Category: Film Review

Writer/director Chris Le has a strong idea for “Cartel 2045.” It takes place in a futureworld where technology has advanced criminal interests, giving the unsavory and the violent access to unimaginable power and precision, making it impossible for law enforcement to do their job. Unfortunately, Le doesn’t have the “Chappie”-style money or the sheer helming power to pull off such an ambitious concept, which requires a lot more than good intentions and a crackerjack concept. There are a host of problems keeping “Cartel 2045” grounded for most of its run time, watching Le struggle to make the gritty actioner he wants to, often facing the constraints of bad dialogue (or none at all), budget CGI, and editorial slackness. There’s something here that has potential, but it’s never realized to satisfaction.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Little Pink House” is based on the true story of “Kelo vs. City of New London.” It’s a David and Goliath tale of a woman forced to fight for her own home when corporate interests and local government threaten to take it away through the use of eminent domain. Writer/director Courtney Balaker has passion for the battle, which explores basic American rights and human need, also detailing morally corrupt practices and abuse of laws that were never meant to be bent in so many directions. There’s a television movie feel to “Little Pink House,” but messages on spirit and community remain vividly detailed by Balaker, who seeks to create a war cry for injustice with the feature, reminding viewers how easy it is for one percent interests to steamroll over hardworking citizens when stacks of money are at risk.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Grace Jones has been a recording artist and general pop culture figure for over 40 years, but those who’ve stood outside her fame would probably find it difficult to identify what makes the icon tick. “Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami” isn’t a career overview or a very in-depth biographical investigation, but director Sophie Fiennes makes it a priority to deliver a seldom seen side of the artist as she approaches the age of 70, following her as she records a new album, dominates the stage, does the promotional rounds, and pays a visit to her family in Jamaica. “Bloodlight and Bami” offers outstanding concert sequences to refresh appreciation for Jones’s talents and blazing sense of style, but it’s also an intimate study of temperament and trauma, with the subject unafraid to showcase her impatience with world as she quests to realize her art.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s a particular speed of teenage angst that charges “The House of Tomorrow,” but it’s difficult to catch the vibe writer/director Peter Livolsi is shooting for with his muddled adaptation of a Peter Bognanni novel. The material strives to understand the rhythms of rebellion facing three adolescent characters, and Livolsi definitely achieves a level of frustration common with kids, especially during exploratory years. But there should be more to “The House of Tomorrow” than juvenile behavior, offering writing that cares for all the characters, not just the ones who haven’t turned 18 yet. While some ideas and design elements break through to make a decent impression, the rest of the feature doesn’t share the same distinction, ultimately presenting a limited representation of musical and domestic liberation.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Human trafficking is a major issue in the world today, with organization and corruption transforming kidnapping into big business, often occurring right out in the open. “Traffik” is interested in addressing the idea of human trafficking, but it has no real game plan when it comes to a thoughtful, harrowing study of crime. Writer/director Deon Taylor would rather make a B-movie than something that addresses real issues, and he’s not especially skilled at summoning suspense. “Traffik” is trashy and, most painfully, quite dull, with Taylor struggling to establish some type of POV when it comes to ugly business. A little portion of the feature wants to show concern for the real world plight of human trafficking, and the rest is content to offer DTV-style thrills and performances, quickly draining the life out of the picture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” is a documentary on the life and times of Fred Rogers, but it also acts as a form of therapy for the dark times we live in today. It’s one thing to understand what Fred was pursuing during his lifetime in children’s television, but director Morgan Neville (“20 Feet from Stardom”) reaches for a grander comprehension of the PBS icon’s work, where a seemingly simple man decided one day to give kids the confidence and communication they need to interact with the big world outside. It’s not a picture that can possibly avoid heart-tugging offerings of memory and adulation, with Neville managing to shape a complex portrait of an atypical human being. “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” isn’t a valentine, but a necessary inspection of creative control, selflessness, and gushing concern for the welfare of children. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

