SYNOPSIS: In “Maria,” a new psychological biopic now playing in theatres before moving to MUBI on December 11, Angelina Jolie stars as Maria Callas, the world’s greatest opera singer, as she lives the last days of her life in 1970s Paris, after a glamorous yet tumultuous life spent in the public eye.
CAST: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, and Kodi Smit-McPhee. Directed by Pablo Larraín.
REVIEW: “Maria” finishes director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy of films about iconic women of the 20th century. Having already examined Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana, this third, and final film features a commanding performance by Angelina Jolie as the temperamental opera star Maria Callas, a woman who no longer performs but admits, “There is no life off the stage.”
She may feel the absence of her voice, of performing for adoring crowds, but her life provides a dynamic backdrop for this ornate, hypnotic film. “There’s a point where self-confidence becomes a kind of insanity,” she says.
In Jolie’ hands the opera singer is every bit a diva. She is now a pill popper whose gift, a voice that once mesmerised the world, has left her, but she remains a diva nonetheless. Regal and occasionally ridiculous, she spends her days barking orders at her loyal staff (Alba Rohrwacher and Pierfrancesco Favino)—”Book me a table at a café where the waiters know who I am,” she says. “I’m in the mood for adulation.”—reminiscing about her life with an imaginary interviewer (Kodi Smit-McPhee) named Mandrax after her drug of choice and refusing to return an important call from her doctor because he said she “must” call him.
Even when there’s not much is happening in “Maria,” Jolie is captivating, emanating the larger-than-life star power that made “La Divina” beloved personally and professionally. In one playful moment Mandrax asks, “What would you say if I told you I was falling in love with you?”
“That happens a lot,” she replies with a smile.
Character study aside, the film itself is more of a mixed bag. Stunning work from cinematographer Edward Lachman and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas create a beautiful canvas for Jolie’s work, but it feels incomplete. There are flashbacks (mostly shot in black and white) and some paparazzi style footage that provide a sense of Callas’s elevated place in the opera world, but director Pablo Larraín, working from a script by Steven Knight, is more interested in her struggles and foibles than her triumphs. It provides Jolie the dramatic space to give the crowning performance of her career so far but doesn’t allow the character the privilege of a fulsome portrait.
SYNOPSIS: The weird and wonderful stop-motion film “Memoir of a Snail” is the heartbreaking but somehow life-affirming story of Grace Pudel, voiced by “Succession’s” Sarah Snook. She’s a young girl in 1970s Melbourne, Australia who collects snails, to fill the void left by her inability to make connections with others. “If I saw something snail-y,” she says, “it had to be mine. I became a snail hoarder.”
CAST: Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski, Dominique Pinon, Tony Armstrong, Paul Capsis, Nick Cave, and Jacki Weaver. Written, produced and directed by Adam Elliot.
REVIEW: An animated film for adults, “Memoir of a Sail” touches on alcoholism, loneliness, shame, grief and even “Prey the Gay Away.”
Grace, a clay figure with sad, watery eyes and a knit cap with snail antennae, is the kind of character who could have escaped from Edward Gorey’s “Gashlycrumb Tinies,” but as tragic as her life may be right from the start—her mother died giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kody Smith-McPhee)—she perseveres, struggling as life lobs grenades at her. Sarah Snook’s lowkey, but empathetic voice work goes a long way to humanizing Grace and her journey.
Australian actor Jacki Weaver, as the elderly, former table dancer Grace befriends, also delivers knowck-out voice work. “For the first time in my life I feel older than I look, and I look like a testicle,” she says.
Grace’s lot in life is miserable, and yet despite all the grimy love, loss and heartache on display, writer-director Adam Elliot manages to mine humor, a sense of hope and courage from the mostly melancholy material.
The painstaking, frame-by-frame animation is gloomily beautiful with stunning details woven into the film’s fabric. That it is also 100% CGI free brings an organic, handmade feel that gives the images, and by extension the entire movie, a great deal of heart. “Life has bashed me around a bit,” Grace says near the end of the movie, “but the roses smell better, and I am finally becoming the person I always wanted.”
“Elvis,” the new King of Rock ‘n Roll biopic from maximalist director Baz Luhrmann, begins with a sparkling, bedazzled Warner Bros logo and gets flashier and gaudier from there.
The movie is told from the point of view of Elvis’s (Austin Butler) manager Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks under an inch or two of makeup), a huckster with a flair for spotting talent and a gift for manipulation.
Working on the carnival circuit taught Parker that a great act “gave the audience feelings they weren’t sure if they should enjoy,” a standard the early, hip-shaking Elvis met and exceeded.
Their partnership is one of the best known, and well documented success stories of the twentieth century. For twenty years, through the birth of rock ‘n roll of the late 1950s and the cheesy Hollywood years to the legendary 1968 Comeback Special and the Las Vegas rise and fall, Elvis and the Colonel shimmied and shook their way to the top of the charts and into the history books.
