The Grouchy Editor

The Trap

Mladen and his wife Marija are young professionals living in Belgrade, where they rent a small apartment, drive a beat-up Renault and raise their 8-year-old son. When the boy is diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, his desperate father considers desperate means to pay for an expensive operation. The Trap begins as a Strangers on a Train-type thriller (“you solve my problem, I’ll solve yours”) but it’s most effective as an absorbing riddle:  How far would you go to save your child?  Release:  2007  Grade: B+

*****

The Last Days

A moderately compelling thriller from Spain about an environmental plague that wipes out humans – except for the people who stay indoors, where the transportation system consists of rat-infested sewers and thug-patrolled subways. Days contains a few silly scenes, but it also has some good ones. The filmmakers were smart enough to realize that if we care about the characters, which we do, we won’t snicker (too much) when they get attacked by … oh, say a bear in a church. Release: 2013  Grade:  B-

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Life Itself

I liked Roger Ebert. He was that rare celebrity who would reply to reader comments on his Web site, or respond to e-mails, as he did once or twice to mine. I think Ebert was America’s most popular film critic because he merged an “everyday Joe” persona with keen intelligence to produce thoughtful, accessible reviews. And it didn’t hurt that his TV pairing with Gene Siskel was a movie-buff’s delight.

But Ebert could also be, as we learn in the documentary Life Itself, something of a jerk. And so when Steve James’s camera records Ebert’s lengthy battle with cancer, the movie is honest, but perhaps not as moving as it might have been with a more sympathetic subject.  Ebert was a superb writer with unpredictable taste in movies, so it’s hard to know what he might have thought of Life Itself, but my guess would be “thumbs up.”  Release:  2014   Grade:  B+

 *****

Flu

Here’s a big, dumb, special-effects-heavy disaster pic from Korea, inspired by big, dumb, special-effects-heavy disaster pics from Hollywood, but featuring that peculiar Korean mash-up of 1950s wholesomeness and modern sensibilities (the heroine is a single-mother virologist).

The action scenes are well done and exciting, but what ruined the movie for me was snippy Dr. Kim who, for unfathomable reasons, puts our hero, a virtuous emergency-services worker who is smitten with her, through hoop after romantic hoop.  I mean, seriously, how many lives does the guy have to save – including those of Dr. Kim and her daughter – before she’ll give him the time of day? The plot involves an infectious disease spreading through the Korean peninsula, but I found myself hoping the flu would infect Dr. Kim.  Release: 2013  Grade: B-

*****

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

Critics adore this movie, presumably because 1) it’s an Iranian story (shot in California); 2) it has a female Iranian-American director; and 3) it is a mash-up of — according to some reviewers — the vampire/western/romance/graphic-novel genres.  (I might debate the inclusion of “western.”)  What most critics don’t mention are Girl’s artsy, pretentious asides and the interminable pauses during which the plot grinds to a halt and the audience falls asleep.  Nice cinematography, though.  If you want to see a better movie about a lonely, female vampire who finds love with a cute Muggle, I recommend Let the Right One In. Release: 2014  Grade: C

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 Housebound

The plot is both clever and ridiculous, but Housebound is one entertaining comic thriller from New Zealand.  Morgana O’Reilly plays a young woman who is not – I repeat, not – the clueless ingénue we’ve come to expect in movies like this one – you know, the pretty-but-dim heroine you can’t wait to see with an axe planted in her skull.  No, O’Reilly’s character is a street tough sentenced to house arrest at the creepy old home where she was raised, sharing close quarters with her scatterbrained mother and mealy-mouthed stepfather.  But there are strange doings in the house, and they don’t seem to be caused by the oddball family.  Housebound is great fun, with colorful actors and oh, yeah, a superb musical score.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B+

*****

Force Majeure

What does it mean to be a man?  In particular, what defines a “family man” in 2015?  Like any good Swedish drama, Force Majeure raises lots of provocative questions … and then fails to answer any of them.  But that’s OK because we know that it’s the journey – in this case, a ski vacation in the French Alps – that matters, and it’s a bumpy trip indeed for a family of four when the husband’s reaction to a sudden avalanche ruins everyone’s good time.  Release:  2014      Grade:  B+

