TV MVP: Riz Ahmed in "The Night Of"

Chris Feil on HBO's latest buzzy drama...

HBO has gotten back into the crime genre with the launch of new limited series The Night Of. Adapted from the BBC's Criminal Justice, the series has more than a few shades of Serial thrown in as it examines the gruesome murder at its center. While the new series has already established a patient fascination with glacial detail, what has kept it from becoming a flat procedural is the fascinating performance by Riz Ahmed as murder suspect Naz.

Just as he served up a humane human foil to Jake Gyllenhaal's psychopath in Nightcrawler, Ahmed brings a necessary soulfulness to this otherwise cold world in The Night Of. In the lead up to and fallout from the crime, Naz makes an endless string of bad decisions that the actor effortlessly makes believable. He is a wounded deer in the headlights, alternating masked sexual nerves, outsiderness, and blind panic. If the script makes Naz out to be a naive dope, then it's to Ahmed's credit that he finds the honesty about why he would willfully put himself in an obviously toxic situation.

With an insurmountable amount of evidence against him and a convenient blackout during the murder, it's the raw believability of the actor that drives our doubt about Naz's guilt...

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Teensy Reviews: 6 Films We Didn't Review Properly

These reviews could fit in a tweet. Presented to assuage Nathaniel's guilt from not having properly reviewed them when they arrived, though he sometimes dropped hints of his feelings in other contexts.

IN THEATERS

Swiss Army Man (Daniels)
Story: A suicidal man (Paul Dano) finds companionship and a new zest for life when he meets a corpse (Daniel Radcliffe)
Review: Wobbly start, Self sabotaging end. But, Oh!, those imaginative mental heights in the middle. 
Grade: Middle Hour: A- / The Rest: C+

Genius (Michael Grandage)
Story: An account of the long working relationship between famed editor Max Perkins (Colin Firth) and one of his literary finds Thomas Wolfe (Jude Law). Let us not mention the women (Nicole Kidman, The Lovely Laura Linney) lest we rage again at the terrible gender politics
Review: The work of an editor is shape & rhythm, so why is a film about a great one lumpy and lead-footed? Over and under-acted at once. 
Grade: D- 
Extra: Amir's festival review

The Shallows (Jaume Collet-Serra)
Story: A grieving med school dropout is attacked by a shark and stranded in the ocean alone. Can she survive? Review: Mechanical, but that's meant as a compliment. It plays. Slight with just enough bite (sorry). Bonus points for Steven Seagull.
Grade: B 

ON DVD & BLURAY

The Bronze (Bryan Buckley)
Story: Two former Olympic champions (Melissa Rauch & Sebastian Stan) fight over a promising new female gymnast
Review: Rude and daring. But its suffocatingly narrow comic tone mars the promising conceit, good jokes, and a lunatic sex scene. 
Grade: C+ 

How to Be Single (Christian Ditter)
Story: Four single girls (Dakota Johnson, Leslie Mann, Rebel Wilson, Alison Brie) try to find themselves... and maybe a boyfriend... in Manhattan.
Review: Unexpectedly involving performances. Fun. And yet, as uneven and generic as first dates. One entire storyline needs to go.
Grade: B- 

10 Cloverfield Lane (Dan Trachtenberg)
Story: A woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) wakes up chained up by a man (John Goodman) in an underground shelter. Should she fear the man or the apocalypse he swears is raging outside the bunker? 
Review: Discomforting. What it lacks in scope, it makes up for in propulsive plotting: from frying pan to fire to inferno.
Grade: B 

Doc Corner: 'Miss Sharon Jones!'

Glenn here. Each Tuesday we bring you reviews and features on documentaries from theatres, festivals, and on demand.

Barbara Kopple is an old-fashioned filmmaker who is free of flash. Whether she is documenting the lives of everyday people or celebrities, she has a knack for zeroing in on subjects whose lives demand closer inspection. We saw this in Shut Up & Sing about the Dixie Chicks and her Oscar-winning debut masterpiece Harlan County, USA, even in A Conversation with Gregory Peck, which we looked at recently. And we see it again in her latest film, Miss Sharon Jones! What could have been a simple tribute doc becomes something much more poignant by pointing her camera at a subject who’s trademark energy and spirit has been pointedly struck down my destructive cancer and its ramifications on those around her.

The early parts of Kopple’s film are actually a lot like its subject: hectic. A rough start that shows signs of a filmmaker at uncharacteristic odds with how to tell her story. In these early passages we get our only instances of awkward narration, out-of-place talking head testimonial that never appear again, and an all-too brief history lesson that isn’t thorough enough to add anything of any real consequence. The editing is skittish, bouncing around the story, cutting off performances, and taking unnecessary diversions. Was Jones not allowing herself to be truly seen on camera? Who knows, but it thankfully doesn’t last when at the 30-minute mark Kopple’s camera remains fixed on Jones as she performs “The Eye is On the Sparrow” in a gospel church. It doesn’t cut, it doesn’t flinch, it just lets Jones’ miraculous voice and performance physicality take over. The film is never the same. [more...]

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Review: Ghostbusters (2016)

This review was originally published in Nathaniel's column at Towleroad

Remember when Sony rebooted Sam Raimi’s take on Spider-Man (2002) with The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)? Their whole conceit at the time appeared to be “What if you didn’t know the story?” so they just told it again. Only everyone actually did know the story. The result was an instantly forgettable retread, useless but for the printing of money. While that may have been the whole point, it left a lousy corporate aftertaste. It took the world gargling with some Marvel Studios mouthwash (aka Captain America: Civil War) to make people excited about Spidey again.

The good news is that the mega corporation appears to have learned from their mistakes. Ghostbusters NOW does not moronically assume you don’t know Ghostbusters THEN. Sure, it’s the same story again — the Ghostbusters set up shop, refine technobabble gadgets, fight against a supernatural invasion of New York and the bureaucrats that get in their way — but writer/director Paul Feig and his cowriter Katie Dippold (who wrote The Heat together) have correctly guessed that the fun of the movie will be in the makeover. 

the ladies fighting the (undead) patriarchy

The story gets a new look, freshened up details, and most famously, four female Ghostbusters and a male receptionist in place of the original’s four men and a female receptionist; that gender inversion proved more revolutionary that any rational human might have expected because a lot of manbabies have been freaking out on the internet ever since...

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Review: The Infiltrator

Manuel here with a review of The Infiltrator which opened yesterday nationwide.

Fact: Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic is one of the most influential films of the 21st century. That’s not a qualitative assessment but an increasingly common thought that’s rankled in my brain. Can you believe Soderbergh actually struggled to get his film financed because Hollywood execs didn’t think audiences would want to watch an entire film about the drug trade?

Fast-forward to summer 2016 when USA is premiering Queen of the South, Netflix will bring us season 2 of Narcos, two competing El Chapo TV series are in development, and Bryan Cranston’s The Infiltrator joins an ever-growing list of films about the war on drugs that range from the sublime (Sicario) to the pedestrian (Blow) with everything in between (Savages, anyone?).

In Brad Furman’s The Infiltrator, the Breaking Bad actor plays U.S. Customs Service special agent Robert Mazur who, as is par for the course in certain genres, decides to take on one last job to go undercover as “Bob Musella.”...

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