Swiss Army Man

In the feature film debut from DANIELS, the music video and commercial directorial team of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, another Daniel—Daniel Radcliffe—plays the title character. This third Daniel, known to the entire world as Harry Potter, is now called Manny, named, with the same juvenile sardonicism that almost christened a British polar research ship Boaty McBoatface, in the script written by DANIELS. The in-joke is that Manny isn’t a man, exactly, but a former man; a corpse whose utility now supersedes his humanity.

To whom is Manny’s lifeless body useful? His new best friend Hank (Paul Dano), a lonely, suicidal castaway, finds Manny’s body washed up on the shore of the presumably deserted island. The film never discloses how long Hank has been in this remote location or how he got there. He’s unkempt with a scraggly beard, but his phone still has some battery power left. Later, Hank admits to running away from a life so unsatisfying and disappointing that what flashes before him as he attempts to bring about an early demise is a ride on a city bus.

As unthinkingly selfish as the little boy in Shel Silverstein’s “The Giving Tree,” the original tale of indoctrination to male entitlement, Hank projects his needs, both physical and emotional, onto Manny, who is gradually regaining sentience and motility, though severely diminished. Still, Manny’s talents are largely corporeal and involuntary, and Hank exploits them unrelentingly, offering in exchange lessons in a developmentally stunted worldview. If Manny, dressed in a suit, asks childishly naïve questions, in his answers Hank reveals he’s the one stuck in a state of permanent adolescence.

The current darlings of the music video world, DANIELS have the potential to visually transform film. But not in the way they’re going about it in this feature-length debut. For all the startling winsomeness of some of the movie’s visual effects, the majority divulge an immaturity in DANIELS’s ability to tell a story. Every uplifting, sunlit fantasy is countered by at least three coarse or obscene sequences. This exhibits either a stubborn and bold indifference to what most viewers find repulsive in hopes of lowering the bar Judd Apatow style, or an unconscious filtering of the puerile minds belonging to a couple of man-children.

Let’s hope it’s the latter, and that DANIELS won’t waste their talents by entrenching their storytelling in mere defiance against etiquette. If anything demonstrates their talents, it’s their inclusion of the oddball score by Manchester Orchestra members Andy Hull and Robert McDowell, a phonic collage that combines diegetic sound with swelling orchestration. It’s beautiful and deserving of better subject matter than a farting corpse. After all, if we know everyone poops, why do they have to make a movie about it?

The Conjuring 2

Rating: Trash

In this sequel to his wildly successful 2013 haunted-house movie, director James Wan (also responsible for the Saw and Insidious franchises) proves once again that screen horror, without a cohesive story and compelling characters, is often much less than the sum of its scary parts.

Free State of Jones

Leathery and wild-eyed, with a mossy beard and a skeptical attitude toward war, Mississippi native Newton “Newt” Knight (Matthew McConaughey) deserts his post as an orderly in the Confederate Army after the 1862 Battle of Corinth. He returns home to Jones County, where his relatives and neighbors live as subsistence farmers, to restore his nephew’s corpse to his kinfolk, but also as protest against the Twenty-Negro Law, which exempted planters who owned 20 or more slaves from conscription. As Newt tells one of his neighbors, a foot soldier in the same company, “I'm tired of helpin' 'em fight for their damn cotton.”

The most compelling, and certainly the most surprising, feature of director Gary Ross’ (“Pleasantville,” “Sea Biscuit”) latest film is its origin story. The script, written by Ross from a treatment by Leonard Hartman, is based on the mostly unknown real-life Confederate insurgent Newton Knight. Not to be mistaken for any kind of pacifist, the Mississippi farmer led a band of his compatriots—mostly made up of other deserters—hiding out in nearby swampland in waging guerrilla warfare against the Confederacy. At issue were the Confederate tax collections, which stripped local families of their last scraps of food and clothing.

Under Ross’ ambition to touch on the many milestones of Newt’s life, the film expands into an unwieldy sequence of charged scenes, featuring those with McConaughey and also a frame story about an anti-miscegenation trial in pre-Civil Rights era Mississippi. At 139 minutes, it attempts to be both an exhaustive biopic as well as a social issues movie, yet it still feels cursory; the viewer comes away with a simplified idea of the motives behind the mutiny but not much feeling for it beyond what Ross provides through speeches filtered through contemporary sensibilities.

