Aquaphobia, the fear of water, is a real thing. But I’m not sure what you call the phobia at the heart of “Night Swim,” a new horror film starring Wyatt Russell and now playing in theatres.
Based on the acclaimed 2014 short film by Rod Blackhurst and Bryce McGuire, the story of a haunted swimming pool begins as major league baseball player Ray Waller’s (Russell) career ends due to a degenerative illness.
“You’ll always be a baseball player,” his wife Eve (Kerry Condon) tells him, “but that’s not all you are.”
Rebooting his life, he moves into a fixer-upper with Eve, teenage daughter Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and young son Elliot (Gavin Warren).
The house has seen better days, but there is a great school nearby and Ray thinks the backyard pool is the perfect place for the kids to play and for him to work out as a form of physical therapy.
When the renovations are complete, the family enjoys the pool, swimming and playing Marco Polo. “This pool’s the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Ray says as his health takes an uptick.
But soon strange things happen.
“My kids have seen things,” says Eve, “and I’m afraid something is happening to my husband.”
Voices and visions from the deep end of the pool torment them as a malevolent force somehow is able to identify the family’s wants and desires. But at what price?
“Night Swim” begins with a flashback to 1992 that effectively sets up the pool as a watery menace. Unfortunately, the movie belly flops from there. The idea of drowning is terrifying, especially if someone or something is pulling at your legs, or pushing your head under the surface, but in the theatre you’ll find yourself playing Marco Polo in search of actual scares.
Russell and Condon are blandly appealing in the leads. Both are overshadowed by the kids, Hoeferle and Warren, who, as siblings caught up in a supernatural water trap, raise the story’s stakes. You don’t want anything bad to happen to them, but you do want SOMETHING to happen other than jump scares.
By the time director Bryce McGuire reveals the source of the evil, and offers up an unspeakable solution to the family’s problems, the movie is waterlogged, too soggy to have much of an impact. “Night Swim” never gets out of the shallow end.
There will likely not be a more melancholic movie this year than “All of Us Strangers,” a new, otherworldly study of grief, adapted from a Japanese ghost story by Taichi Yamada, that is grounded by real, earthbound emotion
Andrew Scott, best known for portraying James Moriarty in the BBC series “Sherlock,” and his role as the “hot priest” on “Fleabag,” is lonely screenwriter Adam. He lives alone in an abandoned London high rise, empty save for Harry (Paul Mescal), who lives on the sixth floor.
They meet when Harry, unannounced, arrives at Adam’s door with a bottle of whiskey. “I saw you looking at me from the street,” he says. “I’ve seen you a bunch of times, coming and going with your head down.” He’s fishing for an invite in, but Adam keeps the door between them.
Adam’s new project is a script set in 1987. To put himself in the right mindset he listens to music from the era, and makes a visit to his childhood home. There, he encounters the ghosts of his parents, played with warmth by Claire Foy and Jamie Bell. Killed in a car accident when Adam was twelve, they are stuck in 1987, while he exists in present day.
“You were just a boy,” says mom, “but now you’re not. You look different but it’s you. I thought you’d be hairier, like your dad.”
Visiting with these apparitions from the past provides a measure of closure for him, as he attempts to make up for decades of missed moments.
Back in London, he and Harry begin a relationship, the first meaningful connection of his adult life. “I’d always felt alone,” says Adam. “This is a new feeling.”
“All of Us Strangers” is a supernatural family drama, but it isn’t an “I see dead people” rehash. It is a chance for Adam to get to know the parents who left him, to tell them about his life, hear them tell them they love him and are proud of him, and possibly most importantly, get to say goodbye. It’s a work of melancholy, a study of one man coping with grief and loss, that is both gentle and devastating.
It’s never clear whether the parents are hallucinations, dreams or actual ghosts, but Scott’s contemplative performance renders that question moot. What’s important is Adam’s relationship to them, how they make him feel, not if they are real or not.
