Blake Cooper, who plays the overweight and vulnerable teenager at the heart of the here’s-what-I-learned-on-my-summer-vacation movie Measure of a Man, has a future playing beta males. With his combination of smarts and insecurities, in due time he’ll start to land the roles that Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Cera are starting to age out of, the sort that John Cusack typified the … [Read more...]
‘Godard Mon Amour’ depicts renowned auteur with real humor
Like writing a traditional biography about James Joyce, composing a conventional symphony in honor of John Cage, or painting a realistic portrait of Picasso, directing a standard narrative feature about Jean-Luc Godard risks alienating the very audience that would consume the — yes, I’ll say it — product. Squaring experimentalists into familiar forms insults their genius. Or … [Read more...]
‘Double Lover’ audacious and erotic, but ultimately a letdown
Though it’s only arriving in Palm Beach County on Friday, it’s no coincidence that Francois Ozon’s Double Lover opened in limited U.S. release on Feb. 14, less than a week after Fifty Shades Freed tied up a few thousand screens. Though its debt is more to David Cronenberg and Brian De Palma than to E.L. James’ risible mom porn, the movies share more space on a Venn diagram that … [Read more...]
‘Aardvark’ too sluggish to make much of psychological premise
Why do screenwriters hate therapists so much? In most cases, accuracy and verisimilitude are important to a film’s pedigree, but that’s rarely the case when dealing with licensed mental health counselors. Psychologists in popular entertainment rarely resemble anything like their real-life counterparts — morally, legally, temperamentally. They’re either silent, judgmental … [Read more...]
Feminist bent partly redeems ‘Blockers’ raunchfest
Blockers, the latest lurching vacillation of sweetness and raunch from Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures, reimagines the sex-pact theatrics of American Pie from the female perspective. This makes it inherently more interesting than the original, in which the objects of the boys’ desires remained just that—objects. Here, three bright, witty, self-assured young … [Read more...]
‘Death of Stalin’ mocks, hilariously, a murderous regime
When a movie is called The Death of Stalin, spoiler alerts need not apply. The title character does, indeed, meet his ignominious end, less than a quarter of the way into this riotous satire. In March of 1953, Josef Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin), in the comfort of his office, is struck by a cerebral hemorrhage. He collapses to the carpet and loses consciousness. The members of his … [Read more...]
Tired tropes, gimmicks take edge off ‘Unsane’
A young professional woman (Claire Foy), traumatized by irrational visions of a stalker from thousands of miles away, visits a therapist. She’s done everything she can do to escape his presence, yet she still sees him, suddenly, in the eyes of other men. She confesses to the counselor that she has, in the past, harbored suicidal thoughts. All of a sudden, after signing some … [Read more...]
‘Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?’: A harrowing look at a racist cold case
In October of 1946, a white, racist Alabama shop owner named S.E. Branch fatally shot a black man named Bill Spann in the rural town of Dothan, 18 miles from the Florida line. He was charged with first-degree murder but did not serve time. Scant information about this crime exists outside of Spann’s death certificate, but documentary filmmaker Travis Wilkerson, who is S.E. … [Read more...]
‘Wrinkle in Time’: Hokey, clunky, but its heart is in the right place
Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle in Time is the first $100 million feature to be directed by a woman of color. This is a big deal for the news chyrons and for DuVernay’s rising clout in an industry dominated by white males. But headlines about budgets and box-office returns give us critics the blues, because they rarely have anything to do with the art and politics of cinema. For … [Read more...]
The Oscars: Who and what will win, and why
This year, the Academy Awards turn 90, and the race for the best picture of 2017 is pretty wide open. This is certainly no runaway Titanic or Lord of the Rings year, and by the same token, as long as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are kept far away from the envelopes, it seems unlikely that there will be audible gasps in the wee hours of the morning after Sunday. … [Read more...]