Carol Doda Topless at the Condor – Movie Review

Directed by:  Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker

Runtime:  98 minutes

‘Carol Doda Topless at the Condor’ is a revealing, insightful documentary  

“No matter who you are, or where you come from, or what you like to do, something exciting and wonderful and different happens in San Francisco.” 

A television reporter uttered the aforementioned statement, via archival footage, in directors Marlo McKenzie and Jonathan Parker’s documentary, “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor”, about Carol’s odyssey as a topless dancer and risky trendsetter.  

In 1964, Carol, a cocktail waitress at The Condor - located in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco - soon began dancing on stage while wearing fashion designer Rudi Gernreich’s new swimsuit, the Monokini, which left little to the imagination from the waist up.  The blonde-haired beauty, topless-dancer pioneer, or “Barbie doll on steroids” displayed no fear and carried charismatic “showwomanship”, which led to immense crowds, publicity, and notoriety at The Condor.  

She became a one-of-a-kind sensation, and for many tourists and locals, Carol became an “exciting and wonderful and different” attraction.   

McKenzie and Parker’s documentary explores Carol’s life, linearly, from her time at The Condor and post-Condor, through interviews with friends and colleagues, like fellow dancer Judy Mamou, former Condor owner Pete Mattioli, musicians Jerry Martini (of Sly and the Family Stone) and Jimi Mamou, and many more.   

The film also presents a voluminous number of archival interviews with Carol herself, whether she appeared on talk shows, one-on-one with reporters in the club, or in and out of court.  Through all these appearances over the movie’s 98-minute runtime, the audience sees Carol’s internal portrait in a few crucial ways.  She enjoyed her job and wished to continue her profession without interruption, as legal fights threatened to stop Carol’s and, eventually, other dancers’ acts.  Even though Carol bravely forged her way into an innovative style of entertainment, she is a sympathetic figure through an artificial physical transformation and her own serious doubts about finding a lasting, monogamous relationship.  The doc unfolds with unexpected moments, including a couple of surprises surrounding Carol’s personal life, ones that will throw you back in your seat in disbelief, at least it did for this critic.

Rather than only focusing on Carol’s story, the film – along the way – expands into cultural issues of that time.  It was the 1960s, so racism against Black dancers and interracial marriage reared its ugly head, which one may not suspect in progressive San Francisco.

Women’s rights and fights against or general acceptance of the “male gaze” are explored with academic rigor – with insight from author Florence Williams and others - so Ms. Doda’s experiences are studied and explained in retrospect here through – both - broad and precise sociological perspectives.

That said, Carol’s profession is on display, so this documentary certainly presents an abundance of still photos and clips of topless dancers, including Carol and others.  As a warning, reserved audiences could turn bashfully red and be offended by the subject matter, discussions, and visuals.  However, “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” is a legitimate rated R and doesn’t venture into NC-17 or rated X terrain, but this film is not a first-date flick nor a weekend trip to the theatre with your reserved Uncle Harold or old-fashioned Aunt Gertrude. 

For documentary buffs, “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor” is a revealing, insightful watch.    

Jeff’s ranking

3/4 stars

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Nowhere Special – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Uberto Pasolini

Starring:  James Norton, Daniel Lamont, Carol Moore, Eileen O’Higgins, and Siobhan McSweeney

Runtime:  96 minutes

‘Nowhere Special’ is a beautiful, encouraging story about the devoted bond between father and son but one wrapped in ever-present heartbreak and vulnerabilities.

On the surface, John (James Norton) lives an ordinary life.  

John, 34, cleans windows for a living and careens from job to job around Belfast in his modest car, which sports a trusty ladder on its rack.  He generally doesn’t secure gigs at soaring skyscrapers, but he’ll turn to washes at local pubs, retail storefronts, and expensive suburban homes.  

John is diligent and deliberate with his work and polite with his individual employers.  He’s tall and attractive with professional model-like looks, but our lead carries a glum disposition, and combined with his neck and arm tattoos, he unintentionally telegraphs that he fashioned regrettable choices over the last couple of decades.  

That or something ominous lurks in his future…or both.  

He’s a single dad to four-year-old Michael (Daniel Lamont), a wide-eyed, sweet little lad.  Our forlorn window washer doesn’t regret being a father in the least.  John is a diligent and deliberately considerate caretaker for his young child.  

“He’s a happy wee boy,” John proudly states, and the two assemble as an inseparable pair, one full of love, care, and gentle discourse and gestures.  

However, life can bulldoze over tender feelings and good intentions in an instant, and in director/writer Uberto Pasolini’s “Nowhere Special”, he explores the repercussions of this unfortunate phenomenon and the near-impossible journey when facing the abyss.

Stricken with a fatal illness and with no other relatives in sight, John is forced to give up Michael for adoption.  He regrettably functions with a local government organization in the hopes of finding a new home for his son.  

Stricken with occasional pain that stops him in his tracks, John is infinitely more burdened with giving up Michael, wondering and worrying about the unknown future.  Thankfully, Shona (Eileen O’Higgins, in a terrific supporting performance), a 20-something counselor, regularly accompanies John during his quest, and she’s a frequent confident about his uncertainty along the way. 

Together, John, Michael, and Shona visit several homes – perhaps five or six throughout the film’s 96-minute runtime - where the three meet the potential adoptive parents, and each household feels different.  You know what Forrest Gump says about chocolates; this is their (and the audience’s) experience.  

Structurally, “Nowhere Special” feels like Jim Jarmusch’s “Broken Flowers” (2005), in which Bill Murray’s character visits several past partners – colorfully played by Frances Conroy, Tilda Swinton, Sharon Stone, and more – in search of solving a mystery. 

In Jarmusch’s dark comedy and Pasolini’s heartbreaking drama, the filmmakers and the leads – Don (Murray) and John – successfully construct steep storytelling anticipation of who we will meet next.  

Who will be the right choice?  

In between home visits, Pasolini spends precious minutes with John, in isolation, performing his routine tasks in various locales around town.  Norton gives an exceedingly sympathetic performance over the entire movie but in these quiet moments at work, John washes and wipes various panes of glass, seemingly as a metaphor, like looking for clarity through the windows.  

When John isn’t on the job, he spends every spare minute he can with Michael.  

Norton and Lamont live in this authentic on-screen bond where the exceedingly young actor seems to effortlessly operate in concert with his elder thespian.  

Pasolini regularly fills the two’s time with simple, tranquil scenes, such as a trip to the grocery store, ice cream in a park, simple breakfast table talk, restful minutes on the living room couch, and reading.  Granted, not every second of John and Michael’s time is undiluted bliss, but the film avoids the cliches of introducing forced arguments.  Explosive conflict between the two doesn’t materialize.

What does appear – at its core – is a beautiful, encouraging story about the devoted bond between father and son but one wrapped in ever-present heartbreak and vulnerabilities.  It’s a film filled with colossal purposes in everyday, unprotected spaces. 

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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The Idea of You - Movie Review

Directed by: Michael Showalter.

Written by: Michael Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt.

Starring: Anne Hathaway, Nicholas Galitzine and Ella Rubin.

Runtime: 115 minutes.

‘The Idea of You’

At what cost comes a woman’s happiness? 

Because there’s always a price to be paid when a woman seizes pleasure and dares to put her needs first: the sideways looks and judgments of strangers, the disappointment of family and friends, relentless public scrutiny. At what point does the pain of the cost outweigh the satisfaction of the pleasure, and why does everyone care so much anyway? 

They are questions asked with welcome care in Michael Showalter’s “The Idea of You,” a mature rom-com with emotional heft co-written with Jennifer Westfeldt (“Kissing Jessica Stein”) in which a 40-something woman’s consenting, joyous dalliance with a 20-something popstar becomes everybody’s business.

Anne Hathaway brings her earnest, endearingly gawky charm to Solène Marchand, a divorced art gallery owner still licking the wounds of her ex-husband’s betrayal. The last thing on her mind is romance, never mind with smoldering but sensitive Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the tattooed heartthrob of the world’s biggest boy band, August Moon.

Their meet-cute is an accident, when a full bladder at Coachella sends Solène careening for the nearest bathroom – which happens to be in the trailer of her daughter’s teenage crush. She’s merely playing chaperone to a group of teenagers and is embarrassed, but not starstruck, to have intruded on the 24-year-old singer’s inner sanctum. 

Hayes, so often beset by twitterpated teens and shallow groupies, finds himself intrigued by a fully formed, self-possessed older woman who doesn’t seem interested in so much as a selfie with him – so intrigued that he takes the initiative to track down Solène at her art gallery, paparazzi be damned. Solène is flattered but bemused. Why on earth would a young, attractive, global pop star with his pick of the world’s hottest supermodels want to have anything to do with a 40-year-old divorced mom?

While the answer may be obvious to viewers in the thrall of Hathaway’s megawatt charm and Hollywood glamour, it isn’t apparent to insecure Solène, who’s been beat down in life and love by lesser men than Hayes. She needs to give herself permission to give into the fantasy as she’s tirelessly pursued and wooed by Hayes. But when the relentless societal pressure and press exposure start to play hell on not just her life but her daughter’s, Solène is forced to weigh her happiness against its cost.

Intentional or not, one can’t help but see a resemblance to the much publicized and ultimately ill-fated relationship between One Direction heartbreaker Harry Styles and older mom of two Olivia Wilde in this adaptation of the 2017 novel of the same name by Robinne Lee. Hathaway brings emotional vulnerability and Galitzine genuine tenderness to two characters ripped from the headlines, and it makes for an unexpectedly moving arc in what easily could have been titillating fan fiction. (Steamy sex scenes rooted in a 40-year-old woman’s pleasure don’t hurt). 

Director Showalter (“The Big Sick,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) and co-writer Westfeldt delivered instead a thoughtful rom-com for adults that should have all of us re-assessing our knee-jerk reactions to a woman enjoying life on her terms with enthusiastic consent. 

Barbara’s ranking

3/4 stars

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The Fall Guy – Movie Review

Directed by:   David Leitch

Written by:  Drew Pearce

Starring:  Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Winston Duke, Hannah Waddingham, and Stephanie Hsu

Runtime:  126 minutes

‘The Fall Guy’ floats.  It’s an easy, breezy ride.