In particular, Ross unequivocally establishes Newt on the right side of history by dramatizing his good deeds toward the runaway slaves who then become freedmen. Newt trades his desperately needed blacksmithing skills to Moses (Mahershala Ali) in exchange for learning how to survive in the swamp and other wise life lessons. How shallowly Ross sketches the men Newt meets in the swamp would be insulting except that no character, save for Newt’s wife Serena (Keri Russell), is portrayed in full flesh or with any complications. The villains are ruthless and bad; the good guys are righteous, written with the benefit of hindsight into history.

Still, between speeches there are several astonishing moments courtesy of cinematographer Benoît Delhomme. In one, Serena lies exhausted in bed, one arm covering half her face as she looks out with one eye. The silence finally allows an opening into the moment’s emotion.

Maggie's Plan

There have been several recent attempts to subvert the tropes of the mainstream, modern romantic comedy, such as the gender reversal in 2014’s “That Awkward Moment,” the meta “They Came Together” and “Trainwreck” starring Amy Schumer’s commitment-phobic bad girl. Nonetheless, those movies disappointingly fell back on entrenched conventions, particularly the third act grand gesture and final resolution. The credit of coming closest to following through on its promise to undercut the typical narrative of the genre in recent memory goes to writer/director Rebecca Miller’s (“The Ballad of Jack and Rose”) latest film, though it too loses its power of surprise by at least the end of the second act.

Applying her patent awkward bossiness that still magically reads as charming, Greta Gerwig (“The Dish & the Spoon,” “Frances Ha”) stars as Maggie, the antidote to the typical rom-com protagonist. She’s forthright, efficient and refreshingly real—as opposed to the purposely objectified and deservedly reviled manic pixie dream girl. Not that Maggie doesn’t have her own assured mania: she’s convinced she’ll never find a suitable partner so has decided on single-handedly raising the baby she plans to mechanically conceive with a hipster artisanal pickle maker Guy (Travis Fimmel), a former math genius she met in college.

Gerwig shines as Maggie so even when her plan goes awry, as they inevitably do, and she’s paired up with the ever-pretentious Ethan Hawke, the result at first isn’t entirely awful. It helps that Miller has crafted the perfect persona for the simpering actor; he plays John, an adjunct instructor in the obscure field of “ficto-critical anthropology” and aspiring novelist. But there’s a hitch, as there inevitably is, John is married, albeit unhappily of course, to Georgette, a narcissistic Danish tenured academic played mostly in broad strokes by Julianne Moore, unsuccessfully reprising her role as Euro avant-garde artist Maude in “The Big Lebowski.”

What Miller’s script gets oh-so right is the rapid erosion of identity caused by the friction of long-term relationships. (As Maggie’s best friends, married to each other, Bill Hader and Maya Rudolph exhibit a hostility toward each other that’s both funny and a tad too realistic.) Not long after the initial grand gesture from John to Maggie, which occurs at the first juncture of the movie instead of near the end, our formerly intrepid female lead, who at first longed to be the gardener to John’s budding flower, finds herself overburdened, wanting to be left to raise her daughter alone like in her original plan—and as her mom raised her, a story she reveals in a wonderfully tender moment in her early courtship with John.

The film’s conflict begins the moment most other romantic comedies would end. It’s a bold and commendable move but regrettably the plan of the film’s title, Maggie’s plan B, so to speak, gives more on-screen time to John and Georgette’s rekindled relationship, including a slow scene showing a meandering hike in the snowy woods, than displaying how Maggie’s new scheme could help her recoup her previous dynamic energy. Maggie needs a new plan.

Criminal

Rating: Trash

Overlong, over-violent, yet underdeveloped, Criminal is notable only for enlisting an A-list cast — Kevin Costner, Gary Oldman, and Tommy Lee Jones, reunited for the first time since 1991's JFK — in service of strictly B-list material.

Midnight Special

Rating: Art

Nichols reflects on human belief in the face of the inexplicable. The script is beautifully spare, allowing halting pauses in the dialogue and the actors' emotive faces to do the work.

Demolition

Jake Gyllenhaal’s dour investment banker Davis Mitchell could give “American Psycho”’s Patrick Bateman a run for his money in anesthetized comportment and sartorial habits. After the death of his wife, Julia (Heather Lind), from a sudden on-screen car accident, Davis becomes obsessed with destruction. It starts with an exploratory attempt at fixing the leaky refrigerator his wife was complaining to him about when the other car smashes into them and quickly escalates to  full-blown demolition of property, all while wearing bespoke button-down shirts with French cuffs.

