Category: Films

Film Review: Brad’s Status

A midlife crisis worth watching: Stiller shines in funny and poignant story  

Brad (Ben Stiller, l.) reflects on his life while touring colleges with his son Troy (Austin Abrams). 

Ben Stiller, who can play middle-age angst like no one else (see While We’re Young, for example), is in fine form in writer/director Mike White’s new film Brad’s Status. Although the film’s premise about a soon-to-be-50 straight white man facing an existential crisis as he grapples with his life choices may sound like the epitome of naval-gazing white privilege, the picture touches on some universal themes with sensitivity and wry humor, thanks in large part to Stiller’s well-tuned performance and White’s sharp screenplay (White is perhaps best known for the 2000 cult hit Chuck and Buck and this year’s social satire Beatriz at Dinner).
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Film Review: mother!

If a stranger knocks at your front door…

Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother struggles with hostess duties as Javier Bardem’s poet entertains.

Standing before an unpainted bedroom wall, a young and thoroughly domesticated woman ponders which shade of eggshell will look just so. She mixes up a tester, applies a strip, and steps back to regard her work. Elsewhere an older man inhabits his writing study, conjuring magic onto the page and thence to his readers. Later the two will enjoy her hearty meal, and settle into reading by the fire.

But something isn’t right. A sound, or maybe a feeling, forces the woman to cock her ear. She moves as quietly as possible, propelled by a feeling she can’t explain, to peek in on the man. He isn’t writing. He’s just sitting, waiting, watching. Something isn’t right.

Such is the ominous atmosphere of Darren Aronofsky’s latest film mother!, which only partly succeeds, through the use of the horror genre overlaid with biblical themes, at offering a portrait of female anxiety.

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Film Review: Home Again

Reese goes home again, but that doesn’t mean you have to    

Lillian (Candice Bergen, l.) and her daughter Alice (Reese Witherspoon) delightedly share breakfast with the three total strangers that Alice has let in her home (from l., Nat Wolff, Jon Rudnitsky, and Pico Alexander).

With Home Again, writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer’s debut feature, we see that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. The daughter of filmmaker Nancy Meyers (The Intern; It’s Complicated; The Holiday; Something’s Got to Give), Meyers-Shyer here copies her mother’s patented feel-good glossy, Pottery Barn-infused style to create a romantic comedy that is blandly harmless at best and ludicrously insipid at worst. That Meyers herself produced the project is no surprise, as the entire picture feels like Mom just handed her daughter the keys to the family car and admonished her to drive it exactly as Mom would.
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Film Review: Patti Cake$

Straight outta Jersey: Portrait of an unlikely rap star makes for one of the summer’s best films    

Aspiring rapper Patti, AKA Patti Cake$, AKA Killa P (Danielle Macdonald), makes a grand entrance at the pharmacy where her friend Jheri works. 

New Jersey filmmaker Geremy Jasper got his start making music videos, so it makes sense that his first foray into feature films is a picture about an aspiring musician. With Patti Cake$, Jasper draws on both his New Jersey upbringing and his music video experience to bring us the thoroughly entertaining story of one Patricia Dombrowski. She’s Patti to her friends and family and Patti Cake$ or Killa P in her brilliantly constructed rap songs, but, either way, Patti is one of the most unique and unforgettable characters to grace the silver screen this year, and her story makes for a great way to close out the summer film season.
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Film Review: Ingrid Goes West

Tonally uneven film obscures provocative premise   

Social media obsessed Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) moves to L.A. with a plan to befriend her Instagram idol.

If you sometimes worry you may be checking your Facebook and Instagram feeds just a little too frequently, rest assured that you’ve got nothing on Ingrid Thorburn. As portrayed by an exceptional Audrey Plaza, the social media obsessed heroine of Ingrid Goes West becomes a poster child for smart phone restraint. Unfortunately, first time feature writer/director Matt Spicer and his co-writer David Branson Smith run into tone problems, turning what could have been a brilliant satire into something mildly amusing but ultimately unsatisfying, almost to the point of troubling.
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Film Review: The Only Living Boy in New York

Let your honesty shine, shine, shine… Except when it doesn’t, like in this phony, affected picture   

Thomas (Callum Turner) confronts Johanna (Kate Beckinsale), his father’s mistress.

The word “serviceable’ gets bandied about quite a bit in director Marc Webb’s new film about a young writer, which is ironic, since The Only Living Boy in New York is anything but. In fact, serviceable is actually far too kind a word for this hackneyed, derivative embarrassment.
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Film Review: Brigsby Bear

Mooney’s funny and poignant film Bears witness to the restorative power of art 

James (Kyle Mooney) dons the costume of his idol, Brigsby Bear. 

If you watch Saturday Night Live regularly, you know that cast member Kyle Mooney seems like the kind of smart-but-nerdy guy who probably spent his middle school years making goofy action-figure based short films with his friends. Fast forward some 20 years later, and not much has changed, though the results are no doubt exceedingly more polished than his junior high efforts. Mooney, along with his 7th grade buddies Dave McCary and Kevin Costello, has made his first feature film, and, fittingly, Brigsby Bear is a charmer that celebrates the healing power of both art and family.
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SFJFF37 Spotlights: The Boy Downstairs / Mr. Predictable / A Classy Broad / Bombshell

The 37th San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, showcasing over 60 films from more than a dozen countries, opened on July 20th, and runs until next Sunday, August 6th. This year, the Festival boasts over 15 West Coast premiers, and more than 40% of its films are directed by women, including both its opening and closing night films. 

With a full week left to go, there is still plenty of time to catch some great new films. Below we spotlight four Fest titles (two documentaries and two features) that you may want to check out. Complete schedule, tickets, and more information are available here. Continue reading “SFJFF37 Spotlights: The Boy Downstairs / Mr. Predictable / A Classy Broad / Bombshell“

Film Review: Atomic Blonde

Theron heats up a cold city

Lorraine Broughton (Charlize Theron) smokes, drinks, kicks, and kills with the best of them.

Take a world nearing collapse, a main character with oodles of bitchy beauty, add some cold-war cloak and dagger spycraft, throw in some “fluid sexuality,” lots of fight scenes, and just a pinch of back story. Good so far? Not so fast. Take away the script. Take away the music. Take away much of the acting. Not so great? Ok, so put one truly fantastic fight scene back in, and you’re served Atomic Blonde, the Charlize Theron vehicle opening wide today.

First time helmer David Leitch, a former stunt man with co-directing credits on John Wick has taken the graphic novel series The Coldest City and turned it into a mostly a muddled mish-mash that owes much of its existence to Luc Bresson’s La Femme Nikita and Leon: The Professional, as well founding father Doug Limon’s The Bourne Identity.
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Film Review: Detroit

Bigelow’s intense, harrowing film remains fiercely relevant

A city under siege: Detroit, July, 1967.

“It’s hard to believe this could happen in America,” a character says in Detroit, director Kathryn Bigelow’s grim but brilliantly effective new film about the 1967 Detroit riots and their aftermath. But for those of us watching exactly 50 years later, such believing is all too easy — and that’s perhaps the most disheartening take away from Bigelow’s gut-punch of a film.
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