“I might fall from a tall building.  I might roll a brand-new car.  ‘Cause I’m the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star.” – “Unknown Stuntman” performed by Lee Majors in “The Fall Guy” (1981 – 1986)

“The Fall Guy”, a popular action-adventure ABC television show, fell into the laps of families across the U.S. from 1981 through 1986 as Majors – from “The Six Million Dollar Man” (1974 – 1978) fame – starred as Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman who doubles as a bounty hunter in his spare time.  Majors’ longest-running project – co-starring Heather Thomas, Douglas Barr, and Markie Post – was an enjoyable excursion that didn’t take itself too seriously even though Colt, Howie (Barr), and Jody (Thomas) regularly found themselves in precarious spaces every week.

Director David Leitch’s 130-million-dollar film with the same title and lead character, Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling), doesn’t feel like ABC’s weekly production at all, however, this 126-minute enjoyable excursion also doesn’t take itself too seriously, even though our hero, Colt, regularly finds himself in precarious spaces.  

“The Fall Guy” is an action-comedy where Colt, a Hollywood stuntman, frequently labors for an all-around jerk and film actor, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), when hazardous moments call for Mr. Seavers to step in and drop 30 stories or be lit on fire, all for the glory of the shot! 

Still, Colt opines that this is his dream job, and he works with his dream girl, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), so he’s “living the dream.” 

Dreams, however, don’t last forever, and his reality changes.  Eighteen months later, Colt “needs” to win back Jody’s affections while she’s promoted to a director – and shipped out to Sydney, Australia – to helm a cheesy sci-fi love story called “Metal Storm”.  

Writer Drew Pearce forges about one-third of the screentime on the fictional set where Colt will do anything – save juggling a chainsaw, a bowling ball, and an iPhone – while Jody slowly ponders sawing away her resistance towards a rekindling a romance when she’s not feeling the pressure of her first film.  The palatable tension runs high between Jody’s angst and Colt’s sheepish advances, but during the first 30 or 40 minutes, “The Fall Guy” feels like it can descent into pure rom-com territory, which becomes – admittedly – a bit disconcerting when car crashes and belly laughs were hopefully in order.  

Thankfully, thoughts of “Pretty Woman” (1990) and “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” (2003) begin to fade when Colt ventures on his own.  You see, an abrasive plastic producer, Gail (Hannah Waddingham), sends him on an errand in Sydney to find Tom, who has gone missing.  

Gosling’s comedic gifts kick in while he searches the city for clues about Tom’s whereabouts.   He battles through a drug-induced haze and teams up with his stunt coordinator, Dan (Winston Duke), for some fisticuffs.  

Duke and Gosling make a dynamic duo, and with more scenes together, “The Fall Guys” would be an appropriate alternative title.   

Thoughts for a sequel, perhaps?  

Even though Colt - and sometimes Dan - face gunfire and other perilous threats from a litany of faceless henchmen, there’s rarely a moment when we think that their lives are in danger.  Still, credit Leitch and Gosling for conveying that Colt is actually taking these furious bumps on the Sydney streets and the set.  Colt repeatedly pulls himself up from the ground with the sluggish umph of an 80-year-old, and one will swear that he’ll echo Roger Murtaugh’s (Danny Glover) famous line from the “Lethal Weapon” series, “I’m too old for this sh*t.”

Even though “The Fall Guy” feels like a throwback to an 80s adventure, with the whodunnit mystery and classic tracks from AC/DC and KISS, (again,) it doesn’t resemble Lee’s TV vehicle.  Also, with a two-hour runtime, the editing department could have clipped Stephanie Hsu’s brief appearances entirely, run over Blunt’s silly, shoehorned karaoke scene, and raced over a couple of unneeded twists featuring a barrel full of baddies.  Hence, the film has some clutter and pacing issues. 

However, Gosling’s charm, Duke’s support, a couple of surprises, and some dandy smash-‘em-up sequences – like “(falling) from a tall building and (rolling) a brand-new car” - deliver just enough big-screen good feelings.  

“The Fall Guy” floats.  It’s an easy, breezy ride.  

Jeff’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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We Grown Now – Movie Review

Directed and written by:   Minhal Baig

Starring:  Blake Cameron James, Gian Knight Ramirez, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson, and Lil Rel Howery

Runtime:  93 minutes

‘We Grown Now’ is a poetic story about childhood friendship

As director/writer Minhal Baig’s film opens, two elementary-age schoolboys, Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), drag a twin-size mattress through the hallway of an apartment building.  With a broken elevator temporally halting the dynamic duo’s expedition, they shuffle to the stairs and, eventually, outside as they lug the 8-foot sleeping apparatus down various streets for an unknown goal.  

Well, Malik and Eric attain their ultimate purpose – which will not be revealed in this review – but to give a hint, their found aspiration is a joyous one, a whimsical occasion where childhood know-how provides a glorious, momentary reward that will echo with memories for years, similar to soaring on a 3-speed Huffy bike over a makeshift wooden ramp or completing a flip off a diving board for the first time at a local pool.  

Bragging rights and mutual support. 

The location is Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing center, built during WWII, but the year for “We Grown Now” is 1992.  Michael Jordan is the King of the Basketball World, and people of all ages pay respects to His Highness.  However, The Windy City residents offer exceptional homage, including 10-year-old boys who regularly debate Scottie Pippin’s value to the Chicago Bulls on the way to school. 

“We Grown Now” centers around Malik and Eric’s friendship and home lives, but the movie doesn’t sprint over a 93-minute runtime.  On the contrary, it strolls, rests, observes, and wonders.  

Baig captures the poetic beauty of the freewheeling innocence and imagination of childhood while also constructing boundaries, healthy and unhealthy ones.  Some figurative walls – like classrooms and parental directives – are universal, but others, like a nearby senseless murder and police overreach, are certainly not.  

Still, Baig doesn’t stir up constant, exploitive dramatics that paint Cabrini-Green in heavy coats of woe and misery.  Yes, slim household budgets and the chance of witnessing violence exist.  These issues loom, but by and large, the screenplay nestles into Malik and Eric’s encouraging, two-person bond and sustains accommodating influences at home.  

Malik’s mom, Dolores (Jurnee Smollett), fashions homecooked meals and serves them at the dinner table every evening.  She’s a payroll clerk who recently learned about her co-workers’ elevated salaries, so Dolores yearns for something better for herself, Malik, Malik’s sister, and her mother (S. Epatha Merkerson).  Moving out of Chicago was a previously unexplored option, but Dolores is presented with a plum choice that would require a change of neighborhood scenery.  

Eric’s father, Jason (Lil Rel Howery), a widower, owns a pizza joint.  He asks his son to help count the money for the impending monthly bills to illustrate the financial struggles that 10-year-old children don’t ordinarily realize.  

Jason, Dolores, and Anita extend lofty pillars of support for their children, even if their internal fortitude feels wobbly over lifetimes of marching up steep societal gradients to make ends meet.  Contentious race relations visually emerge in one brutal scene.  The word – racism – isn’t spoken, but Anita’s explanation of her Mississippi backstory includes a vicious act against her family that – decades earlier - led her to Illinois.  Dramatically less egregious but still frustrating, an ever-present exasperating drip from a faucet (that the landlord hasn’t fixed in months) implies a broader inequitable system or a simple case of neglect. 

James and Ramirez give impressive performances as the BFFs.  Their authentic alter egos regularly volley from playful humor, actively listen to the respective single parents, ponder the future, and have the wherewithal to exclaim, “I exist!  We exist!” in a sometimes-heartless world.  

Baig and cinematographer Pat Scola ensure to find splendor in plain sight, like occasional treetops, cracks in the ceiling that reveal sparkling stars, and streetlights’ glow shining through curtains while trains interrupt the artificial illumination like a visual Morse Code, pleading to these two young minds that a big world exists outside of Cabrini-Green.

One of the adult characters quietly pronounces, “Seems like we’re always running from something.”

Malik and Eric occasionally dash through their neighborhood with youthful exuberance, and hopefully, their futures will be filled with running to something.  

All the while, the film’s music department lead, Jonas Tarm, accompanies Malik and Eric on their journey with a delicate and moving cavalcade of strings and ivory keys that offer hope to the young pair and induce tears from the movie audience.  Yes, Malik and Eric are kids, but in some ways, they are also grown now.  

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Challengers - Movie Review

Directed by: Luca Guadagnino.

Written by: Justin Kuritzkes.

Starring: Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor.

Runtime: 131 minutes.

All’s fair in love and tennis in Luca Guadagnino’s sexy ‘Challengers’

Love? It means nothing in tennis. Zero points scored. But on the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” love is everything. Or if not love, at least the game of it. 

And Tashi Donaldson (Zendaya) treats love and sex like any other competition, ruining men’s lives for sport and having them thank her for the pleasure. You’ll thank her, too, if you meet “Challengers” on its sexy, silly terms as three extraordinarily beautiful people play an intricate game of power and pleasure behind the tennis match that unfolds onscreen. 

We meet Tashi and her husband Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) on a downswing. The First Couple of tennis, self-proclaimed “game changers” swanning around in designer duds and slinging ads for Aston Martin, are on a decline. Art is the championship-winning tennis star and Tashi, whose own tennis career was sidelined by a catastrophic knee injury, is his merciless coach, both on and off the court. But their tennis supremacy is on the line as Art suffers a crisis of confidence, unable to get out of his own head and secure his spot at the next Open. 

What he needs is a confidence boost, an easy victory to change his momentum, which is how the champ finds himself slumming it at the New Rochelle Phil’s Tire Town challenger, a piddling qualifier for has-beens and never-weres, far beneath the typical notice of a player with an Aston Martin sponsorship. 

His opponent, the louche and lanky Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), should be easy pickings, a washed-up poster child of squandered potential sleeping in his car and playing in ratty shorts that look like they were dug out of a dumpster by a possum. But Patrick is hardly a no-name easy mark; it turns out the two have a history. Art has everything to lose – and Patrick, nothing. 

