Reviews of “Heart of the Beast” and “Unabomber”

30 Sep

A survival thriller and a crime drama

“Heart of the Beast”

⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 2.5 out of 4

The vast wilds of Alaska are where James Belmont (Brad Pitt) goes to tamp down the PTSD he suffered as a former special ops sergeant, as well as heal the war scars of his loyal German Shepherd Odin, who served with Belmont during multiple Middle East tours. The two are flying around the wilds of the 49th state to do some birding, fishing and communing with nature.

 Odin’s scars are more visible: titanium fangs (someone smashed him with a brick during combat) and a prosthetic paw. Belmont matter-of-factly says he shot the responsible parties “in the head” during a campfire encounter with a jovial old coot also roaming the wilds, played by none other than the baritone-blessed J.K. Simmons (“Whiplash”). The two enjoy some tasty Belgian beers and go their separate ways in the morning as a storm is closing in. 

From there “Heart of the Beast” becomes one long perilous survival journey after Belmont suffers a heart attack (if the storm don’t get you cardiac arrest will) and the plane goes down. Frigid lake waters revive Belmont. He and Odin go on to endure encounters with bears, wolves and moose (oh my!), not to mention steep ravines and white-water rapids. Through all this, man and best friend seemingly have nine lives, in part because they take turns saving each other’s lives (the dog may get a tad more screen time than Pitt).  

This is the second pooch-and-person flick in two months, after August’s “The Dog Stars,” directed by Ridley Scott. This one, thankfully, spares us the human actor (in “Dog Stars” it’s Jacob Elordi) over-explaining the plot to the canine actor. This one is also set on Earth where the sweeping mountainous terrain of Alaska does a lot of cinematic heavy lifting. 

Unfortunately, “Heart” suffers from woeful computer FX to conjure the tooth and clawed furries of the wild — if he was still alive, Bart the Bear (from 1997’s “The Edge”) would have been a massive upgrade. The movie pretends to be a based on true-events kind of film, but it’s not, which makes the sepia-tinted flashbacks to war time both disruptive and unnecessary. Still, Pitt and Odin (played mostly by a dog named Uber) convincingly sell the deep connection of two beings who have seen the worst of the world and are seeking peace and solace both from within and through each other.

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Cambridge’s worst intersections getting safety makeovers

26 Sep

“High Crash Locations” are the target of a new effort by the Department of Transportation, starting with three between MIT and Central Square.

The intersection safety data map. Blue dots show safety projects that are or will be underway. Credit: City of Cambridge

After seven deaths in the last four years, the city’s taking new steps to fix its most dangerous intersections, starting with Mass Ave at Albany Street.

That intersection is at the top of Cambridge’s list of High Crash Locations (HCLs), as measured by the number and severity of crashes and whether those crashes involved people walking or biking. Although the Cambridge Department of Transportation (CDOT) has previously reviewed intersections for safety problems, this new program creates a formal process that will be updated every two years. At higher-ranked intersections, transportation staff will examine crash trends, travel patterns, conditions at the site and any recent or planned changes before determining what safety improvement measures to apply.

Jackie McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Cambridge Department of Transportation (CDOT), said the impetus behind the program came from concerns by city council and others, “especially after some of the fatalities that unfortunately happened and we were trying to identify and formalize the process.”

The program is part of the city’s ongoing Vision Zero effort to eliminate fatal and serious-injury crashes. Somerville has achieved zero road deaths for four years running. Cambridge has had seven fatalities in that same timeframe.

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“Primetime”

25 Sep

Catching predators in the name of fame


⭐⭐⭐ Rating: 3 out of 4

Documentarian Lance Oppenheim (“Ren Faire,” “Spermworld”) steps into the narrative feature-scape with this lurid submersion into the early years of online predation, where chatrooms were used as Venus flytraps to snare underage targets and goad them into real-life meetups. The scummy underbelly, as Oppenheim depicts it in “Primetime,” isn’t seen so much in dirty basement dungeons as in the relish Dateline NBC reporter Chris Hansen and his crew on “To Catch a Predator” take in the lewd exchanges as they try to lure the next would-be predator.

