The box office success of the Pirates films brought Verbinski a budgetary and artistic freedom granted very few directors. The first fruit of this freedom was the notorious 2013 flop The Lone Ranger, a bloated pastiche of Hollywood Westerns that even the appearance of Johnny Depp was unable to redeem. Having learned little from the Lone Ranger fiasco, Verbinski delivers A Cure for Wellness — another pastiche, this time of Hammer Films/American International Pictures Gothic horror — with all of the visual style and self-indulgence one has come to expect, substituting startling images and creepy atmosphere for coherent storytelling.
The Space Between us
In the far away near future of (possibly) next year, Mars is ready for its first long-term inhabitants. The colony is some sort of privately financed endeavor, yet still under the auspices of NASA. It's the brainchild of Nathaniel Shepard, played as a platitude-spewing egoist by Gary Oldman, whose designer spectacles and longish hair indicate a rogue authoritarianism: the style of Steve Jobs but the ambitions of Elon Musk.
Still, Nathaniel is but a man, and what man could resist a cute astronaut (Janet Montgomery) willing to sacrifice years of her life to make his dream a reality—Nathaniel's potential pressure-induced hydrocephalus (I kid you not) prohibits him from space travel—and in her speech before takeoff even embellishes his platitudes? The two exchange significant looks, and even though this is a love story, it's not their love story.
Forward to 16 years further in the future. Gardner Elliot (Asa Butterfield) is the colony's resident rebellious teenager. A classified secret, Gardner must stay on Mars because of shaky scientific speculation about the effect of Mars' lighter gravitational force on his organ development. The responsibility of raising Gardner has fallen to Kendra Wyndham (Carla Gugino), one of the few women in the colony. Gender seems to be the only requirement because who better to raise a baby than a childless-by-choice botanist? At least Gardner has a robot to keep him company, when he's not hacking it to research information about his mother.
When his growing curiosity about his parents makes Gardner intractable, he finally gets permission to come to Earth, where he escapes from quarantine and observation to set off on a road trip with his secret Skype friend Tulsa (Britt Robertson), a motorcycle-riding foster child whose current guardian is lout who dusts crops with a biplane in Colorado. They hotwire their way to California in search of Gardner's father.
Director Peter Chelsom (“Serendipity,” “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) is responsible for all these moving parts, and his habit of shooting the logistics that allow his characters to get from one place to another makes writer Allan Loeb's already unwieldy script into a lumbering, bloated catastrophe. As filmmakers concoct increasingly extravagant situations in which young love can bloom, they forget the one requirement of a teenage love story: the emotional flow.
Gardner's struggles with a new atmosphere and Tulsa's reaction to that are charming. Those are the moments analogous to the metaphor set up by Gardner's watching Wim Wenders' lovely Wings of Desire than any of the other details: the extensive backstory, the pseudo-science and the politics of space.
Julieta
On paper it may seem a poor fit: the restrained, subtle fiction of Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author Alice Munro translated to the screen by audacious Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. Well, maybe it's the quality of the source material or the older, more mature director at the helm, but "Julieta," Almodóvar's adaptation of three Munro short stories, transcends transpositions of medium, locale (Canada to Spain), and culture to deliver an affecting meditation on the life-altering power of loss and guilt.
Split
Made with low-budget horror production company Blumhouse, "Split" represents for Shyamalan, more than a return to form, but a return to making the sort of film that truly draws on his particular narrative and technical skills. The result is a wildly entertaining, unabashed B-movie.
Elle
Arriving nearly 20 years after his halcyon Hollywood tenure and ten since his last major release, "Elle" suggests that Verhoeven is still at it. As graphic, bloody, and politically incorrect as any of his more notorious efforts, "Elle" takes what appears to be a rape-revenge genre film and turns it into a character study, alternately examining and flouting the culturally imposed balance of power between the genders.
