Lisbeth Salander is back. The lead character in the Millennium film and novel series, she’s the leather-clad computer hacker with a large tattoo of a dragon on her back, an eidetic memory, and, if you are a movie fan, an ever switching identity. The look—dyed black hair, body piercings—hasn’t changed but the actresses playing her have.
Noomi Rapace became famous playing her in the Swedish franchise and Rooney Mara was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress as Salander in 2011’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Now another face takes on the role. In “The Girl In The Spider’s Web” Clair Foy trades the tiaras and trinkets of “The Crown” for cyber criminals and car chases.
Since we’ve seen her last Salander has been exacting a very specific kind of revenge. Using her hacking skills and some other, more physical life hacks, she, as a self-styled righter-of-wrongs, evens the score between cheating husbands and their wives.
Her life is thrown into chaos when she gets a call from her handler. “There is a client asking for the impossible. Interested?” Of course she is. It’s ex-NSA employee Frans Balder (Stephen Merchant) who created a power program called Firefall. It can’t be reproduced, only be moved. Balder has lost control of it and wants it back. In the wrong hands a single user on the single computer could “be imbued with Godlike powers.”
She agrees and easily steals the program but when she misses the drop off Balder thinks she’s going rogue and alerts law enforcement. Her involvement also attracts the attention of The Spiders, a terror group who want the program and want her out of the picture. With an NSA agent Edwin Needham (Lakeith Stanfield) and journalist—and former Salander love interest—Mikael Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason) on the case things get complicated, especially when it turns out the big bad villain may have a direct link to Salander’s troubled past.
“The Girl In The Spider’s Web” is a thriller set to a slow simmer. The action comes in bursts, a car chase or an exploding building, followed by lots of atmosphere and shots of Salander’s brooding face. The Millennium film franchise are dark thrillers with overtones of murder, pedophilia, incest and even self surgery and while all those elements are on display here the tone of the film feels different than the previous films.
Set in Sweden, with all the trappings of an icy Nordic noir, the new film feels more American in its style. Salander is a little too much like James Bond and not enough like Elizabeth Salander. Foy is up to the task but the character, once edgy and daring, has become a Ducati-straddling superhero. In addition to being a world-class hacker she’s also a skilled hand-to-hand combat artist with a web of icy blonde girlfriends to do her bidding and a way with a Taser. But sometimes she’s a little too capable. An escape on a bridge works simply because it has too. Not because it makes sense. Her operations are timed with split second precision. There’s no real sense of danger, just boilerplate thrills. Things blow up real good but by the tenth time Salander has too easily and conveniently tamed an out-of-control situation you wonder why she’s wearing black leather and not spandex and a cape.
And don’t get me started on Blomkvist. Once a layered interesting character, he’s there simply because he’s always been there.
“The Girl In The Spider’s Web” is a serviceable action thriller with enough action to entertain the eye but too many twists and turns coupled with drab characters it feels generic when it should make your heart race.
We all know how “First Man” will end. No surprises there. What may be surprising is the portrayal of its titular character, American astronaut and hero Neil Armstrong. It’s a small story about a giant leap.
Focussing on the years 1961 to 1968 “First Man” introduces us to Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) as an engineer and envelope-pushing pilot. When an X-15 test flight gives him a glimpse of space he becomes obsessed with going further. When his three-year-old daughter dies of a brain tumour he turns his grief inward, throwing himself at work. Becoming a NASA Gemini Project astronaut over the next seven years he fulfils the dream of President Kennedy 1962, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” speech. Alongside Buzz Aldrin (Corey Stoll) and Jim Lovell (Pablo Schreiber), he begins a journey that will take him to the moon and back.
“First Man” is based on one of mankind’s greatest achievements and yet feels muted on the big screen. Deliberately paced, it nails the bone-rattling intensity of the early flights, the anxiety felt by the loved ones left behind as the astronauts risk everything to beat the Russians to the moon, and yet it never exactly takes flight.
Part history lesson, part simulator experience, it doesn’t deliver the characters necessary to feel like a complete experience.