“Challengers” doles out its character backstories in a tennis match punctuated by flashbacks showing Tashi as a Stanford-bound phenom on the court, a maneater who reduces then-best friends Art and Patrick to love-struck putty in her callused hands as they vie for her attention – a “homewrecker,” Tashi calls herself as she treats the besotted boys like a pair of Ken dolls she’s playing with on her bedroom floor. And just like Ken dolls, she can even make them kiss, if the fancy strikes. 

The thing to understand about “Challengers” going in is that it is a deeply unserious movie, like if you combined the sexual adventurous and homoerotic undertones of “Y tu mamá también” with the sado-masochistic codependency of “Phantom Thread,” but made it goofy. Guadagnino’s penchant for ravishment – romantic in films like “Call Me by Your Name” and “I Am Love,” horrifying in “Suspiria” and “Bones and All” – is rendered ridiculous on the tennis court.

The question is whether or not “Challengers” has the self-awareness to know its own ridiculousness. You’ll be tempted to take it all deadly seriously; the characters certainly do. Especially convincing is Faist, whose screen-commanding turn as Riff in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” was no one-off. But given the film’s thumping, synth-heavy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the Looney Tunes tennis ball POV shots, and lingering close-ups of Art and Patrick suggestively eating bananas and churros in each other’s faces, it’s hard to conclude “Challengers” isn’t in on the winking joke of itself.

Just sit back and enjoy the match.

Barbara’s ranking

3/4 stars

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Hard Miles – Movie Review

Directed by:  R.J. Daniel Hanna

Written by:  R.J. Daniel Hanna and Christian Sander

Starring:  Matthew Modine, Cynthia Kaye McWilliams, Damien Diaz, Zachary T. Robbins, Jackson Kelly, Jahking Guillory, Leslie David Baker, and Sean Astin

Runtime:  108 minutes

‘Hard Miles’:  This inspirational cycling story is worth an easy trip to the movie theatre

Rice, Atencio, Smink, and Woolbright. 

These four teens have walked hard miles.  Their long journeys of bad decisions and misfortune led them to reside at Colorado’s Ridge View Academy, a school for troubled teenagers.  It’s where arguments and fist fights break out more frequently than acne, as the young men posture for position to get through their days.  Still, Ridge View isn’t heartless.  Counselors like Greg (Matthew Modine) and Haddie (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams) march to the beat of a well-intentioned drum, but verbal altercations with the kids wear on their rhythms.  

To help reach Rice (Zachary T. Robbins), Atencio (Damien Diaz), Smink (Jackson Kelly), and Woolbright (Jahking Guillory), Greg Townsend, an avid long-distance cyclist, convinces Haddie and their boss, Skip (Leslie David Baker), to let him lead the quartet on a “Tour de Grand,” a 762-mile bike ride from Ridge View to the Grand Canyon.  

Skip is skeptical and calls the idea “hoods in the woods” and “redeeming the irredeemable.”  Haddie has her doubts, but she rides along with Greg and the boys by driving an accompanying van packed with tents, supplies, and food.  

Director/co-writer R.J. Daniel Hanna prepares “Hard Miles” for the big screen, an inspiring tale based on a true story.  

It’s a movie about grit, teamwork, perseverance, and empathy.  

Hanna and Christian Sander’s screenplay spends a large majority of the 108-minute runtime on the road (and a noticeably abbreviated number of minutes to prep for the said trip), where the guys joust with one another and fight against the system, which (during this trip) consists of Greg and Hanna.  As one might expect, they learn life lessons and emotionally grow over who-knows-how-many days.  

“Hard Miles” has a similar vibe as “McFarland, USA” (2015), a satisfying sports movie in which Jim White (Kevin Costner) leads a high school cross-country team in a working-class California farming community.     

The silver-haired, 6’ 3” Modine, 65 years young, is perfectly cast as he demonstrates Greg’s athletic gifts and command of the sport but also exudes physical and emotional vulnerabilities.  Greg carries a couple of serious ailments that impede his 24/7 freewheeling cycling lifestyle.  He also cares about these kids but constantly balances his altruism versus the flush realities of reaching them through discipline.  Thankfully, Haddie provides a figurative scale and doubles as his conscience when he tips too far in one direction.  McWilliams’ warm and frank performance delivers a comforting blanket of female energy and another voice for Greg and the young team. 

Deep down, just about every adolescent needs defined boundaries whether adults want to forge them or not, and “Hard Times” confirms the benefits of doing so.  

While also contending with injuries and teenage attitudes, the film delves into Greg’s lifelong struggle with his father that comes to a head – through horrible timing – with the Tour de Grand.  Hanna communicates Greg’s relationship with his dad through flashbacks and childhood trauma, a theme explored more often on the big and small screens in recent years.  Frankly, these flashbacks and Greg’s ever-present strife with his dad don’t seem necessary through the first two acts, but Hanna and Modine deliver an affecting sequence in the third.  

Make sure you have tissues nearby.  

“Hard Times” is a positive, role-model film for teenage boys and girls, but for boys in particular, especially when they have recently fallen behind in education versus their female counterparts and are having trouble defining masculinity in the modern world.  Robbins, Diaz, Kelly, and Guillory all give commendable performances as teenagers living on the edge without a net, and all four of the characters’ arcs feel authentic.  The story flushes out more of Smink’s and Woolbright’s emotional excursions, but these four young men form a faithful peloton as the actors seamlessly absorb themselves into their troubled teen roles.  

Visually, Hanna and cinematographer Mack Fisher capture – seemingly – 1,000,000 glorious frames of the rugged and harrowing landscapes throughout the 762-mile trek, as audiences will hope for an extended look-see at one of the planet’s seven wonders.   This critic won’t reveal the end, but either way, “Hard Miles” is worth an easy trip to the movie theatre.

   Jeff’s ranking

3/4 stars

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JEFF MITCHELL

A member of the Phoenix Critics Circle, Jeff Mitchell has penned film reviews since 2008, graduated from ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism, and is a certified Rotten Tomatoes critic. Follow Jeff and the Phoenix Film Festival on Twitter @MitchFilmCritic and @PhoenixFilmFest, respectively.

Celebrate Brendan Gleeson’s birthday with this terrific triple feature

Brendan Gleeson turns 69 years young on March 29, and this Dublin native has entertained movie and television audiences since 1989.  With 110 credits (in IMDb) to his name, the Academy finally recognized this charismatic thespian with a 2023 Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for his memorable role as a former best friend hell-bent on self-harm in Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin”.  His fans have supported his work for decades, and in celebration of the man’s birthday, here are three memorable Gleeson performances you should see right now. 

Happy Birthday, Brendan and Sláinte!

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Bunny Kelly, “I Went Down” (1997) – “He’s a good man,” Mr. French (Tony Doyle) says.  He’s referring to Bunny Kelly (Gleeson), a 40-something ex-con who sports demonstrable red mutton chops and a curt, no-nonsense persona.  Bunny works for Mr. French, a small-time, small-town mobster, so look, his testimonial is in the eye of the beholder.  Well, director Paddy Breathnach’s vision of a cool buddy-movie crime caper is realized, thanks to Conor McPherson’s snappy script, tone-setting frames of rural, working-class spots in County Kildare and County Offaly, and a cast of characters led by Bunny and his new and unwilling 20-something “business partner” Git Hynes (Peter McDonald).  Git gets himself in a wee bit of trouble with Mr. French, so Bunny and he must stumble across the Irish countryside on a hazardous errand for him.  Gleeson and McDonald’s odd-couple energy bursts with tension and “guy humor” as Bunny regularly hands tricky tasks to Git - like entering an unfriendly pub to gather information and crossing a rugged bog - while our red-headed middle-aged fella catches up on his reading.  Even though their working relationship falls into predictable spaces, their engaging chemistry and witty banter will glue audiences to the screen while they stick together in several stolen automobiles.   

(3 out of 4 stars) 

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Police Sergeant Gerry Boyle, “The Guard” (2011) – Director/writer John Michael McDonagh’s detective story opens with a group of young adults - in a red sports car – buzzing by Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson), who sits idly in his parked, modest police vehicle.  Before you can say “recklessly speeding,” they fatally crash in a one-car accident.  Well, Gerry strolls to the wreck, finds drugs, and nonchalantly ingests a tab of the kids’ LSD.  That’s just one of countless unexpected and hilarious hits in “The Guard”.  Most on-screen players cannot get a read on this seemingly unassuming sergeant, including FBI Agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle), who visits County Galway to stop a 500-million-dollar drug deal.  Everett needs Boyle’s help to accomplish any police work, as McDonagh tilts into unusual (to Everett) Western Ireland culture, and our American agent cannot decipher Gerry’s code either.  “I can’t tell if you’re really mother f***ing dumb or really mother f***ing smart,” Everett says.  Well, Gleeson playfully gives the audience clues – throughout the 96-minute runtime - in an ingenious, comedic effort.  

(3.5 out of 4 stars) 

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Father James, “Calvary” (2014) – John Michael McDonagh and Gleeson team up again in a dark, unsettling mystery set in a drop-dead gorgeous coastal community in County Sligo.  Drop-dead is apropos because an unknown man enters Father James’ (Gleeson) confessional and declares that he will kill the man of the cloth in one week.  This unidentified individual reveals that another priest molested him for five years, but he will take his vengeance on Father James, who is a decent man.  This exceptionally well-crafted whodunit pits the father – while making his rounds - against a litany of nefarious characters in town.  For the audience, the specific threatening menace could be anyone.  Well, almost anyone, as an American writer Gerald Ryan (M. Emmet Walsh), a fellow priest and bishop, a recent widow, and James’ daughter Fiona (Kelly Reilly) are friendly faces, but just about everyone else addresses him with contempt, dismissiveness, or resentment, or they are just plain suspicious.  Gleeson delivers a layered, beautifully nuanced performance, as James’ patience wears thin with the thick-headed disdain and the constant messages of death, violence, and firearms that surround him.  “Calvary” went criminally unnoticed during award season.  McDonagh’s thought-provoking masterpiece is one of 2014’s best.  It deserved Oscar nominations for Picture, Director, Screenplay, Score, and Actor.  This critic prays that moviegoers catch this film on DVD or a streaming service.  

