East of Wall: Interesting, but under-developed

East of Wall (2025) • View trailer

Three stars (out of five). Rated R, for relentless profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang

Writer/director Kate Beecroft’s feature debut, although heartfelt and at times achingly poignant, nonetheless is challenging on several levels.

 

Porshia (Porshia Zimiga, left) considers her future, during an uncharacteristically calm
moment, while housemates Leanna (Leanna Shumpert, center) and Brynn
(Brynn Darling) provide quiet company.

Austin Shelton’s alternately lush and gritty cinematography often shares space with a distracting barrage of cell phone images and TikTok videos. Granted, this heightens the sense of verisimilitude via faux “found footage” and invasively intimate closeups, which feel as if we’re eavesdropping on actual people. 

No surprise, since leads Tabatha and Porshia Zimiga essentially play themselves; Beecroft lived with them for three years, while assembling her film.

 

The result very strongly belongs in the company of similarly probing, naturalistic dramas such as Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland.

 

Unfortunately, Beecroft’s script doesn’t sufficiently flesh out the large cluster of supporting characters. We too often wonder where our attention should be directed, and why.

 

Matters also aren’t helped by the fact that Tabatha, although ethical and trying to “do the right thing” as best she can, is such a strikingly unpalatable individual: heavily tattooed and pierced, with her blond hair half-sheared in a warrior’s buzz cut. She’s also short-tempered, impatient and relentlessly profane.

 

Ah, but Tabatha has a special talent. She’s a gifted horse-whisperer, and has kept food on the table by training animals either captured in the wild, or rescued from kill pens. She’s also able to sense and diagnose what’s wrong with an ailing animal.

 

Tabatha and her teenage daughter Porshia live on a 3,000-acre, broken-down ranch adjacent to South Dakota’s Badlands, east of the flyspeck community of Wall (population 699, as of the 2020 census). They share their home with an ever-changing gaggle of teenagers who’ve run away; been abandoned by parents impoverished, incarcerated or dead; or simply left to fend for themselves.

 

It becomes clear that the women in this hard-scrabble community are particularly challenged: often the abused punching bags of husbands, boyfriends and fathers who — frustrated by their inability to find work — lash out at the nearest target.

A Complete Unknown: Not come Oscar time!

A Complete Unknown (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

Director James Mangold’s mesmerizing depiction of Bob Dylan’s early years is laden with electrifying moments.

 

Early on, Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) is the self-assured, veteran stage performer,
and Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) is just a nervous kid ... but that dynamic changes
quickly, and quite dramatically.

The first comes quickly, when a scruffy 19-year-old leaves Minnesota for New York’s Greenwich Village, with little more than a guitar and the clothes he wore, in order to visit Woody Guthrie, with whom he had become obsessed after reading the legendary folk singer’s autobiography.

It’s January 1961: a quietly intimate moment in the hospital room where Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) has long been under care for Huntington’s disease (for which there was no treatment, at the time). His frequent visitor is Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who has learned how to understand his longtime friend’s mostly unintelligible attempts at speech. Young Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) appears in the doorway; Seeger invites him inside.

 

Guthrie spots the guitar slung against Dylan’s back, and gestures for a song.

 

The young man obliges.

 

Like ... wow.

 

Movie magic at its finest.

 

A similarly powerful scene comes much later; it involves a cigarette passed between two people standing on opposite sides of a chain-link fence: unexpectedly sweet, intimate ... and sad.

 

Mangold and co-scripter Jay Cocks based their film on Elijah Wood’s 2015 non-fiction book, Dylan Goes Electric: Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night that Split the Sixties. The result is rigorously authentic to actual events — warts and all — allowing for occasional fabrications for dramatic purposes. The time frame is brief, from early 1961 to the galvanic, game-changing evening of July 25, 1965, during Dylan’s closing set at that year’s Newport Folk Festival.

 

To say that Chalamet fully inhabits this performance is the worst of understatements. It isn’t merely an uncanny replication of Dylan’s look, posture, mannerisms and the cadence of his mumbled, almost whispered speaking voice. Chalamet also sings and performs more than 40 songs during the course of this rhapsodic film, often sounding more like Dylan than the man himself.

 

The dramatic arc here will be familiar to those who’ve followed the careers of artists who burst explosively onto the scene, and then become pigeon-holed. Some are content to stay in such boxes, cheerfully riding the money machine; others — the genuinely talented — chafe at public expectations.

 

The resulting weight can be crippling. What, if anything, does an artist owe his public?

Speak No Evil: See no movie

Speak No Evil (2024) • View trailer

Two stars (out of five). Rated R, for strong violence, profanity, sexual content and drug use

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang 

A film of this nature requires an unspoken bond with the viewing audience:

 

We play along only if the story’s eventual victims remain credibly oblivious to impending danger ... because, let’s face it: We know where things are heading here, given that James McAvoy’s leering, sinister face looms from all the publicity artwork.

