Movie review by Greg Carlson

The borders of the real and imagined assume a prominent place in Josephine Decker’s “Madeline’s Madeline,” the new feature from the talented filmmaker of “Butter on the Latch” and “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely.” As a richly layered metanarrative that utilizes the vehicles of acting, performance, and improvisation as the means to probe a complex emotional triangle involving a troubled young woman, her mother, and her theater teacher, Decker’s movie is a visual and auditory odyssey. Newcomer Helena Howard is explosive as the titular teenager, an intense explorer and deeply committed student who channels her demons into a series of stage exercises overseen by Molly Parker’s out-there coach Evangeline.

In what many admirers will see as a shrewd piece of cross-casting opposite Parker, Miranda July is Madeline’s concerned mom Regina. As the events unfold, audience allegiance to the parent and the role model shifts alongside the confused and frustrated Madeline. Decisions made by each person escalate the drama, and Decker handles the works — manipulations, humiliations, and aggressions both micro and macro — with supreme skill. While many of the cruel actions elicit gasps, none read as false.  

The unidentified mental health issues faced by Madeline and the character’s subjective interactions with her world guide the presentation of the content. Decker, working again with cinematographer Ashley Connor, plays with textures so convincingly that “Madeline’s Madeline” quickly transcends the simplistic formula in which a person’s fraying perception is expressed via filmmaking technique (like “Repulsion” or “Black Swan” or dozens and dozens of other examples). Connor, operating a custom rig that allows for close physical proximity to the actors, transforms her roving lens into a character.  

Chris O’Falt notes that Connor’s camerawork has a “liquid-like aspect to the focus, and the image is often slightly doubled or warped, while out-of-focus translucent objects come into the edges of frame to cause pockets of soft, sometimes colorful blurring.” Some viewers will be put off by Decker’s level of comfort with abstraction and shifting depth of field, but for those willing to embrace Madeline’s perilous journey, with all its highs and lows, the style is integral to the story. In this sense, “Madeline’s Madeline” demands repeat viewings to unpack the dazzling manner in which Decker uses the cinema to probe the nature of the creative process itself.           

In one of the movie’s most electric scenes, Evangeline invites Madeline to a dinner party at her home in a potentially inappropriate violation of teacher-student boundaries. Decker’s acute awareness of Madeline’s age and vulnerabilities shapes the film into a potent bildungsroman, despite — or perhaps due to — the outsize talent possessed by both Madeline and Howard. The growing pains dramatized here can make you squirm, and the threat of violence is clear from the beginning of the movie. Howard is given a perfect canvas on which to paint a masterpiece of a screen debut, as Evangeline’s questionable if not unethical decision to use Madeline’s personal experiences as the basis for her theatrical piece simultaneously flatters Madeline with attention and pushes her to the very edge of destruction.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Spike Lee’s stated desire to comment on current events through the colorful prism of a 1970s-set period piece reaps tremendous rewards in Cannes Grand Prix winner “BlacKkKlansman,” a startling and brilliant addition to the veteran filmmaker’s top tier. Loosely based on Ron Stallworth’s autobiographical memoir, Lee’s film dramatizes the utterly unbelievable story of the first African-American officer and detective on the force of the Colorado Springs Police Department. Stallworth, using the telephone, established a relationship with members of a local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, sending a white proxy for face-to-face meetings as he infiltrated the organization.

In the movie, Stallworth is portrayed by John David Washington. Adam Driver plays Flip Zimmerman, Stallworth’s counterpart and fellow undercover operative. Together, the two men create a complex composite, and Lee balances the unique pressures and dangers of the dual subterfuge. Like “Sorry to Bother You,” another 2018 release that addresses code-switching via the presumption of a “Black voice” and a “white voice” ideal for telephone communication, “BlacKkKlansman” captures the nuances of identity construction as modified for particular audiences and situations. While Stallworth keeps the secret of his occupation hidden from Colorado College Black Student Union president Patrice Dumas (Laura Harrier), so too must Zimmerman hide his Jewish heritage from the racists with whom he is now spending significant time.

