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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Review: The Other Lamb

by Chris Feil

Fueled by a fevered intensity, Małgorzata Szumowska's The Other Lamb follows the stoic Selah (Raffey Cassidy) as she comes of age in a cult hidden within the American mountainside. Her fellow believers are all women, suggestively separated by uniforms of blue and red, and under the charms of the faux-Jesus man they refer to only as Shepherd (Michiel Huisman). Selah was born into the flock without experience of the outside world or any of its modernity, instead knowing a normalcy of blood ritual and ominous polygamy.

But as the arrival of puberty brings the threat of becoming one of the Shepherd’s many wives, Selah experiences visions that enlighten her to the sinister nature that belies her deceptively peaceful existence, setting into motion her rebellion...

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