Cold Pursuit (2019)

Cold Pursuit (2019)

Cast

• Liam Neeson as Nels Coxman
• Laura Dern as Grace Coxman
• Emmy Rossum as Kim Dash
• Tom Bateman as Trevor 'Viking' Calcote
• Micheal Richardson as Kyle Coxman
• Michael Eklund as Speedo
• Bradley Stryker as Limbo

Director

• Hans Petter Moland

Writer (based on the movie 'Kraftidioten' wtitten by)

• Kim Fupz Aakeson

Writer

• Frank Baldwin

Cinematographer

• Philip Øgaard

Editor

• Nicolaj Monberg

Composer

• George Fenton

Action, Drama, Thriller

Rated R

118 minutes

"Cold Pursuit" is the 2019 version of a recently minted tradition, the late winter Liam Neeson revenge flick. It's one of the strangest, least predictable movies he's made in years, which isn't the same thing as saying it's consistently good. Based on the Norwegian movie "In Order of Disappearance," and directed by the same filmmaker, Hans Petter Moland, it's a fragmented, meandering tale in which Neeson's character, a Kehoe, Colorado snowplow driver named Nels Coxman, gets a taste of vengeance and becomes a glutton. At times it plays less like a self-contained movie than a couple of episodes of a TV series that don't quite add up the way you wanted them to. It's a shame that it isn't better. At its best, it plays like a wry critique of this unexpectedly lucrative period of Neeson's career, and a borderline-spoof of the genre as a whole.

"Cold Pursuit" kicks off with Nels accepting an award as Kehoe Citizen of the Year, then jumps ahead to the murder of his only son Kyle (Michael Richardson, Neeson's real-life son with the late Natasha Richardson), an airport baggage handler kidnapped and killed by members of a local drug cartel over a mishandled cocaine shipment. The killers made Kyle's death look like a heroin overdose even though the young man didn't do drugs, a touch that adds insult to injury. Nels swiftly dispatches the men directly responsible for his boy's murder, wraps their corpses in chicken wire, and dumps them off a waterfall so that they'll settle on the bottom of the Colorado River and be stripped clean by fish, an evidence-disposal technique that he later says that he learned by reading crime fiction. Unsatisfied by the deaths that he metes out early on, Nels resolves to work his way up the underworld's ladder until he slays the boss of bosses, Trevor "Viking" Calcote (Tom Bateman).  

Complications ensue, and not necessarily the ones you'd expect from having watched other Liam Neeson revenge movies. Moland and his American screenwriter, Frank Baldwin, play around with Western movie motifs, photographing the snow-packed mountains, valleys and roads like panoramas in a John Ford cavalry picture, and envisioning a Cowboys-and-Indians-type rivalry between the white-run drug cartel that's responsible for Kyle's murder and a Southern Ute Indian gang that mistakenly gets blamed for Nels' retaliatory spree. There's also commentary on how outlaws lust after cliched signifiers of respectability. This is conveyed mostly through Viking, a divorced yuppie clotheshorse and preening psychopath who treats his own young son, Ryan (Nicholas Holmes), like a pet, or some kind of experiment in conditioning, micromanaging his diet and recommending "Lord of the Flies" as a self-help manual.

Like its source, this American remake is comparatively light on graphic violence (the beatings tend to be uglier than the shootings), and it has the confidence to handle quite a bit of that business offscreen, staging significant killings behind drawn curtains, or in the cut between one scene from the next. It also detours from the main story to spend quality time with Viking's drug gang, his henchmen (including Domenick Lombardozzi as the aforementioned fantasy football sentimentalist, who refers to Mozart as "Moe-zart"); Nels' ex-criminal brother Brock "Wingman" Coxman (William Forsyth), who got his nickname from "Top Gun"; a couple of Kehoe cops (Emily Rossum and John Doman) trying to make sense of the mayhem, and assorted mates and exes. Laura Dern has a few scenes as Nels' grieving wife Grace, who leaves Nels almost instantly, perhaps sensing that her presence would be wasted in a movie filled with sad, violent, self-involved men. 

"Cold Pursuit" is at least four-fifths a dark comedy, filled with eccentric, often introverted and sad American archetypes. Most would be mesmerizing and/or hilarious if they had been fully fleshed out as characters, and if the film surrounding them were more elegantly structured and paced. The project suffers from a certain flatness in the characterizations, as well as from an inability to introduce new faces, or arrange meetings between established characters, right when the plot needs them, as opposed to much later, when the audience is ready for the story to end and tends to view such moments as narrative speed bumps. But even at its most navel-gazing and disorganized, "Cold Pursuit" still showcases elements you haven't seen before, like the tight-lipped hero asking how many words he's required to speak at an awards dinner, the henchman who keeps losing at fantasy football because he's too loyal to his favorite childhood teams and players, and the Ute crime boss who's saddened by the appropriation of his people's clothes and jewelry by white designers, more so when he turns over a label and sees the words "Made in China."

The film might have been doomed to historical footnote status regardless, because it opened mere days after its star made one of the weirdest, most clueless unforced errors in the history of movie promotion. In an interview, Neeson tried to connect this film, and the futility of revenge in general, to an anecdote drawn from his twenties, when he responded to a white female friend's rape by a black assailant by wandering town around with a crowbar, hoping to get in a fight with another "black bastard" and kill him. Although Neeson didn't kill anyone back then, or even fight them, he flunked the present-day personal disclosure-as-advertising test by failing to realize that the racism part of his story—which he did not apologize for, or even note and explain—was as disturbing as the revenge part, which he condemned on the spot.

Ironically, it's precisely this kind of person who might've ended up as a supporting player in "Cold Pursuit," had the filmmakers been able to justify clearing space in an already-crowded ensemble. Throughout, revenge is treated not just as a disturbing and self-negating activity but sad and bleakly comical as well. The movie starts with a printed quote from Oscar Wilde ("Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go") that sounds like a condemnation of people you haven't met yet. Several of the main characters are obsessed with vengeance. Even more are casually, even murderously racist. It's clear not only that revenge can never satisfy them but that they are incapable of seeing their own flaws, and that their tribal myopia and obsessions with honor and vengeance are ways of distracting themselves from the bone-deep knowledge that they failed the same people whose bodies, or memories, they're hell-bent on defending.

