The Last Viking (Den sidste viking) ★★★1/2 (out if 4 stars) Availability: See end of review. The Last “Normie” Danish director and writer Anders Thomas Jensen’s “The Last Viking” joins a short list of important and sensitive films—among them “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974)—that interrogate the relationship between “insanity” or “madness” and the world of so-called “normal” people who don’t have mental problems. Most of the action takes place in and around an enormous, multi-story, Victorian country house, where Anker (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and his brother Manfred (Mads Mikkelson) grew up in…
Author: 2 Film Critics
Spider-Man: Brand New Day ★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) Availability: see end of review. I’m Just a Lonely Boy Peter Parker, in the latest iteration of the well-plumbed Spider-Man Marvel Comics franchise, has set about to remake himself and his alter-ego, Spider-Man. To become a full-time crimefighter, Spider-Man has engineered the erasure of Peter Parker from everyone’s memory, including his best friends. The “Brand New Day,” a re-start for Parker, pitches him smack into the current epidemic of (or obsession with) male loneliness. Spidey’s problem, a common one for celebrities, is that everyone knows him and applauds his work, but no…
Coyote vs. Acme ★★★1/2 (out of four stars) Availability: Showing widely in theaters. See end of review for future online options. A Coyote Can Make You Cry If Wile E. Coyote had a lawyer. Well, he finally got one. But he’s not suing the Road Runner. Instead, his target is the Acme Corporation, maker of the faulty devices—rocket-powered roller skates, magnet gloves, a jet-fueled pogo stick, detonators and explosives among them—that Coyote employs in his destined-to-fail schemes to capture (and eat) the Road Runner, his speedy bird nemesis. It would seem to be an open and shut case. Except—and it’s a…
Miroirs No. 3 ★★★ (out of 4 stars) Availability: Not in theaters; available through major streaming sites. Full information at end of review. Women on the Edge Near a country house outside of Berlin, a car accident kills a young woman’s boyfriend and slightly injures her, leading (improbably) to the young woman staying with the owner of the house, an older woman. Both Laura (the younger) and Betty (the older) are reserved and enigmatic as they cohab without engaging each other’s “stories.” Respected German auteur Christian Petzold joins numerous directors making films about disturbed women—among them “The Currents” from Argentina that we just…
The Currents (“Las corrientes”) ★★★ (out of 4 stars) Availability: See end of review. Writ on Water “Nowhere to Go.” It could be an alternative title for Argentine writer and director Milagros Mumenthaler’s bleak film. The phrase captures how “The Currents” confines and limits its mentally ill protagonist, Lina (a compelling Isabel Aimé González-Sola)—and the theater audience along with her—presenting the young career woman as unhappy, non-verbal, and lacking in free will, tossed about by her feelings (of ephemeralness, of inadequacy) and senses (the sounds of a sewing machine, of workers in the street, of a man playing the timpani, and…
Rose of Nevada ★★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) Availability: See end of review. The Other “Odyssey” Lost at sea, a sailor wants only to return to his maritime home. Across decades, he encounters distortions in time, a land both familiar and strange, and a specter-like being who seems at once more, and less, than “real.” Shot in analog format for a screen of unusual dimensions, featuring actors one recognizes, the production has the marks of the auteur: the British director, now in his 50s, also writes the script. It isn’t “The Odyssey.” It’s indie director Mark Jenkin’s “Rose of Nevada,” filmed…
Remake ★★★ (out of 4 stars) | Availability: See end of review “It’s not art, it’s life.” “Stop filming—it’s not art, it’s life.” That line is spoken by Charleen Swansea, in “Sherman’s March,” Ross McElwee’s 1985 award-winning documentary, which began as a study of Gen. William T. Sherman’s “scorched earth” Civil War campaign through Georgia and ended up as something vastly more personal and idiosyncratic. The excerpt from “Sherman’s March” appears in this film, too—McElwee is known for using clips of previous films in his subsequent work—and so does an aging Charleen, who decades later still rebels against McElwee’s method, calling…
The Odyssey ★★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) Odysseus Does Hamlet An enormous metal horse, rampant and atilt, its hind legs buried in sand, on the shore of a vast sea, opens Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” It’s a startling image, evoking the top of the beached Statue of Liberty in the last scene of “Planet of the Apes” (1968), about another civilization in crisis. The ingenious director, characteristically rearranging time, again and again returns to the horse. Initially we see a boyish soldier pinned with arrows against the belly of the beast. Inside, Odysseus and a cadre of his men, their bodies…
The Last Guest of the Holloway Motel ★★★★ (out of 4 stars) Social Suicide In the first 30 minutes of co-directors Nicholas Freeman and Ramiel Petros’s powerful documentary, its subject, an English-born (1947) former soccer player—an idolized golden boy—loses in short succession his job, his chihuahua who’s been his companion for 17 years (“Sammie’s my daughter”), his much-loved home (an apartment in a Los Angeles motel), and is hospitalized with a heart condition. And then his luck runs out. It’s an old joke, but in this case it captures the Job-like succession of events that threaten to overwhelm Tony Powell, once an all-star…
Toy Story 5 ★★1/2 (out of 4 stars) iPhoning It In A hundred or so of Buzz Lightyear not-so-bright astronauts “wake up” from a shipwreck to march together in search of Star Command. Their march, the first of many action scenes, ends with a joke, which we won’t spoil. It’s an auspicious beginning. Attempting to connect the franchise to prior episodes, Cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack), a star of “Toy Story 4,”and the main Buzz (Tim Allen) —he’s Jessie’s deputy and wears the star to prove it—take the lead in “Toy Story 5,” continuing the feminist take from the now 7-year-old TS 4.…