Category: Film Review

The massive success of 2017’s “Get Out” has cleared the way for filmmakers to explore racial tensions using genre storytelling. This allows the audience to participate in the tale as it weaves around fantastical turns, giving them a ride before hitting them with doses of reality. Jordan Peele found a way to give his lesson some big thrills, continuing his odyssey in the similar 2019 effort, “Us.” Screenwriter/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz have the same idea with “Antebellum,” which surveys the horrors of slavery and its continued presence in 21st century America. It’s an unexpectedly grim feature, and one with surprises viewers will either tolerate or reject in full. If Peele and M. Night Shyamalan had a baby, it would be “Antebellum,” which is at its most successful when toying with reality, providing a puzzle to solve while reinforcing the lasting wounds of an unforgiving nation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Lost Girls and Love Hotels” is an adaptation of a 2006 book by Catherine Hanrahan, and while it initially appears to be a salacious account of secretive Japanese sexuality as it pertains to the titular housing, it’s actually a much darker understanding of obsession and depression. There’s definitely kink play featured in the movie, but Hanrahan (who also scripts) is more invested in her characters, following a woman as she succumbs to grim thoughts while embarking on an emotional connection to a forbidden man. There’s plenty of atmosphere in the effort, with director William Olsson making the trek to shoot in Japan, and there’s beguiling shapelessness to the endeavor as well, helping the production to capture blurred headspaces with elements of mystery and compelling displays of self-destructive behavior. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To help bring to life a tale of rural American horrors tied to all levels of faith, co-writer/director Antonio Campos (“Afterschool,” “Christine”) gathers a cast of European and Australian talent to help fill out the ranks of corrupt and threatened characters. It’s a different approach when dealing with such regionally specific torment, but this isn’t a straightforward account of evildoing. An adaptation of a 2011 Donald Ray Pollock novel, “The Devil All the Time” offers a knotted timeline as it manages a community of thinly related and connected people confronted by their demons, with Campos looking to keep the audience on their toes while he experiments with the shock of violence to capture attention. While lengthy (138 minutes) and fond of stillness, the feature connects when necessary, offering an immersive tour of mental illness with a few pulpy touches. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There seems to be an endless appetite for movies and shows about Sherlock Holmes. He’s a perennial character, with the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creation offering an intellectual game of sleuthing, merging the thrill of the hunt with room for audience participation. While Sherlock has a part in “Enola Holmes,” the film’s really here to introduce a new sibling full of deductive reasoning, adapting a tale from author Nancy Springer’s YA book series. Attempting to make something appealing for a teen audience, screenwriter Jack Thorne (“Wonder,” “His Dark Materials”) delivers a spunkier take on the family business of solving crimes, with “Enola Holmes” aiming for emotional ties and empowerment glow with this whodunit, which is more of a whereshego. It’s a different style of caper for Sherlock’s little sister, putting a lot of pressure on star Millie Bobby Brown to carry the charm and the narrative focus of the picture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Blackbird” takes on the topic of euthanasia, offering a family drama about a matriarch who’s planning to end it all after a weekend of personal time and group activities, finally stopping developing health issues. Of course such a reunion isn’t easy to watch, but the subject is an important one, and director Roger Michell (“Notting Hill,” “Hyde Park on Hudson”) tries to protect some of the ideas and feelings involved with the event while maintaining dramatic focus. The movie isn’t a grand offering of emotional volatility, but it remains a tearjerker, and one capably handled by the cast, who deliver deeply felt performances. It doesn’t exactly brighten the day, but the sadness of “Blackbird” is compelling, visiting universal issues of dysfunction and communication as the story highlights difficult areas of personal engagement, especially when a level of finality is introduced. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“H is for Happiness” is an adaptation of the book “My Life as an Alphabet” by Peter Jonsberg, and it’s a bit of a miracle that an American production company didn’t get its hands on the material for a film adaptation. It’s slightly quirky work with some level of melodrama, but the picture is an Australian undertaking, thus achieving a bit more oddity to offset the formulaic elements of the plot. There’s genuine weirdness running through “H is for Happiness,” and that’s a good thing, with director John Sheedy making his feature-length debut with true test of tonal balance, setting out to visualize Jonsberg’s world of unhappy people and one girl’s push to solve their problems, without overdosing on cutesiness or heartache. The helmer gets the movie most of the way there, offering a charming understanding of positive thinking from a juvenile point of view. