I jointhe CTV NewsChanel to talk about the jump scares of “Five Nights at Freddy’s 2,” the historical drama “Hamnet,” the Broadway stylings of “Merrily We Roll Along” and the thrills of “The Secret Agent.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Hamnet,” is a fictionalized look how the the lives of William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes Hathaway are left in tatters following their son Hamnet’s death from the plague.
CAST: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn. Directed by Chloé Zhao.
REVIEW: Based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, “Hamnet” is an unflinching portrait of love and loss.
Set in Warwickshire, England in the late 16th century, “Hamnet” begins with love at first sight between the free-spirited Agnes Hathaway (Jessie Buckley) and Latin tutor and poet William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal). Defying their families, they marry and soon have twins, Judith (Olivia Lynes) and Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe).
When Hamnet is stricken with the bubonic plague, Agnes cares for him as Will, unaware of his son’s illness, works in London and returns after the boy’s death. Consumed by grief, they live separate lives of anguish, until that pain transforms into a work of art that provides an opportunity to heal.
Intimate and as raw, “Hamnet” is an open wound; a profound portrait of heartache that is as uncompromising as it is emotionally involving in its depiction of a mother’s loss of a child. Buckley, one of the finest actors of her generation, taps into the harrowing stages of grief with an unforgettable ferocity. Her despair is palatable, which makes the extended “healing power of art” climax, the climb out of the abyss of woe, even more powerful.
It’s not a spoiler to note that the work of art in question is Shakespeare’s tragedy “Hamlet.” (BUT TREAD CAREFULLY, DETAILS TO FOLLOW) A title card at the film’s beginning reads, “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.”
As an examination of death from all angles—philosophical, emotional, spiritual and physical—the writing and preforming of “Hamlet” is an epiphany for both William and Agnes, in that it meets mortality head-on, from the mourning of a loved one, to the effects of loss on those left behind and the fear of, “what dreams may come” in “that undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns.” Their healing may never be complete, but the play’s examination of art as a source of solace is uplifting.
The play, which makes up much of the film’s final moments, may be the thing, but it’s director Chloé Zhao’s intimate exploration of child loss, as expressed by Buckley’s riveting performance, that sticks. It’s so overwhelming I may never submit to the raw intensity of it again—it’s not a movie you could rightly say you “enjoyed”—but it stands as a powerful study of loss.
I join the Bell Media Radio Network national night time show “Shane Hewitt and the Night Shift” for “Booze & Reviews!” This week I tell you about a the movie “Hamnet” and some literary cocktails to enjoy with the movie!
Click to HERE to listen to Shane and me talk about about a record price for a Superman comic, what movie Macaulay Culkin watches with his kids and Guinness gravy!
Then, it’s “To shake, or not to shake; that is the question”! To hear the Booze & Reviews look at “Hamnet” and some Shakespearean cocktails to enjoy while watching this flick click HERE!
I join the CTV NewsChannel to talk about the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown,” the epic “The Brutalist,” the sports drama “The Fire Inside,” the unrelenting evil of “Nosferatu,” the office romance of “Babygirl” and the wild biopic “Better Man.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “The Brutalist,” an epic new story of the American Dream starring Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones and Guy Pierce and now playing in theatres, a Jewish Hungarian-born architect survives the Holocaust, only to struggle to find success in the United States. His life changes when a wealthy patron recognizes his talent.
CAST: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola. Directed by Brady Corbet.
REVIEW: At three-and-a-half hours with a fifteen-minute intermission, “The Brutalist” is the kind of sweeping, personal epic we don’t see very often. Think “There Will Be Blood” and “Oppenheimer” and you’ll get the idea.
Spanning 33 years, the film begins with Hungarian Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect László Tóth (Adrien Brody), separated from his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) in Budapest during World War II. Once in the United States, alone, save for his cousin and his wife (Alessandro Nivola and Emma Laird), László’s life is up and down. Once a celebrated architect, he now dabbles in drugs, does menial jobs and lives in the basement of a church. It isn’t until his previous work in Europe is noticed by wealthy industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pierce) that his fortunes change.
Hired by Van Buren to design a community centre as a monument to his late mother, László creates an ambitious design, complete with a library, a theater, a gymnasium and chapel, quietly incorporating the brutalist elements of the prison at Buchenwald where he was incarcerated. His artistic temperament leads to conflicts with the Van Burens, and his own family.
“The Brutalist” uses the broad canvas of László’s personal story to comment on themes of assimilation, iconoclasm, identity, creativity and the American Dream.
László’s refusal to compromise and his unconventional methods reverberate with echoes of Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” although director Brady Corbet (who co-wrote the script with Mona Fastvold) shifts the focus from rugged individualism to the immigrant experience.
