more intriguing. Through superb period detail and art direction against a backdrop of a revolutionary time period in Panama paralleling a transformation in the boxing industry through television and sponsorships circa late 70’s and early ’80s, the filmmakers create a soaring narrative that turns the tables for American audiences expecting to root for their native son. Usher Raymond is a delight in a small part as U.S. boxing hero Sugar Ray Leonard, conveying magnanimous authority. Ana de Armas is remarkable as Felicidad Durán, imbuing the spouse role with grace and verve. Magnificent in other supporting parts are Ellen Barkin and Rubén Blades, the latter legend contributing mightily to the soundtrack as well. But it is Robert De Niro who reclaims his mantle as one of the cinema greats as champion trainer and narrator Ray Arcel. He is splendid in the supporting role; and like Ramírez, you can’t take your eyes off him. De Niro’s corner of the ring pep talks with the Panamanian boxer are part inspiration, part confessional and part master class in quiet dignity. Whether you love sports movies or actively resist them, you will find this story – and the style of telling it – captivating.
In the tradition of the talky and compelling Before Sunrise trilogy, a new movie takes a similar approach to the fateful first date of one of the most historic and captivating couples of modern times. Writer/director Richard Tanne’s Southside with You (A-) stars Parker Sawyers and Tika Sumpter as a young Barack and Michelle Robinson Obama, respectively, circa 1989 in Chicago. This slice of life – literally one day in the life – is buoyed by radiant performances by the two leads and a timeless tale of a young couple challenging each other to become their best selves. Sawyers brings charisma and persistence and Sumpter a fierce intelligence and drive to the love story. Both are indelible and delightful in the roles. The incidental nature of a first-date-in-the-making that involves a picnic, an art gallery, time in The Gardens, an organizing meeting, drinks, a screening of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing and a trip to an ice cream parlor illuminates so much more about a future First Couple than a traditional montage-filled biopic ever could. It is a lovely story, gorgeously filmed and beautifully acted. It’s gimmick free and groundbreaking in its own way as a chronicle of history unfurling before our eyes.
Although a perfectly acceptable way to kill time with your kids and an occasionally sweet tale, David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon remake (C-) adds very little to the Disney canon or to movies about kids and their is-he-or-isn’t-he-real fantasy friends. Shucking the musical sequences and cornball whimsy and melodrama of the 1977 original (not to mention the charming Don Bluth animation), the new Pete’s plunges its titular protagonist into a straight drama about a boy whose parents die in a car wreck in the Pacific Northwest, leaving him to be befriended and raised by the reclusive mythical dragon Elliot with neon green fur. A kindly forest ranger (Bryce Dallas Howard) discovers and helps the orphan boy while an opportunist lumberjack played by Karl Urban tries to hunt and exploit the creature. Child actor Oakes Fegley does his best with an underwritten and moptopped role. From Howard’s glassy eyed acting, it would appear she was trained aboard The Polar Express. Even the dragon is only passable, a distant cousin of Falkor from The Neverending Story. The slight script, the dank film quality and the predictability of virtually every sequence don’t help matters. File this with the Jungle Book remake and BFG as family films that are a bit of an insufferable slog.
David Mackenzie crafts his neo-Western Hell or High Water (A) with such methodical pace that he disguises how urgent a work it is for modern times. Yes, on the surface it’s a heist thriller about sworn “Comanches,” or enemies: a pair of bank robbers versus a duo of rangers facing off on stark Texas terrain. But a deeper viewing of the film finds a dramatic, elegiac tale about brothers surviving a cycle of poverty and abuse, about lawmen making a last stand to protect a land and a way of life and about a community coping in the shadow of institutional greed. There’s a sense everyone is playing their assigned role in a Western, down to the cowboys and Indians, but the pop psychology behind the characters is very much grounded in America after the devastation of recession, payday loans and foreclosures. Everyone is wounded in this unconventional oater that eschews constant shoot-em-up in lieu of rich character development. Chris Pine and Ben Foster are superb as the sibling protagonists, with Pine delivering the best work of his career to date as a man conflicted between duty to family and revenge against the bank that wrecked havoc on his homestead. Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham, playing a character of Native American and Hispanic descent, are also wonderful as the rangers. Bridges can add his colorful role to a series of late-career triumphs. It’s telling that the bank is ostensibly the real enemy in the film, but it is populated by low-level bureaucrats who seem unaware or indifferent to their effect on Main Street USA. Giles Nuttgens’ lived-in outdoor cinematography and Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ plaintive score bring additional gravitas to the proceedings. There’s action too, but this movie is best in the quiet reflective moments that speak volumes about pockets of the country left behind in the march toward progress.
It’s an inspired idea indeed to have celebrated actress Meryl Streep perform in a most meta Emperor’s New Clothes style homage as an infamous no-talent. But as the titular character, a songstress oblivious of her pronounced vocal limitations, in Stephen Frears’s 1944-set biopic Florence Foster Jenkins (B), Streep’s seriocomic riffs are often on the mark even while the notes are all over the map. It is clear Frears finds his mercurial Manhattanite subject endlessly fascinating; and like Ed Wood, Bullets Over Broadway, Grey Gardens or The Producers, he finds fits of dry wit amidst the Schadenfreude. Hugh Grant as Florence’s conflicted husband is serviceable and occasionally sentimental, despite the actor’s limited range. Simon Helberg is a bit of a misfire as the songbird’s pianist, registering on the nebbish scale somewhere between Alan Cumming and Jason Schwartzman but with little of the charm. Nina Arianda is funny as a gangster moll type but is given strange motivations during a critical sequence. At the film’s heart is Streep herself, demonstrating with droll doses of heart and high-note heinousness that throwing yourself into an artistic passion with gusto, even when all the pieces aren’t altogether effective, can still be somewhat satisfying.
