Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Plan A’ Review: Seeking Vengeance for the Holocaust

      by

      Set in postwar Germany, this film dramatizes the true story of a group of Jewish survivors who sought revenge through an astonishing undercover operation.Movies about the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust often focus on the long journey to begin life anew, but “Plan A” dramatizes attempts by some survivors first to seek retribution — on a huge scale. The directors, Doron and Yoav Paz, fashion an undercover thriller from the true story of some 50 Jewish vigilantes called the Avengers who tried to poison millions in German cities.Max (August Diehl) returns to Germany in 1945 to search for his family and finds antisemitism still widespread. He meets a Jewish brigade of the British Army that is secretly targeting war criminals for off-the-books executions. They’re efficient — cue a montage sequence of Nazis being shot in the head — and Max helps them until he learns of the Avengers, or Nakam, which means revenge in Hebrew.Max joins their mission to infiltrate a water plant, while their leader smuggles toxic substances from abroad. The scale and ambition of the plan can’t fail to create some suspense, even as it falls apart. But the storytelling is surprisingly slack, while it grasps for anguished romantic tension between Max and another plotter (Sylvia Hoeks). Diehl moves from looking stricken to single-minded but doesn’t bring much weight, moral or otherwise, to his pivotal protagonist.An opening voice-over asks what you would do if your entire family were murdered. Despite sounding like a preview trailer’s hook, the blunt question emotionally situates us in the Nazi hellscape more effectively than the film’s visuals of ruins and hide-outs. The rest of “Plan A” never quite rises to the challenge posed by this remarkable chapter in history.Plan ANot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Halloween Ends’ Review: It Probably Doesn’t

      by

      David Gordon Green wraps up his reboot trilogy for a horror franchise that never stays dead for long.Can we imagine future Halloweens without a new “Halloween”? We might have to, if David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” the wrap-up film of the reboot trilogy he began in 2018, plants a full stop on a 44-year-old franchise. Savvy viewers, though, will intuit the title’s missing question mark, understanding that Michael Myers, one of cinema’s fustiest boogeymen, is unlikely to remain interred for long.And for a spell in “Halloween Ends” it seems as if Green might be offering a creative hand to his possible successors, only to withdraw it in favor of business as usual. Four years have passed since the events of “Halloween Kills,” and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has given up the gunslinging-granny look and doomsday prepping in favor of a cottage-core aesthetic and memoir writing. She and her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), have inexplicably remained in Haddonfield, Ill., where the townsfolk still blame Laurie for inciting Myers’s last stabbing spree and, presumably, for their plummeting property values.Also shunned by the locals is Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a geeky lad whose disastrous babysitting exploits three years earlier resulted in a dead child, a murder trial and an acquittal. Clearly, he’s perfect boyfriend material, and after saving him from the town bullies, Laurie introduces him to Allyson. Things go swimmingly until Corey encounters Myers one night in a dank cave beneath an underpass and learns there might be more to life than enduring insults and suffocating shame.At first, Corey’s involvement with the visibly declining Myers (again played by James Jude Courtney) is strangely ill-defined, a cross between caretaker and understudy. But as proximity to evil causes Corey to change — being an acolyte apparently does wonders for the libido — his too-rapid transformation constitutes a missed opportunity for the franchise. By pumping up Corey’s psychological damage, Green could have made a passing-the-torch movie, giving Corey a clear framework for his capitulation to the allure of slaughter. This also would have meshed perfectly with Laurie’s declaration that evil doesn’t die, it just changes shape.Changing shape, though, is something that exhausted movie properties struggle to do, and Green and his three co-writers soon revert to the comforting beats of the body count. This time, the townspeople — after virtually hijacking the previous installment — have dwindled to a few familiar faces, and there’s a touching reunion between Laurie and a flirty Officer Frank Hawkins (nice to see you, Will Patton, however briefly). He doesn’t know she’s already taken.The twisted bond between hunter and hunted that’s common to many serial-killer narratives (though rarely more overtly and eloquently than in Bryan Fuller’s terrific TV show “Hannibal”) has always been this franchise’s backbone. As if attempting to honor that, Green has made a movie that’s less frantic and more intimate than its predecessor, one that unfolds with a mourning finality. For me, its most evocative image is of a severed tongue circling lazily on a record turntable — maybe Green’s way of letting us know that he, at least, has nothing more to say.Halloween EndsRated R. Don’t pretend you don’t know why. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Decision to Leave’ Review: A Labyrinth of Desire

