Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to do a high five! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the thriller “September 5,” the epic “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim” and Daniel Craig in “Queer.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “Queer,” a romantic drama based on the 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs and now playing in theatres, finds American ex-pat Lee, played by Daniel Craig, living in 1950s Mexico City. He’s cut adrift and lonely until a young man named Eugene Allerton, a recently discharged US Navy serviceman, becomes the object of his infatuation.
CAST: Daniel Craig, Drew Starkey, Jason Schwartzman, Henrique Zaga, Lesley Manville. Directed by Luca Guadagnino.
REVIEW: A study of loneliness and longing, “Queer” is a melancholic film with a slow burn, introspective story that explores both the main character’s mind and outward desires. More than anything this is a character study, a dive into the deep end of Lee’s (Craig) psyche.
He’s lost, looking for a love that may never come, and even if he can find a companion like Eugene, how can he be sure the feeling is reciprocal? Feelings of sadness, self-doubt and frustration are the character’s fuel, the thing that makes move him through the story, and make him so interesting.
Daniel Craig is terrific, casting off the suave James Bond persona, and once again reminding us of what a great actor he is outside the action-adventure of the 007 world. It’s a touching performance in a very specific movie that touches on universal themes about aging, one’s value to others and longing for love.
Craig is the film’s centerpiece, casting a long, charismatic shadow over the supporting cast, save for Joe, Jason Schwartzman’s welcome comic relief and an almost unrecognizable Lesley Manville as the scruffy Dr. Cotter.
Director Luca Guadagnino stays true to the wandering, rambunctious Beat Generation spirit of Burroughs’s book, sending Lee into the night, or to bed with a stranger or to the jungle to take a psychedelic drug that may help him ascertain how Eugene really feels about him. The connective tissue is Craig in a performance that is as intensely personal as the intimate work by Burroughs that inspired it.
The legendary “Playbill” chose my review of “The Critic” among their top picks for the week.
Have a look HERE!
SYNOPSIS: “The Critic,” a new, melodramatic thriller starring Sir Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton and Mark Strong, and now playing in theatres, sees a powerful London theater critic lure a struggling actress into a blackmail scheme.
CAST: Ian McKellen, Gemma Arterton, Mark Strong, Lesley Manville, Romola Garai, Ben Barnes, Alfred Enoch. Directed by Anand Tucker.
REVIEW: A tale of blackmail and revenge, set against the (somewhat) polite society of England, circa 1934, “The Critic” is a deceptively dark and grimy drama.
Handsomely mounted, with sumptuous period details, “The Critic” details mostly despicable people who hide their nefarious motivations behind an upper-class veneer.
Topflight performances from McKellen as a powerful theatre critic who’ll do anything to maintain his status, Arterton as a morally compromised actress and Stone as the nepobaby owner of a large newspaper, smooth over some of the rough patches in the movie’s storytelling.
Early on, actress Nina Land (Arterton) confronts the critic, Jimmy Erskine (McKellen), only to have her worst fears about her talent—or lack thereof—confirmed by the sharp-tongued writer. It’s a masterclass from McKellen in controlled cruelty and tells us most everything that we need to know about the unapologetic character. He’s an extravagant wordsmith, one who uses his words not only to entertain his readers, but to also eviscerate his enemies.
It’s a marvelous scene, sleek and caustic, that sets a tone that is, unfortunately, not continued throughout, despite the good performances. McKellen and Company are let down by a script that, time after time, falls for its basest impulses. Every dark turn, and there are many of them, pushes the story deeper into melodrama at the expense of interesting exchanges like the one detailed above.
“The Critic” slides by on the work of McKellen, Arterton, Strong and Lesley Manville, but doesn’t know how to use their performances to the story’s best advantage.
LOGLINE: The Amy Winehouse (Marisa Abela) biopic “Back to Black,” now playing in theatres, details the chaotic relationship with husband Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell) that inspired the internationally best-selling album “Back to Black.”
CAST: Marisa Abela, Jack O’Connell, Eddie Marsan, and Lesley Manville. Directed by Sam Taylor-Johnson and written by Matt Greenhalgh.
REVIEW: With all the depth and curiosity of a Wikipedia page, “Back to Black” attempts to tell the tale of a complicated artist who left a mark, but who left us too soon. Painted in the broadest of strokes, this sad story of sex, drugs and jazz is buoyed somewhat by Marisa Abela, who looks and sounds like the late singer, but instead of becoming a well-rounded character, Winehouse comes across as a walking, talking attitude with an impressive beehive hairdo and an alcohol problem.
An early scene detailing the writing of “What Is It About Men” hints at what is to come. Struck by a bolt of inspiration, she sings, “My destructive side has grown a mile wide.” It’s a shame, then, that “Back to Black” wallows in Winehouse’s self-destruction.
