From Network and Natural Born Killers to To Die For, Shattered Glass, Nightcrawler and this season’s Ink, cinema has long chronicled how far the fame-hungry will go to manufacture a shameless sensation; Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime (B+) earns its disturbing place in this lineage. The documentarian-turned-narrative filmmaker directs Robert Pattinson as an intense, fame-starved Chris Hansen amid the chaotic production of NBC’s mid-2000s reality phenomenon To Catch a Predator, exploring the murky intersection of public service, media exploitation and voyeuristic entertainment. Pattinson surrenders completely to the role in accent, affectations and clammy mannerisms, playing Hansen as a man who seemingly rehearses every waking hour to appear comfortable in his own skin yet still radiates a deeply creepy persona. As his long-suffering segment producer, Merritt Wever is wonderfully wry and matter-of-fact about the frankness, absurdity and eccentricity of the surreal spectacle she is helping curate. Skyler Gisondo is equally terrific as “Decoy Dan,” a newcomer to the predator-trapping troupe who briefly parlayed his reed-thin acting abilities into bait for the surveillance house. The queasy tone, ominous music and David Bolen’s hypnotic cinematography create a deeply unsettling freak-show atmosphere, skating between nostalgic dark comedy and a voyage into the heart of darkness. Oppenheim’s ability to locate flashes of humanity among people on every side of the camera only makes the enterprise more terrifying; nobody is made better by this fun house mirror being held before them. In the specifics of this story, the keen director reveals the universal. His film magnifies media malfeasance with a cynical, unforgiving lens, delivering one of cinema’s most unnerving examinations of how easily the prurient can become prime-time entertainment.
To be an awards showcase or not to be satisfied until the whole cinema audience is sobbing? These are indeed the questions of Simon Stone’s Elsinore (B+), but it’s such a stirring celebration of the indomitable power of the human spirit and of theatre that any calculated designs quickly become inconsequential. Scott plays closeted Scottish actor Ian Charleson, best known to moviegoers for Chariots of Fire, who steps into the role of Hamlet at London’s National Theatre just as he is diagnosed with AIDS at the height of the epidemic. The film follows Charleson’s determination to deliver a defining performance during the final months of his life, even as his failing body threatens to betray him. Olivia Colman is a formidable foil as the doctor who warns him of the punishing demands Shakespeare’s great role will impose. Scott gives a magnetic, sensitive and occasionally very funny performance, lending the actor’s private struggle the same grandeur as Hamlet’s public anguish. Soaring soliloquies about life upon the stage are complemented by inspired flourishes, including a hospital-wing dance break set to techno-infused Ethel Merman. In Elsinore, show business becomes both refuge and rebellion in the face of tragedy. Fans of Shakespeare, Scott and unabashed sentimentality will want to seek out this film.
Peter Farrelly directs Anthony Ippolito as a young Sylvester Stallone, the impoverished, perpetually rejected actor who refuses to sell his Rocky screenplay unless he can play the title role himself. The aptly named behind-the-scenes drama I Play Rocky (B) offers a nostalgic, crowd-pleasing account of how Stallone’s real-life tenacity came to mirror Rocky Balboa’s. Ippolito delivers a magnetic performance that transcends his uncanny mimicry, while AnnaSophia Robb is quietly effective in the underwritten role of Stallone’s wife, Sasha Czack, and Stephan James brings confidence and charisma to co-star in the movie-within-the-movie Carl Weathers. Tracy Letts frequently steals the show with biting humor and cynicism as a representative of the studio brass. Though the film rarely strays from the familiar making-of formula, it remains a contender, fleet-footed and flying high through the final bell.
Beyond its significance as a historic production, Hosam Abu Dan’s Thirteen in Gaza (B+) is an intensely moving one. A widower (the quietly wonderful Feras Al Masri) and his teenage daughter (a superb Mary Ziyara) struggle to maintain the rhythms of ordinary life inside a Gaza refugee camp, their relationship providing an intimate lens on adolescence, grief and moral choices under extraordinary circumstances. Ghassan Salem is also powerful as an industrious and morally dubious power broker who may hold the keys to lifting the surviving family out of poverty. Ziyara is pitch-perfect as the titular adolescent, fiercely trying to retain her dignity and discover who she is on the cusp of womanhood. Abu Dan and his Gaza-based crew focus their camera on humanity rather than destruction and survival rather than despair, as a father strives to protect his daughter amid the deprivations of prolonged conflict. Simple acts of securing food, water and basic supplies take on profound resonance when played out against the reality of a displacement camp. Most powerfully, the film refuses to define its characters by their suffering, finding pride, resourcefulness and familial love amid circumstances that threaten these values. In celebrating that humanity, the film becomes both a tribute to people enduring intolerable conditions and a haunting challenge to a world that has failed to adequately protect its most vulnerable.
