The Gentlemen
by George Wolf, MaddWolf.com
If nothing else, Guy Ritchie and his Gentlemen are not lacking in self-confidence. This is a film, and a filmmaker, anxious to prove the old guys can still cut it, and that any young upstart who thinks otherwise has a painful lesson coming.
Ritchie returns to the testosterone-laden, subtitle-needin’ bloody British gangster comedy terrain of Snatch and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels – the early films that still define him – for a stylish ride through a violent jungle with a man who’s not sure he still wants to be King.
Matthew McConaughey is Mickey Pearson, an American Rhodes Scholar who put his brains to work in the drug trade, utilizing a string of expansive British estates to build an underground network that controls the supply of “bush” aka “supercheese” aka weed.
But now it seems he’s ready for a quiet life of leisure with wife Roz (Michelle Dockery), and offers to sell his entire operation to brilliant criminal nerd Matthew (Jeremy Strong) for a sizable sum.
As Matthew is mulling, Roz smells “f&%$ery afoot,” and she smells wisely.
There’s plenty, and a PI named Fletcher (Hugh Grant) thinks he has it all figured out, so much so that he visits Ray (Charlie Hunnam), Mickey’s number two, with an offer to save Mickey’s hide…in exchange for a hefty fee.
Ya follow? There’s plenty more, and it’s all spelled out via the screenplay Fletcher has conveniently written. As Fletcher joyously outlines the plot to Ray (and us) over scotches and steaks, Ritchie uses the device to play with possible threads, backtrack, and start again.
The Gentlemen is not just meta. As the double crosses and corpses mount, it becomes shamelessly meta, a sometimes engaging, other times tiresome romp buoyed by slick visual style and committed performances (especially Grant and Hunnam), but marred by self-satisfaction and stale humor that might have been less tone deaf a decade ago.
You get the feeling that after a marriage to Madonna and some big Hollywood franchise films (Sherlock Homes, Aladdin), Ritchie is out to prove he hasn’t gone soft with a little raucous, chest-beating fun.
But while The Gentlemen does show Ritchie’s way with a camera can still be impressive, its best parts only add up to a fraction of their promise.
The Turning
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
Way back in 1961, Jack Clayton directed Deborah Kerr to an Oscar nomination with the atmospheric thriller, The Innocents, a nerve-jangling screen version of Henry James’s oft-adapted novel The Turn of the Screw.
Respectful of the book without being a slave to it, Clayton perfectly balanced that ever-important horror theme: is this woman insane or is something supernatural afoot? The novel’s been remade for TV and the big screen dozens of times in countries the world over. Given that, director Floria Sigismondi must have something new to say with her latest, The Turning.
She certainly has one heck of a cast.
Mackenzie Davis has impressed in every film she’s made, regardless of the fact that most of those films have gone utterly unnoticed by moviegoers. She quickly morphs into whatever is needed—badass, emotional wreck, whimsical youth, badass again—without losing an authentic human grounding. She’ll need that as Kate, the new live-in nanny.
Finn Wolfhard (It) and Broklynn Prince (The Florida Project) portray her charges, Miles and Flora. Both kids are amazing. Wolfhard masters the contemptuous sneer of the privileged but still convinces as a tender, protective older brother.
Prince, so entirely stunning in Florida Project, again owns the screen. Her timing is spot on and her sassiness magnificent. In a smaller role as prim housekeeper Mrs. Grose, British TV actor Barbara Marten delivers the perfect mix of brittle and caustic.
Not one of them manages a convincing argument as to why this film was made.
It’s been ten years since director Floria Sigismondi made a feature. A groundbreaking music video director, Sigismondi moved primarily to television after her impressive 2010 feature debut, The Runaways. For The Turning, her eye for setting and framing are clearly on display and, again, the performances are strong. There’s just not much she can do with this script.
Written by Carey W. and Chad Hayes (The Conjuring), The Turning suggests no solid reason for its existence. Every scene is rushed, every revelation unearned. Early red herrings prove pointless (cheats, even, as they make no narrative sense in retrospect).
Worse yet, Sigsimondi fails to develop any real tension or sense of dread and there’s not a single scare in the entire film.
