Author Archives: Keith Garlington

REVIEW: “I Came By” (2022)

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Just a few days ago Netflix stealth dropped a chilling new potboiler called “I Came By”. Co-written and directed by Babak Anvari, this crafty yet overly ambitious thriller has a hard time finding the balance between social politics and straightforward genre filmmaking. Yet it still scratches at some meaty themes, and the genre thriller elements are a lot of fun. And it’s nice seeing a movie break from convention, even if its pieces don’t always fit.

Anvari takes an interesting approach to storytelling, ending his film in a dramatically different place than he begins it. He changes perspective several times, shifting between three different protagonists throughput the course of the movie. This infuses the movie’s fairly familiar premise with some unexpected layers. And there are more than a few surprises that keep the story simmering.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

Best friends Toby (George MacKay) and Jay (Percelle Ascott) have gained notoriety as what newspapers call “renegade graffiti vandals”. The masked duo targets wealthy and affluent Londoners, break into their swanky homes, and adorn their walls with their signature graffiti tagline, “I Came By”. Driven by their angst-filled convictions, Toby and Jay are products of a radical underground youth culture who are fed up with the establishment’s ways.

But their crusade against the rich hits a speed bump after Ray learns he and his wife Naz (Varada Sethu) are going to have a baby. He bows out of their cause, determined to settle down and be the best father he can be. A frustrated Toby chooses to carry on without his partner in crime, taking aim at a new mark – a recently resigned high court activist judge named Hector Blake played by a deliciously sinister Hugh Bonneville. This is a truly twisted turn from the man who plays the kindly Mr. Brown from the “Paddington” movies.

Image Courtesy of Netflix

Saying much more would be doing a disservice as this truly is a movie built around subverting your expectations. So the less you know the better. But it’s safe to say the movie’s change of perspective is key. It starts with Toby but soon shifts to his single mother Lizzie (Kelly Macdonald). She has a hard time connecting with her embittered son, and their turbulent relationship is rooted in some deep-seated pain. Macdonald is excellent, and while I wish Anvari would have dug deeper into her character, Macdonald does a good job making us care. Later, the movie shifts to Jay’s perspective which offers a much different take on the unfolding events.

But it’s Bonneville who makes the movie and takes it to some unsettling places. The film is at its very best when it lets him loose to uncoil the secret side of his otherwise esteemed character. It makes for some gnarly genre entertainment. Yes, shots at capitalism, greed, and corruption are certainly taken. But they don’t quite resonate the way the movie wants. They’re interesting additions that show the film has some things on its mind. But they don’t go far enough to leave an impression. Instead, it’s the thriller elements that energize the movie. Anvari shows himself to be a savvy filmmaker with enough tricks up his sleeve to keep us guessing. And that’s a big part of the fun. “I Came By” is now streaming on Netflix.

VERDICT – 3 STARS

Movie Poster Spotlight: “The Menu”

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The trailer for “The Menu” was a surprising black comedy and horror mash-up that was hard to read. It was tough to tell if it was a genuinely smart satire, a corny genre exercise, or a potential guilty pleasure. Maybe a little of all. But I really did like what I saw, and the early reaction from its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival have made it sound even more tasty. Now Searchlight Pictures has released the new poster which is as odd as the movie sounds. It’s also just as alluring. What do you think?

DIRECTOR – Mike Mylod

WRITER – Seth Reiss, Will Tracy

STARRING – Ralph Fiennes, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicholas Hoult, Judith Light, Hong Chau, Janet McTeer, John Leguizamo, Reed Birney, Paul Adelstein, Aimee Carrero, Arturo Castro.

RELEASE – November 18, 2022

REVIEW: “Honor Society” (2022)

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Director Oran Zegman and screenwriter David A. Goodman team up for “Honor Society”, a high school coming-of-age comedy wedged right between freshly original and disappointingly conventional. It’s a movie with plenty of its own ideas and a charismatic star who helps the film consistently subvert our expectations. But there are also times where it resorts to the more familiar teen movie formula. That’s when you can see the filmmakers checking boxes and leaning on tropes rather than using them in interesting ways.

