821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 38)

As King-Lu (Orion Lee) takes Cookie (John Magaro) to his hut, he starts preparing a fire. The sound of the axe hitting wood continues at a rhythmic pace and the woodland ambiance, tapered to an almost therapeutic constant, cushions each blow. Then, as the camera rotates to its right, Cookie grabs a blanket. He stands in the doorway and whips it back and forth. The air crashes around it. The wood continues to bonk. The walls hold against the Oregon breeze and the camera, snugly within a makeshift cave of dust and dampness, views both men in one frame and their own respective prosceniums. Continue Reading →

Ireland’s good-natured paranormal rom-com is uneven in spots but makes up for it with charm & wit. Romantic comedies are a nice escape from the real world, mostly because they in no way reflect what the real world actually looks like. Everyone’s thin and gorgeous (even though the audience is supposed to buy them as plain and dowdy), with exciting careers that allow them to afford loft apartments in Manhattan. Most love stories with “regular” looking characters in non-glamorous jobs have touches of pathos to them, like John Hughes’ Only the Lonely or Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s Extra Ordinary is the rare lighthearted rom-com featuring normal, relatable characters who fall in love not because a cruel world pushed them together, but because they just happened to be the right person for each other. That it also involves ghost hunting and virgin sacrifice is merely a bonus. Rose (Irish comedian Maeve Higgins) is a lonely driving instructor, and the daughter of paranormal investigator Vincent Dooley (Risteard Cooper), whose videos on the science and lore of the supernatural are featured throughout the film. Rose inherited Vincent’s ability to communicate with the dead, but gave up the family business after Vincent was killed in an accident involving a bus and a haunted pothole. Hapless widower Martin Martin (Barry Ward) hires Rose for driving lessons under false pretenses -- he really needs help with the ghost of his late wife, Bonnie, who mostly bullies him from beyond the grave about what shirts to wear, and when to pay taxes.  Though their attraction to each other is immediate (Martin is thoughtful enough to show up for his driving lesson with a sandwich, juice box, and single breath mint for Rose), Rose wants nothing to do with his spooky situation. She gives in only when Martin’s teenage daughter, Sarah (Emma Coleman) appears to become possessed. It’s not Bonnie who’s possessing Sarah, however - she’s under a spell cast by has-been rock star Christian Winter (Will Forte). Christian has made a pact with the Devil, agreeing to sacrifice a virgin in exchange for his next album becoming a hit. Falling in love along the way, Rose and Martin, who turns out to be an excellent conduit for exorcising ghosts, team up to rescue Sarah before Christian can complete his end of the deal. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For March, we celebrate the birthday (and the decades-long filmography) of one of America’s most pioneering Black filmmakers, Spike Lee. Read the rest of our coverage here. It’s been 32 years since the release of Spike Lee’s 1988 hit School Daze, a film that tackles the tough conversations and experiences of young educated black people through music, dance, and situational confrontation. It’s Lee’s third film, one where he’s still finding his footing, and yet he already has his finger on many of the issues that affected young black audiences at the time, and still do today.  Set in the fictional historically-black Mission College, viewers are first introduced to young black activist Dap (Larry Fishburne) when his boycott of apartheid in South Africa is interrupted by Greek life (and social order) leader Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) and his pledges. Throughout the film, the pair butt heads in more ways than one, but the confrontation at its core is who really brings power to black people.  Continue Reading →

Viewers expecting the season finale to have an exciting climax will be disappointed, as characters and grim reality drive the ending. Warning: don’t read until you’ve seen the episode! I’m just going to come right out and say it: I know I’m going to be a lot easier on “Must/Can’t,” the finale of The Outsider, than other people. With the last few episodes a whole lot of nothing (well-acted nothing, but nothing all the same), expectations that the show would end with a horror movie-like confrontation between heroes and monster were high. Well, surprise -- it’s over barely halfway through the episode, and not the most action-packed ten minutes or so of television you’ll ever see. Despite its spooky, supernatural themes, The Outsider ended up being less about monsters and more about people, for better or worse. But let’s move on and take a look at the casualty list that’s racked up before we even get to the opening credits. Deader than disco are Alec, Detective Andy (sad face!), Howie, and Seale. So, basically everybody you expected to get killed. Yunis (Yul Vazquez) is wounded, but alive. Also in very bad shape is Jack (Marc Menchaca) who, after successfully killing off more than half the team, is rewarded for his trouble with multiple rattlesnake bites. There are bosses from Hell, and then there’s El Cuco. Continue Reading →

