Todd Martin
MOVIE REVIEW
The Novice (2021)
Why can’t girls just have fun? We never learn why rowing is so important to Alex (Isabelle Fuhrman) – before she can introduce herself at the team induction, she’s interrupted. But it’s made very clear by Coach Pete (Jonathan Cherry) and fellow novice Jamie (Amy Forsyth) that anyone who’s good enough to make varsity by sophomore year gets a full scholarship. This is probably why there are so many people at the initial tryouts, but the 5 a.m. starts, punishing gym regime and the uncomfortable requirements of the sport swiftly thin the ranks. But Alex can’t get enough, and it’s immediately clear that her determination is indistinguishable from self-harm.
Continue reading “A Hard Row” »
Laura Wilson/Sony Pictures Classics
MOVIE REVIEW
12 Mighty Orphans (2021)
Was “12 Mighty Orphans” meant to be so howlingly funny? And doesn’t the fact that it clearly was not make it even funnier? Inspired by true events, we are in the depths of the Depression when Rusty Russell (Luke Wilson, who everyone forgets is from Texas), his wife Juanita (Vinessa Shaw) and their cute little daughter arrive at the Masonic Home in Fort Worth, Texas. Home to 150 orphans and run by Frank Wynn (Wayne Knight, who does everything the part requires with tremendous flair), the only kids that matter are the ones who end up on the fledging football team. Of those 12 boys, only six really have speaking parts, not that it matters who is who: You might as well call them Dashing, Angry, Weedy, Stammers, Peeper and Jolly. There’s also an assistant coach (Martin Sheen) who’s an alcoholic doctor perfectly called Doc and a knowing newspaperman (Rooster McConaughey) even more perfectly called Pop. It’s a damn shame Robert Duvall’s brief cameo part isn’t called Mac, but that would have been ridiculous.
Continue reading “Field Goals” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Jump, Darling (2021)
Oscar Wilde once said that no man becomes like his mother, which is his tragedy. But what writer-director Phil Connell’s film presupposes, what if he becomes like his grandmother?
Russell (Thomas Duplessie) is a resting actor who refuses to work more than one shift a week in a Toronto drag bar called Peckers (devastatingly, this is not a real place). On his 31st birthday he receives a card from his grandmother Margaret (Cloris Leachman, in one of her final roles) offering him her car if he comes to Prince Edward Island to collect it. So when his partner Justin (Andrew Bushell) calls him an embarrassment and dumps him, Russell takes his last money and shows up on Margaret’s doorstep. Russell loses little time in writing himself a large check from his grandmother’s checkbook, but a mishap with the car shortly followed by a mishap of Margaret’s means he decides to stay with her a while.
Continue reading “Cross to Bear” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Dramarama (2021)
What are five 18-year-old virgins to do their last night together before they depart for college? A night when they are entirely alone in a house that also has a swimming pool?
Well, whatever you’re thinking, they don’t do any of that. A lot of moms will be happy for this movie to be shown at a lot of theater-kid sleepovers, but it’s unclear if “Dramarama” wanted to be anything beyond a note-perfect nostalgia trip. On Twitter this critic routinely sees 20ish gay influencers, with complete sincerity, call anyone gay over 40 an “elder” and casually discuss how we’re still trapped in the closet since all our friends are dead from AIDS. Will anyone with that mindset actually care about how much things have changed since 1994, when “Dramarama” is set? Can someone who can’t believe gayness existed 27 years ago be able to sympathize with the struggles of someone in a world that can’t even see him in the first place, much less carefully sub-categorize him?
Continue reading “And Then There Were None” »
BFI Flare
MOVIE REVIEW
Sweetheart (2021)
The British seaside movie is normally a house of horrors. There are vampires (“Byzantium”), human trafficking (“London to Brighton”), exploitation (“Brighton Rock” in all its guises), drug deals gone awry (“Away”), kidnapping and torture (“The Scouting Book for Boys”), and violence in all its forms (“Quadrophenia” being the granddaddy of them all). “Sweetheart” triumphantly breaks the mold by being about exactly none of these things. It is such a relief to see a movie set on the English coast where the worst thing that happens is a fancy-dress night in the pub.
Continue reading “Offline Connection” »
Giulio Biccari
MOVIE REVIEW
The Lost Sons (2021)
Not every film should be made. There are obvious reasons why Paul Fronczak’s story deserves to be told; and over the course of the film it becomes brutally clear why he needs to tell the story, and yet. Some stories people are just not ready to tell, not now and maybe not ever.
Continue reading “Double Lives” »
SXSW
MOVIE REVIEW
Twyla Moves (2021)
What did you do in 2020? While under lockdown, did you attempt to choreograph a new ballet, to be performed over Zoom, with dancers split between New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, Denmark, and St. Petersburg, Russia? Did that mean some directors were able to take this as a hook to put together your career retrospective, interweaving 60 years of your life and work as one of America’s leading choreographers? Well, if you did, Twyla Tharp’s lawyers will probably be in touch, because she did it first.
Continue reading “Try This at Home” »
SXSW
MOVIE REVIEW
The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson (2021)
Leah Purcell wrote, co-produced, directed and stars in “The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson,” a howl of despair against Australian racism and misogyny. Ms. Purcell adapted the film from a stage play she also wrote based on a short story by Henry Lawson, the deaf writer whose work is some of modern Australia’s foundational art. A woman alone on a farm, who must protect her children against threats of the animal and human variety, is an archetype of suffering. And my god, does the heroine of this movie suffer. But the movie’s strange inability to focus on the most important parts of her suffering weakens its overall impact, which is a crying shame.
Continue reading “Down and Under” »
Steve Price
MOVIE REVIEW
Lily Topples the World (2021)
In the United States, right now, there are about 15 professional domino artists – that is, people who make a living setting little plastic disks up to knock them down in beautiful, complicated patterns. Only one of them is a woman, Lily Hevesh, who began posting her domino art videos on YouTube age nine. Now she has millions of followers (2 million the time of filming; 3.15 million as of March 23, 2021) and a career with enough momentum that it was worth dropping out of her freshman year of Rensselaer Polytechnic to pursue it. Jeremy Workman, who directed, edited and co-filmed this documentary, spent three years with Ms. Hevesh as she goes to work in her 19th and 20th year. This is a movie about work, and the ways in which work feeds into your virtual identity and vice versa. But on both of these issues, it is strangely guarded, which means the movie sets up a great many questions which it fails to knock down.
Continue reading “Domino Effect” »
No Ficcion
MOVIE REVIEW
A Cop Movie (2021)
Alonso Ruizpalacios has pulled off something here that Christopher Nolan could only dream of. This is a movie about being in a movie, while simultaneously being a documentary about being a police officer in Mexico City. The Mexican police do not enjoy an unbesmirched reputation, and “A Cop Movie” is not going to change that. But what it does is show how ordinary people turn themselves into officers of the law, in the same way that actors turns themselves into their characters. It’s a neat metaphor, especially with a subject as complex as this.
Continue reading “Power Play” »