Most dramas about epic familial turmoil don’t take place on the planet of Pandora, but the characters in Florian Zeller’s NYC-set (D+) might as well be blue aliens, as they’re completely unrecognizable as behaving like actual people on this earthly world. Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern portray the divorced parents of a troubled teen, relative newcomer Zen McGrath. Vanessa Kirby gets the thankless task of embodying Jackman’s new wife who has a newborn of her own with him, and Anthony Hopkins has a small bit as his mercurial grandfather. No one in any of the film’s generations appears to be capable of rational discussions, and there are conflicting narratives about saving a depressed youth and breaking domestic cycles of dysfunctions, with neither plot line ever finding a satisfying something new to say. A clearly committed performer, Jackman is the primary subject, but his bewildered dad character perpetually asks really boorish and basic questions of his clearly depressed offspring. The script does no favors to McGrath either as its views of mental health feel locked in on discourse from many decades ago. The film never credibly gets inside the head of its titular character and instead focuses on how the situation weighs on pop. Neither flashbacks nor flash-forwards help make the talky screenplay any more palatable. Also if you watch the film on television, disable the close captioning or else you will often see the word “chuckles” describing characters’ frequent awkward laughs punctuating the strained dialogue. It’s indeed a grim watch, made all the more frustrating from strange tonal shifts, a repetitive and reductive story and talented actors misused. It also feels like a play in which much of the interesting stuff happens offstage.
Sarah Polley’s Women Talking (B) starts like a really long homeowner association meeting with a lingering SWOT analysis and transcends into a bit of a moviemaking miracle about resiliency, triumph and restored faith. Set a decade and a half ago, the story focuses on eight women from an isolated Mennonite colony who grapple with reconciling their reality with their religion after it is revealed that men from their community drugged and raped the community’s women at night for years. It’s solemn material for sure, and Polley makes the stagey cinematic with lush cinematography and a desaturated color palette plus a soaring score by Hildur Guðnadóttir. Rooney Mara and Judith Ivey are luminous standouts in a multigenerational ensemble also getting lots of attention for two women shouting, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy. Like a war movie, though, the strength is in the composite set of performances and central conflict rather than in the work of any one or two individuals. The final reel is missing some requisite suspense but compensates with bursts of emotion. Overall Polley as screenwriter and director delivers a moving work, grounded in old-fashioned sentiment with a brazen modern touch, that undoubtedly will gain more appreciation over time.
Antoine Fuqua’s relentlessly violent slavery survival film Emancipation (C) both showcases and demands endurance. It is tonally out of balance, caught between being a prestige piece about a grim time in American history and an exploitative action film. Will Smith is effective in an underwritten role, and the film’s tropes and characters don’t illuminate much fresh light on their subject. Fuqua’s monochromatic cinematography is often expansive and expressive but paints its images over a hollow story. It spends long passages with dogs chasing escaped slaves who must brave forests and swamps and brush fires in an attempted journey back to family. Ben Foster has the thankless task of antagonist in a nightmarish work that doesn’t give anyone much of a showcase. There’s an important and well-intentioned story shrouded in the film, but Fuqua goes about telling it with little new or nuanced.
Stinging in the reign over his cinematic kingdom, “provoc-auteur” Damien Chazelle delivers his famed hometown of synthetic dreams a tart tragicomic valentine box filled with live grenades in the audacious multi-character drama Babylon (B+). This is a movie so singular and sprawling, with so much budget spent on bodily fluids and bacchanalia, that it’s bound to attract polarizing reactions. A trio of Tinseltown’s talkie-era troubadours – an old guard swashbuckler played by Brad Pitt and up-and-comers Margot Robbie and Diego Calva as a starlet and studio gatekeeper, respectively – chews and gets chewed up by the scenery in this occasionally bloated but most often blissful circus maximalist. It’s so completely overstuffed that at one point nobody realizes the elephant in the room is a literal pachyderm. Chazelle creatively crafts an amped-up Wild West moviemaking fantasia and whisks viewers up into an absurdist mile-a-minute travelogue through the underbelly of a mad, mad dreamworld; just when you think he’s dug deep into the city’s noxious center, you recognize he’s just getting started. The voyeuristic whirling-dervish of the camera consistently discovers playful details in its panoramic production designs, finding whimsy even in some of the film’s most uneven passages. Through the slyly observant lens of a filmmaker with lots on his mind, this full and frantic epic wields its poison pen with a brass band syncopation boldly matched by a jazz-infused Justin Hurwitz score . The anachronistic screenwriting about the haves and have nots is hit or miss, but memorable monologues glide like a heat-seeking missile to the luminous Robbie who delivers a spectacular supernova of an unhinged performance. Pitt and Calva are also standout gems at either end of the cynicism spectrum in a crackling ensemble. The film’s more than three hours of running time highlights the evolution of its characters from fresh celebrity flesh to jaded stars with scars. The film’s rumination on the origins of a sometimes scandalous art form is sexy, shrill and everything in between and ultimately holds up its sparkling mirror ball to reflect a bit about that Hollywood flicker that has become resident in all of our collective aspirations.