Hansen and members of an online activist group baited a potential perpetrator online and goaded him or her into a real-life meetup at a camera-rigged house. They used a decoy (a paid actor posing as the underage target) to let the miscreant inside before Hansen, “Candid Camera”-style, sauntered in and cornered the suspect. The show was filled with quotes from their salacious online transcripts and questions about intent, as the cops waited outside, ready to swarm in.

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Reviews of “The Weight” and “Resident Evil”

18 Sep

Intensity in survival and horror

“The Weight”

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4

In “The Weight,” a muscular, Depression-era survival drama, Ethan Hawke again looms large in a small, gritty framework. Hawke brings a lean, tightly wound intensity to a man carrying more than his body— or perhaps his soul — can bear. It’s another powerful performance, following a deserved Oscar nod for his turn as beleaguered lyricist Lorenz Hart in Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon” last year, and his portrayal of spiritual torment in “First Reformed” (2017). 

Set in Oregon in 1933, “The Weight” centers on Hawke’s Samuel Murphy, a widowed mechanic barely holding together a life for himself and his young daughter, Penny (Avy Berry). An unwise altercation lands him in a brutal prison work camp with Penny taken into state custody. Samuel’s only path back to reuniting with her comes through the camp’s corrupt warden, Clancy (a droll, snaky Russell Crowe), who offers him early release if he helps transport an illicit stash of gold through miles of treacherous wilderness.

Samuel sets out with a fractious band of convicts and armed overseers, among them Rankin (Austin Amelio), Singh (Avi Nash) and Anna (Boston-born Julia Jones), a resourceful Native American woman who joins their perilous trek. The gold grows heavier with every arduous mile, but it’s hardly the only burden being carried. There’s Samuel’s guilt over losing Penny, his responsibility for those traveling with him and the moral toll of participating in Clancy’s corrupt enterprise. There’s also the crushing pressure that poverty places upon people with no good choices.

“The Weight” marks the feature-directing debut of Padraic McKinley, a veteran editor whose credits include “Dexter,” “Igby Goes Down” (2002) and Hawke’s 2020 John Brown mini-series “The Good Lord Bird.” McKinley’s background shows in the film’s lean construction and tactile action. In tempo, texture and tenor it feels akin to some of the best character-driven cinema from the New Hollywood-era— think “Cool Hand Luke” (1967), “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972), and William Friedkin’s 1977 film “Sorcerer.”

Like Clint Bentley’s similarly set “Train Dreams, (2025)” the film regards the American wilderness as beautiful, indifferent and faintly mythic, though McKinley substitutes hard-driving suspense for lyrical introspection. Crowe makes for a formidable avatar of institutional greed, but this is Hawke’s load to shoulder. Quiet, weathered and morally alert, he gives the film its grit—and its gravity.

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“The Uprising”

11 Sep

A Robin Hood origin story–kind of, sorta

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4

The latest action flick from “Jason Bourne” director Paul Greengrass has been marred by a marketing fumble that hailed the movie as a Robin Hood origin story. “Witness the rise of Robin Hood,” was the mid-summer tagline until Focus Features caught flack — too much of a spoiler, and not the story’s focus — and walked it back. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, the reveal of Andrew Garfield’s rebel Ploughman as Robin Hood arrives late in the movie, as a semi-gotcha. But it’s really a non-issue since “Uprising” works on its own as a period piece about the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, Robin Hood subtitle or not. It takes place after the Black Death of the mid-1300s, when half the population has been wiped out. Fourteen-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman, foppishly excellent as the effete and conniving overload) and his court of corrupt advisors are economically squeezing peasants and serfs under the Poll Tax to finance the ongoing war with France and the lush life of the royals. Commoners must toil under inhumane conditions and give up all they reap to the king — resist and die. During one such incursion, a peasant wanting to hold reserves to feed his family is beaten, which is when Garfield’s Ploughman (that is all he is called) wades in and gives it back fist-for-fist. The film frames this as a major galvanizing point in the sweeping peasant uprising led by Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and monk John Ball (Jamie Bell). Ball and Tyler were real historical figures; Garfield’s working man is loosely pulled from William Langland’s “Piers Plowman” — the OG Robin Hood — which was put down on paper around the same time as the plague and revolt. Other (later) tellings of Robin Hood — the ones that begat Errol Flynn’s randy forest romp of 1938 and Ridley Scott’s 2010 redux starring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett — placed the cloaked outlaw further back in time (1199/1200) with King Richard the Lionheart (Richard I), King John, and the Sheriff of Nottingham as the faces of tyranny. 

