Film Reviews
Steve McQueen’s Lovers Rock Is a Reggae-Filled Celebration of Black Joy: NYFF Review
The Pitch: In London’s West Indian community in 1980, a house party brews. The men haul furniture out to the backyard and bring in huge speakers to replace it, while the women crowd into the kitchen, cooking goat curry and plaintains while singing and laughing with each other. Men and women file in one at a time, paying the bouncer while the DJ pumps in the songs of Carl Douglas, Sister Sledge, Janet Kay — romantic reggae, “Lover’s Rock”. This is the setting for Steve McQueen‘s Lovers Rock, a glimpse into the Blues parties that served as an important space for Black Londoners of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s to find community, solidarity, and love, as a rotating ensemble of characters sing and scrub throughout the evening. And in the middle of it all, a young woman named Martha (Amarah-Jae...
Viggo Mortensen’s Falling Offers Repetition and Expletives, But No Payoff: TIFF Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival. The Pitch: In Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut, gay Air Force pilot John (Mortensen) struggles to care for his ailing conservative father, Willis (Lance Henriksen). Malcontent and never afraid to shy away from a racist, homophobic or sexist rant, Willis offends everyone from John’s husband Eric (Terry Chen) to his daughter Sarah (Laura Linney), all while he slips in and out of flashbacks, including his two marriages to wives Gwen (Hannah Gross) and Jill (Bracken Burns). Grumpy Old Man: Early in Falling, as the relationship between John and Willis is being established, it’s clear that Henriksen is exceptional in the role. Willis is the kind of curmudgeonly character whose edges are too often softened in ...
Antebellum’s Message Overshadows Its Story: Review
The Pitch: The elevator pitch for Antebellum was probably quite simple: Veronica Henley is an enslaved woman on a cruel plantation and must stay silent until she can find the perfect moment to escape. But there’s a twist: It’s a story about the Antebellum South, updated for modern audiences and designed to speak to the present moment. While this sounds great on paper, all of these elements culminate into a forced, muddled mess that’s less than the sum of its parts. It’s not that Antebellum is bad — there are many things it does well — it’s just trying so hard to be the perfect movie for this moment in time. Because of this, the film winds up losing control of its message. The Past Is Present: Antebellum is trying to make a commentary on white obsession with Southern “heritage.” It’s trying...
Vanessa Kirby and Shia LaBeouf Stand Out In the Shrugworthy Pieces of a Woman: TIFF Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival . The Pitch: Pregnant couple Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and Martha (Vanessa Kirby) go through a dangerous labor with a new midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), only for the worst possible outcome to occur. In the months that follow, they each process their grief and anger in different ways. Meanwhile, Martha’s mother, Elizabeth (Ellen Burstyn), pushes for legal justice that may or may not offer the closure that the family needs. Labour Pains: When people discuss Kornél Mundruczó’s Pieces of a Woman, the discussion will inevitably be broken into two parts. Most will focus on the film’s first 33 minutes, which takes place entirely on September 17th and follows – in one long, mostly uninterrupted take – the night that Martha...
Frances McDormand Walks Right Into the Oscars With Nomadland: TIFF Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival . The Pitch: Based on Jessica Bruder’s 2017 non-fiction novel, Nomadland follows 60-something Fern (Frances McDormand) over the course of a year as she moves from place to place, working odd jobs and living in her van. Throughout her journey, Fern comes across a multitude of communities: some who accept her as she is, others who try to pin her down and keep her stationary. These series of experiences offer a character study of a head-strong, mature woman working through her grief and searching for herself. Authentic Experiences: Over the course of four features, director Chloé Zhao has repeatedly returned to stories of marginalized people, living on the fringes of conventional society. She favors stories of...
Netflix’s The Devil All the Time Is a Messy Southern Gothic Stew: Review
The Pitch: Set against the mud-covered backdrop of southern Ohio and West Virginia in the ’50s and ’60s, we see the ways that faith, violence, and lost innocence play out against an interconnecting web of characters. There’s Willard Russell (Bill Skarsgård), whose experiences in WWII haunt him even as he tries to make a life back home with a sweet waitress (Haley Bennett). There’s also Carl (Jason Clarke) and Sandy (Riley Keough), who get their kicks picking up hitchhikers, photographing them, then slaughtering them. There’s Sandy’s brother, Lee (Sebastian Stan), a portly, corrupt sheriff constantly gunning for re-election and turning a blind eye to his sister’s wrongdoing. Caught in the middle of it all is Alvin (Tom Holland), Willard’s orphaned son, trying to navigate his way throug...
