Tag: Drama

REVIEW: ‘Boys in the Boat’ bores more than it excites

It feels kind of bad to pile on Washington after they just lost the football national championship, but the review must go on.

“The Boys in the Boat” is set in the mid 30s, right in the middle of the Great Depression. The film begins by introducing Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a student at the University of Washington who’s homeless and is having difficulty paying for his tuition. While looking for work, he finds he can make money for the semester by making the school’s rowing team.

After a grueling selection process, Rantz and seven others are picked for the JV team. Their coach, Al Ulbrickson (Joel Edgerton) puts them to work right away and soon learns they’re able to compete well with the varsity team. Because of their talent, the coach begins considering the JV squad to compete for a spot in the 1936 Olympics.

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REVIEW: ‘Nyad’ sinks more than it swims

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are known for their documentaries chronicling individuals who do incredible physical feats. Maybe they should have just done a documentary with this subject, too.

The duo’s latest film is a narrative feature centered on distance swimmer Diana Nyad. In the late 70s, Nyad (Annette Bening) participated in several open water attempts, swimming around the island of Manhattan and from the Bahamas to Florida.

What she wasn’t able to do at that time, though, was conquer a swim from Cuba to Florida. The film picks up with Nyad in the early 2010s, now in her 60s, with a fiery desire to try the swim again. The movie chronicles her attempts with help from her coach and friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster).

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REVIEW: While moving, ‘Memory’ often feels distant

When there’s hardships aplenty, sometimes a human connection is what can get a person through.

Writer and director Michel Franco’s new film “Memory” shows just that, as two broken people find each other and form a relationship. The film opens by introducing Sylvia, a single mother and recovering alcoholic who works in an adult care home. While she’s been sober for years and able to manage her daily life, she still deals from trauma in her past.

The movie picks up with her meeting a man, Saul (Peter Sarsgaard), who has early onset dementia. This leads to their first encounters being difficult, but as time goes on, they grow closer. While the relationship brings them some happiness, though, there are still struggles for both.

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REVIEW: Story of ‘Rustin’ is important, but told without cinematic flair

Sometimes a film comes along that does something positive by shining a light on a hidden figure, but doesn’t do so in extraordinary fashion.

This movie is an example. It tells the story of Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), who was the lead organizer for the March on Washington in 1963. The event is now most well known for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and a subsequent meeting with President John F. Kennedy.

Getting to those historic moments took an immense amount of planning and mobilization, though, and Rustin was at the center of it all. The film dramatizes this, as well as Rustin’s experience as a gay man during a time where he had to keep his relationships hidden.

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REVIEW: Despite strong filmmaking, ‘Zone of Interest’ loses momentum

During the Nuremberg Trials, Rudolf Höss admitted that well over a million people were killed while he was commandant at Auschwitz. As this film shows, he had no issue maintaining a regular life next door.

Set in 1943, “The Zone of Interest” follows Höss (Christian Friedel) not inside the infamous camp, but rather at home with his family. While he was in charge of the camp, his residence was right beside it, only separated by a high concrete wall.

As the film demonstrates, the proximity to a place of extermination did not hinder the Höss family from living an average life, where the patriarch went off to work in the morning while his wife tended to the children and kept busy with a garden. They did all of this all while hearing the sounds from the camp.

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REVIEW: ‘Iron Claw’ is mostly effective in showing family drama and trauma

Wrestling may be theatrical and scripted, but the physical and mental toll is very real, as this film shows.

“The Iron Claw” tells the story of the Von Erich family, which has produced multiple generations of professional wrestlers. The origins of wrestling in the family go back to its patriarch, Fritz (Holt McCallany), who was a professional in the 50s and 60s. In addition to his career, Fritz became the father to several sons.

Once his time in the ring was done, he decided to push wrestling on his kids, Kevin (Zac Efron), Kerry (Jeremy Allen White), David (Harris Dickinson) and Mike (Stanley Simons). Fritz doesn’t just stop at tough physical training, though, as he also uses manipulation and pushes his sons too far, leading to tragic consequences.

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REVIEW: ‘Poor Things’ is positively weird and wonderful

When director Yorgos Lanthimos makes a film, you can usually expect it will make a person laugh, think and be taken aback. “Poor Things” is another example, and it’s also pretty damn good.

Willem Dafoe portrays scientist and surgeon Dr. Godwin Baxter in the film. Early on in the movie, we learn that the latest experiment by Dr. Baxter, a sort of Frankenstein-like mad scientist, was the resurrection of a young woman who had jumped off a bridge.

To do so, Baxter utilizes a brain that he recovered from the baby that the woman was pregnant with and calls the revived being Bella (Emma Stone). The experiment results in Bella getting a crash course in living, as her intelligence rapidly develops while she’s learning about life experiences and the world around her.

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REVIEW: Inconsistencies causes ‘All of us Strangers’ to struggle

Sometimes you want so badly to enjoy a movie, and it just doesn’t work out. Enter “All of Us Strangers.”

The character Adam (Andrew Scott) is at the center of this U.K.-based drama. A writer who resides in London, Adam is in a melancholy state at the start of the film as he finds himself reflecting on the death of his parents who passed away when he was young.

When visiting his childhood home one day, though, by unexplained circumstances, Adam sees his parents as they were just before they died. As he’s reconnecting with his parents, he also meets a new resident in his apartment building who he starts a relationship with.

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REVIEW: ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is a fine film about healing

The mind of Hayao Miyazaki continues to be a wonderfully mystical place.

He’s shared some more of his magical vision with his latest animated fantasy feature, “The Boy and the Heron.” The film, set during World War II, centers on a pre-teen boy, Mahito, who is struggling mentally and emotionally after the death of his mother in a fire.

The film picks up with the protagonist’s father recently getting remarried to the sister of his late wife, Mahito’s aunt Natsuko. Mahito is resistant to moving on and accepting the new reality, but when he discovers a path to a magical world, he’s thrust into an adventure where he has to learn to live and trust again, as well as embrace his family.

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REVIEW: While not a masterpiece, ‘Maestro’ remains a strong biopic

Bradley Cooper has returned to the directing chair and once again put together a film revolving around a musician.

Unlike “A Star is Born,” though, his latest picture is about a real person. “Maestro” is a biographical film about Leonard Bernstein, who Cooper also portrays. Bernstein had an illustrious career as a composer and conductor in various capacities, including film and orchestras.

While the movie covers his professional background, though, the movie is much more centered on his relationship with his wife, Felicia Montealegre Bernstein (Carey Mulligan). The film shows how they became a couple and how their marriage was strained by Leonard’s work and his affairs.

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