While “Honor Society” may not be the most balanced movie, it does have its own distinct personality and allure which keeps you locked in. It all starts with the film’s lead character, Honor Rose, played by a delightfully snarky and devilishly charming Angourie Rice. Honor is an ambitious and determined overachiever in the final days of her senior year of high school. Since her freshman year, Honor has stuck to her own strict and obsessive four-year academic plan with only one goal in mind – acceptance into Harvard. There are no contingency plans, no second choices, no rethinking it if something goes wrong. It’s Harvard or bust, and she’ll trample anyone in her path to get there.

Image Courtesy of Paramount+

The framing of the story is interesting. Basically, Honor is walking us through her story, constantly breaking the fourth wall to let us know how she really feels about what we’re seeing. It’s revealing as we learn she’s not only brutally honest, but also conceited, condescending, and astonishingly self-serving. She’s ready to ditch her small town and leave middle-class life in the dust. And she lets us know she has just the kind of ego to do whatever it takes to make it happen. Rice conveys all of these qualities with jarring clarity, and she gives us a character we are appalled by but also strangely admire. I mean her point-of-view on certain things may be a bit harsh, but they can also resonate.

Essential to Honor’s plan is her perverted guidance counselor, Mr. Calvin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) who happens to have Harvard connections. Honor needs him to write her a letter of recommendation and has tried to use his utterly inappropriate feelings towards her to her advantage. But instead of writing her the letter, he informs her that she’s among his top four choices. Only one will get his Harvard recommendation. Of course that is unacceptable for Honor who immediately starts putting together her next course of action.

Honor narrows down her competition to Travis Biggins (Armani Jackson), the hunky captain of the lacrosse team; Kennedy Park (Amy Keum), an eccentric and ignored introvert who wears historical costumes to school; and Michael Dipnicky (Gaten Matarazzo), a brilliant but bullied outcast. Honor hatches several plans to preoccupy the three so that they bomb their mid-terms. But in her efforts to manipulate everyone for her benefit, she unknowingly ends up changing some of their lives for the better.

Image Courtesy of Paramount+

As the plot unfurls more characters are introduced which is where the movie begins to veer towards the conventional. Collectively most feel like typical teen movie types and neither them nor their story angles move beyond that. Some characters fare better than others. But most hit all too familiar beats with very predictable trajectories. And it’s not without its corn and cringe. Take the all too tidy finale that comes right after a smart and surprisingly wicked twist. The sappy and groan-worthy final few moments land with a thud.

But the most stable force from start to finish is Angourie Rice. This should be an attention-getting performance and a star-making turn for the 21-year-old Australian. Regardless of where the story goes she keeps us anchored, brilliantly juggling acting directly into the camera and with other actors. And despite a few tired conventions, there’s still some good material here that let’s Rice take her character to some unanticipated places. That’s when “Honor Society” is at its best. “Honor Society” is now streaming on Paramount+.

VERDICT – 2.5 STARS

Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022)

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The great Jean-Luc Godard has passed away.

A renowned movie critic, screenwriter, and director, Godard was a pioneer and architect of the French New Wave, a film movement of the 1960s that significantly reshaped the way movies were being made. Along with other cinema revolutionaries such as Truffaut, Rohmer, Chabrol, Varda, Rivette, and Resnais, Godard challenged not only the way filmmakers approached movie-making, but also the way they viewed life through their lenses.

Godard is without question one of the most influential and groundbreaking filmmakers in cinema history. And storytellers are still drawing from his work to this day.

Jean-Luc Godard was 91.

REVIEW: “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” (2022)

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With “Three Minutes – A Lengthening”, Bianca Stigter has given us one of the most compelling documentaries of 2022. The film centers on three minutes of 16mm home movie footage from 1938, shot in the Jewish neighborhood of Nasielsk, Poland. These three brief minutes are full of smiles, joy, and laughter as members of this lively Jewish community enjoy the attention of the camera. But in a few short months, most of the people in the footage would be gone – victims of Nazi Germany’s systematic genocide of European Jews.

