Category: Film Review

Rarely does a film about a misanthrope achieve any level of laughter. “Listen Up Philip” concerns the daily adventures of a narcissist, a complete monster of a man, yet, in the care of writer/director Alex Ross Perry, the titular character is handled as a full-blooded human being, with his toxic ways played for horror and hilarity. This fine blend of reactions keeps “Listen Up Philip” in motion, allowing the viewer to enjoy the shock value of the ghoul and still settle into his complex domestic situation and curdled social viewpoint. While it eventually falls apart, the feature sustains an intriguing personality and daredevil tone, asking the audience to spend time with total jerk and enjoy it. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

After forging a career in comedy, most recently presiding over “The Daily Show” for the last 15 years, Jon Stewart is finally ready to direct movies. Naturally, the funny man has gravitated toward the story of Maziar Bahari, a journalist held captive in Iran, locked inside solitary confinement for 118 days. Granted, “Rosewater” does offer a few points of humor along the way, but it’s primarily interested in sobering sequences of interrogation and hopelessness. It’s nice that Stewart is hungry to show off another side to his creative focus, and “Rosewater” is accomplished work. However, it’s exactly the type of viewing experience expected from an Iranian imprisonment story, leaving surprises few and far between. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Jessabelle” is the latest entry in the low-budget horror sweepstakes, with company Blumhouse Productions trying to sustain their run of hits with another chiller of limited scope. A ghost story of sorts with a bayou tilt, the picture attempts to scare with images of menacing spirits and a mysterious past for its lead character. Sadly, all director Kevin Greutert can muster is limp chills and formulaic atmosphere, making “Jessabelle” look like every other fright film in the marketplace. Perhaps screenwriter Robert Ben Garant (“Balls of Fury,” “Herbie Fully Loaded”) once held an interesting idea for a possession story, but the work has been stripped of identity and anxiety, blandly going about its business. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Jazz is nothing but suffering, at least according to the movies. “Low Down” is the Joe Albany bio-pic, surveying the pianist’s life as he disrupted his musical gift with drugs and selfishness, neglecting his only daughter in the process. This is not a story of sunshine and clarity, but prolonged mistreatment, watching characters struggle for nearly two hours, never quite learning anything about themselves or their demons. “Low Down” has a specific glaze that’s certainly tended to by director Jeff Preiss, but rarely does it hit a note of profundity that revives interest in the gradual unraveling of an irresponsible man. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Wolves” is writer/director David Hayter’s obvious attempt to jump-start a werewolf franchise with superhero overtones. It’s expected work from the co-screenwriter of “Watchmen” and “X2: X-Men United,” who tries to reenergize horror and action with this collection of stunts and heavily made-up actors growling at one another. “Wolves” is ambitious but never completely in Hayter’s control, striving to build a mythology that could be covered in numerous sequels without ever establishing a reason to care about the first installment. It’s loud and violent, but the feature drags more than it should, struggling with iffy performances and lousy visual effects to raise a properly furry screen commotion. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

At this point, it would be strange to see a sincere holiday picture that values family time and trusts in the special fantasies of the season. “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas” is the umpteenth variation on the dysfunctional ways of parents and children thrown together for the holidays, and it will receive the bulk of its publicity due to the death of star Robin Williams, who appears in one of his final screen roles. Predictable and largely unfunny, “A Merry Friggin’ Christmas” doesn’t make much of an effort to subvert clichés, wasting a perfectly skilled cast on lukewarm relationship woes and a yuletide appreciation that’s meant to lean toward the farcical, but mostly comes off unimaginative. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Superheroes are big business these days, grossing billions at the box office as characters both famous and obscure score high with audiences hungry for fantasy heroism. It makes sense for the Marvel Comic Universe to hit CG-animation, with “Big Hero 6” providing an opportunity for Disney to bring comic book adventure to a more family-friendly audience. Although considerable changes have been made to soften the source material for the screen, “Big Hero 6” retains its basic sense of courage and high-flying action, while Disney-esque formula brings the heart. This is not groundbreaking work from Walt Disney Animation, but the movie remains fabulously entertaining, with colossal visuals and an endearing character in Baymax, who more than earns his lovable status. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

This review contains strong language.

