With "It Comes at Night," writer-director Trey Shults masterfully manipulates darkness and light, silence and sound, stillness and action to unnerving effect as he portrays a family swallowed by loss and grief.
Churchill
For the anniversary of D-Day, you could go to a showing of this ticking-clock thriller that is only suspenseful to those who haven't an inkling of the events that transpired seventy-three years ago on June 6. Director Jonathan Teplitzky ("The Railway Man") and writer Alex von Tunzelmann manufacture needless suspense for this historical drama when true events would more than suffice.
A nearly unrecognizable Brian Cox ("The Bourne Identity") is pitted against the indomitable Miranda Richardson ("The Crying Game," "Tom & Viv"), and the two labor to invigorate this waxen cadaver. John Slattery shows up as a willowy and platitude-reliant Eisenhower, who mistakes Churchill's concerns for the safety of his young countrymen as mere anxious snarls of the aging British Bulldog. With friends like that, who needs Hitler?
Photography by David Higgs ("RocknRolla") is beautiful but overworked, as are the politics—repeated warnings against the surge yet disconcertingly pro unmanned drone.
Wonder Woman
Yes, it's another origin story. And yes, it pits super heroine against super villain in a super battle of superpowers, the finale of which is laboriously protracted. Yet, with a woman behind and in front of the camera, Wonder Woman surprises and elates by tapping into something that has been missing from its DC predecessors: heart.
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
Like its four increasingly tiresome predecessors, there are pirates a plenty, sword fights galore, naval battles, a hidden MacGuffin with super powers, a larger-than-life villain, and gazillion-dollar CGI effects. Yet rarely has so much frantic motion felt so leaden, so pointless, so dead.
Alien: Covenant
True to Scott's original dark vision, accomplished sequences abound. Crewmembers cross a Forum-like clearing, threading their way among hundreds of charred humanoid figures frozen in their death throes like victims in Pompeii. And the well-orchestrated, tightly edited xenomorph encounters are gruesomely effective. Still, one can't shake the air of familiarity that lingers over the proceedings.
King Arthur: The Legend of the Sword
In his early films writer/director Guy Ritchie (“Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” “Snatch”), who dropped out of school at 15, revealed an instinctive talent for storytelling. In fact, the way in which the story lines in those films develop was so fresh and innovative it seemed as if Ritchie were inventing a new language for film: a deconstruction in which a cheeky narrator explains non-linear intersecting plot threads, leaving audiences pleasantly gobsmacked.
As the budgets for Ritchie's subsequent films have ballooned so has his storytelling. No longer interested in the fast and dirty life of petty criminals, Ritchie has taken on some of the most recognizable characters, including Sherlock Holmes, the most-portrayed literary figure in movies and television.
Ritchie’s latest stars Charlie Hunnam—a Brit known in this country for playing California outlaw biker Jax Teller on “Sons of Anarchy”—as the mythical folk hero, largely based on Arthurian legend, but with other recognizable details from the lives of other icons, such as Moses, Jesus, Robin Hood and even a little Oliver Twist, thrown in for good measure. This could be “the greatest stories ever told” if it weren’t told so badly.
Written by Ritchie in conjunction with Lionel Wigram and Joby Harold, the screenplay covers a long narrative arc, following young Arthur as he grows up on the streets of the fictional Londinium to his reclaiming the throne, with the discovery of his ownership of the sword in between. Early scenes almost recapture the style and spirit of Ritchie’s early films but for their being rushed through in montage; enough only to pique the desire for some fast-talking storytelling but not sate it. And Hunnam’s native accent isn’t nearly as entertaining as Brad Pitt’s ersatz “caravan talk” in “Snatch.”
And so Arthur, unaware of his royal heritage, has no driving purpose, and even after his success at removing the sword from the stone, remains in no great hurry to make a plan to get started on fulfilling his destiny. Or even learning how to use the sword, which comes not from hours of practice wielding its heft but from merely recalling a repressed memory, which then sets off a whirlwind of CGI effects.
As a result, the final showdown between evil uncle Vortigern, played adequately but not gleefully by Jude Law, and Arthur looks more like a video game than the turning point of a civilization.
