Paddington: Paul King

Of all the things I’d imagined I’d think while watching Paul King’s Paddington (2014), one of the last things would be “that’s the most delicious orange I’ve ever seen in my life.” In one of the opening scenes, the eponymous talking bear pulls a fresh orange apart right in front of the screen and the juices spray across the screen and dribble to the ground. It was one of the best combinations of what I assume were CGI (the bear) and practical effects (the orange). The whole film is like that: seamless. CGI has rarely looked so crisp and lively; CGI characters have rarely interacted with their environments so perfectly. The film is also a pitch-perfect combination of age-appropriate humor and drama. There are many sequences made of up nothing but Paddington trying (and failing) to navigate modern life that feel inspired by classical slapstick and silent comedy. It’s such a lovely, happy, pleasant film. Although I wish that the film didn’t resort to a villain to provide pathos. I wish it could have just been a sequence of silly things happening to a silly bear.

8/10

Carmen Comes Home: Keisuke Kinoshita

My, but the post-war American censors are strong with this one, aren't they? Keisuke Kinoshita's Carmen Comes Home is an undeniably confused yet gentle comedy about a young woman who returns to her rural home town after running away to Tokyo and becoming a stripper. She returns with a friend who also happens to be a stripper. The two girls go about their village in their most outrageous outfits, deliberately provoking as many people as possible. When they get ostracized for their behavior, they decide the only logical conclusion is that, in order to win over the townspeople, they must do a nude striptease for the whole village. Old world morals are challenged here with Carmen's family agonizing over her decision. But finally, they decide to let her do it for reasons that don't quite make sense. Because it's her right? Because her stripping is actually art? But the general gist of the film seems to be that cultural modernity can be good: the girls donate much of their stripping earnings to their family which then uses it to pay off their debts and invest in a new school. The film ends with both sides vindicated: the modern strippers return to Tokyo feeling proud of themselves, the traditional village goes back to being...traditional...and none the worse for wear. In other news, apparently this was the first Japanese film to be made in color. And boy, you can tell they were proud of that. The film is brimming with long takes that emphasize negative space; people are constantly dwarfed by the countryside and mountains. There's a gorgeous sequence where Carmen and her friend walk through a verdant forest and the camera dollies along with them, not cutting or looking away. It's beautiful in a blasé pastoral sense: Kinoshita doesn't really do anything with the setting other than use it as a setting.

6/10

A Patch of Fog: Michael Lennox

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/movie-review-patch-fog/.

5/10

Dave Made a Maze: Bill Watterson

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/slamdance-17-movie-review-dave-made-a-maze/95716.

7/10

Spy Hard: Rick Friedberg

Whatta stinker. Rick Friedberg's Spy Hard feels like a film made entirely of the scrap pieces of footage found on The Naked Gun's editing floor. Apparently it was the first film written by Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. First off, I had no idea they were making movies back in the mid 1990s. Second, you can really see the degradation of the spoof humor that made Leslie Nielsen so popular: repeated punchlines, randomness for the sake of randomness, and referential humor that feels woefully dated. The worst example was a random scene where somebody dressed like Michael Jackson gets their hair caught on fire. He yells "not again" and jumps out a window. Okay...There was one good part of Spy Hard: 'Weird Al' Yankovic's amazing opening theme song. Too bad he couldn't write and star in the whole movie...

3/10

To Catch a Thief: Alfred Hitchcock

[Revisit Review]

Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief is pure popcorn fluff in the best way imaginable. Beautiful people doing wonderful things in luscious locations aided by one of the smartest, snappiest, memorable, and clever screenplays of the era. Hitchcock's visual prowess was at its height here; you could practically watch it with the sound turned off. But why would you want to? You'd miss all the incredible dialogue!

8/10

Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy: Kelly Makin

Maybe it wasn't the best idea to watch Kelly Makin's Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy without watching the original television sketch comedy show. Or familiarizing myself with its actors, reoccurring characters, and popular segments. Or looking up what the film is actually about. Yeah...I probably could have done this screening a bit better. But when push comes to shove, I did like the film. I thought it was funny, clever, and occasionally bitterly cynical (that whole "you can't truly be happy without sadness" morale really stinks of the Clinton years, doesn't it?). My favorite bit was the ongoing side-plot about the closeted gay father who comes out of the closest. Do I think it's a good film? Well, without familiarity with the show, no. But it's still good for a few laughs.

