Review: The Little Things

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

John Lee Hancock's "The Little Things" makes up for what it lacks in originality with atmosphere, mood, style, solid performances and a great open ended finale. Its plot mechanics might seem as if they've been selected from the David Fincher playbook - the picture's style resembles that director's classic "Seven," although the screenplay for "The Little Things" was written years before that film - but its eerie, obsessive aura is often compelling.

The film is set in the 1990s, and there's a good explanation for that. Hancock wrote the screenplay about three decades ago and sat on it for years. Updating a criminal investigation picture would have required a complete overhaul, considering today's reliance on forensics and all sorts of new technology that is used to aid homicide investigations.

The film opens with a young woman on a deserted highway outside of Los Angeles, singing along to The B-52's "Roam," an ironic choice, and then being tormented by a creep in a car. She just barely escapes with her life. We cut to Bakersfield, where deputy Joe Deacon (Denzel Washington) is dealing with small town cop issues. He was formerly a big shot L.A. detective, but we get the sense that his stint in the City of Angels ended poorly.

Deacon's boss gives him an assignment that will require him to travel to L.A. and coordinate with that city's police department. Once there, he overhears a press conference being given by a hot shot cop named Baxter (Rami Malek) on a series of brutal murders that seem to ring a bell for Deacon. On occasion, we see flashbacks of a previous case Deacon had worked in L.A. that culminated with the discovery of several young women discovered nude, dead and tied to a rock. Similar to the case being investigated by Baxter, the young women had bags placed over their heads.

Although the two men get a bad first impression of each other, Baxter eventually asks Deacon - who is stuck in L.A. for the weekend due to the assignment given to him back in Bakersfield - to get involved in his investigation. Baxter is seemingly impressed by Deacon's observations at the crime scene of the serial killer's latest victim. And yes, this plot thread is a bit far fetched, but it's necessary for the two to team up. 

Much like David Fincher's far superior "Zodiac," Hancock's film is less about serial killing than it is about obsession, and how his film's two detectives go desperately down the rabbit hole - albeit for different reasons - in their attempts to catch the killer. The film heads in a different direction after they stumble upon a suspect - a creepy mechanic named Albert Sparma (Jared Leto, looking like Charles Manson) - who seems too good to be true.

Leto appears to be having fun hamming it up as Sparma, a self-described crime buff who seems to understand the logistics of police work, and appears to be - as the British say - taking the piss with the two detectives, leading them on to believe he might be the killer, but withholding just enough to make them doubt. Sparma's actual motives might seem questionable - and again, far fetched - but his taunting of Deacon and Baxter is what ultimately leads to the film's ambiguous, open ending - which I personally liked, although I can see it infuriating others.

As I've mentioned, "The Little Things" doesn't really break any new ground narratively, although to be fair it was written several years before the glut of 1990s serial killer thrillers like "The Bone Collector," "Kiss the Girls" and "Copycat." It's way better than those entries in the genre, although not on par with such classics as "Zodiac," "Seven" or "The Silence of the Lambs."

However, the film still has quite a bit going for it - Washington gives the typically strong performance you'd expect of him as the obsessive workaholic Deacon, while Leto's work is fun in an over-the-top manner and Malik is more of the straightforward, by-the-book cop - that is, until he isn't.

The film is also visually compelling - the moody night photography accompanied by Thomas Newman's almost soothing score goes a long way - and like many neo noirs, it makes great use of Los Angeles as a backdrop, from the entrancing scenes in which cars trail other vehicles on darkly lit, lonesome highways to one particularly memorable shot of a woman jogger being pursued by a vehicle down a dark alleyway with the L.A. skyline in the distance.

So, while "The Little Things" may have an aura of familiarity in terms of its storytelling devices and its focus on detectives given over to obsession - although, for me, that theme is often what makes these types of films compelling - the movie is rich in style and presentation, and by the time I reached its haunting culmination, whether the case was brought to a satisfying conclusion was almost besides the point. Hancock's film isn't a classic of the genre, but it's an effective and enjoyable potboiler. 

Review: The White Tiger

Image courtesy of Netflix.

