Movie Reviews
Movie reviews: ‘Beast’ is not an ambitious film, but it doesn’t have to be
![Movie reviews: ‘Beast’ is not an ambitious film, but it doesn’t have to be Movie reviews: ‘Beast’ is not an ambitious film, but it doesn’t have to be](https://www.ctvnews.ca/content/dam/ctvnews/en/images/2022/8/18/beast-film-1-6032238-1660833260071.jpg)
BEAST: 3 STARS
“Beast,” a brand new nature-gone-wild flick starring Idris Elba and a giant, indignant CGI lion, and now taking part in in theatres, is a throwback to man versus beast films like “Jaws” and “Anaconda.”
“I’ve by no means seen something like this,” says wildlife biologist Martin Battles (Sharlto Copely). “A number of assaults, with out consuming its prey. Lions don’t do this. Not less than no lion I’ve ever seen.”
Elba is Dr. Nate Samuels, a just lately widowed father of two teenage daughters, Meredith (Iyana Halley) and Norah (Leah Jeffries). In an try and reconnect together with his youngsters, he arranges a vacation to a South African wildlife reserve, run by Battles, a childhood buddy of his late spouse.
Daniels met his spouse in South Africa, and, though he was separated from her when she handed, he needs his daughters to connect with their mom’s homeland.
The journey is idyllic till they arrive at a village that has been devastated by a grotesque lion assault. Quickly, they meet the wrongdoer, a wrathful male lion who regards all people as enemies after his delight was worn out by poachers. The lion is now preventing again.
“It’s the legislation of the jungle,” says Battles. “It’s the one legislation that issues.”
Elba hasn’t had nice luck with felines on display (see “Cats”), and quicker than you may say, “Outdated Deuteronomy,” Samuels and his household are engaged in a horrifying struggle for his or her lives.
“It’s you towards him,” says Battles. “And that’s not a struggle you’re designed to win.”
As a thriller “Beast” is so predictable the subtitle might have been known as, “Maul’s Effectively That Ends Effectively.” Nonetheless, Icelandic director Kormákur does stage a number of, easy motion scenes in lengthy takes that can make your blood stress rise. The struggle sequences in and across the Jeep the primary forged spends many of the movie in are claustrophobic and primal, with an actual sense of hazard.
Screenwriter Ryan Engle makes an attempt to weave some father-daughter dynamics into the story, however we’re not right here for the dysfunctional household stuff. We’re paying prime greenback to see Idris Elba punch a lion within the face (earlier than you @ me, these are CGI creations, no animals had been harmed within the making of this film) and so he does in high quality B film type.
“The Ghost and the Darkness” this ain’t.
Between lion assaults, the silence is stuffed with a wide range of dialogue that ranges from, “You keep proper right here,” to “We’ve received to get out of right here.” Elba does deliver some emotive qualities to this motion character, whereas Copely lends the story some grit. Because the sisters, Halley and Jeffries deliver a mixture of steeliness and empathy. There’s extra to them than being scream queens on the Savannah.
“Beast” will not be an bold movie, however it doesn’t must be. It has Elba and sufficient indignant animal motion to make its 90 minutes fly by within the swipe of a lion’s paw.
ORPHAN: FIRST KILL: 3 STARS
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13 years after creepy child Esther was revealed to be a grown girl within the unique thriller “Orphan,” she’s again in a prequel that units up the occasions of the primary movie. Isabelle Fuhrman returns to play the crazed-killer orphan of the title, a 30-something girl bothered with a hormone dysfunction that stunted her bodily development. “She by no means grew older,” says her physician. “Not less than on the surface.”
The motion in “Orphan: First Kill,” begins on the Saarne Institute, an Estonian psychiatric hospital dwelling to a harmful killer named Leena (Fuhrman). “Leena might appear like a toddler, however she is a grown girl.”
One murderous rampage later, she escapes, and, after some fast on-line analysis, finds a lacking child she resembles. Utilizing the title Esther, she makes her technique to Connecticut, and poses because the long-lost daughter of Allen (Rossif Sutherland) and Tricia Albright’s (Julia Stiles). She rocks a Wednesday Addams sort of look, sporting old style ribbons in her hair to disguise the scars from the electrical shock therapy on the hospital, and says she picked up her heavy accent after being kidnapped and brought to Russia.
