Greenland - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Gerald Butler in “Greenland”

In some ways, ‘Greenland’ is a surprising disaster flick, but it’s also a dull, predictable trip

Directed by:  Ric Roman Waugh

Written by:  Chris Sparling

Starring:  Gerald Butler and Morena Baccarin 

“Greenland” – After discovering “Greenland” on your Video On Demand Rolodex, you might assume that the 1-hour 59-minute film is a new Disneynature documentary about the planet’s largest island.  (Greenland is over 800,000 square miles and about nine times bigger than the United Kingdom.) 

Perhaps, this movie is a Werner Herzog doc, but that’s not right because it would’ve been named “Greenland: The Perils and Wonder of a Massive Ice Sheet and Rectifying any Confusion or Conflation with Iceland”. 

No, “Greenland” is a feature, and director Ric Roman Waugh’s picture is a disaster film.   No, the script doesn’t call for the country’s glaciers to melt into the nearby oceans, although that will likely happen in reality and probably sooner rather than later, but this Artic nation is a refuge for our heroes, the Garrity family.

John (Gerald Butler), Allison (Morena Baccarin), and their seven-year-old boy Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd) live in suburban Atlanta, and life used to be swell.  Unfortunately, John and Allison’s marriage is in trouble.  Divorce seems inevitable, although their mutual grace is winning the day.  Still, a cataclysmic event endangers civility on a global scale.  A comet – that someone harmlessly named Clarke – is speeding towards Earth, and with not one but thousands of individual space rocks in a close-knit and deadly collective that will pummel the world and billions of people along with it.  

Yikes!  How dangerous!  I don’t know about your planning skills, but I don’t have a basement, and my Trader Joe’s Panda Puffs cereal box only has enough for two more bowls.  Thank G*d, this is just a movie. 

Anyway, these type of popcorn flicks heavily rely on massive special effects, as individual protagonists and worldwide populations – under duress - desperately attempt to run, drive, and fly to safety.  Movie studios have recently served up plenty of cartoonish nightmare scenarios, including “Deep Impact” (1998), “Dante’s Peak” (1997), “The Quake” (2018), and “2012” (2009), and the latter film stressed out some moviegoers for three years until the clock reached January 1, 2013.  Little did we know that 2020 would be a horrific doozy, but let’s not dive into the pandemic film genre because “Contagion” (2011) is hitting a little too close to home at the moment.

Back to “Greenland”, the Garritys reside in suburban Atlanta.  As they watch (on television) a small portion of Clarke wiping out Tampa like a nuclear explosion, they discover that the government chooses them – like lottery winners - for asylum.  They are the fortunate ones because their friends and neighbors have to find their own shelters.  Yea, good luck with that. Hey, suburbia has its privileges, but when a boulder – the size of a football stadium slams into your city, the one-bedroom studio crowd and the 5,000 sq. foot estate gang are all – except the specifically chosen, like John, Allison, and Nathan – created equal. 

The government hands them VIP bracelets that get them backstage access to a faraway utopia, which we discover is Greenland, but this mom, dad, and son have to fend for themselves after some bad buck.  Actually, John makes a downright terrible decision that carries the most apparent stupidity of horror movie cliché like, “let’s split up to find a way out of this haunted house.”

This moment will provoke the most painstaking, sarcastic groans from the audience who can foresee the next stumbling chain of events.  The Garrity triad needs to somehow get from Georgia to Greenland, and Waugh – through movie “magic” – speeds up on-screen events, so our heroes travel hundreds of miles in a scene or two through occasional happenstance and makeshift transportation conduits.  It’s quite miraculous, and if you ever need travel advice, John Garrity is your agent!  He’s performing these nomadic wonders under extreme pressure too, because pieces of Clarke occasionally drop from the sky to cause out-of-this-world road hazards.  

That’s not exactly true, because - surprisingly - the first real encounter between John and Clarke occurs about 90 minutes into the 2-hour runtime, as Waugh’s film is thankfully void of sweeping and frequent special effects destruction.  Instead, Chris Sparling’s screenplay dives deeply into John’s relationship with Allison and their relationship with Nathan.  Sparling tugs on our heartstrings a bit, especially with dreamy flashbacks of loving embraces and birthday parties, and Butler draws down his action-hero bravado to become much more accessible to many fathers out there.

That doesn’t mean that their implausible journey to an icy Promised Land doesn’t take several telegraphed, predictable turns.  It does, which makes this disaster flick about as exciting as a one-person Main Street parade, and hey, I’d love to travel to Greenland someday, but I don’t need to see this movie again.

(2/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Wild Mountain Thyme - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Emily Blunt and Jamie Dornan in “Wild Mountain Thyme”

'Wild Mountain Thyme': This beautiful-looking rom-com doesn't pass the smell test

Written and directed by:  John Patrick Shanley

Starring:  Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Christopher Walken, and John Hamm

“Wild Mountain Thyme” – This tale of two families – the Reillys and the Muldoons – might be the most Irish film released in 2020 or any year in recent memory.  Gorgeous, sweeping shots of Kelly green prairies and rolling hills, crystal blue streams, winding country roads, a wandering sheep herd, and a horse or two grace the screen with proud bravado.  Accompanied by a lovely score – heavily influenced by the nation’s traditional music (The Chieftains, perhaps?) – this welcoming Emerald Isle setting needs a few random shots of Kerrygold butter, a nearby Guinness distributor, and a Riverdance number to feel complete. 

I’m teasing, but writer/director John Patrick Shanley’s picture certainly has an Irish fairy tale quality.  Filmed in Crossmolina, this enchanted, rustic town in County Mayo - about 250 kilometers from Dublin – is the perfect spot for the movie crew and cast to work their magic.

This light romantic comedy strikes the right tones, because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.  Unfortunately, the earnest attempts at humor repeatedly falter.  Worse yet, rich passion and chemistry must have left on a one-way Aer Lingus flight the day before shooting, which leaves the audience with a clumsy story that feels like an Irish movie parody.  That’s quite a feat, especially with a top-notch cast, including Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Christopher Walken, and John Hamm. 

Anthony Reilly (Dornan) and Rosemary Muldoon (Blunt) are life-long neighbors.  They grew up on their adjacent farms that have been run by their respective families for generations.  In fact, the Reilly farm has blossomed for 121 years, and one might suspect that the Muldoon homestead has flourished for about the same lengthy stint.  The Reillys and Muldoons aren’t the Hatfields and McCoys, but Anthony and Rosemary carry some noted tension. 

Basically, Rosemary wishes that Anthony would court her. 

She’s had a thing for him for years, but Anthony’s too emotionally blind or distracted to recognize Rosemary’s amorous wishes.  In other words, the central plotline is boy-meets-girl, and then boy-stands-up girl for two-plus decades.  Well, as much as Shanley and Dornan attempt to portray Anthony as a clueless klutz, it’s awfully tough for Jamie to convince anyone of that.  Come on now, Dornan is one of the most sought after big-screen leading men, and hey, he was Christian Grey for crying out loud. 

Yes, despite the infamous “Fifty Shades” trilogy, Jamie is a capable actor, and see the WWII thriller “Anthropoid” (2016) for reference, but awkward fool shouldn’t be on this man’s resume.  Still, Shanley wrote that Anthony should frequently look for treasure via a metal detector, randomly trip and fall, practice conversing with Rosemary by speaking to a horse, and finally reveal his irrational internal hurdle in the third act.  Incidentally, Anthony’s mental block is so laughably absurd that any audience-empathy - built for the man over the previous 75 minutes - will quickly be dismissed.

To get from here to there, Anthony and his dad (Walken) argue over his inheritance.  Also, our lead repeatedly ignores and pushes away Rosemary and casually mentions that Ireland “is a terrible place for a decent person.”   With several clunky starts and stops, the film finally starts to run at a brisk, promising pace once Anthony’s American cousin Adam (Hamm) arrives.  Even though he rents a Rolls-Royce, Adam might as well have landed in a solid gold 757 draped in American flags.  Think back to Hamm’s hilarious turn in “Bridesmaids” (2011), but he dials it down here.  Still, Adam’s a direct threat to swoop Rosemary off her feet and fly her back to the U.S.   Sure, this potential love triangle bathes in clichés and standard rom-com formulas, but at least Adam gives the film some purpose for a short while.  Well, “Wild Mountain Thyme” does offer Blunt and Dornan a chance to sing, and their short but notable ballads are quite beautiful.  The locale is too, but this romance doesn’t pass the smell test.

(1.5/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

I'm Your Woman - Movie Review by Jen Johans

Director: Julia Hart

Cast: Rachel Brosnahan, Arinzé Kene, & Marsha Stephanie Blake

Review by Jen Johans

Swanky, immaculate, and impractical, “I'm Your Woman” opens in the luxe '70s Pennsylvania home afforded to Jean (Rachel Brosnahan) by her husband's life of crime. Also given to Jean within the first five minutes of the movie is a new baby that her man Eddie (Bill Heck) delivers like a jumpsuit, string of pearls, or new stereo that might have fallen off the back of a truck in his vicinity over the years.

The only difference between this and the typical swag that the veteran thief brings home is that this property is not only hot but it's also a living and breathing thing and as such, it looks immediately out of place in this cold, catalog ready environment.

Sensing his wife's hesitation, Eddie promises Jean that it's all worked out. “He's our baby,” he explains but then changes his wording later on. He's "your baby,” Eddie says, correcting himself in a line of dialogue that's as much an important distinction as it is an eerie piece of foreshadowing for the film.

You see, mere moments after he says this, Eddie disappears from Jean's life. And no, that's not a spoiler, it's merely the set-up for this engaging piece of storytelling from “Miss Stevens” and “Fast Color” director Julia Hart, who wrote the film along with her husband, producer Jordan Horowitz.

A clever reinvention of '70s cinematic crime fiction, in “I'm Your Woman,” Jean gains a baby and loses a husband, the first when one arrives home unexpectedly and the second when the other does not. Thus, one man or – to be more precise – one “he” replaces the other in Jean's life and our leading lady goes from being the woman and the whole world for one to the woman and the whole world for another when Eddie fails to return home following a job gone disastrously wrong.

What went wrong on the job remains a mystery for the better part of the movie but it's only interesting from a tangential perspective because it happens offscreen. Serving not as the movie's climax the way that most heists are utilized in crime movies centered on male protagonists, “Woman” is instead concerned with how one man's actions and decisions affect the woman at its core and the baby she's left to protect.

“Something happened tonight,” one of Eddie's partners tells her and, handing her a bag with two hundred grand in it and instructions to take the kid and go with a man named Cal (Arinzé Kene), we discern that that is all we need to know. Rather than stay with the crooks and either go to the mattresses or Sicily with the men eluding capture as we did in “The Godfather,” Hart and Horowitz instead opt to follow Diane Keaton's Kay instead, or rather, their Kay in the form of Jean.

A light flutter of wind you initially ignore until it builds into a tornado that no one – not even the weatherman sees coming – Jean goes from a meek, decorative glass figurine living in her husband's dollhouse to a frazzled yet determined woman trying to find and hold onto any semblance of control she has in her new, now suddenly uncertain life. Who Jean is, as not Eddie's woman but her own (and now baby Harry's as well) is the crux of Hart's picture. And in a messy, initially submissive turn that's light-years away from her performance on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” gifted producer-star Brosnahan is there, fully committed to exploring Jean's compelling evolution every step of the way, even when she occasionally but realistically goes backwards instead of forwards.