Rand’s exploration of Objectivism, her philosophy of productive achievement as the noblest activity, is filtered through László’s experience as an immigrant who is told, “We tolerate you,” by the entitled Harry van Buren (Joe Alwyn). Rand’s take in self-interest as the road to happiness is replaced by László’s bittersweet reality of assimilation as personal and professional suppression at the hands of the Van Burens.
It’s a fascinating lens with which to observe László and his family’s tainted American Dream. It is an epic story, told in epic style. Corbet shoots in high resolution, widescreen VistaVision, flooding the screen with gorgeously composed images, set to Daniel Blumberg’s mesmeric score.
Against that backdrop are Brody, in his meatiest role since his Oscar winning turn in “The Pianist,” convincingly portrays László’s broken psyche and tortured genius as roadside stops on the way to his emotional ruin. It’s an impressive performance, one that feels lived-in and weathered. Without Brody at the film’s core as a man who loses himself, “The Brutalist’s” emotional impact would be much blunted.
As Erzsébet, who plays a major role in the film’s second half, Jones displays a grit earned by years of suffering.
The film’s showiest performance belongs to the charismatic Pierce whose flamboyant performance is a grabber, particularly when he’s sparring with Brody.
These three key performances, coupled with a terrific supporting cast, are as ambitious in their personal scope as the film is in its big picture approach.
Like the architecture it showcases—large intimidating structures that feel simultaneously claustrophobic and vast—“The Brutalist” is beautiful but overwhelming in its scope.
LOGLINE: “Kinds of Kindness,” a new, absurdist dark comedy now playing in theatres, reteams “Poor Things” director Yorgos Lanthimos and star Emma Stone, in three interconnected stories, detailing the codependency between a man and his eccentric and controlling employer, a policeman whose missing wife reappears, but isn’t the person he remembers and a woman devoted to a spiritual leader.
CAST: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos.
REVIEW: Director Yorgos Lanthimos follows up the Academy Award winning success of “Poor Things” with another study of the dark side of humanity. The film, “Kinds of Kindness” is a portmanteau, a triptych of tales, each featuring different stories and characters, but the same main cast. Loosely connected, each section deals with some sort of manipulation and falling under the sway of someone who may, or may not, have the best of intentions.
Those expecting a rehash of “Poor Things” or “The Favourite,” the Lanthimos films that edged the Greek director into the mainstream, will have to adjust expectations. This is a return to the, despite the movie’s title, unkind tone of earlier works like “Dogtooth,” “The Lobster,” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” The harder edge brings with it a certain kind of bleak, mean spiritedness that may be entertaining to watch, but not always exactly enjoyable to process as a viewer.
Still, Lanthimos has made a movie that is not soon forgotten.
In a landscape of movies that offer instant gratification, “Kinds of Kindness,” with its unexpected twists and often unpleasant story developments, is one that takes its time to burrow into its audience’s collective consciousness.
To say it takes some surprising zig zags is an understatement, but it’s not simply strange for the sake of being strange. There does seem to be a motive behind the madness of this co-dependency comedy, no matter how impenetrable it may be. Your enjoyment level will depend on your ability to hang on to the mast as the waters get very choppy.
In “Catherine Called Birdy” director Lena Dunham leaves her best-known locale, the gritty streets of “Girls” era Brooklyn, New York, behind in favor of medieval England. Thematically, however, she is walking the same path.
Based on the 1994 novel of the same name by Karen Cushman, the movie follows 14-year-old Lady Catherine (Bella Ramsey), the unruly daughter of a cash-strapped nobleman, as she works to foil her father’s attempts to marry her off to a rich suitor.
Set in a thirteenth century English village that Catherine’s father Lord Rollo of Stonebridge (Andrew Scott) has allowed to sink deeply in debt as he lives the high life, “Catherine Called Birdy” sees the strapped for cash Rollo put his daughter up for auction to the highest bidder. “You’re my daughter,” he says. “If I say that you shall be married, than married you shall be.”
Trouble is, Catherine, who has witnessed six of her mother’s troubled pregnancies, wants nothing to do with marriage and childrearing. She is more interested in the things that any thirteenth century teen might enjoy.
“My truest passions are avoiding my chores,” she says. “Critiquing my father’s horrible swordplay. Disrupting cottage raisings. Causing mischief in the village. And listening through doors I should not listen through.”
She uses her wiles to avoid the altar, finding cunning ways to humiliate her suitors. One by one she scares them off, until Shaggy Beard (Paul Kaye), a wealthy older man who enjoys her manipulations, comes along. “Would I choose to die rather than be forced to marry?” she says. “I do not think either option appealing, or fair.”