(4 out of 4 stars) 

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The Peasants – Movie Review

Directed by:  DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman

Written by:  DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, based on Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont’s novel

Starring:  Kamila Urzedowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Miroslaw Baka, Ewa Kasprzyk, Sonia Mietielica, Mateusz Rusin, and Andrzej Konopka

Runtime:  108 minutes

‘The Peasants’ doesn’t brim with riches, but it works as an eccentric curiosity

“Surrounded by strangers I thought were my friends.” – “Against the Wind” (1980) by Bob Seger

For Jagna Paczesiowna (Kamila Urzedowska), she is surrounded by enemies.  

Kamila, 29, who could be Margot Robbie’s long-lost cousin, plays Jagna, a beautiful 20-something farmhand living in Lipce, a modest Polish village, in the late 19th century.  She’s a peasant, and like so many Lipce residents, Jagna toils on the land but doesn’t own it.  Prospects for wealth, or even simple comfort, are out of reach. 

Conversely, a widower, Maciej Boryna (Miroslaw Baka) – with his six-acre estate - is “the richest farmer in town.”

The modern-day saying, “Cash is king,” doesn’t apply in Lipce. 

Instead, land is king, and Jagna’s mother, Dominikowa (Ewa Kasprzyk), and Mayor Piotr (Andrzej Konopka) work out a marital arrangement between Maciej and Jagna that extends a reach into his treasured six acres.  

This is the story of “The Peasants”, a 108-minute film adaptation of Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont’s Nobel Prize-winning novel.  The current paperback runs 976 pages, so directors DK and Hugh Welchman had much to unpack and carefully choose which aspects to plant into their film.  

One plainly obvious wrinkle is that the Welchmans filmed a live-action production, but after the shoot, 127 artists – through “oil-painting animation” – essentially painted the film, frame by frame.  According to Rich Johnson’s Nov. 24, 2023 “Animation Magazine” article, the animators painted “40,000 frames of oil paintings.  If one person were to paint the entire film, it would take almost 100 years.”  

With so many folks on the Welchmans’ team, “’The Peasants’ took three years to paint and animate.” 

It’s a mind-blowing effort, and the results offer a living, breathing artwork that beautifully sways and waves on-screen.  Brush strokes appear while cast members speak Polish and move about.  Visually, the best moments are when movements fill the frame, like large swathes of grass rolling with the wind, a flock of birds gliding in the sky, and a couple of vibrant dance scenes where dresses are swinging and spinning while a few local musicians are bursting with string instruments and an accordion.  

Although, the effect is also a bit surreal.  The animation may be distracting.  For this critic, it took 15 to 25 minutes to settle into a sense of comfort with the Welchmans’ creation.

Circling back to Reymont’s invention, the film follows the four seasons, beginning with autumn and ending with summer, and that’s by design. 

The youthful Jagna marries the elderly Maciej (referred to by his last name, Boryna, throughout the movie) in the fall, the season when deciduous trees begin their slumber, and their leaves dry up and die.  

The marriage feels like Jagna’s death sentence, and one of the townsfolk snidely comments that the new bride looks as though she’s attending a funeral.  Meanwhile, Jagna and Boryna’s son, Antek (Robert Gulaczyk), have been engaging in an ongoing adulterous affair.  

Fans of the novel will be intimately familiar with the themes, and the movie version explores ugly topics, such as the aforementioned infidelity, jealousy, resentment, greed, smalltown gossip, an institutionalized class system steeped in sharp elbows and cruel words, and the double standards placed on women. 

The movie also features several acts of violence (with fists and blunt objects), a couple of scenes with nudity, an attempted rape, and an actual rape. 

No, “The Peasants” is not “Kung Fu Panda” (2008) or “Shaun the Sheep Movie” (2015), not in the slightest, and the Welchmans’ adapted screenplay does not contain one moment of humor.  This rated-R film is unsuitable for kids, nor will they find these grown-up-themed troubles particularly fascinating.  After the movie ends, one might also wonder about the reasoning for turning this tale into an animated feature rather than simply representing it as a live-action movie. 

Reymont’s work is world-famous and significantly meaningful to Poland, so the movie’s presentation could present an everlasting and unique ode to the material.  The Welchmans and the team took extraordinary efforts to bring their innovation to fruition while also revealing the troubling nature of humanity in this cautionary and challenging saga, one that clearly communicates its grievances.  

For “The Peasants” experts, those close to Polish culture, or animation fans, this movie – and its dark themes – could brightly land with enthusiasm.  

For others, it could work as an eccentric curiosity, and that’s how “The Peasants” strangely surrounded me. 

Jeff’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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Problemista – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Julio Torres

Starring:  Julio Torres, Tilda Swinton, RZA, and Isabella Rossellini

Runtime:  104 minutes

‘Problemista’ is an inventive, eccentric comedy, but a couple of problems trip it up

Alejandro (Julio Torres) has a problem.  

The 20-something, wide-eyed New York City upstart – with a slight frame and a mop-top haircut with a sometimes-noticeable cow lick – just lost his job at FreezeCorp, a cryogenic stasis outfit that dresses its clients in a tube to sleep for – perhaps – hundreds of years.  

Alejandro didn’t calculate differential equations to pinpoint the math behind these science-fiction devices in the here and now.  He handled the Sleeping Beauties’ personal belongings, or for one client, an artist named Bobby (RZA).  

However, Alejandro was awakened with his walking papers after a critical faux pas. 

The more significant issue for our young hero is that he no longer has an employer to sponsor his work visa, and this El Salvador resident will be forced to leave the U.S. if he doesn’t find another stat! 

As “luck” would have it, he finds a new position with Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton) as her assistant, but she may be the most neurotic boss in recent movie history.  

Elizabeth’s disheveled appearance of vintage, layered textiles, gnarled locks of pink with blondish roots peaking from the top of her head, and Raggedy Ann rouge on her cheeks indicate that emotional stability isn’t her strong suit.  The woman probably has an undiagnosed case of borderline personality disorder, while she barks confusing orders, bathes in inefficiency, and regularly responds with “Don’t scream at me,” while Alejandro offers polite, soft-spoken suggestions to course correct.  

If there’s a silver lining, our pink-headed friend ultimately means well, but her methods march in madness.  The infamous “Office Space” (1999) boss, Bill Lumbergh (Gary Cole), may have his staff work on the weekends, but at least they’ll be filling out the TPS reports in peace.  

Still, Alejandro needs this job while he waits for Elizabeth to officially sign the paperwork to sponsor him and satisfy the whole work visa thing.  

This is the premise for “Problemista”; the comedy is Torres’ first feature-film directorial effort.  The 37-year-old also wrote the film as well. 

Although the premise is straightforward, stylistically, the film is wildly eccentric, like a cross between “Being John Malkovich” (1999) and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022). 

Frequently, the audience must jump between two twisted worlds: modern-day New York City and the maze inside Alejandro’s head.  Torres pleads his case that The Big Apple (or the United States, in general) in 2023 is a miserable place and time for the immigrant experience or for anyone simply trying to establish secure roots in society.  

Indeed, Millennials have suffered through 9/11, the housing crash, insane tuition hikes, crowded job markets, and the housing boom that makes mortgages out of reach.  

Alejandro is simply attempting to find a job and stay in the country while multitasking to realize his dream position as a toy maker at Hasbro.  Still, the everything-seems-out-of-reach Millennial feeling rings true here.

Anyway, what is present in the real world?  

Clutter, individual pieces of trash, or piles of Hefty garbage bags seem ever-present in nearly every shot of the city, like a dystopian society where littering is an Olympic sport, and garbage men have been on strike for months.  

Alejandro’s reality isn’t pleasant.  Living with seemingly five roommates in a cramped apartment, desperately trying to keep his bank account above $0, and following Elizabeth’s twisty directions – where taking one step forward and three steps back is a productive day – can be exhausting.  

It’s also exhausting for the audience.  

Swinton’s Elizabeth is a tremendous force of confusion and dismay, like accidentally sending a fork down a garbage disposal while Slayer’s “Reign in Blood” blasts on 11, and the dog barks at the mailman.  

Which immediate clatter do you address first?  

Calgon, take me away! 

Well, cheers to Tilda because she delivers a searing, purposely over-the-top performance.  Elizabeth’s machine-gun banter, which tends to shoot down everybody within eyeshot throughout the movie, is impressive.  However, her nails-on-a-chalkboard/fork-swirling-in-a-garbage-disposal act is a chore to digest after the first act.  Since Elizabeth and Alejandro are the two principal players onscreen, there are few chances for refuge.   

(Think of “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006).  Even though Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) is an incredibly difficult boss to Andy (Anne Hathaway), audiences – including this critic - relish their moments of tense chemistry, but I often winced when Elizabeth and Alejandro were present in the same room.)

When the two aren’t combatting over FileMaker Pro or scouting out an art gallery to showcase 13 paintings of eggs, Alejandro struggles to find a job by talking to an oddball, unfunny genie encased in wires on the Internet.  He also anxiously crawls through an endless dollhouse designed by Steven Hawking on LSD or argues with a Bank of America employee while trapped in a constricting rock formation.  

No question, Torres has a wonderous imagination.  He seems to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the screen, including a slinky that doesn’t slink down a flight of stairs and Elizabeth dressing up in a dragon-like costume from the old Sid and Marty Krofft days.  

“Problemista” doesn’t have a creative idea problem in the slightest, and Swinton and Torres (with his Justin Long-like look and tone from “Dodgeball: True Underdog Story” (2004)) offer several amusing moments over 104 minutes.  Rooting for Alejandro is extremely easy, and his situation appears impossible.  These aspects are immensely desirable when building a screenplay, but Alejandro and Elizabeth’s working relationship dominates the film, and this critic needed more breaks from their caustic dynamic.  Still, his flaky roommates and her new smug intern weren’t enough.  Neither are the frequent jumps into kooky weirdness, and there just isn’t enough comedy or normalcy to balance out the rough edges. 

Still, “Problemista” follows through – with its eccentric, imaginative nature - to the end, and Isabella Rossellini wonderfully narrates the story for our lead.  How about that?  Hey, Torres has a bright future as a director.  He has a lot to say.  Just maybe, in this case, less innovation is more. 

That’s a relatively easy problem to fix.   

