Category: Film Review

It’s been a long time since Hal Hartley has made something that looked and sounded like a Hal Hartley movie. Experimentation has been his primary concern for the last 15 years of his career, and while artistic growth is always welcome, Hartley’s gifts remain rooted with his earliest work, which took a droll, artful look at the pressures of romance and connection in a troublesome world populated with lonely people. “Ned Rifle” is a return to form for the filmmaker, with this strange revenge story working as a final act to his “Henry Fool” trilogy and as an opportunity to revisit a few notable faces from Hartley’s body of work. It’s a class reunion with a side of intrigue, executed in a most Hartley-like manner. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Last Knights” is a film that offers an extreme amount of exposition without truly explaining anything at all. It’s a confusing fantasy/adventure from Kazuaki Kiriya, the director of “Casshern,” who embraces the visual potential of gathering armies, tear-strewn sacrifices, and monstrous displays of power, yet doesn’t take the time to invite the audience into this familiar world. “Last Knights” does boast the participation of stars Clive Owen and Morgan Freeman, but it’s doubtful either actor was pulled into the production due to a secure script. The picture plays like a DTV effort, with a plodding pace and unadventurous dramatics between action sequences, better at wasting screentime than exploiting it. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Turning the “Fast and the Furious” franchise into a long-form parody isn’t exactly a difficult achievement. The Vin Diesel-starring series has already done the leg work, with each sequel growing progressively more absurd, filling seven films with borderline sci-fi events and broad characterizations. “Superfast” doesn’t care about sloppy seconds, committing to a satiric vision of roaring cars, dim-witted heroes, and physical humor. It’s the latest release from “Vampires Suck” and “Meet the Spartans” directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, and while it’s far from their worst picture, “Superfast” doesn’t exactly relax a longstanding opinion that the moviemakers are the least funny people in the funny business. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Scientology is too immense of a subject for a single two-hour documentary to explore. It’s a religion with cult-like tendencies, and an entity that prides itself on secrecy, shunning the outside world. According to “Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief,” fear is what drives the organization. Fear of exposure, with its myriad of oddities and destructive teachings revealing just how Scientology uses it power to keep its members in line. Director Alex Gibney doesn’t provide many answers, but his use of eyewitness accounts and insider footage is impressively shaped, generating an introductory understanding of church practices while rubbing fingertips over lasting scars, working to finally question an organization that’s resisted prying eyes for 60 years. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