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“Mighty Mary” and the all-woman team that cannonballed America’s Cup

11 Sep

A high seas adventure that broke the glass ceiling

A still from “Mighty Mary”

Most of the action in “Mighty Mary,” the new documentary about the first all-woman yachting team to vie for the America’s Cup in 1995, takes place in San Diego, where the women train and race. But the film also has plenty of Cambridge connections. Director and former Olympic rower Mary Mazzio lived in Cambridge in the early 1990s and trained at the Weld Boathouse on the Charles River. So did two of the Mighty Mary crew, 1992 Olympic teammates of Mazzio: Amy Baltzell and Marci Porter Lucier.

“There used to be a national-team training center run out of Weld Boathouse,” Mazzio said in an interview with Cambridge Day. “All of us came from that — birthed, if you will, by Cambridge. Love that dirty water.”

Mazzio, a filmmaker-in-residence at Babson College, was drawn to the story of the all-women’s crew as they trained for the competition to represent the U.S. in the race. “I remember following the story and thinking, ‘Oh my God, how are they going to achieve this?’” Mazzio said. “It seemed daunting, almost a fool’s errand. Then I thought, ‘I know these women. If anybody can do it, it’s them.’”

The story behind the story was that Bill Koch — who had won the 1992 America’s Cup with a nearly all-male crew — wanted to push boundaries with an all-woman crew. Koch believed that with advanced technology and tactical skills, winning the race was no longer just about sheer strength and endurance.

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Reviews of “Remake” and “The Runner”

11 Sep

an intimate documentary and a sprinting kidnapping rescue

“Remake”

Adrian McElwee in “Remake.” Credit: Courtesy of Music Box Films

⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4

Ross McElwee’s “Remake” opens with a wry proposition: a Hollywood producer wants to turn McElwee’s 1986 documentary, “Sherman’s March” — the filmmaker’s meandering meditation on love, Southern culture, and romantic rejection — into a conventional scripted feature, perhaps even a comedy. Questions abound: Who would play McElwee? How could its accidental encounters and intimate revelations be scripted? McElwee picked up a camera to document the cinematic transformation but, as both efforts inched forward, McElwee’s film takes on a more painful tone. The Cambridge-based filmmaker’s lens turns inward on decades of footage of his son Adrian, who died from a fentanyl overdose in 2016 at age 27, eight years into McElwee’s project. In the rewinds, we watch Adrian grow from an imaginative, playful child into a sullen teenager and then a young man struggling with addiction, mental-health issues, and the burden of finding his own identity — particularly as an aspiring filmmaker living in the shadow of a celebrated documentarian father.

McElwee, an avuncular, reflective man whose deeply personal work has always blurred the line between home movie, essay, and autobiography, does not spare himself. Had the camera brought father and son closer, or placed an obstructive lens between them? Did appearing in his father’s films distort Adrian’s understanding of reality? And did Ross’s attempts to mentor Adrian — from “Sherman’s March,” we know his own father never encouraged his filmmaking — carry expectations the son could not meet?

For anyone who has seen “Sherman’s March,” the notion of turning the captivating documentary into anything else would seem improbable, if not wrong — but the outcome will surprise you. And that’s the gentle initial humor of “Remake,” underscored by McElwee’s patient cynicism. While there are moments of joy and tenderness with Adrian, those images — the two at Cannes with Adrian shooting his own mockumentary about a film honcho, Haskell-Wexler style — take on a secondary weight as the catalyst for “Remake” gets pushed to the corners of the frame. It’s a devastating film about the way grief slowly and surely guts you. “Remake” is as much a loving memorial as it is an agonizing act of self-interrogation. Some things can be remembered, revisited, and even remade — but never repaired.

