The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, on Apple TV+

Homecoming is a staple theme of holiday specials, but unlike Pa Walton, this unnamed Boy does not know where home is. Yet, he is determined to find it. His journey will be more of a fable than an adventure, especially considering his ability to talk to his animal companions in Peter Baynton’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and The Horse, produced by J.J. Abrams, which premieres tomorrow on Apple TV+.

When the Boy wakes up in the forest, he has no idea how he got there or where he lives. Fortunately, he runs into the Mole, who has all kinds of helpful ideas, like following the river to the human settlement. Initially, the Boy must protect the Mole from the Fox, but when the little mammal frees his predator from a hunter’s snare, he starts to trail after them, shyly. The going gets easier once the Horse joins up with them, especially when they need a wind-break from the storm.

Co-adapted by Charlie Mackesy from his children’s book, The Boy etc. features some platitude heavy-dialogue, by Tom Hollander manages to sell some of the clunkiest, fridge-worthy banalities, with his warmly sensitive voice-over performance as the Mole (he even sort of looks like a mole in real-life). It is sort of like the Pooh stories at their most Taoist, pushing the envelope of New Age schmaltz. However, the stylish animation, derived from Mackesy’s original illustrations, is quite elegant.

Sundance ’20: Lost Girls & Mole Agent

Hitchcock loved putting average everymen into breakneck thrillers. To a large extent, that is what happens to the three protagonists of three standout films for mystery thriller fans that premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. They also happen to be stories grounded in reality, but the circumstances of each are vastly different.

One of the best films of any genre at this year’s Sundance was Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark, which featured the festival’s most classically Hitchcockian hero, Greville Wynne, the real-life British businessman who was recruited to make contact with a highly-placed Soviet mole, as an amateur spy, completely unaware of the greater stakes involved. Full review here.

Liz Garbus’s Lost Girls is also directly based on a true story, but rather than playing a grand game of espionage, Mari Gilbert finds herself in a harrowing nightmare when her daughter Shannan disappears, presumably because she is another victim of the Long Island Serial Killer (a.k.a. Craig’s List Killer). Based on Robert Kolker’s well-received true crime account, Lost Girls follows Gilbert’s campaign to shame the Suffolk County police in to conducting a more thorough investigation, as well as her own free-lance efforts.

The problem is the cops on the case are not particularly motivated to investigate the serial murder of prostitutes like Shannan, nor are they inclined to dig too deeply in the gated community where she was last seen. The fact that the victims came from families decidedly on the lower end of the socio-economic and educational spectrums does not help either. Mari Gilbert is the roughest of family-support group, but she is also the toughest. Police Commissioner Richard Dormer starts to grudgingly respect her, so he might even start pushing the investigation a little.

In many ways, the Craig’s List killings were similar to Robert Pickton’s prostitute murders depicted in Rachel Talay’s On the Farm, but at least the Vancouver serial killer was eventually brought to justice. The Long Island murders remain unsolved, which necessarily implies an unsatisfying conclusion for Lost Girls. Yet, Amy Ryan’s withering intensity as Gilbert and the world-weary sadness Gabriel Byrne brings to Dormer still make Lost Girls deeply compelling. In fact, screenwriter Michael Werwie manages to shape the material into a surprisingly suspenseful narrative, while Garbus nicely balances the socially conscious anger with gritty procedural elements.

Mr. Sergio is sort of a spy like Wynne, but he is even more ordinary than Gilbert. He also happens to be a spry 83-years-old, which makes him the perfect candidate to go undercover as a nursing home resident in Maite Alberdi’s Chilean documentary, The Mole Agent.

Lies We Tell: Where Two Englands Intersect

The legal age for marriage in the United Kingdom is a reasonable eighteen, but it is allowed for those as young as sixteen, provided there is parental consent. Apparently, that consent is easily granted within the Islamic “South Asian” enclaves in cities like Bradford. That is something an Irish-Anglo chauffeur probably never considered very much, until he takes a protective interest in his late boss’s Pakistani mistress, who finds herself at odds with the misogyny of her family and community in Mitu Misra’s Lies We Tell (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Demi Lamprose always told his chauffeur Donald, the only cheating husbands who get caught are the ones that do not love their wives enough to sufficiently cover their tracks. Presumably, he also thought enough about Amber to want to shield her from the shame such an affair would cause her Muslim family. It falls on the loyal driver to clean out the love nest, where he has the unfortunate duty of breaking the bad news to Amber. It is an awkward meeting that get even more awkward due to an unlikely chain of circumstances. However, when Amber reaches out, asking Donald to take care of some revealing photos on Lamprose’s phone, trust starts to develop between the two.