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Boy Erased (2018)

Boy Erased (2018)

Cast

• Lucas Hedges as Jared Eamons
• Nicole Kidman as Nancy Eamons
• Russell Crowe as Marshall Eamons
• Joel Edgerton as Victor Sykes
• Xavier Dolan as Jon
• Troye Sivan as Gary
• Joy Jacobson as Brandy Vidler

Director

• Joel Edgerton

Writer (based on the memoir by)

• Garrard Conley

Writer

• Joel Edgerton

Cinematographer

• Eduard Grau

Editor

• Jay Rabinowitz

Composer

• Danny Bensi
• Saunder Jurriaans

Drama

Rated R for sexual content including an assault, some language and brief drug use.

114 minutes

Released only months ago, Desiree Akhavan’s powerful period drama “The Miseducation of Cameron Post” is about a young woman who survives a Christian “ex-gay” conversion therapy camp she is forced to attend, after getting caught making out with a female classmate on prom night. Adapted from Emily Danforth’s YA novel, the title character of Akhavan’s film (played by Chloë Grace Moretz) has a strong conviction of self: we can detect only a faint amount of uncertainty seeping into her conscience while she grows into her sexual identity and wrestles with the traumatizing rituals of the Evangelical camp she bides her time to get out of.

On the heels of Akhavan’s film comes Joel Edgerton’s poignant, similarly themed “Boy Erased,” adapted by Edgerton from Garrard Conley’s memoir with the same name. Quite different in tone, structure and narrative goals, the two films surely don’t need to be compared just because they share a common topic. But the proximity of their release dates almost begs a side-by-side consideration. In that, it’s worth noting that Jared Eamons, the struggling teen at the heart of Edgerton’s film, doesn’t initially exude the same self-assurance Cameron Post does. In fact, Jared’s coming out journey, as charted in “Boy Erased,” aligns more closely with an LGBTQ person’s inner negotiation that Akhavan, who identifies as bisexual, talked about during a post-screening Q&A of her film earlier this year in New York. Akhavan said many people in the LGBTQ community come to a decisive realization in their own time, that the portion of the world that doesn’t accept them is wrong and they themselves are right.

Jared, portrayed with startling nuance and complexity by Lucas Hedges (“Manchester by the Sea”), finds himself in the thick of the aforementioned reconciliation Akhavan articulated. The son of a Baptist pastor being raised in a small, conservative town, the college-aged Jared is told by almost everyone around him that there is something wrong with him; that he won’t be loved by God unless he beats his homosexual urges. A kindly doctor (in a memorable cameo by veteran actor Cherry Jones) happens to be the only grown-up who privately tells Jared that he is a perfectly healthy and normal teenage boy. And yet, Jared gets denied his true identity by almost everyone else. When a soul-crushing sexual assault, the details of which he can’t bear to share with his parents but we learn as part of the film’s steady supply of flashbacks, forces him to come out to his family, his authoritative father Marshall (Russell Crowe) and initially obedient mother Nancy (Nicole Kidman) register him to a conversion program run by the impassioned, self-appointed therapist Victor Sykes (Joel Edgerton). Once under the daily, 9-to-5 control of the villainous Sykes at his Love in Action facility, the young men and women give up their phones and their larger freedoms, not permitted to discuss the details of their “therapy” with their guardians, who dutifully wait at a nearby hotel.

What Cameron Post, a skeptic from the get-go, figures out swiftly with the help of some equally strong-willed allies—that she has to pretend and play along for a while— Jared has a significantly more difficult time with, particularly due to a lack of guiding voices around him. An exception to this is his fellow camp inmate Gary (Troye Sivan, also the co-composer of the film’s gloomy original track “Revelation”), who tells Jared to fake his way through the program until he safely gets out. The alternative is ugly: the undesirable fate of being stuck with Sykes’ program full-time for a whole year is one Jared is determined to avoid. As he works his way through the emotionally manipulative curriculum and builds his family tree to look for the sources of his “sin” (that’s what Sykes calls it), heartbreaking suicides unsurprisingly occur just as they do in “Cameron Post.” To the script’s fault, the secondary members of Love in Action (one played by filmmaker Xavier Dolan), get little time of their own in “Boy Erased.” Still, the later one of the suicides especially leaves the audience heartsick—the episode creeps up after we watch the ill-fated character selflessly lend a helping hand to a vulnerable Jared, when he desperately calls his mother for help in a moment of deep crisis. In this impressively shot, escalating scene, Edgerton captures the panic-inducing entrapment of Jared with startling tension. For a few moments during that sequence, “Boy Erased” almost feels like a thriller.

And yet, the most emotionally arresting moments of “Boy Erased” are delivered through quieter scenes between Jared and his parents. In various over-the-top, true-to-character costumes, the predictably excellent and heavily made-up Nicole Kidman brings forward Nancy’s inner dilemma as a sweet, religious woman, who eventually leans into her motherly love, intuition and common sense with confidence. In an exceptionally measured performance that reminds us the fine actor that he really is (we almost forgot between misfires like “Les Misérables” and “The Mummy”), the scene-stealing Russell Crowe leaves a haunting impression as a conservative but soft-edged father, who is asked to question his bigoted values at last. In navigating the delicate storylines of Jared’s parents, Edgerton mostly does a decent job, conveying that they act out of misguided love and circumstantial concern. While left a bit on the surface and cut brief, the eventually rewarding transformation of Nancy and Marshall is what sets “Boy Erased” apart. However imperfect, Edgerton’s film aims to intimately speak with parents like them and, who knows, perhaps to even change their hearts for the better.

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Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Cast

• Rosa Salazar as Alita
• Christoph Waltz as Dr. Dyson Ido
• Ed Skrein as Zapan
• Mahershala Ali as Vector
• Jennifer Connelly as Chiren
• Keean Johnson as Hugo
• Michelle Rodriguez as Gelda
• Lana Condor as Koyomi
• Jackie Earle Haley as Grewishka
• Eiza González as Nyssiana
• Jorge Lendeborg Jr. as Tanji
• Marko Zaror as Ajakutty
• Casper Van Dien as Amok

Director

• Robert Rodriguez

Screenplay

• James Cameron
• Laeta Kalogridis

Comic Book

• Yukito Kishiro

Cinematography

• Bill Pope

Editor

• Ian Silverstein
• Stephen E. Rivkin

Music

• Junkie XL

Action, Romance, Science Fiction, Thriller

Rated PG-13

122 minutes

With his 1992 debut of “El Mariachi,” Robert Rodriguez announced himself a director with an eye for action. He prefers to keep his camera movement light and energetic, his edits quick and focused. His movies tend to carry an unmistakable playfulness, like in the all-out barroom brawl between humans and vampires in “From Dusk till Dawn” and the bizarre yet stylish “Spy Kids” franchise in which two siblings face off against some truly surreal-looking enemies.  