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Alone” is a remake of a 2011 Swedish chiller (titled “Gone”) about a woman traveling across the country getting into trouble with a mysterious and malevolent driver on the open road. Original screenwriter Mattias Olsson returns to duty for the Americanized version, sticking close to the recipe that made the original picture a prime candidate for an English-language do-over. Director John Hyams aims to bathe the endeavor in mood, which becomes a necessity, as “Alone” isn’t big on incident, keeping the helmer attentive to small details and daily business while striving to find some level of suspense to keep the viewing experience passably unsettling. There’s not a lot to the feature, and it shows in the final cut, with Hyams stretching to fill the run time, losing valuable tension along the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Once again, actress Noomi Rapace is sent in to portray a physically and psychologically tortured character, this time taking the lead role in “The Secrets We Keep,” which has her playing a woman confronted by the agony of her World War II past. The part plays right to Rapace’s professional capabilities, giving her a chance to deliver the gut-rot emotionality she’s known for, with director Yuval Adler (“Bethlehem,” “The Operative”) making sure to emphasize the character’s pain as much as possible. If only the entirety of “The Secrets We Keep” was as invested in the moment as Rapace, with Adler riding the line between promising chiller and a filmed play with the endeavor, which is big on conversations, preferring dry patches of conversation instead of creating something more intimidating, which it definitely has the potential to do. Adler lingers instead of delivers with the effort, which could use a great deal more anguish and a lot more movement. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Rent-A-Pal” is set in 1990, but it’s a relevant picture for today’s world of frustrated people dealing with isolation. This isn’t what writer/director Jon Stevenson initially intended, but he’s found a way to make a movie about 2020, creating a slow-burn chiller about one man’s decent into madness due to suffocating domestic experiences and his own distance from a functional relationship. While other filmmakers have touched on the toxic relationship between man and machine, Stevenson gets oddly specific with his writing, which turns a simple quest for VHS attention into a downward spiral of insanity. “Rent-A-Pal” has flashes of originality, and Stevenson has a good eye for casting, finding actors capable to doing something memorable with a shapeless threat. It’s not the tightest feature around, in need of more editorial pruning, but when it focuses on blurred lines of reality, it’s vividly executed with a wonderfully dark sense of humor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Lacrosse is not a sport that’s often depicted in movies. While offering heated competition and high-scoring highlights, filmmakers aren’t all that interested in doing something with the contact game, which received one of its more high-profile explorations in 2012’s “Crooked Arrows.” For “The Grizzlies,” lacrosse is the impetus of the story, but screenwriters Graham Yost (“Speed,” “Hard Rain”) and Moira Walley-Beckett (“Breaking Bad,” “Anne with an E”) are more interested in the community unification of the sport, merging underdog cinema with a sincere examination of despondency in the Artic region. “The Grizzlies” has its playing field highs and lows, but the feature is more interested in the struggles of life for Inuit people, finding a way to deliver sporting development with a stark study of anguished characters looking for something, anything, to lift themselves up. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s been a long time since Pauly Shore has the been the star of comedy. The once mighty pop culture force has been elsewhere since the 1990s, when he delivered one genuinely fun feature (1993’s “Son in Law”) during his brief reign, soon falling out of favor with audiences, leaving him to wander around the industry for decades. There was one stab at a comeback (2003’s “Pauly Shore is Dead”), but “Guest House” is Shore’s highest profile release in a long time, putting the former weasel back in charge of laughs for co-writer/director Sam Macaroni, who puts his faith in the star to deliver the goods in a raunchy, riffy offering about a hostile living situation spinning out of control. Unfortunately, “Guest House” doesn’t have much more on its mind than shapeless shenanigans, with Macaroni trying to raise hell without putting in the effort, creating an unimaginative ride of dismal antics and desperation while Shore displays little participatory interest in this mess. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With musician bio-pics all the rage these days, it’s about time someone decided to bring the story of Helen Reddy to the screen. A powerhouse vocalist and cultural icon, Reddy has experienced all the ups and downs of the music industry, also enduring a multitude of challenges in her personal life. She’s a fascinating individual, but it’s strange to watch “I Am Woman,” which is more about her marriage to manager Jeff Wald than it is about Reddy’s achievements and ambitions. Screenwriter Emma Jensen (“Mary Shelly”) looks to honor Reddy, highlighting her as a key figure of the feminist movement with anthemic songs and fierce intelligence, but she makes a curious choice to downplay the individual to focus on the couple as they stumble through the years. There’s more to Reddy than her self-destructive spouse, and it’s very strange that “I Am Woman” doesn’t recognize that, resulting in a disappointing film. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

If we’ve learned anything over the last decade, it’s that Lifetime Movies and Hallmark Channel productions have the potential to be very popular. The business of being easy on the senses has increased in recent years, with the cable networks sticking to a formulaic understanding of new love, nostalgia, and holiday magic. Netflix offers their version of the subgenre with “Love, Guaranteed,” which isn’t set at Christmastime, but it retains a lightly comedic approach, sticky romantic entanglements, and easily solvable problems. There’s nothing here to challenge the audience, but that’s the point of the picture, with the screenplay by Elizabeth Hackett and Hilary Galanoy refusing to color outside the lines. It’s the kind of film made for nights filled with too much wine and regret, and while it does what it does, there’s a growing feeling during the viewing experience that it could try harder to be something special. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As Disney continues to mine their animation catalog for live-action remakes, “Mulan” emerges as the rare offering trying to keep some distance from its inspiration. In 1998, the material offered a broader take on the original Hua Mulan legend, turning the tale into a musical and hiring Eddie Murphy to voice Mushu, a talking dragon. Mushu is gone from the update, along with most lightheartedness, with director Niki Caro committed to a more serious take on the source material, playing up scenes of war and sacrifice, aiming to give the story a richer sense of purpose and influence for a different generation of viewers. The experiment largely works, with the new “Mulan” a different beast in all the right ways, with Caro delivering a sumptuous event film with an excellent cast and newfound fierceness, giving the remake some additional heft as it details an unusual quest for identity and honor. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Christopher Nolan is consumed by the ways of time. Such obsessiveness has infused everything he’s made, with recent endeavors such as “Inception,” “Interstellar,” and “Dunkirk” all fixated on the demands and pliability of time. While Nolan likes to go big with his ideas, he’s not one to change up his routine, with “Tenet” his latest movie and, true to form, it inspects the manipulation of time. It’s easy to be wowed by the production effort, which presents massive action imagery and exotic locations sold with major technical achievements. It’s the rest of “Tenet” that’s rather ho-hum, finding Nolan repeating himself to remain in his comfortable, profitable filmmaking bubble, once again issuing a brain-bleeder that only he understands in full, offering audiences a speaker-rattling puzzle that’s not all that interesting to solve. It’s a shiny creation, but if one doesn’t buy into the central concept, there’s nothing here beyond occasional property destruction and heaps of exposition. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Silver Linings Playbook” was the first Matthew Quick novel to enjoy a big screen adaptation, and the author found tremendous success with the movie, which did well at the box office and collected Oscar gold. Eight years later, “All Together Now” tries its luck with the Quick way, this time adapting his YA novel, “Sorta Like a Rock Star,” which examines a teenager with an unbreakable spirit facing tests to her heart and soul that forces her to rethink her positivity. It’s a much softer tale from the writer, who shares screenwriting duties with Marc Basch and Brett Haley, who also directs. The team manages to generate something wonderfully human with the work, and while the midsection teases an onslaught of unbearable melodrama, “All Together Now” remains in control of its tone and sensitivity, securing characters and feelings for this slice of feel-good cinema, earning its warmth along the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Measure for Measure” is an adaptation of a William Shakespeare play, which was originally classified as a comedy. In the hands of co-writer/director Paul Ireland (a longtime actor, recently appearing in “Judy and Punch”), the material is stripped of any lightheartedness, going dark with its tale of forbidden love and crime world power plays. Ireland has also downplayed the original dialogue, transforming the story into a modern understanding of hostilities between gangs and cultures, but he keeps sweeping displays of romance and familial discord. “Measure for Measure” doesn’t become exactly what Ireland wants it to be, showing difficult handling deep feelings and, in some cases, thespian expression, with the picture gradually falling apart when it means to come together as a tight exploration of troubled relationships. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

When a movie sits on the shelf for two years, it’s usually a sign the picture isn’t very good. Actually, it’s always a sign the picture isn’t very good, with “The New Mutants” finally hitting theaters after a lengthy delay, having been shot over three years ago. It was intended to be a minor riff on the “X-Men” world, with co-writer/director Josh Boone (“The Fault in Our Stars”) trying to bring a little teenage drama to the superhuman superhero franchise, going very small to try something different when it comes to the daily drudgery of being a mutant. While Boone has a history with melodrama, he’s not a visual effects guy or even a horror maestro, painfully ill-equipped to handle the genre demands of “The New Mutants,” which ends up becoming 75% exposition and 25% underwhelming action. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 1989, there was “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” a modest teen comedy that wasn’t expected to do much business, only to become one of the biggest hits of the winter. It offered the world two lovable goons who needed time travel to help finish their history homework and save the world. A sequel arrived in 1991, and “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” was a risk, dialing back the cuddliness for an edgier take on time travel, sending the characters on a darkly comedic adventure to Heaven and Hell. It was magnificent fun. There was a cartoon, merchandise, and even a cereal, but the Bill & Ted experience was pronounced dead in 1992 (after an unwatchable live-action series rightfully tanked), leaving fans to dream about another lap around the circuits of time. 28 years later, the boys are back with “Bill & Ted Face the Music,” and while they’re older and not necessarily wiser, the chemistry shared between stars Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter remains delightful, while screenwriters Chris Matheson and Ed Solomon actually find a way to shake up this universe for one last round of musical unity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Binge” is a semi-parody of “The Purge,” going fully ridiculous with the original picture’s premise, which had a frustrated nation accepting a one-night stand with legal murder, permitting participants to go hog wild as the powers that be cull the herd. For “The Binge,” future American leaders relax their policies toward drugs and drink, giving the nation an evening of complete permissiveness. Of course, screenwriter Jordan VanDina is a little late to the party, as “Purge” sequels have already brought the series down to the level of self-parody, but he tries to create something raucous and tasteless with the new film, looking for a younger audience that might appreciate such a raunchy endeavor. VanDina doesn’t reach the potential of his idea, and he has a funny way of making his adult characters more enjoyable to watch, creating a teen-centric feature where the adolescents only get in the way. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com