Hounds of Love
Mickey and Mallory. Kit and Holly. Sailor and Lula. Cinema has long had a fascination with killer couples and their twisted relationships. The feature debut of Australian writer-director Ben Young revolves around a married couple that abducts, abuses, and murders high school girls.
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
"Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" is not a bad film, yet it disappoints — not because it fails to deliver what its audience wants, but because it delivers exactly what they want.
Colossal
In his latest (and first full-length American) release "Colossal," Spanish director Nacho Vigalondo ("Timecrimes") plays with the giant monster genre, mashing it up with the romantic comedy and using the creature as a fluid metaphor for some seriously dark truths about human nature. The result is a completely original bit of magical realism, intertwining giant monsters with a compelling human-scale story.
Graduation
Director Cristian Mungui (“4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days”) is adept at excoriating the corruption and hypocrisy in her country, Romania. Her latest film portrays a desperate moment in the life of surgeon Romeo (Adrian Titieni), who cheats on his wife but refuses to take bribes. That is, until his daughter (Maria-Victoria Dragu) has a chance to leave the country, if only she can pass her school exams after she's been the victim of a violent crime.
The atmosphere of the movie is defined by threats of violence and a sustained tension. This gives the probing of the country's culture of exceptionalism—can the ends justify the means?—an extra poignancy.
Donald Cried
The first feature-length film from writer/director Kris Avedisian begins with the realization that something has been lost. The item—a wallet—belongs to investment banker Peter (Jesse Wakeman), who has misplaced it on a bus somewhere between New York and Warwick, Rhode Island, where he has reluctantly returned, intending to dispatch all that remains of his grandmother, including her actual remains, before catching the next bus back to the city.
But best laid plans, as the saying goes, often go awry; even more so for anyone lacking the conventional items carried in a wallet, such as cash, credit cards and ID. This leaves Peter at the mercy of former neighbor and childhood friend Donald, played by Avedisian with a choppy bowl cut-mullet hybrid and outdated aviator eyeglasses, to lend Peter both the mobility and legitimacy needed to complete the business of mourning.
Donald is the title character, but at first it's difficult to believe this tactless dimwit capable of displaying any emotion other than awkward expectancy. “Do you still masturbate?” he asks without a whiff of humor as he shows off the poster of his favorite porn star he has plastered above his bed. It's just one of the many candid questions he has for his friend when they first meet up again.
Not just Donald's bedroom décor and taste in music but everything he says and does date his arrested development to high school, and he's eager and able to resume his intimacy with Peter as though his friend has just returned from a mere summer vacation. Hence Peter's vacillations between amusement and discomfort as Donald basically holds him hostage for the day.
In the time since Thomas Wolfe declared that you can't go home again, each generation of filmmakers has made it a mission to corroborate the claim. From Jack Nicholson's sarcastic roughneck in “Five Easy Pieces” to Zach Braff's impotent proto-hipster in “Garden State,” those who have dared to venture out and then come back prevail as the hero, or anti-hero, in Nicholson's case, of their own story. Rarely has the contrasting point of view of the one who's been left behind overtaken the screen in such a raw and overwhelming way.
For Peter, there's no escaping Donald, and so it is, too, the condition of the viewer. There's no relief even when the real world pierces the fog of depression and sad nostalgia. It seems there was never a time in which Donald wasn't already a loser or Peter, a secretive poser; only moments in which they're allowed to pretend otherwise and only to themselves.
Frantz
Not long after the war to end all wars but still a few uneasy decades before the next, a young Frenchman (Pierre Niney) arrives in a small German town. His presence there, in a place near the border where both nationalities had shared art and culture and learned each other’s languages but is now where the French should fear to tread, is the source of much speculation.
Anna (Paula Beer) soon witnesses the young man leaving flowers on the empty grave of her fiancée, Frantz; his body buried in a mass grave on a battlefield in France, and tells this to her fiancée’s parents, the Hoffmeisters (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber), with whom Anna lives. In mourning, the three conjure up Frantz (Anton von Lucke) by foisting a hoped-for narrative on the visitor: Surely, Frantz and Adrien were friends before the war in Paris, where Frantz had gone to study.
Adrien, desiring to keep the fellowship by avoiding spilling his secret, complies, and he recounts his imagined memories, realized in soft color in an otherwise black-and-white film, to salve their grieving hearts. Collective wishful thinking is a powerful facilitator to denial.