Thrillingly original and long overdue, particularly for women (like yours truly) who, long obsessed with '70s crime movies, didn't realize just how much they wanted and needed a film focused on the characters that far too often get left behind in traditional white-male-centric fare, one of the wisest decisions that Hart made was not to simply turn Michael into Missy Corleone. Avoiding the pitfalls of over-correction that we sometimes see in revisionist genre efforts where, rather than accurately reflect the true setting and history of the period of the film, filmmakers will just make the hero a woman instead of a man, Hart opts to embrace rather than escape femininity here.

Jean isn't a crackerjack thief or a hitman, she is a crime syndicate wife who's never been on her own before and has no idea how to begin to move on, even temporarily, without a man. In addition to Harry, who is bringing out a new protective side in her, she gets a second man for a time in another figure that would ordinarily be a supporting character as well in the form of scene-stealer Kene's enigmatic Cal.

A Black former associate of Eddie's who he'd entrusted to look after Jean and the baby until either he, Cal, or Jean can figure something out, as a new stranger turned friend, he's at once a calming influence on both Jean and Harry and an armed guard you don't want to cross to everyone else. Yet Cal doesn't only serve to save Jean, even if this is his initial function at the beginning. As the film progresses, Jean finds that he might need to be saved right back. To do that, she'll need to join forces with another woman – Cal's woman, Terry (a masterful Marsha Stephanie Blake) – and one who, if Jean is being honest, is exactly the kind of woman she's always wanted to be herself.

Sharp, unfussy, character-driven filmmaking that has much more in common with the methodical, building block-based storytelling we so often saw in the 1970s as opposed to most modern movies where people frequently speak in expositional monologues, this is a film that tells us only what we need to know at any given moment. Respecting not only our intelligence but also the talents of the actors bringing their characters to life, Hart knows that we will come to better understand the people who populate her film in time. Therefore, she has no interest in giving us a cinematic version of Cliff's Notes to tell us what to think and refreshingly asks us to sit back, get lost in her world, and figure it all out for ourselves instead.

Suspenseful and unpredictable in the way that it leads us down one path only to veer wildly down another moments later, "Woman" leads to a few truly exciting action set-pieces over the course of its running time. A unique hybrid of '70s and modern filmmaking with a lead character who feels like a descendant of Gena Rowlands in “Gloria,” “I'm Your Woman” is first and foremost a celebration of genre storytelling.

One of those mid-range adult thrillers that – as the old adage goes – they just don't make that much anymore since normally, it would be broken down into six half-stuffed episodes of lukewarm prestige television instead of a feature film, “I'm Your Woman” plays best to those who understand its cinematic lineage.

Wearing its influences like “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” “The Getaway,” and other films from the era proudly in each frame, “I'm Your Woman” feels like a '70s movie released in 2020... if, you know, they actually made crime movies in the '70s that focused on what happens to the wives and girlfriends of a crook instead of just relegating them to the sidelines. The end result is a rousing film that plays like gangbusters. With first-rate production specs, including a dynamic soundtrack and crisp yet lived in cinematography from “Ingrid Goes West” DP Bryce Fortner, following this year's “Sound of Metal,” “Small Axe" releases, “Vast of Night,” and “Blow the Man Down,” “I'm Your Woman” is proof that some of cinema's strongest new films are found on Amazon Prime.

Immediately pulling us into Jean's orbit, we watch as she goes from being defined by one man to asking herself just what kind of woman she wants to be both for herself and her child now that she's been left out in the cold. Finding strength she didn't know she had, in a film about people left behind, we meet a woman who at long last, knows her worth.

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

Half Brothers - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Luis Gerardo Mendez and Connor Del Rio in “Half Brothers”

‘Half Brothers’:  This road movie has fun sibling rivalry, but we’ve seen this cinematic vehicle before.

Directed by:  Luke Greenfield

Written by:  Jason Shuman and Eduardo Cisneros

Starring:  Luis Gerardo Mendez, Connor Del Rio, and Juan Pablo Espinosa

“Half Brothers” – Renato (Luis Gerardo Mendez) meets his half-brother Asher (Connor Del Rio) for the first time in Chicago, but most unexpectedly.  Renato flies to The Windy City from Mexico because his estranged father (Juan Pablo Espinosa) is nearing the end.  Flavio (Espinosa) wishes to see his son one last time before he passes.

You see, 26 years ago, Flavio left San Miguel de Allende, Mexico to look for work in the U.S.  He hasn’t seen his son during all this time, so naturally, Renato carries plenty of resentment, which unfortunately has spilled into other aspects of his life.  His fiancée Pamela (Pia Watson) points out that he doesn’t have any friends, and he still hasn’t hit it off with her young son Emilio (Mike A. Salazar).  This 30-something aviation CEO also has a visceral disdain for the United States, which – frankly in 2020 – isn’t out of line, but his contempt is pretty harsh. 

In short, Renato needs a hug.

Well, Asher is the man for the job.  This thoughtful, kindhearted soul would wrap his arms around the nearest tree or goat (yes, a goat).  Back in the Chicago hospital, Flavio reveals that Renato and Asher are his sons, much to the newly discovered half-brothers’ surprise!  This elder statesman asks the boys to travel together, become acquainted, and learn about his story and the reasons for never returning to Mexico.

“Half Brothers” is a road picture with a familiar formula, as two opposites crisscross the country (or a sizable portion of it), and hopefully will grow closer when reaching their destination.  In this critic’s mind, “Midnight Run” (1988) is the all-time best of the genre, but director Luke Greenfield’s and screenwriters Jason Shuman’s and Eduardo Cisneros’ premise best resembles “Due Date” (2010) – starring Robert Downey Jr. and Zach Galifianakis - for a couple reasons.  In the 2010 movie, Peter (Downey Jr.) is in a race against time to see the birth of his child.  Here, Renato needs to finish this excursion to attend his wedding, which is in three days and counting.  Also, Galifianakis made a career out of playing eccentrics, including Ethan from “Due Date”.  When watching Del Rio, one might wonder if he channeled his inner Galifianakis for six months straight before this movie.

A man-child doesn’t begin to describe Asher, as he’s one of the most oddball non-Zach Galifianakis-adults to grace the screen in recent memory.  He sports a 1977 Bjorn Borg-like headband and drives an orange Mercedes station wagon with several plastic containers of Ethanol in the cab (for some unknown reason).  He doesn’t carry cash or credit cards but has no problem ordering coffee at the nearest Starbucks and asking to borrow $2 from a random guy in line.   You couldn’t get two more differing personas, and since Renato holds so much animosity over his dad, the brothers continuously argue and even physically tussle on their trip.

Their trek from Chicago to the American Southwest is a scavenger hunt, and to fill on-screen spaces, the filmmakers include some middling, predictable sequences like a bar fight and a laughing gas attack.  Many of these mini-stops feel like figurative cul-de-sacs, while the fellas’ conversations – sans any Keystone Cops pomp and circumstance – in Asher’s oddball 4-wheeled carriage resonate much more.

Perhaps a “My Dinner with Andre” (1981) stripped-down construction would better serve the material.  Even though the film would sacrifice several on-screen larks, a deeper (and also witty) connection over 90 minutes would add noteworthy gravitas to these two brothers of other mothers.  Of course, that’s a different movie, but “Half Brothers” – as is – has some good stuff, including Mendez’s and Del Rio’s enjoyable performances and a sincere attempt at presenting the current immigration experience.  Ah well, I just would’ve preferred a different cinematic vehicle to get from here to there.

(2/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Sound of Metal - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke in ‘Sound of Metal’

‘Sound of Metal’ resonates with Ahmed’s Oscar-worthy performance

Directed by:  Darius Marder

Written by:  Darius and Abraham Marder

Starring:  Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, and Matthew Amalric

“Sound of Metal” – Director/writer Darius Marder’s feature film debut lands like a gut punch, a barrage of them.  One particular body blow confronts us very early in the first act, and for the remainder of the emotional, 15-round/two-hour runtime - led by Riz Ahmed’s Oscar-worthy performance – the audience tries to recover.

Well, “Sound of Metal” doesn’t feature actual fisticuffs, but Ruben (Ahmed) fights through and for something that he lost.  

His hearing.

Marder offers an immediate introduction to Ruben and his girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) from the film’s get-go.  They are in a two-person band and playing in a crowded, small club, where the audience - standing on a beer-stained concrete floor and just a few feet away from the aforementioned performers - is entranced with a torrent of crashes, booms, and shrieks.   

Ruben and Lou are an alt-metal collaboration.  While he pounds the drums like a WW III declaration, Lou screams into her microphone and strums distortions that lead them into a nuclear assault of the senses.  (For the record, Cooke is an utterly unrecognizable Courtney Love-lookalike who initially appears a decade older than her tender 26 years.)  Their performance is just one stop on a nationwide tour of modest venues, and their comfy silver camper is their rock-n-roll-dreams chariot.  They are in love with one another and their music.  Life is grand, even without 401(k)s, a white picket fence, and health insurance.

Well, this pair unexpectedly becomes desperate for a doctor’s advice because Ruben - without warning – goes nearly deaf during the middle of a show.  “Without warning” is not precisely accurate because Ruben’s naked eardrums have faced and battled thunderous, musical uproar for years.  It appears that his hearing has finally given way.   Like a dancer with amputated legs or a marksman deprived of sight, Ruben now feels disoriented without his chief instrument.  He’s momentarily directionless and has to find his way on uncharted roads.

Ahmed miraculously melds into this struggling musician portrayal, both physically and emotionally.  He looks like a triathlon competitor, and tattoos don’t completely cover his body, but he carries his fair share of ink, including a PLEASE KILL ME message dotting his chest.  His bleach-blonde hair doesn’t hide his dark roots, but hey, that gives him street cred.  He’s an impulsive but passionate 30-something musician, and crude language frequents his vocabulary.  Unfortunately, Ruben doesn’t have the skills to cope with such a drastic change, but honestly, who would in that moment? 

Ahmed also took some semi-drastic steps to step into this role.  In a Nov. 20 interview (with film critic Jeffrey K. Howard), Ahmed says, “When I met Darius, he said, ‘Everything is going to be for real.  When you’re playing the drums on the screen, you’re going to be playing the drums for real.’” 

Ahmed took drums lessons and learned sign language, and he adds that it “took most of a year to learn how to do both of those skills passably well.” 

Also, Ahmed wore hearing aids that fed white noise into his ear canals, so he couldn’t hear himself talk.  “It was very disorienting.  I guess I just felt like I wanted to understand just a glimpse - the tiniest, tiniest sliver - of what that feels like (and) to understand the shock that Ruben is going through and many people go through in that situation.” 

Ruben’s specific life-passages won’t be revealed in this review, but rest assured, our suffering protagonist needs to face his reality and find acceptance, solace, and value with it.  His new mentor, Joe (Paul Raci), has a Mr. Miyagi quality, but rather than offering lessons of “wax on, wax off” or “paint the fence”, his teachings are more cerebral, and due to Ruben’s new circumstances, considerably more challenging to embrace. 

The film also embraces sound as a lead character, as Marder frequently silences or muffles on-screen moments.  Sometimes, we hear from Lou’s or the cameraperson’s perspective, and during other stretches, our ears experience Ruben’s audio outlooks.  These interludes are purposely frustrating, unsettling, and madly successful at engendering deep empathy for Ruben’s new condition.  For moviegoers who have their hearing intact, you might end the film feeling eternally grateful to listen to leaves rustle, prairie grass sway, and birds sing….while also soothing your midsection after an outpouring of cinematic wallops.