It’s hard to argue Director Werner Herzog isn’t being true to the themes defining his peculiar brand of cinema: obsessive characters chasing impossible dreams, hostile natural landscapes and a persistent blurring of truth and fiction. Herzog’s Bucking Fastard (C+) checks all three boxes and still qualifies as a double head-scratcher. Real-life sisters Kate Mara and Rooney Mara, both extremely game for an unusual assignment, play twins who speak, move and even dream in unison while pursuing their eccentric conception of love and belonging. Their extraordinary bond inspires fascination as their shared obsessions range from an unrequited love affair with Orlando Bloom to the seemingly impossible task of digging a tunnel through a countryside mountain. Herzog finds strange beauty and flashes of humor in their singular existence, and the Maras commit so completely that the sisters never become mere caricatures. Yet for all the film’s intriguing eccentricity, it remains frustratingly opaque about what motivates these women, why their obsessions consume them or what Herzog ultimately wants us to understand about their extraordinary bond. Bucking Fastard is unquestionably an original curiosity, but being fascinated by its characters isn’t quite the same as being invested in them.
Charged objects in movies — a lost ark, a Maltese falcon, a rock hammer in Shawshank Prison — can provide cinematic catalysts or consequences, and Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s La Bola Negra (A) uses a manuscript passed among men to reveal multitudes. Three gay lives unfold across different periods of Spanish history, with contemporary Carlos González and figures from the past connected by words that survive their authors and become an inheritance of courage. Inspired by Federico García Lorca, the film flows beautifully through time, capturing pain, shame, desire and persecution while asking what one generation can leave behind to help the next survive. Music star Guitarricadelafuente is a revelation as a young man with a military role discovering both sexual awakening and the courage to embrace it, playing beautifully opposite a winning Miguel Bernardeau, while Milo Quifes brings quieter but affecting power to his role. Familiar movie stars Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close shine in small appearances without distracting from the less familiar faces at the film’s heart. Ambrossi and Calvo mount the story on a sweeping scale, yet its grandest idea is remarkably intimate: passing stories forward can remind people who feel isolated that they were never truly alone. Poetry, art and cinema become more than cultural artifacts here; they are lifelines capable of crossing decades, preserving identity and even saving lives. La Bola Negra is a gorgeous love letter to all three — and a masterpiece revealed at fall festivals including TIFF and playing theatres before streaming on Netflix.
Danny Boyle’s Ink (B-) makes creating sensational journalism look a wee bit too sensational. Jack O’Connell stars as Larry Lamb, the editor recruited by Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) in 1969 to reinvent a struggling British newspaper, turning tabloid The Sun into a populist must-read and helping rewrite the rules of the news business. Boyle attacks the story with locomotive speed, tilted angles and razzle-dazzle flourishes that make the newsroom revolution great fun to watch, but Ink never delivers the Wolf of Wall Street or Boogie Nights-style reckoning its men behaving badly deserve. Viewers familiar with media history will recognize an origin story for many of the excesses that have come to define the modern news landscape, but the film could be considerably clearer about the consequences of what its characters unleash. The extremely charismatic O’Connell and always reliable Pearce are both compelling, yet the dramatic weight between Lamb and Murdoch is often sidelined, robbing their relationship of some potentially combustible central tension. Claire Foy is terrific as a composite character intended to provide another perspective, but even she isn’t given enough leverage to become the foil the story needs. Ink has great style and seemingly honorable intentions as both history lesson and cautionary tale, but in all that breathless headline-making, Boyle buries his own lead.
