Writer/director Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident (A-) traces a chance encounter at a body shop between two men in modern Iran who may or may not share fraught history; and as other characters enter the fray too, memories of the background between the two primary men become even more blurry. This is like a heist movie without the bounty: as the band gets together, the pieces of a political puzzle coalesce. Vahid Mobasseri is the standout main character, and viewers get to watch his vacillation over remembrances and feel his penchant for vengeance against an oppressor. Expect vigorous debates and revelations and sparse use of artifice like musical score. Panahi, who has risked his life and liberty for his anti-regime filmmaking, gets a stellar auteur showcase with this movie. It comes together beautifully in the final passages and is sure to spark discussion.
Amanda Seyfried has been an unconventional film presence throughout her career and sinks her everything into the controversial title subject of Mona Fastvold’s historical epic The Testament of Ann Lee (B+). The actress elevates her every screen sequence as a 16th century pioneer of The Shakers religion, from awakening to ascent to persecution and more. The film explores fascinating areas of faith, mysticism, sexuality, independence, modernity and grief in mighty measures. Like their collaboration on The Brutalist, Fastvold co-wrote the film with Brady Corbet, but this time she directs – and she is well suited to the material. It’s an oddity for sure, with full-fledged musical moments and peculiar twists and turns. William Rexer’s cinematography is solid, although the music is a bit repetitive and the narration sometimes cloying. Fastvold and Seyfried take their tale to the limits and inject tremendous kinetic energy into what could have been straightforward and staid. It’s not for every palette but it’s more risky and twisty than your average religious drama.
Multiple generations have difficulty communicating except through their art in Joachim Trier’s methodical and exhilarating drama Sentimental Value (A). Set in and around a charming legacy family home in Norway, the film follows a fractured relationship between an acclaimed movie director (Stellan Skarsgard) and his two estranged daughters played by Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, which becomes even more complicated when he decides to make a personal film about their family history including an American actress played by Elle Fanning. This is one of the rare works in which the films within the film are of enough quality that viewers will realize the characters are exceedingly bright and talented even if they stumble at maneuvering through real-life human relationships. Gorgeously shot by Kasper Tuxen, the film gracefully discovers mature and intimate moments that add up to a most poignant portrait. Highlights include tension around stage fright in action in a high-stakes theatre, a revealing look at a charged script filled with revelations and a torrent of healing between sisters. The sterling acting ensemble including keen child actors does complex and nuanced work all around, especially Reinsve and Skarsgard as among the most deliriously damaged. There’s warmth and good music here too, amidst all the somber solemnity. In all he does within his marvelous framework, Trier fashions subtle and moving ways to show people pushing within their respective limits in the parts they are born to play in life.
Despite a promising premise, Hikari’s Rental Family (C) proves an undercooked and overly sentimental bunch of hokum. Brendan Fraser plays an American commercial and character actor working in Japan who is recruited by an unusual talent agency to portray fictional people in real life to compensate for something that’s missing. He’s like an emotional support animal to upend family dynamics. Whether it’s the single mother who needs him to play the long-lost dad to help her daughter get into a private school or the single and struggling bachelorette in need of a convenient and compensated groom to prove to her parents she’s suitably settled, the film is episodic and oddly clinical. Some of these matches offer more than each bargains for as the actor learns more about himself and the culture in which he’s engulfed. Although likable enough, Fraser plays his character at a distant low simmer, and the escapades are neither subtle nor arch enough to much entertain. It’s all rather restrained and predictable. As a meditation on loneliness, it succeeds in spurts, but it’s also tied in too tidy a package to expose much below the surface.
Take one iambic pentameter for your sadness, and call me in the morning. Set in the Elizabethan era, Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet (C) depicts two parents grieving the loss of a child in very different ways. Jessie Buckley offers a raw and harrowing reaction; and Paul Mescal, who plays William Shakespeare, addresses his sadness more obliquely through the presentation of a tragic stage play far away from the domestic despair. Despite Zhao’s penchant for painterly and geometric imagery, there’s not a whole lot going here: sequences of courtship, pregnancy, illness, loss and reaction play out in slow dollops. It’s a far better showcase for Buckley, doing very fine work here, than Mescal, who just doesn’t seem as ensconced in the devastation. The strained chemistry between the central pair doesn’t help; thus the final act, moving for many, rang like artificial Oscar bait. It’s a bitter quill with few breakaways or takeaways.