      by

      Park Chan-wook’s latest, about a forlorn detective falling for his beautiful suspect, is an exuberant, destabilizing take on a classic film noir setup.One of the many pleasures of the feverish “Decision to Leave” is that the director Park Chan-wook clearly had as much fun making the movie as you will have watching it. A heady, baroque mystery infused with the kind of old-fashioned romantic fatalism that makes noir-darkened hearts flutter, it is a story of impossible love — though even a determined admirer may wonder if it’s also impossible to get a handle on this sly, ingeniously slippery movie.Never fear, though, as someone once cautioned me about visiting Venice, you will get lost. But navigating a mystery’s enigmas, sifting through its clues and unlocking its secrets are what draw us to stories like this, and here, even if you find yourself at an apparent dead end, Park will guide you back on track. Both times that I’ve seen “Decision to Leave” I questioned whether the movie was overly addled or I was, both being possible. Who’s the lovelorn gangster, I wondered. What does this or that plot kink have to do with the mystery woman? And why does one detective keep thumping his partner with an electric massager?Park drops you into the movie so abruptly that you would be forgiven for thinking that you had missed the first 15 minutes (or a prequel). As the staccato of bullets fills the soundtrack, a flurry of rapidly deployed scenes zip by, and the movie jumps from two detectives shooting at an indoor firing range and chatting, and then working a case and talking some more. The opening draws you right in with its destabilizing jump cuts, controlled freneticism, narrative ellipses and oddball swerves — cut to a fog-wreathed discussion about insomnia — which creates an inviting ambiguity. It’s unclear what’s happening; it will remain unclear for a while.There’s a dead body, of course, which soon materializes with the first glints of the main story. While hiking, a man has died under suspicious circumstances, leaving a broken watch and beautiful widow, Seo-rae (Tang Wei, wonderful), who’s called in for questioning by the two detectives. The lead investigator, the sleep-challenged Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), is instantly and conspicuously drawn to her. By contrast, the other detective, Soo-wan (Go Kyung-pyo), the guy with the electric massager, is more leery, harshly noting that she doesn’t seem especially upset by her husband’s death. Hae-joon replies that his wife wouldn’t be either, a revelatory comment about a man who proves more complicated than he appears.Hae-joon puts Seo-rae under surveillance and before long, in classic old Hollywood detective fashion, he falls for her, hard. He trails and watches her, tracking her every move whether she’s at work (she’s a caregiver for older, housebound patients) or at home with her cat and droning TV. Sometimes, he imagines himself in Seo-rae’s apartment — you see him there, too — where he hovers near her, almost within kissing distance. And when she falls asleep sitting on her couch, eyes closed as a column of smoldering ash precariously droops from her cigarette, he also imagines himself holding an ashtray under its burning tip.Sometimes a dying cigarette isn’t just a cigarette, but an intimation of later smolder and ash. While Hae-joon’s solicitousness toward Seo-rae can read as sweetly considerate (or stalker-ish), his investigation rapidly morphs into fascination and then life-changing, brain-fogging obsession. Under the cover of his detective work, he insinuates himself into Seo-rae’s life — or does she coax him in? — until they’re sharing rooms, meals and rainy walks. He loves her, but even as they grow close, he remains distrustful. From the start, he has decided who she is, putting her in a box, an idea that Park literalizes at one point with a shocking, gasp-inducing shot of her seated alone in the multiple square-shaped rooms of her apartment.On the most elemental level, “Decision to Leave” is a classic detective story driven by Hae-joon’s desire for Seo-rae and by his desire (one shared by the viewer) to know who’s done it and why. But nothing is ever straightforward with Park, an exuberant, adventurous maximalist who likes to kink up narrative and delights in the plasticity of the medium. Here, he plays with time and space, blurs the past with the present and inventively employs flashbacks and fantasy sequences that deepen the mystery, disrupt the flow and draw attention to the filmmaking itself. The effect can be dazzling, and enjoyably dizzying.Park’s most obvious touchstone is “Vertigo,” Hitchcock’s sublime 1958 l’amour fou about a detective who falls in love with a woman he thinks he’s lost only to find and lose her again. Park scatters several amusing nods to the Hitchcock picture throughout “Decision to Leave,” notably with lurid close-ups of eyes, rooftop chases and a gnarled tree jutting atop a treacherous precipice. Like the detective in “Vertigo,” Hae-joon — who periodically uses eye drops — spends a great deal of time looking at the woman he falls in loves with, though whether he ever actually sees her remains a question that’s teased throughout the story.However informed by Hitchcock, “Decision to Leave” is pure Park Chan-wook — his earlier movies include the original “Oldboy” and the erotic thriller “The Handmaiden” — through and through in form, style and temperament. And while Hae-joon may be outwardly driving the story, it is Seo-rae — and Tang’s devastating performance — who imbues “Decision to Leave” with its deep, then deeper wells of feeling. From the very first destabilizing moments of this movie, Park dazzles you with the beauty of his images and the intoxicating bravura of his unfettered imagination. And then, just when you think you have found your bearings, he unmoors you yet once more, blowing minds and shattering hearts, yours included.Decision to LeaveNot rated. In Korean and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Till’ Review: He Was Someone’s Son, Too