Insanity comes easy to “Why Don’t You Play in Hell?” A Japanese production from writer/director Shion Sono (“Suicide Club”), the picture is a wild ride of comedy and action, taking great care to preserve brutality and winks as it winds around an askew tale of revenge. The effort is also something of a valentine to 35mm filmmaking, a dying artform that Sono revives with a vengeance in this berserk creation. Funny and frightening, “Why Don’t You Play in Hell?” is a singular piece of moviemaking, thrillingly committed to screen chaos with marvelous comic timing. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Diplomacy” takes a corner of World War II history and brings it to life onscreen. The picture marks the return of director Volker Schlondorff, the helmer of “The Tin Drum,” who’s explored the war throughout his career, but rarely has he found a tale this theatrical in design. Adapting a play by Cyril Gely (who co-scripts), Schlondorff ignores the expanse of war to manage a tale of two opposing forces softening in a Parisian hotel, keeping the showdown intimate and the mind games suspenseful. Perhaps “Diplomacy” doesn’t overwhelm with its subtleties and general low-budget take on conflict, but it does offer two tremendous performances from Andre Dussollier and Niels Arestrup and a full sense of torturous deliberation. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

For a low-budget comedy about carnal desires and bedroom knowledge, “Sex Ed” doesn’t always want to play it silly. Director Isaac Felder and screenwriter Bill Kennedy have a little more on their minds with the material, using the guise of an R-rated raunchfest to sneak in profound statements of character and sexual expertise. It’s a funny film, but hardly the laugh riot promised in early scenes, while the development of personalities and their viewpoints tends to dip into melodramatic territory. Even with considerable flaws, “Sex Ed” does offer a few charms, including a committed lead performance from Haley Joel Osment, whose depiction of dented dignity and comic timing supports the picture when it needs it the most. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Ricky Blitt has enjoyed an extensive career in Hollywood, with emphasis on comedy. Not everything has hit, but his credits include work on “Family Guy” and “The Ringer,” displaying at least an appreciation for silly business. “Hit by Lightning” marks his directorial debut, with Blitt recycling a spousal murder scenario to kick-off his own take on “Body Heat,” only instead of smoldering sex and good looking people, the picture remains chaste and provides Jon Cryer in the lead role. This should be a hilarious feature, but “Hit by Lightning” never gets past mildly amusing, finding Blitt unwilling to spin the effort dizzy with madcap encounters and pitch-black comedy. Weirdly, he plays it safe, leaving the movie disappointingly free of bellylaughs. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

When Christopher Nolan makes a movie these days, it’s an event. It never used to be this way, but when his Batman sequel, “The Dark Knight,” hit astronomical box office grosses, his importance as a filmmaker grew substantially, making every future project heavy with expectation and secrecy. “Interstellar” arrives without the prelude of major spoilers — a credit to the production, which managed to preserve many of the feature’s secrets before release. However, these key pieces of information are actually quite helpful to any future appreciation of Nolan’s latest, which sets out to match Kubrick and ends up mirroring Zemeckis. “Interstellar” is impressively mounted, boasting inventive and abstract visual effects, but dramatically, the effort fails to trigger much in the way of awe and emotion, at least not the obviously manipulative kind. Nolan’s ambition doesn’t match his material this time around, leaving the picture strangely inert as it seeks to dissect the heavens. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Having made his mark in the horror genre, director Alexandre Aja inches away from pure frights (“High Tension,” “The Hills Have Eyes”) and slightly sillier endeavors (“Piranha”) with “Horns,” a complex and tonally offbeat effort that challenges the helmer in unusual ways. Star Daniel Radcliffe is game to go where this oddball tale of murder and fantasy leads, permitting Aja to explore frequently bizarre escapades featuring a horned lead character with some degree of confidence. It doesn’t always click as tightly as it should, but the ambition of the picture is refreshing, with Aja weaving the wild, violent, darkly comic world of author Joe Hill into an impressively demented feature. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

They don’t make movies like “Nightcrawler” much these days. A feature about evil in multiple forms, the picture is more interested in sinister moves, not overtly violent ones. It gets under the skin with its depiction of a sociopath, yet never loses its sense of humor and appreciation for its home city of Los Angeles. Think early Michael Mann crossed with a heavily sedated Oliver Stone endeavor, and that’s the hazy moral area “Nightcrawler” resides in. Credit writer/director Dan Gilroy for taking a shot with an unpleasant lead character and his business of pure ugliness, pulling off an amazing filmmaking achievement with this devious but hypnotic effort. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