Greeted warmly by Allen and Tricia, son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan) isn’t as overjoyed. “She has an accent now and clothes like Lizzie Borden,” he says when requested what Esther is like since her return.
Thus far, the film echoes the unique movie, however then comes a twist that offers new that means to the outdated saying about cleansing up after the youngsters.
“Orphan: First Kill” maintains the combination of camp and gore that made the primary film memorable. The 30-year-old killer within the physique of a kid is an absurd premise, however it’s dealt with with the correct quantity of darkish humour, type and bloody kills, making it campy, good enjoyable. A lot of this has to do with the twist—which I can’t inform you about—however it additionally helps that Fuhrman, who final performed this character when she was a pre-teen, is ready to promote the concept of Esther as a child-woman.
Director William Brent Bell makes use of various tips, like pressured perspective and baby actor doubles, to determine the phantasm that Esther is a teen and create a way of continuity with the primary movie. 13 years is an extended layover between films, however the two movies match collectively snugly.
“Orphan: First Kill” will be the prequel no person was ready for, however after a sluggish begin within the film’s first half, it picks up and freshens up the story with a ghoulishly enjoyable twist and a few good creepy child motion.
SHARP STICK: 2 ½ STARS
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Frank and provocative, “Sharp Stick,” the brand new movie written and directed by “Ladies” creator and star Lena Dunham, returns to acquainted floor with a sexual coming-of-age story.
Kristine Froseth stars as 26-year-old Sarah Jo. A sexually inexperienced girl who had a hysterectomy at age 17, she nonetheless lives at dwelling together with her mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and wannabe Instagram influencer sister (Taylour Paige). She scrapes by babysitting for Zach, son of Josh (Jon Bernthal) and Heather (Dunham). Heather is pregnant and Josh has a wandering eye, which occurs to land on the flirty Sarah Jo.
Their ”affair” culminates with a tryst on the ground of a cramped laundry room, setting Sarah Jo off on a journey of sexual discovery involving a lot of pornography, a fixation on grownup movie star Vance Leroy (the ornately tattooed Scott Speedman) and thoroughly organized, random “instructional” hook-ups.
“Sharp Stick” reverberates with echoes of the frankness of “Ladies” and the edgy work of filmmakers like Larry Clark and Concord Korine, however by no means rises to the extent of any of these namechecks.
Dunham has woven some attention-grabbing characters to encompass Sarah Jo, like her mom Marilyn, performed by Leigh, a much-divorced Hollywood hanger-on, and twerking sister Treina, however she hasn’t given her major character any actual depth. She is thirsty for carnal data, and approaches it like a job, with a examine record besides, however apart from the humour inherent in that, Sarah Jo’s arc merely isn’t that attention-grabbing. Her desperation to show to herself and others is repetitive, her actions so naïve they recommend her emotional age is much lower than her said age of 26. Given her mom’s openness concerning intercourse, it doesn’t ring true that Sarah Jo is totally unfamiliar with something to do with sexuality.
“Sharp Stick” does have a number of humorous scenes, an attention-grabbing character or three, and an uncomfortable but refreshing candidness about intercourse however, by the point the top credit roll, Sarah Jo’s journey is the movie’s least attention-grabbing ingredient.
DAY SHIFT: 3 STARS
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“Day Shift,” a brand new motion comedy starring Jamie Foxx and now streaming on Netflix, brings a supernatural twist to the acquainted story of a father doing what he has to do to hold on to his household.
Foxx performs Bud, a San Fernando Valley pool cleaner and undercover vampire slayer. A fearless hunter of the undead whereas on the job, at dwelling he’s a faithful father, however issues aren’t going nicely. He and his spouse Joceyln (Meagan Good) have separated, and until Bud can give you $5,000 to pay for personal faculty tuition for daughter Paige (Zion Broadnax), mom and daughter are going to maneuver to Florida.
Neither the pool cleansing or freelance vampire killing pay what they used to, and when a neighborhood pawnbroker (Peter Stormare) presents him a fraction of what his trophy vampire fangs are price, he’s left with just one possibility, be a part of the vampire-hunter’s union.
