Although it takes place in a specific part of history a hemisphere away, Kenneth Branagh’s semi-autobiographical coming of age drama Belfast (C) manages to churn out sentimentality in a perfectly generic geopolitical bundle. The action is set during “The Troubles,” a time of religious unrest and warfare in Northern Ireland from August 1969 to early 1970, often seen through the lens of child star JudeHill, a wide-eyed and rather unconvincing central protagonist. Branagh struggles with creating narrative momentum or a reliably consistent point of view on a rather limited milieu of cramped houses of a street and alleyway backlot. The film manages to keep the stakes pretty low. Jamie Dornan, Caitríona Balfe, Ciarán Hinds and Judi Dench all have strong moments as two generations of the protagonist’s family, but it also feels a bit like assembling a bunch of perfunctory stock characters. The film is a bit of a circuitous journey toward ultimate uplift and eschews many of the greatest hits in the family’s journey. Overall it’s a swing and a miss: surface gloss of history, mostly inert. Even the fact that it’s filmed in naturalistic black and white comes off as lazy shorthand for an under-stuffed memory box. The film zig zags between cloying, sentimental, cutesy, contrived and saccharine – and back again.
This topical directorial debut and central duo of female performances will undoubtedly turn heads. Rebecca Hall’s delicate drama Passing (B) is a puzzle-box of ambiguity shot in 4:3 aspect ratio and overexposed, over saturated monochrome. Unlike some other movies shot in black and white simply to augment prestige factor especially in Oscar season, the cinematography here actually factors in heavily to a story about ideas, ideologies, identity and insecurity and especially framing the interior conflicts boxing these female characters into specific stations in life. In 1920s New York City, a Black woman Irene played by Tessa Thompson finds her world upended when her life becomes intertwined with former childhood friend Clare, portrayed by Ruth Negga, whose fair skin and blond hair helps her maintain a lifestyle “passing” as white. While Irene identifies as African-American and is married to a black doctor played by André Holland, Clare is wed to a wealthy and very racist white man portrayed by Alexander Skarsgård. Hall employs a near stage play environment within her commanding cinematic lens to present mounting tensions between the characters. At times the austere direction keeps viewers at a slight distance or surface level obscuring some underdeveloped sub-themes, but Hall never loses sight of her keen observations as she wields this curious lens on race and class. It’s a slow burn; this film makes Carol look like a potboiler. Thompson and Negga are towering in their nuanced performances, and Hall at the helm has accomplished quite a feat in her audacious first film.
Notorious televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker get a mixed blessing of a big-screen biography treatment in Michael Showalter’s The Eyes of Tammy Faye (B-) with Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain in the lead roles. Chastain commands her every sequence and is the central protagonist as the preacher, singer and puppeteer who becomes an empathetic television personality despite her husband’s Faustian bargains leading to their public downfall. Showalter consistently struggles in this piece with tone; it’s never completely clear if this is serious drama, featherweight cautionary tale or historical diversion. Cherry Jones as Tammy Faye’s staunch mom and Vincent D’Onofrio as fellow Christian influencer Jerry Falwell also get some authentic acting moments as foils to the central duo. Chastain is the revelation here.
Although it joins Eyes Wide Shut and Die Hard in the “I guess it’s a Christmas movie” pantheon, Pablo Larraín’s biographical psychological drama Spencer (A-), about the Yuletide weekend in which Princess Diana chooses to split from the royal family, is a melancholy masterpiece. Kristen Stewart is luminous in the lead role, brilliantly humanizing a public figure we think we all know and plumbing the depths of her spiral into despondency. Larraín’s frenzied fever dream frames its troubled protagonist with such a splendid mise-en-scène of mounting formal and claustrophobic environments, a viewer could well believe it’s a slo-mo horror film as much as a tragedy. The film is often quietly observant, which makes the moments of rage and revelations pulse all the more. For every nightmarish sequence around the corners of her lonely world, there are also tender moments depicting the fun and games Diana furtively plays with her sons. Several supporting performers stand out: Timothy Spall is a hoot as Equerry Major Alistair Gregory, with a constant puss on his face as he tries to reign in our heroine to do her duty, and Sally Hawkins is a delight in a small role as a confidante and royal dresser who whispers into her wanderlust. Deck these halls with Oscars already!
As the fictional John Wick demonstrated across an infamous action trilogy, it’s unwise to meddle with a man’s companion animal! In writer/director Michael Sarnoski’s 2021 cult drama Pig (B), a titular truffle pig is the pet of note and his owner a loner woodsman played by Nicolas Cage. Although its inciting incident indeed involves the kidnapping of the vintage swine, the film centers on the unraveling and reveal of Cage’s withdrawn character through the underbelly of the Portland dining scene, brought into focus by the actor’s singular performance opposite the likes of Alex Wolff and Adam Arkin. Unkept and potentially unhinged, Cage’s character is mesmerizing and buoys this farm to table fable into something quite noteworthy. It’s a return to grizzly form for an actor who has drifted through a rogue’s gallery of unremarkable roles. Sarnoski has undoubtedly tapped into his spirit animal, and his film is absorbing and unexpected.
