Some of the hardest things to explain to children—and by extension adults—are the stupefying incongruities of life. Having no children of my own (bless up!) I can only guess at it, but spending a few hours here and there as deadbeat uncle and/or much-older-half-brother, I catch the occasional glimpse. Light, dark, asleep, awake, yes, no; it’s easy to see how the binary can posses the developing mind. But as life continues to reveal itself, the thresher of complexity will invariably rear its nuanced jaws, and then what? A Monster Calls embraces this cusp in a young man’s life and manages an honest answer to this difficult question: it’s complicated.
 
As a piece of filmmaking, A Monster Calls is a little shaggy. It’s really quite plodding out of the gates, and a dour tone is omnipresent. Stylistically, the picture occasionally reaches for some naturalistic flourishes, but, as opposed to adding a lyrical touch, it’s almost like you can see the stitching on the film: odd stray shots, clumsy out of focus images, a less-than-remarkable score. But the emotional power of the film is unquestionable.

When my editor first sent out the notice for this screening, she appended a brief note, “You’ll cry buckets.” And she’s not wrong. [Editor's Note: I saw this at Fantastic Fest by myself and openly sobbed.] Usually commentary like “not a dry eye in the house” is a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but unless there was a collective allergy attack in the theater, everyone around me was visibly moved. This film is very personally resonant for me—one moment in particular was seemingly plucked verbatim from one of my life-defining traumas—but we can only wait and see if the film will jerk tears en masse.
 
The third feature length film from director J.A. Bayona, A Monster Calls is an adaptation of a fantasy novel penned by Patrick Ness. Focused on the trials and tribulations of young Conor, our guy really gets trounced by the full complement of tough turns. His Mum—Felicity Jones, who is having a massive year—is gravely ill. His father lives across the globe. He’s relentlessly bullied at school. And he’s often left in the clutches of his stringent grandmother, Sigourney Weaver, trying to English accent her way out of this thing.
 
As pressure mounts and nightmares persist, Conor finally meets the Monster (Neesons!). The Monster’s aim is simple, to tell Conor three tales, and then Conor will tell the fourth tale, his truth. Where this may read like straightforward fare, A Monster Calls readily takes its place among the collection of melancholic, challenging “kids” movies. This film has an aching heart, and it guards it with suspicion and rage and confusion. It’s a kind of fairy tale, but only in the stock players. Conor has his otherworldly monster, and the monster tells stories to Conor about princes, witches, invisible men, apothecaries and so on.
 
Through this the film does its most thoughtful work. So many stories of this ilk are neatly portioned out into simple morality tales. The wronged prevail, the wicked are punished, and the good notch easy, indisputable victories. And as is the standard build, there is a beautiful gilt wall of “Happily Ever After” placed at the end, forever containing the purity of this narrative. But A Monster Calls understands that happily ever after is not punctuation, but a through point. As long as we draw breath, there is another chapter. Ill-intentioned good and well-intentioned bad swirl together in so many of the complications life sets in our path, no matter how much we crave a simple, tidy answer.

The Monster imbues Conor with these lessons, and Conor continues to arrive at junctures where these truths reverberate again and again. You can only take the jagged edges of the puzzle as they are and find the best way to piece them together, knowing they will always defy the well machined pieces of our ideal outcome. You’re left with something a bit rough and haggard, and therein lies not only the monster, but our monster. A friend, an antagonist, an ally, and a foil. It’s not an entity to be completely tamed, but one of many forces to fit into our lives.

​Because occasionally, when it’s as though your life has rejected you and the ground beneath you is rent asunder, your monster may be the only one who can save you.

​—Monte Monreal

While watching La La Land, the new musical from Damien Chazelle, I was consumed with thoughts of another film. Not one the technicolor musicals of Hollywood’s supposed golden age this film so desperately gropes for, but 2016’s own Hacksaw Ridge. How could a blood-soaked, Mel Gibson-directed WWII fantasy even tangentially connect with a feel-good studio musical throwback? Quite readily, as it’s the same product but for different audiences.
 
Hacksaw Ridge is a true story reimagined as a work of red state masturbatory fiction. La La Land is the urban archipelago’s fever dream of effortless multiculturalism and smarter-than-you nudge-wink references.  Hacksaw places a premium on values of righteousness and war. A demand for blind adherence to institutions like religion, family, and capital ‘A’ America. La La Land finds pleasure in its patchwork of empowered individuals, self-obsessed creative types, fame as a worthy aspiration, and Los Angeles as center of the universe. Both films are, to that end, rife with problems.
 
