Review: Judy

Image courtesy of Roadside Attractions.

Judy Garland's story is a tragic one, and the new biopic that follows a series of performances she held in London just a short period of time before she died at age 47 of a barbiturate overdose is about what you'd expect of a film of that type. In other words, it's somewhat formulaic.

That being said, the film mostly still works due to its leading lady - Renee Zellweger, in her best role in some time. Even when the film takes the road we all know it'll take, Zellweger's committed portrayal of Garland keeps it compelling.

The picture flashes back and forth between Garland at a young age acting defiantly toward studio head Louis B. Mayer, portrayed here as somewhat of a bully and lecher, during the making of "The Wizard of Oz" and being denied a relationship with Mickey Rooney, and her later years in which she is moving from place to place, often with her kids in tow.

Older Judy is having trouble landing a gig and she's afraid of losing a custody battle to a previous husband (Rufus Sewell, another actor I haven't seen in a while). Meanwhile, she tags along with daughter Liza to a party, pops some pills (a habit seemingly formed from her early studio days) and drinks - a lot. She becomes romantically involved with a younger bartender/entrepreneur (Finn Wittrock), who sells her dreams of a comeback.

Finally, she lands a gig in London performing a series of shows for a theater operated by characters played by Michael Gambon and Jessie Buckley (of the summer indie hit "Wild Rose"). But poor Judy is a mess, and half the performances end up being marred by her drunken antics, which involve insulting booing patrons. Director Rupert Goold's picture isn't interested in much more than observing the decline and crash, which inevitably occurs.

And yet, Zellweger keeps the proceedings interesting with her performance, including the film's musical numbers. Garland was a tragic figure, but Zellweger adds some depth to the character, although the sequences involving the actress's youthful years are the most compelling. "Judy" may paint somewhat by the numbers, but its lead performance offers up some interesting touches.

Review: Rambo: Last Blood

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

Once upon a time, John Rambo was a sympathetic, anti-establishment figure - a long-haired Vietnam vet who returned home only to be terrorized by a corrupt sheriff and his minions in small town America. While Sylvester Stallone continues to get some mileage out of his other iconic character, Rocky Balboa, it's unclear why the actor wanted to yet again revisit Rambo and, in the process, make his finale so unpleasant.

It's true that Rambo has long been considered a right wing action hero after Ronald Reagan suggested that the character's style of negotiating with bad guys abroad was one he believed the United States should emulate. This was, of course, after that president's viewing of "Rambo: First Blood Part II," a highly stylized action movie that favored nonstop action scenes over the subtleties of the original picture.

With "Rambo: Last Blood," the character has become a full-blown MAGA fantasy. The film is casually racist and not-so-casually despicable. And its depiction of Mexico as a hellhole full of bad hombres, all of whom are lusting for violence and ready at the drop of a hat to sell Americans into sex slavery, should guarantee that the picture is Donald Trump's new favorite movie.

In the picture, Rambo is living quietly on a horse farm in Arizona, where he resides with his adopted family (Adriana Barraza) and her granddaughter, Gabrielle (Yvette Monreal). Rambo particularly likes the young girl, whom he takes horseback riding. But Gabrielle is determined to go to Mexico - "why would you want to do that?" Rambo asks her - to find her deadbeat dad who split on her and her mother years ago.

After Gabrielle's father turns out to be the creep that Rambo warned he is, Gabrielle gets nabbed by a sex trafficking ring led by the Martinez brothers (played by Oscar Jaenada and Sergio Peres-Mencheta). Rambo takes a trip to Mexico to confront the brothers, which leaves him with a scar on his face and results in severe punishment for Gabrielle, who is drugged and slashed across the face.

The film's two largest set pieces - which involve Rambo going apeshit on large numbers of Mexicans - appear to have been inspired by "Taxi Driver," "You Were Never Really Here" and, of all things, "Home Alone." The first involves Rambo whacking a bunch of guys with a steel claw hammer, while the latter is a battle at his home, which he has booby-trapped to the hilt.

"Last Blood" has more gore than a slasher film on the extreme end of the scale. Faces are dented in, bodies are blown to bits, a man has a bone yanked out of his chest and then snapped, arrows fly through heads and a guy is decapitated, only to later have his head thrown gleefully out of a moving vehicle's window. At one point, Rambo tells a guy he's going to rip his heart out of his chest, and you know that he'll deliver on that promise later in the movie.

Yes, of course, sex trafficking is a scourge, and there's certainly no pity to be had for the Martinez crew. But "Last Blood" portrays nearly every Mexican onscreen - other than a journalist (Paz Vega) who helps Rambo track down Gabrielle and a doctor who assists him - as a violent thug, and every street populated by our neighbors to the south as a decrepit slum. Much like the previous Rambo movie, it seems to relish watching the lead character sadistically brutalize cartoonishly stereotyped non-white characters.