Amazon's adaptation of the Roberto Saviano novel is far too passive and jumbled to capture your interest. “Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world,” says the tagline to Roberto Saviano’s book, ZeroZeroZero. Now an eight-part mini-series on Amazon Prime, the show promises the same. It purports to be the whole picture of the cocaine trade from the Italian buyers to the Mexican sellers to the American brokers. We follow the effects of a single shipment of cocaine on the lives of people spread across multiple continents. Unfortunately, showrunners Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, and Mauricio Katz’s attempt is unwieldy and unfocused. Reviews of the source material reported similar issues, with Saviano’s narrative often lacking, well... narrative structure. You’d hope that the show would seek to correct this by streamlining Saviano’s many interviews into a cohesive picture, but it ends up replicating them instead. It does simplify the cast of characters, however. We focus mainly on three sets of people: the tumultuous relationship between an Italian mobster grandson (Giuseppe De Domenico) and his grandfather (Adriano Chiaramida) who plan to buy the cocaine shipment; the American brother (Dane DeHaan) and sister (Andrea Riseborough) brokering the deal; and the Mexican soldier turned narco (Harold Torres) doing the selling.  Continue Reading →

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 →

Apple TV+'s reboot of the Spielberg-created anthology series gets off to a lackluster start. There’s something really special about an anthology series: it allows show creators to let their imaginations run wild and try different concepts that may not work for a movie or longer series. Apple TV+’s latest series, Amazing Stories, has the fledgling streaming service trying its hand at the format, but the episode available for preview doesn’t live up to the show’s title.  It’s actually kind of odd that Apple is rebooting Amazing Stories. The 1985 original run wasn’t a hit and while reruns played on The Sci-Fi Channel before it became Syfy, it doesn’t seem to have a large cult appeal. Still, the series does boast a producing credit by Steven Spielberg and its showrunners are Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz of Lost fame, so at least Apple has some star power to bolster the lagging nostalgic appeal.  Name recognition can only get you so far, however, and the success of the show will have to rely on its 5 episode run. Apple has only supplied one episode for critics, titled “The Cellar”, which was directed by Chris Long (The Americans). The story follows carpenter Sam Taylor (Dylan O’Brien, Bumblebee), who is restoring an old house with his brother Jack (Michah Stock, The Right Stuff).  Continue Reading →

Ricky Tollman's directorial debut has great ingredients, but they add up to a terrible stew. Run This Town is an admirable first effort from writer/director Ricky Tollman. Unfortunately, the worse aspects of the film keep it from truly shining. While the film soars in certain performances and technical aspects, a weak script and a lead actor devoid of any charisma prevent this film from rising to the level of the journalism thrillers it is so clearly modeled after.  The film is set in 2013 Toronto, during the much-publicized last year in office of hard-partying mayor Rob Ford, played in a captivating, transformative performance by Damien Lewis. Much to the detriment of the film, Ford is only present in a few tense scenes, when the film truly feels like it’s making a statement. The focus of the film flips between the support staff trying to cover up Ford’s partying and the journalists chasing after the much-publicized video of Ford with a crack pipe in his hand that made its way around the internet in early 2014.  It’s in the cast of journalists that the film’s biggest failure is present, particularly Ben Platt’s performance as journalist Bram, who fights to get his story about Ford smoking crack past his editors David (Scott Speedman) and Judith (Jennifer Ehle). While Ehle and Speedman are fantastic as the kind of editors that any journalist would both hate to work for and also chase their approval, Platt fails to make Bram anything more than a whiny young man who lucked into the perfect story. Continue Reading →

