Category: Film Review

Attention will be placed on “Condemned” for one major reason: the casting of Dylan Penn. The daughter of Sean Penn and Robin Wright, Penn makes her feature-film debut with a low-budget horror endeavor, taking a career route that has helped a great number of actresses, electing to show off some lung power and panicked looks instead of partaking in a significant dramatic test her first time out. There’s more to “Condemned” than Penn, but she’s a braless, blonde focal point in a picture that’s otherwise concentrated on vomit, urine, pustules, and spilled innards, basically guaranteeing all attention will be aimed her way for the duration of the movie. Penn’s been coached well by her parents. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To help “Difret” reach theaters across America, the production is using the good name of executive producer Angelina Jolie to attract attention. The famous humanitarian isn’t directly involved with the production, but it’s almost odd that the movie isn’t her third directorial outing, as it plays directly to her interests in global injustices and the plight of young women in the third world. Helmer Zeresenay Mehari (making her feature-length debut) actually handles “Difret,” making an interesting choice to avoid understandable hysterics to play the effort as a legal drama of sorts, preferring to capture the steps of community condemnation when dealing with the practice of forced marriage, instead of stirring it up with cheap melodramatics. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Welcome to Leith” is an incendiary documentary about the power of hate in today’s world, where growth is carried out through a strict observance of laws, pushing opposing sides into a dance of patience as definitions of engagement are carefully inspected. Directors Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker find a chilling tone of escalation concerning the subject matter, which takes on sinister business from the white supremacist moment in America, using odd events and rattled interviewees to paint a portrait of discomfort that eventually transforms into an authentic summation of community defense in the digital age. “Welcome to Leith” is a strange feature, but it retains substantial suspense in its early going, with the helmers identifying horrors and shaping frustration that builds into explosive moments. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Sarah Silverman is best known as a wily comedian, blessed with a sharp wit and willingness to embrace the grotesque in her humor. She’s hilarious, but as an actress, Silverman has been inching away from funny business, taking supporting parts in dramas such as “Take This Waltz” and the television series “Masters of Sex.” With “I Smile Back,” the talent aims for a grander professional challenge, portraying a troubled mother and wife battling depression in the messiest manner possible. Silverman is game to go where director Adam Salky leads, but her commitment to the frayed ends of the character is impressive, summoning a level of unnerving recklessness that helps “I Smile Back” achieve poignant and piercing scenes of self-destruction. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2012’s “Skyfall” isn’t an easy film to top. Not only was the picture the finest installment of the Daniel Craig era of James Bond movies, it’s perhaps one of the best Bonds of them all, with a perfect collision of villainy, disaster, seduction, and grit. It was a grand blockbuster. “Spectre” merely mimes the same beats. Despite a creative team that features many of the same people responsible for “Skyfall,” including director Sam Mendes, “Spectre” plays like a parody of the previous effort, missing precise, snowballing elements of suspense as it works through a tired screenplay that doesn’t have enough imagination to summon thrilling action or ripe characterization. James Bond has returned, but he often looks as though he’d rather be anywhere but in this movie. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Capturing the zeitgeist, “Suffragette” is a respectful view of history, taking viewers back to 1912 to study the plight of the women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom. It’s an extraordinary story funneled into an encouraging but deeply flawed film, but one that benefits from sheer passion for the subject. Director Sarah Gavron (“Brick Lane”) captures intensity and dissects personal sacrifice with precision, keeping tight control of emotional content and a sensational performance from Carey Mulligan. “Suffragette” stumbles when it comes to establishing a coherent visual look for the picture, and its history is blurred at best, but the core outrage of the material comes through clearly, supporting the feature when artificiality threatens to swallow the whole effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For 65 years, “Peanuts” has managed to dominate, sustaining life through its original comic strip form before graduating to television and feature films. However, the Charles M. Schultz creation hasn’t flexed its pop culture muscle in quite some time, with “The Peanuts Movie” attempting to revive the brand name for a new generation. The basics are tended to with passable care by director Steve Martino (“Ice Age: Continental Drift,” “Horton Hears a Who!”), delivering all the mild thrills and homey charms of the franchise, but the latest adventure isn’t out to break new ground with its community of idiosyncratic characters. While it’s respectful to the Schultz legacy and periodically winning, “The Peanuts Movie” feels a tad stale at times, burning through established highlights instead of creating fresh ones. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With “Miss You Already,” director Catherine Hardwicke is forced to mature as a filmmaker, but she isn’t going willingly. The screenplay by Morwenna Banks offers a tale of cancer and friendship, taking on the impossible bonds of life with a great degree of honesty, urging Hardwicke (“Twilight,” “The Lords of Dogtown,” “Thirteen”) to treat the material with uncharacteristic sincerity. She almost pulls it off, peppering “Miss You Already” with confrontations and confessional moments that resemble human behavior. The helmer can’t help herself with floppy camerawork and only-in-the-movies moments of flamboyant catharsis, but the picture is the least Hardwicke-ian of her troubling career, and that’s a promising development. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Trey Nelson has an interesting resume, coming to “Lost in the Sun” after a decade working in television, helping to craft cooking, game, and reality shows. He makes a dramatic leap with his latest work, and he’s also questing for sincerity. “Lost in the Sun” has its faults, but it primarily plays like an engrossing young adult novel, exploring the weight of guilt and the development of trust, with a whole mess of father-figure issues driving the central conflict. Admirably performed and skilled at detailing Texan expanse, the feature manages to hit the heart when it counts the most, carrying a promising amount of concern for its characters. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Writer/director Diane Bell has a very simple idea for “Bleeding Heart,” but she manages to massage a basic tale of protection and longing into a compelling drama with an exploitation stinger. “Bleeding Heart” isn’t a tumultuous sit, but when it slips into a groove of tentative trust and impulsive acts, it finds interesting behaviors to study, while leads Jessica Biel and Zosia Mamet delivering unexpectedly weighted performances, supporting Bell’s vision for an askew take on a sibling connection. Ironies are sliced thick and violence offers little surprise, but the feature manages matters of the heart quite well, even with little narrative to explore. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Three weeks ago, “Freaks of Nature” was just another picture on Sony’s shelf gathering dust. Missing a few release dates over the last year, the feature was left for dead, about to miss another Halloween season. And then, without warning, the studio suddenly issued a trailer mid-October, promising a hasty limited release for a project that was previously titled “Kitchen Sink.” If there’s any box office potential for the film, it’ll be due to curiosity, with Sony offering movie fanatics an opportunity to see why “Freaks of Nature” is basically being dumped over the holiday weekend, sentenced to a future of late night basic cable immortality. The short answer? There’s a reason why the effort’s been ignored for so long. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse” has an amusing title and a ripe premise, pitting socially awkward teens against a horde of the undead. There’s enough there to fuel an agreeable romp through horror extremes and wild comedy, yet the picture doesn’t quite live up to its potential. Director Christopher Landon desires to whip up a fury of gore and slapstick, and select moments do hit their mark, delivering some last-minute ick for the scary season. Overall, “Scouts Guide” isn’t nearly as tight or funny as it could be, content to stage easy lay-up bodily function gags and wheezy non-sequiturs instead of digging into the premise with both hands. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Room” emerges as an impossible movie to embrace, offering a subject matter that demands the audience sit through unbearable acts of cruelty and despair before the emotional framework of the film begins to take shape. The feature may seem imposing from the outside looking in, but “Room” soon reveals an enormous heart and ability to communicate subtle behaviors as it works through challenging tonality. It’s a stunning effort from director Lenny Abrahamson and screenwriter Emma Donoghue (who adapts her own best-selling novel), who achieve a significant sense of humanity and drama with the picture, managing simplicity of suspense and sophisticated feelings with startling care. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As a screenwriter, James Vanderbilt won acclaim for his work on 2007’s “Zodiac.” Vanderbilt also wrote “Darkness Falls,” “White House Down,” and “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” His track record leans toward moviegoing misery, and now he makes his directorial debut with “Truth,” trying to shake off his reputation as a genre man by dramatizing the brouhaha surrounding the Killian Documents Controversy and the firing of Dan Rather from the “CBS Evening News.” Ideas on journalism ethics, the inherently manipulative nature of reporting, and the uncomfortable marriage between greed and daily news are pushed aside so Vanderbilt can make a cloying, dreadfully acted melodrama, ignoring the juicy details of the event to play as broadly as possible with little to no actual thematic goals. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s no arguing the merits of “Our Brand Is Crisis,” which is a fictional take on the 2005 documentary of the same name. It’s competently acted by a wide range of talent, featuring a compelling lead turn by star Sandra Bullock as a messy, brilliant political strategist. It’s a tale of awakening, identifying politics is a poison the world doesn’t deserve. It also has farcical touches that help alleviate the inherent heaviness of the story, trying to transform culture-crashing insanity into a big screen show. And yet, “Our Brand Is Crisis” doesn’t contain much dynamism, and its reach for profundity is half-hearted at best. In director David Gordon Green’s care, the feature doesn’t add up to much, pretending to be a subversive offering of backstage exploration instead of truly becoming one. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Meadowland” is quite possibly the saddest movie of the 2015 film year. It’s not just a simple, dismissible downer, but a profound psychological breach that touches the bottom when it comes to exploring abyssal parental fears and painful self-destruction. And yet, it’s unmissable cinema. Writer Chris Rossi and director Reed Morano aren’t visiting the sunny side of the street with this picture, but their interest in primal emotions results in a fascinating exploration of a nervous breakdown, with Olivia Wilde truly tested as an actress for the first time in her career. “Meadowland” is raw and almost unbearable, but its quest to understand the stages of grief is powerfully rendered with a great degree of authenticity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Burnt” was once featured on the Black List, an insider collection of the “most liked” unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, endeavoring to shine a light on quality work that’s had difficulty making the leap to the big screen. It’s also another reminder that the Black List is most likely a self-serving sham organized by desperate agents. “Burnt” is heavy with formula and predictable beats of redemption, making a mess out of what should be a straightforward tale of a ruined chef fuming while on a path to perfection. With last year’s “Chef,” Jon Favreau captured a wonderful marriage of foodie delights, technique, and heartfelt drama. “Burnt” is a crudely illustrated flip-book of conflict with unappealing characters, dipping substantially in quality every time it leaves the kitchen. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Taxi” is both a celebration and critique of life in Iran, hosted by director Jafar Panahi, whose own complex history with censorship and imprisonment informs the picture’s sense of secrecy and thinly veiled commentary. Blurring the line between drama and realism, “Taxi” doesn’t chase a gimmick. Instead, it pursues a conversational tone that’s open to explore personalities and politics, trying to establish a human perspective to Iranian hustle, with Panahi offering a slice of life look at everyday business and the citizens trying to make their way through an oppressive culture. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Paranormal Activity” was intended to be a no-budget calling card for director Oren Peli, who employed crude haunted house-style scares and an atmosphere of realism to frighten his audience. The gimmick worked for the feature, which became a massive moneymaker as well as popularizing the found footage subgenre. However, the simple possession story wasn’t built to become a franchise. “Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension” is the sixth installment of the series, and possibly its last. Let’s hope the rumor is true, as the latest installment is quite possibly the worst, offering unrepentant creative bankruptcy and a shocking disregard for viewer intelligence. Once again, things go bump in the night, but this time, there's not a single reason to care about anything the brand name has to offer. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Having found success with his sequel to “G.I. Joe,” director Jon M. Chu (“Step Up 3D,” “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never”) returns to the Hasbro toy vaults to revive “Jem and the Holograms,” an adaptation of the popular cartoon series that ran in the late 1980s. The show celebrated style, fantasy, music, and relationships. Chu’s take decidedly less excitable, trying to mute a flamboyant creation into a tender feature that values buzzy ideas on the unification of social media over personality. “Jem and the Holograms” has almost nothing in common with its inspiration, merely lifting names and labels as it weaves together a flaccid tale of personal corruption and female empowerment, laboring to protect positivity as it gradually loses all hope for identity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com