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “Wild”) from a screenplay by Bryan Sipe (“The Choice”), the first half of the film wades through murky but stylized waters to a satisfying extent. Taking full advantage of Gyllenhaal’s notorious intensity, the film explores the themes of guilt and grief and the frenetic carnage they can provoke when they remain unexpressed, illustrated by the generous use of jump cuts, fades to black and cinematographer Yves Bélanger’s (Wild, Brooklyn) beautiful contrasting photography; a deconstructed bathroom stall door becomes an art exhibit through his lens.

But Davis isn’t really a psycho, or if he is he’s not allowed to stay that way. He writes heartfelt and eloquent letters to a vending machine company. Denied a package of M&Ms in the hallway of the intensive care unit where Julia died, he pours his heart out on yellow legal pad to the customer service department, run by Karen (Naomi Watts), whose early morning phone calls to Davis hint at a suspense that never materializes.

Conspiracy theorists could find the evidence that Gyllenhaal’s most recent character is the direct descendent of one of his first: Donnie Darko. In the 2001 film, the title character discusses Graham Greene’s short story “The Destructors,” arguing that destruction is a form of creation. But Demolition could never be considered its sequel; Sipe’s script, in its need for patched-over redemption and a happy ending, is too derivative.

From laughing at the pain of stepping on a nail at a construction site to dancing manically through the streets of Manhattan to a classic rock soundtrack, the screenplay grasps at worn tropes as a shortcut to a comfortable resolution. It even introduces a precocious sidekick (Judah Lewis), Karen’s runty teenage son.  What started as a menacing compulsion is transformed into nothing more than a playful quirk or, even worse, as Davis, wearing Kevlar, dares Chris to shoot a gun at him, a scene from Jackass.

“Do you ever feel like everything is a metaphor?” asks Davis. In this movie, the answer is, unfortunately, yes.

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is what happens when a film's creators lose sight of their purpose. Or, more cynically, it's what happens when a film has no purpose beyond its function as an elaborate marketing vehicle.

Remember

Hit-and-miss director Atom Egoyan has proven he can handle a surprise ending. In his successful movies (“The Sweet Hereafter,” “Felicia’s Journey”), he sustains the slow burn necessary to carry the final reveal, and in the process practically forcing his characters, who are often the traffickers of debilitating secrets, to expose themselves in tortured dribs and drabs throughout the course of the movie.

Egoyan’s latest release, a one-trick pony, lamentably sacrifices character and story in its singular drive to reveal the final twist, which should be obvious to any viewer familiar in the ways of cinematic tropes. But this may not be entirely the director’s fault. The screenplay, written by newcomer Benjamin August, whose most substantial previous credit is as casting director for reality stunt show “Fear Factor,” is a tedious, strictly linear affair; more hell-bent on racing from scene to scene, alternating between briefly introducing thin characters and spending entirely too much time with over-the-top stereotypes—who other than a neo-Nazi names their Alsatian Eva?—than exploring situations or character.

This failing could be August’s way of disguising the flimsy premise of his story. Any rigorous investigation of the narrative reveals implausibility to a perplexing degree. In what can only be a purposeful attempt at imitating Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller “Memento,” which relied entirely on short-term memory loss for its plot, the script imagines a type of dementia selective in both its timing and substance as its device of choice.

Storied actor Christopher Plummer’s portrayal of Zev Guttman, a purported survivor of Auschwitz, is the sole source of credence in the movie. However, Zev’s indeterminate affliction, which causes him to wake up disoriented to certain facts of his life while others remain steadfast, is convenient, yes, but also problematic. That he is then sent on an assassin’s errand, with only a letter to remind him of his mission, is fundamentally flawed. Anyone who had the misfortune to see Julianne Moore caught in her character’s loop of a suicide mission in Still Alice will be particularly sensitive to this paradox.

Stranger still is Egoyan’s decision to allow the road trip to proceed directly and chronologically, without the benefit of flashback or any other tricks of the editing trade. If anything, these could have provided a better way into Zev’s inner life.

Behind Max’s mission is the wheelchair- and oxygen-dependent, Max (Martin Landau), an Auschwitz survivor who from the confines of his room at the nursing home where he lives next to Max, uses his research skills to hunt Nazis. This Svengali, aided by Landau’s dark, menacing eyebrows, which were on fleek before on fleek was a thing, and his machinations, particularly his grooming of Zev, should have not been relegated to the cheap, tacked-on ending. They should have been the entire movie.

