Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, HoYeon Jung, Louis Partridge, Leslie Manville, Leila George
Grade: B+
Warning: This review of episode 6 of Disclaimer will contain spoilers.
I have an embarrassing confession to make when it comes to Disclaimer: For whatever reason, I hadn’t realized until recently that the flashback segments, which were so prominent in episodes 1-4, were gleaned from the fictionalized novel, which was originally written by Nancy (Lesley Manville) after Jonathan (Louis Partridge) died. Therefore, what we saw wasn’t necessarily the gods-honest truth; rather, it was whatever Nancy had gleaned from her knowledge of Jonathan, and his photographs. This extra layer of fictionalization calls into question not only what happened in Italy between him and Catherine (Cate Blanchett present day, Leila George in the past), but how much we can trust Nancy and Steven (Kevin Kline).
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, HoYeon Jung, Louis Partridge, Leslie Manville, Leila George
Grade: B-
Warning: This review of episode 5 of Disclaimer will contain spoilers.
Voiceover narration is a tricky artistic choice to pull off, even for the most astute director. I don’t know if it’s beginning to wear on me, or if the narration in “V” in particular has gotten lazier, but I found the writing within this week’s installment to be lackluster overall. It’s likely no coincidence that the best moments to be found are the stretches in the second half of the episode where the narration is absent entirely.
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, HoYeon Jung, Louis Partridge, Leslie Manville, Leila George
Grade: B
Warning: This review of episode 4 of Disclaimer will contain spoilers.
I’m not sure if it’s better or worse for Catherine (Cate Blanchett) that her time with Jonathan (Louis Partridge), which we see more of in “IV”, was simply a casual fling, rather than a case of star-crossed lovers who simply met at the wrong phase of their lives. I get the sense that younger Catherine (Leila George) saw it as nothing more than a one-time thing that was never meant to leave Italy, or which she would ever really think about again – and that’s even before she has the argument with Jonathan on the subject. Maybe that’s why she’s so desperate to get back into Robert’s (Sacha Baron Cohen) good graces.
Perhaps what’s most impressive about If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing is that its writer-director just recently turned 20 years old. Sophie Bones – who makes a small cameo appearance as well – riffs on Juno and teenage pregnancy with the right balance of laughs and heart, even when its characters are often painted with a broad brush. The story follows Sydnie (played with an impressive maturity by Aitana Doyle), who discovers she’s pregnant after breaking up with her dipshit college-bound boyfriend Lucas (Braxton Fannin).
There are abrupt character shifts, like the almost forced love triangle that develops about halfway through, or Lucas’s changing feelings on being a father or his immediate reaction to the gender of the baby. But Bones peppers in some truly thoughtful and genuine scenes that elevate If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing above your run of the mill regional film festival indie. A scene between Sydnie and Lucas’s mother Carrie (Catherine Curtin) subverts expectations by painting the two as allies, rather than showing Carrie as the agitator. Scenes like this go a long way in differentiating the film from your average romantic comedy with overly qualified stars in supporting roles. The whole endeavor isn’t perfect, but it’s got enough positives to show that Bones has the chops to be a young, original voice in indie storytelling.
All American is one of the more conventional documentaries to be found at Heartland, but it’s no less emotional. First-time director Mark Andrew Altschul chronicles the girls wrestling movement in high school sports, but his film smartly details the complicated personal lives of its subjects off the mat just as much as it does on. The film isn’t explicitly about the immigrant experience, but the trio of girls just happen to be first-generation Americans living in various areas of New York.
Altschul shows the girls’ struggles not only to excel in the sport, but to gain the acceptance of their family, friends, and the culture at large. The film’s most heartbreaking storyline comes from a girl whose family immigrated from Yemen, and who go so far as to kick her out of the home simply for wanting to play a sport traditionally dominated by men. This is in line with the other characters, whose families come from more traditional backgrounds and believe that a girl’s place is in the home. But it’s encouraging to see so many girls persevere through adversity and acceptance, and it ultimately makes All American a winner.
There’s nothing inherently disagreeable about 2:15 PM, a Korean melodrama from first-time director Seryong Jeong, with a script from Ok-nyeon Park. At times, the film reminded me of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster, which also played at Heartland and was one of my favorite films of last year. But what the former lacks is the latter’s ability to dig beneath the surface to offer a message that resonates after the credits end.