This first act of director François Ozon’s (“Swimming Pool,” “In the House”) latest film was lifted by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo almost directly from Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 earnest antiwar film, “Broken Lullaby,” the director’s only film in sound that isn’t a comedy. (Lubitsch based the movie on Maurice Rostand’s play L’homme que j’ai tué, or ”The man I killed.”) Where the two differ is that Ozon has much less faith in the message and the messenger of the movie.
As if Adrian’s guilty conscience isn’t enough to capture the interest of his audience, Ozon embeds this section with lurid suggestions for alternate motives. Show me a viewer who doesn’t consider a relationship between Frantz and Adrien beyond the trenches of war, and I’ll show you someone who wasn’t paying attention. Yet, the insinuations are pointless. If that isn’t distracting enough, in the second act Ozon offers even more aspersions, particularly on Frantz’s time in France before the war, and builds only blind alleys of suspense.
Since the ubiquity of color film, the choice to shoot in black and white comes with a built-in psychological component. For this film, Ozon purposely exploits this shorthand to tease mystery and indecency—in line with early Hitchcock—where there is none. It’s as if Ozon, lacking faith in the story, has layered the film with false starts and innuendo, only to deny these tricks by the end of the film.
The Lost City of Z
Charlie Hunnam portrays British explorer Percival Fawcett, on the hunt for the ruins of an ancient city in the Amazon rumored to be somewhere on the border between Bolivia and Brazil. Written and directed by James Gray ("The Yards," "The Immigrant"), filming outside the boundaries of his New York comfort zone for the first time, the story—conveyed by Hunnam's performance especially—doesn't convey the same sense of obsessive crusade as David Grann's 2005 New Yorker article and 2009 non-fiction book of the same title.
The question of whether Hunnam, whose butt came to public attention in "Sons of Anarchy," can act hasn't been definitively answered by any of his latest projects. But it may be possible that the script just failed to get to the interior of Fawcett. Robert Pattinson as Fawcett's scruffy aide-de-camp Henry Costin and Angus Macfadyen as whingeing explorer James Murray provide a few moments' entertainment, but overall the movie's timeline is frustratingly protracted.
Despite showing only three of Fawcett's eight actual trips through the jungle, Gray's insistence on running the gamut of jungle cliches—hostile natives, black panthers, bugs and rapids all make their inevitable appearances—makes the film's running time a masochistic trial in patience.
The short shrift given to Mrs. Fawcett (Sienna Miller) only adds insult to injury. The proto-feminist is the one who discovered the written documentation of the discovery of the city, yet there are no scenes of her research or any hint of her life in England while her husband is away.
Far ahead of his time, Fawcett makes the argument for the complexity of the ancient civilization and the capabilities of its inhabitants ancestors—underscored by the hypocrisy of the supposedly open-minded members of the Royal Geographic Society shouting Fawcett down with a chant of "pots & pans." But Gray bogs the mission with tropes from the most xenophobic of early jungle movie's. Under these circumstances, the most dazzling of archeological finds would be hard-pressed to change even the most modern of minds. Zed's dead, baby.
Free Fire
A gun deal goes wrong in an abandoned umbrella factory in Boston. The premise for director Ben Wheatley's latest could be the the most ingenious in a decade. But its lack of snappy lines and a needed shift in the second act makes it only a rip-off of those who do these things best—Tarrantino and the McDonagh brothers.
The violence, almost all of it perpetrated by gunfire, is cartoonish but its relentless action quickly wears on the nerves. The film's excellent sound design should come with a warning for anyone suffering from PTSD. Not even Cillian Murphy ("Peaky Blinders") and those prominent cheekbones can provide respite from the film's increasing ridiculousness.
Tommy's Honour
Biopic about Scottish golfing pioneer Tommy Morris (Jack Lowden), the youngest major champion in golf history, proves about as exciting as watching the game of golf itself. Throw in the topical issue of caddies versus club members, led by a sinister Sam Neill, and an ill-fated love story, and you've got a slow bloat bookended by a flaccid frame story.
The only moment worth watching is a betting contest in which Tommy takes on an archer. But it just goes to show that even the most avid golfers sometimes get bored of their own game.