At one point, Zimmerman confides to Stallworth that because he was not raised in the Jewish faith, he has not previously contemplated that dimension of his culture. Hanging out with violent practitioners of antisemitism, however, now causes Zimmerman to think about it every day. Lee has always demonstrated expertise and clarity when presenting conflict between polarities (from the gender-based double standards faced by Nola in feature debut “She’s Gotta Have It,” to the divisions of colorism in “School Daze,” to Radio Raheem’s homage to the iconic love/hate speech from “The Night of the Hunter” in “Do the Right Thing”), and “BlacKkKlansman” spits fire in this regard.

In what might be the movie’s most riveting sequence, Lee crosscuts between a KKK initiation presided over by David Duke (played to perfection by Topher Grace in one of the film’s many terrific supporting turns) and a student gathering in which the horrific details of the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco, Texas are recounted by Harry Belafonte’s civil rights activist Jerome Turner. Toggling between the locations, Lee and longtime editor Barry Alexander Brown present unsettling footage of the white-robed bigots cheering their favorite scenes in a celebratory screening of D. W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” and the gruesome, professionally shot photographs of Washington’s charred and brutalized corpse, which would be sold as souvenir postcards.

That scene concludes with parallel chants of “White Power!” and “Black Power!” in what one imagines would be the film’s peak example of Lee’s facility with diametric binaries. The filmmaker’s fiercest masterstroke, however, arrives in a late-amended coda showing images from the events and aftermath of the 2017 “Unite the Right” demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia. Donald Trump’s inexcusable, indefensible, David Duke-endorsed “many sides” response and the killing of Heather Heyer are included. We realize instantly that despite the presence and plentitude of the preceding tale’s humor, tragedy eclipses comedy. And past and present are close siblings.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Elsie Fisher’s Kayla Day is the lonely but indefatigable middle-school protagonist of first-time feature filmmaker Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade,” a winning addition to the pantheon of the adolescent cinematic bildungsroman. What details and nuances other performers might have brought to the role we wouldn’t dare to imagine, so perfect is Fisher’s take. She constructs a brilliant characterization utterly unselfconscious in its self-consciousness. There are millions like Kayla, permanently chained to the glowing screens of cellphone, tablet, and laptop — but Fisher is essential. Without her, the movie would be difficult to imagine.   

While the hopes and dreams, as well as the challenges and embarrassments, of “Eighth Grade” are universal experiences, the technological containers in which they manifest make Burnham’s film an instant time capsule. Kayla follows a long line of young movie characters who find opportunities to create distance between themselves and their parents, but her methods involve nonstop scrolling through Instagram, earbud volume loud enough to ignore the attention of father Mark (Josh Hamilton). And as it has been for some time, the World Wide Web is a simulacrum offering intensified, accelerated fantasies and horrors from self-constructed projections of the curated “best life” to candid tutorials on oral sex.   

The ambitious host of a YouTube channel bereft of viewers and subscribers, Kayla commits to “really putting herself out there” via the diary-like doses of solid advice she shares to the internet. Burnham uses Kayla’s clips to structure the film, and the nuggets of wisdom imparted in the interstitials as direct camera address never fail to find their mark. Innocent and earnest, the lessons are so obviously the remedies and prescriptions that Kayla can’t bring herself to swallow. Signing off each installment with a cheerful “Gucci!,” Kayla — like so many kids who express themselves in similar fashion — interestingly projects a more confident persona via the mediated world than she dares attempt face-to-face with her peers.

In the real spaces of the hallways and classrooms at her school, Kayla navigates the minefield of potential humiliations by remaining quiet and observant. Curiously, she does not enjoy the companionship of a close friend and confidante with whom she can commiserate, a circumstance intensified when she and some fellow soon-to-be-freshmen shadow high schoolers. Kayla’s partner is Olivia (Emily Robinson), who invites Kayla to hang out at the mall. Nearly unable to contain herself, Kayla soaks up the conversation of Olivia and friends at the food court. The hilarious scene is one of several in which Burnham reiterates a cyclical, generational motif of the similarities and differences that exist with just a few years of distance.

