A Wrinkle in Time
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
It was a dark and stormy night.
With this cheeky line, Madeleine L’Engle began an odyssey that entertained and emboldened, taught us to take responsibility for our own choices, highlighted the drawbacks of conformity and showed us how to be warriors for the light.
L’Engle’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time, though massively popular and never out of print since its 1970 publication, had its critics. Not Christian enough to be Christian, too Christian not to be, it was also among the first SciFi novels with a female point of view. This wasn’t taken super well by adults in 1970, but it was immediately and forever beloved by its intended audience.
A Wrinkle in Time was smart and groundbreaking, which, of course, makes it the ideal tale for Ava DuVernay.
Can the filmmaker who landed two near-perfect punches of social commentary in the last four years (Selma, 13th) bring this imaginative, vibrant, lovely classic of adolescent literature to life?
Yes and no.
With the help of scripters Jennifer Lee (Zootopia) and Jeff Stockwell (Bridge to Terabithia), DuVernay remains faithful enough to L’Engle’s vision without being limited by it. But she stumbles to translate some of the more dated concepts in the book, and in doing so the film’s conclusion feels a bit rushed and confused.
Her picture looks glorious, though, conjuring images and movements vibrant enough to stand up to our own imaginations.
Of course, the casting is where DuVernay, with little fanfare and no disruption in the story, breaks the most ground. Storm Reid (Sleight) turns out to be the best choice the director makes, offering the perfect mix of adolescent self-loathing and smarts as our reluctant hero, Meg.
On the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of her NASA scientist father, Meg is called on a mission across time and space to find him. She’s joined by her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe, perfectly precocious and/or creepy, depending on need), a cute (and, let’s be honest, needless) boy from school (Levi Miller) and three unusual women (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling).
Their adventure is colorful and beautiful. It’s also full of lessons that feel less like a sledgehammer than reasonable nudging. (“You can do this. You’re choosing not to.”)
The supporting cast—Zach Galifianakis, Michael Peña, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw—balance the fantastical with the heartfelt. Galifianakis is particularly impressive.
Yes, there are more than a few corny, too-precious moments, but it is a kids’ movie. DuVernay can be credited with keeping that audience in mind to create a lovely film unabashed enough to bear-hug L’Engle’s message of positivity.
The Hurricane Heist
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
If your local TV weatherperson has a bit more swagger this week, there’s a good chance they’ve seen The Hurricane Heist and it’s heroic, badass meteorologist.
But it’s not just weatherman Will (Toby Kebbel) saving the day, there’s also ATF agent Casey (Columbus’ own Maggie Grace, repping home with an OSU cap), Will’s brother Breeze (Ryan Kwanten) and one ferocious weather system.
A thieving crew led by the scowling Perkins (Ralph Ineson from The VVitch) launches the latest big screen attempt to rob the treasury, but can you guess what makes this heist a little different?
There’s a hurricane!
What follows is big, dumb, and more fun than it oughta be.
Credit director Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx) with making the most of what he’s got, gunning for B-movie glory instead of overreaching. Let’s be honest, this setup is just south of Sharknado, but the pace is snappy, the effects are effective, and the adventure occasionally thrilling.
The writing team gives us easily identifiable characters that lean on cliche without being defined by them. Casey and Will are both damaged souls, natch, and heroic teamwork just might be their ticket to redemption. Perkins and his team of evil doers, clearly inspired by Hans Gruber’s iconic thieves in Die Hard, chew plenty of scenery while making it easy to cheer their eventual comeuppance.
The Hurricane Heist won’t tax you your brain, but it doesn’t want to. It just wants you to have fun.
You will, “weather” you expect to or not.
Catch phrase!
The Strangers: Prey at Night
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Sequels are hard. Especially when you don’t understand what made the original so unnerving and memorable.
A decade ago, Bryan Bertino released the almost unbearably slow burn of a home invasion film, The Strangers. The underappreciated gem quietly terrified attentive audiences, beginning with the line, “Is Tamara home?”
Director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) and screenwriter Ben Ketai (The Forest) pick up the story of three masked, bloodthirsty youngsters still looking for Tamara.
A loving but bickering family spends the night at a lakeside campground and trailer park. A great deal of exposition ensures that you catch on, but the main gist is this: problem child Kinsey (Bailee Madison) is at odds with her beleaguered parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) and her golden-child brother (Lewis Pullman).
Yes, our three masked malcontents have also settled into that same lakeside trailer park, now mainly vacant in the post-season.
Where Bertino’s horror had the languid melancholy of the old country blues tunes scratching away on a turntable, Roberts prefers the power ballads of the early Eighties. In fact, instead of the cinema of the Seventies that inspired Bertino, Roberts prefers 80s fare, from the early MTV soundtrack to the Argento-esque title sequence to the campground setting.
This is a self-conscious slasher with jump scares, frequent bloodletting and a marauder who is profoundly difficult to kill.
