Ford v Ferrari (2019)

Direction: James Mangold
Country: USA

Versatile director James Mangold has directed two biographic dramas, namely Girl, Interrupted (1999) and Walk The Line (2005), which chronicles the lives of author Susanna Kaysen and singer-songwriter Johnny Cash, respectively. His new flick, Ford v Ferrari, is also a biopic, yet this time addressing car sports racing and centering on the skillful British engineer and driver Ken Miles, the true hero behind the Ford Motor Company triplet victory at the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans race. That same year, he also conquered Daytona with distinction.

A director can’t go wrong when picking Christian Bale for a role, and the actor couldn’t have been more passionate while playing a true sportsman with a tremendous gift to pilot a car at roaring speeds. Under the wing of visionary automotive designer/entrepreneur Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), Miles demonstrates to have what’s necessary to defeat the untouchable leading team Ferrari. Still, the interpersonal tensions between Shelby and Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), the obnoxious Ford senior vice-president, in addition to the lack of respect and consideration from CEO Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), prevented him from having the deserved attention for the feat.

Not just accessible to car buffs, the film has its adrenaline-rushing moments, focusing firmly on the personalities of the ones involved. Yet, on the other hand, I found the car racing scenes way too repetitive and the script - written by Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth, and Jason Keller - mounted with cheap formulaic attractions, including a dull brawl between Shelby and Miles with the latter's wife (Caitriona Balfe) as a spectator, and Mr. Ford’s tears of contentment and affliction after a high-speed ride.

Jojo Rabbit (2019)

Direction: Taika Waititi
Country: New Zealand / USA

Two years after the colorful superhero adventure that was Thor: Ragnarok, New Zealander director Taika Waititi demonstrates that his comedic voice (What We Do in the Shadows; Hunt for the Wilderpeople) is pretty intact in Jojo Rabbit, a rousing and zany satire set in the 1940’s Nazi Germany that is dividing filmgoers.

The plot centers on the 10-year-old Johannes Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis) a.k.a. Jojo Rabbit, a little Nazi boy whose fanaticism for Hitler’s cause diminishes considerably after getting to know Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie), a Jewish refugee who was sheltered by his pacifist, self-assertive mother, Rosie (Scarlett Johansson).

When not filling his notebook with the Jews' common features and behaviors, Jojo is whether dialoguing with the silly, occasionally irascible imaginary figure of Adolf Hitler (Waititi himself), or training to go to war under the orders of the opaque one-eyed Captain K. (Sam Rockwell), the officer in charge of the Hitler youth group.

Nutty and mischievous, but also sweet and enchanting, Jojo Rabbit is pure fun and entertainment from minute one, which is clearly the only goal of the filmmaker. There are plenty of gags and laughable situations counterpointing the unfunny marks of war presented in some crushing scenes that no kid should ever have to witness or participate in.

It is exactly through the contrast between humor and poignancy, innocence and immorality, human values and an unacceptable iniquity, absurdity and seriousness that Waititi succeeds in his efforts to parody the Nazi doctrine. Who didn't think about Tarantino’s Glorious Basterds and Chaplin’s The Great Dictator?

Where'd You Go, Bernadette (2019)

Direction: Richard Linklater
Country: USA

Comfortably enjoying his status of prodigious filmmaker and storyteller, Richard Linklater (Boyhood; Before Trilogy), stumbles terribly in Where’d You Go, Bernadette, a farcical comedy-drama that unlike its central character struggles to establish an immediate, strong connection with the viewer.

Adapted from the 2012 comedy novel of the same name, this flawed film never does justice to Maria Semple’s book, despite a few sympathetic moments that arise from the mighty presence of Cate Blanchett as the apparently dysfunctional, socially anxious Bernadette Fox.

Once a brilliant architect, this frequently impolite woman has exchanged L.A. for Seattle when she lost confidence in herself and stopped working for 20 years. She avoids people to the point of hiring a remote assistant in India for practically every basic need, but her brittle nerves start to attack hard again after she has promised to take her 15-year-old daughter, Bee (Emma Nelson), on a trip to Antarctica.

Besides all the thoughts of fear related to the trip, the relationship with her workaholic husband, Elgin (Billy Crudup), a Microsoft guru, gets more and more complicated in the sequence of an unjustified brawl with her neighbor Audrey (Kristen Wiig), an usurpation attempt from the Russian Mafia, and a problem with a prescription for seasickness medication. However, this tension between husband and wife never went beyond surface frictions, feeling more hypocrite than credible.