Hacksaw Ridge is set in some version of Lynchburg, Virginia, and the Pacific Theater conspicuously missing black Americans who—not only fought bravely in WWII—but comprised at least 11 percent of enlisted men. The only non-whites we meet are Japanese soldiers described as, “Satan himself,” who crave death and only own their modicum of honor in a perverse episode of ritual suicide. It’s a Norman Rockwell painting with a gory, morbid, cynical center meant to illustrate the true sacrifices of war, but I believe only further exacerbates the chicken hawk nation we’ve become. La La Land, well, more on this later but most pressing...what L.A. is this set in? Where are all of L.A.’s staunchly ethnic neighborhoods? Where are the freaks, weirdos, scum bags, and homeless seemingly disappeared from her mural lined streets?
 
This divergence in view is indicative of a larger problem we collectively, urgently have to pull apart. In my bubble, Hacksaw Ridge was a laughable piece of jingoistic non-art, but it did $75 million on no press after being dumped in the lull between summer and prestige season. In my bubble, La La Land is spoken of with breathless wonder. It will undoubtedly be a Best Picture nominee—if not winner—as Hollywood has gone a whole year without patting itself on the back over a movie about THE BIZ. It’s hard to know how La La Land will fare in the “real” world—the nationwide theater kid demographic can only push the needle so hard—but I’m eager to see the results.
 
It boils down to one product: the connective tissue between both films, nostalgia. Choose your delusion. Hold fast to the noxious idea of some remembered village, sanitized for your protection, a place you can never truly occupy. In a line you’ll likely see quoted in every La La Land review, Gosling’s character Sebastian comments that in L.A., “they worship everything and value nothing.” Whether the line is intended to be as thoroughly panoptic and revealing as it is, that’s the nut. Nostalgia is an illusory altar of half-truth and quarter truth and faulty embroidered memory, each recreation and reimagining a more grotesque lie. Yet, people throw themselves in front of it, prostrate, chanting like a holy invocation, “things used to be better, things used to be different.”  
 
To its credit, La La Land allows for something Hacksaw Ridge wouldn’t dare fold into the equation: moments of self-reflection. Yes, the picture is outfitted with weapons grade nostalgia—up to and including the fact that the movie was shot in CinemaScope (*intense eye roll*)—but the film at least challenges itself to play with and subvert the idea. Our leads, Mia (Emma Stone) and Sebastian (Baby Goose) recognize they’re throwbacks consumed by their kitsch. Sebastian is a beleaguered musician and a staunch enemy of jazz aka a dude who really loves jazz. Mia is a plucky wannabe actress who has a wall sized Ingrid Bergman poster looming over her. And it’s as though their fantasy of a bygone, velvet upholstered, glamorously lit Hollywood is so consuming, that when they’re together they block out any semblance of the real world/industry/Los Angeles around them.
 
"Wow, Monte, bruh, so you hated this movie, huh?" Nope. Not at all. It’s perfectly fine. Heck, it’s briefly pretty damn good, but young homie isn’t gonna lie to you neither. What Chazelle has achieved is genuinely mind boggling. For a movie of its scope and caliber, he made it for next to nothing, and it is visually sumptuous. I mean, taking your eyes to a buffet of sound and color. Stone and Gosling are wonderful together. The music, where I don’t think it’s something I’d enjoy independent of the production, is incredibly thoughtful. There are hooks, themes, shapes, and reprises. There are massive numbers at the outset and tiny, quiet, sweet duets. There are moments of pure, unmitigated magic. Yes, even this coal-furnace-grown-cold heart of mine had embers left enough that I was whisked away by the glorious sequence set at Griffith Observatory. The courtship number with an L.A. sunset in the background? Knock me over with your Criterion copy of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
 
Ultimately, the tale of the tape is that La La Land is obsessed with what it perceives itself to be. Like some quixotic Ouroboros, the film is about two people locked in a self-imposed identity, who long for and linger in a world of which they were never a part. Yet they manage to forge the life they want wrapped around these tenets. Through this sentimentality woven wormhole—strictly reserved for the fools who dare to dream—we arrive at a climactic sequence of things remembered and approximated futures, a replication engine of personal nostalgia inside a glittering edifice of ‘remember when.’
 