5/10

Little Men: Ira Sachs

So, my takeaway from Ira Sachs' Little Men is that gentrification is alright as long as the white people forcing the non-white people out of their homes feel really, really, really, really, really bad about it. Alright, I'm being facetious: Little Men is fine. It's got great performances all around--especially from Michael Barbieri--and there's a gentle, truthful eye for adolescent behavior. Yeah, the two boys might be little bastards for the silent treatment they give their parents, but they still seem like humans and not conveyor belt Hollywood children. My problem is that Little Men is the kind of film that attempts to view mankind as through a microscope--not judging their actions, just observing. The whole point is that everybody is selfish, everybody has the capacity to hurt others. But yeah, no. I don't buy into the film's attempts at morale ambiguity. There's a clear bad guy here: Brian Jardine (Greg Kinnear). This middle-aged man would rather chase his acting pipe dreams than actually quit, get a real job, support his family, and not evict a poor immigrant family living in their building. Yeah, life's unfair. Get over it. Get a real job. Don't go ruining other people's lives, throw up your hands, and say "ah...life's so callous, ain't it?"

Ass.

6/10

Hotel Coolgardie: Pete Gleeson

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/film/slamdance-17-movie-review-hotel-coolgardie/95602.

8/10

Withdrawn: Adrian Murray

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/slamdance-17-withdrawn/95594.

8/10

Kuro: Joji Koyama, Tujiko Noriko

To read this review, go to: https://www.theyoungfolks.com/review/95590/slamdance-17-movie-review-kuro/.

9/10

The Long Riders: Walter Hill

For a daguerreotype, Walter Hill's The Long Riders sure is nifty. But as a movie, it's quite lacking. All of the characters move and are blocked like wax statues. What's worse, they don't introduce any of the characters--quite a sin for a film whose raison d'être involves the casting of several groups of real-life brothers to play the members of James-Younger gang. What's the point of such meticulous casting if we can't tell any of the characters apart from each other? (All except for David Carradine--you can always tell it's David Carradine.) I did appreciate how they morphed the story of Jesse James into one of familial vengeance, sort of a Hatfield/McCoy relationship between the James-Younger gang and the murderous Pinkertons who came to arrest/kill them. But much of the drama is drained of its lifeblood by its own solemnity. However, the film comes to vibrant life during action scenes. A knife fight between David Carradine and an Indian in a saloon was one of the most visceral of its kind I've ever seen. And, holy sh!t, the doomed Northfield, Minnesota raid may be one of the best movie shootouts of all time. I mean that 100% honestly. It's probably because it feels like it was guest directed by Sam Peckinpah. And no, that's not an exaggeration. I was going to give this film a 5/10, but that gun fight raised it a point.

6/10

F****** Bunnies: Teemu Niukkanen

For a film with exactly two jokes, Teemu Niukkanen's new short F****** Bunnies isn't half bad. The first joke makes up the entire film: a group of polygamous, Satan-worshipping sex maniacs move next door to a respectable Finnish couple. The Satan worshipers are led by Maki, an invariably polite patriarch who could be mistaken for Ned Flanders if not for the face paint. Of course, they end up teaching the straight-laced Finnish couple how to be kind and accepting. We've all seen variations of this joke before. But it's still done well enough to make us not care. The second joke is a punchline regarding Maki's insatiable appetite for carrots. It's admittedly a bit of a dud.

Suck It Up: Jordan Canning

Full disclosure: I'm not giving Jordan Canning's Suck It Up a rating because I watched a work-print that hadn't been completely polished yet in terms of coloring and audio tracks/levels. But even if I had seen the completed version, I doubt I would have liked it. It's a mean film about mean, unlikable people. It follows two young women--a self-destructing alcoholic, the other a young professional--who retreat to a rural cabin to get over their combined grief over the loss of a young man who was, respectively, their brother and lover. It's an interesting set-up: one's a woman who can't accept love, the other is one who can't really express love. But both try to help each other. But they spend the entire film being horrific and nasty towards each other. There's one scene about two-thirds of the way through that would have ended the friendship between any two actual human beings: the alcoholic tricks the professional into drinking lemonade laced with MDMA a mere thirty minutes before a life-changing job interview. Again, if this film had been about actual human beings, it would have ended right there, the professional driving away and cutting the alcoholic out of her life. But no, this is a film about forgiveness, so after literally fighting each other (and falling into a mud-wrestling ring in the process because this movie hates you) they make up all cheerful and happily. Bullsh!t. I don't believe their friendship. I don't believe their reconciliation. I don't believe any of it.