Jeff’s ranking

2/4 stars

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Frida – Movie Review

Directed by:  Carla Gutierrez

Runtime:  84 minutes

‘Frida’:  Gutierrez’s documentary thoughtfully paints an intimate look at this influential icon

Director Carla Gutierrez’s documentary about one of the most memorable 20th-century artists - Magdalena Carmen Frida Kahlo y Calderon (a.k.a. Frida Kahlo), universally known for her self-portraits - should enlighten broad audiences, those who deeply know her work and Frida novices who may have seen “Self-Portrait with Monkey” once on a 2” by 2” magnet at a flea market. 

The film chronologically markets Ms. Kahlo’s life (1907 – 1954) from her days as a toddler in 1910 to her passing in 1954.  Gutierrez and her team’s conventional use of a (mostly) straightforward timeline offers a sturdy foundation to help support two imaginative facets – the narration and animation style - of this 84-minute presentation.    

Rather than include a slew of current historians who express Frida’s impact on her home country (Mexico) and the worldwide art-world community, Fernanda Echevarria narrates from Ms. Kahlo’s own words – from past writings and interviews - as an effective storytelling device to convey personal confessionals.  

Gutierrez and Echevarria intimately reveal the artist’s thoughts about her marriage, mental and physical struggles with near-crippling ailments (from a catastrophic accident), reasoning for painting portraits, underlying emotions about wealthy art clients, admiration for her father, and feelings over past lovers.    

“The handrail went through me like a sword through a bull.”

“I now inhabit a world of pain.”

“I paint because I need to.”

“Make love, take a bath, and make love again.”

Words from beyond the grave lead the movie.  Visually, Gutierrez finds and presents an incalculable number of photographs and videos, including clips from the 1920s, to support the distinctive, individual words uttered.  Some of the black-and-white still and moving photos –sometimes splashed with bits of color - are of Frida and her family, but there are heaps of records from her time with Diego.  We witness their everyday existence and travels to the United States and France, providing context for her personal and professional “faces.”  

Diego was a vast influence on Frida’s art, and at times, the movie could almost be called “Frida and Diego”, because he’s featured so prominently.  The film provides several examples of Mr. Rivera’s artwork, including massive murals, ones sought by the industry’s admirers and Corporate America, like the Ford family.  Diego was a heavy man at 6’ 1”, and Frida was thin with a height of 5’ 3”, so they were referred to as an “elephant and a dove,” but rather than belabor their physical differences, the doc dives into his grand successes (that sparked their travel) and his divisive infidelities which harmed their relationship. 

In addition to the emotional harm, the movie dedicates difficult but necessary screentime to the aforementioned accident, as the emotional and physical trauma had enormous impacts on Frida’s headspace and paintings, and Gutierrez and Echevarria undoubtedly illuminate the dark connections.  In addition to the verbal reflections and historical images, the film’s animation team splashes dozens of wonderous eccentric delights with stop-motion animation - like a less exaggerated “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” style - that showcases the woman’s most famous and lesser-known works.  

Glorious, moving examples of “The Two Fridas”, “Diego and I”, “The Wounded Deer”, “Henry Ford Hospital”, and many others thoughtfully parade on-screen, reflecting Frida’s marriage and the ongoing physical pain that plagued her for decades. 

The movie features a telling quote from our heroine: “In my life, I’ve only painted the honest expression of myself to say what I couldn’t in any other way.”  

However, in less than 90 minutes, Gutierrez remarkably paints Frida’s emotional expressions in multiple thoughtful ways. 

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Love Lies Bleeding - Movie Review

Directed by: Rose Glass

Written by: Rose Glass and Weronika Tofilska

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Katy O'Brian, and Ed Harris

Runtime:  104 minutes

Kristen Stewart becomes the queer icon of the internet’s dreams in ‘Love Lies Bleeding’

One shouldn’t need much prompting to buy a ticket to see a mulleted Kristen Stewart in a muscle shirt lay waste to bad men with her hot bodybuilder girlfriend in a dirtbag lesbian noir. If that alone doesn’t sell you on the potential of cinema as an artform, I don’t know that a review is going to move the needle in your soul. 

But just in case: “Love Lies Bleeding” rules and gives Stewart a worthy platform to be the queer icon of the internet’s dreams

The sophomore effort from British director Rose Glass (who helmed the God-haunted if undercooked 2019 horror film “Saint Maud”) is a geyser of female strength and rage. It’s a grime-slick riot, a confluence of pain and pleasure in which violence pulses under the neon-light surface like a bulging vein surging with steroids. 

Stewart is instantly winning as Lou, a louche, glassy-eyed muscle-gym manager in a dead-end desert town we first meet unclogging a toilet while sweaty, aggro men do reps underneath motivation signs like “Pain is weakness leaving the body” and “The body achieves what the mind believes.”

There’s not much for a girl like Lou in a place like this, and so it doesn’t take much prompting for her to fall hard for new arrival Jackie (Katy O’Brian), a mesmerizingly buff hitchhiker stopping for a spell on her way to a body-building competition in Las Vegas. Jackie’s only there to pump iron and stash tips from her new job waitressing at a gun range. But a hookup with Lou turns into a 24-hour-sleepover and – improbably, beautifully in Ronald Reagan’s America, when this is set – something that with the help of a few ravenous sex scenes starts to look like a serious relationship.

But there’s rot underneath the spangly unitards and jeweled glow of neon gym signs. Jackie’s hitched her way into a domestic drama that’s about to explode, leaving bodies in its wake. 

“Love Lies Bleeding” recalls nothing so much as Kathryn Bigelow’s neo-Western vampire classic “Near Dark.” There are no fangs here, but instead a She-Hulk waiting to be unleashed. Like Bigelow before her, Glass has filled her dusty dead-end Southwestern town with memorable characters and their violent delights. A gaunt, nefarious Ed Harris (whose skinny face, balding pate and long, pale tendrils of hair make him look like the Crypt Keeper) runs guns and keeps tabs on his estranged daughter, Lou. A porn-stached Dave Franco serves as his henchman, playing the abusive husband of Lou’s battered sister, Beth (Jena Malone). 

It's a powder keg waiting to go off, and Jackie is the match. 

Not all the film’s big swings clear the fence, but Glass’ ambition, matched by powerhouse performances from Stewart and O'Brian, marks a striking leap forward in the young director’s artistic vision. “Love Lies Bleeding” is a tonal tightrope-walk, a pas de deux of seriousness and silliness, tenderness and profanity, pleasure and pain, with a dash of the supernatural. It’s slicked in effluvia, packed with sweaty closeups of pained bodies. Sucking turns into biting, caresses into grips as Lou and Jackie fight – sometimes with each other – for liberation and self-determination that will take more than physical strength. 

“The body achieves what the mind believes” isn’t some cliché platitude after all. In “Love Lies Bleeding,” it’s a promise. 

Barbara’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Dune: Part Two – Movie Review

Directed by:  Denis Villeneuve

Written by:  Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts, based on Frank Herbert’s noveL

Starring:  Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgard, Austin Butler, Dave Bautista, Florence Pugh, and Christopher Walken

Runtime:  156 minutes

‘Dune’ is a spectacular, procedural exercise, but ‘Dune: Part Two’ burns more calories

“It’s been a while since you’ve had one of those nightmares,” Chani (Zendaya) says and asks, “Tell me, what was it about?”

“It’s only fragments.  Nothing’s clear,” Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) replies.

This exchange opens Warner Bros. Pictures’ “Dune: Part Two, Official Trailer 3”, and director/co-writer Denis Villeneuve’s dream project - his science fiction cinematic vision adapted from Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel – continues in theatres on Feb. 29, 2024, more than a while since his first film’s release on Oct. 22, 2021.  

Well, it’s only been two years, four months, and seven days, but it’s been an eternity for diehard fans.  

“Dune: Part Two” – listed with a 166-minute runtime but ended after 156, according to this critic’s watch – offers a deliberately leisure pace for “Dune” fanatics, “Dune” novices, and everyone in between to absorb the grandeur and pageantry of a story between good and evil, oppressors and underdogs, and choice versus fate, all on a faraway desert planet called Arrakis in the year 10191.  

Villeneuve’s follow-up follows right after the events of his 2021 predecessor.  He leans into the regal formalities of Paul’s journey toward (possibly) transforming into a messiah for the Fremen, desert dwellers who spend their lives fighting the Harkonnen, a chalky-white race, hell-bent on military might and controlling spice production on the planet. 

Hence, the quote that opens the film: “Power over spice is power over all.” 

Paul copes with the fallout of slaying Jamis (Babs Olusanmokun) - at the end of the first film – and the Fremen are divided, between North and South, about spiritual beliefs and whether Mr. Atreides is the “chosen one,” a title that he doesn’t readily accept.  

He wishes to fight for his fallen house and late father, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), alongside the Fremen, honor and respect his mother, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and discover a hopeful romance with Chani.  

Meanwhile, the grotesque Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard) and the distant Emperor (Christopher Walken) push back against the Fremen (also referred to as “rats”) with force through the Harkonnen and Imperial troops, assemblies of war machines called ornithopters that look like a steampunk collaboration of helicopters and dragonflies, and the Baron’s sicko nephew, a creep with an utterly punchable face, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler).  

For those who loved “Dune” (2021), this film – in the words of Jerry Maguire - will most likely “complete (you),” as Denis bathes in the visual majesty of Arrakis, a place chock-full of dunes and moons.  According to IMDb, photography in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates help provide the former.  

If you didn’t care for the first film, the second falls into similar patterns of pacing and procedures.  “Dune” is a spectacular, procedural exercise, but “Dune: Part Two” burns more calories, just enough for me to recommend it.

Granted, it’s been over two years since this critic has watched the first picture, but “Part Two” seems to devote more screentime to action set pieces, including the curious floating abilities of Harkonnen soldiers’ suits.  The ornithopter assault looks straight out of the Vietnam War, and the film includes moments of sabotage of the massive spice drilling apparatuses, a few sandworm surfing escapades, and a third-act collision between imperial and Harkonnen forces versus Fremen battalions.  

However, the final battle feels truncated and ends too abruptly.

