Category: Narrative

By Joe Bendel. Seasoned Detective Seo Do-cheol served as a technical advisor to a TV cop show, but he is not about to go Hollywood. Frankly, he is too undisciplined for any sort of corruption. While he is no end of headaches for his frustrated wife and task force leader, he is the last cop any bad guy would want on his case. A coked-up sadistic corporate heir will learn that the hard way when he messes with a friendly acquaintance of Seo’s (Hell yes, that’s all it takes) in Ryoo Seung-wan’s Veteran, which opens this Friday in New York, after laying a smackdown on this year’s TIFF.

After busting a high-end car theft ring Det. Seo and team leader Oh are poised for national promotion. Of course, the car thieves did not give up without a fight, but that was A-OK with Seo. If he can keep quiet for next month or so, he’ll be moving on up. Unfortunately, he meets the reprehensible Jo Tae-oh at a party for the TV show he basically lent his name to. Watching his abusive behavior towards women rubs the cop the wrong way. When he subsequently learns the truck driver he contracted during the stolen car sting tried to commit suicide at the Sunjin Group, Jo’s perennially under-investigation conglomerate, Seo launches a personal investigation.

Apparently, Bae Cheol-ho and his driver colleagues were fired by a Sunjin holding company for joining a union. Since said union is nowhere to be seen, it is safe to say Bae’s dues were not well spent. Regardless, when Bae crashes the corporate office seeking the wages owed him, Jo humiliates him, forcing him to box the thuggish manager Jeon, who pink-slipped him. Needless to say, the bout does not go well for Bae. In fact, he throws himself down the Sunjin stairwell, ending up in a coma rather than the morgue. Unfortunately, the case is not in Seo’s jurisdiction, but he is not about to let bureaucratic niceties dissuade him. Jo and his chief fixer, VP Choi Dae-ung play hardball, but they keep misunderestimating Seo’s obstinate tenacity.

Despite the somewhat clichéd class warfare themes (seriously, whatever happened to that disappearing union?), Veteran is a rock’em sock’em action film that benefits from its comparatively narrow scope and proletarian sensibility. Seo and Jo just really, really do not like each other. That builds mucho anticipation for their climatic face-off, which pays off nicely.

Hwang Jung-min is perfect as the rough-edged, slightly eccentric Seo, taking the maverick cop to a whole new level of unruliness. Yoo Ah-in is just okay as Jo, a standard issue villain whose likes we have often seen before, but Yu Hae-jin is terrific as his calculating right-hand Choi. Oh Dal-su largely keeps the shtick in check as the put-upon team leader, but Jin Kyung (his co-star in the even more awesome Assassination) really makes an impression in her brief but meaningful appearances as Seo’s less-than-amused wife Joo-yeon. Rather inexplicably, Ma Dong-seok (a.k.a. Don Lee) also has a fleeting cameo as a stationary store owner, but he’s still pretty cool.

Although Veteran is not as smart and stylish as Ryoo’s The Berlin File, he still delivers plenty of satisfying action. Its grunginess and contempt for authority are both good things. Recommended for fans of hardnose cop movies, Veteran opens this Friday (9/18) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: B+

Posted on September 15th, 2015 at 10:27pm.

By Joe Bendel. It turns out people do not know everybody’s business in small towns. After having visions of Hell Fire, Old Dutch set out to make amends with everyone he wronged, but his confessions have shocked the rural community. Apparently, this is particularly true of Ben’s Uncle John. Although we do not see how the fatal chain of events transpired, there is no question the titular carpenter is disposing of Dutch’s body in the opening scenes of Steven Piet’s Uncle John, which opens this Friday in New York.

He might be a murderer (manslaughter seems the more fitting charge), but John is not a bad sort, really. In fact, he is a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy according to Ben. As part of his pseudo-courtship of a new co-worker, the Chicago-based web designer explains how Uncle John raised him after his mother died and his father absconded.

As Ben hesitantly puts the moves on Kate, we see John scramble to cover his tracks and deflect the suspicions of Dutch’s delinquent younger brother Danny Miller. Fortunately, the sheriff does not share Miller’s line of thinking, but he keeps popping by at inopportune moments. However, Uncle John will really have to start tap-dancing when Ben brings Kate home for a spur-of-the-moment visit.

At first glance, Uncle John looks like two completely different films—Fargo in Wisconsin and About Last Night in Chicago—stuck together by a mere familial connection, yet somehow Piet makes it click. Partly that is because we get a powerful sense of how important the characters are to each other, even when living miles apart, but there is also a hard to define atmosphere of unease permeating the entire film. Whatever it is, it just works.