Ramin Bahrani's films are often centered around those who are down on their luck - "99 Homes" and "At Any Price" - or outsiders with economic challenges - "Goodbye Solo." In some cases, his films are about both concepts - such as his early pictures "Man Push Cart" and "Chop Shop." The one thing that most of these films had in common was that one could relate to and feel sympathy for his lead characters.

In his latest film, "The White Tiger," which is based on an excellent, award-winning novel of the same name by Aravind Adiga, the lead character, Balram (Adarsh Goulrav), is certainly down on his luck, an outsider and a person of little consequence in the world that surrounds him. However, while Balram's story is compelling, it's often hard to sympathize with him - but this is no matter as many films about captivating characters, such as gangsters and other criminals, keep us compelled even if the characters leave much to be desired as humans.

"The White Tiger" also marks another change for Bahrani - while his previous pictures often have a low budget, handheld indie aesthetic, his latest is more stylistically flashy. While the film adheres to the concept that the movie is never quite as good as the book - although there are more than enough examples of the opposite - it's a compelling crime drama about an extremely poor man pulling himself up out of poverty, mostly through cunning, but occasionally via cold blooded behavior.

Bahram hails from the slums of India, but he recognizes the respect that an aging man who is part gangster, part benefactor to his town gets. Bahram ingratiates himself to the man's more forward thinking son, Ashok (Rajkummar Rao), while attempting to avoid the other thuggish son, The Mongoose (Vijay Maurya), and lands a job as Ashok's driver.

Both Ashok and his wife, Pinky Madam (Priyanka Chopra), take to Bahram, occasionally allowing him to take liberties with them that he wouldn't dare attempt with others outside his caste. But Ashok - especially as the film goes on - eventually finds that he has no problem berating Bahram, even after the servant nearly takes the rap for a horrific accident that Pinky somewhat inadvertently causes. 

The film is narrated by Bahram and includes stylistic touches that might seem at home in a Scorsese film. All that's missing is the record scratch and the voice over noting, "You might wonder how I got here..." Bahrani's film is a swiftly paced rags-to-almost-riches saga about an underdog who learns to swindle by observation and ends up clawing his way to the top - but, as usual, at a stiff price. The narration and framing device is Bahram writing a letter to former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is in the process of making a visit to India in the earlier 2000s.

While Adiga's novel felt fresh and exciting, Bahrani's picture occasionally sticks a little too closely to the cliches of its particular genres - one might describe "The White Tiger" as a blend between a Scorsese crime film and a story of a street kid attempting to escape poverty a la "Slumdog Millionaire" or "Salaam Bombay!" That being said, it's a fast paced and compelling film, even if the earthier style of "Chop Shop" and Bahrani's earlier works was slightly missed.

As Bahram becomes corrupted by the lure of money and we see Ashok's true nature come out when his marriage hits the rocks, I was reminded of the scripture regarding a camel going through the eye of a needle being easier than a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven. "The White Tiger" is another story that reminds one to be careful what one wishes for. As a film, there's not a whole lot going on that we haven't seen before - both stylistically and dramatically - but Bahrani's movie is an engaging, well made movie about money's corrupting influence.

Review: One Night In Miami

Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.

In the past month, I've seen two films based on acclaimed stage productions - first, August Wilson's "Ma Rainey's Black Bottom" and, this week, Kemp Powers's "One Night in Miami." Although both movies are good, the latter - which is the directorial debut of Regina King - is the one that works slightly better as a movie.

While "Ma Rainey" was an acting showcase and a good film, it felt slightly stagey, whereas King's "Miami" does a better job of translating from the stage to the screen and, as a result, it feels more cinematic. Although King's film also - since it was first a play - relies mostly on dialogue to move its narrative forward, it involves more camera movement and variety of location.

The film - and Kemp's play - bears some similarity to Terry Johnson's play and Nicolas Roeg's experimental movie adaptation of "Insignificance," a 1985 film that imagined an alternate history during which Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio were stuck in a hotel room together.

In "Miami," four iconic Black figures of the mid-1960s - Malcolm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Cassius Clay (Eli Goree), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge, whose vocal imitation and cadences of the football legend and Blaxploitation actor are spot on) and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) - wind up in a hotel room after Clay, who has yet to change his name to Muhammad Ali, defeats Sonny Liston during a boxing match in Miami in 1964.

