Category Archives: Drama

Sukkwan Island

Sukkwan Island 4 suns

In Sukkwan Island, 13-year-old Roy, is persuaded by his divorced father, Tom to join him on a year long adventure on a remote island in the Norwegian fjords that can only be reached by plane. Leaving their lives behind, they set off on this trip staying in an old cabin and seem to be well equipped. It is a chance for the two to reconnect and do some real father son bonding. But it soon turns into a challenge of survival as they face the harsh conditions of a cold winter and predators on the island. But the greatest challenge turns out to be the human conflict between the two as mistakes are made and tempers flare. The pair of actors work well together as they convey the rising tension level. It’s clear the characters have issues that they must work through. The location of the shoot was both beautiful and foreboding. They story is based on a book written by the boy portrayed in the movie. I warn you, there is injury and blood involved. But I highly recommendthe movie. I was disappointed there was no Q & A at this event.

Atropia

Atropia 4 suns

As Atropia opens we see the streets of an Iraqi village with street vendors, animals and men with head scarves. Then we see some American Army vehicles come down the street with soldiers shouting at villagers. Insurgents appear, fighting starts. There is an explosion. Then everything stops and we find we are not in Iraq, but are on a US Army base in California called The Box in 2006 and this is a training exercise for soldiers about to deploy to Iraq. The villagers and insurgents are mainly Hollywood actors playing roles in this romantic comedy called Atropia. One of the actors is Fayruz (Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development and Search Party), who wants to get movie roles in Hollywood and schemes to find ways to get noticed. She learns of a famous Hollywood actor who is going to observe the exercises and believes this is her big chance. The head insurgent, Abu Dice (Callum Turner (The Boys in the Boat)) becomes suspicious leading to a confrontation and therefore the romance between the two. There is plenty of room for comedy in a movie about military training. (Remember Stripes and Private Benjamin?) Atropia delivers with bumbling officers and soldiers, misunderstandings when things go wrong and plenty of suggestive comments toward a female mock news reporter (Jane Levy of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist). It is mainly the two leads that carry the movie, especially Shawkat who delivers one of her best performances yet. Her ethnicity is Iraqi so she fits right into the part. She should have more starring roles given her comedic talent. The director/screenwriter, Hailey Gates has done well, given that this is her first effort at directing a feature movie. The movie was developed from a short done several years ago by the team of Gates and Shawkat. At the end a screen graphic tells us that there are hundreds of training sites like the one portrayed. Only now the enemy combatants are Russians. The theater was packed for this one, but unfortunately none of the filmmakers were present for Q & A.

The Ugly Stepsister

The Ugly Stepsister 4 1/2 suns

The Ugly Stepsister (from Norway) takes the fairy tale Cinderella and turns it upside down and inside out making it a body horror movie about envy and body image.  In this take of the classic we see things from the point of view of Cinderella’s stepsister, Elvira who is on a mission to get the attention of the kingdom’s prince at the ball and marry him and save the family from poverty. The problem is that she is rather homely and fat. That won`t do so with her mother’s help, a doctor’s facial modifications, a finishing school and an internal parasite, she sets on a scheme to make herself beautiful. Oh, and there is also the little problem of that attractive annoying stepsister that must be dealt with.  I had never heard before that there was so much sex and baudy language in this classic story.  I guess I must have missed something.  The actress playing Elvira really goes through a range of emotions going from a naive yiung girl to a monster who will do whatever it takes to reach her goal.  The body mutilations become more and more extreme as she seeks to become attractive and meet the world’s expectations of female beauty. There were many exclamations from the audience during each cringeworthy step. It all culminates with the fitting of the slipper and the removal of the “parasite”. The theme is on par with last year’s “The Substance” though maybe not to that extreme.  It’s all about how society sees women as objects,  judging them by some impossible standard and how some women seek to meet them.  And for fans of horror genre it’s a lot of fun.

LUZ

LUZ 5 suns

This international drama deals with estranged family and loss and efforts to heal, covering two different families who are a world apart. There is an element of technology in the form of virtual reality that links the two stories together. The first is set in the Chinese city of Chongqing about an older former gangster who has lost touch with his grown daughter who now makes a living streaming on the internet. In the second story a woman in Hong Kong travels to Paris to be with her stepmother whose health has started to fail. The stepmother is played by Isabelle Hubert who unfortunately couldn’t be at Sundance! The two stories are connected by a painting of a deer in the woods painted by the young woman’s deceased father and is now in a night club connected to the ex-gangster. Both individuals are drawn to a world in virtual reality called LUZ where the players interact and search for the mystical deer in the painting. There they meet and try to find answers to what they are searching for. The stories share themes of brokenness and healing between family members. At the Q & A writer/ director Flora Lau talked of the long process in making the movie and the iterations it went through. There were rewrites even after filming started where she made it less about the virtual world in favor of the family stories. I’d say it was a successful decision. The audience loved it. This movie is in both Chinese and French. Isabelle Hubert appeared in a recorded message greeting Sundance before the film. Wish she could have been there!