(3.5/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Billie - Movie Review by Jen Johans

Director: James Erskine

Cast: Billie Holiday, Tony Bennett, Count Basie, Sylvia Syms, & Charles Mingus.

The way that one interviewee in writer-director James Erskine's new documentary “Billie” tells it, when Ella Fitzgerald sings “My Man's Gone Now,” you think he's on a trip and is due back shortly, but when Billie Holiday does it, you know that man has packed his bags, he's already down the street, and he is never coming back.

Using her voice like a brass instrument to – with Holiday's singular, unorthodox lyrical phrasing, tell vivid, visceral, lived-in stories that cast a spell on her listeners – her friend and fellow jazz vocalist Sylvia Syms sums it up best. “Billie Holiday sang only truth, she knew nothing else.”

As both a word and an idea, “truth” is the quality that comes up most frequently in the film when people describe not just Holiday's voice but her life. And it's only fitting since just one spin of one Billie Holiday record leaves you with the impression that they are inexorably linked. Feeling the same way, in the late 1960s, feminist high school teacher turned freelance journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl embarked on a quest to write the definitive biography on her favorite singer. From Holiday's cousin John Fagan, who recalled her feisty early years to the jazz greats who became her friends, colleagues, and lovers before her untimely death at the age of forty-four in 1959, Kuehl recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with the people who knew the singer born Eleanora Fagan the best.

In Erskine's documentary, these frequently jaw-dropping, often cited, but previously unheard original audio tapes bring Kuehl and her vital first-person sources back to life. They also give us the briefest of glimpses into what her biography of the artist might have looked like if she'd gotten the chance to finish it. Sadly, much like Holiday, whose career trajectory fascinated her just as much as her self-destructive streak, Kuehl's life was also cut short. Nearly a decade after she began working on the book, the young journalist was found dead on a Washington D.C. street in a mysterious event that her family believes was perhaps linked to this quest.

Wanting to accurately represent Billie Holiday as she was and not just pay tribute to her as a legend, while on the surface, a white, Jewish teacher from New York who wrote about women's issues for publications like “The Paris Review” seems like she would have little in common with Holiday, Kuehl's sister dispels this belief early on in the film. Telling viewers that Linda identified with the singer's pain and didn't like the way she'd been portrayed as a victim, Kuehl herself backs up this thesis later on in her manuscript, saying that although the sexually voracious Holiday was often in relationships with abusive men, in the end, it was she who chose these partners for one reason or another.

Keeping an objective approach, even when she interviews a pimp that Holiday tricked for when she was a young girl, much like Kuehl, Erskine's film and Holiday's friends paint a portrait of a woman who loved to live fast for all of its ups and downs. It seems perhaps that Holiday knew her time on Earth was short. Exploring all facets of her personality from her two favorite expletives to her bisexuality, even when friends tell horrific stories about the men who graduated her from pot to hard drugs or beat her senseless (and some openly question whether or not she was, in fact, a masochist), Erskine strives to follow in Kuehl's nonjudgmental footsteps.

Despite this, of course, some of these testimonies are absolutely devastating. Chronicling the way that Holiday and other Black artists were subjected to the shocking racism of America during the Jim Crow laws, interviewees describe Holiday's experiences ranging from club owners making her “darken” up her face to an actual brawl that broke out with a racist, white sheriff in the south. Using the truth of her voice and her ability to tell a story in song, Holiday's response to these injustices was with the powerful anthem “Strange Fruit,” which sadly remains just as timely and moving as ever, more than eighty years after it was recorded.

An eye-opening and engrossing overview of Holiday's life that will hopefully make you seek out, as I did, more information about the events and figures referenced in the film, while it's largely very successful from a narrative standpoint, occasionally, "Billie" struggles with its chronological presentation of facts. Hopscotching around to add new details about pivotal moments in Holiday's life that we wish we would've known earlier, this rings a particularly false note when, late into the movie, we jump awkwardly from one interviewee's analysis of her abusive relationships to the sudden revelation that she might've been raped as a child. While reflective of the way that Kuehl would've heard these confessions at various times throughout her decade-long research, I question the decision to save something so major for near the end of "Billie," particularly when it would've added a crucial counterpoint to the predominantly male recollections of her youth turning tricks, including an ex-pimp's testimony that his girls loved getting a black eye.

Still, knowing that Billie Holiday was Kuehl's raison d'être, particularly in her final years, Erskine’s film pays fine tribute to her beloved subject and Kuehl's journalistic legacy overall. Working in a few facts about Holiday's biographer here and there, Erskine is smart to keep Kuehl's private life off the table until very late into the documentary, when we hear that she had been divorced twice, was perhaps romantically linked to one legendary interviewee, and had started to receive threats regarding that relationship and her book.

Although we would like to know more about her life and work, in her relative anonymity, Erskine taps into the link that not only Kuehl and Holiday share but many women and men do with the singer as well. Instead of openly philosophizing, he lets Kuehl's interviewees try to articulate it aloud when they discuss what they respond to most in Holiday's life and music. And while obviously, their words add vivid color to the black and white photographs utilized throughout, the most unforgettable hue of all comes not from them but Billie Holiday herself. We hear it in the heartbreaking lyrics she sings, the words she means, and the way she uses her instrument inimitably, unreservedly, and unmistakably to tell the truth, even when it hurts.

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

The Croods: A New Age - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Nicolas Cage, Catherine Keener, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Cloris Leachman, Peter Dinklage, and Leslie Mann in “The Croods: A New Age”

'The Croods: A New Age' has more yabba dabba doos than yabba dabba don'ts

Directed by:  Joel Crawford

Written by:  Kevin Hageman, Dan Hageman, Paul Fisher, and Bob Logan

Starring:  Nicolas Cage, Catherine Keener, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Cloris Leachman, Peter Dinklage, and Leslie Mann

“The Croods:  A New Age” – “Tomorrow!  Tomorrow!  I love ya, tomorrow!  You’re always a day away!”

Moms with adolescents running around their humble abodes have probably felt that their teenagers never follow the rules.  By comparison, Guy (Ryan Reynolds) is a model young man!

You see, while sinking in the tarpits to their apparent demise, Guy’s parents told their son to find Tomorrow, a paradise of sorts or their version of Eden, and he respects his folks’ wish.

Wait, tarpits?

This animated film - "The Croods: A New Age" - is not set in 2021, but during the Paleolithic Era.  Our cartoon friends, frenemies, and foes are cavemen, cavewomen, and all sorts of colorful creatures from this ancient time.  Director Joel Crawford’s lively flick is a sequel to 2013’s “The Croods”, but don’t worry if you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen the original because the film catches up any naive audience members – including this critic - within the first few minutes.

Yes, the world may have already provided prehistoric joys like “The Flintstones” (1961 – 1966), “Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels” (1977 – 1980), and Aardman Animations’ “Early Man” (2018), but make some room for the Crood clan’s comical misadventures too.

Now, Guy marches for many moons - in fact, over 200 - and eventually connects with the Croods, a close, nuclear family who joins Guy on his journey.  The Croods mostly click with Guy straight away, and especially Grug (Nicolas Cage) and Ugga’s (Catherine Keener) teenage daughter Eep (Emma Stone).  Eep and Guy fall in love, not unlike an intriguing boy who arrives at a new high school and draws the prom queen’s attention.  In this case, the girl in question has broad shoulders, climbs steep cliffs on all fours lickety-split, and sets aside the gathering and frequently hunts wild game herself.   She’s part-Renaissance young woman, part-ultimate tomboy and takes after her dear old dad, even though he’s not terribly fond of Guy, because Eep has eyes for him.

The point of this 95-minute big-screen adventure is to slap together some pretty effective slapstick.  This lovable family – complete with a doofus son, Thunk (Clark Duke), a tough-as-spears grandma (Cloris Leachman), a feral toddler, Sandy (Kailey Crawford), and a couple of trusty pets – bumble their way to Tomorrow and attempt to fit in.

If this premise sounds familiar, then yes, “The Croods: A New Age” is a “The Beverly Hillbillies” (1962-1971) yarn.  The said kin are bulls in a Hollywood-China shop, and the current, more refined Tomorrow residents are politely-aghast at the primal behavior.  An already all-star cast adds a couple more twinkles because Peter Dinklage and Leslie Mann play Tomorrow’s Phil and Hope Betterman, as the haves and have-nots disagree over proper, everyday decorum.  For instance, Grug has never seen a wall before and regularly walks through them, and when the "enlightened" couple offers separate rooms for their guests, Thunk asks, “What’s a room, and what’s a separate?”

Our friends have much to learn.

Crawford and four screenwriters (four???) pen inspiring comedic lessons during these culture clashes and also offer pure visual joy when the Croods throw massive boulders like baseballs and sleep in one pile every night.  Of course, the Croods and Bettermans – who have their differences – are eventually forced to work together.  Regrettably, their more congenial moments during the film’s third act meld with some wild, distracting absurdity involving wolf-spiders and a few thousand monkeys.  Even though the animators paint some darn-impressive sequences, the more personal, effectual discourse devolves (pardon the pun) into several busy, overblown action sequences that carry the disappointment of an overcooked Brontosaurus burger.

Still, the first two courses…err, I mean acts carry good feelings and hearty laughs, as “The Croods: A New Age” utters more yabba dabba doos than yabba dabba don’ts.

(2.5/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

"Happiest Season" & "Uncle Frank" - Movie Reviews by Jen Johans

Victor Garber, Mary Steenburgen, Kristen Stewart, Asiyih N'Dobe, Anis N'Dobe, Burl Moseley, Alison Brie, Mary Holland, and Mackenzie Davis in “Happiest Season”

“Happiest Season” (2020)

Director: Clea DuVall

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Dan Levy, & Mary Steenburgen

Available on Hulu

“Uncle Frank” (2020)

Director: Alan Ball

Cast: Paul Bettany, Sophia Lillis, Peter Macdissi, & Margo Martindale

Available on Amazon Prime

Review by Jen Johans

'Tis the season of giving... and the season of needing a rest. The weeks between Thanksgiving all the way up through Hanukkah and/or Christmas and New Year's are often dubbed the happiest time of the year. But it's also undeniably the most stressful period of the calendar year as well. And this is particularly true for those of us returning to our childhood homes for the holidays as we come face-to-face with family, old friends, and all of the judgments and pressures that go along with sudden reunions with the people we were once closest to in life, the ones who know us the best, that is if they even know us at all.

Although there's a tendency to revert back to old patterns and behavior when surrounded by nostalgia, not too many of us are the same people today that we were in high school, and sometimes it's hard to make loved ones see you not for the child you were in the past but the adult you are today. And while this might be anything from annoying to awkward for a majority of heterosexuals, it can be absolutely terrifying and life-changing to LGBTQ adults who haven't come out to their family and/or friends as just the act of returning home to old wounds (and a place where you must push that part of you deep down), can be traumatic.

Fittingly, two brand new films releasing onto streaming platforms the day before Thanksgiving tackle the hopes and fears of coming out head-on, first in co-writer and director Clea DuVall's comedy “Happiest Season,” which takes place during Christmas week, and the second, which is primarily set at a funeral nearly fifty years ago in writer-director Alan Ball's drama “Uncle Frank.”