Lion
"Lion" bears the hallmarks of its Oscar aspirations: a true-life story, a child adrift in a big scary world, an against-all-odds-search for family and home, and a heart-warming reunion, as well as high-profile cast members Nicole Kidman, Rooney Mara (Oscar nominee for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and 2015's Carol) and Dev Patel of Slumdog Millionaire and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel fame. Delivered in two distinct parts, the film, however, loses momentum in its second half, slipping into sentimental predictability.
Loving
What anyone remembers from U.S. history class of the civil rights case Loving v. Virginia is the aptness of the couple’s name. What’s been forgotten—or more likely never even mentioned—is that this case, which invalidated state laws prohibiting interracial marriage, took nine years to resolve and during most of that time Richard and Mildred Loving were forced to live outside the borders of their home state of Virginia, raising their children away from their extended families.
It’s this very real hardship that writer/director Jeff Nichols (“Take Shelter,” “Midnight Special”) focuses on in his latest release. At first glance, the subject seems unusual for Nichols, who has carved out a niche in independent film by crafting anxiety-inducing allegories in which threat comes from more ambiguous sources. For Nichols, who adapted the screenplay from an HBO documentary by Nancy Buirski, this is clearly first and foremost a love story, but ultimately it’s one that can’t be told without including the menacing forces that exerted their pressure on the marriage.
Of course it would be impossible for Nichols to tell this story without the benefit of a contemporary perspective. Yet, his narrative avoids the patronizing trap of looking back. In fact, Nichols’ approach to the screenplay is to stay true to the natural forward momentum of a couple first falling in love and then raising their family. In the absence of any righteous speeches that the audience would have no choice but to agree with and even one-dimensional villains (except for Martin Csokas as a particularly hateful sheriff), the story’s authenticity is affecting and heartfelt.
As a result, Nichols has given actors Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga a rare gift for their portrayals of Richard and Mildred Loving—they’re allowed to inhabit their characters and perform to the gold standard of storytelling; they show instead of tell. Both are up to the challenge, but Edgerton in particular is suited to the quiet performance. In one of the tensest scenes in the movie in which a friend proposes that Richard could just simply walk away, the creases in the Aussie’s expansive forehead reveal more about Richard Loving’s thoughts than any words he’d ever dare say.
Even when the unjust situation in which the Lovings are obliged to endure comes to the attention of ACLU lawyer (Nick Kroll), the film avoids devolving into a mere courtroom drama. Nichols deftly hints at less-than-heroic motives for the lawyer while still allowing the audience to root for the victory of a marriage that needs no fanfare or spectacle. Like Michael Shannon’s portrayal of the LIFE photographer skilled in catching his subjects in their natural positions, Nichols exposes them for who they are: genuine, certain, loving.
Ouija: Origin of Evil
Considering its meager origin as prequel to Hasbro’s forgettable 2014 attempt at yet another film franchise (following in the footsteps of the Transformers, G.I. Joe, and “Battleship” films), Ouija: Origin of Evil is far better than anyone had a right to expect.
American Honey
For her fourth feature film, Academy Award-winning British writer and director Andrea Arnold (“Fish Tank,” “Wuthering Heights”) focuses her substantial empathic capacity for the young, misunderstood and dispossessed on the United States. In “American Honey” she blurs the boundary between realism and fable to bare the soul of those millennials who, through circumstance, confound the stereotype of entitlement disparaging their generation.
Charismatic newcomer Sasha Lane plays Star, a stray we first meet while she’s scrounging in a grocery store dumpster for expired food, including a practically molten raw chicken, to help feed her charges, a young boy and girl. Her relation to the scruffy redhead and blonde is anyone’s guess; possibly step or half siblings through a man who refers to himself as “daddy” in a cruelly ironic way as he gropes Star.
Later, Star opens up about her life—that she’s from Texas and was dumped on relatives when her mom died from an addiction to meth—but those may be the only true statements anyone in this film makes. Arnold has crafted her script with more than the customary British antipathy toward exposition to underscore one of the film’s main ideas: life stories are narratives that can be modified to extort a desired reaction.
