Movie review by Greg Carlson

Shane Black’s most satisfying film to date, “The Nice Guys” absolutely pulverizes lurid period milieu, shaggy dog private investigation, “Chinatown” corruption narrative, odd couple buddy bromance, and slapstick noir parody in an industrial blender set to emulsify on maximum torque. Pairing Ryan Gosling – as the world’s worst shamus – with a teddy bearish and relaxed Russell Crowe as a stone-faced straight man, “The Nice Guys” works, against the odds, as a metafiction that manages to simultaneously send up and celebrate the tropes and formulas originated in the hardboiled pages of master stylists Chandler, Hammett, and Cain, minus most of their cynicism and misogyny.

While some of the too-good-to-be-true predicaments endured by Gosling’s Holland March are reportedly based on the exploits of Joel Silver acquaintance Jay Joseph, whose personal experiences also showed up as part of the Black-penned “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” Black inscribes the 1977 Los Angeles setting with a generous dollop of post bicentennial nostalgia (love that early “Jaws 2” billboard). The plot, such as it is, burrows deep into the salacious environment of cocaine-fueled Hollywood Hills porn production and distribution, drawing inevitable comparisons to Paul Thomas Anderson’s cult favorite “Boogie Nights,” with which “The Nice Guys” shares some sensibility and soundtrack.

As ringmaster, Black is unafraid to allow Gosling and Crowe, and the rest of the ace supporting cast for that matter, to go big or go home, but the gags – from a ridiculous pants-around-the-ankles toilet stall confrontation complete with uncooperative door and pesky lit cigarette to a hysterically bleak encyclopedia of gruesome gravitational violence that gets serious mileage from Newton’s three laws of motion – don’t diminish the film’s verisimilitude as a keep-‘em-hooked procedural.

While the easy chemistry between the leading men has received plenty of attention, the big find and breakout of “The Nice Guys” is Angourie Rice as Holland’s teenage daughter Holly, a resourceful and competent kid who provides the story with its moral center. Rice steals scene after scene, convincingly inhabiting a whip smart daughter one step ahead of her blundering papa, no matter how many times she is banished from the danger. Rice is joined by a higher than expected number of women who leave marks in smaller roles. Yaya DaCosta, Lois Smith, Margaret Qualley, Daisy Tahan, and Kim Basinger thoroughly enliven the proceedings, although I would have appreciated at least one more juicy scene between the latter and her “L.A. Confidential” costar Crowe.

Holly is Black’s shrewdest move, particularly because the character alleviates some of the inevitable monotony of the opposites-attract buddy bonding (for which Black earned his cinematic doctorate decades ago). The differentiation in the relationships she develops with her father and with Crowe’s Healy, for whom she instinctively and openly worries, digs deeper than required in search of answers about what it means to be a good person. Additionally, Black knows that Holly will be able to extract information from characters who would otherwise be uncomfortable and guarded if approached by the men, showing that “The Nice Guys” understands the predicament faced by young women in an exploitative and hypermasculine industry at a particularly sleazy point in time.

Movie reflection by Greg Carlson

As an unapologetic admirer of all things Prince, I for one was pretty grateful that “Under the Cherry Moon” was a radical departure from “Purple Rain.” Several years before “Graffiti Bridge” offered a sorta/kinda sequel to the 1984 smash, Prince – with enough earned clout and power to essentially do whatever he wanted to do – sent Mary Lambert packing (a shame) and busted out a black and white quasi-period fantasy that chilled the blood in most critics’ veins and bombed at the box office. Despite a few champions then – nobody will ever touch J. Hoberman’s brilliant original review – and even more now, Prince’s directorial debut is a tougher sell than the sweaty, throbbing first feature. For one thing, the phenomenal music is simply not as smoothly and thoroughly integrated into the narrative as the songs in “Purple Rain,” perhaps defiantly so.

That’s no slam on the brilliance of “Parade” as an album or the welcome presence of composer/arranger Clare Fischer (who received the memorable credit thanking him “4 Making Brighter the Colors Black and White”), but I maintain that “Under the Cherry Moon” would have been much, much stronger had it included fully staged performances a la “Girls & Boys” instead of burying the music as background and extradiegetic score. Shot by the great Michael Ballhaus, who is so widely believed to have guided Prince during principal photography that the Internet Movie Database lists him as an uncredited director, “Under the Cherry Moon” has earned its cult status largely on the basis of Prince’s otherworldly screen image.

