Meticulously crafted and tenderly executed, Baltasar Kormákur’s (Everest, 2 Guns) Adrift is a journey not to be best on the largest screen you can find at your nearby cinemas. Being lost in the sea is one of my favorite movie subgenres. This movie stands on its own against such classics as The Perfect Storm, Dead Calm, Life of Pi, Lifeboat, All is Lost, The Deep, and even Academy Award-nominated pictures like Cast Away and Life of Pi in the sense that it is based on a true story and that the true story is real in the sense that we know what happened because, spoiler, the survivor lives to tell the story. While such stories as Titanic, The Perfect Storm, Open Water, and The Heart of the Sea are based on true stories and are fantastic movies, there is so much fiction added to these stories because we don’t have full accounts of what did happen because there either wasn’t someone left at the end to give the proper details or there were so many fictional elements added to the anecdotes that the plot from which the movie was based on has been entirely changed. That is not the case with Adrift, which makes this movie great. It isn’t “based on” or “inspired by” a true story. It is a true story; ultimately, that’s what we want.
Category Archives: Genre
On Chesil Beach (2018)
Based on Ian McEwan’s (Atonement) novella by the same name, director Dominic Cooke proves that just because you have flint and tinder doesn’t always mean that you can make fire with his memorable and poignant, yet sometimes underwhelming and often slow On Chesil Beach. Not only did Cooke have McEwan’s novel to work with, but the author wrote the screenplay himself. Now, I’m not a huge fan of comparing the book to the movie in my reviews (most of the time, as in the case of this one, it’s because I haven’t read the book), but I have read a couple of reviews that say that the movie did not do the book justice, that the final scenes of the film weren’t even in the book, and that even what McEwan’s main novel points were changed or not flushed out. But since I liked the movie, as did most critics and other moviegoers (68% and 94%, respectively, on Rotten Tomatoes), I’m willing to forget the omissions mentioned explicitly in the unfavorable reviews on Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper’s websites. Nevertheless, I felt a relatable component of this 1962 English set movie to 2018. The relatable component could be applicable in many specific situations in physically romantic relationships between two people.
Beast (2017)
The best thing I can say about Michael Pearce’s Beast (in a movie that is rife with good things) is that I can’t think of a movie where an unknown director directing his first feature-length film (Pearce), an unknown lead actress, starring in her first film (Jessie Buckley) and an unknown lead actor, starring in, really his first film (Johnny Flynn – Love Is Thicker Than Water) have excelled more. The direction is purposeful, stylistic, and detailed. At the same time, the performances between the leads are combustible. The story is rich enough to carry you from the starting line to the checkered flag in a movie that ultimately failed to live up to its initial promise primarily due to errors in editing and an overall storyline that might have been a tad ambitious for this novice in their craft. It’s a difficult movie to recommend if you’re not a hardcore independent movie film buff. But, if, like me, you try to watch anything that comes close to looking like an intense, original, emotional drama, this movie will fill that need. And even if you leave feeling a little unsatisfied, you’ll leave knowing that the director and both leads left everything they had on the floor. If nothing else, it’ll encourage you to look for future films with which any of these three people might be involved.
Disobedience (2017)
Soft, subtle, disciplined, loving, sad, purposeful, and real. Sebastián Lelio’s (A Fantastic Woman, Gloria) Disobedience is all these things and more. But as well as it does most of these movies, there are a couple of things that it just doesn’t hit on. I’ll have a spoilers section for this film later in this review. First, I will say that the film is very well made, but it doesn’t leave me feeling very emotional when it is over. At its base is this life story, but Lelio fails to draw us into it soon enough, and then when he does, it feels very uneven and leaves you uncertain of each of its lead characters’ decisions. Ultimately, it becomes a movie that lacks the poignancy it set out to achieve. However, it does dig deep into the important topic of same-sex attraction and same-sex relationships. It’s so unfortunate that, as a society, we have not fully embraced same-sex relationships yet.
Tully (2018)
Tully. Wow. Way to toy with me, Jason Reitman (Up In the Air, Juno). I will have a spoilers section for this movie, but I will let you know when it happens. This hit me with an emotional punch. And I say that tongue-in-cheek because I did not find this movie all that emotional. Reitman has a way of writing and directing his stories so that you are wholly invested and don’t need to keep your tissues nearby. Instead, he tells his stories in a way that gets you interested from the get-go, creating characters who you wrote for and then hitting you with a gut punch when you least expect it. Ultimately, this results in his movies staying with you long after most movies you’ve seen have been forgotten. In Tully, he reunites with Charlize Theron (Mad Max: Fury Road, A Little Trip to Heaven) when the two team up for the fantastic Young Adult. I wouldn’t say that the Academy has shut out Theron (certainly not in the way that Jake Gyllenhaal has), but to have just two Academy Award nominations (Monster, North Country) is, if nothing else, a little surprising. I wonder if her performance in this film will be enough to land the coveted acting prize, especially with an April release. But she carried this movie in a couple of directions, held together by her evenness and Reitman’s adherence to the story when it felt like things were untangling.