With “I Feel Pretty,” star Amy Schumer wants to make an empowerment anthem for those who suffer from low self-esteem. It’s a fringe demographic, roughly 99% of the Earth’s population, and Schumer hopes to define the anxiety of body acceptance in today’s world of extreme glamour and continuous judgment from others. She also wants to make a date night movie. And a wish-fulfillment comedy. And a friendship melodrama. There’s a lot going on in “I Feel Pretty,” but the picture remains weirdly simplistic, following a strict formula for laughs and pathos as it attempts to relate to every last ticket-buyer. Schumer is a spirited performer, but this is her worst starring role to date, watching her struggle with a dismal screenplay that’s too broad and predictable to drive home intended messages on self-worth.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Ghost Stories” is based on a play by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson, who adapt their own work for the screen. While horror material emerges from everywhere, the stage is rarely employed as inspiration for cinematic frights, giving the creators a quest to find some movement to inherently static storytelling. Three tales of guilt, fear, and the unknown, “Ghost Stories” does an adequate job with suspense, enjoying the chance to play extensively in the dark with completely rattled characters. Nyman and Dyson never dial the tension up all the way, but they manage to find pockets of high anxiety and strange occurrences, crafting a compelling descent into the unexplained and the forbidden, boosted by the occasional nail-chewing showdown between humans and the other side. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Actress Jennifer Morrison makes her feature-length directorial debut with “Sun Dogs,” and she’s selected a very human story to launch her helming career. It’s a tale of dysfunction and confusion that’s familiar in many ways, and it also threatens a level of quirk to help the sameness of it all stand out from the competition. But Morrison doesn’t sweeten behavioral extremity to a sickening degree, delivering a vision for Anthony Tambakis’s script that feels as real as possible while still embracing the strange fantasy found in the plot. “Sun Dogs” is a peculiar film at times, and there’s really no way for the material to find a neat conclusion, but it connects with intimate moments, with Morrison preserving as much personality and private yearning as possible, keeping the picture away from becoming a complete cartoon.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Tomb Raider” was released a few weeks ago, and now there’s “Rampage,” making this spring flush with feature adaptations of popular video games. However, with “Rampage,” the process to bring arcade highs to the big screen is a bit trickier, as the original 1986 release wasn’t exactly an open world game, offering players only the most basic in button-mashing entertainment. It was a chance to live out “Godzilla” fantasies, offering a simple showdown between panicking humans and gigantic monsters, with the pleasures of the game coming from mass destruction and growling antagonists. Turning the brand name into an event movie was never going to be easy, but director Brad Peyton only seems interested in creating noise, not excitement, as his helming duties here primarily consist of adhering to an embarrassingly crude screenplay and overseeing one of the worst ensembles of the film year. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

He was often billed as “The Eighth Wonder of the World,” but it seems all Andre Roussimoff wanted was to be treated as an everyday man. It’s not an easy request when one is over seven feet tall and weighs nearly 500 pounds, but the documentary “Andre the Giant” does a fine job getting to know the person inside the incredible size, looking to explore just how Roussimoff became one of the most popular professional wrestlers of all time. It’s not an especially eventful story, but director Jason Hehir creates a portrait of a young man who used his extreme look to his advantage, finding a home in the squared circle, making a name for himself as a legend while searching for a place in society where, just for a few hours, he could experience a level of normality alien to his existence. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com 

That writer/director Jeff Wadlow has managed to maintain a helming career for the last 13 years is impressive. He hasn’t made a decent movie yet, but Wadlow has been offered numerous opportunities to guide productions, making filmgoing painful with endeavors like “Never Back Down,” “Kick-Ass 2,” “Cry_Wolf,” and Netflix’s “True Memoirs of an International Assassin.” “Truth or Dare” is Wadlow’s latest waste of time, and it’s one of the most idiotic features in recent memory, with the director aiming to make a PG-13 horror event solely for the pre-teen sleepover audience. Its success is assured simply due to obvious budgetary limitations, but Wadlow has nothing to offer his picture, which is a chore to sit through, delivering an insipid story, overly emphatic performances, and complete lack of scares, playing to pushover crowds with the weakest production effort possible.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