Despite the preliminary punchy spice, the film ended up almost flavorless due to a fabricated final section, or should I say confection, so idiotically portrayed that one may question if this is actually a Linklater film.

Toggling between self-commiseration and looking forward attitude, this dramedy turned nonsensical adventure fills each frame with an unconvincing euphoric reassurance. Its descendent trajectory in terms of engagement prevents it to succeed. One reason to see it? Blanchett!

Burning Cane (2019)

Direction: Phillip Youmans
Country: USA

For a drama written and directed by a 17-year-old, Burning Cane has plenty of genuine ambition, but that’s not everything. New Orleans-born African-American Phillip Youmans, even if occasionally reckless when wielding the handheld camera, shows proficiency in setting the mood that best allows him to express his vision on themes like faith, alcoholism, child negligence, domestic violence, and prevarication.

Set in rural Louisiana, the story is filled with strong, well-shaped characters that connect with one another, whether physically or mentally. The pivotal figure here is Helen (Karen Kaia Livers), a woman of faith who laments the family dog’s mange before cut up a chicken with a small kitchen axe while resting a cigarette on her lips. Her painful physical limitations are not what hurries her the most. It’s her alcoholic son, Daniel (Dominique McClellan), who got fired from work for arriving drunk and starting a fight. The latter’s hard-working wife, Sherry (Emyri Crutchfield), supports the family, and has no idea that Daniel, visibly sick and depressed, gives whiskey to their little only son, the silent Jeremiah (Braelyn Kelly), while looking after him.

Apart from this scenario, there’s Reverend Tillman (Wendell Pierce), whose speeches about materialism, the evil ways, and the necessity of building relationships of love are fervently eloquent. However, he undergoes a crisis of faith after his wife's death, and drowns himself in liquor. He often relies on Helen to help him getting home.

The young Youmans weaves an inextricable web, where the ugly aspects of this isolated American community distressingly emerge. However, the inexperience ended up spoiling what would have been a great debut if better ideas had flown to prevent an unsatisfactory, abrupt finale.

Led by note-perfect performances, Burning Cane presents two distinct halves with totally different weights. The downside of it is that the film decreases in fascination. Still recommended, though.

The Traitor (2019)

Direction: Marco Bellocchio
Country: Italy

The Traitor, an Italian mafia account based on the life of the powerful and wealthy Sicilian ‘soldier’ Tommaso Bruschetta, is told with invariable pace and mood. It does pretty much hold our attention in its initial phase, but it loses a bit of direction with the time, making us increasingly detached from the course of events.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Marco Bellocchio, whose career peaks are Fists in the Pocket (1965); Good Morning, Night (2003); and Vincere (2009), the film succeeds in the way that elucidates about the mafiosi pacts, breaches in honor, and the general criminal mechanisms adopted by the Cosa Nostra. It also makes a good point of view in showing how these mad dogs have all the comfort in prison and are treated with permissiveness by the justice and the state.

Unafraid, yet tired of the heroin war that opposes the old Palermo mafia and the new Corleone clan, Bruschetta (Pierfrancesco Favino), known as ‘boss of the two worlds’, became one of the first mafia informants in the mid 80's, after a frustrated attempt to lead a calm life in Brazil with his family. His arresting and torture in Rio de Janeiro and subsequent extradition to Italy caused him to attempt suicide, a fact reinforced by the news that his two eldest sons, Benedetto and Antonio, had been cruelly assassinated, likely by one of his trusted men.

His decision to expose the Sicilian mafia to the authorities caused severe damage in the organization, which saw 366 mafiosi being sent to jail. Bruschetta always defended he was a man of honor, claiming that his former associates were the true vile creatures.

The ridiculing courtroom episodes at the famous Maxi Trial unveiled a limitative script that is more interested in informing about the multiple connections of the man than stepping up the narrative side of things. It’s a film that never quite catches fire despite some creativity in the visual department and the frantic editing by Francesca Calvelli.

There’s no such thing as noble cause or respect for human life in the mafia. Apart from the inflexible judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), The Traitor exclusively portrays men of brute insipidity, only partially digging the dark depths of mafia crime. This film wouldn’t have had a small amount of expressiveness if the performances weren’t so solid.

