Review: Goodnight Mommy

Image courtesy of Radius TWC.

Having just returned from a trip to Austria, I can attest that most of that nation's people are quite friendly and not the severe and - occasionally - violent individuals they are portrayed as by films from their native country.

Although I'm a great admirer of the work of Michael Haneke, the filmmaker's most notorious movie - "Funny Games" - is among my least favorite of his pictures. The oeuvre of another Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, is more of a mixed bag in my opinion. What both filmmakers' bodies of work have in common is that they are stark, bleak and often disturbing.

So, imagine a horror film utilizing those attributes, especially "Funny Games," and you sort of have an idea of what to expect from "Goodnight Mommy," a picture that starts out creepy before becoming unpleasantly nasty. It also doesn't help that the film's twist can be spotted a mile away. If you've seen a movie or two before, you'll likely figure it out within the first 10 minutes.

The movie, which is directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz, is effective enough, but it left me cold and its casual sadism became too much as it increasingly takes over the proceedings during the final half-hour.

In the film, two boys are left alone at an isolated house during the summer. Suddenly, their mother returns following some sort of operation that has left her with bandages wrapped entirely around her head, obscuring her face. The two boys think that something is off about their mom and increasingly begin to smell an impostor. But are they correct or just paranoid?

The film's best moments are near the beginning as the twins wander around the vast expanse surrounding their home, playing in corn fields and walking through creepy wooded areas. "Goodnight Mommy" is rich on atmosphere and if the filmmakers had relied on this attribute alone, it could have resulted in something richer than what we ultimately get.

But as the boys begin to become more and more disturbed by their mother's presence - especially after she takes off the bandages - things take a grim turn. The twins decide to try to torture the woman they do not believe is their mother into some sort of confession as to where their actual mother happens to be. As the film progresses, the mother figure becomes less sinister and the boys more so.

This is the type of film where I can sort of see where the filmmakers are heading and what they're aiming for, even when the picture eventually falls apart. Fiara and Franz display some talent behind the camera, so it's a pity that the film devolves into gory cliches as it reaches its denouement.

"Goodnight Mommy" is not a bad film, but it's also not the type that I can particularly recommend, especially since there have been some truly unique horror movies - such as "It Follows" and "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night" - during the past year.

Review: Queen of Earth

Image courtesy of IFC Films.

Elisabeth Moss gives an unsettling performance in Alex Ross Perry's "Queen of Earth," a psychological drama that plays like a horror film, as a young woman suffering from a recent break-up who spends a week in a secluded cabin with a semi-estranged friend (played by Katherine Waterston, of "Inherent Vice").

The role is a departure for Moss - who I'll always think of as Peggy Olsen, her "Mad Men" character - and she proves that she can take on challenging material. So, it's a little disappointing that Perry's film does not exactly match her commitment.

The director made his debut last year with "Listen Up Philip," a sardonic dramedy about an arrogant writer that had many thinking that the filmmaker was aiming to be a protege of Noah Baumbach or Wes Anderson. But with "Queen of Earth," he heads in a completely different direction, but with mostly diminishing returns.

The film opens with one of its best scenes as we witness a close-up of Moss's tear-stained and eye shadow-smeared face during a break-up with her boyfriend. The actress appears to go through all five stages of grief in a matter of several minutes and the performance immediately hooks you. The film, on the other hand, takes much longer to get moving and, ultimately, isn't as effective as its lead performance.

Moss's Catherine joins old pal Virginia (Waterston) at the quiet, backwoods cabin owned by Virginia's family. The trip is seemingly meant as a healing one, but it is quickly upended by the arrival of Rich (Patrick Fugit), a man with whom Virginia had some sort of affair the summer before. From the start, Catherine and Rich make it clear that they do not like each other and their taunting of one another quickly becomes, well, a little inappropriate.

Meanwhile, we witness flashbacks from the year before when Catherine and her now ex-boyfriend visited the cabin and Virginia and Rich met for the first time. One of the problems with the film is that we are led to believe that while Catherine is in the midst of a psychological breakdown in the present, it is Virginia who was suffering the year before. But this is only hinted late in the film and there is no evidence of Virginia's fragile emotional state in any of the flashbacks.

Also, "Queen of Earth" ultimately does not add up to much in its final sequences. Moss is asked to increasingly act more and more disturbed - and she does so with aplomb - but I'm not sure that we get any better sense of who Catherine and Virginia are and why their relationship has become fractured. The picture uses eerie music and hauntingly creepy shots of sunsets and early mornings to create atmosphere, but it's all used to give off the feeling that we're watching a horror movie, rather than a drama about two friends. In other words, it favors style over substance.