“Elvis” covers a lot of ground. From young Elvis (Chaydon Jay) discovering his love of music from the Black rhythm and blues artists and Mississippi church music he absorbed as a kid to his final white jumpsuit days in Vegas, Luhrmann shakes, rattles and rolls throughout in a blur of images and spectacular sound design.
It entertains the eye but feels akin to skipping a stone on a lake. If you hold the stone just right and throw it across the still water at the correct angle, it will skim along for what seems like forever without ever piercing the surface.
“Elvis” is a great looking movie. A pop art explosion that vividly essays the story’s various time frames and styles, it makes an impact visually and sonically. Unfortunately, Luhrmann is content to make your eyeballs dance, your gold TCB chains rattle and simply skim across the surface.
We do learn that Elvis was the sum of his country music and R’n’B experiences and influences, was fueled by the adoration of his audience and aware of the social change of the 1960s, but there is no excavation, no real exploration of what made the singer or his manager actually tick. It may seem fitting that a movie about a man who drove pink Cadillacs and wore phoenix embroidered jumpsuits and capes is over-the-top, but those images are so woven into the fabric of popular culture already that this feels clichéd, more like greatest hits album than a biography.
Butler is a charismatic performer, playing Elvis through several stages of his life, and despite the superficiality of the storytelling hands in a rounded performance that transcends impersonation of a man who spawned a generation (or two) of impersonators.
It’s rare to see Hanks play a character with no redeeming qualities. “I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” he says, “and yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story.” His take on Colonel Parker grates, with the theatrical Dutch accent and imperious, manipulative manner, he is certainly the villain of the piece. He’s a pantomime of the big, bad music manager, one who saw his client as a musical ATM machine and little more.
By the time the end credits roll “Elvis” emerges as an idealized look at the boy from Tupelo who became the King by paying tribute to the power of the music that made a legend.
“The Power of the Dog,” now playing in theatres before making the move to Netflix, is a story of self-loathing that is equal parts straightforward and exasperating. Much like its main character Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), the movie has moments of interest but is ultimately frustrating.
The film begins in mid-1920s Montana. The Burbank brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), are wealthy ranchers and polar opposites. The only thing they seem to have in common is a reverence for their mentor, the deceased rancher Bronco Henry.
Phil, we learn, studied the classics at Yale, but prefers to live a basic life. He likes the company of horses and the ranch hands, rarely bathes and is quick with a cruel remark.
George is a gentleman rancher. He wears suits, topped with a bowler hat, throws dinner parties at the family home and falls in love with Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed restaurant owner with a gay son named Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who wants to study medicine like his late father. Although he says he’s happy not to be alone, George takes Rose for granted and she turns to the bottle.
Rose’s presence brings out the worst in Phil who takes every opportunity to belittle his brother’s new wife, and catcall her son. Peter is a quiet presence on the ranch during his school break, but as time goes on, it is clear he sees himself as his mother’s protector. “When my father passed, I wanted nothing more than my mother’s happiness,” Peter says. “For what kind of man would I be if I did not help my mother? If I did not save her?”
“The Power of the Dog” isn’t so much driven by its narrative as it is by the characters and an intense central performance.
As Phil, Cumberbatch is an enigma. An unwashed and gravelly-voiced bully, his guard is constantly up. Cumberbatch and director Jane Campion slowly reveal bits of Phil’s backstory through subtle references and scenes. We never get a full picture, and fear of revealing spoilers prevents me from elaborating, but it appears the character’s self-loathing and fragile masculinity seem to drive his vile behaviors. Cumberbatch maintains the mystery of the character, while allowing the odd slip of vulnerability appear, even if it sometimes feels as if he’s playing a studied caricature of a cowboy.
Campion delivers the material in a slow burn. Tensions build, but the level of repression on screen prevents total engagement with the characters. By the time the end credits roll “The Power of the Dog” proves itself to be a beautifully crafted film with a handful of emotionally affecting scenes but an underwhelming overall effect.
“2067” is a rarity. It’s an ambitious sci fi drama, complete with quantum time machines and messages from the future, that portrays a possible end-of-the-world dilemma. We’ve seen that before but we haven’t seen a big Hollywood-style genre pic like this with Australian accents.
Aussie director Seth Larney, who worked in various capacities on everything from “The Matrix Reloaded” and “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith” to “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and “The Lego Movie,” aims for the stars with “2067,” now playing on Apple TV, Bell, Cineplex, Cogeco, Eastlink, Google Play, Microsoft XBOX, Rogers, Shaw and Telus.
