San Diego Reader February 9, 2017 61


MOVIE LISTINGS


All reviews are by Scott Marks, Matthew Lickona, and Duncan Shepherd. Priorities are indicated by one to five stars and antipathies by the black spot. Unrated movies are for now unreviewed. Thousands of past reviews are available online at SDReader.com/movies.


50 Shades Darker — Bad-boy dom Christian Grey wants good-girl sub Anastasia Steele back in his sexually adventurous world, but she would rather have, “no rules, no punishments, and no more secrets.” Boring! Thank heavens there’s a crazy ex-girlfriend to liven things up. Review forthcoming at sandiegoreader. com. 2017 (IN WIDE RELEASE)


20th Century Women — Knowing that it doesn’t take a man to raise a man, single mom Annette Bening duly deputizes surrogate “daughters” Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning, assigning them the role of dual consigliere to look after her 15-year-old son (Lucas Jade Zumann). Once the fastidiously worded dual voice-over narration commences, the characters seldom come up for air. Quality-wise, Women lands somewhere between writer-director Mike Mills’s two predecessors, Thumbsucker and Beginners. The equal numbers of flaws (repetition and a reliance on verbs over visual action) and virtues (an at-times mindful discourse handed over by a near-perfect cast) have a tendency of cancelling each other out. Well worth a look if just for the performances, but know going in that director Mills calls upon his cast and script to do most of the heavy lifting. One unhappy exception to that rule: he imposes an occasional switch into


Koyaanisqatsi mode to give the illusion of smeary LSD trails. It’s an unnecessary stylish distraction that achieves the (possibly) desired effect of drawing more attention to his sparkling dialogue. 2016. — S.M. ★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Alone in Berlin — If the Nazis had invented Twitter, we wouldn’t have found ourselves in the titular predicament. After news that their only son was killed in battle, a German factory mechanic (Brendan Gleeson) and his wife (Emma Thompson) mount a grassroots campaign to take down the Third Reich, one epistle at a time. Armed with little more than a bellyful of solemnity and a growing stack of admonitory note cards to be strategically scattered throughout Berlin, the couple takes to wandering the streets. In a three-year period, Otto and Anna Quangel dropped close to 300 cards before being captured and sent to the guillotine. Dignified to the point of absurdity, this fact-based dud never gets off the ground, thanks to director Vincent Perez’s failure to create — let alone maintain — any level of suspense. Under the right circumstances, I’ll gladly watch two characters spend half a movie walking in silence. But this isn’t Vertigo. With Daniel Brühl as the detective. 2016. — S.M. ★ (DIGITAL GYM CINEMA)


The Comedian — Robert De Niro again, this time charging through the role of Jackie Burke, a once-mighty sitcom star who decades later has difficulty making the rent as a put-down comic. Any script with Roastmaster General Jeff Ross’s name attached can’t help but yield a few mean-spirited howls. (Included is a reenactment of that legendary night in Friar’s Club history when Harry “Parkyakarkus” Einstein, aka Albert Brooks’s father, dropped dead


in mid-roast.) There’s a conceivable romantic subplot involving a woman (an exceptional Leslie Mann) Jackie met while performing community service for punching out a heckler. De Niro gets back to acting, swearing off the focking patented funny faces and building a character who’s more than just a bad- humored comic. Scanning the various audiences for familiar faces is time well spent. But other than watching Jackie wriggle through one uncomfortable gig after another, Taylor Hackford’s The Comedian ultimately has nowhere to go. With Edie Falco, Harvey Keitel, Charles


Grodin, and Lois Smith 2016. — S.M. ★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Daughters of the Dust — A memorial to the Gullah culture on the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast, set at a pivotal moment in 1902 on the eve of one family’s emigration from the African sanctuary to the U.S. mainland. Plainly a labor of love for filmmaker Julie Dash, but a labor for the filmgoer as well — a labor, in particular, to follow the slow, oblique, cross-stitch narrative. It packs in plenty of information, but it is not terribly informative, not terribly forthcoming, not terribly welcoming of those not already informed. The first-time director indisputably thinks in pictures (she thinks most vividly in reposeful group pictures), but not necessarily in moving pictures: there’s an effect of coffee-table-book text and illustration, lopsided in favor of the text. 1991. — D.S. ★ (DIGITAL GYM CINEMA)


The Founder — John Lee Hancock serves up a biopic of McDonald’s king Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton, just restrained enough as a ravenous dog in a human suit) that is not unlike the restaurant’s product: precisely prepared, brightly packaged (oh, that shot of the golden


arches reflected in Kroc’s windshield as he pulls up for the first time), and uncomplicated in its appeal. Or at least, that’s how it goes down much of the time, as it hurtles through the story of how one man took another man’s idea and built an empire before deciding that you can’t really be the burger king while the kingmaker still lives. But then comes the moment where Kroc tells the McDonald brothers (beautifully portrayed as paragons of American decency and ingenuity by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman) that he’s got a greater understanding of what they’ve created than they do. And just like that, the flavors get more complex. The gobsmacked brothers have been comparing Kroc to Hitler, a wolf, and a leech, and there’s no question that as a man, he ain’t much, and maybe less than most. But as a businessman, he’s a blankety-blank marvel, and there’s the rub. 2017. — M.L. ★★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Gold — Gold — or, Mr. Wells Goes to Wall Street. Stephen Gaghan’s gussied-up treatment of a true story about a struggling salesman (Matthew McConaughey, fat, bald, and snaggletoothed) and a rogue prospector (Edgar Ramirez at his most mysterious) and their mad quest to find gold in the jungle is, like its star, scrappy and sloppy and out of its depth, but still appealing in its earnest reach for glory. McConaughey is Kenny Wells, a luckless striver who longs to carry on the family tradition of prospecting. Ramirez is Michael Acosta, a once-hot miner with a crackpot theory about mineral deposits. It’s rough going, what with the malaria and the always- dwindling financial reserves, but it isn’t until their findings catch the attention of the Powers That Be that things really get dicey. (At one point, Wells is required


to enter a tiger’s cage and attempt to pat its head; that pretty much sums up his dealings with the financial system.) The story is sharp but exhausting; the emotion is genuine but overblown; the cast is capable but occasionally misused; and the ending aims at ambiguous but winds up just murky. It’s hard to call this ode to the common businessman a success, but it’s just a little bit harder to call it a failure. 2017. — M.L. ★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


Hidden Figures — NASA’s gone funky when a trio of African-American women (Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe), all experts in the field of analytic geometry, prove they have the right stuff needed to crack the elite white boy’s space program. An important historical achievement — and apparently, the space center’s best kept secret — is brought to light in this entertaining, at times thoughtful big screen adaptation. Filmed in the bright, colorful mode of a ’60’s romantic comedy, the film admirably captures the look and feel of the period — and it does so without lecturing or wagging an admonishing finger. Those pondering the meaning of seamless editing need look no further than Peter Teschner’s flair for cutting on action. The exposition is cumbersome at first as co-writer and director Theodore Melfi’s (St. Vincent) script has a habit of repeating itself: two runs to the bathroom were enough to get the point across. Still, a crowd pleaser in the best sense of the term. 2016. — S.M. ★★★ (IN WIDE RELEASE)


I Am Not Your Negro — Director Raoul Peck takes African-American author James Baldwin’s notes for Remember This House — his unfinished “story of America” as told through the lives of slain activists Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers — and


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92