The experiment is simple: hand the alphabet over to 26 moviemakers, each tasked with cooking up a short film celebrating their assigned letter. There are no rules, just a project goal to create brief blasts of horror using panic, gore, and, in many cases, the most depraved sense of artistic expression imaginable. The original 2012 feature was pretty much a disaster, failing to do anything of interest with a potentially Wonderland-esque visit into the bowels of filmmaking freedom. Around the time “F is for Fart” arrived, all hope was lost. The good news is that “The ABCs of Death 2” is a noticeable improvement over the previous anthology effort, spinning new tales of disaster and irony with greater concentration and imagination. The bad news is that old habits die hard, with a handful of the segments more interested in tepid shock value than weaving wicked magic with their fleeting amount of screen time. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Lynn Shelton’s career has offered intimate comedies founded on uncomfortable events. She’s good with neuroses and terrific with actors, making potentially awkward pictures such as “Humpday” and “Your Sister’s Sister” meaningful with her attention to character, making sure to dial down the cute. “Laggies” isn’t a significant change of pace for the helmer, but it does represent a slow side step toward mainstream acceptance for the once steadfastly independent filmmaker, who makes her version of a romantic comedy with the feature, albeit one that identifies with crippling anxiety and celebrates the rotten layers that form bad decisions. Frequently humorous and sharply observed, “Laggies” may not have the grit typically associated with Shelton’s work, but it preserves a sweet spot of complex behavior and retains a whole lot of charm. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

“Art and Craft” explores the strange world of Mark Landis, a master of art forgery who lives a cluttered life with mental health issues, yet is capable of producing astonishing replicas of a wide range of famous pieces. The twist here is that Landis isn’t doing this for money. He’s not a part of some multi-national criminal empire looking to squeeze collectors for easy coin. Instead, he’s a frail man who lives in a fantasy of philanthropy, gifting museums his creations, taking pleasure from the act of acceptance. Directed by Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, “Art and Craft” has it easy in terms of documentary subjects, as Landis is ready for his close-up, eager to share a distorted idea of himself with viewers. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

While October is widely regarded as a month to celebrate horror, it seems the concept of marriage is the real terror being put under the microscope this year. With David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” audiences were treated to a theatrical display of pent-up matrimonial resentment and harrowing psychological gamesmanship. Sweden’s “Force Majeure” takes a more realistic and intimate look at the cracks in companionship, pitting its characters against instinct, commitment, and themselves, weaving dark thoughts and nagging insecurities through a heavenly, and appropriately forbidding, ski resort location. Patient and incisive, “Force Majeure” takes its time to get where it’s going, but the raw feelings unearthed by writer/director Ruben Ostlund are frightening in their accuracy. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

Apparently, 2014 is the year Nicole Kidman and Colin Firth can’t quit each other. Last spring, the pair co-starred in “The Railway Man,” a stark POW drama that demanded the most out of Firth, while Kidman played support. In “Before I Go to Sleep,” the roles are reversed, with Kidman taking on the majority of screentime, put through the emotional wringer while Firth stands back and waits for his moment. Considering their combined talent and commitment to the cause, it’s a shame “Before I Go to Sleep” is such a snooze, barely putting in the effort to be a proper nail-biter before it reveals that it was never about suspense anyway. It somehow bores and disappoints in the same instant. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com

With a shapeless jazzy score, incendiary material, and pronounced performances, there’s no doubt that “Dear White People” is meant to emulate the work of Spike Lee during his most creatively fertile period. It also targets the bravery Lee once exhibited, marching forward with a provocative take on race relations and self-serving interests in the realm of exploitation, submitting a biting but windy screenplay that’s out to emphasize its thematic reach with every available moment. While not particularly inventive, “Dear White People” has a certain underdeveloped moxie that might’ve resulted in a braver effort, interested in telling a solid story and ruffling feathers. Instead, the movie only makes to the halfway point before it exhausts itself, biting off way more than it can chew. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com