From a purely cinematic perspective, Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser transport us – with Oscar-caliber sweat - outside our comfortable theatre seats and into a foreign, remote, and mesmerizing abyss.  Machines and sporadic traces of life bid for survival in an excessively arid climate while a perpetual power struggle of wills, 400-meter sandworms, cannons, swords, and laser guns clash under a brutal sun.  

However, “Dune: Part Two” is not filled with physical matches throughout the two-and-a-half-hour-plus runtime.  These aggressive on-screen collisions appear as small mini-events of militaristic majesty between long spells of dry discourse.  

For the pomp and circumstance surrounding the immense scale and scope that both films stride about with pride, Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts dedicate countless moments of sequestered individual exchanges.    

“Dune: Part Two” is not excessively conversational, but this movie is not the thrill-a-minute “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015) either, and the main players seem to repeat the same basic ideas while standing or sitting around and pondering what it all means on piles of sand and rocky buttes or inside antiseptic, metallic conference rooms.  

For instance, The Baron frequently complains about his spice production problems, and Beast Rabban (Dave Bautista) repeatedly takes the verbal brunt of the operation’s shortcomings.  Jessica has a raging battle with drinking worm urine, and Paul’s future is her favorite go-to topic, ad nauseam.  The narrative often cuts to Feyd-Rautha so that he can randomly act like a psychopath for a few minutes at a time.

Still, the leads and the seemingly limitless extras don elaborate, eye-catching textiles of opulent royal intricacies, menacing military armor, and purposely unflattering ragged wrapped rags.  

(For the record, “Dune: Part Two” seems destined for Oscar nominations in visual effects, costume design, and sound.)   

Regarding the actors who wear these decorative costumes, Javier Bardem (who plays Paul’s biggest supporter, Stilgar), Ferguson, and Butler stand out the most.  

Chalamet and Zendaya work fine together, but their initial chemistry during the first hour wanes during the last 90-plus minutes, primarily because the script deviates from Paul and Chani’s loving focus and into mechanical questions about their pragmatic fit with Mr. Atreides’ destiny and additional time in propping up Feyd-Rautha’s bullying tactics.  

Unfortunately, the film wastes Florence Pugh and Walken by barely offering them anything to do as Princess Irulan and the Emperor.  They deliver their lines on a nondescript sound stage for the most part, and audiences might desperately wish for some mass quantities of spicy cowbell that never clang true. 

As far as Chalamet playing a messiah, is his performance convincing?  Well, he seems fine enough, and Timothee isn’t accidentally dropping his sword during the most critical moments, so there’s that.  

Speaking of which, if the Emperor, the Harkonnen, and the Fremen have access to guns, why use swords in the first place?  

A few other questions come to mind.

Why didn’t the Baron immediately murder Beast Rabban when spice production initially fell on his watch, especially when the gluttonous leader is incredibly ruthless with everyone else?  Perhaps the Baron is a WWE fan.  Hey, it’s possible. 

When did Chani secure an ornithopter?  It must have occurred off-screen.

How does anyone find their way around Arrakis without a compass?

These are fair questions, but here’s one more:  How often do you see someone ride a 400-meter invertebrate like a surfboard?   

What?  Exactly. 

Bravo, Mr. Villeneuve.  Bravo. 

Jeff’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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Golden Years – Movie Review

Directed by:  Barbara Kulcsar

Written by:  Petra Biondina Volpe

Starring:  Esther Gemsch, Stefan Kurt, Ueli Jaggi, Martin Vischer, Isabelle Barth, and Gundi Ellert

Runtime:  88 minutes

‘Golden Years’ offers valuable insights, but during a recycled cinematic journey

“I’ll stick with you, Baby, for a thousand years.  Nothing’s gonna touch you in these golden years.” – “Golden Years” (1975) by David Bowie

“Growing old isn’t for the weak.” – Michi (Gundi Ellert)

Today is a milestone for Peter (Stefan Kurt).  He’s retiring from a suburban corporate job after 37 years of service, and our tall, youthful senior citizen and his equally spry wife, Alice (Esther Gemsch), will embark on their new journey: easing into their golden years.  For Peter, sleeping in rests on his agenda, but soon into his day-jobless existence, he awakens with a case of health kick-itis, complete with a vegan diet and obsessive bike riding, much to Alice’s chagrin.  She hoped Peter’s free schedule would bring them closer, as rekindling romance snuggles at the top of her wish list.  

Well, these two ships passing within the same household embark on a lavish cruise – courtesy of their grown kids, Susanne (Isabelle Barth) and Julian (Martin Vischer) - but will their marriage of 42 years be left in a wake of opposing expectations?

In director Barbara Kulcsar’s “Golden Years”, she answers this Peter-Alice question during an 88-minute runtime, and long-time couples everywhere might relate to our hero and heroine’s on-screen circumstances.  For certain, “Golden Years” offers a valuable trek of commiseration for movie audiences.  Unfortunately, the film relies too heavily on the leads to carry the picture’s emotional weight, as the joyless, unimaginative script treads water and eventually sinks into bland domestic quarrels over vacuuming, weekday overdrinking, and a lifeless road trip, despite cinematographer Tobias Dengler’s gorgeous captures of the Mediterranean Sea, Marseille, and Switzerland’s countryside.  

Traveling to IMDb, one will discover that “Golden Years” is labeled as a comedy.  Now, humor is in the funny bone of the beholder, but this critic didn’t laugh once during this nearly 90-minute feature.  Although Peter’s lazy attempt at a household chore and a campy intro scene did induce a couple of smiles from yours truly.  

Peter and Alice are coping with a late-life crisis, and they spend most of their screen time complaining to one another or contemplating their uncertain future in silence.  Kulcsar and screenwriter Petra Biondina Volpe could have balanced the gloomy tone with some well-placed comedic circumstances to deepen our engagement with these characters, but the film never does.  

For instance, Peter’s cycling hobby is a perfect way to explore his vulnerability through sight gags, like, say, a random 8-year-old passing him on a straightaway or our retiree chasing down a just-out-of-reach ice cream truck.  Instead, we witness Peter struggle on the bike, and at one point, he plops on a roadside bench while pondering his questionable fitness. Meanwhile, Alice is frustrated with the lack of intimacy in their relationship, and rather than parade a brawny group of local firemen to her immediate sightline via a conga line, she gloomily confides with a new friend, Michi (Gundi Ellert), about her troubles. 

Sometimes, the film explores this couple’s issues with nuance and care, including Gemsch and Kurt addressing a clumsy sexual encounter with grace.  However, the one-note story is built with a low ceiling, where we bump our heads on recycled melodrama and cliches despite open-doorway-distractions of an eccentric pair in an RV, a feminist commune, and a lovely stroll through warm, beautiful Marseille.  

We’re also treated to snappy, happy tunes like “Sara perche ti amo” and “Oye Como Va”, so some joy appears in the cinematic itinerary.  Still, the smooth ditties are muted by a sudden death, a grieving widower, Susanne whining about her miserable life, and a delightful cruise ship – the Costa Smeralda – but with absolutely no eccentric, oddball characters or experiences floating about. 

Well, at least Julian is happy, but we also discover the promiscuous 20 or 30-something has slept with about 200 women.  Are Kulcsar and Volpe stating that Julian’s dating lifestyle is the golden ticket to happiness?  No, but – in a way - Peter and Alice can learn from their son about living in the moment.  Happily ever after may still happen if they “stick with (each other) for a thousand years.”  Will it?  You’ll have to watch “Golden Years” to find out, or maybe stay home and dust off a David Bowie record instead.  

Jeff’s ranking

2/4 stars

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Drive-Away Dolls - Movie Review

Directed by: Ethan Coen

Written by: Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke

Starring: Margaret Qualley, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Beanie Feldstein

Runtime:  84 minutes

Ethan Coen’s queer crime caper ‘Drive-Away Dolls’ can’t find even road

A locked briefcase is a kind of cinematic Chekhov's gun. When a tough guy comes looking for it, heads are going to roll, sometimes literally. 

In the hallowed tradition of “Pulp Fiction” and “Kiss Me Deadly,” director Ethan Coen – of the Coen brothers, flying solo – hides one such sinister plot device in the trunk of a car driven by a pair of oblivious young lesbians too concerned by sex and heartbreak to know they’re being hunted as they cruise down the East Coast, Florida-bound 

But instead of containing nuclear annihilation, a criminal’s soul, or even a million dollars, Coen’s briefcase contains something much, much dumber. Call to mind the dumbest thing you can conjure. However dumb you’re thinking, it’s even dumber. 

That’s both the charm and bafflement of “Drive-Away Dolls,” a raucous sex comedy neo-noir that’s as fun and unbalanced as that genre mashup sounds. 

Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) make for a road trip odd couple, the former a fast-talking, philandering louche kicked out by her girlfriend Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), the latter a buttoned-up, corporate, type-A worrywart still nursing the wounds of a long-ago breakup. Pure plot contrivance pairs the platonic buddies in a Dodge Aries mistakenly loaned for a one-way trip south. 

Their destination – Tallahassee, to visit Marian’s aunt – is the same as the briefcase’s drop-off point, where an interested party awaits its imminent arrival, then panics when the girls don’t make the delivery they don’t know they’re meant to make as they squabble over whether and how Marian needs to get laid. 

Hijinks naturally ensue. 

Coen wrote the script with his wife and longtime editing partner Tricia Cooke for his first solo feature film without brother Joel Coen after four decades, 18 films together and an armful of Oscars together. While Joel’s first solo film, 2021’s gorgeously bleak “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” was moody and formalistic, Ethan bends zany with Sam Raimi-esque camerawork, all zooms and tilted angles and goofball transitions between scenes (not to mention psychedelic interludes with a flower-child Miley Cyrus speaking from what looks like the inside of a lava lamp – the Dude wants a hit of whatever she’s smoking).

Little surprise, then, that in the riot of gags and camera angles, “Drive-Away Dolls” can’t find even keel in tone or structure, careening from one joke to the next, its main characters hanging on for dear life. 