Of course, it is no secret how much John Ashton brings to the film as Uncle John. Best known as Sgt. Taggart in the Beverly Hills Cop franchise, Ashton has worked steadily in the industry for years, but with Uncle he finally gets a career-defining role. He flat-out knocks it out of the park with his quiet, slow-boiling performance. At times, you can practically see the steam rising from his head, as Uncle John struggles to keep it together. Alex Moffat and Jenna Lyng are also charismatic and develop convincing ambiguous chemistry together, but they would probably be the first to admit Ashton is leading this parade.

As strong as the cast is, they cannot do their thing in a vacuum. Fortunately, Piet has a pitch-perfect understanding of the upper Midwest as a geographical place and a state of mind. Frankly, Uncle John looks and feels more genuine than obvious comparative films like Fargo, Blood Simple, A Simple Plan, and A Single Shot. He also shows an unusual keen intuitive sense of how much to reveal and when. It is a strangely effective thriller precisely because it is not compulsively thrillerish. Highly recommended for fans of small town noirs, Uncle John opens this Friday (9/18) in New York, at the Village East.

LFM GRADE: A-

Posted on September 15th, 2015 at 10:26pm.

By Joe Bendel. G.H. Hardy said mathematics is a young man’s game and the world still believes him. This should therefore be Nathan Ellis’s time to shine. However, the young math whiz will always feel out of place in the world, even if he lands a spot on the UK International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) team in Morgan Matthews’ A Brilliant Young Mind, which opens this Friday in New York.

Ellis is “on the spectrum” to use the film’s preferred term for autism. He has a savant like talent for recognizing patterns, but human relationships are almost beyond his grasp. His father Michael was the only one the lad ever opened up to. Unfortunately, he was killed well before his time in an auto accident (it kind of looks like it was his fault, if that mitigates the tragedy for you). Regardless, his grieving mother Julie is now stuck raising a temperamental son, who refuses to let her touch him.

Despite the cold shoulder he is oblivious of, Julie Ellis devotes herself to Nathan and his math-based obsessive compulsions. She finally gets a break when Martin Humphreys agrees to tutor Ellis, with an eye towards the IMO. He too once competed at the Olympiad, but was undone by his self-sabotage and the onset of his MS. Somehow, Humphreys maybe gets through to Ellis just a little bit. There is also a burgeoning attraction between him and Julie Ellis, but he does not feel he can pursue it. Eventually, Ellis will join the other prospective UK team members to train in Taipei with other national teams. It is there that he will meet the charming young Zhang Mei from the Chinese team, who will get past even more of his defenses, much to his arrested adolescent confusion.

A Brilliant Young Mind is inspired by Matthews’ IMO documentary Beautiful Young Minds, which explicitly invokes the Oscar winning A Beautiful Mind. Clearly, title originality was not a priority. Regardless, there is plenty of room for another film that takes maths (as they say in Britain) seriously.

Yet, building a film around a confoundedly reserved character like Ellis is a challenge Matthews never fully licks. Asa Butterfield (a.k.a. Ender Wiggins, who arguably might be a tad on the spectrum himself) is actually quite convincing as Ellis, but it is mostly a one-note give-you-nothing performance. That’s a reality the film scrupulously observes, but it makes it feel wildly unbalanced, because everyone around him is so much more interesting.

Jo Yang is wonderfully smart and sensitive as Zhang Mei, somehow developing chemistry with someone who hasn’t any of his own. However, Rafe Spall really lowers the emotional boom during the scenes in which he wrestles with the indignities of his progressively worsening condition. Sally Hawkins also makes you ache for Julie Ellis, to the point that you would forgive her for resorting to a murder-suicide pact. Eddie Marsan also does his thing as the slightly obnoxious, but rather shrewd UK coach.

There are some truly fine performances in ABYM, but James Graham’s screenplay trots out way too many clichés. Let’s be honest, everyone is doing great if we can believe Zhang Mei is interested in Ellis. Adding another jealous UK team member is really pushing it, but it presents an easy way to advance the action. Still, the scenes in Taipei look great and take Ellis out of his comfort zone in a way that we can believe will be healthy for him. Mostly recommended for those who appreciate watching a cast of fine British character actors, A Brilliant Young Mind opens this Friday (9/11) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.

LFM GRADE: B-

Posted on September 10th, 2015 at 11:14pm.