At the age of 27, Burnham has a tremendous ear for contemporary culture, and his own background as a YouTuber is vividly reflected in the details of “Eighth Grade.” The plot is resolutely low-key. Kayla’s world is distinct from the ones inhabited by Dawn Wiener in “Welcome to the Dollhouse” (as noted by Leslie Felperin) and Nadine Franklin in “The Edge of Seventeen” (with which “Eighth Grade” shares a number of depictions of deeply awkward teen rites of passage). Burnham nails audience identification with his heroine, however, and sequences like the pool party — a “squirmy tour de force embellished with a punctuating zoom and a plangent sense of dread” according to Manohla Dargis — demonstrate the work of a talented newcomer.   

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Tim Wardle’s documentary “Three Identical Strangers” shares the seemingly impossible tale of brothers Eddy Galland, David Kellman, and Bobby Shafran, separated-at-birth triplets who discovered one another as young adults in 1980. Recipient of the U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Storytelling shortly after its world premiere at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, the movie draws on new interviews and a strong archive of visual material to paint a colorful but troubling picture of a secret study that aimed in part to gather information about nature versus nurture.

At the age of 19, Shafran showed up at Sullivan County Community College in New York to an utterly surreal welcome, as people he had never met greeted him with warm hugs and kisses. He quickly realized the students had mistaken him for someone named Eddy, and a visit with one of his doppelganger’s friends arrived at the strange truth. Eddy and Bobby met face to face in Long Island and local and regional media interest followed the long-odds discovery. And then, an even bigger bombshell detonated as David spotted an article on the siblings and recognized himself. Another meeting and the Three Musketeers were off to the races.     

Reconstructing certain key events with dramatized flashbacks, Wardle gets much more mileage from the energetic section following the pre-internet celebrity of the brothers as they dazzle and delight on talk shows and in magazine articles. Playing up their “uncanny” similarities (same smokes, same taste in women, same key interests, etc.), the fellows pour on the charm with matching mannerisms, matching outfits and hairdos, and matching smiles. Madonna invites them to make a cameo in “Desperately Seeking Susan.” They party at the Copa and Studio 54. They open their signature SoHo restaurant Triplet’s and capitalize on the perfect combination of extroverted bonhomie and heartwarming human interest that draws booming business.

But the good times don’t last. Tragedy looms along with the nasty truth surrounding the circumstances of the adoptions. The roller coaster of emotional swings inherent in the story presents Wardle with a narrative conundrum that splits the film with a tonal challenge of communicating the extent of the joy and the pain. Beginning with the weird thrill and jubilance of the unexpected reunion and ending with the grim mystery of the unethical experiment that split up the brothers in the first place, Wardle shifts from the rapid-fire montage illustrating brotherly love to the tearful nightmare initiated by Viola Bernard and Peter Neubauer and facilitated through adoption agency Louise Wise Services.     

“Three Identical Strangers” also hints at more subplots and characters than the length will sustain. The boys were carefully placed with parents that had already adopted an older daughter. One family was working class, one was middle class, and one was well-heeled. None were told of the existence of the other two boys. Especially tantalizing is the supporting appearance of Paula Bernstein and Elyse Schein, authors of the memoir “Identical Strangers” and unwitting participants in the same set of research. Viewers eager to learn more may wish to seek out Lori Shineski’s 2017 film “The Twinning Reaction,” which also explores the same study.   

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Making his feature directorial debut, “The Grudge” writer Stephen Susco scares up a handful of unnerving images and grim thoughts in “Unfriended: Dark Web,” a standalone follow-up to the incredibly profitable 2014 Blumhouse film. Like the first “Unfriended,” “Dark Web” was produced at a cost of roughly one million dollars, practically guaranteeing a big return on investment by the conclusion of its opening weekend. The second installment retains the visual gimmick of delivering the entire story through a series of websites, login pages, applications, video chats, windows, text messages, folders, drop-down menus, and other familiar computer screen experiences that members of the target demographic will instantly recognize.

As a relatively new subset, or extension, of the found footage technique that has existed for a long time, the computer screen point-of-view, or screencast, borrows key tropes from established, hallmark films. Susco mixes in everything from first person camera perspectives ala Robert Montgomery’s 1947 “Lady in the Lake” to the tight close-ups of distressed, sobbing, and almost always doomed unfortunates that call to mind Heather Donahue in “The Blair Witch Project.” One of the first movies to successfully deliver the screen-exclusive storytelling device was Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg’s 2013 short “Noah,” and while a few aspects of the approach have evolved these past five years, the basic gist in “Dark Web” is the same.

