Author: Don Malvasi

Seth Rogen, clad in a Star of David sweater, is tripping on mushrooms while out gallivanting with his two buddies on Christmas Eve. Before he leaves home, his pregnant wife provides him with a small box full of drugs. So it’s only natural according to the logic of dumb comedies that, after wandering away from buddies Joseph Gordon Levitt and Anthony Mackie, Rogen will end up on the steps of the very church his wife is ready to take in Christmas Eve mass with her parents. She notices he’s tripping his brains out (he’s also carrying a mast he just removed from a nativity scene) and tries to shoo him away before the parents arrive. Instead he stumbles into the crowded church with them. What results is the movie’s funniest scene that doesn’t contain Michael Shannon.

Shannon, so recently brilliant as a conniving real estate honcho in 99 Homes, comes into The Night Before with a 180-degree departure from that character in playing a hilarious philosophical drug dealer who our partying boys know from high school. In what would’ve been a barely passable gross-out comedy without him, this film directed by Jonathan Levine (the underrated 50/50) is actually saved by Shannon’s remarkable performance.

Although often annoying (the three dudes somehow, after becoming separated and without any communication with each other, suddenly show up simultaneously at the same subway station), The Night Before contains just enough funny moments to keep itself from the spoiled eggnog designation. It channels that classic of Christmas dark comedy, Bad Santa, enough to keep itself from disintegrating under its own gooey faults. Had Levine the gumption to not sell out and go wide-eyed sentimental, we may have really had something here. As is, it’s a passable stocking stuffer of a film that if it had followed its edginess, could have been a far more memorable goody bag.

Hilarity In A Christmas Eve Church and A Terrific Michael Shannon….3 stars (out of 5)

The 1950s-era drama Brooklyn possesses the unique ability to break your heart while it simultaneously renews your faith in humanity. In what could have been a setup for sentimentality in lesser hands, director John Crowley fine tunes the heartstrings into a stellar chamber piece of emotionally intense filmmaking. When young Irish immigrant Eilis (Saoirse Ronan) rolls with the punches on two different continents only to find herself in a conundrum over the incredibly weighty choices she is forced to make, it’s pure magic.

Twenty-one-year-old Ronan (an Oscar nominee at 13 years of age for Atonement) is a joy to behold. We essentially watch a young girl become a woman right before our eyes. Gifted by her sister and her widowed mom a passage to New York from her native County Wexford, Eilis arrives in Brooklyn under the watchful eye of rooming house maven Mrs. Kehoe (Julie Walters in a pip performance) and Irish priest, Father Flood (Jim Broadbent). She begins a job at Bartocci’s department store in Brooklyn Heights, where she is at first told to smile more. After she meets an Italian plumber at a dance arranged by Father Flood, her smiling at work is as wide as the ocean separating New York harbor from the cliffs of Moher.

Then, abruptly, a death in the family brings her back to Ireland, and just like that her life comes to a crossroads. At this point events seem to be happening to her independent of her own will. Yet Nick Hornby’s screenplay (an adaptation of the Colm Toibin novel) enriches the situation with a welcome ambivalence. As they become more and more crucial, Eilis’ decisions seem barely to be crafted by her. Yet on another level she is purely immersed in forging the outcome of her own fate.

An old fashioned film in the best sense of the expression, Brooklyn is the holiday movie you can take even your cranky friends to–the same friends prone to whine about films that are too stylistic, too obscure, too depressing. Brooklyn contains no highbrow artifice yet if you’re looking for the dumbed down, you won’t find that either. Its elegiac, luminous tone is a perfect fit for its superb mastery of atmosphere and craftsmanship. The 1950s depicted here feel mighty real; the underlying theme, eternal. Feel-good movies are rarely this ingeniously bittersweet–nor are their heroines this PlainJane charming.

The IBTA (I’ve Been To America) Blues and Its Ravishing Redemption….5 stars (out of 5)

A resistant Boston archdiocese that covered up a massive scandal of pedophilia among its priesthood is confronted by a crack Boston Globe team of investigative reporters in the excellent Spotlight. Among the obstacles the journalists face is a 53 percent Catholic readership who, along with the courts, were for many years manipulated into looking the other way. All is not glory for the reporters, however. Their esteemed newspaper was also guilty of burying the initial story. Their bang-up Pulitzer-prize winning investigation uncovered 70 priests and more than 1,000 victims.

Spotlight succeeds on many fronts. Not least it thrillingly captures the immense amount of work and initiative involved in a long-range investigative report. Colorful, highly believable characters leap off the screen. Spearheaded by its leader Walter “Robby” Robinson (Michael Keaton in surely an Oscar-level performance), the Spotlight team (Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Brian d’Arcy James) is assigned the troublesome case by their soft-spoken new editor Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) on his first day on the job. An outsider, Baron is not from Boston but is also “an unmarried man of the Jewish faith who hates baseball,” as one reporter says.

