White Boy Rick (2018)

Score: 2 / 5

What caused 17-year-old Ricky Wershe to be sentenced to life in prison? Well, if you know the story, the easy answer is drugs. If, on the other hand, you've seen White Boy Rick, you know that many factors played into his doom including poverty, crime, and a seemingly amoral police investigation. Of course it's a fascinating story, and one that seems ready-made for a crime serial on cable or even an awards-grabbing film.

Unfortunately, Yann Demange's new film falls cold and flat like the snow covering 1980s Detroit. Though the film's sense of place and socioeconomic class is clearly well-researched and detailed, almost nothing about it allows the audience to connect. The story, written with bizarre tonal shifts and no real character development, stitches together disparate episodes in Rick's life to try and make sense of his downward spiral. While this tactic may have worked in a miniseries, here it serves to disorient. We're not quite sure what we're seeing or why we're seeing it, and when we are sure we can't say why it's important or why we should care.

The characters are wholly unlikable, not helped by the understated actors, almost all of whom feel as inconsequential as their characters. Instead of caring about the considerable drama inherent in the story, I found myself engaged only because of the costumes and lighting. Admittedly, I thus bought into the film on its terms of -- you guessed it -- poverty porn. It pulls at your heartstrings to see Rick's father (Matthew McConaughey) dreaming about opening a video store with his family to make it big, when we know full well that in less than 20 years video stores will all but disappear. It pulls at something (though not perhaps such a sentimental organ) to see Rick's sister (Bel Powley) succumb to a life of drugs and sex. Then, between the glum, manipulative cops (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Rory Cochrane, and Brian Tyree Henry) and the obnoxious, ailing grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie), there's not much room for sympathy with anybody.

The film plods along, not sure if it wants to be a period piece or character study, lurching from deeply saturated hedonistic party scenes of drugs and dancing to starkly bare images of crumbling houses and drugs deals and violence. Its most interesting aspects -- the ambiguous role of cops and their sudden betrayal of Ricky, their youngest informant -- don't arrive until late in the picture, when we neither care why it happened or what will happen next. Additionally, the relatively open ending would be more appropriate for a documentary than a feature film, and so White Boy Rick feels like a mess attempt to preach something. Too bad its message wasn't aimed at something higher than failed sentiment, ruined sympathy, and problematic snapshots of desperate lives.

IMDb: White Boy Rick

A Simple Favor (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Easily the most stylish mystery in ages, A Simple Favor is a beguiling look at the dark secrets in modern relationships. Cast in vibrant hues, the film rejoices in shapes and colors we don't normally associate with the genre, making everything appear at once Instagram-ready. It's a deceptive tactic, those candy-colored extremes, because this film is as noir as they come. In fact, it doesn't take long for the expletives to fly and for the first love-making scene that reveals an unusually hot scene of incest.

Are we moving too fast? Let's back it up.

Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie Smothers, the aptly-named perfect single mother. Immaculately (if gaudily) dressed, always attentive and hardworking, juggling her son with her housewife-themed vlog and all her various voluntary activities. All the other "moms" (including Andrew Rannells) hate her; all, that is, except the one who's never around. That would be Emily (played by Bake Lively), a powerful PR exec from urban glamour. The two women become unlikely friends, starting out a little rocky but escalating quickly to interdependence. Stephanie loves Emily's beautiful life, beautiful clothes, beautiful husband (Henry gorgeous Golding); Emily loves (or at least appears to) Stephanie's cutesy style, hardworking babysitting of their respective sons, and weakness for confessing under the influence.

Sound spooky? Exactly. In what at first seems to be a comedy of manners and clashing lifestyles, the film establishes a rolling banter, a magnificent sort of comedic timing laced with bloodthirsty jabs that I almost want to watch the other comedies that made director Paul Feig famous. However, he did not write this expertly crafted mystery-thriller. That glory belongs solely with Jessica Sharzer of American Horror Story and Nerve fame. Here she has crafted a mystery that, though often feeling familiar in the age of Gillian Flynn and countless crime procedurals, rises above the morass by delving deep into the anxieties between friendship and selfishness in the age of social media.

And while the story's engaging, the performers at their best, and the energy intoxicating, it is the style of this film that remains embedded in mind's eye. Gorgeous costumes that make you want to be the characters and be with the characters. Picture-perfect lives in pristine houses. Gorgeous jazzy French music. Sexy and not afraid of its hidden horrors. Self-knowing and aware of its own manipulations, so much so that it might be laughing at itself or laughing at us, knowing that we're hopelessly caught up in its glorious decadence.