Gosling is at his most restrained here as an analytical man who loves his family but is so stoic he answers his son’s question, “Do you think you’re coming back from the moon,” with an answer better suited to the boardroom than the dinner table. “We have every confidence in the mission,” he says. “There are risks but we have every reason to believe we’ll be coming back.” He is buttoned-down and yet not completely detached. His daughter’s memory never strays from his mind, even if he never discusses her death with his wife, played by an underused Claire Foy. Gosling embraces Armstrong’s fortitude but has stripped the character down to the point where he is little more than a distant man of few words.
“First Man” contains some thrilling moments but for the most part is like the man himself, stoic and understated.
Steven Soderbergh’s new movie asks a simple question, Is Sawyer Valentini’s greatest fear real or a delusion? Starring Claire Foy and Jay Pharoah, it takes the legendary director back to basics. Shot entirely with an iPhone camera, it only cost $1.2 million to make.
Foy plays Valentini, a businesswoman with an unhappy life. After a bad one-night stand leads to a panic attack she consults a head-shrinker at a facility called Highland Creek Behavioural Health Facility. In their meeting she divulges something that has been plaguing her, a former stalker. Even though she moved 450 miles away he still haunts her mind. “Rationally I know this is my imagination, but I’m alone in a big city and I never feel safe,” she says, “not for one minute.” Tricked into committing herself—“ There’s some more forms you need to fill out, it’s just routine.”—she is thrust into a house of horrors, surrounded by troubled patients—like the belligerent Violet (Juno Temple)—many, like her, who are there against their will. Her pleas for release fall on deaf ears. Worse, her stalker David (Joshua Leonard) works in the psychiatric ward as an orderly. Or does he? “This man, he’s followed me all the way here from Boston. I’m calling the cops and I want him arrested!”
“Unsane” is a nightmare that stems from not reading the fine print. “They got meds,” says fellow inmate Nate (a terrific Jay Pharoah). “You got insurance. You talk, they find a way to get you committed and you stay as long as your insurance will pay. When they stop paying, you’re cured!” Sawyer’s situation is a political comment on insurance scams and locking up people for profit. It’s a #MeToo thriller—no one believes her stories of stalking—but really, at its heart, “Unsane” is a Gothic b-movie that owes a debt to “The Snakepit” and “Shock Corridor” with some “Gaslight” thrown in for good measure. It’s an examination of women’s voices not being heard of a crumbling medical infrastructure but mostly it’s about Sawyer’s world falling apart and her frustration at not being able to do diddly-squat to put it back together.
Foy is in almost every frame, bringing a frail yet steely presence to the role. She is more than a damsel in distress. By turns charming, cunning, ruthless and jittery, she’s a character designed to keep us guessing. Does she belong in the facility or not? “The Queen” star navigates Sawyer’s personality shifts, zigging and zagging, keeping the audience tantalizingly in the dark as to the truth of her mental state.
“Unsane” has a few clunky moments that detract from the overall feeling of paranoia Soderbergh builds throughout. Beautifully composed and edited “Unsane” still looks like it was shot on an iPhone. Often blown out or bathed in inky blacks it’s an aesthetic we’ve become used to from Instagram and social media videos and it brings and naturalism to the surreal story.
“Unsane” may be low tech but it’s not amateurish. Soderberg expertly builds tension to the point where Sawyer’s frustration is palpable.
In “Breathe” Andrew Garfield plays Robin Cavendish, one of the longest-lived responauts in Britain history. It is, among other things, undoubtedly the bubbliest movie about polio ever made.
The opening moments of breeze are so unrelentingly chipper that as an audience member you just know the party will soon and in some sort of tragedy will happen. When we first meet Cavendish it’s 1958. He’s a young, vital man who falls in love at first sight with Diana Blacker (Claire Foy), a beautiful, rich woman he meets at a cricket match. It’s all sunshine and roses as they quickly fall in love, get married, get pregnant and move to Kenya to pursue Robin’s career as a tea merchant.