Director Sam Taylor-Johnson, working from a script by Matt Greenhalgh, tiptoes around many of the story’s landmines—the intrusive paparazzi, the exploitation she suffered by those close to her—to focus on the doomed romance with Fielder-Civil. “I need to live my songs,” she says, and her relationship certainly did inspire many of “Back to Black’s” songs, but the focus on her obsessive love, punctuated by the occasional musical performance, shifts the focus from the joy of making music to the story’s tawdry aspects.
Amy Winehouse was a singular artist, a fearless performer who made her own rules, and dug deep to create her art. So, it’s a shame her biopic is such a standard cautionary tale that skims the surface. Recommended instead is “Amy,” director Asif Kapadia’s 2015 documentary that carefully, and fulsomely, examines the life of a person who, as Tony Bennett says, didn’t live long enough to learn how to live.
I usually avoid movies with titles that rhyme. For every “Be Kind Rewind” or “Chop Shop,” which I liked, there’s a “From Prada to Nada” or “Good Luck Chuck” that remind me that some of the time, a rhyme equals grime.
OK, that was lame, but you get the idea.
Cutesy titles are often the first warning sign of what is to follow. A new film, “Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris,” commits the name game sin, but Academy Award nominee Lesley Manville brings the poetry to the movie.
Set in 1957, Manville plays Ada Harris, an optimistic London house cleaner. “Today’s my lucky day,” she says. A self-described “invisible woman,” she is also a dreamer, a person who hangs on to the belief that her husband Eddie will finally come home from war, and that something better is always around the corner.
Only one of those things is true.
When Eddie is officially declared killed in action, she is devastated, but stoic. “I should have known he would have gotten back to me if he could have,” she said, holding back tears. “Well, footloose and fancy free.”
When she sees a beautiful Dior haute couture gown belonging to one of her aristocratic customers, it is an epiphany. Although the dress costs double what she makes a year, she makes it her goal to visit Paris’s 30 Avenue Montaigne, Christian Dior’s namesake boutique, and treat herself to a dress.
Through a series of unlikely happenstances, Mrs. Harris raises enough money to get to the City of Lights, pay cash for the dress and fulfil her dream, but how will she, as the snobby Dior house manager Claudine Colbert (Isabelle Huppert) asks, “give the dress the life it deserves.”
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is the kind of feel good-movie that seems as though it was written by an algorithm. Of course, it’s based on the 1958 novel “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” by Paul Gallico, which later a became TV movie of the same name starring Angela Lansbury, Diana Rigg, and Omar Sharif, but it feels as though a bot was asked, “What makes people feel all cuddly- cushy?”
How about some old school British slang, some romance, the Eiffel Tower, glittering dresses, some class warfare and even a tad of existentialism? Nothing like a movie about aspirations with a side of Jean-Paul Sartre.
The philosopher’s name is used as a prop to illustrate the intellectual prowess of the French love interests (Alba Baptista and Lucas Bravo) but Mrs. Harris appears to take Sartre’s ideas to heart.
When Sartre said, “Life begins on the other side of despair,” he may have been talking about Mrs. Harris’s rebirth after she learned Eddie wasn’t coming back to her. Sartre’s observation, “We are our choices,” applies to the title character’s indomitable spirit and her decision to find the beauty in her world, no matter how frivolous. While the movie reduces the existentialist’s theories to pop psychology, the uplift in Manville’s winning performance provides an escape to a more glamorous time (even if it takes place in Paris during a garbage strike).
“Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris” is predictable and overlong, but Manville brings the heart and soul.
The last time we saw Kevin Costner and Diane Lane paired up on screen they were Jonathan and Martha Kent, adoptive parents of Clark “Superman” Kent. Once again, they are parents who suffer a loss, but their kryptonite, the thing that makes them weak, isn’t a Krypton crystal but a grandson named Jimmy.
In the early moments of “Let Him Go,” now playing in theatres, Margaret and George Blackledge (Lane and Costner) suffer an unimaginable loss when their son is killed while riding horseback on their Montana ranch. Left behind are grandson Jimmy (played by Bram Hornung and Otto Hornung) and daughter-in-law Lorna (Kayli Carter).
Life goes on and several years later Lorna remarries, tying the knot with Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), a terse, violent man who doesn’t invite any family to the wedding. Days later Margaret’s suspicions are raised when she sees Donnie bullying Jimmy and hitting Lorna in public. The next day, stopping by to do a wellness check—with a freshly baked Bundt cake in hand—she discovers that Donnie, without saying a word, relocates Lorna and Jimmy to North Dakota.
Determined to find out where they are and why they left, Margaret packs up the car, and after some discussion, convinces George, a retired sheriff, to come along.
Their investigation reveals the Weboy clan to be a badlands crime family, run by powerful matriarch Blanche Weboy (Lesley Manville). It was Blanche who ordered Donnie to come home and now that the family is reunited, including Lorna and Jimmy, the Blackledges discover she will use any means necessary to keep the fam together.