IMDb: A Simple Favor

The Wife (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Damn, I wish Glenn Close made more movies.

Here, she plays Joan Castleman, the intelligent, dutiful, and endlessly stoic woman behind a Great Man, her husband, Joe. About to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Joe whisks his wife away to Stockholm for the ceremonies. They bring their son -- himself a struggling writer -- and are forced to tear themselves away from a very pregnant daughter. Unfortunately, the strain of Joe's narcissism reaches an unbearable tension, and Joan is forced to make some wrenching decisions about her work, her family, and her life.

During the course of its too-brief 100 minutes, The Wife dramatizes the energetic unraveling of many years of marriage in a way that is not terribly gimmicky, though it certainly stretches credulity in its efforts to craft a realistic chamber piece. The filmmakers balance expertly crafted drama with melancholic intervals that flash back to what we expect to be a happier time. We quickly learn, however, that in the trials of love and ambition, there can be only one victor.

To say more about the plot would be to rob the film's great pleasure. Not the plot, mind, but rather how the slowly unraveling plot informs our understanding of Glenn Close's amazing performance as the (no less amazingly written) wife. She is far more than meets the eye, of course, and though this is no thriller, shocked gasps whistled through the theater multiple times as we saw her character revealed incrementally.

And though the film clearly prefers Joan to Joe, Jonathan Pryce delivers an awesome performance in a wholly thankless role as the to-be laureate. To call him monstrous might be fitting, once we learn his true designs, but painting these characters in broad strokes is to destroy the finer points of the film. While we may at times be frustrated with these characters for doing (or not doing) what we want, the film reminds us several times -- in emotionally jarring moments of psychological whiplash -- that the people we love are never stock characters. To label these people is to dehumanize them, and us by extension. Even those we love the most can and will hurt us the most; the question is how we respond.

P.S.: The only reason I cannot award this film full marks is that Max Irons, playing their Hamlet-like son, never looks good. In fact, I can scarcely imagine how much effort went into making him look so bad. For shame.

IMDb: The Wife

The Florida Project (2017)

Score: 2.5 / 5

It's a slice of life so often omitted from our cultural vista. Six-year-old Moonee spends her summer mostly unsupervised in the somewhat tightly-knit community of a motel. Named the Magic Castle and painted in a vibrant purplish pink, the motel sits precariously on the border of tourist-laden Walt Disney World territory and the lands of impoverished Floridians basking and wallowing in the Everglade sun.

The story itself is wholly uninteresting; its depiction of life, however, is magnificent, particularly as it is seen through very young eyes. Moonee's world is colorful and vibrant, and she understands more about her surroundings than some of the adults might want her to. She knows exactly what her mother (Bria Vinaite) is doing -- namely, struggling to survive by any means she can -- and she knows what's expected of her by the motel manager (Willem Dafoe, in a seriously overrated role). But she also knows that she can get away with a lot more, and so she does. With her friends, other long-term "guests" of the motel, Moonee gets into all sorts of trouble.

What she learns before the end of the film, however, is that trouble is not always fun and games. After covering up the children's act of arson, Moonee's mother tries desperately to make money by stealing perfume and tickets and re-selling them and even by prostituting herself and hiding her daughter in the bathroom. It doesn't take long for us to see that the mother and daughter are remarkably similar in their efforts to enjoy life and cheat their way around responsibility, which they view as artificial and counter-productive. Unfortunately, their lifestyle clashes magnificently with the folks around them, and they quickly alienate all their friends.

I did not like this movie. Is it important? Perhaps. Is it moving? Definitely. But it's also difficult to watch, and not at all rewarding. Poor people are terrible parents, according to the simplest logic of the film, and though that message may be confused and complicated by the finale, it is the purest and most visceral takeaway. Think Beasts of the Southern Wild but with white people and much more grounded, without allegorical significance or consistent aesthetic theme.

SPOILER ALERT.

Speaking of the ending -- WOW. It was the film's saving grace. When CPS-type officials show up to investigate Moonee's mother and take the child -- seemingly violating the colorful dreamlike atmosphere in their stark dark suits and strict dialogue patter -- Moonee steps away to say goodbye to her young friend. But, together, they run away in a remarkable (and wordless) sequence that leads them into the theme park. Apparently shot from a smart phone, the scene wobbles and shakes and takes on the slightly simplified visual dynamics of altered reality as the children escape all their problems and vanish into the happiest place on earth. It's an uplifting and heartrending moment that thrills even as it horrifies, and leaves you breathless and tear-stained as the credits start to roll.