Jason Segel gives us an energetic journey with compelling characters to balance a campy premise. About halfway through the first episode of AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, Simone (Eve Lindley), one of the main characters, exclaims: “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s freaking fun!” This phrase just about sums up this new show, created by and starring Jason Segel. While Dispatches is scripted entertainment, it's based on the documentary The Institute, which explores the hybrid alternate reality game and performance art piece by Oakland based artist Jeff Hull. From 2008 to 2011, Hull “inducted” thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Jejune Institute. He created multiple “episodes” for inductees to participate in, giving them missions with instructions as silly as dancing at a phone box to things as grand as leading a parade. Segel moves the action from San Francisco to Philadelphia but retains the ridiculous and almost cult-like nature of its source material in depicting the on-screen Jejune Institute and its rival the Elsewhere Society. In the first episode, we are introduced to Peter, an average joe working a dull job. Intrigued by flyers with nonsensical adverts for dolphin communication and human forcefield testing, he calls a number and is invited to an office building downtown. He’s soon roped into a world of intrigue just below the surface of our everyday world, where two entities, the corporate Jejune Institute and more radical Elsewhere Society, frantically search for Clara (Cecilia Balagot), a mysterious inventor whose talent promises to liberate humanity from societal shackles. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. 2015’s Ricki and the Flash doesn’t know what’s about to happen. It doesn’t know it would silence the successful string of Singing Streep films. It doesn’t know it’s Jonathan Demme’s final film. And it doesn’t fully realize the changing conservative political tide that was about to crest over America the following year. Ricki and the Flash is a rock ‘n roll fable about Ricki, a prodigal mother (Meryl Streep) who returns to bourgeois Indiana from her life as a working-class musician to help estranged daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) through her divorce and suicide attempt. Her return reignites hostilities with ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and sons Josh and Adam (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate). But with a little classic rock, the atypical family learns to accept one another. Sorta. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Sometimes you still get a Black Panther, or a Baby Driver, but the days of carefully curated movie soundtracks peaked, for the most part, somewhere between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. Largely gone are films that seem to have been built around the incidental music played in them, in favor of original scores that provide far more dramatic weight (or, in the case of Hildur Guðnadóttir ’s Oscar winning score for Joker, even make a mediocre film seem better than it actually is). When we think “soundtracks,” we think Saturday Night Fever, John Hughes, and movies that were far outlived by the songs featured in them, like Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” as heard in Reality Bites. Often left out of the conversation (suggesting that anyone other than me talks about movie soundtracks this much) is Jonathan Demme, despite his crafting some of the best, most musically diverse soundtracks of the 80s and 90s. Like Quentin Tarantino, Demme’s soundtracks seemed to be personally curated from his own music collection, featuring everything from mainstream acts like Bruce Springsteen to smaller indie bands like the Feelies to new wave to reggae. It was as if the cool middle-aged guy who ran the local used record store decided to give directing movies a try. Continue Reading →

Benh Zeitlin's follow up to "Beasts of the Southern Wild" loses its way in a muddle of fairy dust and magical realism. A person can grow up a tremendous amount in eight years. In the case of filmmaker, Benh Zeitlin, that’s how much time it took to make Wendy, a movie about not growing up, and the unfortunate fact that there’s no stopping it. It also happens to be Zeitlin’s follow up to Beasts of the Southern Wild, one of the most celebrated debut films of all-time, but sadly not talked about much these days.  Maybe it was Zeitlin’s lack of a quick second effort that made us forget about it, like a nice dream that slowly disappears as we go about our day, but now we finally have Wendy, Zeitlin’s folksy reimagining of Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Wendy Darling (Devin France). Similar to Beasts, it’s a magical realism film centered around a young girl growing up and finding her place in a big, scary world, but much like growing up, it’s a mixed bag. Instead of the London setting from the original play, this version takes place somewhere in the nameless, impoverished backwoods of America. Like Beasts, the characters are below the poverty line and off the grid. While the residents of the Bathtub in Beasts were mostly fine with  their place in the world and had fulfilling lives, for the characters in Wendy, there is a sense that  joy and imagination have already passed out of their lives, and there’s no getting it back.  Continue Reading →

A sensitive, nuanced Chicago dramedy that dives into the emotional complexities of abortion. There are few movies for which menstruation is a major thematic underpinning; there are even fewer movies that feature menstruation in the first 10 minutes. Saint Frances’ divine inspiration is in the way it centers women’s bodies and experiences with tenderness and a sense of celebration.  This is still a devoutly secular movie, but it has moments of religiosity that ring true for a generation currently adrift amongst confusing ideas of faith and spirituality. Providing a spectrum of religious positions -- believer, skeptic, agnostic, novitiate, etc. the film ultimately finds faith and belief in oneself and others to be the most rewarding. Saint Frances follows Bridget (screenwriter Kelly O’Sullivan), a 34-year-old lost poet in Chicago, who’s living her own nightmare -- a life wasted with nothing to show for it. To escape her serving job, she takes a position as a nanny to precocious six-year-old named Frances (Ramona Edith Williams). Initially, there's some apprehension between the two, each suspicious of the other. But through a series of lessons, the two form a bond of mutual trust and learning that changes everyone involved, including Frances’ two moms, Maya and Annie (Charin Alvarez and Lily Mojekwu).  Continue Reading →