It’s a picture perfect romance until Robin’s health begins to falter. He’s short of breath, his limb ache. Soon he can barely stand. By the time he is diagnosed with polio he is paralyzed from the neck down. “The result is you become like a ragdoll,” Diana is told by the doctor. “He can’t breath for himself. The paralysis is irreversible.”
Grim news for the newlyweds. Given just three months to live Robin asks to be allowed to die but his doctors and Diana will hear nothing of it. Hooked up to a ventilator he lays motionless and despondent in a hospital ward waiting for the inevitable. Unable to find any joy in life he tries to push Diana away but she perseveres, visiting everyday.
Then the jaunty music reappears on the soundtrack and a smile returns to Robin’s face. The couple hatch a plan to move home so Robin can live out his final moments surrounded by the creature comforts of home. “No one, anywhere in the world with your husband’s degree of disability exists outside a hospital,” warns the doctor. Except that he does. In fact he thrives, living for decades, becoming an activist for disabled people and helping to design mobile life support machines to untether patients from their beds. “Do you see a creature who is barely alive,” he asks, “or a man who escaped the confines of a hospital board? I don’t want to just survive I want to truly live.”
“Breathe” breathes the same air as other indomitable spirit movies like “My Left Foot” and “The Theory of Everything.” The big difference is that this is a relentlessly upbeat film. “Are we plucky or pitiful” asks Diana. The answer is obvious but eventually there is something endearing, winning even, about its uncompromisingly buoyant tone. Perhaps that’s because director Andy Serkis paints the story as a love story rather than a medical drama or maybe it’s because of the winning performances from Garfield and Foy.
Garfield is ostensibly the lead but it is Foy who impresses. “The Crown” actress is the heart and soul of the story, providing a rock solid foundation for Garfield’s character.
“Breathe” doesn’t have the gravitas of “The Theory of Everything”—it spends too much time trying to wring all the emotion out of the story like tears from a sponge—but it does have compassion and heart.
“The Daily Show’s” brand of satirical political humour has become a legit source of news for many young people and is so influential Barack Obama has been a frequent guest. But being on the show hasn’t always worked out well for guests.
In 2009, Iranian Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari (Gael García Bernal) was arrested and detained for 118 days after an interview he did on “The Daily Show” aired. The tongue-in-cheek piece featured regular correspondent Jason Jones claiming to be an American spy interviewing Bahari. Iranian officials, under the rule of newly “elected president” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, didn’t get the joke and Bahari was roused from his mother’s home and taken to jail while his pregnant English fiancée (Claire Foy) waited four months not knowing what was to become of the father of her child.
While in solitary at Evin Prison Bahari is blindfolded and interrogated by The Specialist (Kim Bodnia), a zealot who smells of rosewater. Breaking Bahari’s spirit, the interrogator convinces him to make a televised statement denouncing his actions as a “spy” for Iran’s enemies.
This is a true story, based on a memoir written by the main character, so it is no spoiler to mention that after months of physical and mental torture he is released just in time to see his child born in England.
Jon Stewart, stepping out from behind the “Daily Show” desk and into the director’s chair, divides the movie into two halves. The first half concentrates on Bahari’s coverage of the election. It’s fast, frantic and occasionally even funny mix of news and original footage that sets the scene for what is to come.
The second hour, post arrest, is slower, but more intense. It’s a rollercoaster of emotions as Bahari tries to figure out why he is there and what will happen. The blindfold adds to his fear; sightless he can’t see where the next slap might come from. The dynamic between the questioned and his questioner shifts constantly, never more so than in a scene where Bahari, Scheherazade-style, strings the Specialist along with some randy (and untrue) stories of his one thousand and one nights spent in exotic massage parlors.
Their interaction is at the heart of “Rosewater.” Stewart hasn’t opened the story up much in terms of building subtext—unlike his work on “The Daily Show,” the movie is very straightforward—but does bring sincerity and emotion to the film but the over-all “never give up” message seems trite given the backdrop of the story.