“Dark Web” skips the supernatural dimension of the previous “Unfriended” for malevolence grounded in conspiracy theories growing out of the shadowy and unindexed destinations of the World Wide Web that conjure longstanding nightmares of the worst kind of criminal acts, including kidnapping, theft, and murder. Susco combines several of these scenarios via the journey of Matias (Colin Woodell), a tech-savvy guy who has apparently acquired a used laptop that still contains all kinds of sensitive files. Matias, desperate to win back the love of Amaya (Stephanie Nogueras), also participates in a regular game night group video chat with a circle of their close friends. Needless to say, the previous owner of Matias’ computer is a very bad person, and following the exposition/set-up, Susco shifts toward a variation on “The Old Dark House”/“And Then There Were None” approach to supporting characters.

While the body count increases, Susco plays with a few interpretations of cat-and-mouse, although the balance of power never really swings in favor of Matias and his pals. In one scene, a character suffers the horror of swatting, and while the details are farfetched in Susco’s dramatization, echoes of the 2017 death of Andrew Finch in Wichita, Kansas raise questions about the filmmakers’ willingness to caricature unsavory realities of genuine harassment. April Wolfe even argues that the movie “inadvertently glorifies hacker chaos trolls and criminals as hyper-intelligent masterminds,” and her point is worth contemplating, although she goes on to acknowledge the conundrum of critiquing the horror genre on the basis of morality.  

One would think that at least some of the contemporary specifics of the screencast approach to narrative filmmaking come with the inevitability of rapid obsolescence as social media platforms, and the way in which we use them, change and morph. Will these films be viewed one day as curiosities, time capsules, or something else? No matter what happens to the style, there is surely an aspect of movies like “Unfriended: Dark Web” that inspire critical viewers to wonder about the amount of time that so many of us already spend each day looking at a monitor.    

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Brett Haley follows “The Hero” with another intimate and small-scale drama that touches on love and loss, looking back and moving forward. Nick Offerman, who provided memorable support in “The Hero” as Sam Elliott’s drug connection, assumes lead duties as Brooklyn record store proprietor Frank Fisher. Coming to grips with the imminent closure of his shop and the cross-country relocation of his daughter Sam (Kiersey Clemons) to UCLA medical school, widower Frank avoids the realities of his midlife crossroads by way of improvisational and, as it turns out, highly productive songwriting collaborations with the reluctant but talented Sam.

Despite her aptitude for cardiological studies, Sam takes genuine pleasure in “jam sesh time” with her pop. And just like that, father and daughter build and record a track that Frank uploads to Spotify and minor indie mix glory. Akin to the John Carney trio of “Once,” “Begin Again,” and “Sing Street,” “Hearts Beat Loud” occupies that cinematic sweet spot that sprinkles enough pixie dust on music composition montages for us to suspend our disbelief at the tough process of making art. Keegan DeWitt supplies the music, effectively selling the deceptively simple combination of instruments as the work of Frank and Sam (Offerman and Clemons play and sing).

Haley, working again with co-screenwriter Marc Basch, revels in the unhurried pace and quiet revelations that give the actors plenty of space to build and explore characterization. Offerman’s role as written is meatier than the one played by Clemons, but both performers — especially in their scenes together — zero in on the complexities of their relationship. The absence of Sam’s mother/Frank’s partner is effectively integrated. Allison Shoemaker, for “Consequence of Sound,” recognizes one of the movie’s joys in how that grief registers, writing that “Offerman makes his choices look like survival instincts.”

The most interesting interpersonal dynamic in “Hearts Beat Loud” blossoms in the specific and particular way in which Frank and Sam navigate their roles and responsibilities. The loss of Sam’s mom continues to be processed in ways individuated by Haley and Basch, manifesting in scenes like the one in which Sam learns to ride a bicycle, and the subsequent confrontation over her missing curfew. Sam and Frank, especially through the awkward magnet of their aptly-named duo We’re Not a Band, are as much friends as they are parent and child. Clearly, Frank’s pressure on Sam to see where their music might take them cleverly allows Haley to invert the typical trope of sensible adult/dreamy kid.