Rodriguez brings this fun-loving, action-fueled touch to the big-screen adaptation of Yukito Kishiro’s popular manga, Battle Angel Alita, salvaging a project that had languished in development hell since the early aughts. James Cameron, who co-produced the refashioned “Alita: Battle Angel” and co-wrote the screenplay with Rodriguez and Laeta Kalogridis, originally picked up the project around 15 years ago before eventually handing the reins over to Rodriguez. The script is still somewhat unwieldy, chock full of explanations about how robotic bodies work and the history of the decaying setting known as Iron City. Yet, underneath multiple levels of plot and world-building, there’s a weirdo heart keeping the action moving along.

As far as movies about girl robots go, “Alita” isn’t so bad. The movie’s star is a promising Rosa Salazar as the namesake hero, a mysterious yet powerful teen girl bot with oversized anime-style eyes and a good and very powerful heart that could power a city. Alita is the last of her kind, a superior enemy who was somehow were defeated by the humans. After she was found in a scrap heap, Alita is brought back to life with the help of a fatherly doctor, Dr. Ido (Christoph Waltz), a paternal relationship that gives “Alita” some of its more stranger moments. More straightforward is the relationship Alita has with a secret nemesis, Chiren (Jennifer Connelly), Dr. Ido’s former wife, and Vector (Mahershala Ali), a smooth-talking kingpin who promises almost anyone who will listen to him a ticket to Zalem, the city hovering in the sky holding society’s upper class over the heads of the poor below.

Even with so many different creative demands on the story, Rodriguez makes the movie his own. Many of his movies feature Latino actors, like Danny Trejo in the “Machete” movies and Alexa Vega and Daryl Sabara in “Spy Kids,” and the trend continues with “Alita” as the Peruvian American Salazar gets the chance to lead a big-budget movie. He includes Spanish and English signs in Iron City, and some of the extras can be heard speaking Spanish in the background. It’s still rare to hear or see Spanish spoken in sci-fi movies about multilingual futures unless the films are from Latin America.

“Alita” draws inspiration from various sci-fi sources, like the physical divide between the rich and the poor in “Metropolis,” the mysterious femme being with incredible powers of “The Fifth Element," and the multilingual, neon-lit grimy future world of “Blade Runner,” to name a few. Iron City is a place similar to what we’ve seen in other movies, but it’s outfitted with enough differences to tell it apart, like making the society corrupt enough for serial killers and robbing cyborgs of their mechanical parts and giving the place its own gladiatorial-like roller derby that gives Iron City hopefuls their only shot at getting into Zalem. Somehow all of these storylines are interconnected, which adds to the clunkiness of the script but it never allows it to get boring. Some kind of action sequence is always just a few minutes away.

Although Alita is built with some feminist empowerment in mind, some of the messaging malfunctions against old world patriarchy. The odd paternalistic doctor is just the start. Because she looks like a teen girl, of course, she develops a heterosexual crush on a human teen boy, Hugo (Keean Johnson). Never mind that she’s actually 300 some years older and very much a cyborg. The two share some cute moments, but others, like when Hugo introduces her to chocolate or when Alita offers Hugo her one-of-a-kind ancient technology heart so he can go up to Zalem, feel so old school. Was this all because she’s an impulsive teen girl? In another scene, after a devastating battle with a big bad cyborg, Alita must trade out the delicate, girlish body the doctor had built for his daughter (not weird – at all!) for a warrior-grade bod that adheres to her, um, vision of herself. That vision includes a corset-sized tiny waist and an athletic set of breasts that defy gravity. It’s been 300 years after the fall and we’re still holding onto Barbie-size proportions.

Thankfully, Salazar smoothes over many of these cumbersome details with her earnest motion-captured performance. She physically leans into the awkwardness of walking around as a teen girl bot, unsure of her new body and discovering its potential and limits. She explores her new surroundings with literal wide-eyed wonder. When she upgrades her body, she stands tall and confident, having sped through puberty in the span of a surgery. Her character’s chutzpah is the reason why it vaguely makes sense to jump from a “hunter killer,” a bounty hunter in futuristic terms, to a Motorball prospect when she’s working her way to becoming a warrior.

With so much background and story to cover, maybe “Alita” would have benefitted from a “less is more” approach. But considering its estimated budget of $200 million, “Alita: Battle Angel” is an awe-inspiring jump for the man who first burst onto the film scene with a movie that cost around $7,000. The visual bonanza cooked up by Rodriguez, cinematographer Bill Pope and editors Stephen E. Rivkin and Ian Silverstein is enough to power through any narrative bumps with quickly paced action and bleak, yet colorful, imagery.

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Sorry Angel (2019)

Sorry Angel (2019)

Cast

• Vincent Lacoste as Arthur Prigent
• Pierre Deladonchamps as Jacques Tondelli
• Denis Podalydès as Mathieu
• Rio Vega as Fabrice
• Adèle Wismes as Nadine
• Thomas Gonzales as Marco
• Clément Métayer as Pierre

Director

• Christophe Honoré

Writer

• Christophe Honoré

Cinematographer

• Rémy Chevrin

Editor

• Chantal Hymans

Drama

Rated NR

132 minutes

 

 

The specter of AIDS looms through “Sorry Angel,” the new drama from French filmmaker Christophe Honore, but to dismiss it merely as just another drama about the disease would do it a disservice. Instead, it is merely one component in this often engrossing drama about the relationship that develops between two men who come together when both are at very different points in their respective lives. Both sprawling and intimate, it tells a story dealing with life, love, friendship, mortality and, yes, AIDS, in a manner that is relentlessly and deliberately unsentimental in tone but which nevertheless proves to be quite affecting.

The film takes place in 1993, a period of time in the history of AIDS landing between the shock and horror of its initial discovery and devastation and the medical, technological and social advances that would go on to reshape how the illness and its victims would be perceived to the world. For Jacques (Pierre Deladonchamps), a reasonably successful Paris-based author in his late 30s, the disease is just another fact of life to deal with, in his case by sharing his apartment with Marco (Thomas Gonzalez), an ex-lover with a far more advanced case than his and alternating between tenderly caring for him and responding in an unnecessarily harsh manner when Marco tries to make what he thinks is his final goodbye to Jacques' young son, Louis (Tristan Farge). For Arthur (Vincent Lacoste), a college student from Breton who is still wrestling with his own sexual identity (he has a sort-of girlfriend yet sneaks off to have sex with strange men) it is another aspect of the life experience that he hopes to gain by one day moving to Paris himself.