An entertainer in every sense of the word, Prince’s Christopher Tracy puts on one hell of a show. Inviting our gaze in and out of his unbelievable wardrobe, the number of eye rolls, double takes, nostril flares, and eyebrow raises merit any number of perverse drinking games. Jerome Benton’s comic timing in “Purple Rain” drew enough notice for Prince to poach him from the Time, and Benton largely repeats his sidekick function, playing Christopher’s partner in crime Tricky. In her screen debut, Kristin Scott Thomas appears as Mary Sharon, the woman who will inspire Christopher to abandon his occupation.

While neither “Purple Rain” nor “Under the Cherry Moon” boasts the most sophisticated dialogue scripting, the two films share in common several motifs, most prominently a love triangle to fuel some level of tension regarding the development of the inevitable romantic relationships that will favor Prince’s protagonists. While Apollonia could see through Morris Day’s silver-tongued lothario right along with the audience, it is far less clear whether Mary or Tricky resides at the center point of Christopher’s affections.

Close readings can support two seemingly incompatible arguments: that Christopher and Tricky derisively joke about and ridicule homosexuality or that the two men enjoy the kind of flower-petals-in-the-bathtub intimacy that suggests their roles as relocated Miami hustlers/gigolos swindling wealthy women on the French Riviera are constructed performances. The third option, of course, is that Christopher and Tricky, much like Monsieur Gustave H. in “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” are epicures with voracious omnisexual appetites. The suggestion of rent exchange ménage a trois payments is but one element of a subtext that, if pursued, represents a radical fearlessness for a figure as public as Prince in 1986.

“Under the Cherry Moon” is so batshit crazy, the presence of real bats driving a terrified Christopher and the other patrons from a restaurant makes perfect sense. As Old Hollywood glamour fantasia/melodrama, the movie name-checks Bela Lugosi, pays homage to “Casablanca,” and still accomplishes several of Prince’s ongoing career objectives blurring racial, gender, and sexual boundaries. That each of these occurs in relief to a class commentary adds another layer of interest.

Hoberman’s first paragraph ends by asserting, “The flaming creature who calls himself Prince may be the wittiest heterosexual clown since Mae West; black as well as campy, he’s even more threatening.” The rest of that essay is even better, and still ahead of the curve. I agree with Hoberman that the film’s Achilles heel is the frustrating tease (“all talk and no dancing”) of production numbers that never materialize, even though the heavenly performance of “Mountains” during the closing credits soothes a little of that sting.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Money Monster” is Jodie Foster’s first feature directorial effort since 2011’s curiosity “The Beaver,” blending elements of social satire, bomb vest thriller, and conspiracy drama – all of it unfolding in close to real time. Stars George Clooney and Julia Roberts, reuniting in roles they can manage while asleep, play cable TV host Lee Gates and director Patty Fenn of the titular investment/infotainment spectacle. The two, along with the rest of their crew, are forced to continue a live broadcast after being taken hostage by a blue-collar prole whose life savings vanished into the gaping jaws of Wall Street’s rigged system. Armed with a pistol and holding a dead man’s switch, Jack O’Connell’s Kyle Budwell demands the answers Foster will attempt to deliver.

With hints of old favorites like “Network” and “Dog Day Afternoon” looming over the wild, scattershot script by Alan Di Fiore, Jim Kouf, and Jamie Linden, “Money Monster” periodically evokes the edgy 1970s terrain of Sidney Lumet. The new film, no matter how admirably it attempts the kind of risks and outrageousness displayed in Lumet’s great movies, never reaches the level of scorching black comedy and penetrating critique demanded of a classic. Even so, “Money Monster” is as reliably entertaining as it is unrealistic and farfetched.

Foster’s inclusion of several humorous motifs and deliberately comical asides are initially surprising given the underlying seriousness of the David versus Goliath conflict at the film’s heart. In one off-the-rails scene, Gates cajoles his producer into applying an erectile cream that leads to some unexpected broom closet shenanigans. In several others, Foster smoothly upends expectations when humanity fails to embrace the better angels of our nature. While some critics have questioned Foster’s application of comedy, the movie’s sense of humor communicates a tonal lightness that fits the script’s breezier approach to the ongoing global financial crisis.