Jeong’s film concerns two young girls, played by Park So-yi and Gi So-you, and their budding friendship in the face of adverse circumstances. Hyun-su (Park So-yi) finds Min-ha (Gi So-you) on her way home from school when her father breaks a window in a fit of anger. Seeing someone in need of a friend, she begins a daily ritual of coming to Min-ha’s home and spending their brief window of time together. Jeong does a nice job of inserting drama naturally, like in exploring Min-ha’s father’s abusive behavior, or in Hyun-su’s impending move to Canada. That he manages to achieve all of this within 75 minutes is all the more impressive, but I can’t help but wish there was more to latch onto at the end of the day.
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Sacha Baron Cohen, Kodi Smit-McPhee, HoYeon Jung, Louis Partridge, Leslie Manville
Grade: A-
Warning: The review of episode 3 of Disclaimer will contain spoilers.
Only three episodes in, Disclaimer has boldly tackled a number of complex themes, sometimes within the same scene, even when the plot doesn’t progress very much. Set against the backdrop of these two parallel families, and the two timelines, it’s a fascinating look at perspectives, power, and truth. The scene that brings all of this together takes up the bulk of the second half of “III”, at the conclusion of young Catherine’s (Leila George) first day with Jonathan (Louis Partridge), and Cuarón uses it to inform not just their past interaction, but reveals a great deal about Catherine in the present.
Alonso Ruizpalacios channels Alfonso Cuaron and The Bear with La Cocina, an exquisitely crafted but occasionally stilted drama. The film introduces its conflict early on, setting the stage for a great deal of tension, but it abruptly changes gears in its second half to become a bizarrely ineffective story of immigration. Set over the course of a single day in a generic New York restaurant simply called “The Grill”, the film follows the grunts at the front and back of house as management investigates a large chunk of money that was allegedly stolen the previous night.
All of this serves as the backdrop for the drama between Julia (Rooney Mara), a waitress, and Pedro (Raul Briones), a line cook. She recently discovered she’s pregnant, and he wants to support her decision to get an abortion. Mara and Briones are naturally charismatic together and separately, but the film goes on extended tangents that work perfectly well on paper but grind everything to a halt. One scene shows the kitchen going on a back-and-forth of colorfully insulting each other in their native tongues and, though this is probably La Cocina’s most effective instance of the film’s vision, there are similar scenes that don’t work as well. Still, Ruizpalacios gets the details of life in a busy restaurant right more often than not, like in Luis (Eduardo Olmos), the management underling who appeals to the immigrants by appearing friendly, but secretly has the boss’s best interests at heart. And the film looks incredible, shot in black and white in the Academy aspect ratio. Ruizpalacios especially flexes his muscles behind the camera with a virtuoso minutes-long oner during the chaotic lunch rush, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur. There’s a leaner version of La Cocina that’s undoubtedly much more effective, but it’s hard not to be frustrated by the film as it stands.
No other film at Heartland this year has a logline as hilarious as Stripper Boyz. Serving as a kind of documentary-narrative hybrid, the film tackles male body positivity in an ingeniously inventive way, thanks to the chemistry and instincts of its stars. Stephen Sanow and Jozef Fahey – Stephen is the credited director, and both are credited writers – are long-time friends and struggling actors, and Jozef is engaged, so Stephen decides to throw Jozef a bachelor party. But rather than your typical night of debauchery with friends, the pair travel to Las Vegas, where they try to learn the ropes as male strippers.
The film has a lot of fun with blurring the lines of reality and fiction, as we’re often left wondering how much of what we’re seeing is a bit, versus what is genuine. Stephen’s excuse for embarking on the journey is so that he can give his friend more confidence in himself and in his impending marriage, and Jozef is fully game with what is admittedly a kind of insane idea. If the majority of the conflict within Stripper Boyz was in Jozef’s unwillingness to do what Stephen wants, the film wouldn’t resonate as long as it does. Rather, the conflict comes from outside forces and setbacks beyond their control. Thankfully, the duo have enough comedic chops to make enough worthwhile content without stretching the premise beyond its breaking point.
Gentrification is a word we all know and understand, but Emergent City takes an in-depth look at how and why it happens, in one of the biggest hotbeds for the trend. Documentarians Jay Arthur Sterrenberg and Kelly Anderson dedicate almost 10 years to filming the changes to the neighborhood of Sunset Park, a multi-cultural melting pot near the waterfront of Brooklyn. When the industrial warehouses and factories that flourished in the 1950s were left mostly empty and abandoned, the city tried to invigorate the area by turning the buildings into multi-use facilities called Industrial City, leading to upscale restaurants and businesses like what we see in most downtown areas throughout the country.