Hassle is, they don’t need him. “You anticipate me to allow you to again in the place the solar don’t shine?” asks union chief Ralph Seeger (Eric Lange). He’s a insurgent, he doesn’t observe the principles, he’s a wild card, however when legendary vamp killer Huge John Elliott (Snoop Dogg) vouches for him, Bud will get in. Nonetheless, the union has him on probation and his each transfer will likely be monitored by straight-laced union rep Seth (Dave Franco).
“I’ve to be with you always within the subject,” Seth says. “Union guidelines.”
Bud can now earn the cash he must hold his household collectively, until elder vampire Audrey San Fernando (Karla Souza) will get her bloody revenge on him for killing her undead daughter.
“Day Shift” is an motion comedy with an emphasis on bloody motion. Between the decapitations, martial arts struggle sequences, picket stakings and Snoop’s Huge Bertha speedy hearth machine gun, this one has a a lot greater physique rely than your normal giggle fest. Foxx does his finest to bleed the laughs out of the script. He’s a convincing motion star, a sort of jokey Blade, who additionally has a means with a one-liner. His presence provides some much-needed lightness and his chemistry with Franco makes the character of Seth a tad much less irksome.
“Day Shift” suffers from an underwritten script and overwrought plot turns, however regardless of all that, the motion, Foxx and Snoop makes for a fairly good Saturday-matinee-style horror comedy, à la “Monster Squad” or “Fright Evening.”
CARMEN: 3 STARS
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Set in a quaint village in Malta within the Nineteen Eighties, “Carmen,” a brand new movie starring Natascha McElhone as a middle-aged girl who finds a brand new path in life via romance, is an element coming-of-age, half travelogue.
McElhone is Carmen, a 50-year-old girl, loosely primarily based on director Valarie Buhagiar’s personal aunt Rita. In her village in Malta, custom has it that when a person enters the priesthood, his sister comes alongside as caretaker of the church. Starting at age 16, Carmen lives a lifetime of service, 34 years of toil, till her brother unexpectedly drops lifeless.
Freed from her obligation to the church, Carmen embraces life. She will get her hair completed for the primary time, presents very sensible and playful recommendation to the villagers via the confessional, and finds romance with Paulo (Steven Love), a youthful man who runs a pawnshop.
As Carmen discovers new methods to maneuver ahead with pleasure, we be taught in regards to the path that introduced her to this stage of her life.
“Carmen” is an empathetic and optimistic film a couple of second probability at dwelling life to the fullest. McElhone brings a spirit of generosity and heat to the character’s journey. Carmen’s life is blossoming, however her awakening isn’t simple and McElhone acknowledges her character’s battle. Every part is new, and whereas Carmen is getting ready to changing into overwhelmed, this skillful efficiency additionally reveals us how keen she is to embrace life’s alternatives.
The straightforward story is enhanced by the lead efficiency, and cinematographer Diego Guijarro’s attractive images. This small Mediterranean island nation seems locked in time, a contemporary city rooted up to now, surrounded by journey brochure-ready surroundings. It’s pure eye sweet and serves as an ideal backdrop to this story of custom and rebirth.
“Carmen” goals to make you’re feeling higher on the way in which out of the theatre than you probably did on the way in which in. It’s an admirable purpose, and even when the film doesn’t reinvent the feel-good-movie wheel, it accomplishes what it units out to do.
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Movie Reviews
‘The Brutalist’ Review: Adrien Brody Is Devastating in Brady Corbet’s Monumental Symphony of Immigrant Experience
![‘The Brutalist’ Review: Adrien Brody Is Devastating in Brady Corbet’s Monumental Symphony of Immigrant Experience ‘The Brutalist’ Review: Adrien Brody Is Devastating in Brady Corbet’s Monumental Symphony of Immigrant Experience](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/25fea_venice-Best-Of-The-Brutalist-Main-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
The past comes to life as a whole enveloping world in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s fine-grained, novelistic third feature as director, about a man of genius who gets to taste the American Dream but also feel the stinging humiliation of a conditional welcome that turns ice-cold. While there are echoes of The Fountainhead, this expansive story of a brilliant Bauhaus-trained Hungarian Jewish architect who survives World War II and starts a new life in Pennsylvania is a provocative original.