Peshmerga: Bernard-Henri Lévy

To read this review, go to: https://unseenfilms.blogspot.com/2017/01/peshmerga-2016-new-york-jewish-film_16.html.

5/10

The Night of the Generals: Anatole Litvak

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/the-night-of-the-generals/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=The%20Night%20of%20the%20Generals%20May%20Be%20Bloated,%20But%20Still%20Effective.

7/10

The Son of Joseph: Eugène Green

To read this, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-the-son-of-joseph/95144.

6/10

Neck and Neck: Shaun Clark

I can say with complete, unhesitating certainty that I have never in my life seen a Shakespearean adaptation quite like Shaun Clark's Neck and Neck. Boiling down the Bard's classic tragedy Othello to its barest components, the film tells the central story in about 5 minutes. Using expressive animation, title cards, and brief real-life footage of a human mouth, the film makes the Moor's internal anxieties external in a colorful, shocking phantasm. It sounds simple. But its effect is anything but.

Autohead: Rohit Mittal

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/netflix-hidden-gem-92-autohead/.

8/10

Happiness: Todd Solondz

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall when Todd Solondz's Happiness first premiered at Cannes. I wonder what it was like. Were they shocked by something so nihilistic and uncomfortable that even today it seems like the most cringe-inducing movie ever made? Or did they hate it simply because it dealt frankly with issues like pedophilia? Yeesh...and I thought Solondz's Wiener-Dog (2016) was a tough sit. But I think this remains his most challenging and devastating film. Solondz's menagerie of human grotesques--child molesters, murderers, sadomasochistic perverts--all seem vividly realized and, perhaps most disturbing of all, sympathetic. The most unlikable characters in the film are, respectively, a wife-beater who entraps one of the main characters with an affair, and one of that woman's sisters who wishes she had been raped as a children so her writing could have more authenticity. I'm especially curious with this last one: she seems the progenitor of the self-satisfied and snooty film students in Wiener-Dog. I love how Solondz's biggest beef seems to be with other artists. Not that I blame him. Did you see some of the films that got passed off as great this past New York Film Festival?

9/10

The Parent Trap: David Swift

My, but isn't David Swift's The Parent Trap about 50 gallons of pure, gooey sap? It's about as harmless and inoffensive a family comedy as can be. That's not necessarily a sin, but what kills me about the film is that it's so poorly paced that the proceedings get bogged down in the sugary swamp. At over two hours long, it feels about 30 minutes too long. (How odd, considering that Nancy Meyers' 1998 remake with Lindsay Lohan was exactly as long, but for some reason I remember it feeling a lot shorter. And I watched that film a lot when I was a kid.) Hayley Mills is fine, but after a while her aw-shucks persona becomes overbearing. She had that habit a lot of child actors from the time period had: they talked and behaved like miniaturized adults, not children. No matter how comforting I find the aesthetic of 50s and 60s Disney family films--I think it has something to do with the bright, pastel colors and ubiquitous flat lighting--this film was just a snooze. By the way, did anybody else notice that the scene where Mills plays the guitar was one of the most hilariously faked I-can-totally-play-guitar scenes ever? She doesn't even make chords! She just strums an open guitar and different chords come out!

5/10

The Ardennes: Robin Pront

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-the-ardennes/94530.

7/10

Bee Movie: Simon J. Smith, Steve Hickner

Watching Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner's Bee Movie was like an out-of-body experience. It was like watching a movie made up entirely of the kind of stupid jokes middle schoolers make with each other while on a sugar high while at a school dance. It's nothing but stupid puns, preposterous world-building, and horrific misuses of terrific actors. (Oh John Goodman...you didn't deserve that...) It doesn't help that Jerry Seinfeld plays a twentysomething bee while being obviously in his early fifties. It would be like getting Sean Connery to voice over a schoolboy. And yet, the film is compulsively watchable, much in the same way that a car pile-up is. You just can't believe that what you're watching is real.