In "First Blood," Rambo was a guy for whom we could root, a man who served his country and was targeted by some crooked redneck cops for his appearance. Rather than remaining an anti-establishment figure, Rambo has now become the avenger for an establishment that pegs all Mexicans as "criminals, drug dealers and rapists," as you-know-who put it on the campaign trail. At this point, I'd sooner be compelled to see a sequel to "Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot" than another Rambo movie.

Review: Ad Astra

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

James Gray's sci-fi drama "Ad Astra" concerns itself with concepts beyond the scope of most human endeavor and consideration, and yet it still feels like a movie of our current moment. Blending hope for humankind with the realistically bleak outlook for our species, the picture is a thought-provoking outer space drama that has more in common with "Solaris" or "2001: A Space Odyssey" than the type of science fiction pictures that tend to sell tickets.

At its center is Brad Pitt's portrayal of Roy McBride, an astronaut in the somewhat nearish future who is called upon to take part in a top secret mission involving his missing father (Tommy Lee Jones), who's also an astronaut, and an energy surge originating from outer space that has killed thousands on Earth. Pitt gives a quietly intense performance, which coupled with his terrific work in Quentin Tarantino's recent "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" makes for a year that ranks among the actor's best.

H. Clifford McBride (Jones) is a decorated astronaut who was sent years ago to the outer reaches of the galaxy with the mission of discovering extraterrestrial life. He's spoken of as a hero, so his son is a bit miffed when the U.S. space program insinuates that Clifford wasn't on the up-and-up, and that part of Roy's mission is to help locate his father, so that the man's mission can be halted and he can possibly be killed. Donald Sutherland plays an old friend of Clifford, who warns Roy that there's more to his father than meets the eye.

Clifford abandoned his son and wife 29 years prior to take part in the mission, so Roy feels as if he hardly knows the man, despite his having passed along his work ethic and penchant for exploring the stars to his son. Roy - who we often see taking psychological exams that barely cause him to bat an eye and hear him spoken of as rarely having an accelerated heartbeat, no matter the situation - is a man who shows little emotion. Much like his father, he has broken off a relationship with a woman (Liv Tyler), and appears to regret it.

Roy's mission first takes him to the moon, where he and his crew are attacked by space pirates, and then to Mars, where that planet's station manager (Ruth Negga), whose parents were onboard Clifford's mission, is able to sneak him onto the ship that will search for his father, even after Roy's supervisors come to believe that he's not suited to the mission. And sure enough, Negga's character provides a piece of the puzzle regarding his father's existence that causes him some disturbance.

That long-awaited reunion between father and son eventually occurs, but it's not one of reconciliation. Instead, Roy is somewhat horrified that he has become Clifford and that the sins of the father are not only passed on to, but occasionally emulated by, the son. In its final moments, "Ad Astra" provides an emotional arc for Roy that is somewhat unexpected.

Filled with gorgeous imagery and anchored by Pitt's nuanced performance, "Ad Astra" is a hypnotically engaging film that bears more resemblance to a Terrence Malick movie than your typical sci-fi picture. Its progenitors are, as I'd mentioned before, the two great masterpieces of the genre by Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. It's also, on occasion, acerbically funny - especially when we come to realize that futuristic space exploration's purpose has been primarily to set up a mall on the moon and an outer space highway system.

Gray's best films are often ones that focus on intense personal relationships - "The Immigrant" and "Two Lovers" - while his previous picture was also a movie about the tolls on an explorer (the hypnotic "The Lost City of Z"). To an extent, his latest film combines those elements - Roy is an explorer whose years adrift have left him disassociated from other human beings, but the film is also about a relationship, albeit one that doesn't actually divulge its true nature until two characters meet after years of absence. "Ad Astra" is a haunting and hopeful space saga that suggests the most worthwhile exploration in which one can engage is that of one's relationships with others.

Review: Hustlers

Image courtesy of STX Entertainment.

Destiny (Constance Wu), a stripper struggling to survive in Queens with her grandmother, watches during one moment in Lorene Scafaria's crime drama "Hustlers" as Ramona (Jennifer Lopez), the top draw to the strip club where they both work, struts and puts on a show for the clientele to the tune of Fiona Apple's "Criminal." Ramona knows how to work the crowd, thereby explaining why money rains down on her during her act.

Yes, the scene is meant to establish that Ramona is the top dog among strippers, but it also exists to remind everyone that Lopez, who gives her strongest performance here since "Out of Sight," can be a captivating presence when given the right material. As Ramona, she's the cocksure leader of a band of exotic dancers who come up with a scheme - apparently based on a true story - to bilk greedy Wall Street types out of their money by drugging them and running up charges on their credit cards.