While in Rennes to check out a play based on one of his works, Jacques slips into a movie theater showing “The Piano” and meets Arthur. There is an undeniable chemistry between the two but after their first rendezvous, the two seem to come away with different attitudes—Jacques comes across as more removed from the proceedings, more interested in educating the younger man about art and literature than in anything else while Arthur is more driven by his youthful excitement at the freedom that Jacques’s life represents to him. As the relationship between the two develops, albeit in unexpected ways, other characters turn up in their lives as well, ranging from Jacques’s gay neighbor, Mathieu (Denis Podalydes), to the hitchhiker that he picks up on the road—with the sort-of girlfriend in the car with him—for a brief tryst. It all builds slowly and carefully to a series of events that someone like Jacques may look upon as just another fact of life when seen from the outside but which proves to have a much deeper impact when it happens to him.

Honore is a filmmaker whose works have veered between relatively realistic narratives like “Ma Mere” (2004) and “The Beautiful Person” (2008) and more fanciful projects like the musicals Love Songs” (2007) and “Beloved” (2011) and the odd comedy fantasy “Sophie’s Misfortunes” (2016). In the past, I have preferred his more offbeat films but “Sorry Angel” is arguably the best of his more straightforward works and is certainly his most consistent project since “Love Songs.” He clearly knows the usual tropes and cliches of LGBTQ cinema and deftly avoids them in any number of intriguing ways—the manner in which he contrives to inform Arthur that Jacques is HIV-positive is especially inspired. 

On paper, the story may sound like a mawkish melodrama but it proves to be a good deal more clever and resourceful. And when it does get to the more dramatic beats, Honore handles them in a way that avoids the overt jerking of tears while still allowing the emotions to come forth in a direct and affecting manner. He also does a marvelously effective job of evoking the specific era in which the story is set, not just in the easy aspects like decor (including clunky CD players and answering machines) and music (with judiciously selected cues ranging from “Pump Up the Volume” to the Cowboy Junkies’s rendition of “I’m So Lonesome, I Could Cry”) but in the attitudes the characters had regarding themselves and their situations at that particular point in time. He also gets fine performances from the entire cast, especially the central ones from Deladonchamps and Lacoste, both of whom are fantastic here.

Because it is a relatively high-profile French film dealing with LGBTQ issues, “Sorry Angel” will no doubt find itself being compared to such previous works as “Savage Nights” (1992), “Blue is the Warmest Color” (2013) and “BPM (Beats Per Minute)” (2017). While it shares certain thematic elements with each of those films, this is a film that has both a narrative and an approach that transcends the expected cliches in order to give viewers a more ambitious experience. When it does work, which it does most of the time, it does so with a power and emotional truth that cannot be denied.

 

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The Prodigy (2019)

The Prodigy (2019)

Cast

• Taylor Schilling as Sarah
• Jackson Robert Scott as Miles
• Colm Feore as Arthur Jacobson
• Brittany Allen as Margaret St. James
• Oluniké Adeliyi as Rebecca

Director

• Nicholas McCarthy

Writer

• Jeff Buhler

Cinematographer

• Bridger Nielson

Editor

• Brian Ufberg
• Tom Elkins

Composer

• Joseph Bishara

Horror

Rated R

There's a tagline on the posters for "The Prodigy," a new horror film about a possessed child: "There's something wrong with Miles." That's an understatement, and not just for the obvious reasons. Miles is the object of much hoopla in "The Prodigy," which was written by Jeff Buhler ("Midnight Meat Train") and directed by Nicholas McCarthy ("The Pact"). But Miles is never distinct enough to be worth caring about. He's also not scary because his actions are seemingly only motivated by Buhler's need to get to the next schematic horror movie plot point. Worst of all: McCarthy's direction is so sleepy that a number of key scenes fizzle out before they can pay off with the next big jump scare. "The Prodigy" doesn't work because Buhler's scenario is too predictable to be involving and McCarthy's direction is too indecisive to be gripping. One of these two problems might have been surmountable, but both, at the same time, is lethal.

Also deadly: Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), an eight year-old wunderkind who, we are told, is super-smart in some unspecified areas, but also developmentally delayed in other unclear ways. Realistically, it's pretty hard to tell what's wrong with Miles because Buhler doesn't spell it out. Miles appears to be somewhere on the autism spectrum, based on the way that he skittishly interacts with his understandably worried mother Sarah (Taylor Schilling). Then again, you might also think that Miles looks normal enough, right until he starts cursing out Sarah in Hungarian, attacking another kid with a pipe wrench, and doing unpleasant things with the family dog. 

You'd be wrong, by the way, since "The Prodigy" is a horror movie that sticks closely to the post-"The Omen" formula for Evil Kid Flicks. You probably know this formula, even if you haven't thought of it as such: Young Mother gives birth to Violent Child; Kind Doctors find early signs of concern for Violent Child, but re-assure Young Mother that there's nothing to worry about yet; Violent Child begins to act squirrelly; Young Mother is worried enough to consult with Well-Meaning Spiritualist (Colm Feore), who tells Young Mother that Violent Child has become a vessel for Big Evil; Young Mother doesn't believe Well-Meaning Spiritualist until more Bad Stuff happens; then Young Mother takes matters into her own hands, by which time it may or may not be already too late to help Violent Child.

I realize that outlining this type of film's plot is like ragging on the apparently scripted nature of pro-wrestling matches. Why bother? We all know that the fights are rigged and the wrestlers are actors. I appreciate that, but I must re-assure viewers: there is nothing to "The Prodigy" beyond what I just outlined to you. And honestly, I did try to love this movie, having previously enjoyed films by both Buhler and McCarthy. I also tried to ignore all the little tropes and jump scares that Buhler and McCarthy took from earlier horror films, and often blatantly, as in almost shot-for-shot nods to lesser-known films, like Mario Bava's "Shock" and Damiano Damiani's "Amityville II: The Possession." I tried to focus on what I was looking at on a moment-to-moment basis, just so I could suspend my disbelief long enough to invest in these types of characters again.

Sarah and her emotionally distant husband John (Peter Mooney) are not only boring to watch, but also boring to think about. These guys don't just make generic bad decisions, like wandering into the wrong dark room, or participating in a staring contest with the wrong possessed child. Sarah and John are also poorly developed characters. Buhler and McCarthy rely so much on the familiarity of their scenario that they never bother to explain why Sarah immediately accepts the judgment of Feore's hypnotist, or how, exactly, was John affected by childhood abuse (we can guess, but you get what I mean). It's all barely simmering on the film's surface because "The Prodigy" mostly follows Miles as he pointlessly terrorizes other forgettable characters. 

So if there's something wrong with Miles, it's that his creators don't do much with him. They wind him up, and expect viewers to be impressed, because hey, Violent Children are creepy! Unfortunately, the film's scare scenes aren't even well-executed: an ostensibly creepy walk down a dark stairway appears to take a lifetime before it climaxes with the most obvious jump scare imaginable. "The Prodigy" wasn't made by incompetent filmmakers. But that doesn't make it any less wrong.

 

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Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

Cast

• Jessica Rothe as Theresa "Tree" Gelbman
• Israel Broussard as Carter Davis
• Phi Vu as Ryan Phan
• Suraj Sharma as Samar Ghosh
• Sarah Yarkin as Dre Morgan
• Rachel Matthews as Danielle Bouseman
• Ruby Modine as Lori Spengler

Director

• Christopher Landon

Writer (characters)

• Scott Lobdell

Writer

• Christopher Landon

Cinematographer

• Toby Oliver

Editor

• Ben Baudhuin

Composer

• Bear McCreary

Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Rated PG-13 for violence, language, sexual material and thematic elements.

 

100 minutes

How much fun was 2017’s “Happy Death Day,” a gloriously self-aware blend of a teen slasher flick and “Groundhog Day,” with genuine jump-scares and a sharp sense of humor? In director Christopher Landon’s playful genre entry (written by Scott Lobdell) which wasn’t ashamed of its hybrid identity, our feisty heroine Tree Gelbman (“La La Land”'s Jessica Rothe) lived through the day of her murder in the hands of a masked killer again and again until she grew as a human being and a vengeful strategic thinker. And Tree wasn’t just another female survivor—in any other horror flick, this delightfully despicable, unapologetically debauched sorority queen wouldn’t have lasted past the first act. But she’s gotten so far that she received a sequel from the same team. Unfortunately, “Happy Death Day 2U” doesn’t deserve her or her tireless efforts through time to outwit a murderous loser behind a creepy baby mask.

More a geeky '80s-style high school film than horror, “Happy Death Day 2U” puzzlingly gives up on all the strengths that made its predecessor an appealing watch. Throughout this meandering mess, my mind wandered off to anything between “Weird Science” and “Back to the Future Part II—the latter is even frequently name-checked—except, “Happy Death Day 2U” is neither entertaining nor knowingly overindulgent. In reality, its convolutions feel miscalculated in the hands of creators that mistake complicated developments with amusement. And those missteps kick in pretty promptly in the sequel, right from the first occurrence of the very first murder. The early moments of the film admittedly feel like a bummer when we realize we're getting more of the same bloody cycles, but this time focusing on Ryan (Phi Vu); a side character from the first film, playing the roommate of Tree’s boyfriend Carter (Israel Broussard).

Not that Ryan isn’t endearing to follow on his own, but honestly, who’d want a “Happy Death Day” sequel that pushes Rothe, its chief asset, to the side? It’s almost as if the film realizes this gaffe while feeling its way through a cluttered story that corrects and revises itself at once. In due course, Ryan’s involvement in the plot becomes clear: turns out, he and his brainy friends at Bayfield University had invented a machine that created the time loops and sent Tree off to a one-way survival adventure. Surely, history would repeat itself, but in an alternate reality. (Those “Back to the Future Part II” and “space-time continuum” references do come in handy.) Stuck in a different dimension where her mother is still alive, she isn’t in the midst of an affair with a married professor and her fellow meanie Danielle (Rachel Matthews) is dating Carter, Tree tries to resurrect the familial and romantic order in her own universe while repeatedly escaping a mad killer through semi-comical methods.

If you can fend off the recurring bores of “Happy Death Day 2U,” Landon and Lobdell have some chuckles reserved up their sleeves. A sleekly edited montage of Tree’s increasingly creative suicides (why get murdered when you can just kill yourself?) arrives just in time to alleviate the dullness, while an intriguing array of side characters—portraying nerds and villainous teachers—keeps things mildly bearable. The sequel doesn’t drop the ball on some of the previous film’s key roles either—in that, both the adulterous Dr. Gregory Butler and secretly malicious roomie Lori (Ruby Modine) receive character makeovers. Still, the uninventive “Happy Death Day 2U” can neither sustain nor recreate the charms of the first film by recycling its ideas. In a way, Landon’s sequel gets stuck in its own alternate dimension—after starting off as something much closer to “Scream” in spirit, it devolves into a lazy “Scary Movie." 

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Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Velvet Buzzsaw (2019)

Cast

• Jake Gyllenhaal as Morf Vandewalt
• Rene Russo as Rhodora Haze
• Toni Collette as Gretchen
• Zawe Ashton as Josephina
• Tom Sturridge as Jon Dondon
• Natalia Dyer as Coco
• Billy Magnussen as Bryson
• John Malkovich as Piers
• Daveed Diggs as Damrish

Director

• Dan Gilroy

Screenplay

• Dan Gilroy

Director of Photography

• Robert Elswit

Editor

• John Gilroy

Original Music Composer

• Marco Beltrami

Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

Rated R

112 minutes

 

 

Art is dangerous and those who profit from it are risking their lives in Dan Gilroy’s bloody art-world satire “Velvet Buzzsaw.” Gilroy targets all the players who feed the machine of high-priced art—the pretentious artists, the gallery owners, the agents, the clients, and especially the critics—making the case that the more we commodify art that comes from passionate, even dark places, the more we risk suffering as a consequence. And he does so in what could be called a satire-horror hybrid, playfully poking his art world players for the first half and then unleashing actual violence on them in the second. It’s a wildly inconsistent film, sometimes disappointingly clunky and as superficial as the world it’s mocking, but it’s also an ambitious piece of work with unforgettable imagery and an ace ensemble. You know how a painting can look totally different depending on the angle from which you're viewing it? The same thing is going to happen with “Velvet Buzzsaw,” and I think that’s exactly how Dan Gilroy wants it.

Jake Gyllenhaal is in gloriously showy mode as art critic Morf Vandewalt, a writer who can literally make or break an artist’s career with his buzz-generating reviews. He is a kingmaker in a circle of art profiteers that includes agent Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) and her assistant Josephina (Zawe Ashton). Almost like a slasher movie director giving us snippets of character for the eventual victims arriving to the remote cabin in the woods, Gilroy populates an ensemble with quirky characters like installment technician Bryson (Billy Magnussen), gallery manager Gretchen (Toni Collette), grown-repetitive artist Piers (John Malkovich), hot-young-agent Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge), hot-young-artist Damrish (Daveed Diggs), and new assistant Coco (Natalia Dyer). It’s a crowded cast of beautiful people about to have their superficial lives destroyed.

It starts when Josephina comes home to find her upstairs neighbor deceased in the hallway. She peeks into his apartment and finds dozens of gorgeous paintings—and the design of the art is truly fantastic. They’re haunting pieces of work and the movie could have collapsed if they were not. Much of “Velvet Buzzsaw” rises or falls on whether or not the art Josephina finds would believably incite the buying frenzy and fandom that it does, so it’s essential that we believably buy that she’s captivated by the art. She learns that her neighbor was a troubled artist, and he was trying to destroy his life's work when he died. She probably should have taken that as an omen. Instead, Josephina unleashes the art into the world, and all of the aforementioned characters (except maybe Coco) want a piece of the inevitable profit. And then people start dying.

“Velvet Buzzsaw” is a unique horror film visually in that it doesn’t employ the typical dark color pattern or low lighting typical in the genre. It is a bright, vividly colored slice of gore, a pop art riff on “Final Destination” with bright red flames, blood, and paint. The design of the film always kept me engaged, impressed by the visual choices from the paintings to the production design to the costumes to the kill scenes. Almost all of the deaths in “Velvet Buzzsaw” involve characters being absorbed by their art, almost as if Gilroy is saying you can’t be an outsider to true art for very long without getting sucked into it. It was shot by the great Robert Elswit (robbed of an Oscar nod for his work on Gilroy’s “Nightcrawler”) and his work elevates the piece overall. There are striking enough visuals throughout “Velvet Buzzsaw,” and a nice streak of black humor threaded through the entire piece, to keep viewers engaged at least superficially.

The problems start when one starts digging below the surface. It feels like “Velvet Buzzsaw” needed another pass on every level. The script feels clunky at times, uncertain of its targets and willing to go off on tangents that the movie really doesn’t need—there’s a scene between Piers and Dondon that does nothing for the film other than to show John Malkovich can drop a free throw. And I kept hoping for it to coalesce into a statement about art that was deeper than “take it seriously.” There are also some weird, choppy edits, and tonal jumps. It’s an ambitious movie, so a difficult one to manage in terms of structure, but this flick lurches and stops sometimes right when you want it to be building up momentum. It sometimes even approaches “failed experiment” status, but a strong acting choice or design element just brings it back from that precipice a few times. One just wishes it never got so close.

As someone who sees hundreds of movies a year, and covers hundreds of hours of television, I value originality, and “Velvet Buzzsaw” is certainly unlike anything else you’re going to see this year on Netflix or any other streaming service. And so maybe I’m more forgiving of it than people who aren’t subjected to so much predictable mundanity would be. Or maybe, after watching the cautionary tale Morf the cynical critic, I’m just scared something will happen to me if I’m too mean.

 

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If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

If Beale Street Could Talk (2018)

Cast

• KiKi Layne as Clementine "Tish" Rivers
• Stephan James as Alonzo "Fonny" Hunt
• Regina King as Sharon Rivers
• Colman Domingo as Joseph Rivers
• Teyonah Parris as Ernestine Rivers
• Michael Beach as Frank Hunt
• Aunjanue Ellis as Mrs. Hunt
• Ebony Obsidian as Adrienne Hunt
• Dominique Thorne as Sheila Hunt
• Diego Luna as Pedrocito
• Finn Wittrock as Hayward
• Ed Skrein as Officer Bell
• Emily Rios as Victoria Rogers
• Pedro Pascal as Pietro Alvarez
• Brian Tyree Henry as Daniel Carty
• Dave Franco as Levy

Director

• Barry Jenkins

Screenplay

• Barry Jenkins

Novel

• James Baldwin

Director of Photography

• James Laxton

Original Music Composer

• Nicholas Britell

Editor

• Joi McMillon
• Nat Sanders

Drama, Romance

Rated R

117 minutes

 

 

Director Barry Jenkins summons James Baldwin’s spirit in his adaptation of the author’s 1974 book, “If Beale Street Could Talk” by immediately quoting him onscreen: “Every black person born in America was born on Beale Street, whether in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Harlem, New York. Beale Street is our legacy.” For Baldwin, Beale Street doesn’t just run through Memphis, Tennessee; it runs through the DNA of African-Americans, a symbol of our shared experience in these United States. Although we are not monolithic in thought, we are all beholden to the issues Baldwin interrogated and challenged with the words he spoke and wrote, issues like racism, injustice and so on. 

History at large is written by the victors, but Black history is protected and passed on by our storytellers, the folks—famous and not—whose life lessons filled in the blanks for what was so often missing from, or corrupted by, the general narrative. The stories of our ancestors’ trials and tribulations form a generational artery that can never be severed so long as there is someone left to tell the tale.

Jenkins’ decision to let the original storyteller live and breathe throughout “If Beale Street Can Talk” is a wise one. We feel Baldwin’s gaze whenever the director and his cinematographer James Laxton execute the director’s trademark of having his actors look into the camera. The lovers at the heart of this story are technically staring at each other—and by extension, at us—with a devotion that is as tactile as the image itself. Like all love stories, this one occasionally takes fluttery flight, triggered by the gentlest and most subtle of gestures and emotions. But even at his most romantic, Baldwin never let the reader fall too deeply into the starry-eyed ether; the barbed scorpion’s tail of harsh reality remains ever-present, waiting to strike at any moment and break the spell. This realism is rendered in such matter-of-fact fashion that it becomes smoothly woven into the narrative without artifice.

The first words we see are by Baldwin, as are the first words we hear. Tish (KiKi Layne, making a stunning feature debut) utters a sentence you can find on page four of the book: “I hope that nobody has ever had to look at anybody they love through glass.” The beloved person under glass is Fonny (Stephan James), her boyfriend and the father of her unborn child. Fonny is incarcerated for a rape he did not commit. Each time the film visits him in prison, we’re reminded of the cruelly taunting symbolism of Baldwin’s line. Glass is transparent to the eye but impervious to the touch; a lover’s embrace is so close and yet so far away.

But there is no “woe-is-me”-style posturing in these scenes. Instead, Fonny and Tish find a semblance of normalcy tinged with sadness and elevated by hope. Sometimes the duo even laugh at situations that arise, sharing the gallows humor entrenched in the lives of the oppressed or downtrodden. This kind of dark humor snakes its way through “If Beale Street Could Talk,” sometimes finding itself in a release of relief, other times getting caught in one’s throat when situations suddenly become tense. This film knows that suffering and joy are strange bedfellows, opposites that are quite often prone to finding each other, sometimes within the same beat.

Thankfully, Fonny is not kept behind bars for the length of the film, as the retelling of his love story allows Jenkins to fiddle with the timeframe. We see the evolution of Fonny and Tish, first as rebellious, somewhat antagonistic children and later as devoted soulmates. In those latter scenes of burgeoning affection, Jenkins orchestrates a sense of pace and timing that, abetted by Nicholas Britell’s excellent score, makes the viewer swoon. There’s a woozy affectation to these moments—as Alan Jay Lerner once wrote, it’s almost like being in love. So whenever the narrative shifts back to Fonny trapped behind that glass, the result has a shattering effect on us.

Surrounding the leads are their respective, supportive families. Played by a murderers’ row of superb character actors led by the brilliant Regina King, the parents and siblings of Fonny and Tish are as memorable and well-drawn as the main characters. We meet Tish’s family first. Her parents, Sharon and Joseph (King and Colman Domingo, respectively) and her sister, Ernestine (Teyonah Parris) hear about Tish’s pregnancy first. The sequence unfolds in meticulously crafted moments that almost feel sculpted by Jenkins and his actors, none of whom are afraid of the awkward pauses that would realistically inhabit this type of discussion.

King plays this scene as if she already knows what her daughter has to tell her. When Tish calls to her mother before pausing to formulate her thoughts, Sharon’s “yes, baby?” response is so delicate, so impeccably rendered that we’re stunned that King could wring that much maternal love out of two words. Parris adds even more power to the moment. “Unbow your head, sister,” she says with a fierceness meant to instill pride. The bond between these women feels unbreakable, a testament to the actors who build it in such a short period of time.

Ernestine also serves as a bit of comic relief in the extremely tense meeting that takes place once James decides to invite Fonny’s parents over to share the news. Fonny’s parents are played by Michael Beach and the always welcome Aunjanue Ellis. They are joined by Fonny’s sisters (Ebony Obsidian and Dominique Thorne). While the men get along like a house on fire, there’s a palpable tension amongst the women, who seem to tolerate one another less robustly than the men do. The Hunt women clearly think they’re better, and Tish’s pregnancy will give them something to gloat about for sure.

Since this parental meeting is the novel’s most memorable scene, Jenkins’ casting reveals itself to be very clever, especially if you are familiar with the actors. Beach is always shorthand for somebody trifling, Domingo is boisterous yet no-nonsense and Ellis is a master at quickly defining her pride-filled characters. The Hunts are a Sanctified bunch who will immediately inspire nods of recognition for anyone with Sanctified relatives, though Mr. Hunt is definitely not a strict follower of this religious doctrine. When things come to a vicious boil, it’s one of those moments where big laughs give way to even bigger shocks. Though Jenkins tones down Baldwin’s verbal vitriol, the scene lands just as effectively as it does in the book.

Fonny and Tish have their own memorable scenes together, from their first night of lovemaking to their attempt to rent an apartment in a neighborhood whose renters do not want them there. This latter scene features Dave Franco in a landlord role that at first felt like stunt casting (the critics at my screening audibly groaned, in fact). But he, Layne and James create this ebullient, magical scene of pantomime that in lesser hands would come off as silly and trite. It’s the film’s most joyful moment. But again, we know what lies ahead for Fonny, so an underlying sadness is also present.

Though “If Beale Street Could Talk” is a series of vignettes, it holds together better than most films of this type. Each separate piece is tethered to the dual running threads of its love story and its tale of injustice. Though there are White cops in the latter story who are clearly villainous, the mistaken rape victim is also a person of color who has escaped back to Puerto Rico to deal with her trauma. This development sends Sharon to Puerto Rico to attempt to bring her back so she can exonerate Fonny. Before trying to find this woman, Sharon contemplates how she should dress. This scene unfolds wordlessly, yet King plays it so physically well that no words are necessary. There’s an unapologetic Blackness to her thought process as she decides whether to wear a wig or her natural hair—it’s the hairstyle equivalent of code-shifting—and what she settles on seems right, at least in that moment.

“If Beale Street Could Talk” leaves the viewer with feelings of anger at the fate society forces Fonny to accept, but it also conjures up some optimism for his and Tish’s future. This isn’t a happy film but it isn’t a hopeless one, either. The most striking thing that you’ll take with you is that Baldwin’s novel was written 44 years ago, but it’s just as timely now. Not much has changed for people of color, which probably wouldn’t surprise the author. And yet, he’d demand we not give up. This film powerfully conveys that message. The struggle is real, but so is the joy. We live, we laugh, we love and we die. But we are not gone. Our story continues, carried onward by our storytellers.

 

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Fighting with My Family (2019)

Fighting with My Family (2019)

Cast

• Florence Pugh as Saraya 'Paige' Knight
• Lena Headey as Julia 'Sweet Saraya' Knight
• Nick Frost as Patrick 'Rowdy Ricky Knight' Knight
• Jack Lowden as Zak 'Zodiac' Knight
• Vince Vaughn as Jake Roberts
• Thea Trinidad as April 'AJ Lee' Brooks
• Aqueela Zoll as Kirsten
• Ellie Gonsalves as Maddison
• Leah Harvey as Hannah
• Dwayne Johnson as The Rock

Director

• Stephen Merchant

Writer

• Stephen Merchant

Cinematography

• Remi Adefarasin

Comedy, Drama

Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual material, language throughout, some violence and drug content.

108 minutes

 

 

Can you smeeelll what the Stephen Merchant is cooking? Yes, while “Fighting with My Family” boasts a guru-presence cameo by Dwayne Johnson, a whole lot of funny talent performing athletic slapstick, and even some laugh-out-loud shade at Vin Diesel, the key to WWE Studios’ best film yet is the co-creator behind shows like "Hello Ladies" and “The Office.” Merchant’s mind for sharp dialogue and character-based comedy proves to be an essential muscle for this feel-good true story, which tells of how WWE superstar Paige came from a completely lovable wrestling clan and rose to international stardom. 

When Saraya Knight and her brother Zak are shown tussling as kids, their parents intervene—to correct the chokehold to make it more effective. Their home proves to be a charming atmosphere, where the parents, former-convict and current teddy bear Ricky (Nick Frost) and force of nature Julia (Lena Headey), love each other deeply. The family shares this positive atmosphere in their wrestling gym and indie wrestling league in their working-class English town, where they teach a band of excitable young kids how to pin, bounce off the ropes, etc. The two stars are the now-grown Knight children, Saraya (Florence Pugh), her jet-black hair and lip ring as definitive as her shyness and shortness, and the slightly hot-headed Zac (Jack Lowden). The Knight clan sees each other as equals, and when they do fight, it’s the good kind. 