 *****

King of Devil’s Island

Well-done Norwegian drama about the grueling conditions on an island prison for boys, circa 1915.  Too bad so much of the story is familiar; if you’ve seen Cool Hand Luke, The Shawshank Redemption, etc., you can likely predict much of the plot in King.  Still, the acting is superb, and the Nordic scenery is suitably chilling.  Release:  2010  Grade:  B

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 The Station Agent

Tired of movies with world-weary, cynical points of view?  Had enough of characters who don’t speak dialogue so much as argue and snipe at each other?  Then you might dig The Station Agent, a quiet little film about quiet little people who find friendship in rural New Jersey.  Peter Dinklage (Game of Thrones) plays a dwarf who moves to Mayberry– er, Newfoundland, to live in an abandoned train station and, with any luck, to escape society’s jerks.  But his new neighbors (Patricia Clarkson and Bobby Cannavale) won’t leave him alone.  That’s the plot – take it or leave it.  I took it.   Release:  2003   Grade:  B

*****

Septimo

Ricardo Darin, star of Argentina’s Oscar-winning The Secret in Their Eyes, teams with Belen Rueda (The Orphanage) in a thriller about the hunt for two children who vanish from an apartment-building stairwell. I complain about Hollywood’s recent penchant for stretching every movie, no matter how deserving, to interminable runtimes, but Septimo might be one film for which 88 minutes are not enough.  After a tense opening hour, in which estranged parents Darin and Rueda deal with the apparent abduction of their kids, the ending is abrupt and leaves more than a few loose ends.   Release:  2013   Grade:  B

*****

Women Aren’t Funny

The title lies.  Some women are funny, like Bonnie McFarlane, who wrote and directed this behind-the-scenes peek at the life of a typical stand-up comic — or in this case, two comics:  McFarlane and her husband, Rich Vos.  The documentary, during which McFarlane conducts short interviews with a gaggle of American comedians, is more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s hard to diss a flick in which the writer/director/star flashes her own bare butt while strolling bottomless through a field.   Release:  2014   Grade:  B

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Gone Girl

Screenwriter Gillian Flynn’s adaptation of novelist Gillian Flynn’s bestselling book is certainly faithful to the source material, but I don’t see that as such a good thing. Flynn’s twist-filled story – I refuse to call it “clever” because there are so many far-fetched developments – follows the plight of poor Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), who becomes Suspect A when his wife Amy (Rosamund Pike) goes missing.  Unfortunately, the head-scratching plot holes that marred Flynn’s book are also present in the film.  On the positive side, this is a David Fincher project, and that means silly story or not, the movie is always watchable.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B

*****

Fruitvale Station

I have no idea how accurately Fruitvale Station depicts the events of New Year’s Day 2009, in which 22-year-old Oscar Grant was slain by police responding to a disturbance at an Oakland train station.  I suspect that the filmmakers put a bit too much sunshine on Grant, portraying him as a young man who was unfailingly kind to strangers, children, dogs, and his mother.  But as a dramatized snapshot of the disconnect between two Americas — black and white, rich and poor, law and lawlessness — Fruitvale is powerful and thought-provoking.  Release:  2013    Grade:  B+

 *****

The Interview

Critics want us to believe that when they sit down to review a film, they can be open-minded and objective.  But we all have expectations, and I’ll admit that mine were low for the notorious comedy, The Interview.  The movie, in which James Franco and Seth Rogen play TV journalists asked to assassinate North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, is actually … not bad.  Not great, but not bad.  A lot of the humor is sophomoric, and a little bit of Franco’s mugging goes a long way with me, but the film looks good, its heart is in the right place, and there are some genuinely funny scenes.   Release:  2014   Grade:  B-

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 The Babadook

This low-budget chiller from Australia is more effective as a study of the trials and tribulations of single motherhood than as an exercise in horror, mostly because the “babadook” itself – when we finally see it — isn’t especially scary.  Writer-director Jennifer Kent does stage some suspenseful scenes, and star Essie Davis is quite good, but there are too many familiar elements, and that damned babadook, an evil entity haunting Davis and her son, simply isn’t up to snuff.    Release:  2014     Grade:  B

 *****

The Lego Movie

Lego certainly got its money’s worth out of this inane commercial for building blocks aimed at children (and childish adults).  What I got was 100 minutes of flashing colors and nonstop noise, punctuated with bad puns and mildly amusing pop-culture jokes.  I also nearly got nausea as the filmmakers compensated for their clichéd, simplistic story — a toy construction worker mans up to defeat the bad guy and win the girl — by bombarding the viewer with frenzied activity.  (I stopped this movie twice, just to take a break from it.)  Sure, the computer animation looks cool.  I imagine it looks cool inside a tornado, as well, but I wouldn’t care to be there.  Release:  2014   Grade:  C-