By Joe Bendel. By now, when we see twins in cinema, we assume at least one is evil—maybe both (as in The Shining, The Krays, and Full House). Evil is probably too strong a word for Lukas and Elias. It might be fairer to say they are intense. They are also rather confused by their mother’s seemingly arbitrary behavior following her countenance-changing surgery. Their family drama will take a decidedly macabre turn in Veronika Franz & Severin Fiala’s Goodnight Mommy, Austria’s recently announced foreign language Oscar submission, which opens tomorrow in New York.

This is the sort of film that is dashed difficult to review because Franz and Fiala build it around some audacious misdirection. They either keep you looking in the wrong direction, or they don’t. Regardless, it is probably safe to say this family is massively dysfunctional. For some reason, the mother seems to prefer Lukas over Elias, whom she is currently giving the silent treatment. Of course, her behavior makes no sense to the brothers. Since they are inseparable, they would both be equally culpable for whatever triggered her annoyance.

Her strange comportment coupled with her unrecognizable new features lead the lads to conclude the bandaged woman in the house is not really there mother. At this point, they commit to an antagonistic course of action that will often be difficult to watch. Unfortunately for the woman, their house is quite remote and apparently sound-proof.

Produced by festival favorite Ulrich Seidl, Goodnight Mommy is the sort of horror film that explores corrosive psychological pathologies in the much the same manner as Polanski in his prime. There is also a big third act revelation that changes viewers’ perspective on everything that came before. Whether you see it coming or not, it is impressive how slyly the film is cut together leading up to that point.

Lukas and Elias Schwarz are frighteningly believable as the extreme twins. They are all kinds of twitchy, yet they keep us consistently off-balance and hesitant to pass judgement. If they have seen their own movie, they should probably be in therapy now. Susanne Wuest also maintains the ambiguity, while playing some truly harrowing scenes. (Wuest also made a strong impression in Marco Kalantari’s The Shaman, proving critics ignore short films at their peril.)

Even with Seidl’s imprimatur, it is somewhat surprising Austria has submitted a genre film for Oscar consideration, albeit one that is quite polished and rather challenging. After all, within the last ten years, they have won twice with The Counterfeiters and Amour, garnering a third nomination for Revanche. However, what really baffles is the decision not to release Goodnight Mommy in time for Mother’s Day. Seriously, it’s a natural tie-in. Recommended for fans of horror and dark psychological thrillers revolving around children, Goodnight Mommy opens tomorrow (9/11) in New York, at the East 86th Street Cinema.

LFM GRADE: B

Posted on September 10th, 2015 at 11:12pm.

By Joe Bendel. Most ballets tell tragic stories, but the Maoist-era Red Detachment of Women caused them. It certainly contributed to the woes of Lu Yanshi’s family during the Cultural Revolution. Their wounds will never fully heal, even when he is finally “rehabilitated” and released from his prison camp in Zhang Yimou’s straight-up masterpiece Coming Home, which opens this Wednesday in New York.

Lu Yanshi was a college professor—and therefore a class enemy during the Gang of Four’s reign of terror. Further compounding his guilt, Lu escaped from his labor camp, finding the half-starved life of a fugitive more bearable. Naturally, the Communist Party responded by pressuring his family. Lu’s wife Feng Wanyu will bear any risk to protect him, but their daughter, Dan Dan, has absorbed too much of the omnipresent propaganda. She is a gifted ballet dancer, but she could very well lose the lead role in Red Detachment of Women she has worked so hard to win. Convinced to inform on her father, she learns the hard way what sort of opportunities are available to the children of traitors.

Gaining nothing, Dan Dan’s relationship with her mother is nearly irreparably poisoned. Unfortunately, the years Feng spends separated from Lu are not kind to her. By the time he is released, Feng is already suffering from mild dementia. Due to some cruel form of amnesia, she is unable to recognize Lu. Worse still, she sometimes mistakes her distraught husband for the predatory Officer Fang, who used Lu’s safety to extort sexual favors from Feng, like any good Communist would. However, Lu quickly reconciles with his deeply remorseful daughter.

If you think there is a better performance to be seen in a film this year than Gong Li’s turn-for-the-ages as Feng, you either have profoundly faulty aesthetic judgement or were simply even more struck by the achingly poignant dignity of Chen Daoming’s Lu. Watching Lu as Feng unknowingly tells him about himself is more devastating than a thousand Old Yellers getting shot. What they are doing is actually very complicated. They are playing scenes with each other in the moment, but also with each characters’ ghosts from the past. Yet they pull it off brilliantly. It is their work that leaves a lump in your throat, but Zhang Huiwen is still quite touching as the disillusioned Dan Dan—and also convincingly graceful in her dance scenes.