You may question what is real, and what is not throughout, but the individual moments—a father embracing his son for sins committed years ago, a mother’s comforting touch, Harry and Adam relaxing at home, happy and in love—feel real, and are by times moving, painful and utterly earthbound expressions of the power of love in the face of Adam’s unbearable loneliness.
“All of Us Strangers” is an intimate, haunting film that comforts and aches in equal measure.
The alliteration in the title of “Good Grief,” Dan Levy’s feature film debut for Netflix, extends into the storytelling. Mawkish and moving, romantic and realist, it’s a story of loss, lamentation and life that allows Levy to stretch his wings as a writer, director and performer.
Levy plays Marc, an artist who put his career on semi-hold as his superstar writer husband Oliver’s (Luke Evans) sci fi fantasy novels topped the best-seller lists. Tragedy strikes as Marc hosts a holiday party in their beautifully appointed London apartment before Oliver jets off to Paris for a book signing at the Louvre.
Minutes after Oliver leaves the warm, fuzzy celebration, sirens fill the air and Marc’s worst fears are realized. Oliver has been killed in a car accident, just a block from their flat.
Shattered by the loss, and the recent death of his mother, Marc withdraws, save for the company of his two closest friends, ex-boyfriend Thomas (Himesh Patel) and loose-cannon Sophie (Ruth Negga).
“For such a meticulous person,” Marc says of Oliver, “he left behind one hell of a mess.”
With the American publishing company demanding a return on Oliver’s unfinished book advances, a careful study of the couple’s expenses reveal the writer kept a secret pied-à-terre in Paris. Curious, Marc invites Thomas and Sophie for a weekend visit to Paris as a thank you for helping him through a very difficult year. “This is where people come to have sex,” Sophie yowls as they lay eyes on Oliver’s secret getaway.
As the City of Lights twinkles appealingly in the background, the trio confront the ragged truths of messy relationships and forge a path forward.
“Good Grief” is a study in the good, the bad and the ugly of relationships, romantic and platonic. This isn’t like a sad episode of Levy’s sitcom “Schitt’s Creek” and it’s not a ten Kleenex weepie. It’s somewhere in between. There are funny moments (see Kaitlyn Dever’s inappropriate eulogy at Oliver’s funeral for example) and humorous lines, but they are tempered by the central trio’s journey to understand the melancholic messes they have made of their lives.
It’s a mix-and-match of love and sadness with subtle shadings of romantic and road trip comedy, but it never dims the stark light it shines on the realities of friendship. Hard questions are asked and addressed, but at the end it suggests these characters don’t have their acts together, because, really, who does?
It may not be the most original thought, but this is a promising feature film directorial debut that works best when it plays it simple. A scene of the three of them on a Ferris Wheel is revealing, sweet and funny, and Marc’s scenes with Theo (Arnaud Valois), a French man he meets at an art installation, despite some clunky dialogue (“Isn’t art kind of a commemoration of pain?”) are among the film’s best.
“Good Grief” is an open-hearted, amiable film that displays Levy’s abilities as a director. It’s a handsomely mounted movie with a keen eye for casting. Luke Evans is particularly well suited to play the movie’s McGuffin, and capitalizes on his modest screentime. Patel and Negga make the most of their sidekick roles and Paris looks beautiful. Most of all, however, it’s unafraid to defy the expectations we might have had for Levy’s follow-up to the success of his award winning “Schitt’s Creek.”
There are underdog sports movies, and then there is “The Boys in the Boat,” the new film from director George Clooney, now playing in theatres. Set during the Great Depression, the characters in this film fight expectations and fascism.
Based upon Daniel James Brown’s book of the same name, “The Boys in the Boat” centers on Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a struggling University of Washington student who, unable to pay the balance of his tuition for the semester, signs up for the school’s rowing team because it comes with a part-time job and a place to live.
“The depression hit everyone hard,” he says. “No jobs. No food. We were broke.”
Under the tutelage of coach Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) and boatbuilder George Pocock (Peter Guinness), Rantz and the Washington Huskies, his team of inexperienced, working-class student rowers, are pitted against the richest schools in the country.
“We rowed out of need,” Rantz says. “The need to stay in school. The need to eat. To sleep.”