Set in the year 2067 in a world ravaged by climate change, where oxygen is a precious resource and its synthetic alternative is making people ill. If humanity doesn’t find a cure life on earth will end. With all present-day remedies exhausted Chronicorp, the world’s leading supplier of manmade oxygen, builds a time machine to search the future for descendants who may be able to point the way to survival.
It’s a long shot but a message from 400 years in the future gives everyone hope. It says, succinctly, “Send Ethan Whyte.” Whyte (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a “tunnel rat,” an underground worker with a bad attitude and an ailing wife. Shot into the future with no idea of what awaits, he becomes humanity’s last hope.
“2067” is humanist sci fi. The grim picture it paints of a world destroyed by climate change is evocative but the focus isn’t on the quantum time doodads or rocketing through time, it’s about the characters and how these unfortunate situations affects them.
Kodi Smit-McPhee brings the attitude of a young man thrown into a situation he can’t comprehend, effectively portraying the resilience and determination needed to put together the disparate pieces of the plot’s puzzle.
The audience will need to share some of this resolve. Director Larney’s story is a bit of a spider web. Tangential connections are established between Whyte and the other characters, but the plot points that could make this story compelling are often telegraphed so far in advance the audience knows where the story is going before the characters have caught up. It is a straight line approach that doesn’t trust the viewer to stay with the movie’s twists and turns.
Add to that an undeniably distracting melodramatic score and “2067” becomes an ambitious but underwhelming sci fi survival story.
The X-Men have a rich and textured history but almost none is more complicated than Jean Grey, the mutant played by “Game of Thrones” star Sophie Turner in this weekend’s “Dark Phoenix.”
A human with the superpower of telepathy, she’s an empath and, for good and for evil, is also the physical manifestation of the cosmic Phoenix Force, “the spark that gave life to the Universe, the flame that will ultimately consume it.” Over the years she has been included on Top 100 Comic Book Heroes and Comic Book Villains lists and been killed off several times.
The action in “Dark Phoenix” begins with the X-Men team heralded as heroes by the public who once feared them. Professor X (James McAvoy) is a celebrity, featured on magazines, getting medals from the president. He sees their do-good work as a way to keep them safe. “It’s a means to an,” he says, “We are just one bad day away from them starting to see us as the enemy again.”
When a group of astronauts find themselves in trouble Prof X sends Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Quicksilver (Evan Peters), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Grey and others to space on a daring rescue mission. During the operation Grey is hit by “pure and unimaginably powerful cosmic waves” that will eventually transmute her into the Dark Phoenix, a malevolent force with the potential to tear the world apart. The core of good inside Grey battles for supremacy until repressed pain and anger push her to the dark side. “You’re special, Jean,” says shapeshifting energy sponge Smith (Jessica Chastain), “and if you stop fighting that force inside you, if you embrace it, you will possess the very power of a god.”
The X-Men crew have been always been concerned with the greater good, doing what is best for the masses, but what happens when one of their own turns bad and needs to be stopped? That’s the question at the heart of “Dark Phoenix.” “When I lose control,” Grey says, “bad things happen to the people I love.”
At their best the “X-Men” movies are an ode to outsiders. Ripe with metaphor and nuance, they look at how society treats marginalized people. They also find the humanity in their outsider characters. Whether they have blue fur or can bend metal with their mind, their greatest superpowers are always qualities like forgiveness and loyalty.
Progressive ideas about acceptance are still at the heart of “Dark Phoenix” but all the nuance is consumed in a cosmic bonfire of CGI flames and the messaging is delivered with a mallet. “They can never understand you! What they can’t understand they fear and what they fear they seek to destroy!”
The film’s biggest (and only intentional laugh) comes with a good and timely line courtesy of Jennifer Lawrence. “The women are always saving the men around here,” says a huffy Mystique to Professor X. “You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.”
Despite the pyro on display “Dark Phoenix” doesn’t catch fire. The tone is flat, passionless even as a hectic CGI-A-Thon of eye blistering action eats up much of the last reel. (MILD SPOILER AHEAD) Long-time fans may get a lump in their throats as one classic character makes their farewell but as Grey says, “emotions don’t make you weak, they make you strong.” Whether you’ll feel stronger or not after the end credits roll will depend on how much attached you are to the X-Men characters. If you’re not already a fan this lackluster movie is unlikely to convert you.
“Hope for the best,” says Hank McCoy a.k.a. Beast (Nicholas Hoult) midway through “X-Men: Apocalypse,“ “but prepare for the worst.”
That’s the way I approach the X-Men movies. When a movie series spans a universe of stories—in addition to five X-Men flicks, this is the third “First Class” movie—caution is advised. The general rule of thumb is one of diminishing returns: the further away from the source, the weaker the story.
“Apocalypse” isn’t exactly the best of the X-Men movies, but it’s hardly the worst either. What it lacks in surprises, it makes up for in bombast.