An earnest and affable lightweight comedy that – thanks to its dynamic cast of Kristen Stewart, Mackenzie Davis, Dan Levy, Mary Steenburgen, Aubrey Plaza, and Alison Brie – has quickly become one of the most anticipated holiday releases of 2020, “Happiest Season,” plays like an overlong, sweet yet slightly stale sitcom.

Impulsively inviting her beloved partner Abby (Stewart) home for the holidays during a romantic evening out, it's only once they're in the car heading towards Harper's (Davis) family home that she confesses that she's actually never told her parents and two sisters that she's gay. Although initially shocked, Abby agrees to play the orphan roommate with no place to go since the charade will only last five days. Predictably, however, things get out of hand almost as soon as they arrive when Harper's parents (Steenburgen and Victor Garber) try reuniting her with her high school boyfriend (Jake McDorman), only for the women to bump into Harper's first-ever girlfriend (Plaza) less than five minutes later as well.

Cliched and largely laughless, as novel and (incredibly) welcome as it is to watch a gay-themed movie jump through the same formulaic hoops that we so often see in made-for-cable-television holiday romances this time of year, sadly, “Happiest Season” is a work to admire and politely smile through more than it is one to wholeheartedly enjoy. From a scene that finds Stewart literally stuck in a closet to another one that features her best friend, “Schitt's Creek” co-creator and star Dan Levy calling to ask where he could buy a lookalike fish to replace the one that we gather the inexperienced pet sitter has accidentally killed, a majority of the movie's jokes feel as tired as they do uninspired.

Daring to make Harper a flawed and selfish protagonist whom we discover will lie to anyone to conceal her true sexual identity, “Happiest Season” gets points for working in a startlingly sad backstory surrounding her relationship with Plaza's Riley, although their characters are shortchanged a vital conversation where they can truly clear the air.

Wrapping things up in a neat bow, even if there are a few other scenes and discussions between our main ensemble cast of characters that might've strengthened the film as something more human and true than it is a largely cookie-cutter, small screen style comedy, the actors are all terrific. Unfortunately, DuVall and co-writer/co-star Mary Holland's script, which leaves much to be desired, doesn’t know how to use them properly. Nonetheless, a mildly pleasant holiday diversion that you can digest right along with your pumpkin pie, even if it isn't a new repeat-worthy holiday classic, hopefully, Hulu's "Happiest Season" will earn enough viewers that we'll see some stronger, funnier LGBTQ comedies in the years to come.

Less of a holiday-centric offering than it is an offering served up for viewers during the holidays on Amazon Prime, “Uncle Frank” is a heartfelt period drama from writer-director Alan Ball that, in addition to sharing the same theme of coming out to one's family that we saw in “Happiest Season,” rivals DuVall's film in terms of its enviable, first-rate cast.

Led by the versatile, acclaimed “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” “The Da Vinci Code,” and “Margin Call” actor Paul Bettany as the titular Uncle Frank, Ball's film is a who's who of scene-stealing character actors, including audience favorites Steve Zahn, Margo Martindale, and Judy Greer.

The apple of the eye of his niece Beth ("It" franchise and "Sharp Objects" star Sophia Lillis), Frank Bledsoe (Bettany) has traded his conservative, small-town South Carolina roots for New York where he works as an English professor at NYU in the late 1960s/early '70s. Following in his footsteps by attending NYU, Beth soon learns that although her uncle puts on a great show with a lesbian friend posing as his live-in girlfriend, he's actually been in a relationship with his sweet, funny Middle Eastern boyfriend Walid aka Wally (played by Peter Macdissi) for the past ten years.

Paul Bettany and Peter Macdissi in “Uncle Frank”

Forced to return home for the funeral of his own disapproving father (Stephen Root), whom we deduce most likely knew the truth about his son's sexual orientation before anyone else, Frank drives Beth down to South Carolina. Determined to be there to support the love of his life because he knows just how much trauma will be waiting for him in the south, Wally trails behind the pair and soon joins them on the road trip, which becomes a journey into Frank's past.

A film that's as much about Frank's need to finally let the people he loves into that part of himself that he keeps hidden as it is about his need to forgive himself and make peace with a devastating turn of events in his past for which he still feels responsible, while “Happiest Season” addressed past transgressions too, this film is vastly more sincere overall. Though still bursting at the seams with cliches and contrivances that should be far beyond the otherwise amazingly talented Ball (whose explorations into human behavior made “Six Feet Under” one of HBO's best twenty-first-century shows), thanks to the conviction and pathos of its top-notch leads, “Uncle Frank” works much better than it should.

Hindered by a rushed final act that races through an emotional payoff that it doesn't fully earn, as wonderful as it always is to see Bettany in something new that pushes him beyond his work in the Marvel franchise, the real heart of “Uncle Frank” is in Peter Macdissi's performance as Wally. Elevating an otherwise stereotypical role as the tormented Frank's saintly boyfriend, Macdissi's magnetic, cheeky delivery of certain lines – such as when he lectures Beth that niceness is used by her family to hide things – immediately wins us over. Likewise, in just one scene where he calls his mother back in Saudi Arabia from a motel phone booth, which is contrasted by Frank's return back to the motel with Beth after a wake, we realize how much more interesting the film might've been if we'd been following not Frank but Wally all along.

Disappointingly, you can nearly set your watch to certain revelations that seem to hit at precisely the same intervals that most screenwriters well-versed in the Syd Field three-act structure will recognize. However, the film's tenderness and its message about the importance of acceptance and the way that we never fully get over the traumas that inadvertently shape us for better and/or worse still feels timely nearly fifty years after the film is set, as we watch this today in Trump's America.

Comparing the two films, which I watched back to back, “Uncle Frank” is a much more solid and substantive work than “Happiest Season,” even if it isn't nearly as light, airy, and easily digestible as Clea DuVall's comedy. While both films fail to push much past the bar of average overall, they still feel well-timed to their pre-holiday release, especially this year when we especially need entertainment during the pandemic. Perhaps more willing than ever to look past their shortcomings amid 2020's wrath, hopefully, these films will find an audience in viewers who either relate to their characters' struggles to let others see them as they really are or are eager to celebrate their willingness to do as the Christmas carol says and make the yuletide (a bit more) gay. 'Tis the season, after all.

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

Let Him Go - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Kevin Costner, Diane Lane, and Jeffrey Donovan in “Let Him Go”

‘Let Him Go’:  Lane and Costner embrace this effective 20th century western

Directed by:  Thomas Bezucha

Written by:  Thomas Bezucha, based on Larry Wilson’s novel

Starring:  Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, Lesley Manville, Kayli Carter, and Booboo Stewart

“Let Him Go” – “You let it be known, you’re looking for a Weboy, they’ll find you.”

The last time that we saw Diane Lane and Kevin Costner on the big screen together, they played Superman’s parents, Martha and Jonathan Kent, in “Man of Steel” (2013), and in director/writer Thomas Bezucha’s “Let Him Go”, they portray a caring mom and dad as well.  Margaret and George Blackledge (Lane, Costner) don’t live in Smallville.  They reside in Montana. 

For many years, Margaret broke horses, and George – a long-time lawman - broke open cases and chased down criminals.  They’re both retired now and soaking up the good life on a spacious farm and tending to a few stallions in the company of their grandbaby Jimmy, grown son James (Ryan Bruce), and his wife Lorna (Kayli Carter). Other than Lorna and Margaret occasionally quarreling, life feels like a Hallmark card or a Norman Rockwell painting at the Blackledge Ranch, and Bezucha scribes and paints these moments with sunshine, breakfast at the kitchen table, and Stephen M. Davis’ gentle score.

Sometimes, life has a way of muddling our best-laid plans, and tragedy strikes the Blackledges.  Early in the film’s first act, James suddenly passes away, and Lorna remarries Donnie Weboy (Will Brittain), who unfortunately is the wrong guy.  The young family moves out of state, but Margaret is determined to see her grandson again, and then some.  

Bezucha’s screenplay – based on Larry Watson’s 2013 novel – wraps itself within the tightly-wound bonds of family.  It’s a timeless concept with all eras of humanity, but this one is set in the 1960s, an age before global consumer supply chains, Starbucks on every third corner, and social media.  Mothers and fathers regularly converse – in-person - with their adult children and grandkids throughout the week, and big Saturday barbeques with laughter and hamburgers fill up the calendar, year after year.  James’ passing already punished the Blackledges, but the thought of losing Jimmy – due to distance, not death – feels unbearable to Margaret, and this thoughtful, kind mamma grizzly refuses to let her grandson go. 

Margaret admits, “I don’t know when it’s time to call it quits.” 

Mrs. Blackledge may indeed fight past midnight, but this is a core strength.  Margaret is a superwoman of sorts, who also provides a bedrock of support to her steady - but weary - husband.  George has seen more ills in society’s underbelly than he cares to remember and internalizes these troubled memories, as Bezucha hints that his protagonist’s drinking was a frequent source of strife with Margaret.  George equally supports his wife though, and feels at ease following her lead within his unfamiliar spaces.  This couple enjoys a dedicated, healthy relationship, and Costner and Lane proudly offer robust, salt-of-the-earth genuine turns that easily fit in the mid-20th century as well as the 19th, and Margaret’s long braids is a nice touch that doesn’t go unnoticed.

The duality of the film’s tones isn’t unseen either.  As this pleasant pair travel to Gladstone, N.D. to see Jimmy, they embark into dark territory to meet their grandson’s stepfather’s family:  the Weboys.  “Let Him Go” steps into steep noir because the meeting of the minds turns into a tension-filled, Hatfields-and-McCoys engagement.  Instead of a full-on war, nail-biting discourse and underlying threats are the cold dishes cooked and served by Blanche Weboy in Lesley Manville’s mesmerizing performance, one of the very best of 2020.  

Blanche – a poisonous matriarch, who has seen as much mayhem as George – might just be his main adversary - for decades - in an alternate universe.  On Earth 1, however, George and Blanche meet under more civil matters, which quickly turn toxic after 1.5 seconds.   She’s a dangerous villain that stirs memories of - and draws parallels to - Janine Cody (Jacki Weaver) in “Animal Kingdom” (2010), and Blanche isn’t afraid to get her hands dirty and whisper dastardly nothings in your ear.

This clan clash is so effective because the movie takes time establishing Margaret and George’s altruistic – although not flawless – personas and relationship.  These two are human, make mistakes, and also wear white cowboy hats in this modern-day western, as they gallop into hostile territory. 

Margaret and George are courageous, valiant souls, and these roles feel wholly fitting for Diane Lane and Kevin Costner…and Martha and Jonathan Kent too.

(3/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

The Thing (1982) - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Kurt Russell in “The Thing” (1982)

Directed by:  John Carpenter

Written by:  Bill Lancaster, based on John W. Campbell Jr.’s “Who Goes There?”

Starring:  Kurt Russell, Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Richard Dysart, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, and T.K. Carter

“The Thing” (1982) – “I don’t know who to trust.” – Dr. Blair (Wilford Brimley)

We’ve all heard that phrase before.  Perhaps you attended MBA school, competed in a beauty pageant, or watched “Survivor”, the reality television show in which contestants compete for a million dollars in the remote locales of Borneo, the Pearl Islands, or Cambodia.  Although Richard Hatch, Sandra Diaz-Twine, and Jeremy Collins voted their “Survivor” castmates off the island, no one felt like their lives were in jeopardy.

(Now, wear a Michigan Wolverines jersey to an Ohio State home football game on a November afternoon, and well, perhaps one’s health could fall into question, but let’s not digress.)