IMDb: The Florida Project

The Nun (2018)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Valak, a demon in the guise of a nun, made its first horrific appearance in The Conjuring 2, haunting poor Lorraine Warren. It was revealed in that film that Valak was seemingly fated to face Lorraine after previous encounters. In Annabelle: Creation the demon made peripheral appearance in a photograph of the nun's time in Romania, a strange appearance when it escorts the wheelchair-bound child to her encounter with the Ram, and then in a post-credits scene (teasing an upcoming movie) stalking the halls of a monastery.

Here is that upcoming movie, the spinoff focused on The Nun. Demian Bichir and Taissa Farmiga play a priest and novitiate, respectively, who journey together to the Carta Monastery in Transylvania. The year is 1952 and the sisters cloistered in the abbey are terrified of an unholy evil haunting their halls. Mysterious deaths of the sisters may have launched this investigation, but it is immediately clear that the horrors are not over. The presence of the two newcomers seems to provoke the demon, and so we embark on a roller coaster ride of terror.

The newest installment in the Conjuring franchise may not be its most original, most dramatic, or even most frightening, but it is easily the most atmospheric. It's structured not unlike a maze or haunted house attraction, with set piece after set piece constructed to give the target audience exactly what they want: jump scares and full-blown money shots of spooks and ghouls popping out of dark corners. A thickly Gothic atmosphere -- replete with crumbling abbeys, sizable cemeteries, and thick fog -- pervades the picture. Cinematographer Maxime Alexandre (Annabelle: Creation, Maniac, The Crazies) teams well with director Corin Hardy (The Hallow) in crafting a surrealistic world, filling it with insane horror and bewildering style. And, of course, the demon nun itself is a pure nightmare realized all over that silver screen.

Unfortunately, the film also feels highly contrived in comparison with the other films in its shared universe. More impressionistic than the others, it also features so many jumps and shocks that they don't all land well, rather than digging into the central horror of the demon nun itself. Instead we have reanimated corpses running amok, possessed children spitting out snakes, so many hallucinations that we don't know what's real. And the story itself, though promising, feels wholly unoriginal by its climax, at which point it should be at its most potent. When the novitiate claims her faith and takes her vows, when the hunky man helping comes to the rescue, and when the world-weary priest rallies to help, the film reaches a truly moving emotional height. It's sadly undercut when the trio then foolishly split up (as they have done the whole movie, despite the problems this has caused) and get into a hell of a lot of trouble.

As an addition to the franchise, this picture certainly creates a niche for itself in both style and substance, while adding several dots for fans to connect with the other films. I particularly enjoy its aesthetic, and it seems like whatever the equivalent is of a haunted house entertainment spectacle, like a demon-possession version of Grand Guignol theatre. For a spooky time at the movies with one of the scariest horror icons of our age, you could do a lot worse than The Nun.

IMDb: The Nun

Operation Finale (2018)

Score: 3.5 / 5

We all know the story -- even peripherally -- of Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi brains behind the "Final Solution," the Holocaust. We know that he escaped Europe and lived for a decade in Argentina under a false identity. We know that Israeli intelligence agents tracked him down, captured him, and returned him to face trial before sentencing him to death. We know, too, that his name is synonymous with the "banality of evil" and that "little Eichmanns" are the sort of sycophantic, mindless paper pushers and bureaucratic desk workers who never get their own hands dirty but whose activities cause great harm to others.

It would follow, as we know the basic story and characters, that a cinematic depiction of these events and characters might be one of those great war thrillers or revenge dramas that sweep awards and educate while they provoke and honor. Operation Finale, while serviceable and highly entertaining, falls short of such expectations for many reasons. Though a pretty amazing team of artists hide behind the curtain -- to say nothing of the ones on screen -- there's just something that didn't quite work on the grand, epic scale of (for example) Munich or Zero Dark Thirty.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I don't think Operation Finale even wants to be considered a "great film." It's almost a chamber piece, revolving around its two main characters as they intellectually spar during Eichmann's captivity. The great pleasure of the film lies with these characters and the actors who portray them. Ben Kingsley is chilling as Eichmann, at once silly and conceited yet calculating and manipulative. He seems to have no remorse for his crimes, and endlessly seeks justification for his own existence, about which he has apparently no delusions. He knows he's just an animal, and though brief insights into his emotional state occasionally flash through his stony visage, his existence seems based on instinctual tasks like eating, shitting, and finding comfort.

