Category: Film Review

“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

Summit Entertainment went hunting for a Young Adult franchise while their raging success with the “Twilight” movies was winding down. They found “Divergent,” the first book in a literary trilogy from author Veronica Roth. Released in 2014 with an omnipresent marketing campaign, working its similarities to “The Hunger Games” in full, “Divergent” went on to become one of those strange films that, while financially successful, didn’t inspire a feverish reaction with the public. Trying to extend beginner’s luck, the producers have gone ahead with the sequel, “Insurgent,” hoping that now, with introductions out of the way, Roth’s dystopian world can achieve a sense of hostility and blistering action that was sorely lacking from the previous chapter. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The title “Zombeavers” promises a specific viewing experience the production couldn’t possibly provide. A riff on monster movies, “Jaws,” and trendy zombie efforts, the picture isn’t exactly a barnstorming blend of chills and laughs, but it’s also not unpleasant, emerging as a film that’s primarily interested in meeting viewers halfway, content to provide the titular demons and an excitable cast. This isn’t fine art, folks, yet “Zombeavers” manages to deliver the goods in a perfectly digestible manner, with co-writer/director Jordan Rubin providing a reasonable sense of mayhem with his tiny, undead stars, only missing a true daredevil instinct when it comes to assembling a jokey nightmare. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

A documentary almost 20 years in the making, “The Wrecking Crew” sets out to put a face to a song. It’s the story of a group of studio musicians in the 1960s who took this newfangled rock and roll thing and turned it into a series of blissful symphonies, backing up the biggest and most enduring hits of the era, often without credit for their impressive work. Director Denny Tedesco positions himself as the guardian of the gang, using screen time to refresh memories and assign recognition, with his own father, legendary guitarist Tommy Tedesco, the point of entry into this celebratory, exhaustively illuminating tale of musical achievement. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Director Pierre Morel is the man behind “Taken,” a massive international success and one of the best action films of the last decade. With that in mind, there’s a tremendous amount of curiosity surrounding his latest, “The Gunman,” with Morel once again orchestrating a bruising thriller with an older, refreshingly creased star. Sadly, the formula doesn’t produce a kissing cousin to “Taken,” finding “The Gunman” more dour, confused, and sluggish than the Liam Neeson smash. Perhaps direct comparisons are unfair, but established formula is clearly being exploited for another round of bullets and Euro-based brawn, with Sean Penn suitably physical in appearance but mentally checked out as he slogs through a prolonged misfire. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The story of the delicatessen emerges as a surprise, simply because who knew there was a tale to tell? “Deli Man” is a documentary on the history of delicatessen culture and generational responsibility, with director Erik Anjou taking cameras into the most famous establishments remaining in America today, exploring kitchens and customers, out to understand how this tradition, rooted in an old-world sensibility, remains alive today. Obviously, there is a mouth-watering component to keep “Deli Man” in step with recent hits such as “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” yet Anjou cuts a little deeper, striving to achieve an understanding of longevity and culinary skill that gives certain delis their personality and popularity. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com