Where this seems exhausting, I found sincere truth in the final sequence. La La Land elevated itself beyond precious musical to something unexpected and emotionally profound. Because when you see them years from now, after they’ve slipped through your fingers like strands of their silken hair, you’ll realize the memories and imagined outcomes are little more than moveable painted sets and scratched eight millimeter film of the imagination. The agonizing bliss of memory, the cruel necessity of nostalgia. A component of our mind so powerful, that these sequences can devour us. But it’s the rebellion of the now, the strength to puncture this unreality that creates some semblance of the present. And then you can dare to carry on in the messy, uncomfortable world we all have to occupy together. 

—Monte Monreal

Everyone adopts their little tropes, and where I cannot claim to have invented any of these rhetorical tics I pass off as fully developed ideas, I often revert to the ‘TNT doctrine’ when discussing movies. Or the TNT corollary rather, not so much the notion that if film “X” is on TNT you’ll stop and watch it every time (Shawshank Redemption being the most enduring example), but I mean more in terms of, “if it’s on TNT one day you should probably watch it, I guess.” Is there a single director with more TNT corollary films than Clint Eastwood?
 
Yes, Unforgiven and High Plains Drifter are unimpeachable, but between the likes of Outlaw Josie Wales, The Rookie, Mystic River, and—pending its arrival to cable television--American Sniper, it feels like we’re in the throes of a TNT Labor Day marathon right now. The aforementioned network doesn’t necessarily have to be TNT, and this is not a dig on old Clint, but it’s a certain quality his films share. They’re sturdy, economical, terse, and largely enjoyable, if not profound. That could end our Sully review right there, but why would we do that when there are at least 607 words left in the word budget?
 
Sully is a better procedural than a human story, and it’s undoubtedly my favorite film about a governmental body holding a regulatory hearing ever. No bullshit, Eastwood really digs into the minutiae of flight deck to air traffic control to flight simulations to NTSB hearing and it’s genuinely fascinating. Oh, this is a movie about a plane crash and/or water landing often referred to as the, “Miracle on the Hudson.” You know, Sully Sullenberger? It was just like...six years ago.

Anyway, Clint Eastwood made a film about that whole deal. It’s got like Tom Hanks in it, and Laura Linney, and mad character actors. Frank Sobotka is in it! And when the film focuses on the nuts and bolts of how this transaction is resolved, the almost frigidity with which this moment where 155 human lives hung in the balance is turned into paperwork, Sully does its best work.

The real drawback of this picture is the people churning around in this maelstrom. Eastwood is not here to bury Sully, nor praise him, this is a straight beatification. It’s incredible how every person in this film, outside of our shoddily crafted villain, is so good. Capital ‘G’ good, through and through. I want to believe the world is largely chock-full of good people, but films need to work as a shorthand for hard to articulate complexities, and in that capacity Sully fails spectacularly. Insomuch that Sully Sullenberger, in all the inherent goodness, is very shallow in his conflict. The resolution he seeks is a kind of self-serving justification. Where his exoneration is deserved, the film offers me nothing about the man to carry me with him to triumph. Instead, it transforms a real life man who made a difficult decision and did a miraculous thing into an inwardly focused caricature. But I guess this is supposed to be a feel-good movie, and only in an Eastwood feel-good movie are there multiple shots of planes crashing into dense urban blocks of New York City.
 
Can we talk about the weird politics of the movie? I really don’t care about Eastwood’s views; he made Unforgiven, so he can lecture all the empty chairs he wants and totally dub us the Pussy Generation (which sounds awesome, I’m so down). But in that, Sully is definitely about “The Righteous Man,” and the efforts to subvert said righteousness. Who is the villain? Governmental bodies and that damn nosy media. The NTSB especially gets a bum rap, which is bizarre to me. It’s important to not read too much into it—I understand a film needs its villains—but I don’t understand why the horrors of it all couldn’t live inside Cap’n Sully and be resolved through the scope of the many lives he saved. To that end, the most satisfying element of Sully, a needed antidote to all the reductive silliness, is the film’s acknowledgement that an act of heroism takes hundreds of people, not just the name later affixed to the events.

Last night after the film when I laid the TNT bit on my plus-one, she commented on how that’s a low stakes way to think of Sully. It’s not a genuine investment in the film, but a passive approach to art, a middling way to digest something that can be so profound. Maybe that should’ve been my review right there.

​You can decide for yourself, simply check with your local cable provider sometime in late 2017.

ᐧ—Monte Monreal

What a lousy summer for movies. Last summer, while a bit...eh...uninspired, was a feast of watchability. But summer 2016? When the Olympics offer more meaningful subplots than DC can string together across two summer tentpoles, you realize mediocrity has become a kind of aspiration. Perhaps the American filmgoing public has finally grown cape and cowl weary. Perhaps audiences are inching closer to a rejection of #BigFranchise. Or, more so than anything, maybe movies this summer were simply not that good, no matter how hard we wanted it to be so.