They soon encounter a victims’ attorney (Billy Cruddup), who quietly settled many cases with the archdiocese but won’t talk about it. When reporter Michael Rezendes (Ruffalo) looks up a victims’ attorney of an entirely different stripe, the eccentric Mitchell Garabedian (a riveting Stanley Tucci), the investigation quickly escalates. Robby’s immediate boss, Ben Bradlee, Jr. (John Slattery) fights his own skepticism about the investigation but ultimately supports his crew. When the Spotlight team after many months wants to finally run the story, Baron squelches their impulse. Let’s wait and go big, he says. Let’s get Cardinal Bernard Law himself for masterminding the cover-up.

If writer/director Tom McCarthy (The Visitor, The Station Agent, Win Win) and co-writer Josh Singer have presented one false note in this film, I certainly couldn’t find it. Their casting and scripting of interviewed victims prompts empathy with these poor souls’ initial reluctance to talk about their pasts. No shopworn flashbacks or other melodramatic devices are used.

Spotlight impressively presents the bittersweet dilemma of absolute power corrupting absolutely. It’s truly a wonder the Spotlight reporters succeed in uncovering many stories of untold grief and just as powerful ones of oppressive cover-ups. The film’s stirring coda reminds us the problems presented here were by no means exclusive to Boston. Priests, rather than fired, were typically relocated only to allow their crimes to be repeated.

Interestingly, the lawyers who buried the scandal aren’t portrayed as upfront scoundrels but instead as professionals with a built-in ability to cloud over their conscience. Predominant is the theme that lawyer/client privilege prevents their fessing up. If not for persistent journalists, it is clear none would have done so.

Which brings up the final sadness this great film presents. The events of Spotlight took place in 2002. Since then, countless layoffs have nearly decimated the newspaper business. Investigative teams like Spotlight are vastly fewer in numbers and smaller in scope. And that is a crime as big as the ones portrayed here.

The Year’s Best Ensemble Cast in The Year’s Best Film….5 stars (out of 5)

Sometimes you just need to throw out the expectations provided by the conventionalities of film–plot, developed story arc, action itself. With the Assassin, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s wuxia that was seven years in the making, a master of extreme craftsmanship throws the martial arts film on its head. The result is so beautiful to watch, you may forget you are in a movie theater. Hou constructs every scene like it was his last.

The one word that would describe his technique besides gorgeous is quiet–quite the oddity for this genre. Yet when the “action” does come, it’s so sudden and jarring, it positively stuns. That this is the most unusual martial arts film to be encountered is almost besides the point. Hou’s action, while uniquely gripping, is almost incidental to his atmospheric rendering of an epoch, a mindset, a tradition.

Hie Yinniang (an excellent Shu Qi) has finished her training with her fellow female mentor and now must perform a harrowing feat. She is instructed to kill her own cousin, Tian Ji’an (Chen Chang),to whom, incidentally, she was once betrothed. It all has to do with a rebellious province set on seceding from the royal power. Yinniang will come to display a more profound sense of self than is at first imaginable, but not before she handles many trials and tribulations along the way.

Talking about plot with Hou is like talking about the play at the Ford’s Theater the night John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln. What’s at work with Hou can only be experienced. With no guarantees that you’ll find this unique approach to filmmaking engaging, you nonetheless owe it to yourself to check him out if you consider yourself a film buff. The Taiwanese Hou, who has been wowing film festival audiences and highbrow critics for three decades, is one of our very most talented directors and to say he deserves an audience is an understatement.

Swords and Scrumptious Scenes….4.5 stars (out of 5)

Rampant plot shortcuts, large stretches of filler, and a Daniel Craig so laid back this time out he actually seems anesthetized–all add up to a dry-martini-sipping James Bond caught in a movie that’s mostly all wet.

The Bond franchise made strides toward reclaiming the high standing of the Sean Connery era with the advent of Daniel Craig as the newest Agent007 in Casino Royale. Three films later in Craig’s presumptive final go, the result is largely an overblown two hours, 20 minutes with only intermittent excitement and thrills far more predominately displayed in Craig’s first film as Bond and in the prior Skyfall.

With the daunting Spectre organization up his ass once again, Bond goes after a nemesis, Oberhauser(Christopher Waltz on autopilot), who may have a personal tie to Bond. The uncovering of this riveting information, rather than reach its dramatic potential, is treated more like an insignificant subplot that has little impact on Bond or anyone else. Ralph Fiennes is along as the new M. Together he and Bond fight against Spectre’s newly found ability to place surveillance on anyone at anytime. The film carefully avoids chastising any particular government as the peeping tom, preferring to safely portray its villains as private citizens. M’s new boss C also wishes to replace 00 agents with drones.