Donald and the viewers soon learn Amber is already a half-pariah in her community, despite her education and legal career, because she divorced KD, a rising Bradford gangster she was forced to marry when she was sixteen. She certainly had her reasons. However, in an act of sadistic parity, KD is now determined to marry her freshly sixteen-year-old sister Miriam—and her parents are only too happy to consent.

LWT is a scrupulously realistic film, which is terrifying. There is no way to sugarcoat the truth of the matter. Misra is depicting customs and behavior that is flat out misogynistic and essentially tribal in nature. Lest viewers have a kneejerk reaction, it should be noted Misra grew up in Bradford’s immigrant communities, but as a successful entrepreneur-turned filmmaker, he developed a wider perspective.

Granted, there are some first-time filmmaker mistakes to be found here. For instance, there is a pretentious bit of business at the end that is sure to elicit laughs at exactly the wrong time. However, the whole of this film is far more important than a few scattered parts like that. Indeed, some of the dialogue rings with significance, as when Amber’s mother accusingly asks why she always judges the family by British standards. We can see she wants to reply: because we are British and live in England, but she obviously knows that would be a mistake.

Sibylla Deen is terrific as Amber. It is a tough role, because sometimes the character is selfish and unlikable, but Deen really gets at her underlying vulnerabilities and makes her human. Gabriel Byrne reliably anchors the film as Donald, really lowering the boom in key moments. Having Harvey Keitel so prominent on the posters is somewhat deceptive, since Lamprose dies after the first five or ten minutes, but he is fine during the time. Jan Uddin’s KD is certainly a fierce villain, but Manzar Sehbai gives the film heft and complicated dimension with his powerful performance as Amber’s cowardly father, Zulfikar.

It is unusual to find on-screen a completely platonic relationship between two attractive and mature adults, played by the likes of Deen and Byrne, but that central relationship is what so distinguishes Lies We Tell. It is a very good film and an eye-opening reflection of “multicultural” British society as it is lived today in urban centers, like Bradford. Highly recommended, it opens this Friday (2/2) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

Sundance ’18: Hereditary

Like the saying goes, emotional problems do not run in Annie Graham’s family, they gallop. She always blamed her mother, perhaps with good reason. However, she starts to feel guilty about her long simmering resentments when the semi-estranged matriarch finally passes away. Yet, the full toxicity of Grandma’s legacy soon becomes apparent as the Graham family tragedies compound in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, which screens during this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Annie Graham lives with her family in a remote chalet-style home, where she works as a scale-model artist, thereby establishing a creepy locale and décor for Aster to build off. Their teen son Peter can’t even fit in with his stoner friends, but his younger sister Charlie is the real odd duck. Maybe not so coincidentally, Annie and her husband Steve allowed Grandma more access to Charlie, but they totally froze her out during Peter’s early years.

Graham was already unsettled, but further family tragedy sends her hurtling down to some dark emotional places. In some ways, Hereditary evokes the spirit of The Babadook as Graham’s relationship with her son becomes increasingly poisoned. Yet, there is also plenty of The Conjuring, including some seance business, which always works out so well in horror movies, right?

Hereditary is getting a lot of buzz, because its depiction of family dysfunction is nearly as harrowing as its supernatural horrors. As Annie Graham, Toni Collette gets frantic and feverish beyond on all reason. It is sort of a cross between Isabelle Adjani in Possession and a dramatically less shticky Meryl Streep in Ossage County. In a straight domestic drama, she would be excessively over-the-top, but in a claustrophobic horror film like this, she is just what the mad doctor ordered.

Aster’s narrative takes some shockingly dark and insidious turns, but it all seems believable, thanks to his masterful control of atmosphere. Each time he drops a revelation, it raises the hair on your arms. His horror movie mechanics are spot-on, especially in his use of Graham’s diorama models. Plus, there is an attic to the Graham house that you really wouldn’t want to rummage through.