The Brutalist

The Brutalist       5 stars

Brady Corbet’s (The Childhood of a Leader) The Brutalist is a three-and-a-half-hour epic tale about a Hungarian Jewish architect who escapes post-war Europe, makes his way to the US and pursues the American dream, but in the process is nearly consumed by forces around him. The movie is told on a grand scale over a period of decades using some astonishingly large set pieces. The story is so grand it has a feeling on par with The Godfather movies. Adrien Brody (The Pianist) is Lázsló Tóth, an accomplished architect who arrives in New York on a ship shortly after the end of the war. Nobody knows of his work there, so he gets a job with his cousin in Philadelphia working as a carpenter. The cousin (Alessandro Nivola), who is also Hungarian has assimilated to American society and is accepted by the locals. Fortunately, the business finds a wealthy client in the form of the son of a rich industrialist who hires the company to build a library in the mansion of the father as a surprise. But unfortunately, the man, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce (Mary Queen of Scots, The King’s Speech)) is not at all pleased with what he believes to be a mess of the project, kicking them out without pay and leaving Tóth with nothing. It is only much later that Van Buren learns of Tóth’s accomplishments in Europe, tracks him down seeking to make amends. Lázsló has had to resort to shoveling coal by this time. Van Buren, who has fabulous wealth, has a dream to build a multipurpose community center for his town and wants to hire Tóth to design it and help to realize his dream. This job is an incredible opportunity, but it of course comes with a price; that is, being a virtual slave to Van Buren with few options. As the great project takes shape, we get to see what it is like to tackle such a huge construction job. Cost overruns happen forcing compromises in design that has a dramatic effect on poor Lázsló. We get a close-up view of the whole construction process and what it is like to be one of the workers on such a job. I don’t know what it took to build the sets for this movie, but it must have taken years. Lázsló is blessed though as having this job afforded him the chance to bring his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and young niece, Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), who have been stuck in Hungary to America to join him. All of this so far is the set up to what the movie is all about. Tóth’s work is a great opportunity for him, but he comes to realize that his employer, Van Buren, has little respect for his foreign and Jewish background and only seeks to exploit him for what services he can provide. Van Buren is all too willing to cast him aside at the first sign of difficulty and the contempt extends to Tóth’s family as well. In the final scenes this rich man makes it all too clear what his thoughts are toward these foreigners. Being so long and expensive, this movie is about a lot of things. It feels like it is really several movies. Besides the plight of the working man, it concerns the place of Jewish people in America and of course the effect of the holocaust. The story is entirely fictional but is meant to reflect the immigrant experience of many in coming to America. The score is amazing, contributing to the feel of the film. A great deal of the credit in making this a great movie must go to Adrien Brody in his portrayal of the emotionally devastated Tóth (parallelling his performance in The Pianist). I feel like the Best Actor Academy Award is a near guarantee for this actor. This movie is best seen on the large screen, so take it in when you can. (There is a fifteen-minute intermission which you will need.)

Another Round

Another Round                 4 stars

This year’s Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Film comes from Denmark in the form of Another Round by director Thomas Vinterberg and stars Mads Mikkelsen who is Denmark’s most recognized actor. Martin is a high school teacher in Copenhagen who seems to have everything, a wife and family and a good job teaching history to his students. But there is something missing so he joins in a plan with three of his fellow teachers at the school to start an experiment where the four agree to steadily drink on the job on the theory that maintaining a blood alcohol level of 0.05% will improve their performance in their daily life. The rules are no drinking after 8:00 pm or on the weekends. So you are probably thinking what could possibly go wrong with such a plan? Apparently nothing, that is until one of their group challenges them to take things up a level and increase the alcohol intake. What starts out as a comedy takes a dark turn into a serious drama when each one finds out the price of such behavior to their professional and social lives. Much of the success of the movie belongs to Mikkelsen’s Martin who can express a wide range of emotion. (See his earlier work in After the Wedding, A Royal Affair and At Eternity’s Gate) Many of his scenes must have been improvised to great success. This collaboration of writers, director and actors takes a silly premise and makes it into an emotional, dramatic story about what is important in life.