Clever, handsome, and rich but not necessarily in that order, Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a self-made matchmaker. She tinkers in the personal lives of her peers; she fancies herself somewhere between a queen bee and a B-level goddess. That isn’t to say she plays god, though. She has just enough at stake for that to not be the case. It’s more that she, given her 1800s English setting and semi-detached friendships, is royalty in training. It’s an archetypal base that’s spawned adaptations both loose and tight, but when it comes to Autumn de Wilde’s, it’s a little too atrophied to be either. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Good movies are no stranger to trauma, hurt, or hardship. These things give the images projected and stories a truth that allows the audience to forget they’re fiction, but even in the best films, that sort of trauma is usually manicured, packaged, and made digestible in two-hour chunks. Some of the greatest works of cinema still put our collective pain into little boxes that viewers can open and close when needed. Rachel Getting Married is rife with the same sort of pain, pathos, and unfathomable tragedy that has fueled many of those films. However, it presents an uglier, more unvarnished version of those elements and emotions. There’s an unsparing realness to the story it tells, of a family celebrating a beautiful occasion and reliving their worst losses at the same time. The results are, at times, hard to watch. But that just speaks to the raw nerve and level of authenticity that director Jonathan Demme manages to achieve here. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option? The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. Continue Reading →

Sam de Jong's vibrant, raw indie offers an effortlessly dynamic showcase for its model-turned-actress star. On the 1979 song “Stars,” Sylvester belts in his signature falsetto “You are a star / everybody is one / and you only happen once.” Over forty years on, these lyrics seem like a prophecy, where stardom is just one viral video away. Even though it seems so easy, true success as an entertainer is more out of reach than we like to believe. In his sophomore feature, Sam de Jong’s Goldie highlights the divide between dreams of fame and fortune and reality.  Vivacious teenager and aspiring dancer Goldie (Slick Woods in her film debut) is unexpectedly thrust onto the streets of the Bronx when her mother Carol (Marsha Stephanie Blake, The Photograph) is arrested and the family is kicked out of their shelter. With her young sisters Supreme (Jazmyn Dorsey) and Sherrie (Alana Tyler-Thompkins) in tow, she sets out to find a place to crash until she can strike it rich with her breakout gig as a dancer in a music video.  With the help of her friend Elijah (George Sample III, Cronies), she sets off across New York City trying to score some cash and keep her sisters out of child protective services. And like a beacon in the dark, a gold fur coat calls to Goldie; she knows that if she can buy it, she’ll be recognized as the star she is.  Continue Reading →

Netflix’s latest sci-fi/drama/comedy/thriller features realistic characters, but lifts heavily from “Stranger Things,” “Carrie,” & just about everything else in the same genre. Say what you will about Netflix’s baffling business model, particularly when it comes to its practice of releasing hundreds of original programs and promoting perhaps 10% of them. It understands winning formulas, however, none so much as teenagers + supernatural powers=a guaranteed fan base. Filling the gap between seasons of Stranger Things and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (though season three of the latter only just premiered last month) is I Am Not Okay With This, yet another comedy/drama/thriller/etc. in which a teenage girl struggles with both burgeoning mystical powers, and the slings and arrows of growing up. Based on Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, it brings absolutely nothing new to the table (other than a “Dear Diary” narrative device), but features a believable, complicated, often realistically frustrating protagonist. Sophia Lillis, late of Gretel & Hansel and the IT movies, is Sydney “Syd” Novak, a lonely high school student given to outbursts of anger ever since her father committed suicide. On top of grieving, a strained relationship with her mother, new responsibilities at home, and acne in unfortunate places, Syd harbors a terrible crush on her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), who is blissfully unaware of her feelings. Much to Syd’s dismay, Dina begins dating not just any jock douchebag, but the biggest douchebag of them all, football player Brad Lewis (Richard Ellis), who can’t get through a class on the reproductive system without making a snide joke. Insincerity all but oozes from Brad’s pores, but Dina is inexplicably over the moon for him, calling him “babe” and wearing his letterman’s jacket. A heartbroken Syd stares at Brad with hate in her eyes, and it’s only when Brad’s nose spontaneously starts to bleed that she realizes she possesses some sort of telekinetic power beyond her understanding. This power only seems to exhibit itself when Syd is angry, which is unfortunate, because she’s angry just about all the time. Syd is propelled by anger, stomping around her drab little Pennsylvania town and scowling at anyone who isn’t Dina or her younger brother, Liam (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong). She’s a prickly heroine, which is the lifeline I Am Not Okay With This clings to to keep from drowning in cliches. Continue Reading →