There’s a dilly of a scene where Bond puts the make on the widow (Monica Bellucci) of a Mafia hitman he just killed. That he does so at her husband’s funeral is engrossingly preposterous. Spectre is also the type of film where both Waltz and heavy Dave Bautista die multiple times only to somehow come to life again. Waltz also seems capable of showing up anywhere at anytime with little explanation.

If it wasn’t for Craig, who despite seeming half asleep, does his best to try to save the movie from completely going up the Genre Action Film fork in the road, and for the talented and beautiful French actress Lea Seydoux, we’d probably be talking total bomb here. The film pays ho-hum homage to previous installments on the Bond franchise. So unless you’re a forgiving Bond geek, you may as well wait for the home version. That way you can watch the riveting opening sequence, shot in one long take during a Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico City, and skip the rest (although you’d miss Seydoux).

What’s next for Bond movies? Unless Craig re-ups, they may as well sign on Liam Neeson. He’s a little old for the role but after Spectre, the Craig era has unfortunately become old-hat.

A Wild Widowmaker Grinds To A Halt… 2.5 stars (out of 5)

Portraying Dan Rather, Robert Redford perfectly captures the former CBS anchorman’s Texan vocal nuances. Yet Truth, the new film by James Vanderbilt (screenwriter, Zodiac), places its emphasis on Rather’s producer, Mary Mapes, in telling the story of their mutual downfall after televising an investigative report questioning George W. Bush’s military service. Cate Blanchett, as Mapes, displays her usual top-shelf acting talent. In one of her very best roles, here she plays a tough, ferocious journalist who is suddenly called on to get even tougher once the accuracy of the report begins to unravel.

The report, aired not long before the 2004 presidential election, came on the heels of harsh, largely inaccurate Republican “swift boat” accounts meant to discredit Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry. It addressed long-discussed issues in Bush’s service record that may very well have pointed to his receiving special treatment and thus avoiding service in Vietnam. Most glaring was a year-long a gap in his service record when he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. Mapes thinks she has a smoking gun in discovering Texas Air National Guard internal memos and she and Rather get the go-ahead to present the story on 60 Minutes.

Then, a font used in the memos is, according to sources trumpeted by right-wing bloggers and talk show hosts, thought to have not been in existence at the time of the documents. Mapes’ savvy investigative reporter team (Dennis Quaid, Topher Grace and Elizabeth Moss) eventually find evidence the font was indeed around at that time but by then key figures have backed off from their initial on-air corroborative statements. A landslide of outrage questioning the journalistic ethics of the piece proves too much to fight and Rather eventually resigns. Bruce Greenwood is very good as CBS News president Andrew Hayward, who along with other executives, sure seems quick to throw Mapes and Rather under the bus. Their wish to portray the network as politically impartial at a time so close to the election may have been a rush to judgement, the film implies. Mapes is fired but gets to deliver a stunning diatribe against the network review board. It’s quintessential Blanchett with all her guns blazing.

Vanderbilt’s screenplay favors the idea that Mapes and Rather had the essence of the larger story but fell victim due to technicalities. Not so fast. Bush very well may have become president in 200 due to a rigged election recount process. Kerry’s candidacy may have been sideswiped by shabby accounts of his Vietnam record that a gullible electorate bought as the full truth. George W. Bush probably got a free pass when it came to potentially serving in Vietnam. As deplorable as this avalanche of deception and corruption may be, Truth doesn’t do Democrats any favors in leaning toward a side on the Mapes controversy that seems to forgive sloppy journalism as long as it’s performed on behalf of a likelihood of its investigated events. That, you can bet your Edward R. Murrow, is one slippery slope. Yet Truth ought to be commended for stirring the conversation on a topic fraught with importance.

Journalistic Intrigue and a Marvelous Cate Blanchett….4 stars (out of 5)

The Club, intelligently complex yet not in the least academic, has the dynamism of a thriller. Essentially a moral fable, the Chilean director Pablo Larrain follow-up to his Oscar-nominated Film No, is at once a bold tale rooted in the reality of the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal.

Four exiled priests and a caretaker nun live a hermetic life in a house on the shore of Chile. They are prohibited from mixing in with the townspeople, and aside from singing hymns, seem to spend most of their time watching TV and surreptitiously training a greyhound who earns them a few dollars at the dog track. Then one day an outsider, Father Lazcano, another wayward priest, is brought to their door to join them. He also brings disturbing baggage with him when suddenly a bellowing vagabond is right outside the house–loudly and relentlessly detailing sexual abuse he suffered as a victim of Lazcano. The eerie vagrant, Sandokan (Roberto Farias), doesn’t intend on leaving.