In John Carpenter’s “The Thing” – the creature-feature remake of the 1951 classic “The Thing from Another World” – a dozen men working at the United States’ National Science Institute Station #4 in Antarctica don’t have full confidence with their colleagues. 

You see, something has infiltrated their camp. 

A beyond-strange, murderous monster attempts to hunt them down, and it possesses a transformative, shape-shifter proficiency to take their physical form(s) and walk undetected among the rest of the populous as a normal human being.  This ability – of course – gives it the camouflage to easily strike again.

Who is a friend?  Who is a foe?  A more appropriate question is:  How many friends or foes does one have? 

Carpenter’s horror masterpiece combines “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956, 1978) with an Agatha Christie story, like “Murder on the Orient Express” (1974, 2017) or “Evil Under the Sun” (1982).  Now, our villain isn’t from some faraway corner of the globe.  In the film’s opening scene, we see a spaceship enter Earth’s atmosphere, but yes, this antagonist is undoubtedly evil.  Then again, maybe it is just Mother Nature in her most bizarre, lethal, and unworldly form. 

Like 12 men on a jury, the guys operating this secluded government facility come in all shapes and sizes.  A mix of scientists (like Dr. Blair (Brimley, sans his famous mustache) and Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart)) and support staff (like Nauls (T.K. Carter) and R.J. MacReady (Kurt Russell)) are left wondering who to embrace and who to shoot.  Actually, MacReady – a bearded, alpha male with a penchant for J&B scotch whiskey and computer chess – chooses his weapon wisely, as he instinctively decides that a flamethrower is the best defense against this threatening baddie. 

Although the actual combat between the humans and alien is excessively violent, noisy, and extremely gory, psychological horror fills this high-stakes murder-mystery.  The creature can attack at any moment, but it prefers lonely, solitary circumstances.  Carpenter establishes the physical environment from the get-go with several camera shots of the camp.  We see that this large semi-sprawling metallic facility accommodates plenty of radio and computer equipment, small dimly-lit offices, storage rooms crammed with boxes, and a recreation center complete with a ping pong table.  Several times, no one appears on-screen.  This research station sits in the most isolated place on the planet, and it’s pretty darn quiet inside too, with an infinite number of discreet places to hide. 

“This thing doesn’t want to show itself.  It wants to hide inside an imitation,”  MacReady declares.

Even random conversations are filled with tension because – for example - is Fuchs (Joel Polis) speaking with Childs (Keith David) or an extra-terrestrial imposter?   In one scene, MacReady talks into a tape recorder to document his and his coworkers’ ominous predicament, but our director frames him in the lower right portion of his camera lens and leaves a wide-open space – with an open doorway showing an empty hallway - to our reluctant hero’s left.  Carpenter tees up the potential for a sudden, ferocious confrontation, and the audience will surely wince in anticipation of one.    

With good reason, because “The Thing” is the ultimate horror whodunit, but it’s also known for its mind-blowing practical effects that still hold up 38 years later.  The Thing might look like MacReady, Norris (Charles Hallahan), Clark (Richard Nasur), or anyone else, but then an army of snake-like tentacles, spider legs, or green tendons smothered in slimy goo will burst from underneath its skin and wrap-up a victim with malevolent intent. 

During a 2017 interview, Keith David recalls the remarkable and realistic special effects.

“I remember the first day that we walked in and saw the dog that explodes. As I recall, the ASPCA came in because they thought that it was a real dog and wanted to make sure we weren’t mistreating these animals,”  David says.

Although The Thing wants to kill in the shadows, director of photography Dean Cundey displays visual effects artist Rob Bottin’s wonderfully-repulsive creations of visceral guts and gore in plain view with shiny, bright lights.  Cundey doesn’t lean subtly here, as he proudly shows off every square inch of Bottin’s dastardly handiwork, along with the sounds of our suffocating stalker’s sickly shrieks, splashes, and swishes.

While Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978) spills very little blood, “The Thing” is the polar (pardon the pun) opposite.  The two movies diverge in another key way.  His Michael Myers slasher film raked in about 70 million dollars in theatres, but this Antarctic terror fest (actually filmed in the ice fields above Juneau, Alaska and also Stewart, British Columbia) only pulled in 19 million bucks at the box office, and critics offered mixed reviews at the time.  The depressing, doomsday outlook didn’t lift audiences spirits either.

In a 2008 interview, Carpenter said, “I made a really grueling dark film, and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that.  They wanted to see ‘E.T.’ (1982), and ‘The Thing’ was the opposite of ‘E.T.’”

Thirty-eight years later, audiences are much more receptive to “The Thing”, which Carpenter appreciates.

He adds, “I’m very proud of the movie.  I always loved it.  It’s one of my favorites of my own films.” 

Well, “The Thing” is my all-time favorite horror movie.  It’s that good.  Come on, you can trust me.

(4/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Come Play - Movie Review by Monte Yazzie

Gavin MacIver-Wright, Azhy Robertson, Winslow Fegley, and Jayden Marine in “Come Play”.

Dir: Jacob Chase
Starring: Azhy Robertson, Gillian Jacobs, John Gallagher Jr., and Winslow Fegley

A light flickers, flashes, and then blows out. A young boy, panicked, looks intently around his bedroom, holding the glow of a cell phone screen out to illuminate the darkness in the corners. A low grumbling voice grows into a shrieking scream, footsteps pound with booming tremors, the young boy sits covered with a sheet draped over his head.

This scenario could come from any realm of a horror film but it plays the introduction to writer/director Jacob Chase’s debut feature film “Come Play”. The scene of a terrified child placed in a frightful situation, sometimes known as the “child in peril” device, has populated film in many different forms. Sometimes it’s fun, like in “The Goonies”, playful, like in “The Monster Squad”, and other times downright scary and disturbing, like in “The Babadook” or “It”. “Come Play” falls into the scary category, a film that depends less on its jump scare tactics and more on the unease it conjures by placing a defenseless child within arm’s reach of a monster from another realm.

Oliver (Azhy Robertson) is a lonely boy who feels different from everyone around him, most of the kids at his school mock his silence and some take advantage of his kindness with cruel jokes. Looking for a friend, Oliver seeks refuge within the screen of his tablet or cell phone, watching episodes of “SpongeBob SquarePants” and playing with screen applications to take pictures of himself. One day Oliver discovers a story that mysteriously appears on his device, a creepy tale about a lonely monster named Larry who is looking for a friend. As Oliver engages with the story, Larry becomes more threatening, inching closer to a real-life connection with Oliver.

Director Jacob Chase adapts “Come Play” from his 2017 short film “Larry”. While there are moments throughout the feature that feel stretched unnecessarily, a common concern when a short film idea is built into a feature length film, “Come Play” still displays some interesting family character dynamics and a lead performance from Azhy Robertson that is exceptionally composed.

It’s these moments, with a family struggling on the brink of separation and their son desperately retreating further into his protective shell, that adds the emotional component to make the scary and threatening monster have a gravity of consequences. Specifically, the story between the mother and son is so tenderly composed that when Larry begins to stalk the entire family, the peril for the characters is peaked with tension. It’s ultimately what makes “Come Play” so effective.

Larry, the ominous 10-foot tall entity lingering in the dark corners, is mostly a practical effect monster…yes, you read that correctly. In the current days where monsters are computer-generated designs, hearing that the Jim Henson Creature Shop designed this monster, where 4 puppeteers operated the movement, is a complete blessing for movie monsters. While CGI is still used for certain movements and expressions, these moments are hardly scary, Mr. Chase uses the monster in effective frightening ways late in the film, showing the creepy nature of Larry as it stalks Oliver and his mother.

“Come Play” struggles with maintaining its pressing and menacing tone throughout the film but it makes up for these lapses with an effective cast that is provided time to add the emotional components to make the final act scarier than it probably would have been. Jacob Chase proves an understanding of how to set up a scare but, most impressively, the ability to craft characters that mean something to the story. While film will never stop relying on putting children in perilous situations, or placing scary monsters in closets, “Come Play” proves that there is still life and scares to be mined from these movies.

Monte’s Rating
3.50 out of 5.00

Alone With Her Dreams - Movie Review by Jen Johans

Marta Castiglia as Lucia in “Alone with her Dreams.”

Director: Paolo Licata

Writers: Paolo Licata, Catena Fiorello, & Ugo Chiti

Cast: Marta Castiglia, Lucia Sardo, Ileana Rigano, & Katia Greco

Review by Jen Johans

Warning his friend not to put so much stock into his dreams for the future that he loses sight of reality, in “The Shawshank Redemption,” Red (Morgan Freeman) tells Andy (Tim Robbins) that “hope is” not only “a dangerous thing,” but it can also “drive a man insane.”

Of course, for that to happen, you'd have to view hope as a good thing, which is the opposite relationship that eleven-year-old Lucia (Marta Castiglia) has with the feeling in director Paolo Licata’s “Alone With Her Dreams.”  Knowing of hope's pitfalls, she explains that “when a person 'hopes' to do something, they never end up doing it,” which is a lesson that her grandmother Maria (Lucia Sardo) takes to heart, quoting Lucia's words back to her in the Italian film's final act.

Applying this logic to her parents' sudden qualification that they, along with her younger brother, “hope” they can return home for Christmas after so many conversations where it'd previously been a certainty, Lucia sees the writing on the wall when she hears her least favorite word on the phone. Saying that she wishes she hadn't talked to them so she could've gone on assuming they'd come back for the holidays, Lucia begins feeling lonelier than ever, living with the stubbornly defiant Maria in her tiny hometown on the coast of Sicily, after the rest of her family fled to France to make a better living.

Caught in the middle of a family feud that goes back to her grandmother's generation – as the stern woman has forbidden Lucia from having anything to do with Maria's sister Pina (Ileana Rigano) or Pina’s daughter Rosamaria (Katia Greco) – as Lucia waits to join her family in France, she struggles to find out just what led to their rift. Realizing that the truth of the situation is much darker than the gossip she's been led to believe, soon history repeats itself in a cruel twist of fate as the tragedy of the women's past threatens to envelop Lucia as well.

A sun-drenched coming-of-age saga, based upon the novel by Catena Fiorello and adapted for the screen by Licata, Fiorello, and Ugo Chiti, this languidly paced, atmospheric film takes a good thirty minutes to immerse you in its near desolate Sicilian environment. With its one store that, for a fee, will let you use a phone (which is then lowered out of the window by a rope basket) and its statue of the Virgin Mary that residents donate to in order to ask God for wishes, in this town, we feel as though we've wandered into a whole other world.

Centered on a sparsely populated seaside community where nearly everyone knows everyone else or, as in Lucia's case, is related to several other residents, “Alone With Her Dreams” seems to be set in the 1960s or '70s. Timeless, foreign, and remote, the town we find ourselves in is a far cry from the hustle and bustle of Rome, made popular by some of the biggest Italian cinema exports from the era.

Yet as “Alone With Her Dreams” begins to incorporate themes of how abuse, trauma, and shame are passed down from one generation to the next under the guise of secrets and lies, it morphs into an incredibly timely work. Additionally, it's one you just might find that you want to discuss with the women in your family tree as soon as it ends.

Described as a “shocking... new Italian classic from the heart,” by director Oliver Stone, the film is now available on-demand from Corinth Films after a successful, award-winning, festival run. Requiring patience in viewers used to having most things spelled out for them in the first ten minutes of a movie, “Alone With Her Dreams” uses a natural approach that's more indicative of classic Italian neorealist filmmaking.