Well, don’t blink, because as the dog days are set upon us, Kubo and the Two Strings is here to breathe some life into an otherwise grim season.
 
The first attention grabbing thing about Kubo is how attention averse it seems. There are some big names on voice talent—Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Nathaniel Twisleton-Wykeham-Finnes—and some medium sized names like Art Parkinson, aka Game of Thrones’ Rickon Stark who, yeah, I had no idea he could talk either. But outside of a few commercials and a dab of web content, I’d describe it as a bit of an unheralded release. The fourth feature length film from Laika Entertainment (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls), and the first directed by Travis Knight, CEO of Laika, the film seems to be wagering on Lego Movie style word-of-mouth propulsion. A good movie will certainly find its way, and fortunately for Knight and company, Kubo is excellent.
 
Rendered in Laika’s signature stop motion style, Kubo’s visual identity is both aesthetic and narrative adhesive. Reaching beyond mere animated splendor, the look is a tactile underpinning to their world. To describe it here would be criminal, but I encourage you to watch it unfold on the biggest screen possible. Made for a modest $60 million (Finding Dory had a reported budget of $200 million), it’s the cleverness of the animation, the ingenuity to use visuals as story building element, that really lifts the film.

Another of the unexpected merits of Kubo’s style is its simplicity. It's not simple per se, but rather clean and elegant. Our journey moves between snow, desert, forest, and open water, but instead of a field of view cluttered with animated pyrotechnics, Kubo relies on a kind of quiet, absorbing clarity.

Inside the animation’s armor is a much more intriguing tale about telling stories. Where I wouldn’t claim that the script scales the heights of originality, but it is supremely confident in offering you a story you know. So much of what will occur in the film is telegraphed early on, however, it’s not a defensive justification or cheap device—it’s an earnest proclamation: this is a hero’s journey. Where you’re familiar with the structure—and where you’ve definitely heard the villain's rhetoric before--Kubo faintly dips beneath the skin and plays with headier notions, like what is a story? Why is story? Who is story? This isn’t an overbearing thread, but you feel it from the moment we meet Kubo, a little boy with shamisen in hand, a storyteller who can’t finish his own story.  

Where these loftier concepts are manifest, Kubo and the Two Strings is still, at its core, an epic adventure. Breathless action pieces, haunting villains, well appointed sidekicks, and a quest grand enough to warrant Kubo’s goodness. Where there is undoubtedly a strong melancholy streak present, a deeply felt excitement and sincere joy are Kubo’s enduring feelings.

​And where all the big ideas introduced aren’t fully illuminated, there is something wonderful about a film so assured in its familiar story to ask, what is your story, and who are you without it?

​—Monte Monreal

Minutes into The Nice Guys — Lethal Weapon writer and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang director Shane Black’s ‘70s neo-noir buddy comedy — I had already laughed harder than I have at anything in the theater this year. (Credit goes to Ryan Gosling's private eye Holland March, whose botched attempt at a break-in serves as a physical punchline to a bit of introductory hard-boiled noir narration.)

The Nice Guys is a charming cocktail of comedy and crime following two screw-ups who save the day. Russell Crowe plays bone-breaking thug for hire Jackson Healy, while Gosling's P.I. March is a bumbling alcoholic and well-intentioned-but-in-over-his-head single dad who trips and tumbles to case-related revelations. March’s daughter, the precocious, 13-going-on-30 Holly (Angourie Rice) serves as a moral compass for the mismatched pair, who come together to solve the case of a murdered porn star.

Slapstick silliness ensues as March and Healy kick ass and get their asses kicked hot on the trail of a string of clues that point to conspiracy at the highest level. It’s a solid setup to showcase the chemistry between a deadpan Crowe and a squeamish Gosling, even if the whodunnit aspect gets a little convoluted at times. 

Our titular duo aren’t actually nice guys — not at first, at least (spoiler?) — but they are as likable as bad good guys come, thanks to some wonderfully human moments that give us high hopes for the lowlifes, like when Healy explains why the local police know him as “the guy from the diner." 

The Nice Guys sets itself up as a would-be franchise, and boy is it a franchise I hope takes off. While the last thing we need is another trip to been-there-done-that land, a buddy comedy that actually has a clue how to make audiences laugh is nice indeed. Black, Gosling, and Crowe: Nice, guys.

—Eric Pulsifer

I find myself not watching so many new comedies these days — not for lack of wanting a chuckle, but for fear of schlepping through another 90-minute laugh-barren wasteland filled with tired tropes and half-baked jokes. Maybe I’m missing out by sitting it out, but when the biggest comedies of the past year include Daddy’s Home, Vacation, and Pixels, I feel fine being the crotchety old man blindly griping that they don’t make them like they used to. 

But the old boob tube is still a decent source for giggles, and the freshly ended run of sketch comedy show Key & Peele on Comedy Central leads us to Keanu — part buddy comedy, part save-the-girl, or rather, save-the-cat quest with funny guys Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. It’s John Wick meets… well, Key & Peele. (Though it’s worth noting the makers of Keanu say there’s no relation to the feline-free bipedal Keanu’s epic revenge flick. Perhaps a pairing of Keanu and baby animals was a discovery destined to happen or a classic example of multiple discovery — like calculus or Dante’s Peak and Volcano.)

No surprise for anyone who’s watched their eponymous show, Key and Peele play off each other perfectly — Key as a George Michaels-loving, minivan-driving dad and Peele as an easy-going movie-obsessed stoner. Their long-refined chemistry gives a sense of sync that seems symbiotic or hive minded. 

While the concept may grow a little stale by the final frames, the overall experience manages to feel like more than a watered down sketch thanks to the simple fact that’s this duo is funny. Bits that would barely classify as a joke work thanks to their delivery and cartoonish reactions — a high-pitched scream at the end of a car chase or a panicked, whispered aside between the pair as they get too deep in the criminal underworld on this quest for their snatched away kitty. 

Whatever faults it might have as a film, Keanu delivers loads of laughs. It’s been some time since I laughed so hard and so much in the theater. If it’s a good time you seek, this kitty’s got claws.

—Eric Pulsifer

Producer JJ Abrams went to great lengths to keep 10 Cloverfield Lane a secret. The announcement that director Dan Trachtenburg would be working for Bad Robot on a post apocalyptic project called Valencia, which was also referred to as The Cellar, didn't really raise any eyebrows. After some rewrites, Abrams then announced that the film was moving forward as a “blood relative” of the found footage giant monster movie Cloverfield, with a name change of 10 Cloverfield Lane.

Paramount's website had a quote from Abrams saying he wanted to keep the title a secret for as long as possible. Now, 10 Cloverfield Lane is supposed to take place in the same universe as Cloverfield, but is not a direct sequel. In fact, it has little in common with the original film. For one, it isn't found footage (something I was happy about), and it also isn't about a giant monster smashing up a city (something that I was less happy about. I do love a good giant monster smash fest.)

10 Cloverfield Lane is about a woman, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who wakes up after a car accident in stranger's basement. She is then informed that this stranger, played by John Goodman, has in fact saved her life, and that there had been an attack, nuclear or chemical in nature, and that it isn't safe for her to leave. She discovers she is in a well-constructed, fully-stocked fallout shelter with Goodman and another man, played by John Gallagher Jr.

Where the film shines is in the performance of Goodman. He plays an ex-navy survivalist who has gone to great lengths to build and maintain his shelter, a level of doomsday preparation that in and of itself is indicative of a man who is not quite normal. Goodman manages to cultivate an air of imposing menace and, at times, almost clinical detachment, while at other times he projects a patriarchal benevolence that feels protective and almost jovial. But, Goodman's character is clearly hiding something.

10 Cloverfield Lane does a fantastic job of feeding Winstead's character, and by proxy the audience, the truth of her situation. Sometimes it comes quickly and as a matter of fact, and sometimes it happens slowly, with partial truths wrapped in bigger lies. What results is a film that draws us in to the mystery of Goodman's character and what is going on behind his benevolent facade, and the larger mystery of what exactly is happening out there on the surface.

The majority of the film is intense, claustrophobic and mysterious. It's incredibly tight and deliberate, with subtle foreshadowing and little wasted movement or superfluous scenes. But, and this is a pretty big “but” that also is kind of a spoiler. So be warned. This may spoil the film for you. I am about to type something possibly spoiler-y. I have made it quite clear this next bit may spoil this film. Here goes: I felt the film falls apart in the last 15 minutes or so. The ending seemed so incongruous with the rest of the film. It takes a major tonal shift and becomes something completely different from the entirety of the build, and it honestly felt tacked on to somehow tie the film to the original Cloverfield. I think the film could have been better served by losing this attempt to join it to the Cloverfield universe and just letting it be its own thing.

​But, maybe, that's just me. 

—Eric Harrelson