BEAUTIFUL BOY (Amazon/October 12): A true-life story of drug addiction told with sincerity and superb acting, but which can’t shake the feel of generic problem drama. Felix Van Groeningen’s film (co-written with Luke Davies) is based on parallel memoirs by recovering addict Nic Sheff (played most of the time by It Boy Timothee Chalomet) […]
COLOSSAL (no distrib): Well, you haven’t seen this take on sci-fi spectacles before. In Nacho Vigalondo’s whatzit, party girl Gloria (Anne Hathaway) and her hometown friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) discover that they can cause their actions to be mirrored by a giant sea monster and robot terrorizing Seoul. In other words, if one of […]
THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD (Neon – TBD): The Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier, despite being a subject of critical raves over the years, hasn’t penetrated the space where arthouse favorites become known to the mainstream. (It didn’t help that his English-language debut Louder Than Bombs was a bust.) The Worst Person In the World, […]
DREDD, which kicked off the merrily disreputable Midnight Madness program at the Toronto Film Festival last night, isn’t much, but no one can say the director Pete Travis wasted his 3D budget. Things are constantly hovering, fluttering or–often–splattering in the foreground of the frame, and the images do a better job of suggesting visual depth […]
THE EYES OF TAMMY FAYE (Searchlight/Disney – in release): The reason for expanding a documentary into a scripted narrative is typically to allow for an exploration of motive and emotional background not available in the existing footage. A documentary can show what happened, but not necessarily why it happened. That makes The Eyes of […]
MARRIAGE STORY (Netflix – November 6 in theatres/December 6 streaming): A film doesn’t have to be revolutionary to be great. There may be no subjects more intensively depicted in movies and on television than marital break-ups and the miseries of divorce, yet Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is so fully realized and brilliantly performed that […]
> Gus Van Sant has been making movies for 25 years, but Restless–apart from its technical polish–feels like the work of a Sundance newcomer. And one who’s been reading too much Salinger, while meanwhile wearing out his DVD of Harold and Maude. Restless is way beyond twee; its mega-tweeness is like a Transformers movie compared […]
> Oren Moverman’s first film as a director, The Messenger, was a beautifully contained, emotionally detailed story about soldiers assigned to deliver tragic news to the families of the deceased. In his new film RAMPART, which premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, Moverman is more ambitious and, unfortunately, a victim of the sophomore jinx. This […]