Written by Corbet with his partner and regular collaborator Mona Fastvold, The Brutalist is closer to the churning ideas and dark view of power in the director’s debut feature, The Childhood of a Leader, than his more polarizing disquisition on contemporary celebrity, Vox Lux. But it represents a vast leap in scope from both, contemplating such meaty themes as creativity and compromise, Jewish identity, architectural integrity, the immigrant experience, the arrogant insularity of privilege and the long reach of the past.
The Brutalist
The Bottom Line As bold and ambitious as the project it chronicles.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach De Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola
Director: Brady Corbet
Screenwriters: Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold
3 hours 35 minutes
Reportedly the first American film fully produced in VistaVision since One-Eyed Jacks in 1961, it screens in its Venice Film Festival premiere in 70mm, a giant canvas amply justified by the narrative’s variegated textures.
Running a densely packed three-and-a-half hours, including a built-in intermission with entr’acte, the enthralling movie hands Adrien Brody his best role in years as gifted architect László Tóth, ushered through fortune’s door by a wealthy tycoon eager to bankroll his dream project and then viciously cut down to size when his patron is displeased.
Brody pours himself into the character with bristling intelligence and internal fire, holding nothing back as he viscerally conveys both exultant highs and gutting sorrows. His exacting accent work alone is a measure of his commitment to the audacious project.
The opening jolts us instantly into anxious involvement as László is jostled around in a packed train carriage, the shuddering sound design suggesting the nightmare of his ordeal. Over the turbulent strains of Daniel Blumberg’s mighty score, letters from the architect’s wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), from whom he was separated during internment, are heard in voiceover, detailing her situation in a displaced-persons camp in Hungary with László’s niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy). László is soon on board a ship bound for America, with plans for Erzsébet and Zsófia to follow.
Ellis Island arrival scenes are a staple of immigrant dramas, but the disconcerting angles from which DP Lol Crawley shoots the Statue of Liberty as it looms into view seem to presage both the elation of deliverance and the challenges to come. The blank stares of the assembled passengers barely able to follow instructions in English from port officials provide a haunting image of people for whom freedom comes with fear.
After a quick, and notably graphic, encounter with an immigrant sex worker, László travels to Pennsylvania, capital of industry. He’s warmly reunited with his cousin Attila, played by Alessandro Nivola with subtle indications of a fraternal generosity that has limits. Old-world erasure is evident in his tempered accent, his blonde shiksa wife Audrey (Emma Laird) and in the name of the childless couple’s furniture store, Miller & Sons: “Folks here like a family business.” He even converted to Catholicism before marrying.
Potentially important new client Harry (Joe Alwyn) hires Miller & Sons to redesign the gloomy library in his family’s gated mansion as a surprise for his father, Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), away on business. Attila entrusts the project to László, and the architect takes on young Black single father Gordon (Isaach De Bankolé), whom he met on a mission breadline, as a construction hand. The architect’s perfectionism causes delays, but the resulting transformation creates a retreat of serenity and light, with the room’s valuable collection of first editions cleverly protected from damage.
Van Buren Sr.’s reaction is not the surprise his son intended. Unimpressed with the new library, he’s furious to find his house turned upside-down and “a Negro man” on his property, dismissing the contractors in a fit of bellowing rage.
When Harry refuses to pay due to roof damage, Attila blames his cousin. Audrey has already been nudging László to move out since a supposed transgression during a drunken evening at home. Attila uses that tension as further justification to kick him out. He lands in a shelter with Gordon, taking construction work to get by and using opium to numb the pain of his war injuries.
László is surprised when Harrison turns up at a building site, brandishing a copy of Look magazine with a photo spread calling the library a triumph of minimalist design. The industrialist has a folder of research on the architect, including photos of notable proto-brutalist buildings he designed before the war. Given that the Reich deemed the work of László and his colleagues “un-Germanic,” he’s moved almost to tears, having assumed all photographs were destroyed.