Malcolm X, who would be assassinated about one year later, has Clay's future on his mind, acting as a spiritual guide for the boxer, and hoping that he will officially join the Nation of Islam, and then flee it with the Civil Rights leader when he decides to start his own organization. Cooke is coming off a flop of a performance at a famed British music hall, and gets prodded by Malcolm X for primarily writing love songs, although he's inspired to write his Civil Rights anthem "A Change is Gonna Come" during the course of the picture.

Brown's role in the story is slightly more nebulous - although after making the case to Malcolm X that Cooke is the freest of the four due to his owning his own record company, we see his character follow a similar path by deciding to leave the NFL to pursue an acting career. However, there's a powerful moment early in the film during which he visits an aging white man played by Beau Bridges, who appears to be some sort of mentor or bigwig in Brown's hometown. After praising Brown's athletic performance and calling him a tribute to the town, he nonchalantly tells Brown that he won't invite him into his house because, you guessed it, he's Black. Despite being a "hero" to Americans, he is still subjected to their casual racism.

For starters, you have to admire the four lead actors - all of whom are quite good - for taking on such iconic roles, especially considering the fact that Malcolm X has already been portrayed by Denzel Washington in a landmark performance, while Will Smith did a solid job already of portraying Ali.

During the course of the evening, the four men discuss race in 1960s America, how they believe they are contributing to the cause of civil rights and the possibility of life changes, from careers to actual names in Ali's case. The men bicker, but there's an obvious love and admiration among them for each other that is best exemplified when Malcolm X regales them with a story of how Cooke - these two men argue more than any other of the four - once brought down the house at a concert when the sound equipment failed. 

The squabbles between them primarily revolve around their roles in American society - Malcolm X especially recognizes that his three friends aren't just athletes and a musician, but that their success and national recognition give them a voice that can be used to advocate for change. 

So, while the setup of "One Night in Miami" is one that's been seen before, it gets a lot of mileage out of its substance. It's also well written and acted, and King shows assurance behind the camera in her directing debut. Among stage-to-screen adaptations of recent years - and there have been more than a few - this is one that does a very good job of translating the confines of a play into an experience that feels cinematic.

Review: Shadow In The Cloud

Image courtesy of Redbox Entertainment.

 Much like the recently overlooked - albeit uneven - "The Empty Man," Roseanne Liang's "Shadow in the Cloud" is an ambitious genre match-up that works for much of its running time, but contains enough moments that stumble for it to not quite be what one might call a "good" movie.

Unlike "The Empty Man," which is very long for a horror movie, Liang's film is surprisingly short - only about 75 minutes if you subtract the credit sequence set inspiringly to Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love." Its brevity means that the overabundance of exposition and genre switcheroos come at you pretty fast.

As the film opens, a young, mysterious woman named Maude (Chloe Grace Moretz) with a British accent boards a plane filled with soldiers from England, Scotland and the United States on an apparent mission during World War II. The plane is about to cross the ocean, and there's an uneasy feeling from the beginning when many of the men make unsettling comments toward Maude that might lead one to believe they're burgeoning rapists.

For about the first half of the picture, Maude is relegated to sitting in the plane's bottom turret, and much of the dialogue is centered around what exactly she's doing on the plane as it takes place over the intercom system. The men onboard the plane don't trust her, and her cause isn't helped by the package she's brought onto the plane that she claims is highly classified.

Oh yeah, there's another passenger on the plane who causes some trouble - a gremlin that Maude first spots on the plane's wing. She has difficulty getting the soldiers to believe her regarding its presence. "Shadow in the Cloud" vacillates between being a feminist World War II action movie - which is impressive that the filmmakers have managed to make it so, considering how its screenwriter has #MeToo accusations hanging over him - and a horror picture with a gruesome creature terrorizing a plane. 

For the most part, it's a pretty fun genre picture - that is, until the filmmakers decide to go overboard, starting with a sequence during which Maude must crawl out of the turret and chase the gremlin around the plane's exterior after the creature gets ahold of her secret package. The film remains slightly ridiculous right to the end, although a scene on the ground once the plane has landed packs an exciting punch.

