‘The Image Book’: Jean-Luc Godard’s Offers Another Radicalist, Experimental Assault [Cannes]

Read the whole review over at The Playlist.

Pawel Pawlikowski’s ‘Cold War’ Is Admirable & Beautiful To Look At [Cannes Review]

Full review at The Playlist.

Review: Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody's “Tully" Is A Dreamy Love Letter To Women

In Jason Reitman’s beautiful love letter, a fairy tale of sorts, Charlize Theron is Marlo, a mother of three, whose hesitance towards hiring a night nanny Tully (Mackenzie Davis) by her brother quickly turns into a truly heavenly experience once the aforementioned nanny is hired. Marlo and Tully form a bond that feels so touching and heavenly that it effectively works as the driving force of the whole movie. Not much happens in Tully except for conversation, this is screenwriter Diablo Cody’s ruthless, authentic love letter to women all over the world, those that have to go through all the obstacles that men don’t. The obstacles, Cody seems to indicate, should be celebrated for their uniquely feminist traits. Theron's mom-to-be is very much represented as a grounded, blue-collar kind of gal, but she makes the pain of going through the 9 months almost superhero-esque, an unusal way to portray a pregnant woman on-screen. There's a humane, almost angelic quality in the way Theron, a grand actress that is surely one of the very best of her generation, makes the agonizing feel alive and bracing. They say you have to experience to fully know what it feels, Theron, in a performance of immense honesty makes you feel every ache, every strain, of her character’s everyday struggles. This is the fiercest of feminism portrayed on-screen. [B+]

‘Hereditary’: Family Is A Sacrifice

My actual review for The Playlist.

What I wrote for Awards Daily on 2.1.18:

"Sometimes a horror film comes along that you just feel will change the game. Ari Aster‘s “Hereditary” is just that movie – a spooky, hypnotic film that feels like the culmination of the last 50 years of horror. Aster gives us a melange of “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” three of the greatest of the genre, and creates his own masterpiece in the process. This is a remarkable, triumphant, and confident picture by Aster, who gives the film an almost meditative-like sensation, as you feel every space you’re in, every emotion, every moment of grief. “Hereditary” refuses to employ cheap thrills, creating its cinematic scares with atmosphere, and continuously reinventing itself at every turn. Best of all, it’s anchored by an incredible performance from Toni Collette who is so good that, believe it or not, people were already chattering Oscar towards her direction. She’s that good."

To shoot UNSANE, Steven Soderbergh used three iPhone 7 Plus phones, with three Moment lenses (18mm, 60mm, a fisheye) and the $15 FiLMiC Pro app. “I think this is the future,” he said.

Fresh off her triumphant turn as Queen Elizabeth II in "The Crown," Claire Foy is about to take cinema by storm. This fall Foy will star in Damien Chazelle's "First Man," and she is also set to play Lisbeth Salander in "The Girl in the Spider's Web." In the meantime, she stars in the Steven Soderbergh-helmed iPhone movie "Unsane." That's right, Soderbergh shot his psychological thriller on an iPhone, Sean Baker-Style. The film has Foy's Sawyer Valentin involuntarily committed into an insane asylum, she seems to think it's a mistake and pleads for her case, to no avail. Soderbergh, un-retired last year with the light, entertaining "Logan Lucky," has this latest endeavor taking him on a darker path.

The movie “Unsane” most resembles in terms of story is obviously Sam Fuller’s “Shock Corridor.” However, everything else about the newly un-retired writer-director’s latest film feels modern and of its era. Foy's Valentin, God I love this actress, plays a smart, highly successful, blunt-speaking data analyst whose mounting paranoia about being stalked by a family friend has had her on edge for years.

Hell, she's even moved to Pennsvlvania from Boston, but he finds her there. She refuses to tell her mom (as played by Amy Irving) about the creep, but soon finds counseling at the Highland Creek Behavioral Center, where, in what should have been a healthy vent of bottled frustrations, she admits to having had suicidal thoughts. She involuntarily signs her way to being committed for 24 hours, which is then extended for a week when her violent protests make deem her too mentally fragile to reenter society. And so, Sawyer's fight against this repressive system, which has the psychiatric hospital holding patients until their health insurance runs out, welcome to America, is filled with beautifully developed hallway shots and an eerie uncompromising claustrophobia that holds the viewer to a grip for its first 70 minutes. 

It doesn't help that a violent patient (Juno Temple) has taken a disliking to Valentin inside the facility, but our heroine does find comfort in smooth-as-ice Nate (Jay Pharoah), a patient that clearly knows a thing or two about the corrupt system he's been framed in. Every scene Pharoah's in shimmers with energy, known for a 7 year stint on SNL between 2010 and 2016, the actor's chemistry with Foy here is palpable and almost, dare I say it, erotic. 