4/10

Extraordinary Tales: Raul Garcia

Raul Garcia's Extraordinary Tales is two things: a passion project and an animated anthology film of five different Edgar Allan Poe stories. As the former, it succeeds brilliantly. There isn't a frame in the whole film that isn't drenched with a deep, whole-hearted love of the subject matter and its creator. But as the latter, it's so-so. There's really no way to properly talk about it without discussing all five parts. So...here we go:

1) The Fall of the House of Usher, as narrated by Christopher Lee. Delicious and atmospheric. But I'm not sure if the art style fit.

2) The Tell-Tale Heart, as narrated by Bela Lugosi. This is easily the best section, partly because it re-purposes a badly degraded audio recording of Lugosi, partly because of the jaw-dropping art inspired by Alberto Breccia. Absolutely stunning.

3) The Facts in the Cast of M. Valdemar, as narrated by Julian Sands. I had never heard of this story before. But thanks to this wonderful segment, aided by old school pulp comic book art, I think I may have to read it immediately.

4) The Pit and the Pendulum, as narrated by Guillermo Del Toro. I wish this was an audiobook: Del Toro is pitch-perfect for the role, the bland 3D CGI feels phoned in.

5) The Masque of the Red Death, as narrated by...nobody. It's mostly silent although Roger Corman makes a guest voice appearance as Prince Prospero. The dark, painterly artistic style is luscious, but I fear that people unfamiliar with the story will understand what's going on.

I could take or leave the narrative segments in-between each story where the ghost of Poe in raven form, voiced by Stephen Hughes, converses with an anthropomorphization of Death.

6/10

Silence: Martin Scorsese

Aw crap...it's 57 minutes to New Year's and I just realized I haven't finished doing my reviews for the year. All that's left is Martin Scorsese's Silence: a fantastic film that threatened the stability of my end of the year top 11 list. So what can I say that wasn't already summed up perfectly in my buddy Steve's review...well, for starters, I think that Adam Driver was better cast in his role than Andrew Garfield. Garfield does a great job, but he doesn't disappear into his role the way Drive does. I think Garfield's too pretty. Of course, his prettiness may have been a point, seeing as his character was a fresh-faced young priest. But I dunno. I liked how they gave a new translation to the scene where the fumi-e spoke. And I also liked how they did that scene in general. I don't really have anything else to say right now that I haven't said on twitter or by proxy via Steve. So...Happy New Year, I guess!

8/10

Into the Inferno: Werner Herzog

I want more films of Werner Herzog and his friend and volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer. Apparently they met on the set of Encounters at the End of the World (2007) and have been friends ever since. In Into the Volcano, Herzog's new documentary on volcanoes and their relationships with local indigenous populations, Oppenheimer basically becomes a travel channel host. They make a great team: Clive more outgoing and in-front of the camera, Herzog more reticent and detached and behind the camera. It’s fascinating to see how the film gets taken over by diversions as they trot all over the globe. One prolonged sequence sees them hunting for fossils of ancient hominids in an African desert. Another sequence where they visit Paektu Mountain becomes a kind of travelogue on North Korea. The film isn't essential Werner Herzog; if anything his observations about the insignificance of man in the face of nature are becoming old-hat. But the beautiful cinematography and Oppenheimer's enthusiastic charisma makes it compulsively watchable.

7/10

Yoga Hosers: Kevin Smith

*sigh*

Okay...there were parts of Kevin Smith's Yoga Hosers that I liked. First off, Lily-Rose Depp and Harley Quinn Smith really surprised me with how good they were (the problem, of course, was that they played poorly written roles). Some of the humor hit home, particularly the ingenious name of the convenience store where the film takes place: Eh-2-Zed. And all the scenes where the girls fought off the Bratzis were legitimately exciting, silly, and entertaining. But man, this movie blows. It's like a Canadian minstrel show; I was so embarrassed by it that I texted all my Canadian friends and apologized it. The script seemed to have been deliberately written so as to inject as many "eh's" and "aboot's" as possible. It's just all so...forced and...unnecessary. There were times when the film was almost physically painful. And most of those times involved Guy LaPointe (Johnny Depp).