10 Cloverfield Lane

Rating: Trash

When screenwriters John Campbell and Matt Stuecken had their 2012 spec script "The Cellar" picked up by TV and film producer/director J. J. Abrams and Bad Robot Productions, it must have seemed like a dream come true. Four years, 15 million dollars, and a rewrite (by Whiplash's Damien Chazelle) later, the film hits screens with a new title, tying it to the 2008 Abrams-produced giant-monster movie Cloverfield, as well as the typical Abrams abrupt drop/limited detail release.

The resulting film, equal parts Hitchcock and Twilight Zone, feels like a bit like a classic car being outfitted with exhaust tips and rims. The fancy, new parts don't ruin it, but they sure as hell are a distraction.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Like most of the women writer/actress Tina Fey portrays, the latest is smart, funny and almost completely lacking in self-confidence. Kim Baker has made a life out of settling, writing news stories for better-looking people to read on air and unenthusiastically dating her “mildly-depressive boyfriend” (Josh Charles). Her trajectory, which falls somewhere between “Broadcast News” and “Eat, Pray, Love,” earning the non-ironic title, though delivered ironically in the movie, of “the most American white lady story," leads her to a new location; if not a new outlook.

Co-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (“I Love You Phillip Morris,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” “Focus”), with the help of editor Jan Kovac (“Focus”), employ the usual tricks of comedic timing to bring the script, written by Robert Carlock (“The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”, “30 Rock”), a frequent collaborator with Fey, to the screen. The biggest jump, which leads to one of the most egregious of the movie’s many tone-deaf moments—a bloody attack filmed in slow-motion and set to Harry Nilsson’s ballad “Without You”—puts Baker’s supposed transformation in focus.

But what starts as a fish-out-water comedy that, catalyzed by an extreme environment, should evolve into an existential exploration and finally the epiphany that Baker is usually the smartest person in the room, turns into a silly romantic comedy, albeit one that reverses stereotypical gender roles after Baker calls in her favors to rescue her new boyfriend (Martin Freeman).

Carlock’s screenplay is based on real-life print journalist Kim Barker’s memoir “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Barker, who now writes for The New York Times, was one of the region’s longest-serving correspondents, arriving as a newbie in Afghanistan at the time when most military resources were being diverted to Iraq. It’s described as an insider’s account of the “forgotten war.”

Fey’s Baker, by contrast, simply uses the armed conflict: first to escape her life, and then to coerce a better on-screen job. There’s a slight side story in which she visits a soldier she interviewed early on, and for whom she feels responsible for a transfer and subsequent injury. But this is a flimsy attempt on behalf of the filmmakers to create a connection where there is none, and even the former soldier seems suspicious of her dubious motives. Not to mention the throwaway roles, punctuated by dismal casting, that Alfred Molina and Christopher Abbott are shoehorned into.

There is some pleasure to be had from watching Baker, full of adrenaline for the first time, take charge of the camera while under enemy fire. Fey, the perfect foil for Billy Bob Thornton’s scene-stealing general, embeds with the troops brilliantly. She alone notices village dynamics and finds clever ways around cultural constraints. But somehow the filmmakers leave her untouched by all this, still lacking confidence.

London Has Fallen

A retread of the 2013 sort-of hit Olympus Has Fallen (one of two White House-under-siege pictures that year), London Has Fallen raises the stakes this time around while doubling-down on violence, profanity and xenophobic paranoia. 

The Lady in the Van

Beloved English playwright and screenwriter Alan Bennett (“A Private Function,” “Prick Up Your Ears”) reunites with director Nicholas Hytner (“The Madness of King George,” “The History Boys”) for their third stage-to-screen collaboration. Originally based on Bennett’s memoir, the film—on an opening title card— cheekily confesses to being a “mostly true story,” and then proceeds to imaginatively deconstruct that admission, setting it up as a pervasive theme.

It is, in fact, true that when Bennett moved into his house in a Camden Town crescent in 1973 he became the de facto guardian of an odiferous, elderly woman, Miss Shepherd, portrayed on stage 16 years ago by Maggie Smith, who reprises the irascible role here. Real-life Bennett became even more personally involved when he allowed real-life Miss Shepherd to move the hoarded van in which she was living to his drive, where it stayed—newspapers, waste-filled grocery bags and all—for 15 years.