This is the film that finally answers the question, “If a tree falls down in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?” In this case, it makes both a sound and a statement. Gorgeously shot, gingerly paced and sneakily profound, Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams (A) stars Joel Edgerton as a logger, railroad worker and hermit in the early 20th century whose life might not have been outwardly remarkable but proves deeply worthy of examination as a universal allegory for the human plight on earth. The movie confronts time and modernity and observes how the human animal responds to stimuli and reacts across a lifetime. Judicious narration by William Patton evokes both the folksy language of the source novella from which this work is adapted and also that of a nature documentary as we watch Edgerton’s man of few words and even fewer outside influences process love, remorse and so much more within the confines of a sparse story. Adolph Veleso’s lush cinematography does a lot of the film’s heavy lifting, with natural wonders such as luminous sunsets, kaleidoscopic forest fires and gurgling river currents, punctuating lyrical passages with a free flow of landscapes and dreamscapes. Bryce Dessner of rock band The National provides a lovely, ethereal soundtrack to the proceedings. In small but critical parts of the ecosystem on display, an affecting ensemble including Kerry Condon and William H. Macy makes an indelible imprint, their tiny explosions inciting rousing ripple effects opposite the endearing Edgerton. This memory piece is film as poetry, worth a watch and a washing over you. Bentley channels the cinematic pioneer of this form, Terrence Malick, in effervescent use of natural settings to paint an impressionistic human portrait. The movie’s omniscient, elegiac beauty makes for one of the singular cinematic experiences of the year.
Director Jon M. Chu’s hat trick seemed to be nimbly splitting a Broadway musical’s two acts into a double whammy of film spectaculars. Trouble is, the first film was packed with confectionary creativity and a veritable bandstand of bops, so stretching this half adaptation into a sprawling opus simply enhanced the delight. The second installment is as empty as the antagonist wizard’s promises, padding a paltry batch of dirges and a virtually choreography-free display with most of the characters distant, deceitful and depressed. So it may bill itself as Wicked: For Good (C+), but it’s definitely not nearly as good. Much of the sequel replaces its signature girl power with Dynasty-style lady slaps, shoulder pads, back-biting, in-fighting and wedding cliffhangers. The witches and lovers who were once dancing through life and defying gravity seem generally bored this time around. Even the CGI animals are pretty much over the bull-shiz. Both Ariana Grande’s Glinda and Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba get new Stephen Schwartz songs which are showstoppers only in the way they stop the film dead in its tracks (Erivo doesn’t even get to finish her subpar number). Much time has passed since the origin story for this origin story, and a bunch of characters seem to now be behaving badly to help fill in the nightmarish narrative between the witches’ time at school and Dorothy’s house dropping into the scene. The formerly spry Jonathan Bailey gets little to do this time around; and Michelle Yeoh and Jeff Goldblum are dreadful double-threats in both the acting and singing departments as a pair of insipid villains. The Fiyero/Elpheba pop anthem “As Long as You’re Mine” and the Glinda/Elphaba ballad “For Good” are the only good musical numbers in the mix. Those who haven’t seen the stage show may enjoy some of the surprising backstories to the yellow brick roadies, but most of the magic goes up in smoke. Grande makes the most of her character in what is otherwise a much more grim fairy tale this time around.
With a game all-star cast ranging from Glenn Close to Andrew Scott to Daniel Craig as the series’ intrepid detective, Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (B-) fixes its grimacing gaze on a peculiar place of worship where Josh O’Connor and Josh Brolin as warring priests have a spiritual score to settle. The set-up is protracted and so is the finale, but there are delights dotting the way as a droll tale of the undead unravels. Johnson imbues his story with equal parts lore and lark as viewers discover the connections between characters within the creation of his unsettling congregation. Characterizations could have been more compelling and the central premise more intriguing, but it’s still a nifty entry in a sturdy franchise. As the most fascinating denizens in the cast and the cloth, O’Connor and Brolin shine brightest in crafty confessions and sparring matches; they both have great fun with their roles. The film contains requisite twists and turns and a handful of surprises, and there may even be some looming lessons bubbling in the subtext. Prepare to get to the core of this stained glass onion this fall on Netflix.
Rose Byrne plays a beleaguered mom in Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (C-), but its protracted, insistent vibe of showing the horrors of motherhood will likely prove an endurance test for audiences in the process. Bronstein makes some big swings such as never actually showing the main character’s daughter, instead representing her as a shrieking off-screen nuisance. Then there are the all-too-obvious allegories like a gaping hole in the ceiling of their residence, where endless water flows forth. Byrne is committed to her role and acting her heart out of all the maternal madness in the threadbare plot. It’s a lot of heavy acting and heavy-handedness adding up to not much. The film erodes its own summons to empathy with each passing frame, and even Conan O’Brien playing a counselor can’t cushion the film’s blunt force. In some ways it’s the Reefer Madness of movies about deciding to have a kid, and yet it’s unclear if that’s even the point it’s trying to make.