I knew better than to get excited about a January release, but it’s hard not to hold out hope with this group of artists. Give yourself the gift of the Clayton version instead.
Color Out of Space
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
HP Lovecraft has influenced horror cinema in ways too varied and numerous to really articulate. But true Lovecraft is tough to bring to the screen for a number of reasons, chief among them that his madness tends to involve something indescribable: a color no one’s ever seen before, a sound entirely new to the human ear, a shape that defies all laws of geography and logic.
Alex Garland pulled inspiration from Lovecraft’s 1927 short Colour Out of Space for his brilliant 2018 mindbender, Annihilation. But for direct adaptations, Richard Stanley’s newest may be the best.
Naturally, the film’s success is due in large part to Nicolas Cage’s performance, because who descends into madness quite as entertainingly?
Cage plays Nathan Gardner. Nathan and his wife (Joely Richardson), their three kids and their squatter (Tommy Chong – nice!) live a quiet life in the New England forest not far from Arkham. A meteorite changes all that.
Cage basically strums a favorite old tune, landing somewhere on his “nice guy gone insane” spectrum just this side of Brent (Mom and Dad) and Red Miller (Mandy). In fact, the voice that begins emerging once the meteorite hits is gleefully reminiscent of Peter Lowe from Vampire’s Kiss (a call back I can get behind).
Is that the only reason to see the movie? No. Tommy Chong is a hoot, Richardson gets one especially creepy carrot chopping scene, and things go a little Cronenberg just when you want them to.
There’s a lot wrong with the film, too. Scenes are sloppily slapped together, one rarely leading to the next. The film’s budget is betrayed by its FX and supporting performances are not especially strong.
But Stanley’s long-awaited comeback (this is his first narrative feature since being fired from The Island of Dr. Moreau in 1996) infuses Lovecraft with a much needed dark streak of comedy and entrenches his tale of madness within a loving family dynamic, offering an emotional center to the story that the author rarely delivered.
The film lacks the vibrant subversiveness of Mom and Dad and comes nowhere near the insane vision of Mandy, so Cage fans might be only mildly impressed. Lovecraft fans, though, have reason to be excited.
Les Miserables
by Hope Madden, MaddWolf.com
“Remember this, my friends. There is no such thing as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”
Victor Hugo penned those words as he watched the suffering and oppression in the streets of Montfermeil.
Set in July 2018, when the World Cup victory made celebratory compatriots of everyone in France, at first blush, Ladj Ly’s film Les Miserables bears little resemblance to the saga of Jean Valjean and that tenacious Javert. But it doesn’t take long for the filmmaker to use the story of law enforcement and the population of modern day Montfermeil to show that little has changed since Hugo set quill to parchment 150 years ago.
Damien Bonnard (Staying Vertical) plays Stéphane. Ly taps Julien Poupard’s camera to follow Stephane on his first day in Paris as part of a three man unit tasked with keeping an eye on a mainly poor, primarily Muslim district.
Stéphane’s new partners, Chris (Alexis Manenti) and Gwada (Djibril Zonga), have been on the job long enough to have developed relationships and tensions in the neighborhood. Thanks to an almost absurd subplot involving a traveling circus—whose lion delivers an apt metaphor and a heartbreaking scene—Stephane’s first days on the force will be regrettable.
Ly was inspired to write the film by riots that broke out in his own apartment building and neighborhood in 2005. That authenticity lends the film both a visceral dread as well as a complicated compassion.
Like Hugo, Ly seems unwilling to abandon those in authority to the fate of villain any more than he’s willing to entirely forgive the actions of the oppressed. Rather, each side is implicated (one far more boldly than the other), but it’s the lack of tidy resolution that makes the fate of these characters compelling.
While every performance is impressive, young Issa Perica is the film’s beating heart, its undetermined destiny, and he’s more than up to the task. His lines are limited but his performance is heartbreaking, his character really the only one that matters.
A devastating social commentary masquerading quite convincingly as an intense cop drama, I’d say Les Miserables would do Hugo proud. The truth is, it would probably break his heart.
