Known more as a boy band grad who transitioned to soulful superstardom in his own right, Justin Timberlake says bye bye bye to just being a celebrity in occasional cameos and thrusts his thespian chops to a fierce forefront. Palmer (B-) by director Fisher Stevens is decent in every sense of the word, an earnest yet predictable movie about redemption and resiliency featuring JT as an ex-con with a heart of gold and child actor Ryder Allen as the gender-nonconforming boy next door who benefits from a non-judgmental father figure. The genuine goodness of the stoic single man’s burgeoning paternal qualities with the princess-loving preteen is the heart of the story and often quite affecting. Timberlake is in nearly every scene of the movie and endearing in his performance, and yet it’s still hard to connect to his past crimes and circumstances. We don’t really get much of a glimpse into his worst instincts. Allen is a revelation as his fanciful foil. But despite some seeming detours to the dark side, most of the movie sticks to formula. Alisha Wainwright is a standout with a committed performance as a teacher and love interest; but like participants in many of the plot threads, her character remains a bit underdeveloped. Still it’s a largely sunny discovery of a film and, if in case the notion were ever lost, it’s bringin’ sexy sentimentality back.
This is one of those movies in which you really need flashbacks to when the characters may have been much more interesting. Playing loving partners of twenty years in Harry Macqueen’s slog of a road trip through the British countryside, Supernova (C), Colin Firth’s pianist must come to grips with revelations from Stanley Tucci as his lover, an author battling onset dementia. Firth gives the better performance and is often quietly moving. Tucci is adequate but not particularly revelatory in an underwritten role. The sad descent is sensitively handled, and the two actors acquit themselves admirably with tender material. Alas sequences on the road have the allure of one of those calming apps that helps you sleep, and none of the stops – including a mundane family reunion and a charmless rental house – hold much appeal or allure. Aside from the fact that it’s two rather well-known actors who aren’t gay playing gay, there’s really not much to see here that hasn’t been covered in other melodramas. Cosmic metaphors and the theme that even two people living in the tight quarters of a camper van can hold secrets from one another don’t really enliven the proceedings much either. I may have liked the epilogue sequence more than I should have. This movie gets points for tackling a Big Issue from an alternative perspective but ultimately feels lost somewhere between treacly and perfunctory.
Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman (B-) is a devastating and uneven glimpse at a tragedy befalling an American couple soon after bringing a child into the world. The performances are so stunningly good that it’s a shame there wasn’t a more compelling or urgent through-line to maintain the interest generated in a searing prologue. The film will undoubtedly be remembered for the hook of a prolonged childbirth sequence magnificently filmed in a single take and the central performance by Vanessa Kirby, whose acting is incredible especially as she has to show viewers her interior struggles. Shia LaBeouf is good in an underwritten role as her husband, but the other acting powerhouse here is Ellen Burstyn in the kind of fierce role that begs for its own movie. The film’s autumnal elegance and grace is maintained throughout, but its plot and pacing keeps viewers at a slight distance just when you want to find out more about what’s driving the relationships and maternal instincts. It’s a tough watch, recommended mainly for awards season completists because the female performances are peerless.
This is an epic story of a simple man transforming himself into a self-made super man of a different sort, and it’s an opportunity to witness eagerness and disillusion in ample doses on a wide and wary canvas. Pietro Marcello’s Martin Eden (B+) adapts a classic Jack London novel to an Italian setting in which the titular sailor played marvelously by Luca Marinelli falls so deeply in love with a woman above his station (a wonderful Jessica Cressy) that he nearly loses himself in search of success in writing, education and politics. It’s illuminating even when tough at times. Veteran actor Carlo Cecchi also has a nice supporting part as a begrudging mentor. The director weaves a pulpy story with dreamlike flashbacks and a keen eye on characters. It’s not completely clear if the central romance is totally convincing, but Marinelli is so utterly committed to his role that not a moment lacks authenticity. Literary fans will enjoy the juxtaposition of an iconic American novelist’s work to foreign soil and following a classic character through his particular passages.
A meditative and melancholy excursion into an Oregonian outpost circa early 1800s, Kelly Reichardt’s parable of a fur trapper brigade’s sad sack chef, a spry Chinese immigrant on the run, a widowed royal dairy cow and the collective gleam in drifters’ eyes as they embark on a land of milk and honey just might be the American story nobody anticipated this year. Filmed with naturalistic wonder in the great outdoors within the intimate framed contours of a simple cinema square, First Cow (A-) is both a chronicle of renegade relationships featuring superb performances by John Magaro as Cookie and Orion Lee as King-Lu as well as a genuinely crafty and camouflaged story of start-up culture. Not a lot happens in the first hour aside from atmosphere and character development as the central duo of accidental entrepreneurs gathers a notion involving furtive nocturnal extractions from the titular divine bovine whose cream is the secret ingredient of a pastry delicacy received like a Manhattan Cronut in the food desert of the Wild West frontier. The plot sharpens for the second half and rewards patient viewers. Early lessons about the uphill battle of the struggling class versus the capitalist society’s one percenters are abundant to witness as the burgeoning businessmen face the menace of wealthy Toby Jones. But the real traveling medicine show here is a glorious tale of abiding friendship, showcased in mundane tasks and small gestures, each one a grace note from fine actors well directed. Reichardt’s delicate way of grazing through unchartered scenery and lingering on undiscovered details, even from a distance, lends great delight to this immersive story. She crafts an absolute American original, rich with a lived-in quality and sterling originality.
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.