Gabriel Byrne nicely counterbalances Collette as the painfully reserved Steve Graham. Milly Shapiro (one of four young actresses who originated the role of Roald Dahl’s Matilda on Broadway) gives a remarkably weird performance as Charlie, making the more conventional teen angst of Alex Wolff’s Peter, pale in comparison. Of course, Ann Dowd is rock solid as Joan, Graham’s séance buddy, in scenes reviewers will want to revisit after the fact.

Hereditary is an unusually good-looking horror film, thanks to Pawel Pogorzelski’s eerie cinematography and the richly-detailed, award-worthy work of production designer Grace Yun, art director Richard T. Olson, and the rest of the design team. This is a deeply scary film that fans of James Wan ought to flip over. Highly recommended, Hereditary screens again this afternoon (1/27) in Park City, as part of the 2018 Sundance Film Festival.

I, Anna: Charlotte Rampling Rocks a Trench Coat

Architecturally, there are two Londons of note. There is the Old England of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and the glass and steel London of Norman Foster and the Barbican. The latter is becoming increasingly more recognizable, thanks to structures like “The Gherkin.” This is the world Anna Miller and DCI Bernie Reid uncomfortably inhabit in Barnaby Southcombe’s moody noir, I, Anna (trailer here), which releases today on DVD, from Icarus Films.

Anna Welles is a divorced grandmother with misgivings—about the fractured union, not her granddaughter or her single-mother grown-daughter Emmy. In fact, all three live together, with Welles sleeping in the living room New York studio style, while the two younger generations share her one bedroom. Encouraged by Emmy to do a spot of speed-dating, Welles winds up accompanying a mature player named George Stone to his tony flat. Things get a bit haywire from there, especially for Stone, whose noggin is bashed in by a blunt object.

To viewers, Welles looks like an excellent suspect, who even returns to the building to retrieve her umbrella from the lift. However, that is not how DCI Reid initially sees her, but he definitely notices the stylish woman. Stone’s resentful stepson with extensive drug debts seems like a far more likely perp. Of course, the investigation will inevitably turn toward Welles just as she and Reid make an unusually deep emotional connection.

Southcombe adapted Elsa Lewin’s one-hit wonder mystery novel, which was also inspired the late 1990s German film, Solo for Clarinet. Presumably, the clarinet was a bit of German seasoning. In its present screen incarnation, the narrative sort of resembles Looking for Mr. Goodbar, as if James M. Cain had rewritten it. Yet, first and foremost, Southcombe clearly conceived the film as a star vehicle-character study for Charlotte Rampling, who also happens to be his mother.

It should also be immediately conceded Rampling and her co-lead Gabriel Byrne do not look anywhere near the seventy and sixty-six years their Wikipedia pages admit to. Still, they are indeed mature adults, which makes their romantic relationship rather refreshing, even though it is obviously doomed. Together, their chemistry smolders, while individually Rampling implodes spectacularly and Byrne absolutely personifies rumpled angst. Bond and Avengers fans will also enjoy seeing Honor Blackman kill it with a tart-tongued extended cameo. Similarly, Eddie Marsan gives the film additional mystery cred playing DI Frank Towers (frankly, it is about time somebody programmed a Marsan retrospective).

In all likelihood, Southcombe probably did not intend I,A as a commentary on contemporary architecture, but it is baked in nonetheless—and more successfully than in Wheatley’s artlessly didactic High-Rise. They both orbit ultra-modern neighborhoods like Canary Wharf, but they are uneasy in their navigation. Reid seems to be a respected guv’nor (or at least he was), but he prefers to patrol the streets at 5:00 rather than spend time in his fishbowl office with floor-to-ceiling internal windows. Likewise, Rampling’s ageless sophistication looks out of place traversing the endless external concrete stairways of Stone’s complex.

As a mystery, I, Anna is not all that mysterious, but Ben Smithard’s cinematography is seductively noir. Essentially, Southcombe’s film is all about style and Rampling, with some Byrne thrown in for good measure. For most genre fans, that will be more than enough. Recommended for mature mystery/thriller patrons, I, Anna is now available on DVD from Icarus Films.