The weight of that truth hangs over “Three Minutes – A Lengthening”. Stigter’s approach makes sure it’s etched into our minds. At the same time, this isn’t a film solely fixated on the horrors that befell this community. It’s far more about memorializing them by piecing together these few fragments of their lives preserved on the film. It’s an effort to remember them; to let their lives speak beyond the abhorrent atrocities they faced at the hands of their barbaric oppressors. And while identifying the people proved mostly impossible, Stigter honors them through her deep reverence and forensic precision.

Image Courtesy of Super LTD

Stigter begins by playing the full video uninterrupted, without narration or voice-over of any kind. All we hear is the sound of the film running through a 16mm projector. It’s a sobering three minutes. I watched this opening three times before continuing the movie, and in that time several noticeable faces stuck with me. The old bearded gentleman leaning up against the wall. The rambunctious lad sticking his tongue out at the camera. The two manly chaps standing stoically on the left side of the frame. The young girl in a pale red dress with a well-combed bob and a big smile. And several others. I immediately started wondering about them. Who were they? What were their stories? And sadly, were they among the very few who survived?

From there the movie chronicles the search for answers about the town and the people we see. Interestingly, the movie never strays from the actual footage itself. We never see the narrator (a superb Helena Bonham Carter) nor do we see the small handful of contributors. We simply hear their voices as we continually watch those solemn three minutes. But it’s not in a continual loop. Stigter freezes frames, rewinds clips, zooms in on details, etc., all in her efforts to glean whatever information she can. Often that requires examining every inch of the frame: the door posts, the trees, the clothing patterns and fabrics. It all helps paint a clearer picture of the community.

A key voice in the film is that of Glenn Kurtz, the man who discovered the three-minute celluloid in a closet in Florida. Nearly aged passed the point of saving, Glenn donated the film to U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum where it was restored and digitized. Over time we learn the film was shot by his grandfather, an American named David Kurtz, who in 1938 took a trip to Europe. After stops in Paris, London, Amsterdam, and Geneva (among other places), David took a detour to Poland to visit his hometown of Nasielsk.

Image Courtesy of Super LTD

We learn that Nasielsk, some 30 miles north of Warsaw, is where David Kurtz shot the eponymous three minutes of footage. In 1938, Nasielsk had a population of 7,000 of whom 3000 were Jews. But by 1942, less than 100 of the town’s Jewish population would be alive. The deportation of the Nasielsk Jews is shared in a grim and stomach-churning eyewitness account. It adds even more potency to the three minutes of film we’ve come to intimately know by that point in the movie.

While watching “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” you can’t help but notice its nods to the power of filmmaking, the importance of historical research, and the unequaled treasure of memory. All of those things are profoundly realized throughout the film’s compact 111 minutes. But the people on that small 16mm reel are always the centerpiece. Stigner never loses sight of that, and as a result we don’t lose sight of it either. “Three Minutes – A Lengthening” is out now in select theaters.

VERDICT – 4.5 STARS

First Glance: “The Good Nurse”

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Out of the recent flurry of awards season trailers, one that has stuck with me most is “The Good Nurse”. The film comes from Tobias Lindholm who co-wrote two of my favorite movies of the last decade, “The Hunt” and “Another Round”. Here Lindholm directs from a script by Krysty Wilson-Cairns (“1917”, “The Last Night in Soho”). That combination mixed with the star power of Oscar winners Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne puts this unsettling thriller for Netflix high on my list.

Chastain plays a nurse named Amy Loughren and Redmayne plays her co-worker Charles Cullen. Cullen was a real-life serial killer who eventually confessed to murdering a confirmed 29 people while working as a nurse in New Jersey. The most chilling part of his story is that it’s believed Cullen may be responsible for as many as 400 deaths. Both Chastain and Redmayne look tremendous in this, and the story itself carries a disturbing weight. This could be a winner for Netflix.

“The Good Nurse” opens in select theaters October 19th before streaming on Netflix October 26th. Check out the trailer below and let me know if you’ll be seeing it or taking a pass.