Spike Lee Captures a Celebration and Calls for Action With David Byrne’s American Utopia: TIFF Review
This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival . The Pitch: With American Utopia, director Spike Lee brings his eye to David Byrne’s critically-acclaimed Broadway show. Part concert documentary, part contemporary dance performance, and part social commentary, Lee’s latest feature is a call to action about embracing human connections, social responsibilities, and change across the world. Uniform-ity: Unlike conventional concert documentaries — and not too dissimilar from Jonathan Demme’s iconic Talking Heads feature Stop Making Sense — the stage of the Hudson Theatre is kept almost completely bare. Byrne remains under the spotlights for nearly the whole runtime, decked out in a visually bland grey suit and bare feet. Over the course of the first few song...
HBO’s Coastal Elites Feels Like a Carefully Curated Twitter Feed: Review
The Pitch: Amidst the backdrop of 2020 — the heady and often unpleasant mix of an impending presidential election and a worldwide pandemic that’s hitting the United States especially hard — five people deliver five different monologues (or, as they’re briefly dubbed, “unhinged rants”) about the Way We Live Now in the satirical HBO “special presentation” Coastal Elites. Look at the Camera: Because of the very nature of the coronavirus pandemic, Coastal Elites is a decidedly un-flashy glimpse into the lives of a quintet of Americans. From sly writer Paul Rudnick, the 90-minute special presentation (that’s what HBO is calling Coastal Elites, and although it’s movie-length, frankly, the descriptor fits) is meant as a mix of earnest sincerity and dry wit. How is this disparate handful strugglin...
Shakespeare’s Shitstorm Is Lloyd Kaufman’s Manifesto for the Age of Outrage: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Legendary purveyors of late night schlock, Troma Entertainment put their own spin on William Shakespeare’s The Tempest by swapping out a tropical storm for gallons of whale feces and a deserted island for New Jersey. All of this in an attempt to skewer online culture and big pharma’s conquering of America with gross-out gags and a politically incorrect sensibility. What Is Past Is Prologue: That iconic Troma logo — you know, the one with the New York City skyline set against a blood red sky with spotlights in the air — is like a warm blanket for genre cinema lovers who were weaned by Gilbert Gottfried and Rhonda Sheer on USA’s Up All Night. The memorable, simplistic fan fare conjures up an instant wave of nostalgia, but...
Mulan Strays from the Disney Formula by Adopting Marvel’s Blueprint: Review
The Pitch: Disney has remade a number of its ’90s-era animated films into live-action and/or CG blockbuster epics. Now, the 1998 favorite Mulan gets the same treatment. Its story of a young Chinese woman impersonating a man in the Imperial Army has shifted from an animated classic into a live-action tale of empowerment and self-actualization. But does the translation pay off? Breaking the Mold … Somewhat: Most of the live-action remakes from Disney follow a frustrating pattern in which A-List filmmakers and actors go through the motions of replicating magical moments from the classic films of our childhood, all while trying to make something new of those fairy tales. At the box office, these films have been largely successful, with Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King all makin...
The Mortuary Collection Is Halloween Horror With a Mean Streak: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: “The world is made of stories…” and they are left behind by the dead. Montgomery Dark (Clancy Brown) is an aging mortician tasked with not only caring for the bodies of his recently deceased clients but for the stories of their deaths. These he collects and keeps in the massive library of his sinister and dilapidated mortuary. After officiating the funeral of a child, he meets Sam (Caitlin Custer), a young woman looking for a job. Her interview takes a turn for the macabre as she asks Montgomery to scare her with his tales, setting the stage for this spooky anthology. It was a Dark and Stormy Night… Set in the vague past, The Mortuary Collection feels like Scary Stories to Tell In the Dark for twenty-somethings with a d...
The Dark and the Wicked Is 2020: Fantasia Fest Review
This review is part of our Fantasia Festival 2020 coverage. The Pitch: Two siblings venture out to their remote family farm, where their father is slowly dying and their mother is unraveling from grief. Something else is happening, though. There’s a darkness behind the sorrow, an evil slowly poisoning the soil… Something Wicked This Way Comes: Grief is on the mind. Thanks to our ensuing pandemic — and really, the collateral damage of our current administration — we’re a populace poisoned with misery. So much so that it’s become an appendage of our day-to-day, something we’ve had to deal with to check in and check out without losing our minds. In a timely twist of fate, grief has also informed some of this year’s most affecting films, be it Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods or Natalie Erika Jame...