      by

      Chinonye Chukwu’s new film reminds us that before his gruesome murder galvanized a civil rights movement, Emmett Till was a 14-year-old boy with a doting mother.Some stories can seem too difficult to tell, though that doesn’t seem to have crossed the mind of the director Chinonye Chukwu. In “Till,” her haunted and haunting movie about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose barbaric murder in Mississippi in 1955 by white supremacists helped galvanize the civil rights movement, Chukwu revisits the past while doing something extremely difficult. She makes this grim American history insistently of the moment — and she does so by stripping the story down to its raw, harrowing emotional core.In brisk strokes both sweeping and detailed, Chukwu — who shares the script credit with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp — revisits Till’s life, winding back the clock to Chicago in 1955. There, the cherubic-faced Emmett (a tender Jalyn Hall) lives with his widowed mother, Mamie (a superb Danielle Deadwyler), in a cozy house and is eagerly preparing to visit relatives in Mississippi, a trip that hangs over his mother like a worrying cloud. Yet Mamie dotes on Emmett (she calls him Bo) and, as a gift, buys him a wallet at a department store, where she tartly rebuffs a white salesclerk who tries to steer her toward the basement.By the time that Emmett is riding a train to the South — midway through the trip, the Black passengers stand and move en masse to the rear — a divided world of post-World War II optimism and jarring racial segregation has opened up. These divisions widen once Emmett arrives in Mississippi, where he stays with the family of Mamie’s uncle, a sharecropper, Moses (John Douglas Thompson). Soon, Emmett is helping Moses and his children pick cotton under the relentless sun — the palette suggestively lightened — and the camera sweeps over Black bodies toiling in the field as Antebellum America comes to unsettling life.The horrors of that world soon emerge with devastating consequences. Emmett, along with some relations, visits a small grocery store that caters to Black customers but is run by white people. Things rapidly spiral downward when Emmett walks into the store and meets the contemptuous gaze of the woman behind the corner. The Northern salesclerk who insulted Mamie earlier was just a better-mannered racist; he was also an ugly foreshadowing. Now, away from Mamie and the life he knows, Emmett amiably tries to engage the woman, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), whose hostility ends in catastrophic violence. That evening, several white men kidnap, torture and murder Emmett, throwing his mangled body in a river.Chukwu doesn’t show Till’s torture and death, a decision that is a clear, emphatically ethical artistic choice. “Till” is the third feature-length movie that she has directed, the latest following her 2019 drama “Clemency,” about a Black prison warden in crisis, and her work here is impressive. She handles the larger-scale period backdrop of “Till” and sprawling cast with confidence, using her expanded tool kit prudently and without sacrificing the intimacy that helped distinguished “Clemency.” And, just as she did in that drama, which was at once anchored and elevated by Alfre Woodard’s powerful lead turn, Chukwu distills a story — its gravitational force and emotional depths — into the movie’s central performance.With fixed intensity and supple quicksilver emotional changes, Deadwyler rises to the occasion as Mamie, delivering a quiet, centralizing performance that works contrapuntally with the story’s heaviness, its profundity and violence. The weight of Emmett Till’s murder, the horror of it — as well as both the history that preceded his death and that which followed it — is monumental, impossible, really, for one movie. Rather than attempt to convey that significance in its full sweep, Chukwu condenses it into meaningful details, fugitive moments, tranquil ellipses, explosive gestures and, especially, the face of one woman in joy and in agony.Chukwu keeps focused on Mamie even as the world presses in, including after Emmett’s death when she’s swept up in a larger national drama and arranges an open-casket funeral — a bold, far-reaching decision — and then later travels from Chicago to Mississippi to attend the trial of his murderers. During the trial, a grotesque sham, reporters swarm, flashbulbs pop and highlighted figures enter and exit, including Medgar and Myrlie Evers (Tosin Cole and Jayme Lawson). The movie doesn’t go deep into the era’s policies and politics, but while the trial unfolds it sometimes slips into explanatory, near-pedagogical mode, including in some scenes that seem more for the viewer’s (perhaps white viewer’s) benefit than for the actual story.In the decades since he died, Till’s murder and the still-shocking photographs of his body have been the subject of innumerable news stories, scholarly articles, nonfiction books, novels, poems, documentaries, podcasts, websites and exhibitions. At the 2017 Whitney Biennial, a painting of his corpse by the white artist Dana Schutz drew protests and criticism from Black artists. Historical markers installed in Mississippi that designate significant locations in his murder have been repeatedly vandalized. And, in March, Congress finally approved a bill — known as “the Emmett Till Antilynching Act’’ — making lynching a federal hate crime. Nearly 70 years after his death, his legacy and body remain contested ground.Perhaps that’s why I keep returning to the image of Mamie with her mother, Alma (Whoopi Goldberg), who’s sitting near-immobilized with grief after his death. Alma’s limbs hang heavily, as if they had turned to lead, an image that mirrors Jesus as the Man of Sorrows and summons up visions of other grieving Black families. Here, as elsewhere, including the scene of Mamie with Emmett’s corpse that evokes innumerable pietàs, the sanctity of these bodies is as undeniable as their humanity. In the end, what makes “Till” cut deeply is Chukwu’s insistence that before Emmett was a victim of pathological racism and an emblem for change, he was a boy, a friend, a cousin, a grandson and Mamie’s son — a beautiful, loving and loved child.TillRated PG-13 for racist violence and language. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Same Storm’ Review: A Lockdown Grab Bag