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Snowpiercer

It’s the future (again), and what’s left of mankind is crammed into a high-speed train that endlessly circles the frozen Earth.  Will the have-nots in the back of the train revolt and seek revenge on the elite at the front?  Snowpiercer suffers badly from comic-book-movie disease:  It takes itself much, much too seriously.  The dialogue is trite and the character development nonexistent, yet the movie wants us to care about the fate of its cardboard characters.  There are, however, some cool-looking sets aboard the train.  Release:  2013  Grade:  B

*****

Frozen

It’s a cynical world, but you wouldn’t know it from watching Disney’s charming Frozen.  What’s not to like?  For starters, Kristen Bell brings spunk and humor to the heroine, a determined princess named Anna.  The animation is startlingly good and the songs are … satisfactory.  There are some lapses of logic in the story (loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”), but hey, this is a fairy tale and double-hey, isn’t this movie supposed to be for kids?  Release:  2013  Grade:  B+

*****

Nebraska

The rubes who populate Nebraska are a bit stereotyped, but it’s a pleasure to watch 76-year-old Bruce Dern and Will Forte as a father and son making a cross-country trip to claim what Dad thinks is a sweepstakes prize.  This isn’t director Alexander Payne’s best work, but his trademark gentle humor is on full display, and so is the Midwest – for better or worse.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B

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Blue Jasmine

You can take Woody Allen out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of Woody Allen – thank goodness.  Cate Blanchett shines as a society snob who takes a tumble when her husband goes to prison and her finances vanish, forcing her to shack up with a sister on the West Coast.  The setting is San Francisco, but the characters – each with his or her own idea of “the good life” – are pure New York.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B+

*****

Honeymoon

Here’s a spooky movie that’s refreshing both for what it is and for what it is not.  It is not zombies and it’s not vampires and it’s not all special effects and gore.  (OK, there is some gore.)  It is a throwback to 1950s science fiction, in which the communist threat reared its ugly head in monsters and neighbors and plants.  The story, in which newlyweds Rose Leslie and Harry Treadaway find more than good sex at a secluded lakeside cottage, is a bit pokey at first, but the final act is chilling.  Release:  2014  Grade:  B

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All Is Lost

Robert Redford plays a yachtsman who struggles for eight days to survive in the Indian Ocean after his boat is punctured by floating junk.  Redford was praised for his solo performance in this harrowing tale, and deservedly so, but All Is Lost is really a director’s movie … and a sound engineer’s movie, and an editor’s movie, and a cinematographer’s movie, et al.  It’s a fine showcase for what only Hollywood can do:  dazzle us with sight and sound.  Release:  2013   Grade:  B+

*****

Il Futuro

This is one of those artsy, low-plot foreign movies that suck you in because the characters are interesting and the images are striking.  Sad-eyed Manuela Martelli plays an orphaned teen who, along with her younger brother and his shady pals, concocts a plot to rob an aging blind man (Rutger Hauer).  The ensuing romance between old man Hauer and waif-like Martelli manages to be simultaneously creepy and erotic.   Release:  2013  Grade:  B-

*****

Wake in Fright

“He was a good guy.  But then he fell in with a bad crowd.”  John Grant (Gary Bond) is a good guy, a schoolteacher toiling in the boonies of Australia’s Outback.  He goes on holiday, has a drink, does a little gambling … and then meets the menfolk of a community known as “The Yabba.”  What follows is a harrowing, graphic look at just how low the human spirit can fall – disturbing stuff, but expertly realized by filmmaker Ted Kotcheff.  Release:  1971  Grade:  B+

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The Den

Graduate student Elizabeth (Melanie Papalia) is researching online behavior at a video-chat site, but while she spends hours staring at a computer screen, the computer is secretly staring back at her.  The first half of The Den – shot entirely from Web-cam/phone-cam points of view – feels a lot more like Skype than Netflix.  But after tapping into our primal fears about invasion of privacy, the story devolves from clever and cool into a cliché-ridden amalgam of conspiracy silliness and Saw-like gore.  Release:  2014  Grade : C

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