Cruella

Cruella                  4 ½ stars

Disney films make their return to the theaters with an origin story of that most iconic Disney villain, the evil and chic Cruella de Vil. The live action comedy crime movie stars Academy Award winner Emma Stone as young street urchin Estella who through tragedy must live on the streets of 1970’s London with her young thief friends Jasper (Joel Fry of Yesterday) and Horace (a funny as always Paul Walter Hauser). The incredibly smart and ambitious Estella’s greatest desire is to break into the world of high fashion. Somehow she snares a low level job working at the House of Baroness where she gains the attention of owner and CEO Baroness von Hellman (played by two time Academy Award winner Emma Thompson) and is promoted to dress designer to turn out very eye catching designs for the London elite. An additional star of the film is the amazing dresses that appear throughout. Is it too early to predict the winner of the Best Costumes Oscar? Of course, we finally arrive at the appearance of Cruella with her signature white and black hair and learn how she came to be with her evil intentions and especially her motivation for going after dalmatians for their skin. The best Disney movies feature some of the most evil villains imagined and that title must go to the Baroness who is a true psychopath as played by the brilliant Thompson. She delivers some great lines (“Gratitude is for losers.”) and is rarely taken off her game as she treats people with contempt including her own employees. Cruella is aided greatly by a sound track featuring classic rock songs of the sixties and seventies that are well placed throughout the movie (The Zombies’ Time of the Season). I had to do a second take on the dogs in the film to realize they are some of the best CGI creatures I have seen. With Cruella and the earlier release of the Disney Maleficent movies we seem to be having a new trend of classic villains getting their own star treatment and with it a more complete picture of their life stories.

The Father

The Father          4 ½ stars

In The Father, an aging man suffering from dementia is portrayed by Anthony Hopkins, in a role that is said to be especially written for him. Anthony is being watched after by his daughter Anne (Academy Award winner Olivia Colman) who has moved him into her flat in London, and is faced with the difficulty of finding a caregiver who can tolerate Anthony’s behavior and insistence that he doesn’t require help. There have been films about family caring for a person with dementia before, like Amour in 2012 and Still Alice starring Julianne Moore in 2014. (Another new movie, Supernova, deals with the subject but I haven’t seen it.) Those movies were mainly focused on the people doing the caregiving and not so much the person with the disorder; whereas Florian Zeller’s The Father strives to show us the pain and disorientation that Anthony is going through. Zeller does this by sequencing scenes such that time is an unknown quantity, by making subtle changes in the color and furnishings of the flat, and by using scenes that may be a hallucination to Anthony making things all the more confusing to him. His goal is to make the viewer share in the discomfort and fear one must face when they can no longer make sense of their surroundings. He goes so far as to have some actors change their roles within the film, causing a more disorienting feeling. Hopkins is masterful in the role as the intelligent man who can be charming one minute and then cut a person down in the next. I have no doubt that he deserved the Best Actor Academy Award he received. Even in his eighties he shows why he is considered one of the best. (Hopkins was asleep at home when the Best Actor award was announced and released a recorded acceptance speech the next day.) Colman, who may be Britain’s finest actress is also brilliant as the daughter who is trying to cope, but sometimes is about to break down at what she sees.  The other actors too are among England’s finest including Rufus Sewell, Mark Gatiss and Olivia Williams. The film gives us a realistic conclusion of Anthony’s decaying mind, thankfully without being sensational. It has a deep emotional impact in its short hour and 37 minute running time.

Zola

Zola                        4 stars

Back in 2015 there was a tweet thread that went viral on the internet written by a stripper named Zola giving a real time account of a wild ride of her and her “friend” through harrowing experiences in Florida. The thread created quite a sensation but for those of us not addicted to Twitter, the movie Zola by director Janicza Bravo is here to tell us of this ride through hell. The story follows the exploits of Zola (Taylor Paige), a young black stripper and Stefani (Riley Keough), the white girl she meets at a restaurant who insists they will be friends, and convinces Zola to take a trip to Tampa, Florida to make some money performing at a strip club. (If the premise turns you off, you should probably pass on this one.) The driver on this journey is X, Stefani’s “roommate” while Derrek, Stefani’s boyfriend is also along for the ride. The adventure is all fun and games for a while until things turn much more sinister for the two young women. Without going into detail it is up to Zola, the only sensible one in the bunch to protect Stefani from the chaos and major crimes. All the while, Zola is writing an account of the experience on her smart phone which of course goes viral. The movie is both a comedy and a cautionary drama/thriller about a situation getting out of control. If you liked Spring Breakers and Hustlers you will likely be entertained by Zola. Be forewarned that there are scenes involving strong language, sexual scenes and nudity, so the film is not for everyone. The performances by the two lead actresses are what really makes the movie entertaining.

Dream Horse

Dream Horse                     4 stars

Dream Horse is a very traditional British feel good comedy about a middle aged Welsh couple living in a poor village who take on the task of raising a thoroughbred race horse. Toni Collette stars as Jan who used to raise prize winning livestock, but now breaks out of her dull routine and buys a mare on a whim. Since she and her arthritic ridden husband Brian can’t afford this venture on their own, they form a syndicate with some of the townsfolk and the result is a promising young horse to be named Dream Alliance. What follows are all the cliches you would expect in an underdog horse racing movie: the struggle of the training, the exciting first race with the heart-pounding stretch run, the moments of doubt and tragedy and ultimate triumph. Of course it all works to perfection in the film based on a real life story from Wales. Collette can do no wrong in her role as Jan. (For a different kind of role for Toni Collette see the horror movie Hereditary.) Damian Lewis plays a sharp local accountant who joins the syndicate having previously put his family in peril with a gambling problem. The story was actually previously told in a documentary from a few years ago called Dark Horse. I missed that one, but this film was a pleasure to watch.