Ripe with bawdy humor filtered through Dunham’s feminist sieve, “Catherine Called Birdy” is a period coming-of-age story that, despite the corsets on display, has a modern sensibility. Much of that is due to Dunham’s script, which balances the humor with empowerment, but the real sell job here comes from Ramsey.
In a performance that reveals strength and vulnerability alongside comedic and dramatic chops, the former “Game of Thrones” star not only looks like she just stepped out of a medieval Walter of Durham painting, but she also embodies Catherine’s rowdy spirit.
“Catherine Called Birdy” sags in the middle, but what it lacks in pacing, it makes up for in pathos and charm.
It’s rare to see a “Part II” on an arthouse flick title, but here we are. “The Souvenir Part II,” starring the mother and daughter duo of Tilda Swinton and Honor Swinton Byrne, and now playing in theatres, picks up where 2019’s “The Souvenir’s” coming of age story left off.
In that movie, film student Julie (Byrne) falls into a life-changing relationship with an older, arrogant man named Anthony. His death from a heroin overdose sends her reeling.
The new film sees Julie attempt to process Anthony’s death by making a graduation movie as a “memorial” for her late partner. As the project moves forward, it’s apparent Julie, who didn’t know Anthony was a heroin addict, is struggling to make sense of his loss. From the beginning her idea is met with bewilderment by her professors who don’t like the script and her producing partner (Jaygann Ayeh) who grows frustrated with her choice in actors.
“The Souvenir Part II” is a quiet, meticulous film about how artists mine personal experience to create art, to find a voice. Swinton Byrne’s Julie develop into a filmmaker, an artist and person who creates her own path. It is a lovely, delicate-but-steely, natural performance that digs deep into Julie’s maturity, personal and professional. It’s a pleasure to see Swinton and Swinton Byrne interact as mother and daughter in the film. There’s an authenticity to those scenes that feels like a warm hug.
“The Souvenir Part II” is based, in part, on director Joanna Hogg’s experience, and drips with complex ideas and emotions. As Julie heals herself, the film hauntingly has one eye on her past while the other looks to her future.
The filmmaking is more about mood than straightforward storytelling. It’s as if Hogg had a question from Julie’s film school classmate Patrick (Richard Ayoade) ringing in her head as she made the film. “Did you avoid the temptation to be obvious?” he asks. She did, and the movie is better and more challenging for it.
American abolitionist and political activist Harriet Tubman led an extraordinary life. Born into slavery she transcended, escaping to freedom before being a conductor on the Underground Railroad and rescuing 70 enslaved people, including her closest relatives. “Harriet” starring Cynthia Erivo in the title role, details her legendary life in a formulaic film that nonetheless inspires.
Set in Maryland, “Harriet” begins in 1849 with Minty (Erivo)—she didn’t take the name Harriet Tubman until later—leaving behind everything she knew, family, friends, her husband John Tubman (Zackary Momoh) to escape the violence and oppression of a land owner who refuses to honour a deal to give her the freedom she deserves. “I’m going to be free or die,” she says as she embarks on an arduous journey across unfriend territory with a team of slave trackers trailing behind. With ingenuity and some divine guidance she makes it one hundred miles to Pennsylvania, freedom and the helpful hands of William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.), abolitionist and one of the architects of the network of secret roads and safe houses that became the Underground Railroad, the escape route many enslaved African-Americans used to access to the free states and Canada. He helps her get established but after a year Harriet feels that freedom without family is an empty experience. “If I’m free,” she says, “my family should be too. I made up my mind, I’m going back.”
That marked the first of many danger-filled journeys that saw Harriet, sometimes in disguise, sometimes carrying a gun, always equipped with courage and resourcefulness, lead dozens of people to freedom.
“Harriet” sometimes falls into overused thriller conventions but the career-making performance from Erivo, who displays a range that spans the absolute hands-in-the-air joy at crossing the border to autonomy to the steely determination when facing down her former oppressor, masks some of the uneven storytelling. Sudden shifts in tone, from harrowing to light, are jarring but the sheer force of Tubman’s personality (and Erivo’s performance) smooth out the rough spots.
Director and co-writer Kasi Lemmons fills also the story with vivid details that evoke the time and place. The use of coded songs as a way to communicate is one particularly effective note that weaves tradition into the movie.
“Harriet” is an historical origin story that, for better and for worse, echoes the superhero origin tales we’ve seen so much of recently. It’s appropriate. Tubman was a real superhero. She is the stuff of legend, a woman who risked everything to fight against a fundamental, moral wrong. The movie that celebrates her life occasionally errs in its excess—it covers a great deal of ground—but the light it shines on Tubman and her accomplishments burns brightly.