I’m not sure the world is ready for a serious study of tennis players reaching peak psychological strain, but the makers of “Borg vs. McEnroe” have set out to understand what goes on inside two of the finest players the game has produced. A Swedish production directed by Janus Metz, the picture endeavors dramatize a critical 1980 Wimbledon match between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, but it doesn’t devote itself entirely to the ins and out of the epic showdown between rivals that attracted world attention. Tennis remains a priority for the production, but the screenplay (credited to Ronnie Sandahl) looks to peel back the layers on these famous men, working to understand their respective childhoods and personal drive to become the best tennis players around. A competitive battle ensues, but “Borg vs. McEnroe” does a sharp job holding attention away from the court, finding ways to keep personalities as engaging as the titular showdown.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Co-writer/director Fritz Bohm crafts a Grimm Brothers-like tale in “Wildling,” which doesn’t set out to redefine the monster movie, enjoying a chance to play in the subgenre sandbox while dreaming up a few fresh ideas of its own. It’s a dark picture, often quite literally, and one with a plan to sneak up on audiences with scenes of unexplained behavior and baffling personalities, with hopes that when clarification sets in, the feature will have a tight grip on viewers. “Wildling” gets mostly there thanks to a chilling tone and capable performances, and while Bohm doesn’t always have the most original vision for the central metamorphosis, there’s a momentum to the endeavor that’s compelling, and its general direction toward macabre discoveries is periodically hair-raising.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“1945” is a WWII film that examines a different type of combat, inspecting a range of guilt and paranoia as it imagines a community coming apart as the global conflict comes to a close. It’s silent warfare, and quite effective too, with co-writer/director Ferenc Torok taking a look at a unique time in history, when the fighting has largely ended and decisions made in the heat of the moment finally begin to show consequences, highlighting the near-casual cruelty that emerges once morality is muted by opportunity. “1945” is a dark picture, but its bleakness is necessary, with Szanto inching away from evil-that-men-do clichés to find something profoundly psychological that touches on anti-Semitism, mob rule, and the gut-rot of shame that comes with exposure to past sins. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Marrowbone” is an odd cocktail of genres and cultural influences. Half the film reflects its country of origin, with the Spanish production pursing chills and ghostly encounters the local industry is known for. The rest of the picture plays like an English melodrama, with icy characters wrestling with unspoken desires, making dignity-decimating discoveries along the way. One could consider “Marrowbone” an ambitious effort in the manner it wants to sample softness and horror, but writer/director Sergio G. Sanchez (making his helming debut) doesn’t have the training to marry distinct moods, rendering the movie ineffective in both terror and heart, muting whatever eeriness is meant to emerge from this misfire.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2013, Lynne Ramsay was set to direct “Jane Got a Gun,” only to pull out of the production at the very last minute. There was much hullaballoo about her sudden abandonment of the project, with some speculating that Ramsay would never be permitted to make another movie. Proving her critics wrong, Ramsay returns to screens with “You Were Never Really Here,” an askew revenge story that feels like a personal purging of aggression from the helmer, who orchestrates many scenes of the main character bludgeoning men of power with a hammer. Rage flows throughout “You Were Never Really Here,” which provides a visceral viewing experience, but it’s not vital work from Ramsay, who returns to her screen interests and habits, covering artful ways with blood and noise.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In 2010, Barry Levinson and Al Pacino teamed up for “You Don’t Know Jack,” which explored the saga of Dr. Jack Kevorkian and his controversial “death machines.” The picture was not only a riveting drama about a taboo subject, but it managed to make Pacino an interesting actor again, briefly snapping the screen legend out of his paycheck haze. Eight years later, they’ve reteamed for “Paterno,” once again detailing an unsavory topic with confidence, this time dramatizing the whirlwind around Penn State football coach Joe Paterno and his ties to retired coach Jerry Sandusky, a pedophile who viciously abused his trust with children. “Paterno” is already commencing a tightrope walk with this subject matter, but Levinson manages to dissect the case with care, exploring the murky waters that separate willful ignorance and permission. And Pacino does wonders again with a true crime part, generating a sense of downward momentum to a man who once stood with the football gods, only to see everything he worked for disappear over a hellacious weekend.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While it attempts to be a nail-chewing thriller, “10×10” doesn’t have much of a hook to reel the audience in. The screenplay by Noel Clarke (“Storage 24”) has the idea of a small-scale confrontation between two angry people, and he toys with perceptions of guilt and wild accusations, but it takes a very long time to get anywhere interesting. It’s a short film (80 minutes), so screen time is precious, but Clarke offers a lot of filler, which drags the viewing experience to a halt. Suspense is rarely summoned in “10×10,” but when it actually gets around to staging something more than silent reflection and everyday routine, it becomes the movie it’s ultimately endeavoring to be. But the payoff is not worth the time invested. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Wim Wenders is an artist, and he’s made some incredibly powerful films over the years, retaining his singular appreciation for longing across great physical and psychological divides. But when the director goes wrong, he really wipes out. Straining to retain some level of cinematic grace, Wenders flounders mightily with “Submergence,” unable to fully decode what appears to be a romantic tragedy of sorts, but really comes off as a study of insanity in various forms, crossed with touches of social and political commentary. Since Wenders doesn’t have the time or access to sit with each ticket-buyer and explain exactly what he’s going for here, much of “Submergence” remains frustratingly inert and vague, as though the helmer never wanted to commit to a single idea, instead offering several half-baked concepts with hopes something might stick.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com