"Dark Waters"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

It's been 25 years since Todd Haynes made the off-kilter Safe, in which a suburban housewife believes she is being poisoned by the environment and goes mad. And now, a quarter of a century later, Haynes is back with a response to his earlier film: She was right. And he's got proof.

Dark Waters is based on the story of Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo), a high-priced corporate attorney in Cincinnati who switches sides when a West Virginia farmer (Bob Camp) comes to see him about his cows. They've been dying; actually, everything has been dying, and he thinks mega-conglomerate DuPont is behind it all.

Dark Waters wades tantalizingly into the stream of '70s conspiracy thrillers as Bilott convinces his boss (Tim Robbins) and his wife (Anne Hathaway, underwritten but strong) that the case is worth taking. It's tense, convincing and absorbing. Then, for a while, the film seems to meander. So does the case, as 69,000 are tested for contamination. That takes years. And years. And years. As everyone loses faith, Bilott does, too.

If it were only about the environmental misdeeds of a company, it would be Erin Brockovich, but Haynes is playing at something else in this disturbing, stirring movie. He wants us to see what happens to a man who clings to Martin Luther King's conviction that "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." There's truth in that, but the waiting -- ah, the waiting; that'll get you every time. Almost.



Viewed Nov. 29, 2019 -- ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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"Honey Boy"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

Is Honey Boy the work of an attention-seeking egotist in desperate need of attention to solve his own personal conflicts? Yes. Isn't every work of art?

The film is written by and stars Shia LaBeouf -- an actor who, prior to 2019, held absolutely no appeal for me. It's about a young actor traumatized by his self-destructive father. The actor is named Otis (Noah Jupe, mesmerizing) but is, in fact, LaBeouf himself.

It sounds like a deeply pretentious vanity project. Directed Alma Har'el turns it into anything but. Its specific, precise story is about one person and his pain, yet LaBeouf and Har'el have created a film that is as cathartic for the writer as the audience. Honey Boy contains scenes that hurt to watch, that are delivered with the force of a gut-punch, that shine with an honesty shocking in its clarity, and that are suffused with visual beauty.

LaBeouf plays his own father -- or, more exactly, Otis's father, though I did wonder why the movie is so coy about names as the end-credit sequence is filled with LaBeouf's family photos. Otis's father has absolutely no redeeming values, and his abuse of his son is at least in part what drives an older Otis (Lucas Hedges, ubiquitous yet ever remarkable) to therapy. And it's in therapy that Honey Boy reveals its truths about pain, grief, hurt, memory and the difficulty all of us have in being truthful. Honey Boy feels true, and that is its great, gracious gift.




Viewed Nov. 24, 2019  -- AMC Burbank 16

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"Knives Out"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

If Knives Out is ignored by the awards, just know it made me laugh harder, louder and more frequently than any other 2019 film that comes to mind. It wasn't just me. I can't recall a more boisterous, appreciative audience.

Knives Out is written and directed by Rian Johnson, whose wild talent is on display in ways that his last directing job may have hidden. It begins with a grand tradition: the "whodunnit." There's a dead body in a gothic countryside mansion, no end to the suspects; swirling motives; and, in the midst of it all, a suspicious detective.

Johnson "upgrades" that old trope with a delicious style, and a fabulous cast led by Daniel Craig as Det. Benoit Blanc; Christopher Plummer as the corpse; Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon and Chris Evans as the greedy family; and, briefly, Frank Oz as a beleaguered attorney. The family gathers to hear the will of the corpse, who while living had built a $60 million empire writing mystery novels. The family wants that money.

Joined by two hilariously strait-laced police officers (Lakeith Stanfield, Noah Segan), the detective is given to drawling cliches like, "The game is afoot" -- and it most certainly is.

Superficially similar to the rich-family-in-a-house thriller Ready or Not, Knives Out is far more fun, far less sadistic, and more prodigiously satisfying. Knives Out may not be awarded as the "best" movie, but it's bound to be the best time you'll have at the movies. That's a much more wonderful accomplishment.



