6 Best Movies To Watch After The Love Witch (2016)
Theater Camp
For decades, the great American institution of summer camp has been fodder for cinema, and for good reason. A group of hormonal teenagers put together in an artificial environment is the perfect recipe for drama, with the gorgeous backdrop of the outdoors. Continue Reading →
Hudson Hawk
In the 30 years since it made its infamous debut, there have been bigger critical and commercial catastrophes unleashed upon multiplexes than Hudson Hawk (1991). And yet, while most of those disasters have been duly forgotten, it continues to loom large as the ultimate Hollywood cautionary tale of what can happen when a performer riding the absolute peak of their cultural ascendancy is given the chance to make literally anything that they want and it turns out to be something that evidently no one else wanted. Continue Reading →
The Way Way Back
The much-memed movie star finds his footing again in a familiar but satisfying redemption story. Unfairly relegated to memedom thanks to his disastrous press appearances (“Darkness, my old friend…”) and midlife crisis moments like getting a dragon tattoo that Ed Hardy would call too gaudy, Ben Affleck has nonetheless experienced a fascinating and emotional onscreen transformation over the last decade of his career. Still undoubtedly a movie star in the classic sense, Affleck’s cocksure marquee attitude has now melted into a malleable melancholy. And while the rest of Affleck’s performances this decade have orbited around Gone Girl’s masterful lead role, his last few performances have been girded with a deadened soul, whether it be the jaded mercenary of Triple Frontier or the brick wall façade of his Batman performance - which always felt like it could smolder into rubble at any moment. Gavin O’Connor’s throwback addiction film, The Way Back, then feels like an apotheosis of the actor’s new persona. Reuniting with Affleck after The Accountant (yes, the autistic assassin one), The Way Back is a familiar but satisfying take on the redemption story strengthened by the palpable pain of its onscreen protagonist. Continue Reading →
Onward
Pixar gets back to its tear-jerking roots with an emotionally complex modern fantasy about grief, loss, and brotherhood. Early in Pixar's Onward, lanky, nerdy elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) retreats from a harrowing day of school into his bedroom, sitting at his desk where he's effectively erected a shrine to his father. He never met his dad; the man died of illness before Ian was born. All that's left of him are a collage of photographs, which gaze lovingly at the lens (and, by extension, Ian), but without context. The only recording of his dad's voice is a rambly outtake from a tape recorder, a one-sided conversation Ian pretends to fill in with his own words. When we lose someone, especially someone we never got to have in the first place, we do what we can to emulate that experience as best we can. It may not be real, but it's the best we get. And sometimes, it can blind us to the people who are actually around us. That's the scene that finally began to unlock Pixar's Onward for me, a film whose kitschy ads and Dreamworks-level character designs made me fear the worst for the acclaimed studio's output. Pixar's long been known for their original tear-jerkers (it's easy to forget that Inside Out and Coco are two of their best films, released only in the last five years), but their continued mining of their existing franchises for whatever narrative meat is left on the bone -- and, let's be real, toy sales -- has diluted the brand somewhat. It's pleasing to say, then, that Onward, while not Pixar's best, will absolutely hit you in those finely-tuned heartstrings. The premise is somewhere between Zootopia, Frozen and Dungeons & Dragons -- imagine a Tolkien-esque fantasy world where the various races of the realm went all-in on industrialization and abandoned the wonder of magic for the reliability and convenience of electricity, automobiles, and urban development. (The timeline's admittedly a little janky, and the film can't quite settle on how long ago this cultural switch happened, but just go with it.) Enter the Lightfoots, a family of elves living their lives in the suburbs: the painfully anxious Ian, his RPG-loving screwup brother Barley (Chris Pratt), and their overworked mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). They're getting by, but the absence of the boys' father clearly weighs on them. Ian's in desperate need of courage, and Barley loses himself in fantasy games (which just so happen to recount the world's real history) to avoid the real responsibility of adulthood. Continue Reading →
Zola
Janicza Bravo's retelling of the 2015 viral Twitter thread boasts great performances and surprisingly solid filmmaking, even if it ends on a shrug. In 2015, 20-year-old stripper A’Ziah “Zola” Wells met a sex worker named Jessica. Both in Detroit at the time, the two bonded over their “shared hoeism” and established something of a rapport. They spent the night dancing together; they made some money. Fast-forward a couple of hours later and Jessica is inviting her to go dance in Miami, purportedly to make thousands of dollars in one night. This, of course, wasn’t half of it. They got involved with pimps, some gang-bangers, murder, attempted suicide, and oodles of prostitution cash—at least according to Wells’ 148-tweet thread that went viral. She’s since gone on the record to say that she turned up some of the story to 11, but guess what? Now there’s a movie credited as “Based on the Tweets by A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King,” bringing you about what you’d expect and mostly for the better. Granted, a lot of this has a lot to do with one's tolerance for ridiculousness. Those intrigued are likely to have fun. It's raunchy, crass, and stylized, and in the pantheon of stranger-than-fiction stories, this is one to stand out. But if you want a jaunt that signals good things to come from its newcomers and further cement the talents of those already established, this is that too. Zola is aptly aggro while also about something: about race, about class, about predation from the preyed upon. And yet, it runs wonderfully. Just make sure you’re ready for a few bumps. Continue Reading →
Summertime
Sandwiched between a rough start and too tidy of an ending, Carlos López Estrada's latest finds love in its large ensemble. “The sewage water smelt like butterscotch,” a young woman (Mila Cuda) muses. The contradictions are inert, the delivery self-serious, the writing okay but sold as something much more. Elsewhere, Tyris (Tyris Winter) berates a waitress for a restaurant’s prices. They go on a rant and submit a scathing Yelp review before pretending to choke for the sake of a free meal. Their behavior reproachable and their words petty, the movie still seems to side with them. And at this point, it would seem that we’re off to the races with Summertime. Well, not quite. Carlos López Estrada’s follow-up to Blindspotting is, to say the least, the type of movie that makes a surprising about-face after 20 minutes or so. Set over the course of one July day, it takes a neorealist base and warps it into the body of a musical, following an ensemble piece of 25. But it isn’t music: with each character comes a spoken word poem, a fade between the inner and the outer. It’s incredibly uneven at points and obnoxious at its worst, but when it finds its stride, it’s that kind of livelihood that’s too infectious to deny. In some ways, that makes its missteps all the more bizarre. Estrada, who shares a story by credit with Vero Kompalic, approaches most characters with a similar empathy. All of the performers write their respective poems, but Estrada approaches most characters with a similar empathy. Its uniformity is its greatest weakness. It helps, then, when Summertime unravels its connections and its characterizations, allowing them to breathe in tandem with the environments. Continue Reading →