Writer/director Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always (A-) is a film of quiet dignity and grace, with ambiguity around the edges which gives the central plot even more immediacy and universality. Sidney Flanigan is stunning as Autumn, a soulful, forlorn teen protagonist. Faced with an unintended pregnancy and a lack of local support, Autumn and her cousin, Skylar (also amazing Talia Ryder) travel across state lines to NYC on a fraught journey of friendship and compassion. Hittman has a tremendous observational lens for capturing the details propelling a few days in the life of these brave girls. Her combination of vérité and character study is absorbing and affecting. Time and again, Hittman gets the story beats right, prompting viewers to hang on every word and feel the characters’ emotions deeply.
George Clooney directs and stars in The Midnight Sky (C+), an often frosty outer space slog with gorgeous visuals, an inert plot-line for most of its duration and a final act that almost rights the ship of all that came before. Clooney’s lone protagonist is a frail Arctic scientist who, along with a nearly mute child stowaway, must contact a crew of astronauts returning home from a Jupiter moon to catastrophe on a future earth. The action of this oddly paced odyssey occurs in fits and starts and is workmanlike, but the bifurcated drama rarely feels as ambitious as intended. A star-studded cast including Felicity Jones and David Oyelowo gets little interesting to do aside from a spontaneous third-act singalong and meteor shower adventure. The special effects provide some lovely spectacles to behold including some technological and lunar marvels and some all-too-human foibles with gravity amidst dueling stories in the North Pole and aboard the spacecraft. Themes about global/interplanetary cooperation were covered more successfully in The Martian, and adult/child survival dystopian stories were better in The Road, but some final moments of poignancy nearly rescue the film from weightlessness.
In limited theatrical release + Prime streaming service.
A punk rock duo drummer and former addict must reckon with loss of hearing and learns profound lessons about life’s crafty way of altering the rhythm in Darius Marder’s powerful drama The Sound of Metal (B+). The film is a marvelous showcase for the prodigious talent of Riz Ahmed in the lead role, and he is riveting in his painful and touching journey. The ensemble is roundly terrific, from Olivia Cooke as the other half of the protagonist’s band as well as his gypsy love interest, plus Lauren Ridloff and Paul Raci as supportive hard knocks teachers in the deaf community and Mathieu Amalric who makes a superb final act impression. Marder handles the story sensitively without ever devolving into movie of the week level melodrama. The film’s stunning sound design and lived-in performances provide the story with fresh resonance, and not every plot point goes exactly as planned. Expect to be moved by the percussive force of this earnest and engrossing human story and to witness Ahmed at the top of his craft.
In limited release in theatres before December 18 debut on Netflix.
George C. Wolfe’s film adaptation of playwright August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (B) takes viewers into the tinderbox of a fraught musical recording session in 1920’s Chicago in which a nearly all-Black cast showcases the drive for seizing power and making a mark when the odds aren’t stacked in one’s favor. It’s a largely talky film with a few brassy moments of blues music, but the main attraction here is a two-part powerhouse performance by Viola Davis as a demanding show woman and the late Chadwick Boseman as a cocksure trumpeter who clashes with most of the gathering band. In the film’s relatively brief running time, Wolfe chronicles some of the bandmates’ philosophies and back stories including some traumatic tales. The film comes alive gorgeously in its lead actors’ monologues. Davis fully inhabits her diva with fierce finesse; and although they don’t share as many scenes as expected, Boseman commands the screen like he never has before. The film is a riff on race in a minor key but fascinating and filled with majestic prose. Wolfe’s handsome and absorbing production is a solid glimpse into Wilson’s way of subverting expectations.
A curio for film buffs likely to prompt profound admiration more than deep connection, David Fincher’s Mank (B) chronicles several critical years of iconoclast writer Herman Mankiewicz in Hollywood’s Golden Age as he confronts political corruption in the studio system and tenders the script to the legendary Citizen Kane. For Fincher, it’s less what the film is about than how it is about it as he films the movie in vintage black and white with monoaural sound and rhythmic language to a rat-a-tat score. No doubt the visual landscape is sumptuous. Gary Oldman is superb in the lead, even though his character’s motivations are at arm’s length and lensed through a saucy gauze. Amanda Seyfried is a hoot as Marion Davies, the chorus girl turned actress and mistress of William Randolph Hearst; honestly the film lights up when she’s on screen. The movie is darkly cynical but not without its charms. The main character has a way of growing on you, even within a patchwork and sometimes dreamlike pastiche structure. It’s a fascinating experiment for movie history aficionados which, like its protagonist, may press the patience of most everyone else.
Director Carlo Mirabella-Davis crafts a remarkable psychological suspense thriller in Swallow (B) about a working class woman (Haley Bennett) who marries the heir to a major company (Austin Stowell) and experiences extreme isolation keeping up their home. The protagonist develops a disorder in which she consumes inanimate objects as a way to gain control over unresolved emotions. Although the terror is largely an internal trauma, Bennett does an incredible job drawing empathy in the role. The film, shot in brilliant hues with engaging set pieces, is fascinating and works on a variety of layers including as feminist parable. It’s an unusual sleeper film that’s sure to spark conversations.