Frankly, Coming Home is not trying to be a political film, because the terrible implications of the Cultural Revolution need no belaboring. They are ever-present and inescapable. Instead, it is an exquisite tragedy, rendered with incredible sensitivity and humanism. Zhang has gone big with epics like House of Flying Daggers and made Fifth Generation-defining classics with Gong Li, like Red Sorgum and The Story of Qiu Ju, but with the perfectly balanced Coming Home he expresses the pain and confusion of hundreds of thousands of families on a painfully intimate canvas. If you only see one film this year, you want it to be Coming Home. Very highly recommended, it opens this Wednesday (9/9) in New York, at the Angelica Film Center downtown and the Lincoln Plaza uptown.

LFM GRADE: A+

Posted on September 9th, 2015 at 5:29pm.

By Joe Bendel. The land will be befouled and God’s creatures will be senselessly slaughtered. This is China in the full throes of the Cultural Revolution. As they witness the consequences first-hand, two formerly eager volunteers will be deeply disillusioned by the Party’s ruinous policies in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Wolf Totem, which opens this Friday in New York.

When they first arrive, cadres Chen Zhen and Yang Ke really believe they will be making a difference for the hardscrabble herders of Inner Mongolia. However, they quickly learn to respect the power of nature, especially the danger and beauty of the regions’ wolves. They also cannot miss the bad vibes radiating off the local party boss, Bao Shunghi. However, they manage to settle in with their ethnic Mongolian hosts rather nicely, especially considering the condescending nature of their assignment.

Frankly, they learn more from the herders than vice versa. After a too-close-for-comfort encounter with a wolf pack, Chen Zhen becomes increasingly fascinated with the Eurasian wolves. He cannot shake the idea that they deliberately spared him. Therefore, he is increasingly appalled by Bao’s cruel bounties on wolves, to pave the way for the locust-like settlers. He is also threatening the nomadic herders’ traditional way of life by despoiling their grassland for his developments. Seeing the wolves’ numbers dwindling, Chen Zhen does something rash. He secretly adopts an orphaned wolf cub. Yet, it is immediately clear the young wolf will always be too wild to live among people, but might become too domesticated to survive in nature.

Do not take this as a joke: it is frankly amazing what expressive performers these wolves are on the big screen. Lead training Andrew Simpson raised 35 region-appropriate wolves especially for the film—and the camera absolutely loves them. Even with extensive safety measures in place, Feng Shaofeng did not escape injury working closely with the wolves, but it was probably worth it. The co-star of White Vengeance and The Golden Era gives probably his career best performance as Chen Zhen. Once again, Shawn Dou is stuck playing second banana, but he keenly expresses the bitter nature of their hard lessons learned. Yin Zhusheng also makes a perfectly odious yet charismatic villain as Bao. Regardless, nobody will ever upstage those wolves.

It is a not-so minor miracle this adaptation of Lu Liamin’s autobiographical novel (written as Jiang Rong) was ever made, especially considering Annaud was banned from China for years following Seven Years in Tibet. The explicit environmental themes and only slightly more muted critiques of the Cultural Revolution are also third-rail kind of subjects for the state film authorities. Nevertheless, they not only lifted Annaud’s ban and helped underwrite the production, they also chose Totem as China’s official foreign language Academy Award submission. Clearly, they are playing to win rather than score PR points with a non-existent international audience, as they often have in the past. Big and sprawling, with a green conscience, Totem is an Academy-friendly film, in nearly every way.

It also happens to be a very good film, which is a nice bonus for the rest of us. Totem offers more striking proof of why Annaud is considered the best contemporary narrative filmmaker working with animal and natural subjects. Cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou captures all the wolves’ twitchy power as well as the stunning beauty of the surrounding vistas. The late great James Horner’s reputation will also be further burnished by what is sadly one of his final scores. Few composers could produce such sweeping themes that are still so distinctive and evocative of a film’s time and place. It is an aesthetic marvel and one of the best environmental films in decades, precisely because it makes deeply compelling spiritual and cultural connections to the threatened Mongolian ecosystem. Very highly recommended, Wolf Totem opens this Friday (9/11) in New York, at the AMC Empire.

LFM GRADE: A

Posted on September 9th, 2015 at 5:29pm.