Eternal Winter (2019)

Direction: Attila Szász
Country: Hungary

A soviet labor camp in 1944 Ukraine becomes the glacial stage of excruciating episodes. Attila Szász’s Eternal Winter, which was based on the book by Janos Havasi and inspired by several accounts of ethnic German Hungarian prisoners, tells the story of Irén (Marina Gera), a diligent mother who promised her young daughter she would come back home from the wheat harvest she was summoned to. Instead of that task, and against her expectations, Stalin’s Red Army forces her to work in backbreaking coal mines under unsafe and inhumane conditions.

Among the physical and psychological difficulties, she was lucky enough to find the vital love of a Yugoslavian prisoner, Rajmund (Sándor Csányi), from whom she learns all the tricks to survive in a hostile environment.

One cannot deny that Eternal Winter is a moving journey, but Szász couldn’t get rid of certain stereotypes commonly associated with the genre. The film is unfussy but flat in tone, visually arresting but emotionally vacillating, ultimately dramatizing when confronting challenges and resolutions.

The last section wastes most of the emotional gravity previously built, and when the tears begin to roll, it’s the indifference that settles. The predicaments are not in the script, co-written by Szász and Norbert Köbli, but in the approach.

Luce (2019)

Direction: Julius Onah
Country: USA

Super-protective white parents, Amy (Naomi Watts) and Peter (Tim Roth), start questioning the true personality of their adopted black son, Luce (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a former child soldier who never ceases to show gratitude for the opportunities of living in America. At the age seven, he left his war-ravaged Eritrea behind and flew to America, where his new relatives invested in therapy and rehabilitation to give him the emotional stability needed. They apparently succeeded in that effort.

In fact, Luce became an authentic model of inspiration for the African Americans in high school. He is a brilliant student, a winning athlete, and a sympathetic person with whom everyone can have a nice conversation. However, his teacher, Harriet Wilson (Octavia Spencer), becomes considerable concerned about a pro-violence essay he wrote. She confirms her initial suspicion after inspecting his locker.

Based on the off-Broadway play by JC Lee, who also teamed up with director Julius Onah in the script, Luce is all about actions, opinions, and reactions. Yet, its strongest scene - involving Harriet’s mentally ill sister, Rosemary (Marsha Stephanie Blake) - comes from a subplot that contributes significantly to stimulate this character-led drama thriller. Despite the isolated, pungent moment described above, most of the tension is swallowed by the overcontrolled dynamics, with the film crashing in its third act.

Onah has things to say about racial disparity, severe trauma, confused parents, and hidden pain. He just didn’t find the right way of saying it, leading the film to land on an anti-climactic zone that almost made me indifferent to the topics in question, as well as unfulfilled.

The King (2019)

Direction: David Michod
Country: UK / Australia

The phrase “war is bloody and soulless” can be heard twice in The King, a particular cinematic vision on the early life of Henry V, co-written by director David Michod (Animal Kingdom; The Rover) and actor Joel Edgerton (The Gift; The Rover), who sought inspiration in a group of history plays by Shakespeare. However, this decent yet not great effort, marked by a neo-noir ambience and detached from the traditional Shakespearean routines, is less interested in showing the blood shed on the battlefields, but rather inspecting what agitates the peace of an uncertain, inexperienced young king surrounded by artful advisers. Thus, introspection and concern mark the course of this darkly atmospheric account.

The prince of Wales, called Hal (Timothée Chalamet) by his friends, is in open conflict with the politics followed by his father, the dominant Henry IV of England (Ben Mendelsohn), and consumes his time drinking alongside Sir John Falstaff (Edgerton), a brave commander who also fell in disgrace after heroically battling for King Richard II. Uneasy, Hal takes action in assistance of his bland younger brother, Thomas (Dean-Charles Chapman), to whom the throne was promised by their dying father, and defeats the rebel Henry Percy (Tom Glynn-Carney) in a head-to-head armored dispute.

After Thomas and Henry IV have succumbed, Hal is crowned king of England. Short time later, he declares war to France, a country that, according to his counselors, has been provocative and disrespectful to him and his people. For this bold move, the king relies on Falstaff, trusting him more than anyone else in the kingdom. The latter’s risky tactic to defeat the more numerous French under the leadership of the arrogant Dauphin (Robert Pattinson), will reveal perspicacity.

Even not as striking as the previous unforgettable versions of Henry V by Laurence Olivier in 1944 and Kenneth Branagh in 1989, The King is rarely uninteresting and still resonates with a consistent structure, excellent production values, and competent performances. In truth, the 140 minutes never seemed extended to me, since Michod avoids wasting time with plot trivialities and goes straight to the point.