“A gift can often be a curse,” we’re told in the opening narration. “Give them the greatest gift of all, power beyond imagination and they think they should rule the world.” Such is the case with En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaac) an immortal Egyptian pharaoh betrayed a millennium or two ago, left in a fitful slumber under the rubble of a collapsed pyramid.
Cut to the early 1980s. Series regulars Magneto (Michael Fassbender), Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee), Angel (Ben Hardy) and Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) are going about life as usual… or as usual as they can while shape shifting and instantly transporting from place to place.
Their lives intersect again when En Sabah Nur, now nicknamed Apocalypse (no foreshadowing there) emerges from his sleep, eager to take his place as king of the world. The mutant god absorbs television news to learn about the modern world before assembling his disciples—his four horsemen—and unlocking the one last power he needs to control the planet. With the world’s fate resting in his hands Professor X (James McAvoy) brings a team of X-Men to do battle.
The first X-Men movies were allegories for all manner of twentieth century intolerance but gradually over time the civil rights elements of the story have become more lip service than social comment. “Apocalypse” distances itself even further from the core of what made the originals interesting, leaving behind a serviceable action movie that plays more like a Successories unleash-your-power platitude than a cry for universal liberties.
Instead we are given a villain who melodramatically says things like, “Come! Rescue your weakling!” and a CGI climax that feels lifted from “Batman v. Superman” or “Age of Ultron.” The dumbed down story of friendship and teamwork may not engage the brain but it does, however, have outlandish visuals to dazzle the eye. A show stopping Quicksilver (Evan Peters) scene has the faster-than-light mutant rescue a dozen people from a bombed out building, frozen in time by his supersonic speed. It’s cool and like the movie’s best images has the verve and invention the script lacks.
When the film’s biggest reveal is James McAvoy’s bald Professor X head you know the movie is light on new ideas but “X-Men: Apocalypse“ transcends the law of diminishing rewards by upping the action.
“Slow West” looks like a classic western, but there’s little here, other than the landscape, some gunfights and the campfire coffee, that John Wayne would recognize.
Scottish 16-year-old Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a man on a mission. He’s crossing the rugged 1870s American frontier in search of his true love, Rose (Caren Pistorius). Aiding him—and keeping him alive—on the trip is outlaw Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender). “You need chaperoning,” he says of the young man, whose main guide up until this point was a book called “Ho! For the West.” What Jay doesn’t know is that he’s not the only one on the hunt for Rose and her father (Rory McCann). There is a price on their heads and bounty hunters are starting to circle.
Literate and stylish, “Slow West” is an unconventional western, one that is more interested in taking its time to tell its slight story than amping up the action. It’s a love story, a mentor’s tale and an anthropological look into American history (even though it was shot in New Zealand).
First time feature director John Maclean is clearly more interested in setting the scene and exploring the characters than anything else, but he does stage two terrifically tense gunfights, the staple of any good western. The first, in a general store, is quiet, violent and memorable. The second, which provides’ the film’s climax, is a classic shootout, complete with bad men hiding in a cornfield and a bullet riddled farmhouse. Both are edge of your seat and are crucial to the story. There’s nothing superfluous in either scene.
“Slow West” features a surprisingly fleet footed and funny performance from Fassbender and a great villainous turn by Ben Mendelsohn to buoy the dramatic heft of the story.
“Young Ones” mixes sci fi, dystopia and some young stars but unlike recent stories told in a similar vein there are no sorting ceremonies, or mazes or Hunger Games. Instead it’s a futuristic tale about the simple stuff—land, water and power.
Set in the near, dusty future. Water has become the world’s most precious commodity, a resource worth killing for. When we first meet Ernest Holm (Michael Shannon) that’s exactly what he’s doing. He guns down two bandits who try and access his well, the well he uses to hydrate his son and daughter, Jerome (Kodi Smit McPhee) and Mary (Elle Fanning). They lead a rough frontier life, which could be improved by the pipeline construction bigwig Caleb (Robert Hobbs) is building. In an effort to grab Ernest’s land, Mary’s power hungry boyfriend Flem Lever (Nicholas Hoult) helps divert the pipeline, but his assistance comes with a heavy price.
“Young Ones” is divided into three chapters, detailing Ernst’s struggles, Flem’s rise and Jerome’s reckoning. It’s primal stuff, stylishly shot and featuring good performances, particularly from Shannon whose battle with his inner demons is vivid and the most interesting part of the film, but is let down by a weak story. “Chinatown,” the great cinematic water war movie, never let the story get in the way of the characters or vice versa, but “Young Ones” takes an interesting premise that could possess great, almost Shakespearean characters fighting over the most necessary of all human needs and muddles the two so that both fall flat.
It’s an ambitious attempt at redefining what has become of the dystopian genre, but despite some good work from Shannon it’s a bland, bone dry movie.