Through need and determination, the Huskies earned a run at the gold at the 1936’s Nazi-overseen Berlin Olympics.
“They said we couldn’t compete with the richest schools in the nation,” Rantz says. “They said we couldn’t beat the Germans. But they didn’t understand who we were.”
An old-fashioned story of grit and perseverance, “The Boys on the Boat” is a mix of stoicism and sports. Of course, the sport is simply the vessel by which the characters glide through the story. The movie spends a fair amount of time on the water, but rowing is secondary to the rush of inspiration that fuels the story. It’s a story of team work, of young men coming together to overcome not only the economic hardships of their lives and illness on the eve of their big row, but also the Nazis.
Unfortunately, the movie also attempts to play tug-a-rope with your heartstrings. It works its way through to the inevitable happy ending with crowd-pleasing beats that will seem very familiar to anyone with a knowledge of 1990s era sports flicks.
Still, it is a handsomely mounted movie with several intense competition scenes that will set your pulse racing, even if the overly sentimental presentation doesn’t.
The glitzy new musical version of “The Color Purple” maintains the talking points of Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and Stephen Spielberg’s Oscar-nominated film adaptation, but adds in a touch of old Hollywood glamor and rousing gospel, blues and jazz songs.
Set in Jim Crow era rural Georgia, Fantasia Barrino reprises her role from the Broadway stage to play Celie Harris, a timid young woman whose life is marred abuse and separation from loved ones. Impregnated by her father when she was just a teen, her baby is given away. Later, when she is shipped off to live with the abusive Albert Johnson (Colman Domingo), a man she is forced to call “Mister,” she is disconnected from her beloved sister Nettie (Ciara).
The cruel and overbearing Mister tells his terrified wife she’ll never see her sister again and blocks any communication between the two. “Whatever I say, go,” he tells her.
Isolated from everything she has ever known, she perseveres through strength of will, the power of imagination and the friendship of the indomitable Sofia (Danielle Brooks) and flamboyant blues chanteuse Shug Avery (Taraji P. Henson).
Reimagined as a period drama with a healthy dose of magic realism, the new “The Color Purple” is a journey of self-discovery and triumph over adversity as Celie opts to take agency over her life and not be a docile victim. Despite her trauma, she has an eye to the future, hope and, above all, resilience.
Barrino plays Celie as soft-spoken, allowing the songs, like the moving “Superpower,” to stand out, fuelled by cathartic, powerhouse performances. The role is a weighty one, a stand-in for the evolution of many marginalized people, but this version of “The Color Purple” is an emotional Broadway-style crowd pleaser that turns Celie’s ordeal into a journey of empowerment.
The addition of musical weaves joy into the story.
Director Blitz Bazawule allows Celie’s flights of imagination to temper the story’s built-in oppressive tone. The film’s opening scene, featuring Mister playing banjo, while his horse’s hoof clomps keep time, is subtle, while a scene in which Shug, (a terrific Henson), takes Celie to the movies, becomes a luscious Art Deco fantasy reimagination of the song “What About Love?” It is lavish and lovely.
In terms of staging, one show stopping scene sees Celie sing to Shug while perched atop of spinning gramophone record. It’s a blast of old-school Hollywood glamour that cleverly demonstrates Celie’s use of imagination as a coping mechanism.
This isn’t the “The Color Purple” of old. Boldly stylized, it embraces humor, music, imagination and leaves some space for Mister’s redemption and a slightly more explicit depiction of the relationship between Celie and Shug than in the previous film version. More than anything, though, it is a tuneful, joyful journey from powerless to empowered, from heartbroken to healed that is sure to entertain and inspire in equal measure.
“Ferrari,” director Michael Mann’s long gestating look at the summer of 1957 and the existential crisis that plagued Italian motor racing pioneer Enzo Ferrari, both personally and professionally, goes flat out, even when it isn’t on the racetrack.