That scene is one of several in which László’s emotional response to architecture points to the director’s kindred passion for the art form in relation to its time. The fictional protagonist was partly inspired by the life of Marcel Breuer, with Louis Kahn and Mies van der Rohe also among Corbet and Fastvold’s references.
Harrison sends a car for László the following Sunday when he’s just staggering home from a night of excess; he finds himself at a formal luncheon, where a Jewish lawyer offers to help get Erzsébet and Zsófia to America. The guests are then instructed to follow Harrison as he marches them in blistering cold to a hilltop overlooking all of Doylestown. He shares his vision for a vast community center to be designed by László, who will be installed in a guesthouse on the property while construction is underway.
Financial compensation and artistic opportunity shape a turning point in the story, as does the arrival of Erzsébet and Zsófia, the former physically broken by war and famine and the latter initially rendered mute by the horrors she experienced. But almost from the start, László’s dream project is fraught with difficulties, each one chipping away at his sense of control and his ego.
Having the work overseen by Harry, who makes no effort to disguise his dislike for László, is merely an annoyance at first. But when a contractor and another architect are brought in to assess costs and city-planning representatives start making demands, László feels compelled to cover budget overages out of his own fee. The project is stalled by a rail accident involving a train delivering materials, eliciting a sharp reminder of the rage Harrison displayed at their first meeting.
Tension in the architect’s marriage is released but not resolved in a knockout scene in bed, during which Erzsébet, in perhaps Jones’ strongest moment, reduces László to tears by expressing how well she understands him. She’s supportive but not subjugated, chafing at the way he shuts her out of decisions affecting all three of them. As she puts it later, “László worships only at the altar of himself.”
While a degrading incident between Harry and Zsófia plays out offscreen, it doesn’t slip by László, and though the matter is never discussed, it foreshadows a shocking development years later, after work on the project has resumed. That climactic moment happens in Italy, where Harrison accompanies László to the marble quarries in the mountains of Carrera.
In an extraordinarily beautiful passage of writing, Orazio (Salvatore Sansone), a friend and associate from before the war, shares his deep feelings about marble and its significance to his time as a Resistance fighter, about the weight of the geological miracle both in European history and foundational America. That such a moving declaration precedes strung-out László’s brutal debasement only amplifies its shattering wallop.
The Van Burens are revealed to be the quintessence of moral corruption bred by wealth and power; only Harry’s twin sister Maggie (Stacy Martin) seems to value genuine kindness. The Brutalist becomes a scathing critique of the ways in which America’s moneyed and privileged class gains cachet through the labor and creativity of immigrants but will never consider them equals.
Despite Harrison’s big pronouncements on the responsibility of the rich to nurture the great artists of their time, he’s a cultural gatekeeper in an exclusionary club. Despising weakness, he ultimately cuts László down to size with a pitilessness that in hindsight seems preordained from that first encounter.
Brody has seldom been better, bringing tremendous gravitas but also a pain that gnaws at László’s prideful sense of self, one of purpose and destiny. It’s a towering performance; seeing the architect treated like garbage is crushing.
Jones’ role appears almost marginal at first, but the character grows in stature and forcefulness as the clear-sighted Erzsébet — lonely, unwelcomed and toiling away at a job that’s beneath her — makes a damning assessment of America and their place in it while her husband cracks under pressure. Alwyn does some of his best work, making Harry contemptible without veering into caricature. But the supporting cast’s real standout is Pearce in commandingly chilly form. Harrison is a visionary like László, but his practiced charm is undercut by an absence of humanity.
The movie is dedicated to the memory of composer Scott Walker, who died in 2019 and who scored Corbet’s previous films. Blumberg’s stirring work honors him with subtle echoes, also evoking comparison at times with the jagged edges of Mica Levi or the solemn grandeur of Terence Blanchard.
Editor David Jancso threads the sprawling story with a flow that pulls us along, incorporating archival material for historical context. And Crawley’s cinematography is magnificent, never more so than when prowling the mausoleum-like halls of the unfinished project or the tunnels of Carrera. Together with production designer Judy Becker and costumer Kate Forbes, the DP shows an attentive eye for detail, conjuring the look of midcentury America with a period verisimilitude that feels alive, never frozen in amber.