Michael Cristofer's first movie since 2001 is a low-key thriller that respects its characters, even if its setup isn't too original. As a general rule, people love to watch what other people do, especially if the person they’re watching isn’t aware of it. It gives us endless fascination to see how someone else acts when they think that they’re alone. But while knowing someone’s secrets can be fun, knowledge can also be a burden. Michael Cristofer returns to the director’s chair after an almost 20-year absence to explore what happens when you see something you shouldn’t in his drama, The Night Clerk. Bart Bromley (Tye Sheridan) likes to watch people not for unsavory reasons, but instead to learn from them. He has Asperger’s Syndrome and, to better understand human interactions, watches the guests of the hotel where he works via hidden cameras that he’s set up in the guestrooms. One night, Bart’s cameras record a woman getting murdered, causing Bart to rush to the hotel to save her. Since Bart was off at the time his appearance at his workplace rouses the suspicion of Detective Johnny Espada (John Leguizamo). While the case is being investigated, Bart is transferred to another location. There he meets and quickly becomes infatuated with guest Andrea (Ana de Armas) and as the duo bond, Bart starts to feel a little less lonely, but Andrea has secrets of her own.  Despite featuring a murder and a protagonist who records people without their consent, this is a story about loneliness and connection. Most of the plot centers on the relationship between Bart and Andrea with the crime elements being relegated to Johnny’s subplot until the climax. This isn’t a bad angle to take, but it may be a turn off for audiences who are expecting a taut thriller. Continue Reading →

Disney continues to shuffle off Fox's remaining output with this limp, awkward adaptation of the Jack London novel. Jack London started writing The Call of the Wild at the dawn of the 20th century after traveling through Yukon country during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in this period of blind human ambition and greed that he conceived of a story told through a dog’s eyes. The very good dog, Buck, starts as a civilized house pet before being stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. There he gets passed from owner to owner, some much nicer than others, and along the way discovers that his destiny is not with humans but with the beasts of the wilderness, like his ancestors before him. It’s a beautifully written and visceral adventure about the brutality of man, the overwhelming power of nature, and the freedom we’re capable of when we turn our back on society’s rules. On the other hand, the new film adaptation of The Call of the Wild has all the thematic weight of an Air Bud sequel.  Director Chris Sanders, who is very accomplished in the world of animated film with credits like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch to his name, finds himself in no man’s land in the world of live-action. In order to really dig into the book’s themes and capture the harrowing journey Buck goes through, it’s necessary to make it a brutal animated movie like Watership Down. But that would be too much for any Disney-owned studio. Instead, we get a very saturated version of the novel that relies on a CGI dog that looks like a reject from Marmaduke.  Continue Reading →

Al Pacino leads a team of Nazi hunters in a brassy Amazon series stuffed with Holocaust pathos and comic-book sleaze. (Editor's note: this review is based on the first five episodes of the show, which is what was provided to critics prior to the show's premiere.) Amazon’s Hunters is a lot. That’s not bad, by any means, but it is a heads up. It’s funny and heartbreaking and stressful, a love letter to exploitation films, comic books, and revenge fantasies, and it is a lot. It’s also very much something that people need to see right now. Created and written by David Weil and produced by Jordan Peele, Hunters was inspired by his grandmother’s stories about World War II and the Holocaust, stories that Weil saw as a battle between good and evil (much like the comics that the show references and draws visual inspiration from). Nothing is as simple as good versus evil, of course, but Hunters does an excellent job of addressing the battles head-on. Set in 1977, the show revels in its primary NYC setting, full of grit and cigarettes and flickering subway car lights, and the visits to other locales are given equal ‘70s glory by production designer Curt Beech and set decorator Cathy T. Marshall, with loud wallpaper and lights shaped like grapes and so much carpeting. The most real and lived-in location is the modest house where 19-year old Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) lives with his grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin). After Ruth is murdered and the police handwave her death as a burglary, Jonah is approached by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), who knew Ruth from their time in a concentration camp and who, Jonah comes to learn, is the financier and now leader (in Ruth’s absence) of a group of Nazi hunters. While the Hunters are working from a list of Nazis who were active during the war and are now living in the United States, it becomes clear that there is a wider network at play and larger stakes than even the Hunters had suspected.  Continue Reading →