Jake (Shia LaBeouf) is the embodiment of this view. He’s concentrated, quirky energy skilled in offering others a version of himself that they require to give him what he wants, and Star falls in love at first sight. Honestly, who could blame her? In the run-down, depressed area of Oklahoma in which she’s now living, he’s the only one who’s open and alive. Star sacrifices her wards to their evidently negligent mother (their father isn’t “allowed” to have them, doubtless because he’s on the sex offender registry) to accept Jake’s offer of a chance to travel, but even more to spend some time with him.
Star joins the crew of other feral teenagers selling magazines door-to-door, traveling to Kansas City, North Dakota and beyond while bonding over sing-alongs to shared favorite songs on the radio—they all know the words. Still, Star rejects Jake’s chameleon sales lessons in favor of cutting to the truth. He’s squirrelly, but she’s quickly learning who she is and what it is she wants.
There are elements of documentary in the film. Arnold plucked the majority of the cast off the street, or, in the case of Lane, off a beach during spring break. The tattoos, the piercings, probably even the love of rap music are authentic, and the dialog, what little there is of it, seems genuine and likely improvised at some point (or else Arnold is uncannily capable of capturing American slang).
Yet, some elements are almost too on-the-nose to exist in this particular universe, such as a young girl who recites the Dead Kennedys’ “I Kill Children” or a bear that just comes for a quick visit. But these incidents, photographed in exquisite detail by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, are the reminder that the film is actually a fairy tale that Arnold has constructed for Star. It’s a new kind of parable in which a spirited young woman can explore and experiment without having to face the dangerous consequences as a punishment for having courage.
The Girl With All the Gifts
Mike Ireland argues that the British release "The Girl with All the Gifts" is arguably the best zombie flick since Danny Boyle's game-changing "28 Days Later."
Equity
Near the beginning of director Meera Menon’s indie Wall Street thriller, investment banker Naomi Bishop (Anna Gunn) makes a confession to a roomful of aspiring business women: she likes likes money, and, even more, she likes the power that comes with money. The problem with this disclosure is not that Naomi is a woman making this statement; it’s that there’s little evidence in the screenplay, written by playwright Amy Fox, that she is capable of exerting the type of ambition she lays claim to.
Make no mistake, it’s a far better movie for avoiding the expected one-for-one swap with Wall Street’s cutthroat Gordon Gekko. This summer audiences were already exposed to a more blatant and gimmicky gender swap with Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters and responded proportionally—once they’d actually seen it—to its inability to justify itself as a remake. And unlike the scripts that were changed by simply finding and replacing “he” for “she,” such as the Sandra Bullock vehicle “Our Brand Is Crisis,” this is still Naomi’s story. Well, sort of.
With only a lone beta fish as a true companion, Naomi adheres to the strict rules of corporate-friendly faux feminism most recently propagated by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. She doesn’t even try to have it all, preferring to lean in rather than rock the boat, or, since this is Wall Street after all, break through the glass ceiling by breaking through the Chinese wall between her own investments and the deals made by boyfriend, Michael (James Purefoy), a broker at the same firm whose similarity to the Kool-Aid man (breaking through whatever wall he can to secure a sure thing) puts him under the scrutiny of Samantha Ryan (Alysia Reiner), a former college classmate of Naomi’s now investigating white-collar crime as a prosecutor for the U.S. attorney’s office.
When Naomi is reluctant to over-promise on the worth of a company preparing to go public, her righthand person Erin Manning (Sarah Megan Thomas)—more confident and more stylish than her mentor—steps up. But soon enough, she too is thwarted by the biases against women in a male-dominated field, though her response to it is much different than Naomi’s.