David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (C) does a good job introducing and humanizing an ensemble of D.C. Universe villains. Each gets his or her own visual fact file, akin to a baseball card or Pokemon pop-up stats, which is a helpful entree into some potential future adventures. Alas the story in this origin film, a mission in which the antagonists are temporarily released from prison to defeat a witchy villain, is rather perfunctory. And dimly lit. Will Smith is solid as deadly hitman Deadshot, and Margot Robbie is a delight as Harley Quinn, the coquettish one liner-dropping former psychiatrist girlfriend of The Joker (Jared Leto, in a small bit). Viola Davis is also notable as the badass government official who gets the gang together. The effects are only ok. The jukebox of rock songs on the soundtrack are recycled from better sequences in better films. And there’s little in the save the world storyline that hasn’t been done better before. The spare moments of inspiration and flourish simply make viewers wish there were more of them. All in all, the sum of some pretty interesting parts is a bit underwhelming.
At this point watching Woody Allen’s late-career films is a mild act of punishment, and the auteur’s latest Café Society (D+) is a pretty package of nothing. It’s got all the elements of a Woody Allen but no pulse. Set in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Manhattan, the film wins points for art direction and costumes; but alas it’s all dressed up for going nowhere slowly. Jesse Eisenberg is a remarkably dull leading man who falls in love with two women named Veronica – one in L.A. at the start of his career and one in his native New York where he returns to run a nightclub. The two ladies are played by the better-than-expected Kristen Stewart and the pleasant but bland Blake Lively. Allen fails to build any sustained momentum for some mild subplots about love and infidelity and has very little new to say about his go-to subjects. Moreover, there’s precious little to care about about the protagonist’s would-be career either. Steve Carell barely registers as a glib movie mogul, although perhaps he’s as bored as the man behind the camera seems to be. The only surprise in the whole movie is that, despite the delight that it’s actually over, Allen also delivers an unsatisfying ending. When you’re left pining for that Woody Allen film starring Jason Biggs, you know you’ve hit pretty close to rock bottom.
A lark gets quite dark as a fascinating story unfolds in David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s documentary Tickled (A-). Farrier, an offbeat New Zealand journalist, uncovers an odd strain of “competitive tickling” viral videos inspiring him to plumb the depths of a mystery wormhole that takes him on an unexpected crusade around the globe. With Reeve as his Silent Bob-esque camera companion, the intrepid lead reporter displays finesse and fortitude while chronicling the giddy and gritty. In this case he may be covering the armpit of arch-villains, but there are stunning parallels to terrorist cells and cyberbullying rings that can occur when evil masterminds seduce, recruit and retaliate buoyed by the anonymity of the internet. It’s news of the unusual indeed but as absorbing as any suspense thriller this year.
Few traces of classic wit or intellect surface as the crew of the Starship Enterprise weathers the swarm of a bio-weapon hive on a remote planet in the lukewarm third entry of a rebooted franchise in Justin Lin’s Star Trek Beyond (C). Character highlights include some bonding between frenemies Spock and Bones (a solid Zachary Quinto and a feisty Karl Urban). And after a subpar series of action sequences, one of which looks lifted out of a Laser Tag parlor, the final reel delivers the goods with some promised stunts that pleasingly defy gravity. Chris Pine fails to register much at all as Captain Kirk, and the whole film has a whiff of drudgery. Separating the characters does them no favors. Newcomer allies and villains are a bore. See it for some familiar faces but not for many new frontiers.
Despite being loosely based on a tale told better more than three decades ago, Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (B-) doesn’t necessarily lack for ideas. In fact, this all-female makeover of the let’s-capture-ghosts-run-amok-in-Manhattan story is a whirling dervish of special effects and fun gadgetry evoking a mash-up of a haunted Disney dark ride, Q’s invention laboratory and a whack-a-mole carnival gone mad with technicolor Pokemon-style gymnastics. As summer escapist fare, it’s a loud and overstuffed adventure with primary charms provided by Kate McKinnon who, armed with an occasional quip or queef for comic relief, is a welcome Willy Wonka type character entry into the franchise’s pantheon. It’s a bit like she’s working in another dimension from the other collaborators. The film’s biggest disappointments include squandering the talents of Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy with rather bland roles, relying too heavily on throwback cameos that distract from forward momentum and unspooling lame and labored origin story elements. Once the action gets underway, however, the frantic pace glosses over many of the sins of the so-so screenplay. Leslie Jones and Chris Hemsworth are solid in supporting roles, and New York itself – in both a modern and retro dual universe – provides a pleasurable playground of practical effects for spectral warfare. The film rarely crosses the expected streams into the suck, and it’s still a rush to watch a ghost get boxed. This movie is strictly for your inner 13 year old, and the mostly fulfilled “girl power” promised by this reimagining gives enough reason to not give up the ghost.
A genre hopping film about being lost in the wilderness and summoning the courage that only a best friend can help you achieve, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Sundance discovery Swiss Army Man (A-) is the year’s cinematic curiosity as well as a mild revelation. Paul Dano turns in a superb performance as a young man seemingly stranded on an island until he is joined by a one-of-a-kind companion played by Daniel Radcliffe, who brings with him an unexpected sense of magic and utility. A dramedy filled from beginning to end with flights of fantasy and a dreamlike approach to storytelling, the film’s furtive lessons will reward adventurous moviegoers. Prepare to be startled and astonished in equal doses in this rather wondrous parable. The lively and affecting a capella score by Manchester Orchestra is nearly a character as well. Too much description of what goes on would be reductive; but suffice it to say you’ve seen nothing like it, and its filmmaking craft is nothing short of life affirming.