A resultant tragedy ensues. It brings a Jesuit counselor, Father Garcia (Marcel Alonso) into the house. The four original priests sense he’s there to shut it down. As the priests are grilled by Garcia we learn they are not all there due to pedophilia, but one is present because he kidnapped babies from unwed mothers who he says were likely to kill their offspring. As Garcia grills them, the cynical, defensive, yet uniquely compelling priests are anything but repentant. In a strange but riveting venture into black humor, the occupants of the house, the dogs, and Sandokan share an apocalyptic sequence to the tune of Arvo Part’s Canto In Memoriam Benjamin Britten.

In Catholic terms the house clearly represents Purgatory, but one not seeming to offer a possibility of redemption. By film’s end the routine of the passive penance of the priests is replaced with a drastically altered existence. It’s an ironic yet clearly punitive decision by Father Garcia. Yes, it contains the faint possibility of renewed faith. Yet the allegory becomes a double one as a chilling realization sets in that the final state of the house also comes to symbolize plight of the current Catholic Church as it futilely deals with its shady, overbearing recent history.

In The Name of the Greyhounds and The Guttersnipe….4 stars (out of 5)

The narrative surrounding Lance Armstrong was just too good to offer much public resistance. His overcoming of testicular cancer diagnosed at age 21, his championing of promoting others to fight the disease, and not least, his seven consecutive Tour de France victories all clouded the many signals that something grim was awry. Stephen Frears’ The Program outlines the injections, the blood transfusions, the bullying, and most of all, the self-deception that eventually doomed Armstrong into disgrace. Highlighted by an excellent Ben Foster performance as Armstrong, the film also boasts a very good Chris O’Dowd as the London Sunday Times journalist who led the expose. The film’s compassion for Armstrong centers on his unqualified desire to be a champion. His “everybody’s doping” argument finally subsides when he realizes he’s lost, but not before we get a chilling glimpse into the psyche of an obsessed competitor, equal parts flinty and freaked out.

Have Bike, Will Not Break…..3.5 stars (out of 5)

Dirt-poor with no running water nor electricity, and unable to read or write, Maria (unprofessional actress Maria Mercedes Coroy) is set up by her strong-willed, well-meaning parents for an arranged marriage to the foreman of the coffee plantation they inhabit. What transpires is a revealing glimpse into the Mayan culture of the Guatemalan highlands. Maria’s gaze is so intently piercing, it isn’t hard to figure out she is constantly alert for danger. She and her parents, who speak the Kaqchikel language and virtually no Spanish, do things the way they have been done for centuries.

When Maria begins to question things, she proceeds cautiously. Yet her drive for self-expression holds steady through a caldron of superstition and physical danger, including a host of poisonous snakes. I left the film with a deep fondness for these indigenous people, high admiration for Maria’s dynamic mom (a terrific Maria Telon), and nothing but respect for Guatemalan director Jayro Bustamante. Bustamante’s excellent helpers include cinematographer Luis Armango Arteaga and veteran sound designer Julien Cloquet, who had me wondering whether the theater’s sound system was going haywire only to figure out that it was actually the eerie roar of the smoldering dormant volcano in the background. When Maria asks her friend Pepe what is on the other side of the volcano, he flippantly replies the U. S. with that little thing Mexico in between.

A Mayan Masterstroke…..4 stars (out of 5)

The highly versatile Tim Roth stars as Hank Harris, a DEA agent who gets kidnapped by a small time Mexican gun runner in 600 Miles. Sicario it is not. The film’s early scenes depict twerpy south-of-the-border Arnulfo (Kristyan Ferrer) acquiring automatic weapons at Arizona gun shops and gun shows. His pesky gringo friend Carson (Harrison Thomas) does most of the work, easily acquiring whatever automatic weapons he wants although he does get carded when he tries to buy cigarettes.

As Harris attempts to bust Arnulfo, Carson sneaks up on him and cold cocks him. Then we never see Carson again and it is left to Roth to provide any charisma. The very talented actor (and don’t forget Roth’s one foray into directing–the underrated The War Zone) can only do so much here. There is a surfeit of driving scenes where very little happens. It may be the film’s central point that unglamorous schleps like Arnulfo fit the actual profile of low-level players in the over-the-border drug game but Arnulfo is such a boring character he drags down the proceedings. First-time director Gabriel Ripstein does an impressive job with the scenes of violence that ensue but theses shots are no more than diamonds in the rough. A clever enigmatic final scene puts a nice exclamation point on things but generally 600 Miles seems half-baked and often self-consciously deliberate.

A Road Trip With Roth That Actually Feels Like It’s 600 Miles Long….2.5 stars (out of 5)