Tag Archives: Film

‘Wicker,’ ‘Wildwood’ both bring cinematic wonder

26 Oct

A man made of wicker features in one movie while the other consists of remarkable stop-motion animation.

“Wicker”

⭐⭐⭐Rating: 3 out of 4

In “Wicker” it turns out a decent man requires a little basket weaving. At least, that’s the hook in this bawdy fairy tale, adapted by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer from Ursula Wills’ acclaimed short story “The Wicker Husband,” in which a woman’s pursuit of companionship sends a dour village into a tizzy. The premise is fanciful, but the sexual double standards, marital dissatisfaction and resentment of another person’s happiness are familiar enough.

Olivia Colman (“The Favourite,” “The Lost Daughter”) plays an unnamed fisherwoman who lives on the outskirts of a seaside village and occupies a similarly marginal position in its social order. Ridiculed for her dowdy appearance and fishy smell, she commissions a local basket maker (Peter Dinklage) to fashion her a husband. What arrives is Alexander Skarsgård in woven form, somberly polite, virile and more than dutiful in attention—got a leaky roof or a squeaky bed, he’ll have it fixed in a jiffy. Just don’t ask him to do anything with fire. His existence becomes an affront to the community’s understanding of how marriage, and women, should work.

“Wicker” falls somewhere between “The Princess Bride” (1987) and “Caligula” (1979), with its mystical underpinnings — Dinklage’s conjurer feels more amiably puckish Rumpelstiltskin than maniacal Frankenstein — medieval-

adjacent setting and frothy talk of shagging and making babies. You could think of it as King Richard’s Faire dialed up to 11 on the naughty scale.

The perceived marital bliss of Colman’s fisherwoman overthrows social norms, making it the bane of those atop the social hierarchy, especially Elizabeth Debicki’s judging matron, a Karen OG constantly relegating others to places below her station.

Colman anchors the story’s emotional center with assurance, while Skarsgård’s casting supplies a layer of absurdity, putting the hulking berserker from “The Northman” inside an unfamiliar body, with Debicki (“Tenet,” “The Crown”) as the face of the village’s traditionalist status quo.

As lithe and sprite as “Wicker” is, the osiers of its are novel concept are stretched thin by as the plot gets deeper into the woods. The organic nature of a woman’s quest for companionship and respect becomes subsumed and the cheeky, burlesque-leaning humor fades. Still, its apt, able ensemble renders it a merry mug of cinematic mead.

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Potent performances power the taut drama in ‘Fjord’

25 Oct
Ideological isolation in the hinterlands of Norway.

A scene from “Fjord” Credit: Elissa Federoff / NEON

⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4

Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or winner is a stark contemplation on faith, family and the limits of tolerance when deeply held beliefs and social norms collide. The film focuses on a devout Romanian immigrant family living in Norway whose five children are taken by the authorities after the eldest daughter arrives at school with visible bruises. The parents, Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), deny abuse and become embroiled in a long fight to regain custody that, as the case proceedings develop, increasingly becomes a clash between their conservative Christian beliefs and Norway’s secular child protection system.

Throughout the ordeal, the Gheorghius feel largely isolated, even though Lisbet is from the remote village (located at the base of a towering mountain that’s part of Norway’s remarkable fjord system). Mihai, who just lost his parents (part of the reason for the move), speaks limited Norwegian, hampering communication, though he manages somewhat better in English. As parents of two teens, two elementary schoolers and one nursing newborn, the Gheorghius are strict by most standards, denying them cellphone and internet access and insisting on weekly Bible studies and daily prayer. They are also — as depicted — loving, caring and respected by their charges, and integrate well into the township’s general population, including being members of a Pentecostal church.

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“You Can See Everything” is worth the view

17 Oct

The documentary about Theranos’s fallen founder Elizabeth Holmes is riveting.

⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s documentary about fallen tech star Elizabeth Holmes is a riveting head trip and wild genre-bender that intoxicatingly combines classic journalism with inventive narrative departures. This eely shape-shifter burrows into you and won’t let go.

The making of the film is as much the story as its subject, who — at the time Fielder and Oppenheim catch up with her — is 34 days from beginning an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors of hundreds of millions of dollars. Theranos, her blood-testing start-up that promised to revolutionize health care and help detect cancer early, could only perform a small number of the 240-plus analytical tests it claimed. Holmes founded the company at 19. She and her Theranos partner and lover, Sunny Balwani, were exposed in a 2015 Wall Street Journal investigative piece and later tried on felony charges for fraud and fiscal deceit, sentenced in 2022 (Balwani got 12 years), and ordered to pay more than $450 million in restitution.