Sterrenberg and Anderson take an on-the-ground approach to the film, showing various organizations and town hall meetings, as the community pushes back against further re-zoning and redevelopment. It’s hard not to be won over to the community’s side, but Sterrenberg and Anderson are careful enough to occasionally show the potential upside to more development – like additional jobs and revitalizations to areas that were essentially blights beforehand. It can often feel like an uphill battle whenever community members – especially predominantly non-white community members – fight against a multi-billion dollar company, but Emergent City is an engrossing look at democracy in action, full of colorful personalities worth rooting for.
For four years beginning in 2003, a group of eight artists, art students, and friends ventured to create their own space in the bowels of the Providence Place Mall. Jeremy Workman’s documentary Secret Mall Apartment seeks to tell the nearly unbelievable true story of the apartment, but it quickly morphs into a portrait of how art and creativity can shape a group of people. Michael Townsend, an artist and teacher at RISD, spearheaded the project after discovering a small, undeveloped area within the mall, and he quickly makes it a kind of clubhouse for his friends to share ideas, and also play PlayStation.
It’s amusing how quickly the gang adapts to making the “apartment” their own hidden space. They subsist on food from the food court and popcorn from the movie theater. At one point, they raise the idea of getting a PO Box within the mall, so they can receive mail and make it an official address. But the heart of Secret Mall Apartment is a look at Michael’s belief that art can be anything you make, whether it’s murals of masking tape in a children’s hospital or an ad-hoc apartment with stolen electricity. Michael is an easily likable figure, even when his obsession with the apartment essentially ruins his marriage, so when the inevitable happens and the apartment is discovered, you’re still rooting for him. There isn’t much thematic weight to the film overall, but it’s a good time peppered with humor and insight about the arts, so it ultimately feels like a worthwhile endeavor.
The last gasp of summer is rendered with care and vitality in Jared Isaacs’ An Autumn Summer, a freewheeling look at a group of friends’ gradual realization that things may never be the same, for better and worse. But Isaacs, who writes and directs, rarely injects drama where it doesn’t belong, instead choosing to let his young actors see where the scene takes them. It feels as if they were given mostly free reign to improvise, and it makes this summer getaway in the northern Michigan lakeside feel like a natural extension of their lives and rituals, rather than a film with a predetermined beginning, middle, and end. Though the plot is less important here, it’s centered on Kevin (Mark McKenna) and Cody’s (Lukita Maxwell) romance, as college looms and they fear they could lose everything they have.
Isaacs’ dialogue occasionally feels a little writerly, and perhaps he could have cut the film down from its 98 minute runtime. This is a film where conversations span the gamut from college parties to the Big Bang to dreams of marriage and children, all with abundant theater kid energy. Maxwell and McKenna are the standouts and emotional anchors of the film, but Louise Barnes, Katie Baker, Tony Horton, Julian Bass, and Jun Yu make each of their characters feel distinct, and less like different mouthpieces for Isaacs to use. An Autumn Summer may be Jared Isaacs’ directorial debut, but it’s a supremely confident film that belongs at the top of your Heartland watchlist.
At only 78 minutes, Love, Danielle gets a number of sentiments right about life with cancer, but could stand to expand a bit more on its themes. In the opening minutes of the film, we learn that Danielle (Devin Sidell) has been diagnosed with a BRCA1 genetic mutation, which puts her at higher risk for ovarian and breast cancer. She then has to choose whether she wants to have preventive surgery to remove her breasts and ovaries, in spite of her desire to have children. Given that the film follows Sidell’s real-life experience with BRCA, and her co-screenwriter credit along with Steve Sears, the film feels like an accurate, genuine depiction of those who go through this very unique phenomenon. But as if BRCA wasn’t enough, Danielle’s sister Amy (Jaime King) is going through her own cancer journey, and she has to deal with lingering familial trauma from her absentee father (Barry Bostwick) and her uber-picky mother (Lesley Ann Warren).
First-time director Marianna Palka mostly avoids the quirkiness that comes with the cancer dramedy, instead exploring Danielle’s relationships with her family and loved ones. Sidell is disarmingly vulnerable in her performance, never shying away from the uglier sides of having cancer, and the specific guilt of having a treatable form when someone you love is suffering. More often than not, a film is better served when it doesn’t belabor a plot point or character beat, but here is a case where the film would have benefitted from more room to breathe. Still, Love, Danielle gets the emotions right in a genre where shortcuts are too frequently taken.