Eschewing the building blocks of most coming-of-age fare, while initially, I wasn't sure what to make of it, the film grows both more compelling and more universally relatable with each successive scene. Reminiscent of the way that the family sagas helmed by Taiwanese New Wave filmmakers preferred to let their characters live and breathe rather than try to manufacture a protracted plot out of thin air, while Licata's “Alone With Her Dreams” isn't for every filmgoer, those who stay with it will find it's a hard movie to shake.

Potent and wonderfully acted, to Licata's credit, this ensemble drama is brought vividly to life with more color and verve than we typically see in Sicilian set features, which are far too often painted purely in the shades of sun and sand. Likewise, it's a rare, vital, feminist effort about what it means to be a girl growing up in an oppressive Catholic culture where there's much more going on beneath the surface than women are traditionally allowed to discuss.

An unusual and affecting film, in “Alone With Her Dreams,” Lucia and her Sicilian female relatives learn that, rather than hope for a spiritual intervention or the help of a man, sometimes it's better just to take care of things themselves... in whatever way they see fit.

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat in ‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’

‘Borat Subsequent Moviefilm’ is a good success

Directed by:  Jason Woliner

Starring:  Sacha Baron Cohen and Maria Bakalova

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” – “This film is unsuitable for children under the age of 3.” – Four by Two Films

And how!

The aforementioned, extremely valid warning appears just before the opening credits to “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” – which, naturally, is a follow-up to director Larry Charles’ megahit “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan” (2006).

After watching this wild, distasteful, uncomfortable, no-holds-barred comedy, this critic can think of many friends, family, and acquaintances of all ages who would find it inappropriate too.  Then again, many others in my Rolodex will champion director Jason Woliner’s flick and then beg for another film in 2021, instead of waiting another 14 more years for a third Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen) feature.

Yes, Borat - the enthusiastic, America-admiring, sexist, anti-Semitic, Kazakhstani journalist – is back – as well as mentions of gypsy tears, potassium, and much more - in a worthy sequel that reflects a new time in Kazakhstan and the U.S. and A.

Since the events of Borat’s distinctive American reportings in 2006, his home country “has become a laughing stock around the world”, and Kazakhstanis have turned on our favorite Central Asian reporter.  He’s become a pariah.

What?  You joke? 

Well, after several years of punishment (that will not be specifically revealed in this review), Borat finally catches a break, as Premier Nazarbayev sends him on a mission back to the States to deliver a gift to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.  The plan is to refurbish Kazakhstan’s standing with the community of nations.  Thankfully – and as one would expect - this opportunity allows Borat to bump into everyday Americans and hopefully a powerful one or two over 90 chaotic minutes. 

Cohen proudly struts his legendary “Candid Camera” shtick, as his bumbling, 6’ 3” inch alter ego offers his offensive, limited world-view to various Americans who are too polite to correct his many declarations, such as women belong in cages and that COVID-19 is a “liberal hoax.”  To be more accurate, these unsuspecting folks are either too good-mannered to retort, or they silently agree, and in a couple of key moments, they boisterously approve.  It’s all done for comedic effect, and in most cases, Cohen connects, and Borat fans will rejoice, belly laugh, and shed tears of joy.

Cohen enthusiasts and innocent movie bystanders might voice concerns as well.  It’s 2020, and the coronavirus – as we all painfully know - has gripped the U.S., and our hero dives into one-on-one encounters sans a mask.  One assumes that Cohen and his team addressed suitable safety precautions, but then again, that’s the unexplained magic of this British comic savant:  How does he do it?

The first Borat film raked in 232 million dollars worldwide at the box office – and who knows how much in DVD and streaming sales – but Cohen somehow finds random bystanders who don’t know his famous character and then fall for his con while the camera rolls.  In most cases, however, SBC invents various disguises to fool his victims, err…willing participants. 

This time around, Cohen introduces an additional wrinkle: a new, on-screen contributor, Borat’s 15-year-old daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova), who tags along with her dad throughout the picture.  Bakalova – a 24-year-old Bulgarian actress – is a refreshing addition, and she serves as an extension of her father’s obliviousness of modern times.

“It’s impossible for women to drive,” Tutar declares. 

She also holds many tangential, oppressive beliefs that are not appropriate to disclose in a PG-rated movie review, but Bakalova relieves the pressure from Cohen to carry on his performance art for the entire film.  Although fanatics may clamor for constant Borat screen time, Sacha Baron doesn’t wear out his welcome and wisely picks his spots. 

Although in one particular case in the third act, Cohen crosses a line in a mortifying sequence with a prominent politician that will trigger PTSD-shivers from “Bruno” (2009) and former U.S. Congressman Ron Paul.

That moment – even for big Borat and Sacha Baron Cohen supporters – is a tough watch, and it rings as highly embarrassing rather than funny.  Still, Cohen pushes boundaries, and that’s his jam as he spreads his unique comic perspective.

Please note, I haven’t mentioned one sketch throughout this review, and that’s by design.  Why spoil the punchlines?  Rest assured, although “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” doesn’t reach the heights of our misunderstood protagonist’s first picture, it’s a good success.

(3/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Rebecca - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

This gorgeous 'Rebecca' reincarnation would work better as a series

Directed by:  Ben Wheatley

Written by:  Jane Goldman, Joe Shrapnel, and Anna Waterhouse, based on the novel by Daphne Du Maurier

Starring:  Lily James, Armie Hammer, and Kristin Scott Thomas

“Rebecca” – Ever been to Monte Carlo?  

Yea, me neither, and the beyond-picturesque, seaside playground for the megarich – that sits in the French Riviera - is a bucket list trip, for sure.  To boot, the Cannes Film Festival is just 55 kilometers southwest along the A-8, so let’s make a second stop during a future holiday in May.  

For the moment, this critic will have to look back at memories of an NCAA Basketball Tournament weekend at Las Vegas’Monte Carlo Hotel about 20 years ago, but I bet a dollar that the views of the Jardin Exotique de Monaco and the Oceanographic Museum top the sights of a 5-dollar blackjack table at 3 a.m. on the Vegas Strip.   

Just a little.

For a working-class girl (Lily James), her trip to Monte Carlo is a dream come true.  This unnamed early 20-something is an assistant for snotty and snooty Mrs. Van Hopper (Ann Dowd), a wealthy, older socialite who isn’t very skilled at making friends.  She frequently delivers orders and dismisses her ward with seemingly each breath. 

“Honestly, everything I’m teaching you, you ought to be paying me,” Van Hopper snarls. 

Nice, but for 90 pounds a year and the chance for world travel, our young heroine will endure her employer’s putdowns, jabs, and bullying.  Her life, however, theatrically changed when Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer), her version of Prince Charming, appears before her eyes. 

She meets this tall, debonair, affluent widower at a posh hotel’s restaurant on two consecutive mornings, which blossoms into a week-long dream of drives in a 3.5L Bentley, a stroll at Monaco-Ville, and sun and drinks at the beach.  To her surprise, her dance of romance turns into a marriage proposal, and the new Mrs. Maxim de Winter moves into his sprawling English estatecalled Manderley.  

(Not Mandalay Bay, that’s in Southern Nevada.)

Director Ben Wheatley (“High-Rise” (2015)) remakes Alfred Hitchcock’s Best Picture Oscar winner “Rebecca” (1940) – based on Daphne Du Maurier’s novel – but admittedly, I haven’t seen Hitch’s film nor read the book and cannot compare them to2020’s reincarnation.

The title character refers to Maxim’s first wife, a gorgeous, educated trendsetter with a Hollywood movie star’s charisma, and her surviving husband is left picking up his emotional pieces scattered all about his massive home.  Our protagonist is now living in her shadows at Manderley, and the house’s caretaker Mrs. Danvers (Kristin Scott Thomas) isn’t doing her any favors. Danvers could be Nurse Ratched’s refined fraternal twin, and Wheatley wouldn’t be out of line by crashing thunder and flashing lightning during each on-screen appearance.  Think Frau Blucher from “Young Frankenstein” (1974).  Danvers isthat intimidating, as she eerily repeats Mrs. Van Hopper’s cruel intentions but with more panache.  

The second Mrs. de Winter feels massive burden and anxiety, and James is convincing as a virginal, inexperienced replacement.  She’s afraid of making social miscues, which isonly reinforced when she eventually makes them.  Since Maxim semi-drops the man-of-her-dreams routines once they get settled, she feels alone – like an awkward, abandoned queen - in this British Palace of Versailles.  

Wheatley and cinematographer Laurie Rose capture drop-dead (pardon the pun) gorgeous locales and old money.  You could almost smell the cash, stocks, and bonds.  Meanwhile, costume designer Julian Day matches the attractive co-stars with exceptionally striking, dapper textiles from the period (sometime in the 1930s, possibly 1936), including a mustard suit for Mr. de Winter and a grey wool jacket and black beret for the Mrs., that made this fashion-illiterate bachelor take notice. 

The film looks great, and Wheatley and the cast build a foundation for an engaging drama, but the narrative and pacing feel schizophrenic.  Mrs. de Winter rows against Rebecca’s tide for the film’s first 80 minutes, and then the tones change into something entirely different for the last 40.  An altered storylineemerges (that will not be revealed in this review), as Wheatley and James hustle through a catalog of major life events to lunge towards a rushed conclusion.  In other words, the third act feels like a tacked-on cheap trick.  

Speaking of tricks, a sketchy dream sequence and two random flocks of CGI birds offer a few head-scratchers too and don’t help the cause.  

An ode to Hitchcock, perhaps? 

Well, this version of “Rebecca” seems better suited as a 6-part, 4-hour series, so the story has room to breathe, and the filmmakers could – early on - place clues and subplots thatestablish the surprises in the third act.  Instead, the film leaves uswith an unsatisfying ending due to the film’s construction, completely separate from any joy or gloom that the de Winters may feel by the end credits.  

Where have I felt that quasi-empty sentiment before?  Ah, somewhere in Nevada.  

Monte Carlo and Cannes Film Festival…I hear you calling me. 

(2/4 stars) 

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Coming Home Again - Movie Review by Jen Johans

Director: Wayne Wang

Writers: Wayne Wang & Chang-rae Lee (based on his essay from “The New Yorker”)

Cast: Justin Chon and Jackie Chung

Review by Jen Johans

Nothing nourishes you quite like your mother. Whether it's the time you spend in the womb absorbing the nutrients from her body, her milk when you're a baby, or the meals she makes you with love growing up, there's sustenance there that you feel even if the only thing you're faced with is her reassuring smile.

It's this connection that Chang-rae (Justin Chon) wants to forge once again or rather, needs to now that his mother (Jackie Chung) is so close to death. A first-generation Korean American who leaves his job and his life in New York to return home to care for his terminally ill mother in San Francisco, when “Coming Home Again” opens, we watch him begin to prepare his mother's signature kalbi recipe for their New Year's Eve dinner.

Slicing short ribs with care so that the bone begins to fall away but remains connected, in his voice-over narration, Chang-rae explains that the meat needs that link for taste because it borrows its richness from the bone. An obvious metaphor for his relationship with his mother, even though stomach cancer has cruelly taken away her ability to eat, he continues to pay tribute to the recipe that she loved to make, and the one that keeps them connected like flesh and bone.

A quiet, experimental effort based on Chang-Rae Lee's eponymous 1995 “New Yorker” essay, which the award-winning author co-wrote with filmmaker Wayne Wang, “Coming Home Again” is an intensely personal, if not overly successful chronicle of the many stages of grief that come to us in waves as we go from knowing someone is going to die to watching that process play out.