Ron Howard’s literary adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy (C) is death by a thousand paper cuts, a rebel yell of a tale when it should be a reflective requiem. Gabriel Basso is likable as the man from Appalachia, now a Yale law student, pulled back into the melodrama of his roots, dominated by a hard knocks grandma (Glenn Close) and drug addicted mom (Amy Adams). The film never finds its focus, teetering between flashbacks and montages of flashbacks in a package that generally feels a bit condescending to its Rust Belt subjects. Much of the movie is shrill and involves lots of arguments, a veritable poor man’s Prince of Tides without the gorgeous coast and French manicures. There are moments of grandeur, largely in Close’s performance, a bit of a white Madea in pancaked prosthetics whose skilled acting chops still come raging through. Adams isn’t well served by the material despite her commitment to a hot mess of a role. The criminally underused Freida Pinto is a delight in a bit part as the protagonist’s girlfriend. Howard largely misses the mark in attempts at humanizing his subjects or drawing viewers in to a particular narrative path. Twice removed from the memoir origins, Howard’s Hollywood-splaining of rural life rarely finds its footing.
Kitty Green’s The Assistant (B+) is a powerful drama about a day in the life of a woman who is on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder working for a largely unseen abusive movie mogul. Green’s muted color palette and simple set pieces help focus all eyes on the master class performance of Julia Garner as the titular worker bee trying to do her job well in a work environment replete with predatory, harassing and enabling supporting characters. Garner is astonishing in the role in a film that captures the zeitgeist of the #metoo movement better than Bombshell did and in a disturbing category occupied by In the Company of Men and Glengarry Glen Ross. There’s not much plot to speak of, and there are many unsolved mysteries, but Green does a wonderful job tapping into the asphyxiation of toxic work culture.
Hot on the trail of a potentially cheating spouse, a woman turns to the philandering father whose extramarital affair broke up her own family, Clarice Starling/Hannibal Lecter style, in an absolute confection of a new melancholy comedy. Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks (A-) hits all the right notes with a crackling central daughter-father dynamic between Rashida Jones and Bill Murray within a film that poses the question: who is that stranger who is also called your parent or spouse? Coppola lenses a glamorous Manhattan out of fairy tale dreams, a little too perfect at times actually, as the backdrop for a vodka stinger of a comic caper with just enough witty detours to fully reveal its characters. Jones is dynamite as the plaintive female protagonist, a lobster mildly boiling in the water of writer’s block and an uncertain marriage (her mysterious husband is nicely played by Marlon Wayans). Murray has rarely been better as a flirtatious iconoclast who may just have the capability to mildly reconcile with the daughter whose family he shattered due to his own infidelity. His propensity to sing and whistle his way through life and to lay himself bare through his hot takes regarding the ways of men and women is the engaging stuff of a classic character. Coppola lends a joyous, non-judgmental eye to her broken subjects and threads her marvelous themes about the nature of humanity with absolute pleasure and droll dialogue. The result is a charming observational piece demonstrating a director at the top of her game. It’s a delight.
Writer/director Aaron Sorkin starts off and ends The Trial of the Chicago 7 (C) capably even as his unremarkable filmmaking style and pacing rarely meet the might of his prose about rabble-rousers caught up in history and a civics lesson with modern undertones. A saccharine Eddie Redmayne as Tom Hayden, one of the founders of the Students for a Democratic Society, and a restrained but potent Sacha Baron Cohen as notorious Yippies leader Abbie Hoffman showcase contrasting styles of social protest in a real-life story set in the six months’ aftermath of riots protesting the Vietnam War at the 1968 Democratic Convention. Sorkin’s real conspiracy is with his camera as he seems to know very little to do with it aside from a colluding gaze at the star-studded faces of his courtroom pageant. It all feels like it’s leading up to a denouement that doesn’t quite land. Some of the writing has zest, and the acting, especially Frank Langella as the judge and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the lead federal prosecutor, delivers some relish to legal proceedings. Many of the intercutting flashbacks don’t add much to the matters at hand, and much of the ensemble film simply feels stagey. Noble in intentions but marred in talk and treacle, the movie never becomes as Very Important as its auteur intends.
Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield (B) is the anti-Masterpiece Theater take on the autobiographical Charles Dickens classic, and it’s a delightful ode to harnessing one’s creative impulses. It’s not as breezy a bildungsroman as last year’s Little Women remix, but it has significant whimsical charms. The director, a noted acerbic satirist, tells the story with a sunny disposition and multi-ethnic casting and condenses the novel’s hundreds of pages into a tidy two hours. It’s nearly all there: the house made of an upturned boat, the kite fashioned of prose pages, the scene-stealing lapdog personified by its ventriloquist owner and much more in a brisk build. Dev Patel embodies the Victorian Everyman with relish, even though the story feels a bit like it is happening to him rather than him having much discernible dominion over his destiny. Hugh Laurie and Tilda Swinton stand out in the vividly painted ensemble of eccentrics festooned with fabulous costumes and stunning locales. Dickens was notoriously paid by the installment, so it’s fitting that Iannucci dramatizes his story in almost serialized form with title cards marking each episode. Despite its storied pedigree, this adaptation is a bonbon of coming of age reality bites.
This planned pre-COVID-19 release is now making its way into select theatres.
Sometimes we search for meaning in art where there is actually very little to mine, and often we give a story more patience than it deserves. Giuseppe Capotondi’s neo-noirish drama The Burnt Orange Heresy (C+) features some idiosyncratic performances and a stylish milieu but doesn’t successfully integrate its intriguing elements before culminating in a corker of an ending. Claes Bang plays a charismatic art critic who along with a new companion (Elizabeth Debicki) met while lecturing in Italy, is hired by an eccentric collector (Mick Jagger) to pull off a mission to swipe a painting from a reclusive artist (Donald Sutherland). Clunky, unrealistic dialogue diminishes a Hitchcockian/Highsmithian plot set on lovely Lake Como, and alas character intensions are rather impressionistic for far too long. Bang and Debicki are engaging and make the most of awkwardly written roles. Jagger sinks his teeth into what amounts to an extended cameo, and Sutherland doesn’t bring much to the party. Ultimately this bendy indie doesn’t quite hit its mark.