The film's success often rides on Moretz, whose one-woman show during the film's first half is impressive. The special effects for a low budget film of this sort are also good, and despite its brief running time, it packs a lot in and remains entertaining. I could have done without some of the more over-the-top scenes, which threaten to throw the film off balance, but all in all this is a reasonably decent action-horror movie with a strong central performance and at least one twist you won't likely see coming. 

Review: Promising Young Woman

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

You've probably seen this person before - slumped over at a bar after having had too much to drink, and your immediate thought is, "Will this person be able to get home safely?" At least, that should be your immediate thought, but there are those with darker instincts. 

Emerald Fennell's "Promising Young Woman" might lead you into believing it's a modern take on "Looking for Mr. Goodbar," but you'll soon see that this razor-sharp thriller and (sort of) comedy has much more on its mind. This is a movie containing scenes that go from hilarity to horror in a matter of seconds, but Fennell makes the transitions feel organic - its intent is to keep you on your toes.

In the film, Carey Mulligan plays Cassandra, a once promising medical student who works at a coffee shop and lives with her parents at age 30. She appears to not have much motivation in life other than the revenge she metes out on a weekly basis to creeps who take home women who are too drunk to resist them for the purpose of having nonconsensual sex with them.

In the film's opening scene, Cassandra gets taken home by a young man pretending to be a "nice guy" who will help her get home. But in the cab ride they're sharing, he changes gears and gets her to come to his apartment, where he then tries to put the moves on a seemingly drunk-to-the-point-of-passing-out Cassandra. When she asks, completely sober, what he's doing, he's shocked and has no explanation for his behavior, other than that he thought they had a "vibe."

She repeats this process until she finds new purpose after a seemingly nice guy with whom she went to school and now works as a pediatrician wanders into her coffee shop. They flirt and she kinda likes him, and eventually goes out on a date with him. Their romance blooms, but she also finds out in the process that he's connected to a number of people with whom she went to medical school, where seemingly something awful happened years before and prompted her to drop out.

Cassandra, reminded of the past, comes up with a list of past acquaintances from medical school against whom she bears a grudge and tracks them down with the purpose of making them squirm - or worse. As it turns out, her best friend from school was gang raped during a party in which a bunch of frat boys watched and laughed - and everyone from the school's dean (Connie Britton) and fellow students (including one played by Alison Brie) to a lawyer (Alfred Molina) who has since grown a conscience played a part in covering it up.

"Promising Young Woman" is a righteously angry thriller that often veers into dark comedy, but always aims to make its audience uncomfortable. I mean this as a compliment. There have been a number of #MeToo movies in recent years - such as 2020's critically acclaimed "The Assistant" - but this one is among the sharpest and gutsiest.  

Mulligan gives one of her finest performances as Cassandra, a woman whose character is often framed in the film as the villain - it doesn't recognize her as such, but the way specific scenes are shot, it makes her look like one and those she torments like the victim, until you suddenly realize that the roles are reversed - and she carries what struck me as a challenging role with apparent ease.

There are several twists in the film - one foreseen by me, which doesn't prevent it from still feeling like a gut punch, and one I didn't see - but in the case of this picture, they add to the film rather than come off as gimmicky storytelling devices. This is a mainstream movie that has something rather urgent to say, and for a first feature it's surprisingly assured. The director of "Promising Young Woman" is undoubtedly one herself.

Review: News Of The World

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Paul Greengrass' "News of the World" is a period piece/western of an old fashioned sensibility, although the timeliness of its release doesn't go without notice. It's an often visually gorgeous picture with the type of breathtaking vistas one might recall seeing in old John Ford movies.

In the film, Tom Hanks plays Capt. Kidd, an aging Civil War veteran from Texas whose job it is to deliver the news to audiences who pay a minor fee for him to read the events taking place around the nation. It's not a lucrative gig, but Kidd seems to like being on the lonely road by himself. Mention is made of a wife, but it's not until late in the film that we get the rundown on their situation.

After having delivered the news in a Texas town, he comes across a Black man hanged on a tree on the side of the road and discovers a young girl of German origin, but who primarily speaks Kiowa after having spent much of her life living with Native Americans, who the hanged man was escorting back to her remaining family.

Hanks tries to offload the girl - Johanna (Helena Zengel) - on several people, but when that proves fruitless, he becomes resolved to returning her to some distant relatives on the other side of Texas. "News of the World" is a road trip movie, of sorts, but with more peril than usual. 