Flooded by natural light, with the film's sparse production design, frames within frames, frequent use of reflective surfaces and elements to signify emptiness, and wide, static shots that go on longer than most contemporary fare, director Wayne Wang pays tribute to the intimate chamber dramas of Yasujirō Ozu, Chantal Akerman, and others who've made this genre their bread and butter.

A filmmaker with a significant background helming successful studio ventures like “The Joy Luck Club” and “Maid in Manhattan” in the '90s and early '00s, in 1995, Wang crafted one of my all-time favorite films in “Smoke,” which, along with its freewheeling follow-up “Blue in the Face,” were made in collaboration with the iconoclastic author Paul Auster. 

No stranger to working with acclaimed creators on personal projects, “Coming Home Again,” finds him back in “Smoke” like terrain once again. An opus that celebrated storytelling and human connection, which is what “Coming Home Again” sets out to do too, although Wang has said he prefers independent filmmaking because it allows him to breathe in ways that stressful studio projects do not, this film pales in comparison to “Smoke.” 

Confusingly edited to the point that I had absolutely no idea that a bulk of the film took place over the course of one day until I discovered so in my research, “Coming Home Again” is filled with conversations and flashbacks that weave in and out of the main narrative in ways that feel more random than purposeful. 

Unable to shed its roots as a personal essay brought awkwardly to the screen, “Coming Home Again,” plays like a short film stretched past its breaking point to reach the eighty-six-minute length of a feature. Treating time and memory like a state of mind in flashbacks, this practice extends to the experience overall, making “Coming Home Again” feel nearly twice as long. 

Employing a few bold techniques that we usually attribute to the theater, in the film's flashback scenes, we quickly realize that Chon appears to be roughly the same age as Chung, which says something about the way that time moves both forward and backward concurrently as well as the duo's complex dynamic. This intriguing casting decision also illustrates the number of roles a family member can play in our lives. In several poignant flashbacks, Chung feels more like Chon's sister than his mother, especially when contrasted with the actress portraying his sister whose maternal energy is evident as the two argue about whether it's time to give in to their mother's wish to let her, as Dylan Thomas wrote, “go gentle into that good night” or “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Overly reliant on the performance of Chon as Chang-rae, which is at its strongest when the actor has something major to fight against, such as when he goes head-to-head with Christians who've come to pray but offer no answers, “Coming Home Again” shortchanges the rest of its cast to its overall detriment. 

Ending the film the same way that Chang-rae Lee did his original essay, which served the print version infinitely better than Wang's film, while our minds keep absorbing and digesting the rhythms of the words of the piece as written, onscreen the sudden final sequence plays as though the film's real conclusion had been left on the cutting room floor. 

Filming many scenes from afar, there's one particularly moving sequence, which finds cinematographer Richard Wong's camera stationed in the base of the kitchen where the New Year's Eve dinner Chang-rae has been preparing awaits offscreen. Using two frames within the frame beautifully, in this affecting mise-en-scene, we sense both the nourishment offered by Chang-rae Lee's mother back when she used the kitchen religiously as well as its absence now that the table in the foreground is empty and she's stuck in the bed located in the background.

Frustratingly, the sequence sums up not only the meaning of the film in one immaculate, painterly shot but also highlights what is missing from the work overall. Feeling less like a film than a collection of occasionally clever frames, performances, and scenes in search of a connective thread, in the end, “Coming Home Again” needs the tender richness of a true narrative the way that Chang-rae needs his mother, his mother needs Chang-rae, and kalbi needs the bone. 

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

The Trial of the Chicago 7 - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Sacha Baron Cohen and Jeremy Strong in ‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’

‘The Trial of the Chicago 7’ argues that 1968 and 2020 aren’t so different

Written and directed by: Aaron Sorkin

Starring:  Eddie Redmayne, John Carroll Lynch, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Frank Langella, Mark Rylance, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Sacha Baron Cohen

“The Trial of the Chicago 7” – The Left Coast hosted The Summer of Love in 1967, a time when 100,000 young people converged on San Francisco for music, art, and a sense of community.

In August 1969, the East Coast hosted Woodstock, the famous conglomeration of all-star musical acts and 400,000 human beings touching down on an Upstate NY farm for three days of peace, love, and rock ‘n’ roll/folk melodies.  

In between these iconic events, the American Midwest held an altogether different affair, the 1968 Democratic Convention.  Hosted in Chicago from Aug. 26 – Aug. 29, the political gathering twisted into a tinderbox of frustration, especially for those opposing the Vietnam War.  Add the devastating assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Bobby Kennedy in April and June, respectively, and the country’s tensions reached an all-time high, or one of several angst-filled peaks. 

Walter Cronkite even called the convention a “police state.”

Does this sound familiar?

Writer/director Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7” explores this tumultuous time, and in an Oct. 2020 interview with “CBS This Morning”, he said, “I wanted (the movie) to be about today, and it is.  We really didn’t realize how much it was going to be about today until we got to today.”

Back in ’68, protesters converged in Chicago.  Thousands of these demonstrators and the police reached a confrontation(s), as verbal assaults, rocks, tear gas, and batons became the primary communication tools.  Five months later, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell (John Doman) assigns Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) to prosecute – in U.S. District Court - a select group of the dissenters with criminal conspiracy “to insight a riot.”   The men were known as the Chicago 7, even though eight faced trial. 

Schultz is reluctant.  He thinks that the case is thin because the Rap Brown Law is the basis for the A.G.’s will.  The 33-year-old lawyer says, “(The law) was created by Southern whites in (the U.S.) Congress to limit the free speech of black activists.” 

He adds, “No one has ever been charged with it before.” 

Sorkin spends – seemingly - most of the 129-minute screen time within the courtroom, rather than the infamous events themselves, although the case is notorious for a few key reasons, and he outlines them in his film.  Thankfully, the cast and crew do get outside on occasion, as our writer/director extraordinaire features the protests (and the decisions leading up to them) through flashbacks during the trial, similarly to Jim Garrison’s (Kevin Costner) legal labor in “JFK” (1991).  At times, the court case – admittedly - feels like a lengthy chronicle - rather than riveting cinema.  Meanwhile, the movie’s highpoints tie to the struggles at Grant Park and nearby, on-location spots.  

What’s that news saying?  If it bleeds, it leads.  

Still, this was a drawn-out trial.  Sorkin fills the air with – his signature of - high detailed, stylized nuance.  The comprehensive back-and-forth nestles on a foundation of probably 4,000 hours of research, although the discourse between the defendants and their low-key, pragmatic attorney William Kunstler (played nicely by Mark Rylance) feels procedural.  The minute particulars are essential to catalog for reference, but the sweeping, broader themes of power struggles, unfair and erratic judicial decisions, and one vile, racist act sear into our long-term memories. 

“The Trial of the Chicago 7” really has a whole lot to unpack, and an impressive cast helps with the heavy lifting, as Eddie Redmayne, Alex Sharp, Jeremy Strong, John Carroll Lynch, Danny Flaherty, Noah Robbins, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, and Sacha Baron Cohen state their characters’ cases.  Lynch, Abdul-Mateen II, and Cohen offer memorable performances, but Frank Langella steals the show as the maddening Judge Julius Hoffman.  Langella’s work could levy (additional) anxiety on anyone needing to enter a courtroom someday soon because Judge Hoffman is that upsetting.  Then again, in 2020, feeling anxious is our new normal, so hey, no big deal.  

Well, let’s hope that history repeats itself: Woodstock 2021 and better times next year. 

(3/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

2 Hearts - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Radha Mitchell and Adan Canto in ‘2 Hearts’

‘2 Hearts’ has good intentions, but it flutters with clichés

Directed by:  Lance Hool

Written by:  Veronica Hool and Robin U. Russin 

Starring:  Radha Mitchell, Tiera Skovbye, Jacob Elordi, and Adan Canto

“2 Hearts” – “As the world becomes a more digital place, we cannot forget about the human connection.” – Adam Neumann

“Two of hearts.  Two hearts that beat as one.  Two of hearts. I need you. I need you.” – Stacey Q, “Two of Hearts”

Director Lance Hool’s romantic drama “2 Hearts” does not feature a smartphone, an incoming email, or a Yelp review.   His characters seem to live in the pre-Internet past, but deciphering the exact on-screen year is like attempting to decode David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” (2001) or ascertain the meaning of a random Jackson Pollock painting.  You might unearth some clues, but discovering the exact answer will prove pretty darn impossible.  

This feature actually presents two narratives from different periods.  Chris (Jacob Elordi) - a happy-go-lucky, all-American high school senior who eyes college and good times - lives in more recent times, while Jorge (Adan Canto) – an industrious Cuban professional who helps run his father’s rum business – resides in a prior era.   Ah, but Jorge meets a flight attendant (Radha Mitchell) on a Pan Am flight, and since the airline disbanded in 1991, 1980 or so feels about right. 

Chris also happens to be our narrator, and he frequently declares philosophical mantras about finding one’s purpose and that “life happens for us, not to us.”  

He’s a sweet, thoughtful guy and delivers his proverbs with the cadence of Jack Handey, but sans the punchlines, and why not?   Heck, he meets Sam (Tiera Skovbye), a wholesome, studious co-ed, and they fall in love.  In a parallel amorous yarn, Jorge and Leslie (Mitchell) only have eyes for one another too. 

Throughout most of the first two acts, “2 Hearts” offers – accompanied by an uber-sentimental score - these warm courtships, as each pair of lovebirds - from different locales and times - share their goals, hopes, and feelings with their respective partners.   This is all fine and good, but – other than two specific medical issues – the couples don’t run into conflicts, clashes, compromise, or contention.  Even though they exhibit model adult-relationship behavior – which therapists everywhere will applaud - cinematically, the minutes plod on as Sam watches Chris and his brothers play sandlot football on campus, and Jorge and Leslie lounge on a Hawaiian beach.  

You won’t find a dramatic “The Notebook” (2004) kiss in the rain or a loving “A Star Is Born” (2018) concert duet, as these romances carry the luster of any real-life relationship with plenty of good manners and chivalry but little magic or dramatic spark.  The on-screen couples seem to enjoy one another, but those pleasant vibes don’t entirely translate into vested interest, at least where this critic sat for 100 minutes. 

Did the gushy love affairs feel too commonplace?  Were the struggles between the male leads and their fathers painted with broad, clichéd brushes?  Was the ultimate connection between the individual narratives way too obvious?   All of the above is probably the right answer, and to boot, a third act scriptwriting trick (that will not be mentioned here) feels a bit unfair.

Indeed, “2 Hearts” - based on a true story - owns a positive, kindhearted message, and quite frankly, all audiences should appreciate the movie’s intentions and lessons.  Yes, those in love with love might cherish this film, but others might wish to turn to their phones and flip through social media.

(1.5/4 stars)  

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

White Riot - Movie Review by Jen Johans

“White Riot” (2019)

Director: Rubika Shah

Cast: Red Saunders, Dennis Bovell, & Mykaell Riley.

Review by Jen Johans

Once upon a time, Eric Clapton lost his mind. Stopping a show in Birmingham to ask any “foreigners” in the audience to raise their hands, he told them he wanted them gone, not just from the concert but his country altogether. “I don't want you here,” he shouted. “I think we should send them all back...We need to make clear to them they are not welcome. England is for white people, man … This is Great Britain, a white country!"