The power of memory helps guide the filmmaker’s camera in a profound new motion picture. A modern woman reflects on the shared joy and private sadness of a vacation she took with her father two decades prior in the emotionally affecting drama Aftersun (A+), directed by first-time feature filmmaker Charlotte Wells. Flashbacks real and imagined, plus snippets of camcorder reels, fill in the gaps as the female protagonist tries to reconcile the dad she knew and the man she didn’t. Paul Mescal plays the young father and Frankie Corio his 11-year-old daughter who talk and play at a Turkish beach resort in the late 1990s. Beneath the surface of sightseeing, snorkeling, billiards and pranks, there’s an omnipresent melancholy and mystery undergirding the lively events of a hopeful holiday. The movie juxtaposes a coming of age story in which the little girl experiences friendships and awakenings with a poignant, intimate family portrait of a protective and sometimes idealized father. Mescal is a force of nature in the role, seizing moments of tenderness and pangs of desperation. Corio is funny and bright and hits all the right notes as the pint-sized daughter who idolizes him. Wells captures the beauty of the relationship amidst gorgeous scenery and realistic encounters. Her film leaves an indelible impression and will be a balm and reflection for anyone nostalgic for bygone relationships.
In parts languid and lyrical, Darren Aranofsky’s The Whale (B) takes its sweet time to arrive at its cathartic thesis, but patient viewers will be rewarded by floodgates of emotion. Brendan Fraser is dexterous and expressive as Charlie, a 600-pound man attempting to reconcile with a broken family as he contemplates a life that has become adrift. The cavalcade of people in Charlie’s orbit include a memorable Sadie Sink and Samantha Morton as his estranged daughter and wife, respectively; Ty Simpkins as a mysterious missionary; and Hong Chau as the protagonist’s friend and caregiver. Incidentally, Chau is a wonderful foil and purveyor of some of the best lines of dialogue. The director films most of the action in the confines of a claustrophobic apartment and in stark close-up. His work is a glorified character study with a few additional sparks stoked by familial and religious conflict. Aronofsky and Fraser generate intense empathy and an indelible central character in the complex Charlie, alternately optimistic and at sea. It’s a soulful drama that will be sure to spark discussion.
Welcome to the Young Steven Spielberg Chronicles, where the proverbial alien is a spouse in a loveless marriage, the cliffhanger action revolves around how quickly one can thwart high school bullies and where home movies captured for the screen can reflect destiny profoundly. Spielberg directs and co-writes his own autobiography as a coming of age drama, changing his family name to The Fabelmans (A-) as one mildly manipulative way to keep tiny flickers of details privately veiled. The film is a rich origin story of an auteur-in-training shaped in unequal measures by his drive to make movies and his reckoning with his formerly fantasy world parents becoming increasingly estranged. Gabriel LaBelle is fully convincing in the central role, often opposite Michelle Williams as his dreamer mom, in an effectively showy and emotional performance. All actors are wonderful including Paul Dano as the pragmatic dad who can fix everything but his family and Judd Hirsch as a scene-stealing uncle who’s a former silent film actor and circus showman and a certain real-life director with some sage advice. Spielberg’s greatest filmmaking gifts are all on display here: depicting wide-eyed wonder, pivoting from triumph to dread within the same sequence and contemplating Big Issues while consistently conjuring entertaining imagery. Strangely, the only underwhelming elements are John Williams’s pretty but subtle score and the mostly perfunctory films-within-the-film. Overall this work is a glorious making of a man with unexpected intrigue. With a lofty screenplay, Spielberg’s co-writer Tony Kushner elevates the tale to the stuff of legend, and in the process the director himself has made a really great Steven Spielberg movie.