While “Money Monster” features a skewed ratio of male principal, secondary, and background actors, including a disappointingly underutilized Giancarlo Esposito, Foster makes room for several significant exchanges between named women characters addressing topics other than men. Roberts’ Fenn, whispering instructions to Gates through his IFB earpiece from her position in the control room, stays one step ahead of the deteriorating situation, piecing together components of the algorithm “glitch” with the help of “Outlander” star Caitriona Balfe’s Diane Lester, the CCO and spokesperson for the felonious financial organization that cheated its shareholders, including Budwell.

Two other women, Condola Rashad and Emily Meade (who completely steals her big scene), also provide memorable moments. Unlike “The Big Short,” another film that dealt with the unbelievable and unconscionable lack of ethics within banking institutions trusted to protect the interests of their clients, “Money Monster” won’t be remembered during award season. The demands of the action-oriented standoff tension, especially as the plot ramps up to a melodramatic climax, overshadow any potentially deep political critique. And no matter how many unnecessary side trips the movie makes to South Africa, South Korea, and Iceland, the best location is also the most intimate one: the electric signals sent from Fenn’s intercom microphone to Gates’ in-ear monitor on the studio set of “Money Monster.”

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Green Room,” writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s follow-up to the taut and terrific revenge thriller “Blue Ruin,” is one of the year’s best, an elegantly realized nightmare made with savvy and smarts. The simple logline – a touring punk quartet runs afoul of a gang of murderous, racist skinheads – belies the level of craft Saulnier brings to what could so easily be another Old Dark House/And Then There Were None genre exercise. In my 2014 review of “Blue Ruin,” I concluded by noting that one of Saulnier’s strengths could be found in the way he invested in some humanity for the antagonists, and that impulse continues in “Green Room.”

A number of critics who praised “Blue Ruin” have claimed that “Green Room” is an even better movie. I will not necessarily argue with that position, keeping in mind that the two films share several similarities but also demonstrate some key differences. Both movies apply surgical precision to the structural elements and pacing conventions of their respective subgenres. Both movies also deliberate on the kinds of details that bring the protagonists and the villains to life. Both movies also draft strong senses of place. “Green Room” is not the first movie to capitalize on the frightening image of the neo-Nazi, even though Saulnier’s agenda differs from those witnessed in films like “Romper Stomper,” “American History X,” and “The Believer.”

One pure, crystalline example of Saulnier’s diabolical sense of pitiless, wrong-place-wrong-time circumstance is the achingly unfair and unfortunate way in which the four members of the Ain’t Rights (finely inhabited by Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Callum Turner, and Joe Cole) and their unlikely ally Amber (Imogen Poots) find themselves in the slowly clenching jaws of doom: an unlocked door and a forgotten phone lead to the accidental but fate-sealing knowledge of an awful crime. I actually believed that the white supremacists would have much preferred to send the band quickly on their way.

The presence of beloved Patrick Stewart in the role of Darcy, the cold and brutal father figure to the nest of rural hatemongers in suspenders and red-laced combat boots, makes for a wicked piece of unexpected casting and further cements Saulnier’s against-the-grain construction of the familiar (as opposed to the alien) evildoer. Darcy’s relationship with the seemingly luckless Gabe, played by key Saulnier collaborator Macon Blair, as well as to several other “true believers,” confronts the viewer with an uncomfortable, even grotesque level of sympathy for the eager followers yearning to belong to something.

A.A. Dowd’s perfect description of “Green Room” as the “bastard lovechild” of “one of Kelly Reichardt’s portraits of life on the Oregon fringe with one of John Carpenter’s castle-siege action vehicles” hints at the directorial confidence of Saulnier without fully accounting for the filmmaker’s mesmerizing, even disturbing, consideration of violence. Gorehounds will be attracted to “Green Room” for the sophisticated renderings of all manner of grisly trauma, but as he did with his previous feature, Saulnier really soars by making space for the audience to recoil in horror at the consequences of senseless mayhem.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

At the Sundance Film Festival, writer-director Todd Solondz described drawing his inspiration for “Wiener-Dog” from an unlikely pair of cinematic hallmarks: Robert Bresson’s “Au Hasard Balthazar” (1966) and Joe Camp’s “Benji” (1974). Solondz’s movie, as dark, hilarious, and observant as any of the features in his deeply impressive filmography, does indeed borrow from those two movies, aligning with Bresson’s unflinching examination of life’s cruelties and Camp’s flair for open and earnest communion with the lessons we can learn from our four-legged friends.