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Reviews of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” “The Whisper Man,” “Mayday” and “Onslaught”

3 Sep

Art horror, serial killer nonchiller, espionage comedy and a gorefest

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma”

A still from “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma.” Credit: Courtesy of MUBI

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4

In this latest art-horror curio from Jane Schoenbrun, the alt-indie hand behind psycho-chillers “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” (2021) and “I Saw the TV Glow” (2024), the “Friday the 13th” film franchise and gender politics get skewered with bloody orgasmic gusto. There is plenty of sex and death, as the title promises, with the bloodshed bringing the joy more than any muted, intoned, crest of pleasure. A head gets cut off and an arc of crimson red gushes 30 feet into the air, so over-the-top it’s comical. The effects are gorgeously framed by Eric Yue, who worked with Schoenbrun on their previous projects.

Camp Miasma is somewhere in the wooded Pacific Northwest at a lake, which was many years ago the setting of a slasher film starring Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) as an ingénue. It becomes a long-running series of films and Presley, the “final girl,” now lives as a recluse at the site. 

Enter Kris (Hannah Einbinder, “Hacks”), a young queer indie film director hired to reboot the franchise. Kris hopes to recruit Billy for her project (think Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell). The set up’s clearly self-referential — and part of the backdrop is that the original films have become criticized for their treatment of gender — namely trans. Kris — a clear stand-in for Schoenbrun—is an adoring fan of Billy’s and given the cold foreboding nights (it’s winter) the two end up smoking weed, watching old “Miasma Camp” videos and working on Kris’s failures at sex — she’s in a polyamorous relationship, but appreciates companionship more for the intellectual than the physical. 

Much is asked of Einbinder in range — goofy, sexy, witty but shy — and she pulls it off, but it’s Anderson, with her bumper-bangs-and-victory-rolls updo (and menacingly aloof cattiness) that drives the film and alluringly so. It’s an intoxicating and immersive performance that holds the film together as it slips into alter realities and other strange and wonderfully murky segues. We see plenty of Little Death (Jack Haven) the being at the bottom of the lake, who when hungry, rises from the depths in a Devo Hazmat suit with a ceiling air vent for a mask, and eviscerates any and all with a double-bladed spear. The cherry on the top is seeing Eva Victor (“Sorry Baby”)’s cameo as a punked-out ’80s DJ — mohawk and all — with sassitude.

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Review “The Dog Stars”

28 Aug

“The Dog Stars”

⭐⭐Rating: 2 out of 4

Ridley Scott has been down apocalyptic-ish roads before, notably with game changing sci-fi classics “Alien” (1979) and “Blade Runner” (1982). In “The Dog Stars,” adapted from Peter Heller’s 2012 novel, we trek through uneven end-of-times terrain. A virus has wiped out most of humanity, leaving Hig (Jacob Elordi), a skilled mechanic and bush pilot aviator who lost his wife during the pandemic, holed up at an abandoned Colorado airfield with his dog Jasper (a handsome and regal German Shepherd) and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a heavily armed ex-Marine. Bangley’s survivalist instincts are considerably sharper than Hig’s — the dude retrieves his casings to repoint the bullets so he can use them again.  There are marauders roaming about, and somehow the grid is still limping along. Hig picks up a faint radio transmission, and the possibility of other survivors lures him out of his relatively secure perimeter and into the unknown.

It’s an intriguing setup, and Scott can still give scorched-earth spectacle scale and tactile heft (the man is something of a world building master), but “Dog Stars” never settles into a satisfying rhythm. It also has a lot of nagging questions that hang around like pugnacious mosquitos. The plot lurches and splits between Hig (the main focus), Bangley, who remains behind, and the so-called Reapers, bloodthirsty looters who look fresh out of a 1990s mosh pit. They seemingly have created their own language and alphabet — the why, another gnat buzz. The best and most bizarre is Allison Janney as the matriarch of a small, insular community with specialized culinary leanings (don’t look in the meat locker) and a retro bent — the interior of the hive is practically a verbatim recreation of J. F. Sebastian’s flat of replicant misprints in “Blade Runner.”

