Category Archives: Drama

Emily the Criminal

Emily the Criminal            4 stars

I saw this surprise of a movie during my return flight from Sundance, but had not written about it before. When I saw the awards coming its way I thought I should correct that. While completely fictional it represents the situation that many young people find themselves in today’s economy where one cannot escape their past. Emily (Aubrey Plaza of Parks and Recreation) has a load of student loan debt and needs a good job. The trouble is she has a minor record that keeps coming up in job interviews, thus preventing her from reaching her goals. (Background checks can follow you everywhere.) She has to take menial service jobs in the gig economy that allow the employer to take advantage of the workers. So what is she supposed to do? The answer is in the title. She meets a Lebanese man (Theo Rossi) who runs a theft ring where the participants make purchases using stolen credit cards and fake id’s. Emily gives it a try, has some success at it and is undeterred even when getting beaten up a bit in the process. Things escalate when she finds that she is actually good at it and rises in the ranks of this criminal enterprise leading to some dangerous experiences. The movie has an interesting premise, perhaps taking it in an implausible direction, but it is entertaining and keeps your interest mainly due to Plaza’s excellent performance as Emily. Most of her roles have been in comedies, but here she shows that she is equally talented in dramas. The movie received nominations for both Best Lead Performance (Aubrey Plaza) and Best First Feature (Aubrey Plaza and John Patton Ford) at this year’s Film Independent Spirit Awards. I am glad I gave it a try.

Living

Living                     4 ½ stars

A long time ago a masterpiece of a film called Ikiru was created by Akira Kurosawa about a Japanese bureaucrat in the 1950’s who has found out that he is dying of cancer. I never saw that groundbreaking film but feel that much of its feeling has been recaptured in the British remake Living. Bill Nighy (of Love Actually) stars as Mr. Williams, the London bureaucrat in the Public Works department in Oliver Hermanus’s film. The opening sequence looks so much like an early 50’s film you at first wonder if it is a long lost treasure from that era. The first scenes move slowly and feature very stilted conversations among the bureaucrats that convey how repressed British society is at this time and Bill Nighy is the perfect actor to portray a man hiding his emotions. When the cancer diagnosis is made we can hardly tell what effect it has on him. We follow him as he explores various avenues of spending his final months like going out on the town to strip clubs and having lunch with a young woman he used to work with. Ultimately, he decides to make a difference by doing some good for the community, seeing a project to construct a playground to completion, all the while keeping his condition a secret. The slow pace of this film may turn some viewers off, but the challenge the filmmakers took on pays off mainly due to the talents of Nighy in what is probably one of the best roles of his thirty plus year career. I don’t know if he will receive an Oscar for the performance but he certainly deserves his Best Actor nomination.

Creed III

Creed III               4 stars

Creed III finds Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan, returning as the star but also directing) retired from his world championship and now the owner of his own boxing gym ad quite well off with his music producer wife Bianca (Tess Thompson) and young daughter. It is the third in the series and the first that his mentor, Rocky Balboa does not appear in. The story starts with the young teenage Adonis at a group home with his buddy Damian who is making it in the boxing world when things take a bad direction and the two of them get caught up in an act of violence. Skip ahead about eighteen years and Creed is preparing world champion Felix for his next title match when a figure from the past, Damian (Jonathan Majors) appears at his door. Having just gotten out of prison, it soon becomes clear that Damian is interested in more than getting reacquainted with his boyhood friend. He has dreams of reaching his goal of becoming a champion and will stop at nothing to get it including exploiting Creed’s feelings of obligation toward him a well as cheating in the ring. Creed is warned that trouble awaits if he follows this path, but that matters little to him. Tragic events follow in a movie that is also about race in addition to being a boxing film. It is about two connected lives that took very different paths because of a single event involving young black men and the justice system. Inevitably, the film goes to the final confrontation between the two fighters in a showdown of a fight that is filmed like it is disconnected from the real world around them. The fight scenes are not as good as in the first Creed movie, but how could they be? That was a legendary film. The events surrounding these two characters may seem implausible in the real world making it quite a stretch, but it is entertaining to see these two talents and very well-conditioned actors performing together.