Tunefully tackling mental health, cancel culture and the nature of truth in the Internet age – and none of these topics with much dexterity – Stephen Chbosky’s mixed bag musical movie of Dear Evan Hansen (B-) nonetheless provides an absorbing showcase for an ensemble of female actress/singers who wave into a window of emotions more authentic than that of the film’s male lead. Call it Medicated High School Musical, and call it like it is that Ben Platt’s character translates awkwardly from the Great White Way to the silver screen. Platt is mostly crooning to the mezzanine balconies while Chbosky lenses the actor’s histrionics in awkward close-ups which reveal he is powdered in age-reducing prosthetics to reprise the lauded teenage performance he created nearly a decade ago on stage. The cinema canvas also surfaces flaws in the Broadway source material, namely that the audience is meant to sympathize with a character whose mounting lies prove to undermine his perceived good intentions. The characters breaking out into song isn’t really explained or consistent and can be confusing when one of them actually plays guitar as a plot device; and since emotion is already heightened, there’s often not much higher to go in some pedestrian presentational soliloquies. Were the YouTube fans meant to like the speech or the song? One must suspend a good bit of disbelief. However, let’s get to the good stuff, because there are many highlights in this overlong but often moving enterprise. First, the music is flawless, including two solid new songs to add to favorites such as “You Will Be Found.” The film is chock full of stunning female talent: Amandla Stenberg as an activist classmate whose tune “The Anonymous Ones” is a highlight, Amy Adams and Kaitlyn Dever as a mother and daughter recoiling from tragedy in earnest songs such as “Requiem” and “Only Us,” and Julianne Moore whose final reel “So Big/So Small” is a heartbreaker. Platt does indeed shine in many of his scenes of comedy and intense singing, even though the director should have reigned him in and clarified many aspects of the character. And Colton Ryan as a troubled classmate is so captivating in his two major sequences that it’s surprising he didn’t nab the lead role. Still, the parts of this story that work and surprise have the capacity to genuinely touch hearts and minds about the tug of war of man versus his worst instincts in a quest to belong. The film and its protagonist are often a tangled mess, but musical fans will likely grant Chbosky, Platt and company a full pardon for some of their missteps in bringing such an emotional wallop to the screen.
Julia Ducournau’s bleak and difficult French language drama Titane (B+) is a fascinating glimpse at finding love and redemption in an age when it is hard to distinguish human from machine and in which genderfluidity is the engine powering even more creative sparks than ever before. This is tough material, no doubt, but it will reward adventurous filmgoers with an indelible fable of finding shelter and dignity in unexpected ways. Once viewers get past the romantic coupling of a woman and a showroom vehicle resulting in a complicated pregnancy, there are many wonders to behold in France’s controversial entry into Oscar season. Agathe Rousselle gives the mighty performance in the film’s center, a raw and bruised portrayal of a dancer and occasional killer on the run and in absolute turmoil and often in conflict with her own body as she morphs from sexy siren to tight-lipped first responder and back again while the plot machinations mount in blistering bursts. Vincent Lindon is a fantastic foil to her character, portraying a man damaged in his own way seeking someone for whom he can be a caretaker and desperate for ways to showcase his own take on modern masculinity within a twisted and toxic culture. Ducournau blends provocative body horror film and hypnotic domestic family drama in a nightmarish series of surprising episodes, and she never wavers from a singular vision. Her unflinching film displays ethereal energy on the wide canvas of exposition halls and mosh pits and in the intimacy of tight quarters adds to the layers of the story and its original atmosphere. The film’s graphic and nihilistic spirit will be tough for some audiences, but it’s an indelible and engrossing experience built on a complex character.
Available on Apple TV Plus and in limited release in theatres.
This film is speaking my love language. As the teenage daughter of deaf parents with her only sibling deaf as well, Ruby, played with sublime grace by Emilia Jones, seeks to be a standout in the field of choral music, which no one else in her rural New England family can actually hear, in the formulaic but feel-good dramedy of the summer, Sian Heder’s CODA (A-). Heder writes and directs the film with an admirable lack of sentiment and grounds the central family in a highly relatable milieu. The protagonist’s quest to pursue her art while also pulled into the mounting demands of the family fishing business (she’s their sole interpreter) provides ample material for conflict, but most everything comes back to love in an overall work that can best be described as heartwarming. Marlee Matlin and Troy Kotsur are outstanding as the parents, Daniel Durant charming as the brother and Eugenio Derbez is a delight as the music teacher. Ruby and her family feel real in their every interaction, and even when the story unfolds in pretty much the way a viewer would expect it to, it still does so in surprising ways because of the composition and cunning of this unconventional family. Viewers will be won over by the sweet-natured strengths of the ensemble, the unexpected representation and inclusion of the casting and the writer/director’s skills at quiet observation. Additionally the music sequences are wonderful. Far from a chore or a bore, this film is uplift from beginning to end.