A charismatic Qualley gets the closest to figuring it out, relishing her character’s classic Coen cadence, a loquacious bumpkin waxing philosophical about female anatomy in lilting Texas twang and a heavy-lidded swagger that recalls nothing so much as Nicolas Cage in the Coens’ screwball masterpiece “Raising Arizona.” The film’s rife, too, with classic Coen highbrow nods sprinkled in amongst the lowbrow buffoonery. Marian’s girlfriend is desperate to hand off an irascible little dog named Alice B. Toklas, while the literature of Henry James enjoys a shockingly large footprint in a film so full of sex toys. 

There are pleasures to be had, certainly. But like Jamie’s many one-night stands, the pleasures are fleeting. 

Barbara’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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Io Capitano - Movie Review

Directed by: Matteo Garrone

Written by: Matteo Garrone, Massimo Ceccherini, and Massimo Gaudioso

Starring:  Seydou Sarr, Moustapha Fall, and Issaka Sawadogo

Runtime:  121 minutes

‘Io Capitano’ humanizes refugee crisis and finds a star in first-time actor Seydou Sarr

Headlines inform, but often dehumanize. They’re all numbers, not names, statistics instead of faces.

“Migrant boat capsizes off Libya, 400 feared dead.”

“Massive loss of life reported in latest Mediterranean tragedy.”

“40 migrants 'killed by fumes' in hold of boat off Libya.”

Who were these people, so desperate they risked desks in the desert and on the high seas? What were their names? What were their dreams? If not us, who weeps for them now that they’re gone? Italian filmmaker Matteo Garrone puts heart behind the headlines in “Io Capitano,” a humanizing dramatization of the refugee crisis that’s resulted in thousands of unnamed deaths of Africans seeking refuge in Europe. 

Two such desperate people are Senegalese teenage cousins Seydou and Moussa, played with seeming ease by newcomers Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall. The enterprising, sweet and streetwise boys have a gift for song and a shared dream of something more than dilapidated shacks with caving roofs for their families. Together, the boys make music, fantasize about one day signing autographs for white people once they’re famous musicians, and squirrel away cash from odd jobs until they think they have enough to fund the perilous trek from Dakar to Sicily.

“Io Capitano” hints at the disillusionment that awaits Seydou and Moussa on the other side of the Mediterranean. “You think Europe is better than Africa. Europe is nothing like you imagine. What you see on TV is not real,” the boys are warned. They’re shocked to learn there are people in Europe, a land of plenty, who sleep on the streets. 

But the European-produced film, nominated for a Best International Feature Film Oscar for Italy and winner of the Venice Film Festival’s Silver Lion award, does not meaningfully grapple with Europe’s role in the refugee crisis – the boats turned back, the drowned and suffocated bodies, the closed borders that consign the desperate to death. In “Io Capitano,” both the perpetrators of suffering and the suffering themselves are all African. 

And there’s no limit to the suffering experienced on the trek between Senegal and the Libyan coast at the hands of smugglers, soldiers, and profiteers. The two boys, so full of song at home, bear mute witness to unspeakable horrors: dead bodies prostrate in the sand, rigid as fallen statues, men flung from rocking truck beds and tortured in secret prisons. Seydou’s face burns, scars, twists, and ages as it takes in humanity’s worst atrocities. But it also reveals a kind of enlightenment. 

Though “Io Capitano” lacks political mettle, it’s overflowing in humanity, especially in the grace of Sarr’s beatific face filling the screen with awe and terror. Garrone’s past work has fluctuated between the brutally grim (“Gomorrah,” “Dogman”) and the opulently fantastical (“Pinocchio,” “Tale of Tales”); here, Garrone marries the sensibilities. Like all heroes’ journeys, Seydou and Moussa’s is touched by the divine, a spiritual dimension glimpsed at the edges of terror as visions of angels and ancestors aid Seydou.

It’s possible they’re just the hallucinations of a boy near death. But when the beaten-but-not-broken boy proclaims, “God is with us!” one can’t help but believe. 

Ranking: 3 out of 4 stars

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The Monk and the Gun – Movie Review

Directed and written by:  Pawo Choyning Dorji

Starring:  Tandin Wangchuk, Tandin Sonam, Harry Einhorn, and Deki Lhamo

Runtime:  107 minutes

‘The Monk and the Gun’:  Dorji’s thoughtful approach will fire up audience applause

“You don’t think he’s going to kill anyone.  He’s a monk, right?” – Ron (Harry Einhorn) 

“I don’t know, Man. We live in strange times.” – Benji (Tandin Sonam)

Director/writer Pawo Choyning Dorji’s film isn’t strange but beautifully eccentric. 

Over a deliberately casual pace of 107 minutes, “The Monk and the Gun” introduces the brawny themes of politics and Western influences on the genial, gentle community of Ura, a secluded town in Bhutan.  Through comedy, dramatic theatre, and – yes - some palatable tension, Dorji delivers powerful, persuasive messages through exceptionally thoughtful storytelling.  

The screenplay’s relaxed tones and cinematographer Jigme Tenzing’s sweeping, wide shots of the peaceful, rolling countryside entice us into warm pleasantries of a down-to-earth existence, one without the hubbub of noisy industry or distracting media memoranda that gleefully promotes conflict and engenders consternation.  Still, this unassuming Bhutanese community offers answers to some complex questions about the human condition. 

Bhutan, with a population of about 800,000, is the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined, and it’s sandwiched between two behemoth authorities, India and China.  

Set in 2006, Bhutan is on the brink of turning from monarchy rule toward democratic reforms, as well-intentioned officials descend on the unsuspecting village of Ura and attempt to hold – with the help of some eager townsfolk – a mock election as a trial run.  

A hey-let’s-see-how-this-goes exercise.  

However, a voter-driven election is as foreign to Ura residents as a paper route to a Manhattan debutante.   

Simultaneously, the Internet and television have also arrived, and combined with the upcoming vote, Dorji sprinkles in distinctly memorable moments of observational humor as the local populace reacts to this new stimuli. 

For instance, determining one’s date of birth during the registration process becomes problematic for one potential voter, and Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk) – the monk noted in the movie’s title – guesses at the definition of the never-heard-before word “election” in the most surprising of fashions.  Speaking of fashion, TV is now a coveted science-fiction staple, as 10 to 15 Bhutan citizens huddle around a coffee shop and stare at the square box’s magnificence as U.S. suburban families did during the 1950s.  

In fact, a particular British movie spy – born into cinema in 1962 – becomes the object of the group’s gaze.  

Meanwhile, a local lama observes the upcoming sweeping changes in Bhutan and asks Tashi, “Can you get me guns?”  

Why would a lama bear arms?  Do desperate times call for extreme measures?  

Well, our young disciple follows his wishes as Tashi treks to the house of an elderly man who possesses a rifle from the U.S. Civil War, one that an American collector (Einhorn) covets as well.  

The race to retrieve this gun commences, but not in a “The Cannonball Run” (1981) style.  

Tashi strides on foot while a local, Benji, chauffeurs Ron in his compact burgundy Suzuki Quick Silver, a Fiat-sized vehicle – with four doors, mind you – that calmly and coolly saunters along Ura’s one-lane, winding dirt roads, as the occasional wandering dog trots from the other direction.   

Throughout the film, Pawo volleys between the struggles of an election and possessing a specific gun as the semi-irresistible forces of Western culture knock on Bhutan’s door, step inside, reach into the refrigerator, and plunk down on the couch as potentially permanent guests.  

In the house of Bhutan, these macro collision points unfold with delicate but profound individual realizations, including a mother’s (Deki Lhamo) frank concern about the potential cultural losses on her elementary-school-aged daughter.  

Some may view the Bhutanese as a simple community whose lives can only be improved with democracy, the Internet, and television, but on “The Monk and the Gun” IMDb page, Dorji explains in an interview that the film is “a celebration of the quality of innocence.” 

He adds, “As we embraced (democracy), we are suddenly told by the modern world that being innocent is being ignorant.  With this film, I wanted to show there’s a difference between innocence and ignorance.”  

This movie critic votes “Yes.”  Dorji certainly accomplishes his wish, as moviegoers should be fired up with applause after experiencing “The Monk and the Gun”.  

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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Suncoast – Movie Review

Directed and written by: Laura Chinn

Starring: Nico Parker, Laura Linney, Woody Harrelson, and Cree Kawa

Runtime: 101 minutes

Parker and Linney deliver glowing, memorable performances in ‘Suncoast’

“You all have, like, saved my life.” – Doris (Nico Parker)

Doris is a 17-year-old Clearwater, Fla. teen. She lives in a pink house in a town with constant sunshine and a nearby beach, and our lead attends the reputable (and expensive) Clearwater Christian High School. Our heroine - apparently - leads a life that most kids in freezing cold Duluth, Minn. or snowy Buffalo, N.Y. could only imagine in their wildest hopes and dreams.

Alas, Doris’ most recent six years have not been ideal, not by a long shot.

Quite the opposite.

Her brother, Max (Cree Kawa), has brain cancer. He can no longer speak, see, or walk, and Doris has been his part-time caretaker and full-time agonizing sister, along with her anxious, snappy, and single mother, Kristine (Laura Linney). Kristine’s husband and Doris’ dad sadly passed away 14 years prior.

Very early in the first act of director/writer Laura Chinn’s indie drama, “Suncoast”, Kristine drives Max and Doris – in their beat-up Ford pickup, with the “R” and “D” missing on its tailgate – to place their beloved son and brother in a hospice center called Suncoast.

Chinn’s feature film debut is semi-autobiographical, and she tells “Vulture” in a Jan. 2024 interview, “When I was a teenager, my brother was moved into a hospice with Terri Schiavo, and her story was on the national news. I knew I wanted to tell that story someday.”

Terri Schiavo’s plight gripped the nation in 2005 as her husband and parents debated in the courts about Ms. Schiavo’s right to life, and this saga serves as a noisy backdrop for Doris’ family quandary. However, there is no dispute in Max’s case. His time left on Earth will tragically end due to natural causes.

“Suncoast”, which opened at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, primarily champions Doris’ causes, ones of frustration, isolation, and her budding reach to thrive as a “normal” teenager.