When we first meet Ferrari (Adam Driver) he is a cultural hero in Italy, but his company and marriage are falling apart. His advisors tell him he must take on a partner, like Ford or Fiat, and
Increase his consumer car sales by four times if he hopes to stay afloat. Trouble is, Ferrari wants complete control of his company, and that means no partner and concentrating on race cars, not street vehicles.
At home, his infidelity pushes his wife Laura (Penélope Cruz) to extremes. She doesn’t care if he sleeps around, just so long as nobody knows about it. When he arrives home after the maid has served coffee, Laura expresses her displeasure by taking a potshot at him with a gun she carries for protection. That is, unfortunately, the extent of the passion left in the marriage.
Unbeknownst to Laura, who is grieving the loss of their young son, Enzo has a long-term relationship, and has fathered a son, with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), a woman he met, and fell in love with, during the war. As their son’s baptism approaches, Lina wants to know if the child will carry the name Ferrari, but Enzo has other things on his mind, like the imminent collapse of his company.
His financial advisor Giacomo Cuoghi (Giuseppe Bonifati) suggests entering the grueling, 1000-mile open road race, the Mille Miglia. A win would establish Ferrari supreme over their main rival Maserati, and hopefully encourage sales. “Win the Mille Miglia, Enzo,” Cuoghi says. “Or you are out of business.”
Working from a script by Troy Kennedy Martin, who wrote 1969s “The Italian Job,” Mann’s film feels like two movies on one. On one hand there’s the drama with Laura, Lina and the company. On the other is a piercing look at the dangerous world of racing, circa 1957. “It is our deadly passion,” Enzo tells racers Alfonso de Portago (Gabriel Leone), Peter Collins (Jack O’Connell), and Piero Taruffi (Patrick Dempsey). “Our terrible joy.”
The racing scenes are exciting, shot with verve and style, with a couple of unexpected turns (literally) that vividly capture the dangers of racing. But the racing scenes feel conventional when stacked up against the more complex portraits of Enzo and Laura.
Driver plays Enzo as a charismatic man of action, a physically imposing person haunted by the voices of those who have gone before him, his father, his son and racing colleagues taken too soon. It reveals a rich inner life hidden by his stolid façade. Driver doles out Ferrari’s personality in dribs and drabs; the contented lover with Lina, the hard driving boss with his racers and the stoic husband no longer in love with his wife. All aspects of this performance come packaged in the form of a man treated like a deity—a priest even refers to him as a “god”—but prone to real world failings. Driver captures the public and personal to create a complex portrait of a man driven by a variety of forces.
He is at his best when opposite Cruz. Laura is a supporting character in the story over-all, but her agony/rage for a loveless marriage, a son she was powerless to save and a company she co-founded but is unable to have a say in, is palpable.
You can’t make a movie about Enzo Ferrari and not include racing, particularly the career defining Mille Miglia, but Mann wisely keeps the focus on the interpersonal. “Ferrari” has race scenes, several very effective ones, but the memorable moments happen when Driver and Cruz put the pedal to the emotional metal.
Jason Mamoa returns as the universe’s most famous merman in “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” the last film of the DCEU, now playing in theatres.
“I’m the King of Atlantis,” says Arthur Curry / Aquaman (Mamoa). “Half a billion from every known species in the sea call this place home. But that doesn’t mean they all like me.”
Angriest of all the seafarers is David Kane / Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a pirate and high-seas mercenary who holds Arthur responsible for the death of his father. Jesse Kane perished when his hijacked Russian nuclear submarine flooded with water. Aquaman could have saved him, but refused. Now, Black Manta wants revenge and is prepared to use the dark magic of the cursed Black Trident to get it.
“I’m going to kill Aquaman,” he says, “and destroy everything he holds dear. I’m going to murder his family and burn his kingdom to ash. Even if I have to make a deal with the devil to do it.”
Like I said, he’s angry.
To stop Black Manta from destroying everything important in his life, Aquaman decides to join forces with his estranged half-brother Orm Marius / Ocean Master (Patrick Wilson). Trouble is, the former King of Atlantis is being held in a desert jail for crimes against his old kingdom. Wearing a camouflage suit, Aquaman liberates Orm, and reluctantly, the former king agrees to battle Black Manta.