Even the Queen of Soul herself can be enhanced by a judicious editor, and Liesl Tommy’s Aretha Franklin biopic Respect (C) would have been improved if the filmmakers had commenced to condense. Instead the film takes a fairly circuitous journey in the telling of the songstress’ life and gives cursory treatment to some significant incidents of trauma she experiences as both a child and adult. Jennifer Hudson’s singing is sublime, but there’s a hollowness to the character and portrayal, slighted and undermined by unfocused writing and narrative. Forest Whitaker and Marlon Wayans also have rather thankless roles as the controlling men in the musician’s life. There’s also a relative paucity of musical sequences, which is disappointing given the film’s ample duration. After a rather absorbing first hour, the film doesn’t trust its most creative instincts and instead resorts to paint-by-numbers behind-the-music conventions for nearly 90 more minutes. The movie imparts lots of great data points about why Aretha Franklin was a trailblazer, but Tommy’s film largely misses the mark in taking viewers beneath the surface of the legend.
A striking lived-in central performance by Mark Wahlberg as an anti-bullying crusader lifts Reinaldo Marcus Green’s frank biographical tale of Joe Bell (B-) above its sentimental R-rated afterschool special conceits. Structurally wobbly and a touch treacly, the film about a father’s road to redemption after not doing all he could to save his gay son from abuse at the hands of his high school classmates is often quite moving and revealing. Connie Britton is wonderful as well as the family matriarch, and Reid Miller gives a sensitive portrayal of the troubled teen: fragile, flamboyant and fiery. Green tinges the threadbare story with moments of realism, poignancy and heartbreaking self-reflection; it is best in its most small and intimate moments as opposed to its large gestures. The film is superb in depicting little-seen insights into the father-son bond and showcasing what it means to be strong in your own skin, and Wahlberg nails the central role. Even when the film sometimes stumbles in storytelling, it is a well-meaning summons to travel the world with head held high. It imparts lessons the world still needs to hear.
This is the film that happens after an unlikely pair Meets Cute, after the guy gets girl, after he intercepts her at the airport to go ahead and stay. Set in a gorgeously shot Athens, Greece, as a boozy sun-drenched party paradise, Argyris Papadimitropoulos’ kinetic drama Monday (C+) propels its appealing thirtysomething American expat leads into immediate lust and leaves most of the film for figuring out if they’re even remotely right for each other. Sebastian Stan is magnetic, spry and beguiling as the devil-may-care deejay and vagabond; and Denise Gough is the complete opposite as a plucky but more proper immigration lawyer who is in one of those rebound travel-the-world on a bender type situations. In chronicling this mismatched duo’s fall from an almost too metaphorical Garden of Eden (it’s a fig leaf-free beach in this case), the film plumbs the notion of how a relationship can survive on chemistry and chemicals alone and finds lots of erotic ways to determine if true love can really be skin deep. But the episodes of showing how different the wavelengths each is surfing can be painful and awkward, and the movie’s near-improvised vibe feels a touch incomplete. The filmmakers get points for examining the intoxication of obsessive love but rarely make space, momentum or structure to adequately fill in some of the emotional gaps which would elucidate why these giddy drifters choose to spend time together on any activity other than sex. Because it is set in the exotic milieu of a foreign land with characters somewhat in a toxic fog of trying to find each other, the story becomes more absorbing even as its trajectory appears clear to the audience. Fittingly, it’s all lovely to look at and drink in, but the hangover comprises most of this bittersweet story.
This film has all the narrative subtlety of a string of Reddit forum comments or one of those propaganda film strips from health class narrated by the gym coach. A message movie has to at least be competently made before a viewer can determine if its ideology rings true, but Nick Loeb and Cathy Allyn‘s Roe v. Wade (F) is so glaringly misbegotten as a motion picture that its multitude of flaws eclipse its POV. The lead characters, played by Loeb and Jamie Kennedy, are doctors who perform abortions with reckless abandon and little regard for the ethics of their medical procedures, and yet somehow they are intended to be the vessels of a breakthrough conversion that what they are doing is not (capital R?) right. The tone is all over the map, and any attempt at irony to make its points is largely lost in a muddled storyline. Predominantly filmed in the color orange to imply the 1970s, the film punctuates its loosely interspersed doses of conspiracy theories and heavy-handed (capital M?) messages with a fictional recreation of aspects of the titular landmark Supreme Court trial itself. None of the proceedings achieves the gravitas its filmmakers are hoping to attain. No actor in the ensemble, not Jon Voight nor Stacey Dash, is done any favors by this meandering script. It’s telling when Joey Lawrence may give the film’s best performance as a conservative law professor, certainly “whoa” casting in anyone’s universe. Freeze frames and jaw-dropping narration, songs that would seem routine in a Borat movie if not meant to literally shock, turgid line readings, music that makes Reefer Madness look understated and a systematic sequence of bewildering choices comprise a film that doesn’t meet the minimum bar. No doubt the creators of this film intended to expose the hypocrisy of those who oppose their view, and most certainly they will decry a liberal coterie lauding films like Never Rarely Sometimes Alwaysand not giving this movie a separate but equal applause. But this film doesn’t do a great service to its agenda and certainly fails as cinema.