Destiny is the willing protege, and the group is rounded out by Keke Palmer's Mercedes and Lili Reinhart's Annabelle. The four women meet when Destiny is the new kid on the block at a high-end strip club circa 2007 that draws a number of Wall Street's big money men. Early scenes in the picture also feature rappers Cardi B and Lizzo in small roles.

But when the 2008 financial crisis hits, the Wall Streeters are suddenly no longer interested in blowing hundreds of dollars per night at strip clubs. Ramona ends up working retail, while Destiny takes a few years off after giving birth to a little girl and being disgusted to learn that her former place of work now offers more than just lap dances.

It's at this point that Ramona comes up with her scheme to drug and steal money from Wall Street types, whom she points out stole from others leading up to the 2008 crisis and didn't face any jail time. Although one of the women's victims is sympathetic, it's true that most of the sleazy men they bilk are not. The picture's framing device is an interview between Destiny and a reporter played by Julia Stiles, during which the at-this-point former stripper appears to be feeling Stiles's character out to determine if she's spoken to Ramona, from whom Destiny has become estranged.

Although "Hustlers" leans a little too heavily into the concept that the strippers are a family - a trait that became tiresome in previous movies about ragtag groups, such as the "Fast and the Furious" movies - and liberally borrows stylistically from the Martin Scorsese handbook, Scafaria's picture is well worth seeing for the performances - Lopez and Wu especially - and the camaraderie between the diverse group of women who look out for one another.

Also, it's a fun movie. There are, perhaps, a few too many scenes of the women enjoying their ill gotten gains - after all, the movie takes aim at how rich men can get away with anything because of their wealth, so celebrating the accumulation of fancy objects maybe rings a little hollow in hindsight - but I was also invested enough in Ramona, Destiny and the other characters to not want them to get caught.

"Hustlers" came as somewhat of a surprise. Its trailer didn't do it justice, so it was considered a sleeper when it debuted on the festival circuit in recent weeks. Although I wouldn't say it's as award-worthy as some others have found it, the picture is a well acted, stylish and funny crime drama that gives J-Lo her best role in ages and provides for an overall good time.

Review: The Goldfinch

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

Donna Tartt's 700-plus-page Pulitzer Prize winning opus "The Goldfinch," surely one of the decade's greatest novels, is the type of work that would seem to be difficult to translate to the screen. Filled with numerous characters and multiple settings over a period of years, the novel also features some powerful thematic concepts - from survivor's grief to the idea of great works of art being immortal, whereas human life is fleeting - that are highly effective when they are explored in great length through the written word.

Alas, while John Crowley's film version is able to stuff in about as much of the book's plot as possible, it doesn't quite catch the novel's essence. The picture has its moments, but entire relationships and storylines from the novel are reduced to a mere scene or two, and it's missing the magic that made the book so special. The film's fragmented storytelling devices don't exactly help either.

As it opens, young Theo Decker (Oakes Fergley) has experienced a tragedy. He survived, but his mother was killed, during a bombing at the Metropolitan Art Museum, and has now been adopted by a wealthy Manhattan family, of which the matriarch, Mrs. Barbour (Nicole Kidman), has taken a shine to him. He also bonds with the Barbour's endearingly dorky son, Andy.

But as we come to learn, Theo harbors a secret. After the bomb went off at the museum, Theo met a dying man who gave him a ring to deliver to an antiques shop in the city. The man also convinced Theo to abscond with Carel Fabritius' centuries-old painting with which this film shares the title. That painting had, ironically, been among the few works of the artist that survived a fire, and Theo steals it because, as we later learn, his mother was taken by it.

In Fabritius' painting, as it is mentioned in the book, a small goldfinch is sitting atop its feeder, but its foot is chained and, therefore, it is never quite free. Theo is also chained - to his past, his family and the secret that he keeps from everyone else about the stolen painting.

The ring given to him by the dying man leads him to the doorstep of Hobie (Jeffrey Wright), an antiques restorer who takes him on as an apprentice and shows him his trade. Hobie's partner, the man who gave Theo the ring, had been the guardian of a girl named Pippa (Aimee Laurence), with whom Theo becomes smitten.

Circumstances intervene and Theo is forced to leave New York City to live with his ne'er do well father (Luke Wilson) and his girlfriend (Sarah Paulson) in Las Vegas. It is there he meets Boris (Finn Wolfhard), a lanky Ukrainian kid who introduces Theo to drugs, although the pair's friendship is stable compared to that of Theo's relationship with Wilson's deadbeat gambler dad.

