Category: Film Review

Ever since 2006’s “Clerks II,” writer/director Kevin Smith has been in a career free-fall, dividing his time between filmmaking projects and the creation of a podcast network, which directly inspired his last effort, 2014’s “Tusk.” Fighting to find his storytelling groove again, Smith takes a mighty tumble with “Yoga Hosers,” which aims to be a live-action cartoon that celebrates exaggerated Canadian interests, the comedic value of Nazis, and teen girl friendships. Smith went abyssal with screen grimness before, and now he heads in the opposite direction, aiming to keep “Yoga Hosers” as rubbery and smiley as possible, hoping to give the paying audience a contact high. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As a director, Alexandre Aja has built a career on scares, emerging as one of the more competent genre craftsmen working today. He’s landed chills and dark humor in efforts such as “High Tension,” “Piranha 3D,” and the recent “Horns,” but “The 9th Life of Louis Drax” finds the filmmaker looking to grow as a storyteller, moving away from overt scares to more emotional developments, disguised as a quirky tale of an accident-prone boy finally confronting his problematic years. An adaptation of Liz Jensen’s novel, “Louis Drax” is unable to translate its literary complexity to the screen, with writer Max Minghella struggling to make sense of the story’s working parts, which cover a wide range of emotions and malicious events. Aja tries to find the material’s heart, but he’s much better communicating its menace.  Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Derek Cianfrance has developed a reputation for quality work. He’s drawn to grim material, detailing the death of a marriage in “Blue Valentine” and the death of innocence in “The Place Beyond the Pines.” Now it’s time for the helmer to explore the death of life itself in “The Light Between Oceans,” an adaptation of M.L. Stedman’s 2012 novel. Oppressively melancholy with a special interest in morbid turns of plot, the feature positions itself as a stately drama, respecting its literary origins by taking time with initial characterizations and the wind-whipping setting. However, to Cianfrance, a scene isn’t a scene unless it leaves the audience completely numb, with “The Light Between Oceans” unable to emerge from the dark, effectively destroying whatever richly mournful qualities were found in the source material. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

In recent years, Mel Gibson has experimented with roles in exploitation movies, trying to find his groove with excessive violence and straightforward scripting. Not that he’s ever avoided brutal actioners before, but with “Edge of Darkness,” “Get the Gringo,” and now “Blood Father,” Gibson appears to be creating a new career identity as an enforcer, playing men who aggressively take care of their problems. The change of scenery fits an older Gibson, who’s skilled at finding the dark humor in any heated situation. Thankfully, “Blood Father” is filled with strangely tense moments and blunt confrontations, playing to the star’s strengths as director Jean-Francois Richet puts together a satisfying southwestern obstacle course with this engaging, tightly edited effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

If you like your cinema in a swirled state, where characters bleed into one another and states of consciousness are manipulated from afar, than “Zoom” is a must-see movie. Attacking its puzzling ways with a clear vision is director Pedro Morelli, who finds humor, horrors, and an enormous amount of neuroses in this frequently funny dark comedy. While it teases everyday concerns about body image and professional integrity, “Zoom” often dances to its own rhythm, slipping in and out of animation and reality to braid together three connected tales of anxiety, with Morelli working overtime to make sure the feature is as visually stimulating as it can be, closely matching its scripted insanity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After exploring a relationship between older men and their families in “Love Is Strange,” co-writer/director Ira Sachs turns his attention to juvenile relationships struggling under the weight of combative parents. “Little Men” continues the helmer’s fascination with askew domestic issues and the rental war zone of New York City, mixing real estate and broken hearts for a sensitive drama about the fragility of friendships. Led by terrific performances and a frightening understanding of passive-aggressive combat, “Little Men” is a modest drama with unexpectedly robust emotion, playing into Sachs’s special way with eroding relationships and burgeoning insensitivities emerging from unlikely sources. In a way, it’s almost a continuation of “Love Is Strange,” reinforcing Sachs’s fascination with family ties. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director of “The Son’s Room” and “We Have a Pope,” Nanni Moretti returns with a deeply personal picture in “Mia Madre,” which inspects the psychological exhaustion the pressures and confusion of everyday life delivers, periodically in overwhelming amounts. Collecting anxieties from his own life, Moretti funnels overwhelming feeling into his latest work, giving the feature outstanding emotional texture as it juggles subplots and character temperaments. “Mia Madre” is heartbreaking at times, but it also represents the human experience almost perfectly, understanding the minor scrapes incurred as troubles are worked through, mixed elegantly with mild humor and unusual meditations. It’s an exceptional movie, which isn’t a rare achievement for the helmer, but this material is clearly pulled from deep within, making it his finest effort to date. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Last year, director Alex Garland’s “Ex Machina” studied the idea of artificial intelligence reaching the stage of human emotions, with a robot struggling to experience life as a facsimile of flesh and bone. “Morgan” essentially attempts the same story, but instead replicating Garland’s careful assembly of mood and tension, it offers the helming debut of Luke Scott, and he’s not interested in asking provocative questions. A blunt B-movie hidden under the guise of thought-provoking science, “Morgan” is more of a horror endeavor than a dramatic one, emphasizing blood and violence with style and a cast made up of actors way out of their league. It’s a tremendously goofy picture, but one delivered without hesitation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

