It's officially autumn folks and that means the arthouse cinema is in overdrive! Your local arthouse theater is playing lots of movies of varying shapes and sizes and even the streamers are getting into the spirit by debuting some smaller-scale movies meant to stimulate the brain rather than take in billions at the box office. Yes, award season is upon us, which means it's time for yours truly to dive into a selection of recent releases in bite-sized reviews. Up ahead, you'll get reviews for six different movies, each brief but certainly informative on both the overall quality of each production and where you can watch them. Let's dive right in to this breakdown of fall 2023's arthouse cinema landscape!
Foe
You can throw as many famous and talented people as you want on a movie...you just can't salvage a piece of art that's broken from the very inside of its soul. So it is with Foe, which is headlined by some of the most talented young actors of the modern world (Saoirse Ronan, Paul Mescal, Aaron Pierre) and helmed by Lion director Garth Davis. This story (adapted from a novel of the same name by Iain Reid) concerns a rural married couple (Ronan and Mescal) in the future who learn that Mescal's character is being forced up into space is an absolute waste of time, pure and simple. Good actors like Mescal are misdirected and handed terrible American accents (why does the leading man of Aftersun sound like Aaron Paul now???) while any tension surrounding the central characters is nonexistent. It's impossible to get invested in such flatly realized individuals, who most often seem like they've wandered off from an Asylum version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Meanwhile, the tepid visual scheme of the entire production just makes it easier for your attention to wander. There's lots of screaming, big displays of emotion, and "plot twists" in Foe. All that noise is ultimately as empty as the dystopic landscape the lead characters call home.
Mami Wata
One of the earliest shots of Mami Wata depicts protagonist Prisca (Evelyne Ily Juhen) standing in front of a giant body of water, her head so tiny at the bottom-center of the frame. Such specific placement combined with the way this character is just dwarfed by the ocean behind her instills an immediately arresting image that sets the tone for the visually gorgeous excursion that follows. Above all else, writer/director C.J. "Fiery" Obasi and cinematographer Lílis Soares craft a visually extraordinary exercise with Mami Wata that makes great use out of the feature's default monochromatic color scheme. Those images are also in service of an engaging story that deftly explores conflicts between traditionalism and modernism as well as how misogyny can manifest in even the most seemingly relaxed men. The drama within Mami Wata is well-realized, but it's those endless black voids of the night or Obasi's reliance on engrossing esoteric imagery that truly make the film a must-see.
Mami Wata is now playing in select theaters.
The Burial
Walk around on the internet sometime and you'll immediately find people declaring any movie they just saw as either the best thing ever or the worst piece of filth ever to be rendered with a camera. This isn't anything new nor is this observation exactly fresh, but it only gets worse every year with the way social media erodes social communication. The Burial is the kind of movie that requires more nuance to talk about in terms of ascertaining its overall quality. There's no denying it suffers from some key problems that tend to plague many streaming releases, namely an overlong runtime, and some occasionally uninspired visuals. More often than not, though, The Burial registers as something perfectly agreeable and even manages to absolutely nail its heaviest moments. A montage scene of members of a Baptist church group speaking in a courtroom and directly into the camera about their hardships faced at the hands of a gigantic corporation is especially deftly executed. Plus, it's a courtroom drama that allows Jamie Foxx and Tommy Lee Jones to engage in witty rapport and revel in their trademark silver screen personas. Even if it's sometimes more rudimentary than captivating, The Burial is a perfectly decent movie and the kind of pleasant cinema that can get lost in the hyperbole-laden discourse landscape of the internet.
The Burial begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on October 13.
Fair Play
Emily Meyers (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke Edmunds (Alden Ehrenreich) seemed to have the perfect relationship going in their time working at a Manhattan hedge fund. However, once Meyers gets a big promotion at the company that Edmunds believes he deserves more, their dynamic starts to fall apart. This is the crux of Fair Play, which writer/director Chloe Domont wants to function as a throwback to thrillers of the 80s and 90s. These titles weren't afraid to confront sex or twisted romantic relationships, much like Fair Play, but unlike those earlier works, this Dynevor/Ehrenreich never quite gets in touch with its wild side. Classic entries in the erotic thriller genre like Showgirls and Bound felt truly unpredictable because of their wilder creative inclinations. Fair Play opts to go down more standard routes for drama that are often watchable, but rarely gripping. By the end, Domont's work here comes off as a half-hearted tribute song to classic erotic thrillers rather than an exciting new evolution of the genre.
Fair Play is now playing on Netflix.
The Royal Hotel
The Royal Hotel takes viewers on a very harrowing trip down under, as Hanna (Julia Garner) and Liv (Jessica Henwick) take up a job at a bar (The Royal Hotel) situated in a remote part of the Australian Outback. Here, misogyny runs as rampantly as the booze, manifesting in quiet ways and also other manifestations as loud as an explosion. Writer/director Kitty Green instills an unshakeable sense of dread into The Royal Hotel that puts one right into the perspective of its lead characters. There's such underlying entitlement and hostility to every dude Hanna and Liv encounter, it's all-enveloping like a fog. Even in its quietest moments, The Royal Hotel has viewers on the edge of their seats wondering if Hell itself is just around the corner. These qualities ensure that The Royal Hotel will be like stepping into familiar memories for anyone whose had to deal with toxic behavior in a service industry position. They also cement this motion picture as another cinematic winner from the mind behind the excellent 2020 film The Assistant.
The Royal Hotel is now playing in theaters.
The Mission
After helming documentaries like The Overnights or Boys' State (either separately or together) that chronicled modern events as they unfolded, filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine opt to reflect recent events long after they occur with The Mission. The story of slain missionary John Chau is a cautionary tale about how missionary work is used to further messiah complexes and colonialist narratives, but the documentary struggles to dig really deep into the darker elements of this tale (a lack of interviews with non-white experts in various indigenous cultures keeps things more surface-level). The presentation of this particular yarn also isn't anything to write home about, there's very little in the way of notable visual elements (beyond on-screen animation often evoking the imagery seen in the pop culture that inspired Chau's life-long for "adventuring"). I can't say I was bored by The Mission, but it ultimately doesn't have much to say nor really distinctive ways of communicating what themes it does carry.
The Mission begins its limited release run in theaters on October 13, it will begin to arrive in Texas theaters on October 27.
No comments:
Post a Comment