4/10

Center Stage: Stanley Kwan

Many of my thoughts on Stanley Kwan's Center Stage can be found in the below article. But in short, I think that Kwan's meta-cinematic experimentations kept the film from establishing a genuine emotional connection between his subject and the audience. Still great, though.

http://moviemezzanine.com/center-stage-jackie-essay/?utm_content=buffer1c378&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

8/10

The Hawaiians: Tom Gries

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/the-hawaiians/.

6/10

Wiener-Dog: Todd Solondz

Todd Solondz's Wiener-Dog is everything Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea should have been: a devastating rumination on tragedy, heart-break, grief, and the randomness of an uncaring universe. But whereas Lonergan's film takes itself so seriously it almost becomes hilarious, Solondz realizes that his film and the points it's trying to make are preposterous and pretentious. So he leavens his film with some of the best pitch-black humor I've seen in recent cinema. But that doesn't stop the film from being absolutely, positively soul-crushing. There's a scene where a junkie tells his brother with Down syndrome that their father died that might be the saddest cinematic moment of 2016. The second saddest? A scene where an ex-junkie granddaughter asks her estranged grandmother for money to help support a clearly unfaithful, possibly abusive artist boyfriend.

8/10

Julieta: Pedro Almodóvar

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-julieta/93477.

8/10

The Greasy Strangler: Jim Hosking

There wasn’t a moment in Jim Hosking’s The Greasy Stranger where I didn’t feel grossed out, uncomfortable, or nauseated. All of which, of course, was the point. The Greasy Strangler is like if Wes Anderson made a Troma film. Too bad it isn’t paced like an Anderson film. For all its lusty grossness and perversion, the film is done in in large part by its insufferable pacing. I remembering pausing the movie, thinking that it was almost over. Turns out, I was only about 30 minutes through its 90+ minute run-time. But I can't hate the film. Rarely do you see a film so exemplify a director's obvious vision. There's not a shot in the film that doesn't cohere to Hosking's artistic intentions. And there's something laudable about that. Too bad it couldn't be a better film.

5/10

Moana: Ron Clements, John Musker

Ron Clements and John Musker's Moana is about as good the current Disney princess formula can probably get. It's still blandly formulaic: a young princess (who isn't thrilled about being a princess, she's a regular person, thank you very much!) goes on a magical quest of self-determination where she must do battle with terrible, singing villains alongside wacky sidekicks. But here's the thing: Moana is quite possibly the most likeable Disney princess in years. The music is certainly the best that's appeared in any Disney film since the 90s Renaissance. The comedic relief (for the most part) works. The art is gorgeous and striking. But there's still almost no attention paid to atmosphere and tone. It feels like a string of plot points with all the connective tissue sliced out. I know that the folks at Disney and Pixar are huge Studio Ghibli fans. I wish they tried to emulate their work more. I'm not saying they can't make musicals about princesses. But the story has turned stale. They need something new.

8/10

Selma: Ava DuVernay

Ava DuVernay's Selma is one of the most un-Oscar Baity pieces of "Oscar Bait" I've ever seen. It's too smart, too meticulous, too subtle to be proper Oscar Bait. Condensing the story of Martin Luther King Jr. into his struggles to organize the 1965 Selma to Montgomery voting rights marches, Selma is a stunning tale of faith, organized resistance, and political acumen. It's fascinating to see how MLK wouldn't have been able to do anything without a free and impartial press paying attention to his provocations. Also: I loved how DuVernay treated the scenes where MLK's wife confronted him about potential infidelities. I want to teach the one scene where she plays the FBI tape to him as an example of how to visually create dominance. I have a hard time believing this was DuVernay's 4th film. It works with the assured genius of a master's 40th.

9/10

Always: Steven Spielberg

To read this, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/netflix-hidden-gem-89-always/.

7/10

Kill Ratio: Paul Tanter

To read this review, go here: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/movie-review-kill-ratio/.

3/10

Rogue One: Gareth Edwards

Just saw ROGUE ONE.

That's literally the STAR WARS movie I've wanted to see since JEDI.