      by

      Featuring actors mainly performing from their own homes, this multistory drama clumsily wrestles with the struggles of everyday people during the first months of the pandemic.Do you remember the cringey “Imagine” video that Gal Gadot and her league of naïve celebrities devised and posted on social media at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020? “The Same Storm,” written and directed by Peter Hedges (“Dan in Real Life”), and shot using iPhones and laptops around the same time as Gadot’s much-derided lockdown anthem, isn’t all that different. It’s a well-intentioned gesture of solidarity that tries so desperately to be relatable, it feels alienating.The film — a series of vignettes staged as video-chat conversations between two parties, with each segment introducing a new lockdown-specific dilemma — features a cast of 24 actors, most of them performing in their own homes.There’s Mary-Louise Parker as a cam girl who tries and fails to turn on her latest client, a nurse in Queens who is scarred from witnessing too many Covid-related deaths. We see Elaine May as a woman in denial of her Covid symptoms, and in the next scene there’s a group Zoom funeral held in her honor. Later, a recovering alcoholic (Sandra Oh) attends a virtual support group when she relapses following her son’s attempted suicide. And so on and so forth.Hedges’s script is wildly uneven, and it especially fails whenever issues of racial injustice are broached, with those mini-stories — such as one in which a young protester (Moses Ingram) argues with her policeman father (K. Todd Freeman) over attending a Black Lives Matter rally — often resembling some kind of corporate diversity and inclusion training.At the beginning of the film, the conditions of the shoot are revealed — May fumbles with her camera, and other members of the cast sheepishly grin as they prepare to enact the dramas of regular people. Some stories are more convincing than others, but most are simply boring — especially now, when the surrealism of lockdown has lost much of its edge.The film proves one thing, at least: Like many of us, Hedges and his actors clearly had too much time on their hands.The Same StormNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Rosaline’ Review: O Romeo, Romeo, Thank U, Next

      by

      Kaitlyn Dever plays Romeo’s snarky ex-lover in this Shakespeare reimagining, which crosses its source material with present-day sensibilities.For never was a story of more woe than this — and I’m not talking about the trysts of Romeo. “Rosaline,” Karen Maine’s hapless Shakespeare reimagining, stages history’s most famous romance from the novel perspective of Rosaline, Romeo’s jilted ex. It’s a clever enough gimmick. But in playing out the reverie, the movie epitomizes a du jour Hollywood adaptation style that’s nothing short of agonizing, planting one foot in the source material and the other in a cheeky 21st-century sensibility.Like other half-modernized classic works, “Rosaline” strands its irreverent millennial characters in a stuffy olde world. Think “Enchanted” in reverse: Clad in opulent chemises, bodices and waistcoats, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) whines, cusses and flails through Verona, egged on in her diablerie by her world-weary nurse (Minnie Driver) and sassy sidekick, Paris (Spencer Stevenson). When Romeo (Kyle Allen), Rosaline’s then-paramour, tries to woo her with blank verse, she squints and cuts in, “Why are you talking like that?” The engine of this movie is snark, and Dever, overtaxed with carrying the comedy, brings a dauntlessness to the role, even during more daft moments.Romeo snubs Rosaline for Juliet (Isabela Merced). Paris proposes. The Montagues clash with the Capulets. You know much of the rest, though Rosaline’s courtship with a local hunk named Dario (Sean Teale) and a puerile, eager-to-please third act are some of the movie’s bigger breaks with tradition. Shall I compare the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“(500) Days of Summer”) to the Bard? I’d rather not.RosalineRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Dark Glasses’ Review: She Wears Her Shades at Night