“I don’t know what lies ahead,” says Aquaman as they begin their adventure. “But we can’t leave our children in a world without hope.”
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” has the vibe of an episode of the Saturday morning cartoon “Super Friends.” A mix of goofy humour and action, it delivers spectacle, but ultimately feels like it is hobbled by too much exposition, too much muddy CGI, not enough character development and not enough Black Manta. After a messy first hour of set-up, it catches a wave in the second half, but even when it picks up, the stakes are never high enough to match the first drama of the first film.
Mamoa is game. He understands that Aquaman is a mix of kitsch, charm and action chops, (“There are those who think I’m ridiculous,” he says.), a mighty underwater superhero who rides around the sea courtesy of a giant sea monkey, but the tonal shifts, whether because of reshoots or rewrites or just jerky editing, often make for disjointed viewing. The fine balance of humour and emotion isn’t as carefully calibrated here as it was in the first movie, and the character’s sudden temperament swings, from beast mode to jokester, are jarring.
Abdul-Mateen II is underused. He’s a villain with relatively little screen time whose thirst for retribution is matched only by his ability to make the silly, retro-sci fi Black Manta suit look cool.
Many movies have been fuelled by revenge, but here it quickly becomes a McGuffin, the thing that gets the movie in motion, but is soon forgotten as other plotlines crowd it out of the picture. His scheme to speed the warming of the planet by detonating his store of orichalcum fuel, is the work of a supervillain for sure, but is underdeveloped. “It has to be stopped,” says Atlanna (Nicole Kidman) in a textbook definition of understatement.
Of the supporting characters Wilson is given the only character arc. From disgraced leader to unlikely hero (no spoilers here), he’s as stoic as Aquaman is playful, but, nonetheless, delivers the film’s funniest scene (again no spoilers here, but it would not be out of place on the icky reality show “Fear Factor”). His presence, however, allows the film to explore a redemption storyline that gives the otherwise generic plot a bit of juice.
Amber Heard fans, and haters, may be divided by her appearance. Supporters will think she is underused, while the haters will think she takes up too much screen time. Suffice to say, she is a supporting character who appears throughout, but has little to do with the main action.
“Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom” has its moments (stick around for the amusing mid-credit scene), but the script’s choppy waters, and a low stakes storyline offer a low reward.
The smart, funny and insightful, “American Fiction,” winner of this year’s Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award, is a satire that sees Jeffrey Wright as an exasperated novelist who confronts racial stereotypes by writing a book that forces him to balance hypocrisy with selling out.
An adaptation of Percival Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” the film stars Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an author and English Lit professor frustrated that his publisher rejects his latest work as not being “Black enough,” while another book, “We Lives in da Ghetto” by Sintara Golden (Issa Rae), is heralded by critics as a modern masterpiece.
As Monk struggles personally—his brother Cliff (an excellent Sterling K. Brown) is experiencing a massive life shift while his mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams) is in decline, and will soon need a care home, which the family cannot afford—his professional life turns upside down.
“Monk,” says his agent Arthur (John Ortiz), “your books are good, but they’re not popular. Editors want a Black book.”
“They have a Black book,” says Monk. “I’m Black and it’s my book.”
Angry, on a whim he bangs out “My Pafology,” a satire of Golden’s book under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh. Filled with tired and reductive stereotypes of gang violence and broken homes, his gag novel becomes a publishing sensation, receiving an offer of a $750,000 advance and huge marketing campaign.
Monk is the only person, it seems, who gets the joke. “It’s the most lucrative joke you’ve ever told,” says Arthur.
It may have started as a joke, but Monk needs the money. If he accepts the offer, however, does that mean he’s perpetuating tropes that play into what he regards as “Black trauma porn”?
“American Fiction” finds sharp humor in identity politics, perception and culture wars. Serious in its message but playful in tone, it can cut to the quick. In one scene, Monk and Golden, the only two Black jurors on a literary panel, are castigated to by the white judges to “hear Black voices.” It is one of the film’s funniest scenes, but the performative nature of the sentiment is all too realistic.