Nobody loves wordplay more than the duo of director Richard Linklater and his male muse Ethan Hawke, except perhaps the guy they’re lionizing in their new film, stage lyricist Lorenz Hart, evoked by sharp screenwriter Robert Kaplow, whose rapier wit, poison pen and pathos echo through insular hallways inhabited by this underrated legend of internal rhymes. All nestled in the confines of a 1943 Broadway tavern, Blue Moon (B+) is both a jewel box of wistful nostalgia and a tragic murder ballad inflicted by a lonely man on himself. While lifelong friend and collaborator composer Richard Rodgers (Andrew Scott) toasts the triumph of his “Oklahoma!” opening night with collaborator Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney), Rodgers’ former lyricist Hart (Ethan Hawke) is hosting a pity party, holding court, stargazing and navel gazing through a descent into drunken self-reflection. Hart’s tumbler is both half full and half empty as he chews the Sardi’s scenery with equal parts relish and rage. Hawke’s transformation into Hart is no less than the performance of the year; the cocksure Reality Bites dude bites back at the world as a wisp of an older man, withered, weathered and worn by both a career abridged by alcoholism and the recognition he is unloved. This is a sensational showpiece with many layers including sustained nuance and transformational prosthetics. The film is a glorified stage play with a proscenium like a requiem and multiple dialogue duets, affecting and humorous soliloquies and blocking wizardry to mildly open up the story. As marvelous as Hawke is, he gets a wonderful ensemble with whom to spar: Scott is strong as a serious straight-shooter still in awe of his declining collaborator; Bobby Cannavale is a fun foil as the bartender; and Margaret Qualley is luminous as an art student stand-in for the promise of youth. Following Nouvelle Vague, Linklater has crafted another tribute to artistic life, and Hawke as Hart is a beguiling tour guide to this double-edged underworld of roleplaying. Like Hart’s popular songs, the title tune plus “Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?” and “Falling in Love with Love,” the film is blissfully out of step with its era and evokes bittersweet feelings more timeless than immediately recognized in one’s lifetime. Linklater and Hawke rescue and revive Hart in this sungular work which is as “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” as can be.
The contemporary archetype of “The Karen” is the chilling centerpiece of Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary The Perfect Neighbor (B), tracing the killing of Ajike Owens in Florida and exposes the perils of the “Stand Your Ground” policies allowing the use of force when faced with perceived imminent danger. The film is told almost primarily through police bodycam footage in a cross section of a neighborhood, exploring the series of disputes that led to the murder. The antagonist is the most fascinating character, unhinged and selective in her subversive statements, and the narrative is intriguing as the heated situation between this character and those around her boils to tragedy and then to a quest by the collective neighbors for justice. The repetitive format doesn’t leave lots of room for variety in terms of the look and feel of the shots, but Gandbhir sure knows when to punctuate the proceedings with bursts of revealing dialogue or even a hot pursuit. The real kids in the film are also compelling to witness as they react to very good and very bad adults from their playful vantage points. The form is nearly as fascinating as the story itself and succeeds overall as a cautionary tale.
Folks on polar opposites of debates these days find themselves talking over and past one another with such gusto and conviction, that one individual could perceive an enemy is actually an alien invader. Few forces of nature can burst these righteous, respective belief bubbles. The Yorgos Lanthimos-directed Bugonia (C+) centers on two conspiracy-obsessed men (Jesse Plemons and newcomer Aidan Delbis) who kidnap the smooth-talking CEO of a major pharma company (Emma Stone) after they become convinced her corporation’s products have hurt their family and that she’s also, naturally, an extraterrestrial intent on destroying Earth. This odd allegory continually blends an amusing talkiness with fantastical elements, which makes for a confounding and sometimes curious tone. The script largely fail to rise to the level of the filmmaker’s ambitions, but the performances are phenomenally unhinged. Plemons blithely inhabits his bonkers persona, utterly committed to his provocative role as shaggy myth-monger. Stone is on a tricky high-wire act trying to convince her captor to compromise; in her knowing nuances, she showcases why she is one of the most fascinating and nuanced actresses working today. The film has many intriguing passages and a rousing score by Jerskin Fendrix, but it’s ultimately a triumph of acting over cogent storytelling.