The film shines with memorable performances from Parker and Linney. Woody Harrelson adds some nice touches. He plays Paul, Doris’ new friend who visits Suncoast to support Terri. Chinn also makes plentiful use of a southern small-town community. Even though filming occurred in South Carolina, just about everything on screen feels like Florida with warm tones, blue skies, and unkempt spaces dotted with unwanted – but accepted - crabgrass, including a wide-open spot where a 17-year-old kid learns how to drive.

Chinn uses conflicting tones and attempts to balance – although not perfectly - grief and loss with spurts of unexpected comedy and Doris’ trouble-free, coming-of-age journey. With Max’s death looming, Linney is flat-out fantastic in delivering frequent sarcastic, biting comments born from Kristine’s frustration and angst over the miserable cards that life dealt to Max. Our stressed-out mom casually refers to the hospice director as a sociopath and tells a concerned police officer that she “makes hospice bombs” in her spare time. No question, Kristine loves Doris, but our teen lead is never free from her mother’s criticism, demands, and scrutiny.

However, this also begs the question. Kristine unquestionably accepts that Paul, a 60-something man, is Doris’ new friend. On what planet would this 21st-century mother roll with Doris and Paul becoming pseudo-BFFs? Apparently, this one. Still, Harrelson’s Paul fills a purpose as a complementary adult for Doris to lean on for support, like Woody’s turn as Mr. Bruner in “The Edge of Seventeen” (2016).

Chinn plays with a couple of welcoming, noticeable contrasts in addition to Kristine and Paul.

For instance, Doris lives in a working-class neighborhood. She’s a poor girl growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, err…beach, and her wealthy classmates, who previously ignored this invisible introvert, suddenly accept her. It’s a classic – or recycled, depending on your point of view - case of income disparity via “Pretty in Pink” (1986) or “Some Kind of Wonderful” (1987). However, in this movie, Doris’ discoveries of friendship, games of truth or dare, and keg stands all become positive encounters with little or no resistance.

Yes, social breakthroughs of boyfriend discourse and gulps of alcohol present a reprieve from the cloudy overhang of her brother’s impending passing, but the constant camaraderie admittedly feels lightweight and without gravitas or consequences with her new friends, Brittany (Ella Anderson), Laci (Daniella Taylor), Nate (Amarr), and Megan (Ariel Martin).

Still, Brittany, Laci, Nate, and Megan are an escape, one free from consternation, and that’s by Chinn’s design. It’s a fair stance, even if one might nod off during affable and predictable shenanigans. Even though “Suncoast” tenders hints of “Valley Girl” (1983) and “Mean Girls” (2004), the writing and chemistry don’t match them.

However, the film’s intended chief disparity is that Doris finally finds a visible existence with her peers simultaneously as Max arrives at Suncoast, as an imminent loss furnishes new beginnings.

These two emotional movements cannot peacefully coexist, and Parker offers some powerful scenes that could shed tears from the driest of ducts.

Nico and we are wholly present in these moments.

Speaking of the present, “Suncoast” stays in the on-screen year of 2005 and doesn’t shuffle with constant flashbacks that could hurt the film’s deliberate, casual pacing, one that allows the audience to travel with Doris, Kristine, and Paul. This leaves Max as an unexplored individual, even though we see his motionless body throughout the picture. Additionally, the audience needs more time with Suncoast’s grief counselor, Sue (Pam Dougherty), and her informal sessions with Kristine. Chinn also explores religion, but more screentime on the pious topic is needed for the deliberation to stick.

Still, Parker’s and Linney’s glowing performances are enough to visit “Suncoast”.

Jeff’s ranking

2.5/4 stars

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The Teachers' Lounge - Movie Review

Directed by: Ilker Catak

Written by: Ilker Catak and Johannes Duncker

Starring: Leonie Benesch, Eva Lobau, Michael Klammer, Anne-Kathrin Gummich, and Leonard Stettnisch

Runtime: 98 minutes

The Oscar-nominated ‘The Teachers’ Lounge’ is more than a textbook whodunit

A crime has been committed.

Actually, a series of them.

An unknown thief or thieves have recently struck an institution, and after the latest larceny, an improvised inquiry is instigated.

This establishment, however, is not a bank or widget manufacturer.

It’s a German middle school set in a middle-class or upper-middle-class neighborhood, and the principal, Dr. Bettina Bohm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), begins a makeshift investigation, including searching the children’s wallets to find the most recent culprit who possibly stole a menial sum of cash.

A new, young, idealistic, and quite popular teacher, Carla (Leonie Benesch), isn’t pleased with this rights violation. Still, when suspicions later rise that the perpetrators have access to the teachers’ lounge, Carla – in an impulsive moment – sets up her laptop’s camera to secretly film inside the sacred schoolteacher sanctuary. However, she inadvertently triggers further turmoil that erupts into the established order of instructor-student harmony…or at least a perceived coherence.

Director/co-writer Ilker Catak’s masterful “The Teachers’ Lounge” – nominated for a 2024 International Feature Film Oscar – leans into and then topples the supposedly robust relationships between parents, students, and educators and then squares his notice on Carla as the chief target and scapegoat of a flawed system and her unfortunate action, one that escalates into an unstable predicament. Benesch (“The White Ribbon” (2009), “Persian Lessons” (2020)) is outstanding here, and her performance has been widely overlooked during award season.

Benesch’s Carla is resolute and resilient, but even this dedicated, strong-willed optimist isn’t immune to enormous pressure from seemingly all sides, including rage from a parent (Eva Lobau) and a child (Leonard Stettnisch), scrutiny from her peers, and collective judgment from the students. Our heroine is composed and professional, but Catak and cinematographer Judith Kaufmann grab their camera and relentlessly follow Carla in the hallways and in and out of classrooms that are filled with emotional minefields. Catak’s frequent close-ups zero in on the tension written all over Carla’s face, and during a September 2023 Toronto International Film Festival screening and Q&A, Ilker calls out that Benesch has a remarkable ability to turn red on command.

With good reason, Carla sees red with anger, embarrassment, and frustration as the movie sharply contrasts her universal admiration before the laptop instance and the ridicule afterward. Attitudes from fellow teachers transform in subtle and obvious fashions through one-on-one discourse, and a collective effort from the student school newspaper becomes downright frightening with an incremental descent into a disapproving frame.

No, “The Teachers’ Lounge” doesn’t resort to “Children of the Corn” (1984) physical tactics (mostly), but a schoolhouse brood shifting into a singularly focused, silent mob mentality will chill your soul, especially as Carla and we simultaneously realize the traps that have been set.

Catak’s film feels like a claustrophobic, tick-tock thriller that Alfred Hitchcock would endorse, one accompanied by Marvin Miller’s nerve-racking score. “Lounge” – which also triples as an ethical-debate narrative and whodunit – zips by with its thrifty 98-minute runtime, and before you know it, the last bell rings, and the end credits roll.

Set down your pens, pencils, or chalk and applaud.

Jeff’s ranking

3.5/4 stars

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The Zone of Interest - Movie Review

Directed by: Jonathan Glazer

Written by: Jonathan Glazer, based on Martin Amis’ book

Starring: Christian Friedel and Sandra Huller

Runtime: 105 minutes

‘The Zone of Interest’ holds us captive to a haunting, surreal perspective of The Holocaust

“Bye, bye, Daddy.” – Hedwig (Sandra Huller)

The morning arrives, and Rudolf (Christian Friedel) prepares for his workday, possibly a Monday.

He climbs on his horse and will move through an open gate, as his workplace is adjacent to his home, separated by only a wall. While holding their infant, Hedwig casually throws out the affable goodbye, adieu, or tschüss, tschüss to Rudolf.

Rudolf and Hedwig Hoss are not an ordinary suburban couple living in Chandler, Ariz. or Orlando, Fla.

It’s 1943, and the pair and their children live in Poland. More specifically, they reside – literally - next to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and Rudolf s the commandant. The man runs the place, a horror show where 1.1 million people died (and nearly 1 million were Jewish) during WWII.

Writer/director Jonathan Glazer (“Sexy Beast” (2000), “Under the Skin” (2013)) brings this sinister history to the big screen in “The Zone of Interest”, adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 book with the same title.

Glazer’s surreal creation is unlike any other Holocaust movie (at least that this critic has seen) because the picture takes a voyeur’s perspective of the Hoss family as they go about their day- to-day activities from behind the scenes, behind closed doors, as friends visit for tea, the family celebrates a birthday, housekeeping chores occupy the busy maid’s time, and Rudolf and Hedwig share pillow talk.

During a TIFF Sept. 10, 2023 screening, Glazer called his film – and he may have been quoting someone else – “’Big Brother’ in a Nazi house.” This critic calls “Zone” chilling, haunting, and a movie that deserves Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, Cinematography, and Sound.

Their lavish locale, a spacious domicile and bountiful grounds - complete with a pool and a garden with sunflowers and kale – occupies the vast majority of the film’s 105-minute runtime, where life flourishes. Meanwhile, well-documented atrocities occur just over the adjoining wall. Rather than visually display the murders, Glazer painstakingly films the camp from the Hoss’ perspective. The tops of the brick-and-mortar housing quarters and “offices” ominously tower over the aforementioned concrete divider while Hedwig proudly praises her garden to her visiting mother and where her kids randomly play.

For other select moments, Glazer will present the active chimney of the camp’s infamous furnace during the bright daylight hours and in the middle of black evenings, when it ferociously glows with a burning orange.

Our ears burn too, as we frequently hear screams and gunshots, but (almost) no one on the Hoss estate acknowledges the gruesome clatter because the house needs cleaning or dinner will shortly commence.

Due to the movie’s bizarre observation of this time and place in history, it becomes a challenging chore to grasp the on-screen events. What is Glazer presenting here?

Indeed, the face of evil is on display; however, during the Jan. 16, 2024 Q&A of “The Zone of Interest” Phoenix Film Society screening, one society member opined that we’re looking at indifference as well.

Indifference.

Indifference to the sounds of suffering and bullets, the smells of burning bodies, and the nature of Rudolf’s business. The latter reveals itself through Rudolf and Hedwig’s discourse of his career aspirations and a composed engineer describing Auschwitz’s efficiencies to an attentive Nazi audience, to name a couple.

No, indifference is not the emotion you will feel when held captive by “The Zone of Interest”.

Jeff’s ranking

4/4 stars

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