As Monk, we see Wright in a different sort of role. Given the chance to flex his rarely-used comedy muscles, he excels, playing up his curmudgeonly character’s conundrum to maximum effect. It’s bittersweet. As he watches the fictious Stagg R. Leigh’s book become successful. It confirms his feelings about the biases of the publishing industry. He reacts with a mix of outrage and humor. It’s a bravura work that hopefully means it won’t take thirty years to give Wright another leading role in a theatrical release.
Giving Wright a run for his money is Brown who steals every scene he’s in. His character Cliff is a mess, pushing personal boundaries as a man coming out of the closet and building a new life. Like Wright, Sterling creates a character that gets laughs, but the laughs aren’t shallow, they come from a deep well of pain and Cliff’s lived experience.
Director Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” asks why stereotypes of Black trauma are so prevalent in entertainment by not so subtly satirizing the process and the people who create the limited view of Black life in books and on screens. It is insightful but never forgets to entertain.
Steeped in tragedy and trauma, “The Iron Claw,” a movie about the Von Erich wrestling family starring Zac Efron and Jeremy Allen White, and now playing in theatres, isn’t a sports movie. Set against the backdrop of professional wrestling, the movie is study of toxic masculinity and how the sins of the father can be visited on their sons.
The film begins with Fritz Von Erich (Holt McCallany) patriarch of the championship Von Erich wrestling dynasty. Early in his career, in an attempt to create a villainous heel persona, he changed his name from Jack Adkisson to the German sounding Fritz Von Erich. The switch purposely stoked post-war animosity and made him a wrestler audiences loved to hate.
In the ring he was a relentless competitor, the purveyor of the deadly Iron Claw, his much-feared finishing move that squeezed his opponent’s face into mush. Outside the ring his drive to win saw him push his sons Kevin (Efron), Kerry (White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons), into the family business.
“Now, we all know Kerry’s my favourite, then Kev, then David, then Mike,” said Fritz. “But the rankings can always change.”
Under Fritz’s hardnosed guidance, the Von Erich’s became one of the first wrestling families to become popular, winning championship belts and fans for their high-flying, acrobatic style but their accomplishments are tempered by tragedy, which son Kevin blames on a curse brought on by the family’s adopted name.
“Ever since I was a child, people said my family was cursed,” Kevin said. “Mom tried to protect us with God. Dad tried to protect us with wrestling. He said if we were the toughest, the strongest, nothing could ever hurt us. I believed him. We all did.”
“The Iron Claw” is about sports, and clearly stars Efron and White spent time in the gym to prepare for their shirtless bouts in the ring, but like all good sports movies it isn’t about the sport. It’s about the universal subjects of tragedy, brotherhood, brawn and bullies. The backdrop may be unusual, but anyone who has ever been browbeaten by a bully will find notes that resonate in the Von Erich story.
At the heart of the film are Efron and White as sons Kevin and Kerry. Both hand in performances etched by their physicality but deepened by the emotional turmoil that envelopes each character.
Efron digs deep in a career best performance. As Kevin watches his family fall apart, he slips into a depression, afraid that the curse is real and may affect his own wife (Lily James) and kids. For such a physical film, it’s internal work that reveals a well of emotion and sublimated anger underneath the character’s bulky frame.
White has a showier role, but as Kerry, the son who pays a huge personal price for wanting to please his overbearing father at any cost, he is more outward in his reactions to the story’s twists, but the sadness he carries with him is palpable.
Maura Tierney does a lot with little as mother Doris Von Erich. A stoic figure, when her buried feelings threaten to overflow, the look on her face has such quiet intensity it speaks louder than words.
McCallany has a much larger role. He is the catalyst, the bully who pushed his sons toward the ring by any means necessary. He’s the movie’s obvious boogeyman. Trouble is, the family can’t see it until it is too late.
“The Iron Claw” is a slow moving, somber movie that looks beyond the ring to focus on the price this family paid for success.