One problem with the film is that as Hig, Elordi, while blessed with the physical dimensions of a post-apocalyptic hero, never quite convinces us he’s the hardened, macho survivor the film needs. Brolin, by contrast, wears Bangley’s wary, shoot-first pragmatism as comfortably as an old field jacket. The rapport between the two works but doesn’t feel as genuine as the narrative insists. 

Hig’s journey leads him to Cima (Margaret Qualley) and her father, Pops (Guy Pearce), opening the possibility of connection — and romance — in a world reduced to isolation and suspicion. Here, and at a Mennonite compound near the overgrown airstrip, is where “Dog Stars” finds its humanity. But Qualley, a live wire in “Honey Don’t!“ and “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” is strangely muted here, lacking the sass and unpredictability that make her such a compelling screen presence.

Then there are those marauding Reapers, rendered as primal throwbacks seemingly beamed in from the era of black-and-white Westerns, replete with the genre’s cringeworthy “savage horde” imagery. It’s an unfortunate retrograde touch and a stark and lazy offset in a film ostensibly interested in what remains of our humanity after civilization disappears.

Scott keeps “The Dog Stars” muscular enough visually, but muscles aren’t the issue. Like its leading man, the film looks the part without ever fully inhabiting it. 

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Reviews of “Hope” and “Coyote vs. Acme”

27 Aug

In these films, creatures and cartoon characters live among us

“Hope”

A still from “Hope”

⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 2.5 out of 4

For those who relish Korean creature-feature flicks laced with social commentary — think “The Host” (2006) or the gonzo zombie blast “Train to Busan” (2016) — “Hope” may scratch your itch. But be advised, you’ll be nearly an hour in before the first beastie rears its ugly head (I’m being colloquial, not judging beauty), and the film runs nearly three hours. Set in a small seaside town where residents work the earth and harvest fruits de mer, the chief of police, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), is called out to investigate a mutilated bull — a scene that feels lifted from the opener of “Busan.” (Incidentally, Director Yeon Sang-ho’s ten-year followup, “Colony,” also opens in theaters this week, but not in Camberville.) Puzzled by the grim disemboweling — a tiger is suspected — Bum-seok makes his way back to his department’s humble headquarters, but the streets of the cloistered village are strangely desolate, several buildings have been laid to waste, and blood is smeared on walls like a bad stab at an alfresco Rothko. The ominous scene is punctuated by the echo of gunfire, coupled with loud sonorous growls — and every now and then, a car sails through the air and crashes through a rooftop. It’s a riveting build-up, orchestrated with adroit skill by director Na Hong-jin and his filmmaking crew: The choreography is critically tight, the set work impeccable, and Bum-seok’s hyperbolic reactions add a splash of comedy to the taut suspense. Then, just as all hell breaks loose, one of Bum-seok’s deputies, Sung-ae (Hoyeon, “Squid Game”), zips in on cue to demonstrate her boss-level grenade-launching and F1 driving skills. 

Loath to give away further details, I’ll just say Grendel would be smiling. The second half of the film doesn’t quite marry up to the blistering start; action sequences go on too long, likely an indulgence of cheap CGI. The narrative, too — which, like “The Host,” hinges on human folly — gets weak in the knees late, and the premise, never deepened enough, begins to sag. As “Hope” wraps, it feels like you’ve just seen Part 1 of a two-parter — and clearly something that could have been made tighter and sharper with better editing and narrative restraint. Na hadn’t made a film in a decade since “The Wailing” in 2016, and if that was the full incubation period of “Hope,” perhaps it cooked too long. If you’re curious about the title, Hope Harbor is the fictional inlet where the action takes place. The film also boasts international stars Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as the voices of the shape-shifting humanoids dislocated and in conflict.

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