“Let Him Go” is a love story disguised as a crime drama. Margaret and George’s relationship has a comfortable, lived-in vibe but their love for Jimmy is the engine that drives the story. We don’t get to know the youngster but without him and a grandparent’s love, and to a lesser degree, Blanche’s twisted love for her family, there is no story.
Director Thomas Bezucha, who also wrote the script based on Larry Watson’s novel of the same name, takes his time laying the groundwork leading up to the explosive climax. The slow pace echoes the speed of life in mid-1950s Montana but, in the movie’s first half, tests the limits of the audience’s patience. The malevolent menace projected by Blanche brings the movie to a simmer but it takes too long to come to a full boil.
Costner and Lane bring an authenticity to their performances that make them completely believable as a couple of 40 years and later, when things heat up, a partnership who can get the job done. Costner has aged out of being an action star but he does something different here. He’s older and more physically vulnerable, but his years of experience as a lawman give George gravitas when he needs it.
“Let Him Go” has interesting elements, beautiful landscape photography and some well-rounded characters you can get behind—and others you may enjoy hating—but the story tangents and leisurely pacing blunt the effectiveness of the storytelling.
Fifty years after the 1970 Miss World pageant erupted into chaos a new film documents the events that sent host Bob Hope scurrying from the stage, bombarded by flour bombs and heckles. “Misbehaviour,” a new British film starring Keira Knightley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and now on VOD, sees members of the nascent British women’s liberation movement rebel against the show’s objectification of its contestants and Hope’s terrible jokes. “I consider the feelings of women,” he says, “I consider feeling women all the time.”
Knightley is Sally Alexander, a single mother and academic who believes the women’s liberation movement must address systemic sexism if there is to be meaningful change. Jo Robinson (Jessie Buckley) takes a more hands-on approach, defacing statues and sexist billboards. Despite differing approaches, they focus their efforts on the Miss World pageant, an annual event with a world-wide television audience of over 100 million people.
In a parallel story Gugu Mbatha-Raw is Jennifer Hosten, Grenada’s first competitor in Miss World. Intelligent, elegant and composed, she’s willing to endure the contest’s objectification for the chance to make history as the first woman of colour to win the pageant crown. “You are a very lucky person if you think this is being treated badly,” she tells Miss Sweden, Maj Johansson (Clara Rosager).
“Misbehaviour” is an ambitious movie disguised as a feel good Britcom. Issues are raised and the era is vividly portrayed trough fashion and the attitude of the pageant’s organizers, but the story’s main point, that feminism comes in many styles and can mean different things to different people, is broached in a superficially earnest way, but never explored. Alexander and Robinson see the absurdity of the beauty contest is liken to a “cattle market.” The farcicality of it all, the bathing suit competition, the numbers on the wrists, is not lost on Hosten but for her it is an opportunity to make a statement to other woman and girls who look like her that this, and anything else in life, is possible. That doors can be opened.
Knightley and Buckley are reliably good but it is Mbatha-Raw who brings the heart and soul to “Misbehaviour.” More than just a retelling of the flour-bombing of Bob Hope or a history lesson on the roots of the women’s liberation movement (at the end we actually meet the real-life counterparts of the film’s characters), it’s character study of Hosten. She may not be the focus of the story, that’s Alexander and Robinson, but Mbatha-Raw’s warmth tempered by inner unease makes her the movie’s most layered and interesting character.
In “Ordinary Love,” a new family drama on VOD starring Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville, the “Taken” star is up against a foe that tests his special set of skills.
Neeson and Manville are Joan and Tom, a retired Northern Ireland couple whose perfect life is upended when she finds a lump in her breast. Determined to ease his wife’s journey into the medical morass of mammograms, chemotherapy and all the attendant side effects, he is optimistic and supportive. “There isn’t a moment I won’t be there with you,” he says.
From there the film follows Joan’s year-long treatment, from discovery to treatment to double mastectomy and all the emotions that come with a potentially deadly diagnosis. It is the year that will test the stay-at-home couple’s bond like no other. “We’re both going through this,” he says. “No, we’re not!” she says.
There is nothing ordinary about “Ordinary Love.” It is a well-observed slice of life that celebrates the mundane things that make up a life, particularly when trauma comes to town. Never maudlin and always heartfelt, it realistically handles the seven stages of shock—shock, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, testing, and acceptance— and even adds in a few others that accompanies a life changer like cancer. Screenwriter Owen McCafferty carefully navigates the story as far away from melodrama as possible to delve into the more elemental emotions of everything from compassion and kindness to resentment and rage.
Neeson and Manville, ably assisted by directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Lyburn, appeal to the audience’s sympathetic tendencies but also mines the humor that arises from the uncomfortable situations.
“Ordinary Love” avoids the pitfalls of many other films that deal with illness. It never shies away from the reality of the situation but finds tenderness in its character’s humanity. After thirty years of marriage they still like one another and it shows. I defy you to watch Tom cut Joan’s hair as it falls out in clumps due to chemotherapy and not feel the warm authenticity of the scene.