Rocky first act, but once it gets going...WOW.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

Best action scenes since JEDI, best space battle since EMPIRE.

"GET ME THE HAMMERHEAD CORVETTE!!"

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

Also, ROGUE ONE is 100x better than VII purely because it wasn't an unofficial remake of A NEW HOPE.

Was brave enough to have own identity.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

Also--and I admit this is a purely personal reason--I've wanted to see a movie with Y-Wings kicking ass since the Death Star run.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

And once more, I'm gonna be side-eying my colleagues who panned this but praised TONI ERDMANN and ELLE for some time to come...

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

Also, take note JJ Abrams and Paul Feig: ROGUE ONE is how you properly homage source material without remaking and burlesquing it.

— Nathanael Hood (@NateHood257) December 18, 2016

8/10

La La Land: Damien Chazelle

Oh La La Land...I think you may have been grown in a lab just for me! A modern updating of classic Hollywood musicals? Directed by Damien Chazelle? Sign me up! And yes, the film is quite good. I love how it tempers the unflinching optimism of 40s and 50s musicals with millennial concerns about employment, success, and failure. I love how the film didn't cheat with its ending; it was brave enough to not surrender to contrived sappiness. But here's the thing: it's not perfect. While Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone have great chemistry, I didn't like their singing or dancing. I've heard some critics say that Chazelle deliberately made their singing and dancing sub-par so it would highlight their awkwardness. You know what movie didn't have to rely on sub-par singing and dancing to do the same thing? Mark Sandrich's Top Hat (1935). Go watch the Isn't This a Lovely Day (to be Caught in the Rain) to see what I mean. Also...and I hate to say this...some of the music just isn't very good. The first two numbers in particular were outright forgettable, although the first is saved by some truly astonishing choreography.

8/10

A Month in the Country: Pat O'Connor

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/twilight-time-in-the-french-style/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=Twilight%20Time%20Double%20Feature:%20Hood%27s%20European%20Vacation.

7/10

In the French Style: Robert Parrish

To read this review, go to: http://theretroset.com/twilight-time-in-the-french-style/?utm_campaign=coschedule&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=the_retro_set&utm_content=Twilight%20Time%20Double%20Feature:%20Hood%27s%20European%20Vacation.

5/10

SiREN: Gregg Bishop

To read this review, go to: http://theyoungfolks.com/review/movie-review-siren/92820.

6/10

Run the Tide: Soham Mehta

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/movie-review-run-the-tide/.

5/10

Everybody Wants Some!!: Richard Linklater

Like many of Richard Linklater's films, Everybody Wants Some!! hides some of the gentlest existential questing in American cinema veiled behind a sheen of performative masculinity. tl;dr -- it turns out the jocks who called me f****t in high school have deep thoughts about life, too. That's less of a joke than you might think. The characters in the film are by and large unapologetically douchey jocks who treat their social cruelties as expected, acceptable joshing. I know a lot of people don't think it's a big deal, but it all makes me all the more thankful that I didn't go to college with these bozos. Still, it's a warm film both unexpectedly funny and even occasionally sweet. Zoey Deutch blew me away; I hope she has a fantastic career ahead of her. Oh, and the soundtrack rocks, too. But you didn't need me to tell you that.

7/10

Jackie: Pablo Larraín

Pablo Larraín's Jackie is a film about America that could only have been made by a non-American. For all our bluster about being a democracy, Larraín understands that every four years we elect our royalty. And few members of our royalty were as beloved as the Kennedy's. Larraín delights in the pomp and formality of the tiniest details of the presidency, everything from the outfits to the titles to the Marines who line the hallways leading to the room where JFK had his autopsy. Jackie is an absolutely devastating portrait of grief, resilience, and the search for meaning in a period of loss. It's a triumph of historical reconstruction, costuming, and set design. Natalie Portman is nothing short of a revelation as the titular character: she assumes the historical figures verbally tics as astonishingly as Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller's Capote. One can only watch in awe. It took me awhile to figure out what she was doing opposite Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup) in their interview scenes. That's when I figured it out: she desperately wanted White to say the wrong thing so she could jump on him and devour him, thereby giving her some emotional relief. Incredibly, White never took the bait.