Like the long-suffering donkey in Bresson’s phenomenal masterwork, the title dachshund of Solondz’s film passes from keeper to keeper, silently witnessing a parade of the filmmaker’s signature oddballs and outsiders as they struggle with disappointments, humiliations, and defeats. The whole affair plays out in Solondz’s familiar, off-kilter neighborhoods, and longtime fans will undoubtedly be pleased that the director continues his fascination with the darkest facets of ourselves – and does so with his ever-present grace. Few cinema artists have matched Solondz’s ability to withhold judgment of and fully humanize pedophiles and predators.

The storytelling structure plays out as a series of chapters, inevitably inviting post-screening conversation in which the merits and possible shortcomings of each of the segments can be argued and ranked. The first of the tales is an absolute humdinger. A now cancer-free 9-year-old named Remi (Keaton Nigel Cooke) invests his affection in the newly acquired pooch. Friction between Remi’s mother (Julie Delpy) and father (Tracy Letts) is mirrored by the stress of the pup’s unplanned bodily functions, and a sustained tracking shot of seemingly limitless diarrhea set to “Claire de lune” competes directly with Delpy’s speech schooling Remi on the realities of canine rape for one of the biggest laughs in the movie.

The subsequent caretakers of the title pet, like the custodians of Balthazar, will not all treat her with the same love shown by Remi, and Solondz brilliantly maintains audience interest via the foreboding suspense that something awful might happen to Wiener-Dog. Todd McCarthy finds a flaw in “how the lead character becomes increasingly marginalized as the story lurches along, to the point where she’s more of an ornament than a figure of any central importance either dramatically or to her master of the moment.” While this position will not be shared by all viewers, Solondz’s choice to omit a character like Anne Wiazemsky’s Marie (whose own trials are paralleled with Balthazar’s even after the two are separated) refocuses audience attention each time the dog gets a new master.

While Ellen Burstyn’s bitter, regretful Nana and Greta Gerwig’s Dawn Wiener both project galaxies of intrigue and imagination through the actors’ wonderful performances, Solondz lavishes a great deal of attention on a self-reflexive metanarrative in which Danny DeVito’s Dave Schmerz, a fading teacher and screenwriter at the breaking point, implicates the hound in a shocking plot when he can no longer suffer the ridicule and indifference of his callow, entitled students. Happily, the film’s conclusion delivers everything one wants of Solondz and then some, commenting as it does on the legacies of the creative, our understandings and misunderstandings of the philosophy of art, and the fine line between life and death.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Following its Locarno Film Festival premiere in August of 2015, the great Chantal Akerman’s final work, “No Home Movie,” now makes its way to limited theatrical release and digital platforms in the United States. Currently viewable on Fandor – a fitting small screen residence – the nonfiction meditation featuring Akerman’s mother Natalia in her twilight takes on new shades of meaning and acute pangs of melancholy in light of Akerman’s October 2015 suicide. Natalia died in 2014. A study of contrasts, the movie is alternately inviting and chilly, intimate and detached, demanding and comfortable.

Natalia, a Pole who survived Auschwitz but lost her parents there, shares several conversations with Chantal throughout the course of the movie, often over a meal and seated at a kitchen table. The two speak candidly and urgently – in the way that any parent and grown-up child might – about all kinds of things. From the philosophical to the quotidian, Chantal engages Natalia on dietary habits, the challenges of the elderly, childhood memories, motherly advice, family history, and politics and religion. The little squabbles and teasing give-and-take are suggestive of a big love. As the film goes on, Akerman’s travels take her away from Brussels, and she and Natalia meet over Skype.

Several critics commenting on “No Home Movie” have tackled the metaphoric possibilities of the movie’s introductory image of a windblown tree whipped in a desert landscape (reportedly shot in Israel but not geographically identified in the film). In a typical reading, Clayton Dillard equates the tenacious roots and branches to Natalia, claiming that “Akerman turns an initial instance of isolation into a visual leitmotif, where subsequent iterations of singular personages, whether a man on a bench or a lawn chair in the backyard, serve as functional equivalents for Natalia’s disintegrating self.” As Akerman takes us deeper into the film, evidence of Natalia’s failing health moves into the foreground.

