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

There’s something unsettling about being alone in your empty hotel room, sterile and soulless. Perhaps it comes from knowing there are thousands just like yours — their beds tightly made up just like yours, with minibars stocked just like yours, and with occupants flipping through an unappealing selection of on-demand movies just like yours. It’s a fragment of an unseen infinite mirror world of temporary business-casual coffins equipped with inoffensive art, cheap coffee makers, faux-leather ice buckets, and tiny soaps. Maybe that feeling of existential dread is why the Gideons folks have those thousands of Bibles tucked away in those thousands of bedside table drawers.

It’s this setting where the bullk of Charlie Kaufman’s (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Anomalisa takes place. It’s a story about love and loneliness — both in solitude and in a crowd — told through the stop-motion animation of highly detailed life-like puppets. The film follows a day in the life of Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a man who at times is literally falling apart.

Watching Michael and the other puppets of the miniature world of Anomalisa move and interact so like the life-sized counterparts they perfectly mimic is reason enough to see Anomalisa. But the real puppet master is Kaufman, whose writing (paired with outstanding performances from the vocal cast) makes Anomalisa more than just an animated novelty or technical accomplishment.

We see the puppets' seams, but the real, uncomfortable beauty of Anomalisa is how clearly it sees our own seams. It takes us deep through the cracks into the dark and unseen mechanics that pull our own strings.

Besides the cerebral deep dive you'd expect from Kaufman, Anomalisa packs a surprising number of laughs per minute, many of the biggest at the expense of the city of Cincinnati.

If you’re even remotely familiar with what Anomalisa is, you’ve probably read plenty of praising pull quotes about why you should see it, but I’ll caution up front that the less you know about Anomalisa going in the better. Your spoiler barometer might be calibrated differently than my own, but still: The thing that’s not quite right in the world of Anomalisa doesn’t make itself immediately apparent (unless some jerk critic spoiled it for you ahead of time), but as it gradually does, it’s a wonderful Kaufman-esque moment that I'd have hated having revealed to me beforehand. (After you’ve seen the movie, give the name of the hotel Michael stays at a Google for insight into Michael’s mind.)

In the way that different types of art seem to be able to poke and prod at our emotions in different ways, there’s something about trading the real for the surreal with puppets that makes Anomalisa perhaps better suited to examine the human condition than flesh-and-blood thespians.

Anomalisa is an imaginative new voice that sings out from the droning rabble-rabble of the crowd of forgettable clones we typically meet from our their theater seat. It’s a small story, but one that will have a big impact on the viewer long after the credits roll.

—Eric Pulsifer

At its very core In the Heart of the Sea is a fishing story, and that may prevent any major motion picture studio from retelling it with even a whiff of honesty. The Nathaniel Philbrick book on which this film is based is most certainly a thorough journalistic effort. Written as almost an antidote to what the story of Whaleship Essex became, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Philbrick’s book is a sterling example of those moments when reality couldn’t even masquerade as fiction. The tragedy is almost impossible to scale in our minds, and can only be made real by those unfortunate enough to have lived it. In the strange case of the film adaptation of In the Heart of the Sea, Ron Howard has attempted to take the truth and reverse engineer it into fiction.

Why? Hell if I know, but "why" is a persistent question poking through the hull of this picture. Why on earth would Ron Howard kick this down the road from March until December? I refuse to think the film tested so well they’d hold it back nine months in an effort to sweep award season, even though that seems to be the agreed upon talking point. Why does the movie seem to have no idea what it is? Like, a ghoulish misunderstanding of the intersection where tone and content meet? Again, couldn’t say definitively, but the repeated grabs for old Hollywood prestige picture constantly subvert the grizzly plight of Whaleship Essex. Why…what is with that narrative device? Buds, we gotta go back for that one.

Okay, so the story of Whaleship Essex boils down to two primary sources. One is the widely known version of events by Owen Chase, as played by Chris Hemsworth, the first mate of the ship. Then, in 1980, a second account was found in an attic or some such crawl space on Nantucket Island. It was the account of Tom Nickerson, the cabin boy on the ship. Nickerson wrote his account later in life, and this is where Howard finds his narrative engine, Nickerson finally recounting his harrowing tale.

This, in and of itself, isn’t all bad, but it’s who he tells the story to that jettisons us into the realm of the ridiculous. Nickerson, troubled old man, begrudgingly spins his yarn for none other than intrepid young writer Herman Melville. If this was our group text, I’d submit a GIF found under the search term, “wat?” 

Dialogue, themes, relationships, they’re all cordoned off into this not really real unreality and suffer accordingly. A maudlin score, monotone characters, redemption and resolution coming from all the wrong places. A gross first misstep lead us down a crooked path, and suddenly we’re supposed to be glad Nathaniel Hawthorne gives Moby Dick a positive review. (Trust, I’m super confused too) From there, we’re left with two things to consider, the chain of events and the visuals.