Beyond that, the specifics and motivations behind their relationship are anyone’s guess, including the screenwriter himself, if the musings, delivered by the delightfully buttoned-up Alex Jennings playing the dueling on-screen versions of Bennett, are to be believed. One Bennett, relegated to home, is the writer; the other tasked with “living” in order to give the other something to write about. The two bicker like an old married couple, with the writer egging the on the other self to get more involved in goings-on outside the house in order to mine for material. To him, Miss Shepherd is gold. To the other, the burden of another old woman to care for.

Complicating the psyche of the flesh-and-blood Bennett are his feelings toward his own aging mother (Gwen Taylor). First, asking him to visit more often, and then later not remembering him at all. The dialogue crackles when the two Bennetts discuss either women, and more often than not they can’t mention one without the other. In a moment of pure pathos, Bennett’s mother is apprehensive to meet Miss Shepherd, who homelessness notwithstanding, still speaks poshly.

To present the audience with an existential dichotomy represented by the same actor doubled, though the mild cardigans vary, is a bold move, but it cuts quickly to the heart of the story, which could have easily been presented as a heartwarming odd couple story, marketed to the elderly and simple. And there is some of that. Miss Shepherd is given her due; Smith’s proprietary but lovable hauteur is on full display. Roger Allam and Frances de la Tour are also charming as bourgie neighbors. But Bennett’s creative inspiration, along with the resulting guilt it induces, steals the show.

The Witch

Book-ending writer-director Robert Eggers's gorgeous and terrifying horror debut is a seeming contradiction. The film's subtitle "A New-England Folk Tale" implies a fable, yet the film's postscript attests to its veracity, noting that portions of dialogue were taken “directly from period journals, diaries, and court records."

The film's success results from Eggers's ability to transport his audience to that dark place where myth meets reality: deep inside a devout Puritan mind where God and the Devil are literal and inherent in every aspect of life.

Sicario

 

The opening scene of the latest film from Denis Villeneuve (“Prisoners,” “Enemy”) looks a lot like a display in the controversial traveling “educational” exhibit Bodies: The Exhibition, which began touring the country in 2005. An FBI kidnap-response squad raids a house in Arizona and instead of hostages discovers dozens of decaying bodies hidden behind the drywall. The scene, shot by Villeneuve’s frequent collaborator, cinematographer Roger Deakins, is close and grotesque. An FBI agent runs from the dark house, gasping for breath, and vomits in the yard. The shed in the backyard, rigged with explosives, self-destructs, sending debris toward the camera.

These aren’t the last, nor the most grotesque of the dead bodies in the film. When agent Kate Macer (Emily Blunt), the head of the previous squad, is hand-picked by Matt (Josh Brolin), the de facto leader of a ghost team, her first assignment is to help extradite the brother of a cartel bigwig from a Mexican jail. She must travel with the team to Juarez, a city where the underbelly of its highway overpasses are decorated with mutilated — and, as they are filmed through Deakins’ expert lens, balletic — naked bodies. They’re strung up to send a message. It’s probably how Damien Hirst trims his Christmas trees.

The ghost team’s strategy is to use the brother as bait to lure cartel head Manuel Díaz (Bernardo Saracino) out of hiding. Covert members of the CIA, DEA, a militarized SWAT team and an even more mysterious operative named Alejandro (Benicio del Toro) are on board, identified only by their uniforms: SWAT in desert camo, Matt in flip flops and body armor. Their procession, in official black SUVs is about as fast as word of mouth in the small Mexican town. The resultant chase is stunted, slowed to a crawl by traffic at the border crossing, and every other car contains potential liberators of their captive. Sweaty panic leads to opening fire and a blood bath amid the hundreds of bystanders, not all of them innocent. Just another day in Juarez.

In her previous role as squadron leader, Kate was efficient, competent, but in going by the book was always a step behind the criminals, left to gather the bodies and clean up the mess. She and the viewers are led to believe she may be the linchpin of this new loose group. But she’s kept out of witness interviews in which Alejandro interrogates the prisoner using only an unopened bottle from the water cooler and a complete lack of physical personal space or a single wetted finger in the ear. As a result, the final revelation isn’t as surprising or satisfying as it should be, but watching Del Toro’s Alejandro walk away makes up for some of that.