Roberts borrows a lot. Not just from Bertino’s original, but also scads of other horror gems from across the eras (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Friday the 13th, Bava’s Carnage and so many more).
And while cinematographer Ryan Samul cannot grip you with dread the way Peter Sova’s creeping camera and quiet wide shots did ten years back, he can frame a shot.
That shot 1) has usually been lifted from another source, and 2) often contains a nearly-ludicrous image. Still, there are more than a few beautifully macabre sequences in this movie. One poolside episode is particularly impressive.
Still, the main problem with The Strangers: Prey at Night is that it gets comfortable in clichés, where the stinging original subverted them. That doesn’t make it a bad movie. It’s not. It’s a nasty little piece of entertainment, unoriginal but competent.
And you cannot expect originality from a sequel, of course. You just hope it can be memorable. The Strangers: Prey at Night is not.
Gringo
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
Gringo roll call: Theron! Edgerton! Oyelowo! Seyfried! Copley! Newton! Even M.J.’s daughter, Paris (better call her Miss Jackson, in case we get nasty).
The point is, there’s talent a ‘plenty here. The question is why?
Director Nash Edgerton (Joel’s brother) never fully commits to either madcap romp or suspenseful manhunt, settling for black comedy that’s never really dark or funny, and a tired, “wrong man” adventure propped up by tired cliches.
David Oyelowo gives it is all as Harold, a pharmaceutical exec who accompanies his bosses (Joel Edgerton and Charlize Theron) on a business trip south of the border. The deal, like most everyone around Harold, is shady, and quickly dissolves into mistaken identities, multiple kidnappings, and one drug lord who will kill you for bad mouthing the Beatles.
That drug lord goes by the name “Black Panther,” a minor point that only reinforces how forgettable this film is. The script, from Anthony Tambakis (Warrior) and Matthew Stone (Intolerable Cruelty) offers scattershot bits of promise, but nothing that provides any solid clue to why all these people signed on.
Maybe they all had a good time. Great, but Gringo runs in many directions without ending up anywhere worthwhile, and you’re left wondering just what the point was anyway.
The Party
by Matt Weiner, MaddWolf.com
Sally Potter’s jet-black comedy The Party mostly succeeds as social satire examining the savagery churning just below the surface of the polite and prosperous. Where it definitely succeeds, in ways that must seem truly unfair to every single other actor alive today, is crowning Patricia Clarkson as a national treasure.
Not that the rest of the tight ensemble is full of slouches. Clarkson plays April, one of five guests attending a party for Janet (the almost equally superb Kristin Scott Thomas), who is celebrating a political promotion.
Janet’s guests fall into broadly recognizable personalities who are practically begging to have their worlds turned inside out: from the New Age life coach Gottfried (Bruno Ganz) to the supercilious professor Martha (Cherry Jones, also—and you might be sensing a theme here—outstanding).
Timothy Spall plays Bill, Janet’s husband and a literal odd man out: he is nearly catatonic when the guests arrive. When he finally reveals why, it sets off a series of violent delights, both verbal and physical.
The cast might actually be too good for the material (written by Potter). That’s an envious problem for a movie to have, but it’s still a real one. The repartee is shocking and funny in turn. Just about every single line delivery from Clarkson, Scott Thomas and Spall is perfectly measured—so much so that the barbs feel like they’re cutting a lot deeper than they really are.
And Emily Mortimer provides a welcome degree of grounding as Jinny, Martha’s partner and the only party guest who seems recognizably human rather than an outsized target ripe for mockery.
But for all the wicked pleasures to be had from watching this masterclass in verbal sparring, there’s a nagging superficiality to it all. The rapid-fire pace distracts from the reality that nobody besides maybe Jinny ends up discovering some deeper personal meaning about themselves other than rank hypocrisy. And a gimmicky twist at the end doesn’t help.
And yet. It’s easy to forgive The Party’s shortcomings after you’ve heard Clarkson tell someone “You are surpassing yourself” or “You could consider murder” in tones so deadpan that we really ought to invent a new adjective.
It’s a strange, perfectly flawed bunch Potter has thrown together. And I could have stayed with them for hours more.
Submission
by Cat McAlpine, MaddWolf.com
Submission opens with the sardonic narration of an exhausted novelist/professor. His internal monologue sounds a lot like the opening to a novel but his book, we discover, isn’t being written. Ted Swenson (Stanley Tucci) is uncomfortable, unhappy, and uninspired. Then, in waltzes the first conscious student he’s had in years, Angela Argo (an incredible Addison Timlin).
Writer/director Richard Levine adapts Francie Prose’s 2000 novel Blue Angel (based on Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 film The Blue Angel, which is in turn based on Heinrich Mann’s 1905 novel Professor Unrat). Clearly, the story is not a new one. Fortunately, while the plot feels overwhelmingly predictable, the building tension is immense, largely pulled taught by the strong turns of Tucci and Timlin.
The performances, across the board, carry the film. Kyra Sedgewick is so natural on screen it’s breathtaking. She is also the only likable character, as Ted’s content and then suffering wife. Colby Minifie is delightfully nasty in her short scene as the Swensons’ daughter.
