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.
Category Archives: Year of Release
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.
You Were Never Really Here (2018)
I’m conflicted. Lynne Ramsay’s (Morvern Callar, We Need to Talk About Kevin) You Were Never Really Here is not a great movie. Yet it received an 88% on Rotten Tomatoes and four stars on Roger Ebert’s website. A few times during my viewing, I wanted to say aloud, “This movie sucks,” but, of course, that is something I would not do. But you can imagine how surprised I was when the movie received applause after its conclusion. I was flabbergasted, but I was in an art theatre (this was the only place it was showing). It had been a good year and a half (Arrival) since the audience had last clapped after a movie. So, I decided to read a little about this movie and see what I missed that others saw. First, Joaquin Phoenix’s performance (Gladiator, Walk the Line) was excellent. He was so even and heavy as a down and outgun for hire suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from what he witnessed while serving in the military and from suffering from events of his childhood he was never able to process.
Man Down (2016)
Continuing the two themes of actors who I once didn’t like but who, in recent films, have begun to win me over (Miles Teller), as well as films about characters suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after serving in wars in the Middle East (Thank You For Your Service) comes the critically panned Man Down, a movie that I don’t ever recall being in the theatre and didn’t know existed until a good six months after it was released. Earning a score of just 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, director Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fighting) delivers an emotionally disturbing, uneven film about a character traumatized by a specific incident that happened on his single tour. Man Down stars Shia LaBeouf (Lawless, Honey Boy) in what might be his finest performance to date. He stars as United States Marine Gabriel Drummer, who, after a raid and clearing of a house gone wrong in a village in Afghanistan, tells his story to Captain Peyton (Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour, The Dark Knight Rises), a military superior. The critics said that this movie exploits PTSD compared to a more subtle film like Thank You For Your Service (which also has the advantage of being based on a true story, something that Man Down lacks). While I can see that, especially in the film’s final act, I disagree. War is hell. It’s one of those things that we don’t have to experience firsthand to believe. But we need to experience or be close to someone who experienced it to understand it. When we can’t, we sometimes turn to books, television, or movies, hoping they will portray a true picture. That’s what Montiel did here, even if most of his critics disagreed.