1989’s “Kickboxer” isn’t hallowed ground, but it does hold a place in the big screen development of star Jean-Claude Van Damme, with the B-movie managing to find some box office hustle, helping the young bruiser climb the Hollywood ladder. Over 25 years later, it’s time for a remake, or reboot in fact, with “Kickboxer: Vengeance” looking to restart the Muay Thai machine for a new generation of genre fans, even bringing Van Damme back into the fold after he passed on a series of dismal sequels. Unfortunately, instead of reviving the original picture’s bright, kick-happy spirit, “Kickboxer: Vengeance” goes dark and dull, showing little interest in becoming the participatory event the first feature pulled off rather well. It’s nice to see Van Damme back in action, but there’s almost nothing memorable about the new take beyond a few fight sequences. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It hasn’t been an easy road to release for “The Sea of Trees,” which was soundly rejected at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, searching for a brave distributor after its initial critical drubbing. Finally seeing the light of day, the latest effort from director Gus Van Sant is also one of his worst, asking the audience to remain intimate with a morbid soap opera that’s overlong and dramatically undernourished. While offering committed performances, “The Sea of Trees” is intolerable at times, finding Van Sant unable to make sense of Chris Sparling’s screenplay, keeping emotions pronounced and pacing minimal as the helmer takes a good long look at the end of hope and the birth of survival. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s hard to imagine two performers as opposite as Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville. While they’ve both made a fortune on reckless stuntwork, putting their bodies in the line of fire to secure special visuals for appreciative audiences, they are less successful landing jokes, relying on broad slapstick to secure appropriate responses to high-flying action. Pairing them in “Skiptrace” is meant represent a merging of East and West clowning, but madcap results aren’t found here. Formulaic to a point of immediate predictability, “Skiptrace” sets out to dazzle with stunts as it tries to stroke a limp funny bone. Director Renny Harlin knows his way around screen chaos, but jokes are not his forte, remaining permissive with Knoxville and Chan, who need all the professional guidance they can get. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Producers rarely need a reason to mount sequels, but it would be nice to know why 2011’s “The Mechanic” was selected to become a franchise. The picture wasn’t particularly well-received with audiences and critics, and its box office take was flat, failing to achieve the same results as star Jason Statham’s previous action series, “The Transporter.” This mystery may never be solved, but something triggered the creation of “Mechanic: Resurrection,” a follow-up that strips away all the faux grit of the original feature to transform into a James Bond-esque romp that’s as loosely scripted as can be. Paycheck performances and cartoon heroics tend to dominate in “Mechanic: Resurrection,” making it a less satisfying effort than its passable predecessor, with outrageousness missing genuine thrills. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s tough to get excited about a boxer bio-pic. All these tales tend to follow the same dramatic arc, following the hardscrabble life of a restless kid in search of discipline and glory, battling his way to success and, inevitably, personal corruption. “Hands of Stone” is billed as an examination of boxer Roberto Duran, but there’s very little that defines the subject’s life. Writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz simply bites off more than he can chew, forced to resort to clichés to keep the feature on the move, forgoing a detailed inspection of triumph and disaster to play the entire effort as a random crisis generator featuring a boxer who isn’t nearly as interesting as the production would like to believe. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Fede Alvarez pulled off the impossible in 2013, put in command of a remake of Sam Raimi’s horror classic, “The Evil Dead.” Prospects were grim, fans were ready to revolt, and yet the director managed to make something suitably bloody and bananas to celebrate the brand name, overseeing an inventive take on an Ash-less deadite invasion. Returning to screens with a different style of chiller, Alvarez cements his skill with “Don’t Breathe,” an askew home invasion thriller that offers an enormous amount of suspense, boosted by accomplished performances and an appreciation for genre insanity. “Don’t Breathe” is a terrific nail-biter that makes a few noticeable errors, but Alvarez delivers a clean and snappy fright experience, striving to locate terror in a real-world setting, away from any cabins in the woods. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Unlike most former child actors, Daniel Radcliffe has managed to keep his career fresh by finding interesting parts to play, some miles away from his heyday as Harry Potter in the blockbuster fantasy franchise. Just this year alone, Radcliffe has portrayed a malicious magician (the lone highlight of “Now You See Me 2”) and a farting corpse (“Swiss Army Man”), showing encouraging versatility. For “Imperium,” the star goes deep as an undercover federal agent infiltrating a neo-Nazi community, and he’s convincing as a rattled man in a troubling situation. Thankfully, writer/director Daniel Ragussis (making his helming debut) backs Radcliffe up with a powerful movie. “Imperium” is haunting, skillfully blending procedural highlights with a prolonged study of shock, giving Radcliffe plenty to work with. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

