an intimate documentary and a sprinting kidnapping rescue
“Remake”
⭐⭐⭐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.
“The Runner”
⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4
Streaming giants use a soft-shoe tactic when they get stuck with a stinker that has big-name stars attached — no press or fanfare. The movie just shows up quietly in your watch queue one day, dropping like a tree in the forest. Last week, it was “The Whisper Man,” starring Oscar winners Robert De Niro and Michael Keaton on Netflix. This week, it’s “The Runner” on Prime Video with “Wonder Woman” portrayer Gal Gadot as Maia Marten, a London attorney and single mom squeezing in a run between dropping her young son off at school and heading to court, where she’s prosecuting a notorious kingpin who could go to prison for life. Halfway through her loop, Maia gets a call: Her diabetic son has been kidnapped, in a near coma, and will die if Maia does not release the key witness, held at a secret location. The mysterious voice on the phone belongs to chameleon actor Damian Lewis — so good as Steve McQueen in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019), and more recently, as British General Bernard Law Montgomery in “Pressure” — playing the feathery operator in the service of the crime syndicate looking to subvert the court case. Directed by the capable hand of Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “Touching the Void”), the film becomes a rote race against the clock, as Maia sprints through crowded London roadways (she can’t use a car or a tram), occasionally stealing other people’s cells (her phone is under a hacker’s control) to try to contact authorities. There’s an unnecessary backstory about Maia being an Olympic-level pentathlete with an abusive coach and father. As the runner, Gadot is angular and lithe, but the film is so mono-dimensional that you get bored long before Maia starts to huff and puff. Macdonald keeps the editing on pace and the action filled with cadence and purpose, although some of the slo-mo and jittery flashbacks detract. Despite the game effort, the ill-conceived premise should never have made it to the starting line.
For What it's Worth 
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