Causeway

Causeway           4 stars

I viewed another Oscar Nominated performance in Causeway, the recent movie by director Lila Neugebauer available on Apple tv+. This low budget drama stars Jennifer Lawrence (of The Hunger Games fame) as Lynsey, a soldier recently returned from duty in Afghanistan after suffering a brain injury in an IED attack. At first the movie is about her rehabilitation in New Orleans, seeing doctors and caregivers and going through physical therapy and the frustration  of trying to regain physical function. But it is also about her forming a bond with James (Brian Tyree Henry of Atlanta), a local Black auto mechanic who has suffered his own trauma (though not war related) who sees someone suffering and is in need of a friend. Lynsey also has her mother, but she is very self-centered and of little use in Lynsey’s recovery. The two find that despite their widely different backgrounds there is a connection between them though it gets a bit rocky along the way. It’s a straightforward story without complicating flashbacks that owes a lot to the great acting skills of Lawrence and Henry. Brian Tyree Henry is honored with a deserved Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

The Quiet Girl

The Quiet Girl    5 stars

The Quiet Girl is the third award winning movie featuring the Irish I have seen this year, the others being The Banshees of Inisherin and Aftersun. This one actually deserves more attention than it received having been nominated for Best International Feature at The Academy Awards. The film is the first by writer/director Colm Bairead and is one of the most emotional ones I have seen lately. We meet Cait (newcomer Catherine Clinch) a girl of 9 or 10 who is painfully shy and who obviously has a tough life both at home and school. At home she lives with her parents and five siblings on a farm where money is short as is any empathy. Her father is both a drunkard and a gambler and not much of a farmer either. He even complains about how much his children eat. Now her mother is pregnant with the sixth child. The parents agree that in order to make things more manageable, Cait should spend a few months with a relative on a distant rural farm where she can be cared for until the baby arrives. There is no explanation of why her and not any of the other children. The relatives are an older couple and are obviously better off financially than Cait’s family. The woman, Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) provides attention and care to young Cait like she has never had before. The man, Sean (Andrew Bennett) is at first aloof but then warms up to her, allowing her to help out on the dairy farm and challenging her to run to retrieve the mail as fast as she can. They even buy her new clothes and shows. Cait is still shy through this, clearly a cry for help, but gradually she becomes more talkative, using the dialect of Gaeilge. (Fortunately, the entire movie uses subtitles.) Eventually, we learn of events from the couple’s past that bring these people closer together. It is never forgotten that this arrangement is temporary which makes the ending of the film a truly memorable and emotional moment. The Quiet Girl should especially be seen by anyone who is a parent as well as a wider audience. It could have easily received a nomination for Best Picture. I hope that we see more from director Colm Bairead in the future.

Human Flowers of Flesh

Human Flowers of Flesh                2 stars

German director Helena Wittmann’s new movie Human Flowers of Flesh has been described as an exercise in elusiveness, with a procession of predominantly maritime imagery (Clayton Dillard). The film is about a woman who lives on a yacht with her crew who sails from Marseilles to Algeria where she becomes fascinated with the French Foreign Legion and then decides to travel to the headquarters of the Legion. I know this from reading the Imdb description of the film as I was not able to discern it from watching the movie. There is very little dialogue in the film itself and what little there is consist of short snatches of conversation among the crew about myths, the work on the ship and the collecting of letters and samples of plant specimens. The woman whose name we rarely hear speaks even less, but does spend much time swimming in the sea. The film focuses mainly on some spectacular images of the sea and marine life. There are some extended shots of a snail crawling a short distance and a long shot of microscopic creatures moving about the screen. The writer/director may be saying something about life being adrift with so much time spent at sea, but I find that very hard to tell from watching the movie one time. I don’t object to a movie having very little plot, but I at least expect to learn something about the characters and what motivates them. We don’t get much of that here. I very much liked Wittmann’s earlier film, Adrift, about a couple on a wrecked yacht trying to survive. But Human Flowers of Flesh left me very confused.

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant

Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant                         4 stars

If you have seen any of Guy Ritchie’s earlier films you know that they are action packed and have a style all his own. His movie The Covenant that includes his name in the title certainly lives up to his standards. This time we follow the exploits of an army sergeant, John Kinley (Jake Gyllenhaal) and an Afghan interpreter, Ahmed (Dar Salim) as Kinley and his squad are tasked with hunting down IED factories somewhere in the wilderness of Afghanistan. It is 2018 so it is near the end of the war and Kinley is dedicated to this near impossible task with the threat of a Taliban attack at every turn. Ahmed is there because he is drawn to the job for the money and the promise of a visa to the US for him and his family. He also hates the Taliban for killing his son. As the pair face this challenge they learn to rely on one another despite the great cultural differences especially when they are being hunted by every available Taliban fighter in the area. The characters are not based on any particular men, but their story is symbolic of how the American military came to rely on the Afghan interpreters who were promised relocation to America and safety from the Taliban. The real meaning of the film’s title comes later when Kinley is sent back to the US with his family after being severely wounded, but feels the responsibility to get Ahmed and his family out of Afghanistan. He personally endures the frustration of dealing with government red tape and finally hires high priced mercenaries to help find Ahmed who has gone into hiding and get him to safety. The movie is thrilling as a war movie should be and full of harrowing scenes, and also shows the dedication of an American soldier and the loyalty to his fellow man. This is one that comes highly recommended.