 

Ben (Scoot McNairy), Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler)
initially assume they'll be spending a fun West England weekend with friends met
during a vacation in Italy. Boy, have they got a nasty surprise coming...

(The trailer also gives away the entire film, but that’s a different complaint.)

At first blush, it appears that director/co-scripter James Watkins, along with fellow writers Christian and Mads Tafdrup, understand this bargain. They burden this story’s sacrificial lambs — Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy), wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and tween daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) — with plenty of distracting baggage: a frayed marriage, unhappy relocation to London, lost employment prospects, and an overly sensitive and anxious child.

 

A family vacation in Tuscany, although intended as a “do-over,” doesn’t entirely quell Ben’s feelings of emasculation and anger, over Louise’s recent infidelity; she, in turn, is exasperated by his sad-sack failure to re-launch, and his whiny unwillingness to move past her one-time transgression. And both argue how best to parent Agnes, who slides into meltdown whenever separated from her stuffed “comfort bunny,” Hoppy.

 

Their vacation package includes communal dining each evening, during which the Daltons fall into easy company with the gregarious Paddy (McAvoy), his surprisingly young wife Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), and their adolescent son Ant (Dan Hough). They’re mischievous and buoyant: just the tonic to lift Ben and Louise’s spirits.

 

Even so, Paddy’s charm seems a bit ... aggressive. But that’s probably Ben and Louise’s imagination.

 

All vacations come to an end, and the Daltons’ return to London revives old wounds. Cinematographer Tim Maurice-Jones amplifies this atmospheric shift by replacing Italy’s soft light and warm tonalities with London’s dreary, harsher grays and muted colors.

 

A postcard from Paddy and Ciara repeats an invitation, first extended back in Italy: You really must spend some time with us, at our West England farm. Recalling the lift their company provided, Ben, Louise and Agnes impulsively make the long drive.

 

On their home turf, Paddy and Ciara are ... a bit different. His mischievous side becomes bolder, her flirtatious nature subtly threatening: both challenging Ben and Louise’s comfort zones. Paddy plays on Ben’s insecurities; Louise’s rising concerns are dismissed as unwarranted or even rude, leaving her feeling uncertain and embarrassed. Davis plays this aspect of her character very well, whereas McNairy’s over-the-top weenie behavior becomes insufferably tiresome.

 

Our Brand Is Crisis: The result is distasteful

Our Brand Is Crisis (2015) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for profanity and sexual candor
By Derrick Bang

This seems to be the season for transforming well-regarded documentaries into starring vehicles for Hollywood A-listers.

Jane (Sandra Bullock) watches smugly as her candidate picks up steam in the upcoming
Bolivian presidential election, which prompts rival campaign "fixer" Pat Candy (Billy Bob
Thornton) to whisper another round of Sun Tzu-esque imprecations in her ear.

But whereas Freeheld mostly retains the soul and warmth of its 2007 nonfiction predecessor, while highlighting sensitive work from stars Julianne Moore and Ellen Page, Our Brand Is Crisis is an awkward, bewildering mess that benefits not at all from Sandra Bullock’s presence.

She barely tries, falling back incessantly on the half-amused sidelong glance that has become her go-to expression in far better projects. Much of the time, in fact, Bullock appears to have forgotten her lines, and instead attempts to “cover” by flailing aimlessly.

This doesn’t speak well of director David Gordon Green, apparently unable to handle his leading lady. Or maybe Bullock didn’t like him. Whatever the reason, she just isn’t present ... even when lovingly framed, front and center — and too frequently in tight close-up — by cinematographer Tim Orr.

Bullock is far from this film’s only problem. Peter Straughan’s script is a mess: His effort to transform this serious premise into a satire is half-assed at best, but most often just clumsy. And when satire fails — particularly if the topic is based on actual events — the result becomes tasteless. And offensive.

Rachel Boynton’s 2005 documentary of the same title tracks the jaw-dropping degree to which the American consulting firm of Greenberg, Carville and Strum (GCS) did its best to rig the 2003 Bolivian presidential election on behalf of its client, Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, who’d held that top spot from 1993-97, but had come to be seen as arrogant and out of touch with the common people.

Yep, you read that correctly: American political consultants plying their dirty tricks to affect the outcome of a presidential election in a foreign country. Clandestine U.S. involvement in foreign politics is nothing new, of course; what made this particular case so egregious was the degree to which GCS made little or no effort to conceal its activities. Hell, these guys were proud of their work.

The charismatic James Carville was the beaming public face of GCS; that’s the role assigned here to Bullock, playing burned-out campaign fixer “Calamity” Jane Bodine. Anxiety and a series of high-profile failures sent her into isolated retirement; as this film begins, she’s tempted back into the game by the opportunity for one more match against her longtime professional nemesis, Pat Candy (Billy Bob Thornton, who apparently based his look on Carville).