Levine does the good work of leaving breadcrumbs without pointing to them with a neon arrow. It’s hard to trust your audience (mother! being a timely example) but like a good novel, this film works because of its layers. And also because Stanley Tucci can do anything.
Surely a teacher/student affair between two narcissistic artists can’t end well, but I’ll leave the how and why to your viewing.
Honestly, I wanted a little more from Submission. I wanted to know more about the tragic death of Swenson’s father. I wanted to know why Swenson’s daughter hated him. I was desperate to know which of Angela’s somber backstories were real and which were contrived. I wanted more cause to care about the destruction of a man’s family. And shockingly, I wanted more voiceovers ripped from the pages of the resulting novels.
But I guess I’ll just have to read the book.
Submission’s inevitable resolution suggests that no matter the terrible things we do, we’re all just potential fodder for America’s next great novel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kL1ftT3ANYM
A Fantastic Woman
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Four years ago, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio graced us with the nearly flawless coming-of-middle-age character study Gloria, the magnificent observation of a particular woman’s battle to truly participate in life.
A similar approach and another utterly stunning lead performance guarantee that his latest, the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman, is also a triumph.
The grace that envelopes every moment of Daniela Vega’s turn as the fantastic woman in question is very nearly magical. This is aided by surrealistic, Almodovar-esque flourishes, but it’s mainly the result of Vega’s quietly fiery performance. Resolutely uncommunicative, her deeply interior character demands your attention, refusing to surrender her dignity even as forces pummel it from every direction.
The film opens as the sixtyish Orlando (Francisco Reyes) meanders through a day leading to an audience with Marina, a trans singer (Vega). Then it’s on to Marina’s birthday dinner and home, to the apartment they’ve just begun sharing. The evening is lovely in its run-of-the-mill newness, and though Lelio appears to be setting up the coming conflict in rather broad strokes, the truth is that every moment so far has been a type of misdirection.
When Orlando dies, the assault begins: at the hospital, where Marina’s treated with suspicion; with the family, whose contempt cannot be contained; with the police, whose baseless investigation is perhaps the most degrading moment of all.
There is an aching tenderness to the first act as we begin to understand the nature of Marina and Orlando’s relationship, and we grieve the loss of that tenderness along with Marina. In Vega’s lovely performance we see not only her strength and resilience but also the courage it must have taken Orlando to be himself.
There is a drawback to such a quiet performance, though. In detailing the harassment and abuse Marina suffers from all sides without offering a clearer look inside the character, Marina becomes a symbol rather than a character, an object of sympathy rather than empathy.
Even if Lelio and Vega don’t let you truly know Marina, you cannot help but respect her.
The Cured
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Zombies have proven to be metaphorically versatile over the decades. For Romero, they were sometimes the mindless consumer, sometimes the oppressed, sometimes the political outcasts.
David Freyne’s new Irish horror, The Cured, pushes the epidemic/ostracism angle to create xenophobic and racist parallels, as well as flashes of the kind of contagion-phobic hatred the AIDS epidemic met with. And Freyne does so without losing sight of a compelling, sometimes punishing story.
The Dublin of the not-so-distant future is home to the world’s most cataclysmic outbreak of the MAZE virus—a 28 Days Later kind of thing.
Senan (Sam Keeley) is among the stricken. Along with thousands of his countrymen, Senan has spent the last several years a zombie of sorts—a mindless, cannibalistic killing machine.
And though a cure has been found—relieving 75% of the infected—returning to a society proves difficult because the cured can remember their beastly behavior. So can the uninfected.
Plus, there is still that tricky question of what to do with the other 25%, “the incurable.”
Ellen Page (who also executive produces) co-stars as Senan’s widowed sister-in-law, and becomes our window into what humanity may be left in humanity.
For a world in chaos (ours, not that of the movie), zombies offer a simple way to contend with the unimaginable: racism being celebrated at the highest offices, child molestation being excused when it’s politically convenient, Nazis being labeled good guys. For Freyne, publicly sanctioned fear and hatred leads first to oppression and then to uprising.
His set decoration echoes WWII-era propaganda as his characters struggle with shame, disenfranchisement, and righteous indignation. Keely’s deeply human performance remains focused on overcoming, but it’s the unnerving turn by Tom Vaughan-Lawlor that makes this film a keeper.
A barrister with political aspirations before the outbreak, Vaughan-Lawlor’s Conor proves a natural to lead a revolution. But what feels at first like an imbalance between entitlement and outrage slowly blossoms into something impressively fiendish.
There are two concerns with The Cured. 1) By horror standards, it’s a sociopolitical drama. 2) By the time it decides to become a horror movie, any hint of novelty or originality vanishes.
But don’t discount it. The Cured is smart and relevant. It doesn’t leave you guessing and won’t satisfy your bloodlust, but there is something satisfying in knowing that the ugliness and chaos of the day has not gone unnoticed.