Moviegoers looking for something darker and edgier won’t find it in the crowd-pleasing fuzz of “Hearts Beat Loud,” but I don’t think Haley should be faulted for his tone. So many potential cliches are deliberately ignored (Haley veteran Blythe Danner’s challenges with aging and possible dementia as Frank’s mom/Sam’s grandma may come closest to stepping on the line) that repeat viewings will reward the watcher with tiny details in the low-key interactions between and among the central cast. The supporting players, including Ted Danson (tending bar!) and especially Toni Collette and Sasha Lane, add to the good vibrations of Haley’s sweet summer tune.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

The career of legendary Hollywood iconoclast Hal Ashby is given a thorough assessment in “Hal,” one of this year’s several top-notch biographical documentaries and an absolute must-see for cinephiles. Making her feature debut as director, Amy Scott — whose own background as an editor closely aligns her with obsessive cutter Ashby — draws heavily from the research of Nick Dawson, author of “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel.” The resulting film is a colorful portrait of an underappreciated master moviemaker whose marijuana-fueled, hippie sensibilities only enhanced the deep connection he felt to so many of the outsiders and dreamers who populated his films.

Scott is more interested in Ashby’s work than in his personal life, concentrating attention on the run of the filmmaker’s seven key movies of the 1970s, spanning from directorial debut “The Landlord” to the more-apt-than-ever “Being There.” The film does not, however, ignore Ashby’s prodigious appetite for drugs and his string of romantic partnerships that included five marriages. Scott strikes an effective balance between the public and the private, often acknowledging the intersection of the two in the ongoing battles waged between the filmmaker and the studio executives that Ashby viewed as nothing less than demons in tailored suits.

In addition to audio recordings of phone calls and conversations that allow the voice of Ashby to consistently represent himself as narrator, Scott invites Ben Foster to read excerpts from the letters that the director would furiously tap out to the objects of his love and his ire. Both Ashby’s words and his own voice complement the impressive lineup of luminaries who agreed to be interviewed for the film, and when unavailable for whatever reason, Scott draws on some terrific archival clips. Ruth Gordon, obviously, could not record and Bud Cort declined, but both are nicely represented in a vital section on “Harold and Maude” so tantalizing it could readily sustain its own full-length documentary.

Despite the cult devotion for “Harold and Maude” that would be sustained years later in the work of Ashby admirers like Wes Anderson (who landed Cort for the memorable role of bond company stooge Bob Ubell in “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”), Scott furnishes solid segments on Ashby’s other essential movies. Both “The Last Detail” and “Coming Home” are discussed with a passion and verve that will inspire fresh visits to the films, and “Bound for Glory” and “Shampoo” are treated with appropriate insight and reverence. Through each, Scott illuminates Ashby’s maverick, anti-authoritarian ethos.  

Along with his superhuman abilities at the controls of the motorized plates and rollers of the massive flatbed motion picture editing systems from which he could conjure magic, Ashby adored the characters brought to life by so many talented performers. Owen Gleiberman even asserts in his “Variety” review of “Hal” that Ashby was the “anti-Kubrick, treating each actor as the center of the universe.” Followers know that Ashby’s party ended with the dawn of the 1980s, and that chronologically arbitrary dividing line represents an eerily prophetic demarcation fixing the man firmly in time and place. Even though he made several more movies in the years before his death at the age of 59 from pancreatic cancer, Ashby no longer enjoyed the level of creative control that accompanied his staggering string of seven consecutive masterworks, but that initial septet is as good as the output of any filmmaker in the same period of time.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarin remember their late grandmother in “306 Hollywood,” an appealing mixture of nonfiction and magical realism the filmmakers have dubbed “normalized magic.” Premiering in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival, the film will be broadcast as part of the 31st season of public television’s “POV” series following a number of festival screenings. “306 Hollywood” has been compared to the audio segments one might hear on NPR’s “This American Life” or “Radiolab,” but the filmmakers use their visual sensibilities to great advantage. A seemingly simple house, and all the objects accumulated within, turn out to be a splendid gift to the viewers who will immediately recognize familiar aspects and dimensions of their own departed loved ones.