Louder than Bombs: Trier Directs Huppert, in English

Just like T.E. Lawrence and Buford Pusser before her, it seems cosmically wrong that celebrated war photographer Isabelle Reed died in a motor accident. However, the awkward circumstances surrounding her death are more likely closer to that of Ernest Hemingway. Her widower Gene Reed has tried to shield their youngest, moodiest son from the truth, but an upcoming press tribute is almost certain to broach the inconvenient subject. The father and his two sons will struggle to finally come to terms with her death in Joachim Trier’s first English language feature, Louder than Bombs (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

To mark a round number anniversary of Reed’s passing, her friends and admirers have organized a career retrospective exhibition. To tie-in, her wordsmith partner will write a personal appreciation of her life and work for the Times magazine or something very much like it. He duly warns Gene Reed that he will not duck the eight-hundred-pound gorilla. That only gives the long-suffering father a few days to level with the increasingly surly and anti-social Conrad. His grown brother Jonah seems to have dealt with her loss, but that is only a superficial impression. Deep down, the new father is probably the most dysfunctional member of the family.

For an angst-fueled domestic tragedy, a considerable amount of stuff happens in Bombs. Inevitably, it all boils down to life is not fair. As one might expect of the busy narrative, some of it works and some of it does not. Poor Gene Reed serves as the glue holding it all together, constantly sacrificing his subplots for the sake of others. However, Gabriel Byrne plays him with such profound sorrow, he gives the film a deeply humane core.

Of course, Isabelle Huppert outshines everyone as her namesake. She effectively haunts the film, dominating the ensemble despite her limited flashback screen-time. As the not so mature Jonah, Jesse Eisenberg also surprises with the quality of his work and the character flaws he reveals along the way. However, as the Number Two Son, Devin Druid feels like he is doing a third rate riff on Wes Bentley’s brooding teen in American Beauty. Conversely, David Strathairn dramatically elevates the film during his pivotal confrontation with Byrne as his wife’s suspiciously close colleague.

Indeed, the are moments in Bombs that rings with brutal honesty and forgiving compassion, but there is also a good deal of uncomfortable filler. Those messy interludes are rather surprising given the uniformly Spartan elegance of co-screenwriter Eskil Vogt’s directorial debut Blindness, which is sure to appreciate critically even further as time passes. Still, when Bombs connects, it leaves you smarting.

It might be inconsistent and even derivative with respects to Conrad’s resentments and fixations, but when it finishes, you know you have seen a film. Recommended with all its warts and ragged edges for patrons of mature chamber-dramas, Louder than Bombs opens this Friday (4/8) in New York, at the Lincoln Plaza.

Tribeca ’13: Just a Sigh

Given the rainy climate and the subject matter, performing a regional production of Ibsen in Calais must be depressing.  It is a gig, but Alix has yet to be paid for it.  Her career is not going so well and her personal life is rather rocky too, so when she meets a handsome stranger she cannot help wondering “what if” in Jérôme Bonnel’s Just a Sigh (trailer here), which screens during this year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Alix and a quiet, sensitive looking man are both taking the train from Calais to Paris.  She hopes to re-establish some order in her finances and have a long talk with her partner.  Maddeningly, he just does not seem to be around.  Yet, as fate would have it, she again crosses paths with the man with the sad eyes.  Douglas has come from Britain for the funeral of a Parisian college friend.  Despite his very real grief, he is undeniably attracted to Alix.  Things do indeed run their course, but both are reluctant to let go of the moment.

Granted, Sigh revisits the familiar terrain of Brief Encounter and other short but sweet cinematic trysts.  However, Bonnel’s mostly French language film is unusually mature, sophisticated, and frankly kind of hot, in a middle aged way.  The on-screen chemistry between co-leads Emmanuelle Devos and Gabriel Byrne is quite powerful.  Devos shows considerable flexibility, segueing from Alix’s scatter-brained rushing about to her massively smoldering scenes with Byrne.  For his part, the Irish actor radiates tragic dignity as her temporary lover.

Sigh is a deceptively simple story, implying years of frustration and regret with a glance.  Gorgeously lensed by Pascal Lagriffoul, it is seamlessly elegant package.  Paris never looked better on film and every love scene should be so tastefully staged as those found here.  Bonnel only errs giving too much screen time to Alix’s condescending family, because they break his intoxicating spell.

Deeply romantic but never sentimental, Just a Sigh is exactly the sort of French film French cinema connoisseurs love to love, harkening back to the cross-over appeal of A Man and a Woman.  Featuring Byrne, arguably a bigger star today as result of his TV work on In Treatment and Vikings, it should be a no-brainer acquisition candidate.  Enthusiastically recommended, Just a Sigh screens again this Sunday (4/21), Thursday (4/25), and next Sunday (4/28) during the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival.