SUNDANCE 2020: Character-Driven U.K. Horror ‘AMULET’ Takes Time But Packs Punch

January 27, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Alec Secareanu, Amulet, Carla Juri, Horror, Imelda Staunton, Reviews, Romola Garai, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

An atmospheric slow burn that has no qualms really stretching out the burn, the first feature film from director Romola Garai is a deliberately-paced, well-acted and artful horror chamber piece fastened to a real whopper of an ending. Movies live and die by their ending; a great ending can make an otherwise okay movie great and a terrible ending can make an otherwise great movie terrible. This, fortunately, is a case of the former. To Garai’s credit, she absolutely nails the ending, delivering the kind of capstone that makes you go back and reconsider the rest of the film through new eyes and newly discovered context. My mind was racing trying to piece together things as the credits began to roll, certain things not snapping into place until my drive home. (You’ll have to excuse the slower processing power of my brain at the time. It was 2AM after all.) Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Benh Zeitlin’s Gritty Pan Redux ’WENDY’ A Gorgeous Hot Mess

January 27, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Benh Zeitlin, Devin France, Reviews, Sundance 2020, Wendy Leave a comment

Benh Zeitlin joined a very exclusive club of first-time filmmakers in their 20’s to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Director when his debut Beasts of the Southern Wild broke out. In the years since earning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and an Oscar nod to boot, Zeitlin withdrew from the spotlight, whittling away to rebrand the Peter Pan story with his signature Zeitlinisms. Retelling the James Matthew Barrie fantasy with all the semi-grounded, semi-gritty magical realism that propelled Beasts, Zeitlin paints himself into a bit of a corner, refusing to grow up as a director. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Humanist Spy Thriller ’IRONBARK’ Is On a Mission to Move You

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Abel Korzeniowski, Angus Wright, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ironbark, Merab Ninidze, Rachel Brosnahan, Reviews, Sean Bobbit, Sundance 2020, Tom O'Connor Leave a comment

I’m calling an early shot here: if there’s one movie out of Sundance 2020 that stands a decent shot at a Best Picture nomination almost a year from now, it’s very likely Ironbark. The Cold War espionage thriller takes a classical approach to its telling, leaning into familiar biopic/historical nonfiction tropes, while viewing events through an extremely humanistic lens. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Rebecca Hall Is Next Level Good in the Scariest Ghost Story in Years: ‘THE NIGHT HOUSE’

January 26, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews, Most Popular Tagged Ben Collins, David Bruckner, Evan Jonigkeit, Horror, Luke Piotrowski, Rebecca Hall, Reviews, Sundance 2020 2 Comments

On darkness, Nietszche offered, “He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes back into thee.” The Night House, an expertly-crafted, terrifying ghost story with a towering lead performance from Rebecca Hall, takes this sentiment to heart. Hall is Beth, a widow hoping to understand her husband Owen’s (Evan Jonigkeit) shocking suicide, diving into the dark recesses of his cell phone and discovering more than she bargained for. Glimpsing the abyss beyond, Beth confronts a terrifying, mutually exclusive truth: either ghosts exist or there truly is nothing waiting for us beyond this mortal coil. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Giggly Horror-Comedy ‘SCARE ME’ Finds New Ways to Tell Old Stories

January 25, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Aya Cash, Chris Redd, Josh Ruben, Rebecca Drysdale, Reviews, Scare Me, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

A startlingly original and stripped-down madcap horror-comedy about the terrors of the creative process, Scare Me manages to find a fresh entry point to a well-trodden subgenere by asking, simply: what do we want from horror? What is the draw of scaring ourselves – be it with Joe Hill novels, Ari Aster movies, or Ryan Murphy TV shows – and how is any good horror story crafted? These are the ideas that interest Scare Me, a horror-comedy in the tradition of oral storytelling. The film, which leans more towards comedy than horror, follows two writers and new acquaintances in Fred and Fanny, both eloping from society to far-flung snowy cabins to hack out the next horror story sure to terrify the world. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: ‘COME AWAY’ Scrambles Its Fantasy Fiction, Fails to Appeal to Both Adults and Kids

January 24, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Angelina Jolie, Brenda Chapman, Come Away, David Oyelowo, Jordan A. Nash, Keira Chansa, Marissa Kate Goodhill, Reece Yates, Reviews Leave a comment