The chain of events is almost identical to the book. They leave Nantucket, they hit a squall, they whale a bit here and there, they go out into the no man’s land of the Pacific Ocean, and then the Dick hits the fan. Or, no, they are in for a whale of a time. And from there things get very bad for the crew of Whaleship Essex. The story itself is really compelling, but that was never in question. It was about Howard accentuating this story in a new medium, and the shortcomings aren’t terminal, but they are persistent.

Visually, In the Heart of the Sea has a few stellar moments. The film is so heavily reliant on CGI, it sits heavy on the picture. Howard and company spent the big bucks to be out at the front of the field, but it’s asked to do too much. Between Nantucket Island in 1819, 19th century whale ships, and battles with a mythic sperm whale, it’s too great a task. Compound that with this claustrophobic style adopted where things are shoved into the foreground from some 3D fireworks, it all starts to veer into visual white noise.

In the Heart of the Sea had everything going for it; exceptional source material, a well credentialed director, A-list stars, plenty of budget, but there is this pervasive sense the film felt it needed to be something more. From there identity crisis after identity crisis comes unfurled like a main topsail leading us to our certain doom. The truth of Whaleship Essex is epic enough to fill any major motion picture, but the film In the Heart of the Sea insists on putting a Hollywood topcoat over the whole affair. And in the end, we're left with something akin to a complex, fascinating slice of the human experience cloistered inside tacky a mall glamour shot. 

—Monte Monreal

Creed is the sort of film that realizes the measure of its creation. What Creed so willfully understands about itself is that the wheel does not need to be reinvented. Wheels are crazy amazing. Their genius are so pervasive, they’re too common to even be commonplace. Expertly balanced, the wheels on Creed have the structural integrity to carry us the distance. But young Adonis Creed, the vehicle atop these well tread beauties, provides enough depth and aberration to ensure this film travels beyond an outcome in the ring.

Michael B. Jordan is form fitted for the role of Adonis. Power washing the stink of Fantastic 4 right off him, this is another sterling credential in his exciting young career. Never given over to breathy speeches or melodrama, Jordan comfortably occupies the identity of a man who communicates with his body. I know little about boxing, but the commitment Jordan pours out on screen feels authentic. And in a bit of the expected/unexpected, Creed’s finest performance comes from Sylvester Stallone, his best turn in a decade.

I didn’t have an expectation as to how much Rocky Balboa would be involved with this story, but his is the richest vein in the picture. He never overshadows Adonis, yet he serves as an essential backdrop. Occupying a space between cobwebbed relic and father surrogate, Stallone exercises a kind of simple dignity. Increasingly buried under years of abuse take in the ring, Rocky maintains certainty within his weathered frame. With components both bodily and character driven, Stallone adds unexpected dimensionality to our familiar Stallion.

There is an investment in these characters. It’s no sort of observation to note our leading men are intended to be a film’s bedrock, but Jordan and Stallone seemed consumed with one another. Not due to the drama massaged into their arc, but the mutual identity forged through shadowboxing and speedbag work. There are only so many ways you’ll play a boxing picture, but the relationship at the core of Creed breathes considerable warmth into paces you may know by heart.

Speaking of boxing, Creed looks great. Maryse Alberti’s cinematography moves freely between the sensitivities of young love and over the shoulder tension in the ring without compromising visual identity. Where the Rocky’s of past became increasingly glitzed up, this is a rougher, dimmer effort with just enough naturalistic touches. 

For all its good, Creed leaves unrealized potential on the table. Adonis’s mother, arguably the most transformational figure in his life, spends the entire story a coast away watching events unfold on her television. Bianca—love interest and musician working on some tasty ass tracks—is given little more to work with than the demands of “good woman.” Tessa Thompson is talented enough to take these filaments of character and give Bianca a voice, but there is so much intrigue and excitement surrounding her that goes unfulfilled.

Creed is a story about boxing and identity. Boxing requires technique and repetition, identity is solidified incrementally, and our film is no different. Early on in the film, Adonis stands in a towering image of Rocky projected onto his wall, footage from an old fight, and he mimics a flurry of punches he’s learned after hundreds of viewings. Later in the film Rocky embraces another outsized persona familiar to the franchise, the same kind of knowing tribute fueling Adonis. And through this both men have to come to grips with the the lingering visage of Apollo Creed, an icon casting a long shadow over both lives so deeply affected by man and legend.

Where these things could stumble into tacky homage, they instead seem to be utilized for no reason more complicated than they work. But the fact that it works isn’t enough. Instead this  a completely realized idea about transition. Rocky tells Adonis he can teach him everything he knows about boxing, and the methods remain unchanged, but he reminds Creed that beyond all the footwork and one-armed pushups and sparring there is an elusive something special that sets a great boxer apart.

​The same could be said for any boxing picture, and it's certainly what makes Creed worthy of the name.

—Monte Monreal