The Starling Girl

The Starling Girl                4 stars

The Starling Girl, the first feature film from director Laurel Parmet appeared at this year’s Sundance and was just released in theaters. It concerns a young seventeen-year-old girl, Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen of Little Women and Sharp Objects) who is coming of age in a small rural town in Kentucky where she and her parents are part of a fundamentalist congregation. Jem is very devout in her faith, but is starting to realize her sexuality and the limits placed on her in this patriarchal society. She takes pride in the dance troupe she is in, but must heed the warnings from adults not to make it about her and to keep God first. One must be very careful in this setting as straying from the fold can result in requiring a confession in front of the congregation and being sent to a disciplinary camp for rehabilitation. Owen Taylor (Lewis Pullman), a handsome thirty-year-old youth pastor returns from an assignment in Puerto Rico with his wife, having a deep impact on Jem’s world. It is then that the story takes a darker turn with Jem pursuing a relationship with the pastor which he is all too willing to accommodate. The naïve Jem sees it as part of God’s plan to get them together while the audience knows what Owen is up to and that only disaster can result. To some extent the story is predictable, but it is made believable because of the acting ability of the young Eliza Scanlen. I don’t know anything about Laurel Parmet’s background but the film was useful in framing the Christian fundamentalist view of life and the outside world and of the effect on young people within the fundamentalist community.

You Hurt My Feelings

You Hurt My Feelings     4 ½ stars

The new movie You Hurt My Feelings, written and directed by Nicole Holofcener first premiered at Sundance this past year and was one of those I heard good things about but didn’t get the chance to see. Now it is in theaters and thankfully can be seen and appreciated by movie fans. The previous Holofcener movies I have seen, Friends with Money, Please Give and Enough Said all have a special comedic style. They feature relationships between people that care for each other and have conversations where slight amusing cuts are made between them. They are not cute but also are not vicious; they are for the most part honest. In this movie Beth (Julia Louis Dreyfus), a writer and writing instructor is happily married to Don (Tobias Menzies), a therapist. Beth has written a memoir about her relationship with her father that was a success and is now working on a work of fiction but can’t get a publisher to accept it. Her sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins) is an interior designer and is married to Mark (Arian Moayed), a stage actor. The couple discuss everyday things and go about their jobs until one day Beth and Sarah accidentally overhear Don telling Mark that he thinks Beth’s new book is awful but is afraid to tell her that and instead only gives her more encouragement. This causes great distress for Beth but she is afraid to say anything and is now worried that her marriage is all a lie. All of this is handled in comedic style with the combination of Holofcener and Dreyfus giving us plenty to laugh at. Dreyfus’s acting here is not at all like her angry character in Veep. She plays it more subdued and really brings out Beth’s insecurities toward everything. Holofcener and Dreyfus worked together previously on Enough Said and it’s great to see them collaborating again in a light comedy. I find Julia Louis Dreyfus to be one of the funniest actresses working today. This pair working together has given us a real gem of a comedy.

Past Lives

Past Lives            5 stars

Past Lives is another of the Sundance movies from this year that I did not see in Park City. Fortunately, it has hit the big screen and can be seen by all audiences. The movie brings out the concept of In-Yun, a Korean belief that people that are connected to one another and will reunite in other ways in other lives at different times, hence the name of the film. This movie Is a real emotional tear-jerker that is aided by some great performances from the main actors. The story takes place in three time periods. We first meet Na Young and Hae Sung as 12 year olds in South Korea where they are close friends, But Na Young’s family is about to immigrate to Canada so they must separate. Later the story jumps ahead twelve years and Na Young now goes by the name Nora (Greta Lee previously appearing only in supporting roles) and is trying to get established as a writer in New York. Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) stayed in Korea and is doing his mandatory military service, but has never forgotten his childhood friend, so he has done an online search for her and finally found her. The pair carry on an on-screen relationship where the pair relate well to each other and they are obviously close, but they must end things. Seeing one another in person is not practical. In the third act, an additional twelve years later, Nora has married Arthur, an American man, (John Magaro) another writer and received her Green Card. Hae Sung still has not forgotten his friend and arranges a trip to see her in New York. One may think this would create a very awkward situation but the writing of first time director, Celine Song is so honest and subdued that she makes the characters seem very real. There is still an obvious attraction between the two main characters, but the reality of their situations determines that they must remain friends. Hae Sung even says that it hurts to like Arthur, Nora’s husband so much. Greta Lee is impressive as an actress who can express feeling with a simple look and through long pauses that tell a great deal. By the end you are wondering what will be in store in their next lives. Some people have already said this is one of the best films of the year.