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Outrage and scandal: “The Devils” is back in theaters

16 Oct

It shocked audiences and the Vatican in 1971. Now, it’s back in a director’s cut by Ken Russell. The film may just have been 50 years ahead of its time.

A still from “The Devils.” Credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros.

⭐⭐⭐1/2 Rating: 3.5 out of 4

Ken Russell’s cult-classic “The Devils,” which comes to the Somerville Theater this week for a limited re-release, remains a glorious cinematic affront: one part historical drama, one part political horror flick where the monsters wear vestments and call their cruelty salvation. Its graphic sex and scenes of torture earned it an X rating when it was released (it’s now NC-17, which didn’t exist in 1971) as well as the condemnation of the Vatican.

At the time of its initial release, critic Roger Ebert bashed the film for its graphic excess. Fellow critic Judith Crist judged it a “grand fiesta for sadists and perverts.” Through the lens of the now, I’d call it a riveting, lurid spectacle that contains hard truths. It’s a must-see for cinephiles, with its masterful cinematic composition and status as probably Russell’s magnum opus — in a career that spawned the sensual wrestling match “Women in Love” (1969), the psychedelic rock opera “Tommy” (1975) and the bodily transformations of “Altered States” (1980, shot in Beacon Hill). “The Devils” brings his gifts into their fiercest alignment: theatrical excess, sexual frankness and a deeply felt anger at the abuse of power.

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Rachel Morrison on grief, loss and her new movie

11 Oct

The prominent cinematographer, a Cambridge native, has directed her second film, “Love of Your Life.” She talks about filming in her hometown, how Ryan Coogler feels like family, and why she didn’t go to CRLS.

Rachel Morrison, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer, will still get behind the camera now that she’s directing. Here she’s filming Margaret Qualley, the star of Morrison’s new movie “Love of Your Life.” Credit: Chiabella James / Prime

One of the most powerful women in filmmaking is Cambridge-bred Rachel Morrison, the Oscar-nominated cinematographer whose movies include “The Black Panther” and “Mudbound.” Morrison has moved to the director’s chair, making her debut in 2024 with the female boxing biopic “The Fire Inside.” Cambridge Day caught up with her as her new movie, “Love of Your Life,” opened at AMC Boston Common this week; it streams on Prime Video starting October 14.

In a universe of funky coincidence, it turns out Morrison played Cambridge youth soccer with Sian Heder, who directed the Oscar-winning, North Shore set, “CODA” (2022). Heder, whose mother Mags Harries created the “Glove Cycle” sculpture in the Porter Square MBTA station, went to Cambridge Rindge and Latin.

Morrison did not go to CRLS, which was my first question to her. She grew up on Hawthorne Street not far from the Charles Hotel, where we met, and attended Concord Academy because she wanted to play ice hockey (CRLS didn’t field a team then). Morrison was a shutterbug from a young age and at Concord Academy started to get interested in the moving picture. She studied both as an undergraduate at New York University, but in the real world knew she had to choose one over the other. “It took me a minute to realize that they’re completely different careers.” Morrison said. “You really can’t take a photo portfolio around by day and film reels around by night. There’s just so many hours in the day.”

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“Digger”

3 Oct

What could have been redemption remains a disappointment

⭐1/2 Rating: 1.5 out of 4

The latest from revered filmmaker Alejandro G. Iñárritu is a shocking disappointment, a meandering muddle more akin to his last effort, “Bardo” (2022). than his Oscar-caliber dramas like “Birdman” (2014) or “The Revenant” (2016). For the first hour we are subjected to one of the most bombastic, self-indulgent projects by a master helmsman since Francis Ford Coppola’s urban architecture mishegas, “Megalopolis” (2024). 

The backdrop of “Digger” involves a “Cats”-like cultural phenomena called “Fossil Fools” — I’ll say no more to avoid spoilers. Tom Cruise, as the paunchy, cantankerous oil tycoon Digger Rockwell, is tight enough with the POTUS (John Goodman) that he can get the leader of the free world and his military advisors to come meet with him at his ancestral estate (badly in need of roof repairs). 

There’s a lot of white people with money in “Digger,” which hints at having something to say about inherited wealth, white power structures and Christian values (for an example of a movie that addresses these issues well, see “One Battle After Another”). Those are just mirages, an exhausting exercise for the audience, which is forced to endure all-for-naught zaniness such as a 30-year-old cat with diarrhea using Digger’s sprawling bed as a litter box. It’s like Iñárritu morphed into Wes Anderson on a bad acid-trip.

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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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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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