Viewed November 23, 2019 --  ArcLight Sherman Oaks

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"The Irishman"

 ☆☆☆½ 

Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is a movie that demands attention and patience, and some people sitting in the movie theater when I saw it could not quite muster either: I heard both snoring and whispers of questions like, "Who is that?"

It's not a film that will pair well with the distractions that invariably accompany watching anything on Netflix, where it will mostly be seen; its three-and-a-half hour running time will not be forgiving of stops, starts and interruptions. Paying half-attention to The Irishman may lead people to conclude that it's either  boring or brilliant, though it's actually neither, although Scorsese consistently reminds us of his filmmaking brilliance.

At times The Irishman is grandly entertaining, but also times when it drags in its flashback-driven story of Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), a small-time criminal who becomes part of a crime family led by Russell Buffalino (Joe Pesci) and goes to work for Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). More than an hour of setup drags, but the film really gets going as it tells the Hoffa story. In its final, strongest third, it's a melancholy exploration of aging and guilt, but it takes a long while to get there.

Throughout, the movie offers often convincing, often distracting computer-enhanced "de-aging," and an exquisite production design that is one of its highlights. Less florid than Scorsese's earlier crime dramas, The Irishman (introduced on screen as I Heard You Paint Houses) requires, and rewards, patience even if its length proves to be a not-insignificant detriment.



Viewed November 17, 2019 -- Laemmle NoHo

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"The Good Liar"

 ☆☆☆ 

The Good Liar is a good movie, not a great one, but taut, twisty and enjoyable. You may see those twists coming, you may even (if you're particularly clever) figure out some of them in advance, but the present of Ian McKellen and, especially, Helen Mirren raise it all a cut above where it needs to be.

Working from a novel by Nicholas Searle, director Bill Condon has crafted an affably relaxed mystery-thriller that relies on its magnetic central performances to keep interest in the film from waning during some of its more melodramatic revelations.

The two legendary actors both play widowed and, ahem, mature Londoners who meet on an online dating service and click. Though there's no noticeable romantic spark between them (nor, particularly,  electric chemistry between the actors), which becomes an important part of the film's plot. For most of the movie, we follow McKellen's Ray, a moderately suave con man who is clearly not at all what he appears. He's a swindler, and his partner in crime Vincent (Jim Carter) soon have their eyes on Mirren's modest yet wealthy Betty.

Her suspicious grandson (Russell Tovey) almost immediately doubts Ray, leading to a series of flashbacks (lazy plot devices, perhaps, but still fun) that reveal a web of deception. The revelations may not be as "shocking" as they hope to be, but still and all The Good Liar is entertainingly modest, a good story well told, and the kind of simple, straightforward thriller that is increasingly, distressingly rare.

Viewed ArcLight Sherman Oaks -- Nov. 16, 2019

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"Doctor Sleep"

 ☆☆ 

Stanley Kubrick made an aggressively, obsessively weird movie in The Shining, a film that utilized his love of cinema, puzzles and design to come up with something that was under-appreciated in its time and has grown to be a classic. It is entirely fair to compare Doctor Sleep with The Shining, since the movie invites and welcomes comparisons. On every level, Doctor Sleep is woefully inferior.

If Kubrick freely adapted The Shining into a capital-F Film, director Mike Flanagan makes Doctor Sleep into a lower-case movie that might be perfectly at home on, say, FX. It's as literal as Kubrick's movie was obtuse, and if you haven't seen the 1980 original, Doctor Sleep will make absolutely no sense; if you have, Doctor Sleep feels extraneous.

Instead of the hyper-focused fixation on family dynamics in the first film, Doctor Sleep bounces around between three stories, including one in which we get to see a little boy brutally tortured and murdered on camera while he screams for help. Throughout, there are weird, distracting re-creations of actors from the first movie, but the plot remains strictly in Stephen King good-versus-evil territory.

There are occasional hints that it's all really about now-grown Danny Torrance (Ewan MacGregor) exorcising his demons, but it's so jumbled and intentionally reverential to Kubrick's film that nothing makes much sense. King famously hates Kubrick's movie, but this one makes the fatal flaw that one never did: It's dull. This Doctor may indeed put you to sleep.



Viewed Nov. 9, 2019 -- AMC Century City

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