So, while the performances in "Queen of Earth" are solid, the film itself feels a little lost. There's a sense of tension throughout, but it's difficult to parse exactly what we're supposed to feel tense about. Moss is a wonderful actress and Waterston is a star on the rise and it's always a pleasure to watch them. I'd just love to see some material that gives them more to work with than this film does.

Review: No Escape

Image courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

If you can get past the retrograde sequences of white Americans being terrorized by hordes of crazed foreigners abroad and the film's occasionally confusing politics, John Erick Dowdle's "No Escape" is an intense low budget thriller.

In the picture, Owen Wilson plays a bigwig at an American company that will take over the water supply in a section of a southeast Asian country that I'm guessing is Indonesia (although the film was shot in Thailand) and, shortly after Wilson's Jack Dwyer and his family arrive, he comes to find that the natives aren't too happy about that.

No sooner than he, his wife (Lake Bell) and two little girls have checked into their hotel, which is swarming with Americans and Europeans, a massive riot begins, pitting men with all sorts of sharp weapons against the police. The picture opens with the nation's prime minister/president being assassinated, so it's a little unclear how exactly this apparent coup ties in with the violent protesters going after Wilson and all Americans involved with the water supply situation.

Dwyer and his family escape the marauding masked men - who shoot, stab and bludgeon virtually any non-native who crosses their path - with the help of Pierce Brosnan, who plays some sort of CIA operative who happens to be staying at the same hotel.

The first of Dwyer and family's many perilous escapes - the film's title is a little misleading, no? - involves he and his wife throwing their young children from one very high rooftop to another. During other sequences, Dwyer and Bell's Annie are captured and just when you think they are about to be killed, well.

As I'd mentioned before, the film is occasionally a bit retrograde as it portrays the unassuming Americans abroad fleeing repeatedly from the scary foreigners. And while most of the southeast Asians are portrayed as machete wielding maniacs, there are also a few stoic ones on-hand who, of course, put their safety in danger to help Dwyer and company.

Also, there is a sequence in which Brosnan's character essentially places the blame on western nations and organizations such as the CIA for the melee that ensues. So, the combination of this speech with the occasionally crass portrayals of the natives makes for a slightly confusing mix.

However, "No Escape" is an example of a low budget genre film done well. It's quickly paced and often intense. Wilson and Bell are mostly there to react to outbreaks of violence, rather than act out the parts of fully formed characters, but they do well, all things considered. In other words, don't go looking for a serious movie about U.S. corporations meddling in third world countries. But if you're down for an exciting and well-shot white knuckle thriller, "No Escape" is a pretty good one.

Review: American Ultra

Image courtesy of Lionsgate.

"American Ultra" feels like the result of a mix-up at the screenwriting laboratory. On the one hand, it wants to be a stoner comedy with quirky characters, while on the other, it's an ultra-violent espionage movie as well as sort of a romance. All of these elements do not exactly blend naturally, although the film has its charms, a few funny moments and some decent - albeit gratuitously violent - action sequences.

In the film, Jesse Eisenberg plays Mike Howell, a wake-and-bake convenient store clerk whose raison d'etre is his stoner girlfriend Phoebe (Kristen Stewart), but who feels as if he is constantly letting her down. As the movie opens, they are planning to take a trip to Hawaii, but Mike cannot get past his phobias and anxieties, so the trip is called off.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., a CIA agent played by Connie Britton is told that the cover is going to be blown on an operative she has in the field and that said agent is to be eliminated. As it turns out, that operative is Mike, who is programmed in a "Manchurian Candidate" manner, so that whenever specific nonsensical words are spoken to him, he becomes a professional killer.

Much of the film involves Mike and Phoebe attempting to figure out Mike's identity as a smarmy CIA bigwig played by Topher Grace sends out hired killer after hired killer to snuff out the duo. Whenever the characters aren't speaking in expository dialogue, they are stabbing people in the neck with spoons or hitting them in the face with hammers.

The plot lines of "American Ultra" don't always work well together and the story is a little threadbare. What makes it occasionally work is that Eisenberg and Stewart prove they are game for the film's unrelenting silliness and, as a couple, there is some charm on display.

I rarely laughed out loud during the film, but I smiled often enough. And although I wouldn't go as far as saying that it works, I can assure you that you could do worse when it comes to mindless summer fare.

Review: Sinister 2

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

The 2012 horror film "Sinister" was a fairly creepy concoction. In it, a demonic serial killer preyed upon children, coercing them into making creepy home videos that typically culminated in entire families being murdered on film.