There are worse places to be contained than a designer home where a gorgeous pair of acclaimed actors rhapsodizes about the complexities of contemporary life. Florian Zeller’s Bunker (B) pairs Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem in a topical allegory about whether we as a society are engaging with an unsettling world or simply retreating from it. Bardem plays an increasingly paranoid star architect contemplating a lucrative assignment to construct a survival bunker for a tech billionaire, a morally compromised project that strains his marriage and exposes anxieties about wealth, power and isolation. Some of Zeller’s symbolism feels strikingly prescient; just as often, it lands squarely on the nose. Yet there’s an added layer of intrigue in watching a real-life couple navigate the film’s marital power struggles, much as there was with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut. Cruz and Bardem know exactly how to push and pull against each other, turning domestic arguments into intellectual and emotional sparring. When Bunker threatens to bury itself beneath its own metaphors, its stars keep digging out something compelling. It’s an awesome power play by a genuine power
Despite its vital message about the systemic bias confronting women who report sexual assault, director Susanna White’s adaptation of Prima Facie (D) is misbegotten in nearly every dramatic respect. Cynthia Erivo plays a formidable London defense barrister forced to confront the very tactics she once employed after a colleague played by Daniel Ings assaults her, but the typically commanding performer rarely materializes into a persuasive central presence. White establishes neither the workplace, courtroom nor domestic worlds with enough specificity or realism to make the protagonist’s ordeal feel fully lived-in. The underwritten supporting characters register primarily as devices to advance the thesis, while the absence of authentic relationships or convincing chemistry leaves even the most consequential encounters dramatically inert. A story built around the collision between intellectual certainty and devastating personal experience should crackle with tension, yet the film repeatedly states its ideas without finding compelling ways to dramatize them. Even its courtroom passages rarely muster more intrigue than a routine weekly television procedural.
Writer/director Beth de Araújo’s Josephine (A) is an absolutely astonishing exploration of childhood trauma, parental fear and the dangers both rational and imagined that invade a family’s life. Eight-year-old Josephine witnesses a brutal assault while walking through Golden Gate Park with her father, and the crime’s reverberations gradually reshape her behavior, her sense of safety and her parents’ already contrasting approaches to raising her. Mason Reeves is an absolute revelation, conveying hypervigilance, confusion and simmering defiance with a naturalism far beyond her years. De Araújo’s tremendous commitment to Josephine’s point of view makes us question the parents’ choices while forcing us to consider how we as viewers might respond to the same impossible situation. Channing Tatum is effortlessly authentic as her father, while Gemma Chan delivers a quieter, more understated performance as her mother. Through a series of small but increasingly alarming escalations, the film captures how one heinous act can make danger feel omnipresent and turn ordinary childhood anxieties into consuming dread. Josephine’s journey is simultaneously disturbing and empowering as she struggles with defining and overcoming fears while discovering her own capacity for self-defense. Absorbing and sometimes devastating, the film finds flawed human beings searching for a way forward when innocence can no longer lead the way.
Writer/director Alexandra Pechman’s Magazine is essentially The Devil Wears Prada without the devil, crossed with the loose, hangout camaraderie of Everybody Wants Some!! or Almost Famous as an aspiring poet protagonist joyously embodied by Lily McInerny enters the intoxicating orbit of a prestigious New York literary journal. Joshuah Melnick makes a strong impression as an assistant editor who catches her eye, while Iris Apatow operates on an entirely different comic plane, sublime as a daffy socialite. Pechman’s crisp direction and buoyant visuals keep the pages turning even when her writing feels less original; frankly, spending this much time with writers made me expect them to be a little more interesting. There’s plenty in the margins to enjoy, including terrific curated music and fashion that make the entire production feel like a lovingly preserved cultural artifact. There’s a warm nostalgia to hanging around these people, and the ensemble’s easygoing chemistry frequently makes the movie feel less like a plotted comedy than an invitation to join an unusually well-dressed writers’ room. It’s fun, affectionate and consistently pleasurable, even as the absence of meaningful conflict leaves the narrative without much editorial urgency. Even at 105 minutes, it could have benefited from a ruthless copy editor and a few pages left on the cutting-room floor. Still, even when the story isn’t quite cover-worthy, this is one issue that’s awfully enjoyable to flip through.
The majestic Norwegian landscape looms large in writer/director Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord (B), but the moral avalanche unfolding on its terrain proves even more imposing. Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve play a Romanian-Norwegian couple who move their five children to a remote village where their conservative beliefs and disciplinary practices attract child-welfare authorities. Mungiu denies audiences an easy position from which to judge the stoic parents. Stan’s father can be controlling and deeply troubling, yet the authorities appear so convinced of their own moral superiority that compassion vanishes from the process. Each interaction shifts viewer sympathies without erasing the harm at the story’s center. Stan buries fear and humiliation beneath a rigid exterior, while Reinsve quietly devastates as a woman trapped between her husband, children and homeland. The long takes and clinical pacing effectively tighten the screws, although the film keeps underlining points it has already made clear. Cold, controlled and deliberately provocative, Mungiu’s film plays like a combustible discussion guide for the world’s most contentious talkback. Its argument lands: Empathy matters most when every side believes it has already won the moral debate.