Things get tense when Valentin soon realizes that male nurse George is actually her stalker David Strine (Joshua Leonard). She tells the doctors and nurses there, but they don't believe her, they just think she's a loon and send her down to solitary confinement after she punches George.

The "Shock Corridor" comparisons have to do with the fairly pulpy, claustrophobic story of institutional oppression. Just like Sam Fuller's classic, this is a messy, unnerving, sometime shocking, psychological affair. 

The screenplay by James Greer and Jonathan Bernstein isn't anything special, it encompasses familiar genre tropes that will not make this a Soderbergh essential by any stretch of the imagination. The film does fly off the rails in its last 20 or so minutes, but it's Foy and Soderbergh that carry it down to the finish line with the kind of director/actress partnership that's all too rare these days.

Soderbergh is once again his director of photography here under pseudonym Peter Andrews, (and as his own editor, using the pseudonym Mary Ann Bernard), and he really does serve us a masterclass of how to use the iphone camera in ways we never thought were possible with such limited tech range.

To shoot Unsane, Soderbergh used three iPhone 7+ phones, he outfitted them with three Moment lenses (18mm, 60mm, and a fisheye). On occasions, he used the phone’s standard lens, and it some scenes it shows but it never distracts or prevents us from being gripped by the film.  The 4K resolution of the iPhone used is actually fairly close to a film camera as Inverse says "in all its 4,000 glorious, horizontal pixels that there’s no difference on the big screen." That's why people watching this film and not knowing it was shot on an iPhone wouldn't tell the difference. This is groundbreaking stuff and almost makes you want to go and make your own movie, it just feels so effortless and easy in how "Unsane" is delivered.

Inverse had this to say about the film’s technology: “To record these intimate, sometimes distorted scenes, Soderbergh used the $15 video app FiLMiC Pro, also used by Baker to shoot Tangerine. Soderbergh also used the $10 FiLMiC Remote app, which allowed him to view the video being shot from one phone on a different phone, if the shooting phone was positioned so that the screen wasn’t easily viewable (like if it was on the floor). “We have seen pictures in articles showing him shooting with FiLMiC Pro, and this is one of the highpoints in the journey of our company,” Neill Barham, CEO of the Seattle-based FiLMiC, tells Inverse, adding that the app has “seen exponential growth in the last few years as the mobile filmmaking trend has exploded.”

“I think this is the future,” Soderbergh said at the Sundance Film Festival in January. “Anybody going to see [Unsane] who has no idea of the backstory to the production will have no idea this was shot on the phone. That’s not part of the conceit.”

‘6 Balloons’: Love Is A Drug For Abbi Jacobson & Dave Franco [SXSW Review]

Watching Abbi Jacobson and Dave Franco  strut their dramatic chops feels a bit odd at first, after all these are comedic actors. Jacobson known as one half of the irresponsible, stoner duo of the great “Broad City,” and Franco, well, he's cast a lot in frat-boy stuff, which is usually pretty endearing given his contagious smile et all.  

In the Netflix film, “6 Balloons,” they are dead serious in their roles. It takes some getting used to but they do sneak up on you. 

Netflix has the official synopsis:

"Over the course of one night, a woman drives across LA with her heroin addict brother in search of a detox center, with his two year old daughter in tow."

The film marks the directorial debut of Marja-Lewis Ryan, who also wrote the script. “6 Balloons” premiered at SXSW, and I reviewed it for The Playlist, here are a few excerpts from my B-/C+ review:

Heroin, even in the abstract, is harrowing. Loved ones as junkies and their slow, painful demise is a nightmarish scenario. This is the premise of  Marja-Lewis Ryan’s SXSW feature-length directorial debut  “6 Balloons,” a sobering, no-frills indie drama featuring two actors known for their stellar comedy work in roles that are utterly serious and cast against type. Premiering next month on Netflix, but debuting in Austin this week, “6 Balloons” features a sister (Abbi Jacobson of “Broad City” really stretching her chops) desperately trying to help her self-destructive heroin-addicted brother (Dave Franco) enter rehab and clean himself up for good. How much emotional damage can you endure before making the painful decision to sever ties with someone you love? How can you save someone who can’t help themselves? Those are the questions asked in”6 Balloons,” a sometimes didactic, but always anxiety-inducing film. Shot in a near-claustrophobic handheld style, Ryan’s film is a hell and back 24-hour journey across L.A. that is sometimes too hard to watch.