The year was 1976. As shocking as these words were back then and remain to this day, when it came to views like these, Eric Clapton was far from alone. Joined in supporting the new rise of fascism in the UK, David Bowie argued that Britain was ready for a fascist leader and called Adolf Hitler the first rock star in an interview with “Playboy.” Following Clapton's lead, Rod Stewart went even further, giving a full-throated endorsement for racist National Front political party member Enoch Powell, saying that he too thought it was time for foreigners to leave. But this position wasn't just coming from those in rock. With punk taking over the music scene in Britain, The Sex Pistols, Adam Ant, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were just three punk groups who openly embraced Nazi symbolism and swastikas in their costumes and performances.

What the hell was going on, you might ask? The short answer is that in the mid to late '70s, England was rampant with anger and hate. Inundated with job loss and scapegoating the problems of the country on immigrant “invaders” with “black, brown, and yellow faces,” as the National Front ranted in their rallies, Britain's tide was turning in a horrific direction. Watching this happen in real-time, rock photographer Red Saunders vowed to do whatever he could to stop the impending flood of xenophobia before it was too late.

Writing an open letter to Clapton, whose music, he rightfully charged, was cribbed directly from Black blues artists, Saunders sounded the alarm and offered a solution. “We want to organise a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison in rock music,” he wrote. Leaving his contact information in the letter for interested parties, after his missive was printed in music publications across the UK, Saunders was overwhelmed by the response.

Joining forces with gifted graphic designers, writers, photographers, musicians, and artists, they formed the group Rock Against Racism to reach the youths of England in an attempt to educate the younger generation against propagandist hate. Hosting events where they purposely had Black and white bands playing back-to-back, the organization put on more than two hundred shows in its first year and created a fanzine called “Temporary Hoarding,” which addressed the real-world problems of racist policing, the Catholic side of the North Ireland conflict, sexual violence, immigration, LGBT issues, and other topics which were ignored by the mainstream press.

Chronicling the legacy of the group while bringing issues of “Temporary Hoarding” bursting to life through vibrant animation (which filmmaker Rubika Shah acknowledges was inspired by the films of Brett Morgan, including “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck”), “White Riot” is a lively time capsule of a fraught period in England made eerily prescient due to recent events.

Watching the arguments made by the National Front in the wake of MAGA, Trump, the murderous Nazi march on Charlottesville, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter protests, as well as the advent of increasing fascism around the globe, “White Riot” plays like one of the scariest horror films you'll see ahead of Halloween. From bullets in the mailbox to assaults against musicians and concertgoers to the open police support for the National Front and their policies, it's a harrowing document of a fraught era in British history and the brave artists, organizations, and youths who dared to join forces to put hate in its place.

Interviewing not only Red Saunders and his colleagues but also some of the musicians who played Rock Against Racism (or RAR) gigs, including The Tom Robinson Band and Alien Kulture, while Shah's film admittedly suffers from a lack of focus as it seems to adjust and expand its thesis every time a vital new issue is introduced, it's an urgent eye-opener, nonetheless. Releasing to virtual cinemas from Film Movement ahead of the U.S. election, it's sure to inspire viewers to get involved, stay involved, and – here in the states, at least – vote.

Featuring amazing archival interviews, photos, and concert footage with bands including The Clash, Sham 69, Matumbi, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, and more, “White Riot,” which gets its name from a widely misunderstood Clash song off their first album, is of particular interest to UK music fans. Celebrating the grassroots movement that started in an east London print shop and exploded into a legendary carnival so important that The Clash swallowed their egos and played second to last before event headliner Tom Robinson (who'd been with RAR from the very beginning), the debut feature from Shah promises great filmmaking from the documentarian to come.

Clocking in at a mere eighty minutes, “White Riot,” is the film equivalent of a punk song. Frenetically edited, it hits its thematic chords hard to drive home the message, ensuring that, unlike Clapton's “I Shot the Sheriff,” this is one refrain you'll be glad to get stuck in your head long after it’s done.

(Bio: A three-time national award-winning writer, when Jen Johans isn't reviewing movies at FilmIntuition.com or releasing new episodes of her podcast “Watch With Jen,” you can find her on Twitter @FilmIntuition.)

The War with Grandpa - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, Cheech Marin, and Jane Seymour in ‘The War with Grandpa’

Maybe ‘The War with Grandpa’ should give peace a chance

Directed by:  Tim Hill

Written by:  Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember

Starring:  Robert De Niro, Oakes Fegley, Uma Thurman, Rob Riggle, Cheech Marin, Christopher Walken, and Jane Seymour

“The War with Grandpa” – Since I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, sometimes 2020 feels like an alien world, not necessarily due to miracles of modern technology, but socially. 

Back in the day, parents left their Gen X children to their own devices (not cell phones but ideas and related tomfoolery) for hours and hours.  My mom would shoo my brothers and me out of the house on Saturday or Sunday mornings, and say, “Have a great day.  Dinner is at six.” 

My father’s word was law, including his cashless payment system in exchange for child labor assignments, like shoveling the driveway during Upstate New York’s arctic winters and multitasking numerous yardwork duties during the humid summers.

I didn’t work for free, because he usually declared, “Don’t worry, Son.  You’ll get double desserts tonight.”   

Great.

On top of this odd duality of rampant freedom and strict adherence to parental commands, most kids – in say, 1980 – wouldn’t start a war with one of their grandfathers.  Forty years ago, grandfathers began smoking at 15 and lived during The Great Depression, World War II, The Cold War, and the Heidi Game.  Quite frankly, I wouldn’t have started a conflict with either of my grandpas for Jack Lambert’s rookie card, a pinball machine, and a year supply of Big League Chew.   Why invite a death wish?

In 2020, Peter (Oakes Fegley) has no such fear. 

Shortly after Peter’s Grandpa Ed (Robert De Niro) moved into his grandson’s room, this plucky 6th grader at Garfield Middle School unleashes a fierce rivalry with his mom’s dad.   You see, Peter had to give up his 12’ by 12’ domain and take up residence in the attic, and hence, Ed – who is a pleasant widower, outside of an ill-advised supermarket confrontation within the movie’s first few minutes – becomes Public Enemy #1 for the loosest of reasons.   

“The War with Grandpa” doesn’t aim very high, but director Tim Hill’s slapstick family comedy serves a couple of purposes.  This critic chuckled a few times over 94 minutes, but I don’t know, perhaps elementary school audiences will have a blast.  Adults will enjoy catching glimpses of the big-time cast.  Hill and 37 producers conjured some magic to sign on De Niro, Uma Thurman, Rob Riggle, Jane Seymour, Cheech Marin, and Christopher Walken.  It’s a head-scratcher, but just about everything entering our orbit in 2020 is laced with surprises. 

There aren’t many other revelations in “Grandpa”.  Ed and Peter have a “Home Alone”-like prankster-filled battle that includes toothpaste mixed with sweets, faulty door hinges, a snake, and the 69 boyz “Tootsie Roll” blasting at an inopportune time.   The movie is harmless and perfectly acceptable for playing in the background while cleaning the house or piecing together a puzzle, but it’s also a bit nonsensical.  Ed is a sympathetic fella and frankly doesn’t deserve Peter placing a bullseye on his head, so the film isn’t set up for compelling theatre.   

Thurman and Riggle carve out ample screen time, but Beatrix Kiddo delivers any ole mom role offered in 10,000 other light comedies, and funnyman Riggle plays it straight.  At least Seymour, Marin, Walken, and De Niro serve up a semi-mean game of dodgeball, so there’s that.   Then again, Walken and De Niro flinging red rubber balls doesn’t have the gravitas of Michael (De Niro) and Nick (Walken) enduring Russian roulette in a Viet Cong prison.  

Hey, the average 10-year-old won’t know the difference, but I’m a child of the 70s and 80s, so…

(1.5/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.

Time - Movie Review by Jeff Mitchell

‘Time’ is sometimes off, but the punctual, personal messages resonate

Directed by:  Garrett Bradley

“Time” – “If you fall, I will catch you.  I will be waiting, time after time.” – Cyndi Lauper, “Time After Time”

Sibil Fox Richardson (a.k.a. Fox Rich) has been waiting for her husband’s return for just over 20 years.  Fox and her high school sweetheart Rob are not legally separated but remain physically apart.  

The couple is legally separated but in an altogether different way.  You see, in 1999, a Louisiana court sentenced Rob to 60 years in prison for armed robbery, and Fox was not an unknowing party.  The Louisiana State Penitentiary does tender Fox a couple visits a month, but can a marriage survive on – what equates to – two days of face-to-face connection per year? Somehow, Fox holds her family – that includes six boys – together in the face of loneliness and regret, making two decades seem like a few centuries. 

During a January 31, 2020 interview with “Film Comment”, director Garrett Bradley stated that she originally intended to make a documentary short about Fox and her story.   On the last day of shooting, however, Bradley’s “worst nightmare and biggest dream came true.”   Rich handed her a bag with “18 years of mini-DV tapes”, and after the director watched 100 hours of home movies, she decided to turn her film into a doc feature.  

“Time” is a challenging watch.  Garrett mingles Rich’s rich history over the past two decades with current footage throughout the 81-minute, non-linear runtime, so it’s sometimes difficult to find your footing.

The movie’s opening six minutes introduces Fox as a young mother with a dissolving safety net.  Rob is in prison, and she is pregnant.  Hope is scarce.   

In the next scene, fast forward to the present, and Fox – born in 1971 – is a seasoned mom, wife, confident business professional, and public speaker, but Rob is still imprisoned.  Their boys have grown into responsible young men, and “Time” organically swells into a plea against the justice system, one that administers lost years between a father and his family.

With approximately 2 million Americans circulating in the prison population, “Time” is one personal story of self-examination, anger, remorse, and devotion where one decision cost the Richardsons nearly everything.  Indeed, plenty of documentaries and features chronicle the madness of an unjust justice system versus people of color, and while “The Central Park Five” (2012) and “Just Mercy” (2019) flash 10-story spotlights on wrongly-accused black men, “Time” documents the pain and anxiety over the consequences of imprisonment. 

The separation takes a toll.  Through numerous cuts and edits (and accompanied by a soft piano), Bradley presents Rich to the audience.  This legally-forsaken wife and mom absorbs her grief, channels it into positive messages for her sons, and tries to hang on to some semblance of normalcy.  Instead of sitting down for straight-up interviews, Fox offers confessionals to her camera and Bradley’s.  The director also seeds the screen with B-roll depicting everyday life, like the first day of school or mom-son teaching moments in the car.  Through these avenues, Bradley’s handiwork feels like director Asif Kapadia’s (“Senna” (2010) and “Amy” (2015)) docs.   Fox’s sons – such as Remington and Justus - also provide needed context for growing up in a split household, and her mother offers frank talk in possibly the only formal interview.

In some ways, “Time” is a remarkable find, but it’s also an unconventional, artistic, and sometimes disjointed one.  It’s a film that could use more traditional documentary threads to stitch together Rich’s and Bradley’s work, but their voices resonate and sometimes cinematically harmonize.   At one point, Bradley captures a pile driver at a nearby construction site, as it repeatedly pounds on the beginnings of a new building. Like clockwork, it utters constant, ominous thuds.  At another place in the film, Rich addresses a live audience by saying, “It’s been 20 years, y’all.” 

These moments feel linked.

(2.5/4 stars)

Jeff – a member of the Phoenix Critics Circle – 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.