All of the spotlights and president’s men can’t make this story surprising again. Maria Schrader’s investigative journalist saga SheSaid (B-) is an imminently watchable but not terribly original drama about a pair of New York Times reporters sleuthing into the misconduct of movie producer Harvey Weinstein, whose character’s face is never visible in the frame. The film is buoyed by two effective central performances, Carey Mulligan as Meghan Twohey and Zoe Kazan as Jodi Kantor. Both women are courageous portrayals of strong working mothers on a quest to improve the lives of others through a cathartic chronicle. Others in the ensemble, except the outstanding Samantha Morton and Jennifer Ehle as compelling corporate sources, don’t make much of an impression. The combination of people playing themselves and cloaking the antagonist as basically an “over the shoulder” stand-in didn’t really work. There aren’t a lot of new bombshells in the screenplay, and the story doesn’t tell us a whole lot about the intrepid reporters; but the crafts are uniformly strong with a clean, glossy sheen to the proceedings. There are shots aplenty of peering through glass, so the viewers can feel like voyeurs to the procedural in minutia. The film is a strong teaching tool for future journalists and builds to the inevitable triumph setting the #MeToo movement into motion. For all the sensational scandal it breaks into the open, the approach is a bit tame.
Taylor Russell and Timothee Chalamet make fine young cannibals in Luca Guadagnino’s audacious and astonishing ’80s-set body horror romance Bones and All (B+). This walk on the wild side chronicles a twee twosome who feast on flesh, and there’s generally sufficient allegory to transcend the most gruesome episodes. Opposite the mesmerizing central couple who very comfortably occupy their pulpy roles, Mark Rylance is also absolutely unhinged as a terrifically terrifying man-eating mentor. Guadagnino guides his story gracefully into truly dark territory and finds sufficient humanity in his curious macabre. This offbeat road trip follows in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde and Natural Born Killers and will not be for all tastes.
The crushing waves depicted in gallery art and in the seaside Brighton, England milieu imply a story with more ferocity than what we actually get in Michael Grandage’s rather staid romantic drama MyPoliceman (C). A contemporary cast – Linus Roache, Rupert Everett and Gina McKee flash back to a love triangle in the 1950s between their characters played by Harry Styles, David Dawson and Emma Corrin respectively. It’s the classic gay artist meets closeted cop meets straight teacher tale, and this type of soapy story rarely ends with everyone happy, although there are some tiny twists in the final act that make events a tad more intriguing. It’s a handsome production; but in a film so buoyed by the need for compelling performances, none are particularly remarkable. The audience learns little about being a policeman, a museum curator or an educator and even less about what motivates their psychologies. Dawson is ostensibly the standout and feels like a real person in his role, and Styles vanquishes himself with a performance a touch better than his most recent tentpole effort. Some of the film is pretty and picturesque, but its tepid melodrama makes for a largely listless affair.
Now playing in select theatres from Focus Features.
Foisting an often unflattering, unremarkable personal memoir on the masses is a sure fire way to open oneself up to bruising judgment, especially when the memories intended to move or inspire simply feel dramatically inert. Writer/director James Gray’s Armageddon Time (C-) leverages his wistful recollections about being 12 years old in Queens, New York in the 1980s to moralize about the enduring state of affairs in the world. The retro atmosphere is all there, from toting metal lunchboxes, riding on the subway, touring the Guggenheim and playing in Flushing Meadows, but the film rarely gathers steam in any of its locales. Banks Repeta is the central boy learning retconned lessons about white privilege as he watches his Black friend played by Jaylin Webb get in trouble for mutual troublemaking. It feels like the protagonist isn’t really there; he’s just watching himself be an unsure tween, longing for better choices he could have made. Jeremy Strong and Anne Hathaway are believable but oddly written as the parents; the viewer will be unsure what to make of them exactly, and they have very little to do or say. Even a nice portrayal of the sage family grandfather by Anthony Hopkins feels perfunctory. There are indeed some life lessons lurking beneath the heavy handed plotting, but there are few revelations to draw viewers into this feature as essential viewing.
There’s a film history of deadly horrors in hospitals, where scalpels to the neck and syringes to the temple are among the go-to medical murder weapons, but a real-life sick bay slayer committed crimes with a much more understated approach. An engrossing drama with hints of a suspense thriller, Tobias Lindholm’s The Good Nurse (B) is wonderfully acted by Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne as two professional caregivers embroiled in a crime scene. Chastain plays an overworked single mom who is working the ward round the clock and counting down to her one-year mark of employment to qualify for health insurance to beat a secret pesky heart palpitation issue, a convenient plot point for a character primed for stressful sequences. She’s marvelous and relatable in the protagonist role. Redmayne is wonderful too as an often endearing character who clearly harbors issues under the surface. His simmering cauldron of an acting approach is a deft balance and consistently absorbing to watch. Nnamdi Asomugha and Kim Dickens are additional standouts in the ensemble as a police investigator and risk manager, respectively, demonstrating the frustrating boxes of the corporate medicine machine when patient care goes wrong. The film’s formula feels familiar, but Lindholm elevates the proceedings with creepy true-life conventions and by orchestrating high pedigree acting. His film is highly watchable as his primary characters get in your bloodstream.