Starring: Renate Reinsve, Ellen Dorrit Petersen, Endre Hellestveit, Thea Lambrechts Vaulen, Øystein Røger, Vera Veljović-Jovanović, Loke Nikolaisen
Grade: B+
A debut feature from a nepo baby brings a wide range of expectations for me. Sometimes they can turn out fantastic, like Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides, and other times you get films like Ishana Shayamalan’s The Watchers, a haphazard attempt at replicating her father. Luckily for Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the grandson of Ingmar Bergman, his debut Armand finds himself a worthy directorial talent to look out for in the future.
The Worlds Divide opens with a title card declaring that the film was entirely drawn and animated by one person, writer-director Denver Jackson. Though it’s almost fully unnecessary, it can be seen as both an excuse for any shortcomings, and a humble-brag for what’s to come. Though the animation is undoubtedly impressive in its intricacies, it still needs some refinement that could have come from at least a second set of eyes. The issues which plagued Jackson’s previous film The Crown of Babylon (which played at Heartland in 2021), mostly the inaccurate lip syncing, continue here, but Jackson still retains his knack for original sci-fi storytelling.
The film concerns Natomi (voiced by Breanna Pearl), who lives in a dystopian dictatorship where no plants or vegetables have grown for ages. She’s transported by her father to a distant world called Esluna, where he’s seen as a kind of god, and various forces try to destroy her. She learns she has unique powers and teams up with a ragtag crew – including a robotic teddy bear – to return her home. Jackson wears his influences on his sleeves, from Star Wars to The Matrix and the films of Studio Ghibli. This, along with an almost punishingly convoluted plot and a nearly 2-hour runtime, makes the film harder to sit through than it should be, but there’s no denying Jackson can craft engaging action set pieces. It’s a miracle for any independent animated film to see the light of day, so it’s even more miraculous for one made from a single person. But that won’t stop me from wishing The Worlds Divide was a more engaging film.
Sometimes an original sci-fi property doesn’t need a crazy, high-concept premise to succeed. Saturn starts with a simple enough hook: a planet suddenly appears in the sky. But director Eric Esau’s film uses this sci-fi backdrop more as a way to explore more dramatic tensions brought to the surface by the unexpected development. The film mostly becomes a weepy familial drama between a man named James (Dominic Bogart), his wife Sarah (Piercey Dalton), and their son George (Elijah Maximus), in the imminent days before the end of the world. Without delving into spoilers, Saturn looks at what it means to be a hero, and the cost of self-sacrifice. We rarely see the planet, so we’re left with its implications, and what regular people would do in the face of unprecedented circumstances.
Esau’s script, which he co-writes with Anna Esau and Douglas Haines, leans into ancient mythology, as we learn that James is a “shepherd”, an ancient being responsible for protecting Earth. So, with the arrival of the planet, he has to choose between saving humanity, or abandoning Earth and escaping with his family to another planet. Even a passing glance at a regional film festival will reveal that low-budget sci-fi can easily lead to embarrassing disaster, so Saturn immediately gains points for not stepping on rakes at every turn. The film looks great, even when it’s as dimly lit as the later seasons of Game of Thrones. Though the meat of the film could stand to be more compelling, it’s hard not to recommend an original idea made with care like this.
You’d think a production featuring the likes of Elizabeth Deschanel and Sam Trammell would feel like more than a micro-budget indie, but such is not the case with the sci-fi dud ReEntry. Remember the plot point in Annihilation where Oscar Isaac inexplicably returns from a void, only to find himself barely functioning as a human or relating to his wife, Natalie Portman? This is essentially the structure for first-time director Brendan Choisnet’s film, working from Daniel Nayeri’s script, but it removes any nuance or menace from the proceedings.
Deschanel plays Elenore, the wife of Lucas (Trammell), a scientist who disappears for a year after going into a portal to another dimension. He returns one year later, and she begins to suspect he’s not who she remembers. Cracks begin to form as she wonders how she can move on, if he’s not the man she’s come to love. Thankfully, without spoiling, Choisnet doesn’t belabor the point until the finale, and the second half provides a sort of interesting rumination on love. It’s just too bad that neither Lucas nor Elenore are terribly interesting as characters, nor do Descanel or Trammell give the kinds of performances that rise above the middling material.
Yes, technically, Flow is an animated fantasy film featuring a cadre of wild animals in a post-apocalyptic landscape, but it’s the more grounded naturalism that makes the film sing. Besides, given that we’ve just seen two “once-in-a-generation” hurricanes strike in the past two weeks, perhaps it’s not so far-fetched after all. Gints Zilbalodis, the co-writer (with Matīss Kaža) , director, producer, editor, cinematographer, production designer, and co-composer (with Rihards Zalupe) has crafted a warm and inviting story about friendship and nature that stands as one of the year’s best films.
The Movie State 