“306 Hollywood” is the mediated monument to Annette Ontell, a New Jersey grandmother who lived what many might describe as a full but unremarkable life at the title address. The Bogarins are shrewd and competent storytellers, however, melting down that “unremarkable” adjective to poke at questions of grief and the way we honor the lives of the ones who have meant the most to us on an intimate level. Midway through the movie, a visit to Bob Clark, the full-time Director of Archives at the Rockefeller Archive Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York, invites what might be the key question of the story: are ordinary people less important than the titans of history whose accomplishments are preserved and shared at a more privileged rate?

Clark’s answer is a good and satisfying one, and the Bogarins — who may already have suspected how the response would shape their feature — add to Ontell’s legacy even when they focus attention on a wonderfully curated group of outsiders. M.I.T. professor and physicist Alan Lightman addresses the mysticism of presence and absence at the molecular level. Fashion and textile conservator Nicole Bloomfield analyzes the dresses constructed by Ontell, who designed fashionable clothing for wealthy New York women and always sewed a copy for herself from the leftover fabric. Jonathan’s affinity for time spent in Rome leads us to the Biblioteca Casanatense for a lesson on cataloguing that will delight anyone who has ever admired the work of a devoted librarian.

But no matter how far away Elan and Jonathan take us from the house, Grandma Annette looms large, courtesy of a decade’s worth of videotaped interviews that began when she was 83 years old. It is hard to say whether “306 Hollywood” could have been completed without those recordings, given the vivacious personality of Ontell and the candid way in which she responds to all sorts of queries. In one sequence, which has divided reviewers, Ontell is coaxed into trying on an old dress by her daughter and granddaughter. A corresponding sequence, in which dancers twirl elegantly in the grass of Ontell’s front yard, affirms the highly particular vision of the Bogarins.

That lovely image, and several others, like the display of old clothing on the house’s rooftop and exterior siding and a rainbow assortment of old toothbrushes and dentures, evoke the compositional symmetries of Wes Anderson, cited along with Agnes Varda by the Bogarins as an inspiration. A scene in which actors lip-synch a tape-recorded 1972 family argument in the very room where it took place recalls Clio Barnard’s “The Arbor,” and the presence of a custom scale model of Ontell’s home, meticulously designed and executed by master dollhouse builder Rick Maccione with wallpaper by Evan Raney and miniatures by Frank Galica, coincidentally echoes “Hereditary,” another Sundance premiere deeply attentive to family, albeit in a decidedly different genre.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Boots Riley hallucinates a wildly funny feature debut with “Sorry to Bother You,” a sharp-fanged social satire that mashes up the innovative handmade aesthetics of Michel Gondry with the fierce truth-to-power consciousness of Spike Lee. As uneven as it is addictively watchable, the movie caroms from sharply on-point to murkily broad. Fans of alternate reality dystopian nightmares like Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy” and Richard Kelly’s “Southland Tales,” two of a smallish number of fellow genre torchbearers, will help assure the movie’s future cult status. Love it or lump it, “Sorry to Bother You” is perfectly situated for the messed-up cloud cuckoo land infected by the down-is-up, black-is-white fabrications of life under the current presidential administration.  

The film opens with a brilliant sight gag summarizing the hapless financial straits dogging Cassius Green (Lakeith Stanfield), whose significant bright spot is his romantic relationship with visual artist Detroit (Tessa Thompson). The desperate Cassius finds employment at a shady outfit called RegalView, working the phones as a telemarketer under pressure to make sales or risk termination. A tip from veteran closer Langston (Danny Glover) to “use your white voice” is the movie’s most obvious application of code-switching, but Riley will extend his consideration to wonder aloud about the degrees of Blackness performed by everyday people as well as wealthy entertainers.

Riley’s agenda is so comprehensive, there is virtually nothing the filmmaker doesn’t incinerate with his barrage of Molotov cocktails. High on the list are corporate evil, capitalist greed, mass media numbness, the insidiousness of casual racism, and the challenge of remaining true to principles when faced with the temptations of selling out and/or seeking financial security. Not all of Riley’s commentary lands with equal dexterity, but the filmmaker’s spirit of experimentation is so loose and comfortable, the absolutely bananas dreamscape of the film’s later segments boasts a kind of surreal weirdness almost never seen at your local multiplex.    