The Brutalist is a massive film in every sense, closing with a resonant epilogue that illustrates how art and beauty reach out from the past, transcending space and time to reveal a freedom of thought and identity often denied its makers.
Movie Reviews
‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc
![‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc ‘Martha’ Review: R.J. Cutler Tries to Get Martha Stewart to Let Down Her Guard in Mixed-Bag Netflix Doc](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Martha_00044009_01191620.jpg?w=1440&h=810&crop=1)
From teenage model to upper-crust caterer to domestic doyenne to media-spanning billionaire to scapegoated convict to octogenarian thirst trap enthusiast and Snoop Dogg chum, Martha Stewart has had a life that defies belief, or at least congruity.
It’s an unlikely journey that has been carried out largely in the public eye, which gives R.J. Cutler a particular challenge with his new Netflix documentary, Martha. Maybe there are young viewers who don’t know what Martha Stewart‘s life was before she hosted dinner parties with Snoop. Perhaps there are older audiences who thought that after spending time at the prison misleadingly known as Camp Cupcake, Martha Stewart slunk off into embarrassed obscurity.
Martha
The Bottom Line Makes for an entertaining but evasive star subject.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Distributor: Netflix
Director: R.J. Cutler
1 hour 55 minutes
Those are probably the 115-minute documentary’s target audiences — people impressed enough to be interested in Martha Stewart, but not curious enough to have traced her course actively. It’s a very, very straightforward and linear documentary in which the actual revelations are limited more by your awareness than anything else.
In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject. The prolific documentarian has done films on the likes of Anna Wintour and Dick Cheney, so he knows from prickly stars, and in Martha Stewart he has a heroine with enough power and well-earned don’t-give-a-f**k that she’ll only say exactly what she wants to say in the context that she wants to say it. Icy when she wants to be, selectively candid when it suits her purposes, Stewart makes Martha into almost a collaboration: half the story she wants to tell and half the degree to which Cutler buys that story. And the latter, much more than the completely bland biographical trappings and rote formal approach, is entertaining.
Cutler has pushed the spotlight exclusively onto Stewart. Although he’s conducted many new interviews for the documentary, with friends and co-workers and family and even a few adversaries, only Stewart gets the on-screen talking head treatment. Everybody else gets to give their feedback in audio-only conversations that have to take their place behind footage of Martha through the years, as well as the current access Stewart gave production to what seems to have been mostly her lavish Turkey Hill farmhouse.
Those “access” scenes, in which Stewart goes about her business without acknowledging the camera, illustrate her general approach to the documentary, which I could sum up as “I’m prepared to give you my time, but mostly as it’s convenient to me.”
At 83 and still busier than almost any human on the globe, Stewart needs this documentary less than the documentary needs her, and she absolutely knows it. Cutler tries to draw her out and includes himself pushing Stewart on certain points, like the difference between her husband’s affair, which still angers her, and her own contemporaneous infidelity. Whenever possible, Stewart tries to absent herself from being an active part of the stickier conversations by handing off correspondences and her diary from prison, letting Cutler do what he wants with those semi-revealing documents.
“Take it out of the letters,” she instructs him after the dead-ended chat about the end of her marriage, adding that she simply doesn’t revel in self-pity.
And Cutler tries, getting a voiceover actor to read those letters and diary entries and filling in visual gaps with unremarkable still illustrations.
Just as Stewart makes Cutler fill in certain gaps, the director makes viewers read between the lines frequently. In the back-and-forth about their affairs, he mentions speaking with Andy, her ex, but Andy is never heard in the documentary. Take it as you will. And take it as you will that she blames prducer Mark Burnett for not understanding her brand in her post-prison daytime show — which may or may not explain Burnett’s absence, as well as the decision to treat The Martha Stewart Show as a fleeting disaster (it actually ran 1,162 episodes over seven seasons) and to pretend that The Apprentice: Martha Stewart never existed. The gaps and exclusions are particularly visible in the post-prison part of her life, which can be summed up as, “Everything was bad and then she roasted Justin Bieber and everything was good.”