And it's a good one. Aside from the stunning views and the solid performances of its two leads, there's a timeliness to the proceedings, especially when Hanks attempts to tell a bitter old confederate that the Civil War is over and if peace is ever going to come, now is as good a time as any. Considering the events of this past week in the U.S. Capitol, America could only be at the beginning of such a rift in its nation's denizens for the second time.

Since the film is somewhat of a western, there are some conflicts - a sleazy group of bandits attempts to purchase Johanna from Kidd, but he refuses, leading to them taking more aggressive measures. A well-shot shootout in the desert commences.

After that, the captain and Johanna arrive in a horrific town run by a corrupt man named Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), whose cronies have the local exploited workers - they skin buffalos - living in fear. When Farley deems Kidd's outside tales of the rest of the country and world as "fake news" and attempts to force him to read from a local paper overseen by Farley, which reads more like a cult initiation pamphlet, conflict arises. Sound familiar?

But mostly, "News of the World" is an old fashioned western drama that is likely to inspire comments about how "they don't make them like that anymore." It has elements of "The Searchers" - although Hanks's character is more noble than John Wayne's was - and other classic westerns, while feeling strangely of-the-moment. It's a good movie and one that provided a surprising element of comfort at a particularly distressing time.

Review: Sylvie's Love

Image courtesy of Amazon.

Eugene Ashe's visually stunning "Sylvie's Love" is a film that had it been released in the era in which it was set - the late 1950s to early 1960s - it would have been described as a "women's picture," and would likely have been directed by the great Douglas Sirk. Stylistically and thematically, it comes across as a Todd Haynes ("Far from Heaven" and "Carol") film with a primarily Black cast. That's a compliment. 

The film is set amid a time of pivotal change in the United States, and while the lead character's cousin, a minor character, does some work for the Civil Rights Movement, race and politics are surprisingly only given minor attention in the picture - at one point, the titular character's husband has a dinner with a possibly important client, whom his wife discovers has been attacked by the NAACP for discriminatory practices. 

But otherwise, "Sylvie's Love" is primarily a gorgeously rendered period romance. Sylvie (Tessa Thompson) is engaged to a fiance whom, at the film's beginning, is out of town. She works part-time at her father's (Lance Reddick) record store in New York City in 1957. Her mother (Erica Gimpel) runs a finishing school for young ladies. One day, a talented saxophonist named Robert (Nnamdi Asomugha) who plays in a jazz band known as Dickie Brewster's Quartet enters the record store to inquire about a job as a sales clerk. 

Both Robert and Sylvie - although she might not admit it - are taken with each other from the start. He has dreams of playing his own music and leading his own band, while she, an avid television watcher, wants to become a TV producer. Over the course of the summer, their romance blossoms, although we know that her fiance will one day return, and then Robert's band gets offered a gig playing at a Paris jazz club over a period of months. Sylvie discovers she's pregnant, but rather than tell Robert and prevent him from leaving, she keeps the secret to herself. 

Five years pass. One night, Sylvie runs into Robert in New York outside of a performance hall where she's planning on seeing a concert. The two reconnect, which naturally causes tension between Sylvie and her businessman husband, Lacy (Alano Miller). Also, Sylvie is currently in the process of working her way up in the TV business, acting as an assistant to a Black woman producer on a cooking show. This interferes with Lacy's view of Sylvie's domestic duties. Meanwhile, Robert comes to find that jazz isn't as popular as when he first started out, and that pop music has drowned out the art form. 

"Sylvie's Love" is technically a melodrama, but then again so are Haynes' films, although they're typically swimming with brilliant subtext. Ashe's film is more content to play out on the surface, which is perfectly fine because the surface is so stunning. Using film stock that makes specific sequences look as if they're from the era in which they're set, and filled with splashes of color and gorgeous photography, the film is often beautiful visually. 

Thompson and Asomugha give strong leading performances and there are some very good supporting ones as well - Reddick is particularly good as Thompson's good natured, record store-owning father. Its story is a classic Hollywood romance, although the film was made independently, and its winsome nature goes a long way. This is a sleeper film - I hadn't heard of it until it was released in late December, and now I'm very glad that I have.