9/10

A Perfect World: Clint Eastwood

Here's what you need to know about Clint Eastwood's A Perfect World: everything after the scene where Kevin Costner gets shot in the belly drags interminably. The film also comfortably checks off a lot of entries off the melodramatic checklist you’d expect from a Hollywood treatment of this material. But in the spaces between those beats is a movie as rich and true and honest as anything to come out of Hollywood in its era. Some of my favorite scenes: Costner assuring the boy that he's got a "perfectly fine size for his age"; the cornfield killing; Costner giving the boy his first "roller coaster" ride; and my favorite--Costner, the boy, and a certain mother and daughter waltzing to an old record. These were all scenes that made me thrilled to be alive and watching a great piece of filmmaking. There's just enough of the meandering 90s indie spirit in it to keep it from becoming bloated and trite.

8/10

Tree Man: Jon Reiner, Brad Rothschild

To read this review, go to: http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/movie-review-tree-man/.

6/10

The Wailing: Na Hong-jin

I liked Na Hong-jin's The Wailing despite not understanding a damn thing that happened in the third act. So...was the oni Jesus? Was that woman in white a good spirit? If the old man was evil, why did the film treat him like an innocent for much of the second act, including the scene where he hides down the side of a cliff? I get the feeling that all of these questions and more are probably answered within The Wailing, but you can only get at them after re-watching the film several times. But I also appreciated The Wailing as an emotional, aesthetic experience. It's so beautiful, so lyrical: the perpetually rainy woods is one of my favorite settings, after all. It's also a masterwork of tone: it amps up the creepiness and discomfort like a symphony. Maybe I'll revisit this film one day. But I don't know. One viewing was emotionally catastrophic enough.

7/10

Pete's Dragon: David Lowery

Ya know, for a soulless, corporate Hollywood super-production, David Lowery's Pete’s Dragon sure doesn’t feel like a soulless, corporate Hollywood super-production. It looks, feels, and sounds like a low-budget indie film. If not for the ginormous CGI dragon, it could easily be mistaken for such. Sadly whatever indie roots it might claim are quickly shoved aside for a humdrum environmental message featuring a humdrum evil land developer who wants to capture/kill the dragon. It made me long for the introspective storytelling and plotting of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are. But the ending still made my throat swell up and my eyes moisten. The story may be contrived, but it's still a good film. Between the two 2016 Disney remakes featuring little boys in even littler pants, I still prefer Jon Favreau's The Jungle Book (2016). But I think that mostly comes from the fact that Favreau had richer source material to draw from: one of the greatest works by one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language.

7/10

Green Snake: Tsui Hark

I don't really have a proper review for Tsui Hark's Green Snake, merely a succession of impressions.

--Green Snake is like falling down an endless flight of stairs while Maggie Cheung pelts you with bricks.
--Green Snake is like a 5-film franchise edited down to just the lively bits.
--Green Snake is like getting a glimpse into an alternate reality where filmmaking developed different timing, pacing, and editing norms.

I'm pretty sure the copy of the film I saw had some scenes edited out: there were multiple times when the film would cut to a different shot for a millisecond before cutting to something completely different. But even if the plot was presented entirely as Hark had intended, I still think it would be better appreciated as a kinetic experience than a narrative one. It's an exhausting, bruising sit. But definitely worth it.

7/10

Hell or High Water: David Mackenzie

David Mackenzie's Hell or High Water may be a neo-Western, but in its own way it is just as politically relevant and important as nearly anything else that was released in 2016. Only Andrea Arnold's American Honey took such a penetrating glance into rural, white American poverty. Yet Mackenzie resists the temptation to romanticize the poverty featured in his film. It's a remarkable achievement which, along with Jim Jarmusch's Paterson, represents everything American cinema should be moving towards. Jeff Bridges and Chris Pine are pitch-perfect in their roles. But what really wowed me was the screenwriting. There are so many quotable, memorable moments which I'm sure will monopolize my brain for weeks to come: "Hey, Mr. Banker!"; "What don't you want?"; "Let it burn...they have to take care of themselves now"; "I'm the Lord of the Plains"; the final conversation on the porch. In terms of pure screenwriting, it is a colossus. But as a film, it's one of the most moving and effective of the year. It's certainly the best non-Tarantino Western in quite some time.

9/10