Oscar Isaac carries the film as his primary captor, Peter Malkin, who struggles to keep his mission professional but nevertheless succeeds where his peers fail. He crosses boundaries in his efforts to get Eichmann to comply, alienating his team, but as the story's end attests, Malkin apparently knew exactly what he was doing the whole time. His beauty in no way detracts from the proceedings, though it does distract on occasion; his greatest contribution to the character, however, is in his dedication to the little moments of silence as he contemplates the horrifically complex ethics of the mission.

With a team including Javier Aguirresarobe and Alexandre Desplat, Operation Finale had great resources and guidance. While director Chris Weitz may have been ill-prepared for a postwar espionage thriller with timely and important themes, there's not a clear reason why this flick isn't a new staple in the WWII canon. Perhaps we can blame the story itself: not really a war movie, it flips constantly between feeling like a thriller or drama or history. How do we read it? How did the director read it? It's not an easy question to answer, made all the more difficult in the film's repeated tonal shifting; I love breaking the mold of genre and experimenting with new art forms, but it's important too to have a sense of purpose and intent and, it's true, direction. Its attention to detail and fabulous nuance in ethical dilemma make Finale engaging if not quite thrilling, and even got me to forget (briefly) how the story would end.

P.S.: Keep your eyes peeled for Simon Russell Beale in a surprising single-scene role as David Ben-Gurion, blessing Malkin's team before they depart Israel.

IMDb: Operation Finale

Searching (2018)

Score: 3.5 / 5

Every once in a while we get one of those movies that just works. It taps into real issues and anxieties, it knows how to showcase its cast, and it is just a hell of a good time in the theater. Searching is one of these pictures. Fun, fast, and pretty smart -- until you're heading home and you realize it's not as smart as it wanted to be. Under scrutiny, it falls apart. But to hold your disbelief suspended so thoroughly for over 100 minutes is no small feat, especially when the whole film is a gimmick.

Our beloved John Cho plays a father (and I forget his name, so let's just keep it John Cho) whose daughter disappears. As he attempts to find her, he must also try to get to know her. Using her social media accounts, he reacquaints himself with his own daughter and discovers that their relationship was not as healthy as he had hoped. The story isn't terribly interesting or compelling, though by the halfway point it gets surprisingly twisty in its "whodunnit" attitude. John Cho starts to lose his cool and points fingers at those closest to him, and we go through every single emotional beat with him.

What is interesting and compelling is the film's presentation. Not filmed with conventional cameras and techniques, the movie plays at us through the frames of whatever electronic device John Cho uses: his computer, his daughter's computer, video cameras, smartphones. I was worried the shtick would wear out fairly quickly, but in director Aneesh Chaganty's capable hands the film flows nicely from one intrigue to the next. We often see the screen through John Cho's eyes, and when he makes an insight or discovery, we do simultaneously. For not ever actually seeing "the real John Cho" directly, we profoundly understand what he's going through and thinking.

As a mystery, the film has more red herrings than I could count. But what really bothered me during and after the film is the extent to which the gimmick is adhered to. Would a detective really use Face Time in the dead of night to regularly contact the father of a missing girl? Would she allow -- indeed, encourage -- him to do his own investigating and then take him at his word without following up? And would she -- oh, wait, that would spoil the mystery! Though not the kinds of problems that stopped me from enjoying the movie, these issues had me thinking a lot about my own digital footprints and online security. Of course, that's probably the main takeaway the filmmakers intended to impart.

But really, I was just here for the John Cho magic. You should be too.

IMDb: Searching

Where is Kyra? (2018)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Thank heaven Michelle Pfeiffer is back. Her turn in mother! was great, but this is an even better example of her powerful ability to act. Odd how, before her brief break from the screen, so few of her performances exhibited her profound craft. Hopefully she can now get the quality roles she deserves.

In a thankless, notably glamour-less movie, Pfeiffer shines as Kyra, a woman in her late-middle life struggling to survive in Brooklyn. That's it. That's the movie. Her ailing mother -- for whom she cares and on whom she entirely depends -- dies early in the film. She spends the final 80 or so minutes of its running time attempting to make ends meet. She can no longer cash her mother's disability checks; she's been jobless for two (?) years and can't land a new job.

The director and cinematographer create an arrestingly desperate world around Kyra, rich with darkness and entirely stripped of any romantic crap that so often ruins these movies in which celebrities fictitiously battle poverty or homelessness. Here the world is quiet and cruel, and we struggle with Kyra as she navigates fear and need in a doomed spiral downwards. One brief spark of hope is embodied in her neighbor Doug (Kiefer Sutherland), whose attraction seems born of a shared loneliness. They know a happy ending is out of the picture, but we hope along with them -- however briefly -- that they might escape some of their world-weariness and have some kind of comfort in each other. Spoiler alert: They do not.