That’s not to say that “Sorry to Bother You” is completely unprecedented, despite the presence of its brain-melting “equisapiens.” The Halloween costume-inspired popularity of Cassius’ soda can head injury, in both theory and application, plays an awful lot like the runaway “success” of the plastic blackface masks inspired by “Mantan: The New Millennium Minstrel Show” in Lee’s “Bamboozled,” a movie from which Riley borrows much. Another of Lee’s favorite bits — off-the-wall television parodies broadcast in-universe — manifests in the gonzo gameshow “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me,” one of Riley’s reminders of the depths of humiliation not too far away from existing “reality” programming.   

The all-in culmination of Riley’s manifesto, a dark metaphor featuring a coke-fueled, sarong-appreciating Armie Hammer as a rich and terrifying overlord named Steve Lift, will split viewer opinion, but it is not the only element that will attract criticism. The protagonist of “Sorry to Bother You” is most certainly Cassius, but Riley fails to carve out the richer opportunities that Thompson’s Detroit deserves. Despite industry credits stretching back to 2005, Thompson has more recently broken through to tremendous exposure via standout performances in higher-profile projects from “Dear White People” to “Creed” to “Thor: Ragnarok,” and is a major star in the making. Not surprisingly, you miss Detroit when she is not on screen.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Filmmaker Debra Granik’s “Leave No Trace,” based on Peter Rock’s novel “My Abandonment,” demonstrates some spiritual and stylistic kinship with the director’s tremendous “Winter’s Bone,” but the new film stakes out the emotionally intense territory shared by a father and his daughter living off the grid as a means of self-care/self-preservation and survival. Ben Foster turns in a predictably excellent performance as Will, a veteran with serious PTSD. Will’s thirteen-year-old daughter Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), it would appear, is the single motivation and responsibility that keeps the man’s demons at bay. Together, they live quietly, furtively, and out of sight of institutions, authority figures, and most other aspects of society.

Building on interests explored in “Winter’s Bone,” Granik doubles down on the instinctive, often unspoken rhythms of committed outsiders, and the opening scenes of the film illustrate the lengths to which Will and Tom must go to protect their anonymity and independence. Illegally camping in Forest Park to the west of Portland, Oregon, father and daughter work in tandem, complementing one another without much need for verbalized instruction. It’s the movie’s first sign of Granik’s consistently remarkable way with her actors, suggesting an almost documentary-like verisimilitude regarding the rituals used by the characters to stay off the radar.

Of course, the primary external conflict of the story manifests in the inevitable interactions Will and Tom have outside of their cultivated bubble of privacy. Those scenes, constructed by Granik to maximize the simultaneous wariness and curiosity aroused in Tom, mirror the movie’s underlying psychological conundrum: no matter how close the bond between father and daughter, Tom’s desire to learn more of the world places her relationship with Will in a position as precarious as their legal status. Granik circles that growing divergence with a series of scenes in which the heartbreaking reality of Tom’s responsibility to Will puts a lump in the throat of any parent who has witnessed the emotional and intellectual growth of a child coming into independence and personhood.

A number of writers and viewers have already remarked on the basic decency with which Granik chooses to portray nearly every person who crosses paths with Tom and Will (very far from the dark menace faced by Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree Dolly in “Winter’s Bone”). In one sense, that choice is a testament to the filmmaker’s sophistication; nuance can be challenging in the absence of a concrete antagonist. Not even the representatives of the bureaucracies Will so strongly opposes betray any sense of incompetence or apathy, and the device sparks us to deeper questions about the tough hand Tom and Will have been dealt and whether there is any way back for the latter.    

One of the ideas best expressed in “Leave No Trace” is the extent to which Tom and Will parent one another. Very obviously, Will has brought up his offspring with a level of skepticism and fear that suggests an arguably unhealthy — or at least deeply limited — view of community. Granik will challenge Will’s position in several ways, and the presence of Dale Dickey, so unforgettable in “Winter’s Bone,” is but one suggestion that Tom might be better served by opportunities to interact with humans beyond her dad. Newcomer McKenzie’s performance is so remarkable, not only does she match the skill of the always-invested Foster, she renders Tom’s growth with an astonishing and vivid sense of the changes that test her willingness to continue the status quo. We watch her grow up before our very eyes.