      by

      A prostitute blinded by a stalker tries to protect a young boy. But in his first film in 10 years, Dario Argento opts for visuals as banal as the scares.Five decades ago, the Italian director Dario Argento (“Suspiria,” “Inferno”) melded slasher flicks with modern art, saturating the screen with lurid colors that were more captivating than the ideas underneath them. Giallo, the genre Argento popularized and, later, clumsily satirized in a poorly received 2009 film of the same name, is often snubbed as having more style than substance. “Dark Glasses,” Argento’s first film in 10 years, responds by stripping away the style, too.Visuals are overrated, this intermittently ticklish thriller seems to insist. Argento and his cinematographer, Matteo Cocco, limit the film’s palette to shades of mildewy gray-green spattered by crimson blood (shot, of course, in gruesome close-up). Our heroine, a surly call girl named Diana (Ilenia Pastorelli), is too vexed to fuss about this dishwater depiction of Rome. In the opening scene, she irritates her eyes gazing at a solar eclipse; shortly after, she’s blinded when a serial murderer in a van rams her car into oncoming traffic, killing the other driver and orphaning a 7-year-old named Chin (Xinyu Zhang).How can Diana dodge her deadly stalker when she can’t — and won’t — ever see his face? Argento has masterminded a setup that empowers him to dazzle audiences with sound instead of sight. Oddly, he doesn’t follow through on it, despite declaring his intentions with an extended cameo from his daughter Asia Argento as a care worker who teaches Diana how to listen for aural clues to her surroundings. The inept cops on the case (Mario Pirrello, Maria Rosaria Russo and Gennaro Iaccarino) wax on about the limits of the eye — they’re stymied by fuzzy CCTV footage, microscopic chips of paint, and vehicles that change color from black to white — but the film’s execution never proves their point. In one ineffectual detour, Diana smashes lamps in an attempt to hide from her pursuer. Not only does the scene continue to be filmed in relative brightness, but her brainstorm doesn’t affect the chase one bit.The scares are as banal as the visuals. Argento made his reputation on tangled yarns where witchy women usually wielded the knife. At 82, he’s finally resorted to a straightforward male-sicko-slays-sex workers tale. He and co-writer Franco Ferrini may believe they’re saying something or other about misogyny. (Even Diana’s non-murderous clients are varying degrees of awful.) Still, the writers seem to have spent little time developing their villain, who is so dashed off that the baddie doesn’t even commit to a weapon, reaching for garrotes, blades, nooses and steering wheels as though from a random grab bag. (At least Arnaud Rebotini’s spidery synthesizers set the right mood.)Yet, while it’s easy to dismiss “Dark Glasses” as the work of a master gone soft, Pastorelli’s prickly, sharp-tongued Diana is perhaps the most charismatic leading lady of Argento’s career. She dominates her surroundings — a rarity in his films — and delivers a performance that creeps close to camp (particularly while being strangled by a snake). The best moments of the film involve Diana’s unsentimental alliance with Chin, the orphan who offers her more protection than she’s able to afford him. Their quirkily endearing relationship allows the horror legend to dabble in a genre that’s wholly new to him: the odd couple comedy.Dark GlassesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Eternal Spring’ Review: When State TV Got Hijacked

      by

      Two decades after members of Falun Gong took over local television programming in Changchun, China, a documentary looks back.“Eternal Spring” revisits an incident from 2002, when members of the spiritual movement Falun Gong hijacked local television programming in the city of Changchun, China. Their goal was to air a video that contradicted the Chinese government’s negative portrayal of the practice, which combines elements of Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese breathing exercises. China, seeing Falun Gong’s popularity as a political threat, had banned the group in 1999.This documentary, directed by Jason Loftus, incorporates animation to revisit these past events. In an eye-catching early sequence, the cartoon equivalent of a fluid single take depicts law enforcement rounding up several people suspected of being involved in Falun Gong or of hijacking the TV signal.“Eternal Spring” primarily trails Daxiong, a Toronto-based comics artist who designed the movie’s storyboards. A Falun Gong adherent who says he had disagreed with the hijacking but who fled China to avoid the crackdown that followed it, he visits with participants in the TV takeover and adjacent figures who now live outside China. (Some of the dramatis personae are introduced with comics-style nicknames: “the mastermind,” “the runner,” “the electrician” and so on.) Daxiong draws illustrations as his interlocutors tell stories of the event’s planning and aftermath, and as they share vivid memories of planners who are no longer alive.“Eternal Spring” has value as an educational tool about Falun Gong and its place in China, and as a testament to its subjects’ bravery in defying the state. Still, while the animation gives the documentary some distinction, the narrative can’t entirely shake the sense that this momentous but brief episode is scaled more for a short than a feature.Eternal SpringNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More