Since that picture was fairly successful and a pretty decent example of its genre, well, here's the sequel. And it's not particularly good. "Sinister 2" is not very scary, unless you count the picture's numerous jump scares, a tactic that has become increasingly tiresome in horror movies. The issue is often that the film's material is not scary enough, so that the filmmakers make things pop up in front of the camera as a means of compensating. Yet it rarely does.

In this second entry in the franchise, a battered woman (Shannyn Sossamon) and her children flee their dirtbag of a husband/father and hide out in an old home in the country that is next door to a church where - of course - a massacre occurred. First, let me say that Sossamon's husband is one of the summer's most absurd villains. He's so unlikeable and evil in every way that it's hard to believe that the law agrees that he should have custody of his kids, whom he beats regularly. It's one of those plot points that only occurs because the movie needs for it to do so.

Sossamon's twin boys begin seeing creepy ghost children - and, I might add, some of the most talkative and annoying ghost children I've seen in a movie - who try to convince them to make the spooky home videos of the family for the aforementioned demonic serial killer. His name is Bughuul and while he was a frightening presence in the original picture, his resemblance to the member of a Swedish forest metal band increasingly became a distraction for me.

This is one of those horror movies in which you know exactly what is going to happen next - and then you're mostly right. You can easily guess in which part of the frame the creepy ghost children or killer will appear. Nobody listens to reason. People walk into basements from which eerie noises can be heard. Etc., etc.

James Ransone pops up as a former cop who has been investigating the Bughuul murders and his burgeoning friendship with Sossamon's mother of two results in the film's best moments. But here's a good example of how lazy this sequel is: Ransone's character's name is listed as - and I shit you not - Ex Deputy So and So. I'd be willing to bet that some awkward moments involving resumes and future job interviews are likely to stem from this.

So, "Sinister" goes the way of "Insidious" - a creepy original chapter followed by unnecessary and, worse, not particularly scary or engaging sequels. On the other hand, if there are any forest metal bands out there seeking a new lead singer, look no further.

Review: Mistress America

Image courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures.

Noah Baumbach's "Mistress America" may be more of a minor entry in the director's oeuvre, but it's still a charming, funny and emotionally engaging picture. Co-written by Greta Gerwig, who also stars and previously worked with Baumbach on the lovely "Frances Ha," the film is a good showcase for both the filmmaker and actress.

Clocking in at a breezy 85 minutes, the movie wastes no time setting up its scenario: lonely college freshman Tracy (Lola Kirke) is having difficulty making friends at school during her first semester in New York and she is passed up by the literary society in which she aims to ingratiate herself. She befriends classmate and fellow writer Tony (Matthew Shear), but he is soon whisked away by the jealous and gloomy Nicolette (Jasmine Cephas Jones), leaving Tracy to wallow on her own.

However, her mother tells her that the daughter of the man whom she is about to marry lives in New York and suggests that Tracy look her up. She tracks down Brooke (Gerwig), a thirty-something with many ambitions, but few actual prospects who spends her days teaching classes at Soul Cycle, tutoring middle school children, freelancing as an interior decorator and planning a restaurant that most people in Brooke's orbit doubt will come to fruition.

Brooke is a classic Baumbach character, although Gerwig is likely most responsible for her creation - insecure, bitingly funny, neurotic and exhibiting delusions of grandeur, but also wanting to become a better person. The filmmaker's body of work in recent years has included the great "The Squid and the Whale" and "Greenberg," but also the very good "Frances Ha," "While We're Young" and "Margot at the Wedding." Although "Mistress America" is not quite on par with some of those films, it's still often very funny and a solid story about friendship and the artistic process.

The film is centered around several set pieces, if that's the right expression here. The first is Tracy's first time hanging out with Brooke, an all-nighter that culminates with a hilariously awkward encounter between Brooke and a former grade school classmate. The second is a trip to Connecticut during which Brooke, Tracy, Tony and Nicolette corner and accost Brooke's former best friend, who allegedly stole her fiance and an idea for a T-shirt design that brought in a fair amount of money.

Much like the films of Woody Allen - to whom he is often compared - Baumbach's films have simple, dialogue driven setups with a minimalist visual style, but rich writing and characterizations. "Mistress America" is no exception - both Gerwig and Kirke inhabit their characters, which are finely drawn and imperfect, but sympathetic.

Perhaps, the film's brisk pace, which is especially noticeable in the first 30 minutes, and short running time give the movie a bit of a rushed feeling, so that by the time we come to the end we want to spend more time with these people. But that's at least a sign that the picture is working. "Mistress America" is a charmer. While it's more of a minor film and not quite as good as Baumbach's other 2015 movie - the very funny and wise "While We're Young" - it's certainly worth a look.

Review: Straight Outta Compton

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