It’s a rare event to have a movie about the President of the United States created and released while the subject is still in office. In 2008, there was Oliver Stone’s “W.”, which tried to crack a tough nut of political ambition and suspect behavior, rushed into production to capitalize on the final days of the George W. Bush presidency. “Southside with You” is about Barack Obama, but writer/director Richard Tanne takes a different approach in his inspection of the world leader’s personality, traveling back to 1989, where a young lawyer from Chicago went out on a date with his colleague, Michelle Robinson. Stripping the story of flammable material, Tanne recycles the “Before Sunrise” formula, tracking developing chemistry between the individuals long before they became one of the most famous couples in the world. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A few years ago, director Hirokazu Koreeda crafted “Like Father, Like Son,” a sincere examination of parental love soon challenged by a strange events and custody concerns. It was a terrific picture, showcasing Koreeda’s preference for humanistic stories and a love for deceptively simple drama, adding another triumph to an already impressive filmography (including “After Life” and “Still Walking”). Koreeda returns to screens with “Our Little Sister,” which also explores a family disrupted by unforeseen developments. While urgency is less of a priority this time out, the helmer still puts together an irresistible collection of characters and personal issues, fashioning a community of anxious types looking for clarity in life and love. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Spaceman” inspects a rough period in the career of pitcher Bill Lee, a notorious wild man who led with passion, growing comfortable with recklessness during his time in Major League Baseball. However, those expecting to see much sport in the picture (executive produced by “Bull Durham” helmer Ron Shelton) are going to be disappointed. “Spaceman” isn’t a baseball story, it’s a tale of desperation and aging threaded through the internals of a man who can’t process change and loss. Lee is a fascinating subject for a cinematic exploration, and writer/director Brett Rapkin is pointed the right way, but this is not a satisfying overview of panic, missing important pieces of the story as the effort speeds through its run time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Miss Sharon Jones!” is a documentary about a singer, but isn’t really a musical film. It’s directed by Barbara Kopple, famed helmer of “Shut Up and Sing,” “Wild Man Blues,” and “American Dream,” and she clearly has great affection for the subject, separating Jones from her professional career in the picture, which details her fight with pancreatic cancer. It’s an emotional journey, observing stages of hope and frustration that traditionally go along with such a medical diagnosis and treatment. However, with Jones, there’s a bit more to explore, finding a viciously talented performer struggling to maintain a burgeoning career along the way, finally feeling the cool air of fame as she faces her own mortality. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The recent “Nerve” touched on the idea of cruelty disguised as internet gamesmanship, focusing on a paying audience logging in to watch strangers strip themselves of humanity to achieve popularity — fame being a more prized currency than actual money. While a promising thriller, “Nerve” didn’t follow through on many of its ideas, copping out with melodrama instead of maintaining incisive commentary on the sorry state of the internet union. “Level Up” has roughly the same idea, though it launches with more ferocity, inspired by gaming culture and its addictive rhythms of violence. Sadly, the production also fails to dream up a satisfying closer, but in spurts, “Level Up” connects as bleak entertainment, with co-writer/director Adam Randall generating a propulsive viewing experience, though one that just isn’t furious enough. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com