As cookie cutter as the “Fast and the Furious” movies are, “Furious 7” certainly didn’t have an easy ride to the big screen. Losing star Paul Walker to a fatal car crash mid-filming slowed the momentum of production, with behind the scenes players scrambling to figure out how to finish the feature without one of its biggest draws involved. I’m happy to report that Walker’s send off is tasteful, downright sentimental for this steely saga, but the rest of “Furious 7” doesn’t share the same inspiration. Automobiles speed, glass shatters, muscles flex, and monologues are mumbled, leaving the latest chapter of the popular street racing saga looking much like the other ones. It turns out 2011’s “Fast Five” wasn’t a turning point for the series, just a wildly entertaining fluke. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Woman in Gold” is an audience-pleaser, and a highly effective one at that. It recounts the case of Maria Altmann, an elderly woman living in Los Angeles with claim to one of artist Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings, engaging in a lengthy legal battle with Austria for its return. The case involved heated behind the scenes negotiations, substantial research, and, most pointedly, physical endurance, making it prime fodder for a big screen exploration. Director Simon Curtis (“My Week with Marilyn”) respects the sensitivity of the fight, but he’s not above staging a few moments of broad villainy, which include Nazi atrocities and impatient courtroom behavior. Despite surges in exaggeration, “Woman in Gold” captures the spirit of Altmann’s quest with efficiency, making for a satisfactory drama with deeply felt performances. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Most documentaries about magic endeavor to reveal tricks and dissect personality, searching to understand what draws people to the performance art. “An Honest Liar” takes a slightly more superhero approach to the appreciation of a showman, recounting the life and times of James Randi, a.k.a. The Amazing Randi, a master magician and tireless seeker of the truth. He’s the Batman of his chosen profession, sick and tired of seeing the masses treated unfairly by charlatans, gearing up with intelligence, clear thinking, and an arsenal of tricks to help discredit popular psychics and faith healers. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Recall all the great suspense efforts released throughout the previous year, and few come close to matching the tension of “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem.” All the more surprising, the entire picture takes place inside an Israeli courtroom, focusing on a handful of characters as they spend years of their lives figuring out the proper way to dissolve a ragingly dysfunctional marriage. Limited in scope but massive with screen tension, “Gett” is a frequently stunning examination of frustration and indignity, detailing a culture where marital separation for a woman requires a thick skin and superhuman legal fortitude. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With costume dramas, there’s a formula that always tempts filmmakers. Working within tea-and-dismissal confines, the lure is often societal rejection and domestic coldness, which delivers all the known beats of discouragement and ostracism fans of the genre have grown to love. Every once in a while, a movie will come along and find true heat under layers of clothing, and Emma Thompson was one of the few to trust 3D emotion in her screenplay for 1995’s “Sense and Sensibility.” “Effie Gray” returns Thompson to the overcast world of isolating English domesticity, and while the plot all but demands a bubbling sense of life, the feature is cold to the touch. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s little reason to doubt to energy of “Electric Slide.” It’s set in Los Angeles during the pop culture-shifting year of 1983, and features a cast of blank people in colorful outfits. The plot concerns a stylish bank robber using flirtation to disorient his targets. And yet, “Electric Slide” is a painfully dull effort from director Tristan Patterson, last seen with the skateboarding documentary “Dragonslayer.” The ingredients are there for a lively ride with sinful encounters, playing up the oddity of the true-life case. Unfortunately, Patterson gets caught up in the surface details, pumping the picture full of color and music as what little here passes for drama shrivels up in the first ten minutes of the movie. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“The Public Domain” takes place in the aftermath of the 2007 I-35W Mississippi River Bridge collapse that occurred in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It’s a delicate topic to handle, even after eight years, but to writer/director Patrick Coyle’s credit, the feature doesn’t utilize the horrific event for disaster movie purposes. Instead, the helmer has built a sensitive drama around the idea of unification through shared trauma, only periodically bringing up imagery from the nightmarish day to tie subplots together. While a low-budget endeavor with a few limitations, “The Public Domain” is a wonderfully open-hearted understanding of the ties that bind, featuring charming performances and a screenplay interested in the strange interactions of life, which provides a unique form of group therapy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Backcountry” doesn’t break new ground in the man vs. nature subgenre, but it does play up the finer points of fear so well, it’s easy to forgive its familiarity. It’s a survival story, and a deceptively simple one at that, using the marketable aspect of a bear attack to mask numerous stages of panic that crowd the picture, allowing the movie to achieve a remarkable level of suspense. “Backcountry” marks the directorial debut for Adam MacDonald, and I hope he’s got a few more horror stories in him, as his way with scares emerges with a wonderfully primal sense of urgency, infusing the work with secure grasp on anxiety. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Comedy doesn’t require rules, but formula tends to be a best friend of the genre. Typically, a humorous balance is achieved with a comedian and a straight man, creating a rhythm to the work that generates the proper timing to sell a punchline. “Get Hard” stars Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart, two performers primarily known for their ability to yell jokes at top volume. Creating a competition for most aggressive screen presence, Ferrell and Hart are unleashed for the effort, which doesn’t feature much of a script, just a series of tired scenarios for the comedians to bark through, sometimes quite literally. Frighteningly unfunny and surprisingly lazy for a movie scripted by three people, “Get Hard” plays more like a Funny or Die skit than a genuine feature. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