The picture jumps back and forth between Theo's younger years and his young adulthood in New York City. Ansel Elgort plays the older Theo, who finds himself in trouble after attempting to pass off inauthentic pieces of furniture as antiques. This discovery leads one jilted customer to investigate Theo and put the pieces together about his being at the scene of the museum's bombing and the theft of the painting. Meanwhile, Theo is engaged to the daughter of the Barbours, with whom he has reconnected, and Boris pops back up as a low level criminal.

In other words, yes, there's a whole lot going on in "The Goldfinch," which suited the novel well. Tartt's wonderful book had a Dickensian feel to it and allowed readers to get to know its characters well over the course of its 784 pages. The novel culminates with a lovely passage in which Theo contemplates "the history of people who have loved beautiful things and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire."

In one of the film's better moments, this concept is expressed by Hobie, who scolds Theo for stealing "The Goldfinch," telling him that human life goes by quickly, but Fabritius' painting is immortal and was, therefore, not his to take. However, where Tartt had pages to fill with the concept, the film only gives it a brief, albeit moving, line or two of dialogue.

Therein lies the problem with Crowley's film - it's too devoted to relaying every bit of plot from the novel, but it's missing the novel's essence. There's too much going on during the film's two-and-a-half hour running time and the result is that the exposition overshadows all else. The film has its merits - some good performances, especially by Fegley and Wright - but it pales in comparison to its remarkable source material.

Review: It: Chapter Two

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

It was, perhaps, fated that Andy Muschietti's cinematic second chapter of Stephen King's gargantuan 1986 novel "It" would be a little bit of a letdown. The second half of the novel - which ranks among King's scariest and best - isn't quite as compelling as the first and, as a running gag points out in the picture, its ending isn't its strongest asset.

That being said, there's a decent amount to like in the film's whopping 165 minutes, including some strong performances - Bill Hader is a standout as the adult Richie Tozier - and surprising social commentary.

The film opens with the brutal beating of Adrian Mellon (played by Canadian director Xavier Dolan), a gay man who is accosted by some small-town homophobes in the fictional town of Derry, Maine after he attends a local carnival with a boyfriend. After he is beaten, he is dumped over the side of a bridge, where he is then murdered by supernatural psycho clown Pennywise (Bill Skarsgard), the film's uber-villain. In both the novel and book, the incident was inspired by the fatal attack on Charlie Howard, a gay man who was also beaten and thrown off a bridge in Maine in 1984.

During other scenes in the film, a character who is a closet homosexual is called a homophobic slur by a redneck townie and, if you'll recall, Mike Hanlon (Isaiah Mustafa), the one black member of the Losers Club, was mistreated due to his race in the first film. In "It: Chapter Two" especially, Pennywise appears to bring out the hatefulness in the small town of Derry, and it's left to the members of the Losers Club - a majority of whom have left their small town and moved to the big city - to return and fight not only an evil entity, but also their hometown's small mindedness.

King's works are always at their most compelling when they focus on the characters, rather than the supernatural elements (although, that's often a lot of fun too). This proves to be the case in this film. The best scenes involve the characters reuniting, and the cast does a great job of convincing the audience that the kids from the first film could grow up to be these people. Hader is often hilarious, but also surprisingly vulnerable, and James McAvoy (as Bill Denbrough, now an author who is prodded for his "bad endings") is solid, while the other Losers - Jessica Chastain as Bevy, Jay Ryan as Ben, Mustafa and James Ransone as hypochondriac Eddie - are also very good.

If only the film's two-hour-and-45-minute running time had merely been a reunion with these characters. The shared trauma between the members of the Losers club and the concept that when you outrun the past, not only do you leave behind the hardships, but also the good memories and people you care about, make for compelling stuff.

Alas, the film gets bogged down in sequences during which each of the characters is terrorized for long periods of time by Pennywise. I know, that's one of the film's main draws - and don't get me wrong, the clown is pretty creepy when he's not being cartoonish - but there's too much going on at all times in this film. It's a little too busy.

There's at least two scenes per character in which they are attacked by some incantation of Pennywise - a gigantic old woman, a large Paul Bunyan figure, spiders, etc. - and the film has a slavish devotion to the novel, thereby including a whole lot of material that could have been left on the cutting room floor.

So, when "It: Chapter Two" is focused on how the bonds forged through friendships made at a young age and shared experiences, especially traumatic ones, can shape one's adulthood, Muschietti's film works quite well. But the nonstop special effects-driven sequences often feel as if they go on endlessly and, ultimately, "It: Chapter Two" ends up being a little too long and too much. It's not a bad movie - in fact, it's often quite engaging - but it doesn't live up to the much better first chapter.