Escapism is at its best when it allows audiences to step away from the troubles of their lives. To make away to a magical land where fairy dust extends the power of flight, kids stay kids forever and crocodiles do away with malevolent hook-handed nemeses. Come Away is no such escapism. Scrambling up the mythology of Sir James Matthew Barrie and Lewis Carroll, the film geared predominantly towards children attempts to tell a magical realism-inspired, wait for it, meditation on grief and losing a child…intended for children. Read More

SUNDANCE 2020: Well-Intentioned Slam Poetry Misfire ‘SUMMERTIME’ Has Zero Commercial Appeal

January 24, 2020 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Carlos López Estrada, Reviews, Summertime, Sundance 2020 Leave a comment

With Blindspotting, new director Carlos López Estrada emerged onto the scene with a distinct and fiery voice, delivering a knockout primal scream of a film that laced the power of spoken word into a poignant and brilliantly-acted Oakland gentrification satire. In his sophomore feature Summertime, Estrada has bungled almost everything that worked so well in his first outing, delivering an amateurish variety show that leans much too heavily on disparate young voices within Los Angeles slam poetry community coalescing into a Crash-like ensemble of random interconnectivity. Read More

SIFF ’19: ‘YESTERDAY’ Part Sunny Beatles Musical, Part Terrible Rom-Com

June 11, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Danny Boyle, Himesh Patel, Lily James, Out in Theaters, Reviews, Richard Curtis, SIFF, SIFF 2019, Yesterda, Yesterday 1 Comment

With Yesterday, a rom-com Trojan-horsed in a concept comedy that imagines a world where Paul, John, George and Ringo never formed The Beatles, Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) has allowed the musical catalog of that formative group to do most of the dramatic heavy lifting. If you’re up for a poppy movie about Beatles music that co-stars Ed Sheeran, this is the movie for you. Otherwise – yeah, probably best to not pay it much mind. Using just enough of Boyle’s trademark flair behind the camera to simulate a modicum of visual intrigue, Yesterday deeply fails its quasi-sci-fi conceit by treating the intriguing parallel universe concept as mere window dressings for a lukewarm romance between struggling artist Jack Malik (Himesh Patel) who strikes it big exploiting his knowledge of Beatles music, and his DIY manager Ellie (Lily James). The movie earns good graces when its blazing through the band’s discography and seeing the world at large react to their music for the first time but the rom-com-heavy second half drags it all off the rails with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually) succumbing to one tired, obnoxious cliché after another in increasingly painful manner. (C) Read More

SIFF ’19: ‘THE DEATH OF DICK LONG’ A Dicked Up Black Comedy for the Sickos in the Crowd Like Me

June 8, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged A24, Andre Hyland, Daniel Scheinert, Michael Abbot Jr., SIFF 2019, The Death of Dick Long Leave a comment

In The Death of Dick Long, three close friends and bandmates are horsing around and, wouldn’t you know it, Dick Long dies. Causes are…mysterious. Playing out like a demented Nickelback-version of Fargo, so begins the most incompetent criminal coverup of all time. Every effort Zeke (Michael Abbot Jr.) and Earl (Andre Hyland) take to conceal their part in the matter only serves to shape a police case against them. The film from Daniel Scheinert (Swiss Army Man) is of the jet-black-comedy variety, loaded with schadenfreude and cringe humor that only gets weirdest as it circles a truly wild conclusion. What’s most shocking is that as it turns increasingly deranged, it finds an unexpected sensitive side, turning these Alabama fuck-ups into more than one-dimensional laughing stocks. Do note, this is a textbook A24-style acquired-taste-only films exclusively for those truly looking to get weird. (B+) Read More

SIFF ’19: Zom-Com ’THE DEAD DON’T DIE’ Is Stiff Attempt at Satire

June 6, 2019 by Matt Oakes Posted in Festival Reviews Tagged Adam Driver, Bill Murray, Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, RZA, Selena Gomez, SIFF, SIFF 2019, Steve Buscemi, The Dead Don't Die, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits Leave a comment

As if struck with rigor mortis, Jim Jarmusch’s take on zombies is a DOA satire of sorts, one that’s much too self-aware for its own good. Foregoing the traditional scares of an undead creeper, Jarmusch swings and misses trying to put the “dead” in deadpan comedy. Even his pairing of stars Adam Driver and Bill Murray remains something that sounds better on paper than actually works in this context, their synchronized low-energy, unfazed drift through the world of the undead unable to get much of a rise. Read More