Most interesting to me in this film is not its beak aesthetic, its sparse and haunting story, nor even Pfeiffer's amazingly nuanced performance; it's that the film often feels less like a drama and more like a thriller. It moves slowly, glacially, digging its icy grip into the viewer, but the nocturnal color palette pairs wickedly with a voyeuristic camera, chopped effectively into some hard-hitting editorial beats that make you feel that you are trespassing into a story you shouldn't be seeing.

A few moments of enigmatic images scattered throughout the film depict the figure of Ruth (Kyra's aged mother) still walking around Brooklyn with her cane, bundled up in so many layers she looks like a cartoon character. In these strange moments, with extreme closeups of her feet, hand on cane, sunglasses under a wide-brimmed hat, the visuals are accompanied by shrieking strings in dissonant harmony; it sounds like musical parts of Psycho have been lifted and dropped into the gutter.

Though the film may not force you to the edge of your seat, these scenes had me shrinking into mine. How can Ruth be wandering around? She's dead! I wondered may times if this was in fact a horror movie, and if I had been misled by genre trappings. And while this may not be a horror movie, it is certainly shot like one, and it's not until about halfway through the picture that we learn the truth: Kyra has been dressing up as her mother to cash her checks. Her fraudulent activities will soon catch up with her, no doubt, and so the film's remainder does not explore that process so much as Kyra's psychological unraveling as the inevitable catches up to her.

It's a gamble of a movie and nothing pleasant to view, but Where is Kyra? is a magnificent portrayal of life on the fringes of society, of art on the fringes of our cultural awareness, of a genius in the golden age of her craft, and of a film that shits on genre conventions and forces something truly new on us.

IMDb: Where is Kyra?

Disobedience (2018)

Score: 5 / 5

An opening scene depicts an aged rabbi orating to his Orthodox Jewish temple on free will before falling down dead amidst a congregation that obviously loves him. It's a haunting scene, made all the more powerful by the story that follows after. We immediately redirect our focus to a young woman, Ronit Krushka (played to perfection by Rachel Weisz), a photographer in New York who receives a phone call and flies to London. Ronit is the rabbi's estranged daughter, and the film chronicles her journey back home to the community that has many mixed feelings about her presence.

Her best childhood friends, Dovid and Esti (Alessandro Nivola and Rachel McAdams, respectively), invite her to stay in their home. Ronit is surprised to learn the two are now married, though it takes us some time to learn why. We do, however, clearly see that Ronit does not fit in with the Orthodox community honoring her late father. Indeed, we hear that it has been many years since Ronit has visited, and we surmise that some bridges, once burned, can never be repaired.

Alone with her two friends, we begin to understand the love triangle that begins to burn anew: Ronit and Esti were young lovers together, which seems to be the root of her estrangement from the community. Esti, left behind, decided to marry Dovid, perhaps as some sort of consolation. Esti's desire is awakened and she and Ronit embark on an affair. Dovid, meanwhile, attempts to step into the rabbi's shoes, and in his stressed state, turns a blind eye to the discord he has sown into his own home, which he tells the elders he keeps in perfect order.

Disobedience is a fabulously melancholy chamber piece, reaching operatic heights in its depiction of the intersection of religion, history, and sexuality. In fact, this is the queer movie we should be raving about this year (I'm looking at you, Love, Simon). Rarely have we ever seen a film that explores this fully the essence of the religious queer person; equally rarely do we see this sympathetic a portrait of modern Orthodox Jewish life. It's a lovely premise and and even lovelier slice of culture.

More important still is the craft built into the film. This is top-shelf work from the actors (and, really, why haven't the two Rachels been in movies before? Or lovers before?), all of whom should be in more movies, period. We have soft, subdued lighting with gloriously muted hues and shapes, tightly controlled camera that humanizes its subjects, and some amazing music that underscores themes of subversion and romance. The score teams up nicely with the editing in creating a realistic yet somewhat disorienting sense of cultural shock and psychological dissonance.

These characters at once belong and do not, love and cannot, believe and should not. The film's insistence on delving into these complexities and shunning clear-cut answers, characterizations, or solutions makes this film a gripping exercise in humanity. For a powerhouse story about the virtues of doubt and bravery, extolling defiance and uncertainty as virtues, you could do a lot worse than Disobedience.

IMDb: Disobedience