Akerman’s decision to collect the images for “No Home Movie” on digital video provides the work with a particular quality that implies a homemade or handcrafted character. In many scenes, the viewer is left with the impression that the camera has been placed on a tabletop or perched on a counter (perhaps to blend in unobtrusively and become invisible to the subject being filmed), and the apparent absence of a tripod suggests additional DIY sensibilities. The compositions, often framing spaces through open doorways and capturing speakers from behind, work in tandem with the auditory effect of hearing dialogue without being able to always see the face of the person talking.

As the swan song of a legendary filmmaker, “No Home Movie” might direct newcomers to Akerman’s best-known film, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” alluded to in both a potato-peeling anecdote and, as Peter Debruge points out, the “domestic apathy” embodied by Natalia. “No Home Movie” also calls to mind the excellent “News from Home,” among other films in Akerman’s oeuvre. That Akerman herself appears – the last time we see her, in a staged callback to a story about shoelaces – is a haunting sight. Viewers experiencing “No Home Movie” will now negotiate its meanings and messages in terms of two deaths instead of one.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Werner Herzog shares another meditation on humanity in “Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.” Lit with the master filmmaker’s blazing curiosity, the fascinating documentary ponders a wide variety of digital era conundrums and curiosities via ten chapters. Bouncing from topic to topic, “Lo and Behold” accomplishes the showman’s trick that leaves the audience salivating for more – many of the sections could sustain feature length examinations on their own. From our dependence on the electronic infrastructure that could be wiped out by human error, hacker malfeasance, or solar activity, to the scary eventualities surrounding the self-awareness that will accompany artificial intelligence, Herzog knows how to ask questions that simultaneously fascinate, delight, and terrify.

In the film’s most harrowing sequence, the family members of Nikki Catsouras – a young woman who died in a car wreck in 2006 – recount the shocking and unconscionable anonymous online harassment they faced when trolls began sharing, posting, and emailing crash site images that had been taken by California Highway Patrol officers. The Catsouras case, which attracted national attention when the family sued the CHP, continues to illuminate and inform the parameters of speech, personal expression, and First Amendment protections in virtual space. Herzog knows that he cannot possibly arrive at an answer.

Herzog’s respectful inquisitiveness elicits some terrific responses from many of the colorful characters represented on camera. The subjects include a higher than normal percentage of unbelievably intelligent respondents, but Herzog’s warm sense of egalitarianism extends to those who do not hold advanced degrees on complex matters. For example, the typically skeptical filmmaker shows compassion for Internet addicts, and a sequence in which we visit a community of people physically affected by electromagnetic radiation is so expertly constructed, you find yourself envying the cellular phone-free lifestyle made possible by the legal restrictions of the National Radio Quiet Zone.

While the inhabitants of Green Bank, West Virginia live under tech-restricted conditions for their health if not for their ideological beliefs, many of the movie’s thinkers have developed relationships to computing, robotics, and theoretical physics that are just as intriguing. Kevin Mitnick breezily describes just how easy it can be to con someone into giving up what should be secure information. Ted Nelson, still youthful in his 70s, makes for the perfect mad scientist/Cassandra mash-up. His incredible vision for creating code that would allow powerful flexibility in linking ideas (and simultaneously organize and store the entirety of the world’s knowledge) makes Google look like a drop in the bucket.

During Herzog’s post-screening discussion at the film’s Sundance world premiere, the director insisted that he was not a journalist. His subsequent thoughts offered insight into his filmmaking technique, especially in the way he approaches on-camera conversations with participants. Echoing some of the movie’s thematic fiber, the presentation included heartfelt pleas for continued critical thinking, even if the next generation of technological unknowns threatens to erase our desire/need to process certain kinds of information with our own brains. “Lo and Behold” certainly dispels the possibility that Herzog is a Luddite tethered to the old-fashioned and the analog (even though he did refer to himself as an anomaly when compared to the percentage of first-time directors presenting at film festivals). Still, it was refreshing when his advice to the cinematically inclined audience was to “Read, read, read, read!”