One of the film's funniest scenes is early on, when the Knights meet the parents of Kirsten (Aqueela Zoll), Zac’s girlfriend. With Kirsten’s dad played by the comparably demure Merchant, the Knight family are true bulls in a china shop of delicate upper-class niceties. To watch Merchant interact with them is especially funny, while highlighting how this family has their own language, and that they can’t help but be themselves. Most of all, they’re proud of where they’ve come from. It makes for a very warming ensemble comedy, the quartet’s chemistry making a vivid nest that Saraya soon leaves when she gets a shot at professional wrestling. 


Saraya's steady ascent to WWE stardom with blood, sweat, tears, and personal branding (where she changes her stage name from Britani to Paige) then presents Merchant with a narrative challenge he doesn’t entirely pin down—how do you show a character’s progress arc in an industry where everything is fixed, not faked? He finds a solution in part by not forgetting about Zac when he doesn’t make the cut, and putting a lot of dramatic screen-time into Paige’s weaknesses—that she isn’t as strong as some of the other women, which her coach Hutch (played with tough love by Vince Vaughn) reminds her about. Worst of all, she gets stage fright when it comes to the essential act of talking trash in the ring. Pugh and Lowden’s full-bodied dramatic performances express the complete frustration and isolation within these shortcomings, representing hard-working people who are tempted to give up on a dream for many reasons. This eventually makes for moments in which the film, as unabashedly formulaic as it is, can be genuinely inspiring. 


But in spite of the many montages that show what wrestling requires physically, this movie is honestly about successfully branding yourself to superstardom, which WWE seems to be in denial of in pursuit of a classic athletic success narrative. Even though there’s a sense of those who simply do and do not have what Vaughn calls “spark,” there’s little explanation of that, blurring the potential of being able to root for someone to have “it,” whatever that is. The movie goes so far as to make its pivotal match seem like a fight won purely by strength, even though The Rock himself shared during the Sundance Q&A that while Saraya's first big match (known at that point as Paige) did have the same winner, he did tell her the result the night before, which the script avoids. It’s artifice in awkward denial of itself, and it cheapens the hard work of people like Paige, as much as we see her and her peers throw every part of themselves into this entertainment.


Packaged in part as a look back on executive producer Dwayne Johnson’s own success, the film begins with old wrestling footage of him as The Rock, and then jokes at the end about how he created himself a career outside of wrestling. It calls to mind how Johnson became a superstar by branding himself as down-to-Earth on- and off-screen, making him one of the most inspirational superstars you can follow on Instagram. You get a comforting sense that the WWE is following his lead: even though “Fighting with My Family” is undoubtedly about branding the WWE as a fantasy factory, its biggest strengths are its wit and surprisingly big heart, celebrating underdogs who rumble for what they love.

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Arctic (2019)

Arctic (2019)

Cast

• Mads Mikkelsen as Overgård
• Maria Thelma Smáradóttir as Young Woman

Director

• Joe Penna

Screenplay

• Ryan Morrison
• Joe Penna

Cinematography

• Tómas Örn Tómasson

Editor

• Ryan Morrison

Drama, Thriller

Rated PG-13

97 minutes

 

 

For movies meant to put a character through a gauntlet of death and hopelessness, survival stories are abundant with dramatic potential: here’s someone just like you, he's stranded in the middle of nowhere, now let’s watch him try not to die. It’s almost more exciting to think of the writers figuring out such a precise situation than the unfortunate characters themselves. But the best ones (like Robert Redford’s yachting adventure gone wrong “All is Lost”) have a poetry to their physical tales of hope, and the worst play out like a survivor’s manual of what to do and not do, or an endurance test. “Arctic,” directed by newcomer Joe Penna, is stuck somewhere in the middle of those qualifications, its drama largely subsisting on the on-screen muscle of Mads Mikkelsen. 

Things start off relatively manageable for Mikkelsen’s Overgård, all things considered. Yes, his plane has crashed in the middle of an Arctic nowhere, but he has a pulley system into a water hole that’s gotten him a few fishes he can save for later meals, and a radio system that he cranks with hopes of catching a signal. He is alone, but he knows how to read a map, and has a watch alarm that keeps him regimented. He seems confident and weirdly prepared for this crisis, two key creative choices from Penna and Ryan Morrison’s script that take away the vital nervousness of watching him figure this all out. 

So when a helicopter attempts early on to rescue him but crashes, it comes off as bittersweet, and less of a traumatizing lost chance at surviving. Pros: he gets a sled, some Ramen, and some other gear out of the crash. Cons: Overgård now has to care for the one person who survived the crash, a woman in a coma. He silently vows to take care of her, in a few warming passages for a movie that makes you very aware of the temperature of your toes. But then “Arctic” finally gets to its major event: he’s going to drag her on the sled and trudge with limited supplies through the deadly conditions, his goal a seasonal station that the map tells him is a few days’ journey away. 

But even with its bouts of good and very bad luck, once “Arctic” endeavors on its suicide mission it feels alarmingly straight-forward. The film’s testing of Overgård’s strength goes from polarizing contrivance to heavy-handed metaphor for his inner resilience. Can one drag a body on a sled for numerous days, sometimes on a steep incline, with hardly any food in one’s stomach and frost bite? How much does a desperate will to live lead to adrenaline? Those are the kinds of questions that distracts from the pain and spirit “Arctic” was clearly inspired by, distancing the viewer from its visceral nature as it beats on Overgård’s body this side of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant.” It doesn’t help that the movie wears out its most impactful visual note, a lonely white canvas that sometimes can only colored by two bodies and a sled to show any semblance of life. 

As the flagging eyes and brawny fighter of this endeavor, Mikkelsen is a vivid casting pick. But it’s a shame his role doesn’t feel more spiritual, as this crises takes place in a land that even God’s silence seems to have forgotten, and as “Arctic” does have moments in which it flexes cheesy irony on his life-and-death decisions. The movie is instead most concerned with the empty spectacle of watching his body overcome nature’s cruelest obstacles, hollowing him out in its most hope-deficient moments. And though Overgård spends a lot of time alone with his thoughts, “Arctic” lacks what makes for the best movies of its ilk: it does not inspire much imagination concerning what our hero might do first if he does get back home. 

 

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