The Lodge's Filmmaking and Lead Performance Are Thoughtful, Its Script Less So

Right away, The Lodge lets the viewer know that it's going to be playing things gruesomely. Once Laura Hall (Alicia Silverstone) learns that her ex-husband Richard Hall (Richard Armitage) is marrying a woman named Grace Marshall (Riley Keough), she pours herself a glass of wine, sits down at her kitchen table and proceeds to shoot herself. Now deceased, Laura's kids, Aidan (Jaeden Martell) and especially Mia (Lia McHugh), are traumatized from the whole affair and harbor a deep level of resentment again Grace. They blame her for the death of Laura. Grace having a past associated with a Catholic church death cult also makes them suspicious of Grace.

Under the Silver Lake Is The Poor Man's Inherent Vice

Under the Silver Lake is a movie all about hidden messages, but none of those messages are as hiden as the movie itself, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last May before a prospective June 2018 release. But then the film reviewed mixed marks at the festival and its distributor, A24, delayed it to December 7, 2018. That day came and went without a trace of Under the Silver Lake. What happened? Was Under the Silver Lake doomed to just sit on a shelf somewhere? Then the film got a brief (read: three day long) theatrical run in April 2019 before dropping unceremoniously on Amazon Streaming last week. It's been a long journey for Under the Silver Lake and for some, this highly unusual motion picture will have been more than worth the wait. For me, it turned out to be a movie that would have been underwhelming even if I had been waiting just five minutes for it to arrive.

Hold the Dark Is A Shallow And Tedious Journey Into The Cold Wilderness

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD 

I kept waiting and waiting for Hold the Dark to suddenly click into place for me, but that moment never came. Writer Macon Blair and director Jeremy Saulnier (the latter being the director behind one of 2016's best movies, Green Room) have delivered a feature that only gets more and more inert as it goes on as one gradually realizes that the slow-burn restrained atmosphere of the whole movie isn't going nowhere. Oh to go back to the start of the movie, when I still had hopes for this one realizing its potential. The beginning of Hold the Dark is easily the strongest part of the whole feature, as we're introduced to Russell Core (Jeffrey Wright), an author who is contacted by Alaska resident Medora (Riley Keough) to help her find her son who was recently taken by wolves.