Review: Liberté

by Chris Feil

Cineastes missing human touch might find an antidote in Albert Serra’s Liberté, another gallery-ready period piece from the Catalan filmmaker. The film is a barrage of increasingly queasy, bewigged kinky fumblings in the woods with the director audaciously exploring the repetitive nature of lust.

Set just prior to the French Revolution, Liberté opaquely follows a set of libertines who have been banished from the king’s court. Opening on the fringes of a forrest at dusk, the voice of one of them describes the public torture and dismemberment of a prisoner in brutal detail. The story goes beyond the biologically possible, the telling centering as much on the violence as the response from those who witness it. “The crowd enjoyed the show,” he muses, “and you know, I have a taste for these things.” As this grotesque story preambles for the audience, the film's extremity is as much about voyeurism to the act as the act itself.

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Review: Bad Education

by Tony Ruggio

Filmmaker Cory Finley is fast becoming an auteur. That much is clear, and more, when watching his second directorial effort Bad Education, a great film unfortunately relegated to the streaming fringes of HBO. A film this good would’ve been poised to make a bigger splash with Netflix or Amazon, as well as contend for Oscars over Emmys.

Hugh Jackman gives the best performance of his career as Frank Tassone, a Long Island area school district superintendent who in the early aughts, along with district business manager Pamela Gluckin (Allison Janney) and others, embezzled millions of dollars from school funds to support their lavish lifestyles... 

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Review: Extraction

by Tony Ruggio

Chris Hemsworth, good actor and better action hero that he is, has had a helluva time finding material worth his salt outside of Marvel. Directed by first-time feature filmmaker Sam Hargrove and produced by the Russo brothers, it’s a rough-and-tumble action film set mostly in the slums of Bangladesh. His name is Tyler Rake and he’s a mercenary with a troubled past, hired to whisk and wend his way out of dangerous slums with a drug lord’s kidnapped son intact. Where have we seen this before?

Well, never mind the plot, silly and often pedestrian, and focus instead on the action. It's visceral and often well-choreographed... 

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Review: True History of the Kelly Gang

by Chris Feil

For director Justin Kurzel, folklore goes hand in hand with with gorgeous brutality. After emerging with the true crime saga The Snowtown Murders and then the Fassbender double of Macbeth and Assassin’s Creed, Kurzel has established himself through a fascination with grisly legend, rending violence with stoic sheen and brooding male personas. His latest, True History of the Kelly Gang, is no different but somewhat more accomplished.

The film follows the rise of the infamous Ned Kelly, a tale you might have seen in the many, many cinematic retellings. Here George MacKay plays the historical figure with crumbling psychosis. Instead of a detailed account of the actions of his band of outlaws, this version (adapted from Peter Carey’s novel by Snowtown’s screenwriter Shaun Grant) charts Kelly’s exploits from adolescence to execution, delivering more of a character study of Kelly as a psychological victim of British imperialism. Along the way is an ensemble of characters that oppose him in ways big and small, from The Babadook’s Essie Davis as his bitter mother, to Russell as Harry Power showing the preteen Ned his first brushes with violence, to Nicholas Hoult as the film’s dandy police officer villain Fitzpatrick.

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Review: Endings, Beginnings

by Chris Feil

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, one of the past decade's best examinations of the messy terrain between mental health and romantic entanglements, hilariously gave us a number called "Sexy French Depression". Skewering the French New Wave aesthetic, the song (co-written by recently departed genius Adam Schlesinger) spoofed not only our outsized self-perceptions, but a wan glamorization of female depression in cinema. It’s a trope you’ve seen before and will see again.

That vibe is very much at play in Drake Doremus' new minor key film Endings, Beginnings, where Shailene Woodley suffers from an actually rather sexy but very Los Angeles depression. Woodley stars as art programmer Daphne, in a rut after a recent breakup sends her (back, apparently) to her sister's poolhouse as she tries to find a job between art club sessions with Kyra Sedgwick and performing R.E.M. at karaoke. Woodley is solid, but in Doremus' hands, the most cliche version of Los Angeles plays itself.

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