There’s a fine art to making movies about reprehensible characters. It’s not easy to ask an audience to spend time with people born without a moral compass, who engage in arbitrary violence and embrace the opportunity to humiliate those perceived beneath them. “The Riot Club” features a collection of personalities best viewed through the bars of a prison cell, but director Lone Scherfig and screenwriter Laura Wade endeavor to understand corrupted behavior, tracing it back through generations of English privilege and youthful indestructibility. “The Riot Club” is coarse work, attempting to rile up viewers with troubling scenes of destruction and dismissal, but it’s also convincingly acted, with accessible emotions keeping the material fascinating. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The pairing of actors Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper should inspire a great deal of moviegoer excitement. The duo has created magic before in hits such as “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle,” reinforcing their fluid chemistry and gift with sharp banter. “Serena” is their latest collaboration and it’s an ambitious drama, packed with betrayals, murder, and sex, yet a certain spark is missing from the feature, which has been edited in a way that strangely prevents momentum from building. It’s a handsome picture, and director Susanne Bier is a truly talented helmer, but something went awry here that’s difficult to pinpoint, leaving an enticing display of screen pain gasping for oxygen. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“It Follows” is a collection of compelling ideas trapped inside a movie that isn’t as sharp as it needs to be. It’s the second feature from writer/director David Robert Mitchell (“The Myth of the American Sleepover”), who maps out an unusual ghost story using familiar working parts, marrying a John Carpenter/Stanley Kubrick audio and visual aesthetic to contemporary indie film stasis, searching for ways to extract terror out of stillness. “It Follows” is accomplished work, always interesting to watch, but it doesn’t quite live up to its potential, finding Mitchell scrambling to reclaim suspense lost to budgetary and thespian limitation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Most movies are perfectly content to offer a single ending to satisfy ticket-buyers. “Home,” the new DreamWorks Animation production, has about five, and none of them are especially effective at wrapping up the story. However, vague climaxes are only a few of the many problems that plague “Home,” which boasts exceptionally detailed character designs and a few amusing vocal performances, but can’t seem to land a single joke, while its idea of what a 12-year-old girl sounds like is up for debate. Weirdly frustrating, without a level of self-awareness that favors pace over laborious plot, the feature doesn’t connect in a significant way, reduced to a series of skits, poo-poo, pee-pee jokes, and commercials for the soundtrack. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Mystery is a key component of “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter.” Little is outwardly explained in the picture, which employs enigmatic behavior quite well, keeping viewers guessing about the final destination of the story as they’re slowly surrounded by cinematic atmosphere. Writer/directors David and Nathan Zellner create an alluring package with “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter,” which is carefully made and intriguingly performed, but utterly airless at times, testing patience as the film moves along as slowly as possible. Despite its stasis, the feature is an original vision, best suited for those with high tolerance for art-house adventuring and an appreciation for the mischief the Coen Brothers conjured in their seminal 1996 hit, “Fargo.” Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

2010’s “Monsters” was an unusual feature. The directorial debut for Gareth Edwards, the picture set out to find intimate spaces of human connection while standing in the shadow of building-sized alien invaders. It was low-tech and largely uneventful, but it had imagination, with Edwards’s strange vision contributing to an unexpectedly restrained sci-fi production. Five years later, there’s a sequel, and one without Edwards, who went on to make a true monster movie with 2014’s “Godzilla” update. His touch is profoundly missed in “Monsters: Dark Continent,” which attempts to keep the aliens-as-background-noise approach, while filling the foreground with an unreasonably oppressive, generic war film. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

To bring the firepower of “Miss Julie” to life, director Liv Ullmann has recruited actors Jessica Chastain, Colin Farrell, and Samantha Morton to do the heavy lifting. It’s just these three performers for two hours of screen time, interacting with varying speeds of vitriol, playing insanely detailed mind games as one idyllic evening of celebration turns into a visit to Hell. This is not an easy film to watch but a fascinating feature to study, with Ullmann managing levels of fiery behavior as her cast bleeds through their eyes, making the viewer feel every jagged edge of misconduct presented here. While tiring, “Miss Julie” is thrillingly raw and ghoulish, making the most out of minimal cinematic ingredients with rare emphasis on pure human explosion. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com