Thomas and Reiner developed the story with Fox, and both produced. Even without celebrity cameos, the action is easy to follow. In some scenes, exposition makes it a little too easy, and causes the narrative to stall. Performances, too, slow down the pace when it should be building. It’s almost as if Menon has asked all the actors to deliver each line with an emphasis that, no mater how mundane, when combined with Eric Lin’s shadowy cinematography, comes off sounding like either a threat or a come-on, and too often it’s difficult to tell the difference
Don't Breathe
Rating: Great Trash
Taking a diametrically opposite approach to horror from his blood-drenched feature debut, 2013's Evil Dead remake, Uruguayan director Fede Alvarez turns to the subtler tools of cinematography, editing, and soundscape to generate scares this time around. And for an hour, the resulting home-invasion movie Don't Breathe is a brutal, relentless little thrill machine. Unfortunately, it runs another 28 minutes, during which the film goes wildly, and tastelessly, off the rails.
Don't Think Twice
Rating: Art
While set within the world of live comedy, Don't Think Twice, comedian Mike Birbiglia’s meditation on talent, ambition, and the personal price of creating art, transcends the narrow limits of its subject matter. In fact, for folks (like me) who don't particularly respond to improv comedy, the film succeeds precisely because it focuses on the comedians, not the performances.
The Purge: Election Year
The concept of the Purge films — in the near-future, a cadre of reactionary one-percenters (The New Founding Fathers of America) have instituted an annual Purge Night during which all crime is legal as a means of economic revival through the ritual extermination of America's underclass — has always seemed like a great premise in search of someone who could really exploit its potent cultural and political undercurrents.
After three attempts, however, it's beginning to look like series creator, writer-director James DeMonaco, is not that person.
Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
Brothers Dave and Mike Stangle needed dates for their cousin’s wedding in Saratoga, New York, so they did what any two red-blooded American males would do in 2013—they put an ad on Craigslist. The ad went viral, as they say, and the two were briefly the flavor of the month on the morning talk show circuit. The result was probably more than they could have imagined, or, if you’re cynical, was exactly what the two imagined: a book deal, followed by a reported seven-figure script offer. No dates materialized; the two went to the wedding with friends.
What material the Stangle dudes added to stretch a Craigslist ad into 244 pages of brother bro adventures can only be known by those who actually read it, meaning those who read “American Psycho” for inspiration, or anyone who enjoys a good hate-read. Apparently, very little of what the two Tucker Max wannabes had to say made it into the feature film, which didn’t improve the film as much as it should have.
Written by Andrew J. Cohen and Brendan O'Brien and directed by television and Web series helmer Jake Szymanski, the story hinges on the notorious Craigslist ad but is stretched out in order to reach a completely different outcome. In a misplaced attempt at equal opportunity through nondiscriminatory amped-up crassness—an increasingly unfortunate trend in comedy—Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) are matched by Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick), who, having seen the Stangle brothers on “The Wendy Williams Show,” dupe the two into believing they’re decent women deserving of a free vacation to a destination wedding in Hawaii.
From a change in perception in the opening credits, there’s a glimmer of hope that this comedy could have been made with a surprising, self-reflexive tone. First, the brothers’ antics are shown from a heroic perspective; epic is how they’d be described. Surprisingly, the point of view widens, revealing their behavior as clumsy and destructive. It’s all the more unfortunate then when what remains of the movie contains none of this irony. Instead, the movie stumbles from one implausible scenario to the next, distracted from barreling toward the inevitable paired-off ending only by drawn-out physical stunts and bad behavior in broad strokes.
Character actors Stephen Root, Sam Richardson and Sugar Lyn Beard, whose squeaky voice was probably put to better use as Wish Bear in the straight-to-video Care Bears, are hammy props, relegated to supporting Devine’s foolish lead. Efron is a remarkably able straight man. But the biggest disappointments are Plaza and Kendrick. (It’s anyone’s best guess what accent Aubrey Plaza has assumed for the New York scenes.) Better to have been written as the heroines of screwball comedy, their roles lack the nuance needed to pull off the needed deceit or even the patience to keep up the ruse. Lessons can be learned from the greats: Hepburn, Russell, Lombard, Dunne and especially Lemmon and Curtis.