On the eve of a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend,  Katie’s (Jacobson) life is once again sideswiped by family. It’s not her mom (Jane Kaczmarek) and dad (Tim Matheson), helpful in setting the party up, that are the problem, but Seth (Franco), her trainwreck of a brother. Living life in a constant state of worry, Katie suffers while watching her brother swing between sobriety and relapse. Worse, Seth somehow has to care for his 4-year-old daughter on weekends which makes Katie’s constant state of unease all the more wrenching. The child (alternately played by twins Charlotte and Madeline Carel) is caught in the crossfires of a helpless, disoriented, and, quite frankly, dangerous person.

Mostly known as an actor in lightweight frat-house comedies, Franco lost a significant amount of weight for the movie and his obvious investment in the role is like nothing we’ve ever seen on screen from the actor. Like his agitated character, he changes moods and bodily mannerisms in the blink of an eye in convincing fashion. Jacobson also steps far outside her comfort zone for the part, but she nails this challenge. Katie’s emotional hardship is thankfully never expounded upon in dialogue, instead communicated through an admirably internalized performance. She keeps everything bottled up and it’s through a skillful body language that Jacobson not only communicates all the character’s alarm and pain but proves she’s got far more depth beyond her Comedy Central show. A dramatic future wouldn’t be out of the question.

As striking as some of these performances are, “6 Balloons” is not without its problems. At a barebones 74 minute running time that doesn’t dive into the emotional texture as much as it could, “6 Balloons” at times, feels slight.  Some of the self-soothing narrative tropes don’t work either, such as when Katie finds the time to listen to self-help audio in the car. This easy contrivance feels too on the nose. There’s also the sneaking feeling, as you watch her give in to her brother, that she is an inadvertent enabler of his behavior. The movie hints that she’s given him too many passes over the years, her parents have disowned him, and that this isn’t the first time she’s had to “rescue” bro. The concessions she makes for Seth tend to aggravate the viewer rather than deliver any kind of sympathy for the characters.

Nevertheless, the no-bull, minimalist approach employed by this first time director makes for a distressing, sometimes excruciating, experience. A writer/actor turned director (known for the LGBTQ drama “The Four-Faced Liar“), Ryan clearly has talent, though perhaps it’s not quite fully formed. She’s been tapped to write a “Splash” reboot starring Channing Tatum and Jillian Bell and drafted to spearhead the sequel to “The L Word,” as a showrunner, but “6 Balloons” doesn’t quite live up to the promise that all this exciting, upcoming work suggests. The film may not always work because of its slightness, but at the very least it will leave you shaken as a sobering argument against ever fucking around with hard drugs. 

Netflix on April 6. Watch the trailer below.

Review: “Foxtrot”

Before it spirals out of control in its final few minutes, this Israeli firecracker was nevertheless unfairly dismissed when the nominations were announced for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 2018 Oscars. A mistake if you ask me. “Foxtrot” has been directed by Samuel Maoz (“Lebanon”) in such an artful and unprecedented way. The film, split into three chapters, all but starts off with an emotional knockout of a scene, soldiers arrive at the home of a middle-aged couple Dafna (Sarah Adler) and Michael Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi) to tell them their son has been killed in action. They need tranquilizers to control the grieving mother, but dad is all cool and calm, despite the air of shock running through his face. Don’t be fooled by his demeanor, Michael is about to burst open raw demons that have been lurking inside him for years. The first call he does is to his mother (Karin Ugowski), locking himself in a room, his face traumatized with fear and hurt, he has no words. Ashkenazi, best known to American viewers for his role as the Prime Minister of Israel in last year’s underrated gem “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Fall of A New York Fixer,” is mesmerizing as a dad that says more with his grieving face than any words can describe.

In the film's second section Maoz takes on four Israeli soldiers working in an isolate border checkpoint which seems to separate Israel and Palestine. Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray), is the Feldmans' son, leading the group in random car intervenings. The boredom is contagious, think of Jake Gyllenhaal's character in "Jarhead," as these four youngsters have nothing to do but wait. Maoz' visuals during this sequence damn near blow your mind what with the limited spacial nature of the setting. The desert is turned into the surreal, and there's even a hypnotic dance with a rifle that will no doubt be attached to this film's reputation for years to come (it's even used in the poster). A camel shows up as well, the gate is hilariously opened for it to pass, but don't expect the same thing to happen to a car filled with a Palestinian family.

The final, and more problematic, third section has us back at the Feldman's household, as they try to cope with the loss of their son. Instead of continuing on with the ambiguous nature of the story, Maoz decides to give us answers and a final twist that feels like a copout. That's ok, because the ambition and reach he shows for most of "Foxtrot" is damn-near exhilarating. I also didn't see any of the "anti-Israel" narrative that some of his country's harshest critics have laid upon his film. Instead, the political statements are kept at a minimum here, in favor of an artful resonance to story and character development that leaves the viewer deeply impacted. There's humanism in the writer-director's film that feels like it could connect with both sides of the argument. [B+]