Occasionally, Stewart gives the impression that she’s let her protective veneer slip, like when she says of the New York Post reporter covering her trial: “She’s dead now, thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with that crap that she was writing.” But that’s not letting anything slip. It’s pure and calculated and utterly cutthroat. More frequently when Stewart wants to show contempt, she rolls her eyes or stares in Cutler’s direction waiting for him to move on. That’s evisceration enough.
Stewart isn’t a producer on Martha, and I’m sure there are things here she probably would have preferred not to bother with again at all. But at the same time, you can sense that either she’s steering the theme of the documentary or she’s giving Cutler what he needs for his own clear theme. Throughout the first half, her desire for perfection is mentioned over and over again and, by the end, she pauses and summarizes her life’s course with, “I think imperfection is something that you can deal with.”
Seeing her interact with Cutler and with her staff, there’s no indication that she has set aside her exacting standards. Instead, she’s found a calculatedly imperfect version of herself that people like, and she’s perfected that. It is, as she might put it, a good thing.
Movie Reviews
Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad
![Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/191/afd/c29a986144336e39edf1ea310d979113fd-reagan-review.1x.rsocial.w1200.jpg)
Dennis Quaid in Reagan.
Photo: Showbiz Direct/Everett Collection
Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice. The picture attempts to take in the full arc of the President’s life, following him from childhood right through to his 1994 announcement at the age of 83 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. But you’d never guess that this man was at all complex, complicated, conflicted — in other words, human. He might as well be one of those animatronic robots at Disney World, mouthing lines from his famous speeches.
Dennis Quaid, a very good actor who can usually work hints of sadness into his manic machismo, is hamstrung here by the need to impersonate. He gets the voice down well (and he certainly says “Well” a lot) and he tries to do what he can with Reagan’s occasional political or career setbacks, but gone is that unpredictable glint in the actor’s eye. This Reagan doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Everything he thinks or feels, he says — which is maybe an admirable trait in a politician, but makes for boring art.
The film’s arc is wide and its focus is narrow. Reagan is mainly about its subject’s lifelong opposition to Communism, carrying him through his battles against labor organizers as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually to higher public office. The movie is narrated by a retired Soviet intelligence official (Jon Voight) in the present day, answering a younger counterpart’s questions about how the Russian empire was destroyed. He calls Reagan “the Crusader” and the moniker is meant to be both combative and respectful: He admires Reagan’s single-minded dedication to fighting the Soviets. They, after all, were single-minded in their dedication to fighting the U.S., and the agent has a ton of folders and films proving that the KGB had been watching Reagan for a long, long time.
By the way, you did read that correctly. Jon Voight plays a KGB officer in this picture, complete with a super-thick Russian accent. There’s a lot of dress-up going on — it’s like Basquiat for Republicans, even though the cast is certainly not all Republicans — and there’s some campy fun to be had here. Much has been made of Creed’s Scott Stapp doing a very flamboyant Frank Sinatra, though I regret to announce that he’s only onscreen for a few seconds. Robert Davi gets more screentime as Leonid Brezhnev, as does Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner. Xander Berkeley puts in fine work as George Schultz, and a game Mena Suvari shows up as an intriguingly pissy Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife. As Margaret Thatcher, Lesley-Anne Down gets to utter an orgasmic “Well done, cowboy!” when she sees Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech on TV. And my ’80s-kid brain is still processing C. Thomas Howell being cast as Caspar Weinberger.
To be fair, a lot of historians give Reagan credit for helping bring about both the Gorbachev revolution and the eventual downfall of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, so the film’s focus is not in and of itself a misguided one. There are stories to be told within that scope — interesting ones, controversial ones, the kind that could get audiences talking and arguing, and even ones that could help breathe life into the moribund state of conservative filmmaking. But without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting. We get little mention of his family life (aside from his non-stop devotion to Nancy, played by Penelope Ann Miller, and vice versa). Other issues of the day are breezed through with a couple of quick montages. All of this could have given some texture to the story and lent dimensionality to such an enormously consequential figure. But then again, if the only character flaw you could find in Ronald Reagan was that he was too honest, then maybe you weren’t very serious about depicting him as a human being to begin with.
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