Black Sea: No treasure here

Black Sea (2014) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rated R, for profanity and violence
By Derrick Bang

Something’s rotten in the state of cinema...

Back in the day of classic Hollywood “disaster movies” — a cycle that began with 1970’s Airport — the survival rate was roughly an audience-acceptable 50 percent. This issue revolved around key characters; in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, we lost Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Roddy McDowall, Leslie Nielsen and Stella Stevens, while Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Pamela Sue Martin, Jack Albertson, Carol Lynley and Eric Shea made it to daylight.

Frustrated by the mutual hostility that divides his Russian and British crew members,
Robinson (Jude Law, center) angrily orders the men to get along ... while promising that
this clandestine submarine mission will make them all very, very rich.

In 1974’s The Towering Inferno, Robert Wagner, Jennifer Jones, Robert Vaughn, Richard Chamberlain and Susan Flannery got toasted, while the survivors included William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Fred Astaire. (Paul Newman and Steve McQueen weren’t in the building.) And so it went, with Earthquake, the various Airport sequels and others.

More to the point, many of those who perish do so heroically or tragically, in some cases while saving others. We feel for them. Yes, all such films have their villains, but no more than one or two ... and they always get their just desserts.

Things have changed.

These days, disaster/survival films have become slaughter films: mainstream cousins of the countless “dead teen” horror flicks that erupted in the wake of 1980’s Friday the 13th. Most of the characters are nameless, faceless and two-dimensional, just like all those doomed teens: stick figures present solely to be killed, under unpleasant and often ludicrous circumstances. Nobility and self-sacrifice are absent, replaced instead by venal and brutish behavior.

If we’re lucky, one person might survive, as in 2011’s odious Sanctum, which raised the bar for acceptable mainstream butchery. Alternatively, nobody survives, as with 2012’s The Grey. Heroic effort proves futile.

Which, in my mind, makes such films rather pointless.

And deplorably mean-spirited.

I’d hate to think this attitude shift reflects our national psyche; if it does, we’re in a lot of trouble.

All of which brings us to Black Sea, ostensibly an action thriller from director Kevin Macdonald, best known for absorbing dramas such as The Last King of Scotland and State of Play. I say “ostensibly” because you shouldn’t believe the promotional slant; this is actually a disaster movie. Which is to say, in the current vogue, a slaughter-fest.

And an insufferably dumb one, at that.

Non-Stop: Well-executed terror in the air

Non-Stop (2014) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for action, intense suspense, mild profanity, fleeting sensuality and drug content
By Derrick Bang

This is a taut, tidy and thoroughly engrossing little thriller ... although it won’t do a thing for people already nervous about flying.

The resourceful Bill (Liam Neeson) thinks up several quite clever ways to expose the
identity of the indivisual who keeps sending threatening text messages ... but the
unknown tormentor/terrorist eludes our hero at every turn. Eventually, even Jen
(Julianne Moore) begins to wonder if the situation is beyond Bill's ability to solve.

John W. Richardson, Christopher Roach and Ryan Engle have concocted a twisty, danger-laden mystery that Agatha Christie would have admired: a whodunit and howzithappening that makes clever use of the claustrophobic setting and modern smart phone technology. Granted, the premise is preposterous, and interior details don’t withstand much scrutiny, but director Jaume Collet-Serra and editor Jim May move things quickly enough to obscure the logical lapses.

I also applaud the casting and sidebar character development, elements usually overlooked in lesser action thrillers. Although this is Liam Neeson’s show, and he commands the stage quite ably, we also get solid work from a dozen or so supporting players.

Neeson and Collet-Serra also worked together on 2011’s Unknown, although that initially suspenseful thriller was undone by its sloppy script. If the improved work here on Non-Stop reflects learning from that earlier mistake, then it’s nice to know all concerned paid attention.

The premise is simple: Veteran air marshal Bill Marks (Neeson) boards a routine flight from New York City to London, and starts receiving cryptic text messages from some unknown sender who demands the transfer of $150 million into a numbered account ... or passengers on the flight will start to die, at 20-minute intervals. It’s immediately obvious, from what the sender knows, that s/he is on the plane.

Bill’s major issue is credibility: How can he possibly take such a crazy ultimatum seriously? And when evidence eventually suggest that this unknown terrorist truly has the means to carry out such threats, how can Bill get anybody to believe him?

Character back-story muddies the water, of course. Bill is a man under a cloud: an alcoholic carrying a heavy personal burden — details of which emerge slowly — and therefore a less than reliable judge of any given situation, in the eyes of his colleagues and superiors. Even his fellow on-flight air marshal, Jack Hammond (Anson Mount), finds it difficult to accept Bill’s story at face value.

Bill does everything by the book; he immediately confides in the plane’s captain (Linus Roache) and veteran flight attendant, Nancy (Michelle Dockery). Keeping the situation concealed from the passengers is essential, but that becomes progressively more difficult, as Bill’s invisible cat-and-mouse tormentor escalates the stakes.