At the end, the shady palace intrigues and tenebrous ambiances give place to a bright ray of light, infusing some hope in the heart of the victorious somber king.

The Dead Center (2019)

Direction: Billy Senese
Country: USA

Shane Carruth (the mastermind behind Upstream Color) embodies an obsessive, hard-working psychiatrist in The Dead Center, a supernatural low-key horror pic written, directed, and produced by Billy Senese. Considerably better than Closer to God, his debut feature from 2014, The Dead Center still is a clichéd film impregnated with demonic transferences, haunting pasts, and unexplainable deaths.

The busy and oftentimes insubordinate Dr. Daniel Forrester (Carruth) struggles to understand what’s wrong with the latest admitted patient (Jeremy Childs) in the Fulton County Hospital. The man, who had committed suicide, is a strange amnesiac who literally woke up from the dead and escaped the morgue to where his body was sent.

Under hypnotic treatment, he unveils some more details of his obscure past, also confessing he killed a man. Doctors and nurses will experience the power of the malevolent entity that possesses his body and mind.

Besides the unimpressive and somewhat expected finale, the film misses that definite creepy factor that would bring him to the forefront. There are some freaky moments elevated by strident sonic attacks, which are not enough to overcome the shortcomings.

Mediocrely entertaining and repetitive in the procedures, The Dead Center lacks guts and never coheres into something special. Its characters are bland in posture and underdeveloped in their essence. The film might not be as much creative as we would have hoped, but at least it doesn’t waste time on giving useless explanations for the occult puzzle. This is perhaps the most valuable aspect that Senese has to offer.

The Laundromat (2019)

Direction: Steven Soderbergh
Country: USA

The unequalled filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has proven capable of the best (Sex Lies, and Videotape; Traffic; Ocean’s Eleven) throughout a career than spans nearly 40 years. At times evoking the theatrical slapstick, this documentary-style comedy based on the Panama Papers and aptly called The Laundromat is not among his most successful efforts despite featuring an incredible cast with Meryl Streep, Antonio Banderas, and Gary Oldman occupying central roles. The plot’s occurrences were taken from the incidents described in Jack Bernstein’s novel The Secrecy World, and starts with Ellen Martin (Streep), a persistent widow who decides to investigate who’s behind the fraudulent scheme that left her without insurance compensation after she had lost her husband in a boat accident.

Curiosity and perseverance take her to Panama, where she locates two greedy lawyers, the film’s narrators Jürgen Mossack (Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Banderas), who keep mining the global financial system to their personal advantage. Corruption, fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, the exploitation of innocent people, and illegal offshore machinations are exposed and explained with a ridiculous posture that is often feels more vexatious than favorable.

From the three stories emerging from Scott Z. Burns’ screenplay, the one involving an adulterous African billionaire (Nonso Anozie) turns out to be the drollest, while the third one, a reconstruction of the assassination of British businessman Neil Haywood (Matthias Schoenaerts) by Chinese attorney and businesswoman Gu Kailai (Rosalind Chao), is permeated with supplementary tension.

Even with the best of the intentions in mind, Soderbergh didn’t avoid a mess, plunging The Laundromat into a sea of silliness and artifice. The revelation of names, their scams, and their shameless impunity are all that was left, and despite the mixed feelings, I hope the film can get people to avoid this plague in the future.

The Farewell (2019)

Direction: Lulu Wang
Country: USA

How good can a lie be? According to the debut director Lulu Wang, who deftly wrote the script of the bi-cultural comedy-drama The Farewell, a justified lie can produce beneficial effects, at least, in what health is concerned. The film was partly based on the life of Wang’s grandmother.

Billi (Awkwafina) is an independent New Yorker whose parents, Jian (Diana Lin) and Wang (Tzi Ma), left China 25 years ago to establish themselves in the US. She gets visibly upset when informed that her Guggenheim fellowship application was denied, but this was nothing as devastating as when she is told that her paternal grandmother, Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), who lives in Changchun, China, is dying from advanced lung cancer. With the pretext of attending a cousin’s wedding, she and her family travel to China for a last family gathering. Upon serious discussions and doubts, where the differences between the East and the West are amply debated, they collectively decide to hide the truth from the matriarch, in a way of protecting her from the overwhelming distress of knowing she’s terminally ill and has just a few weeks to live.

The family dynamics include pleasant moments and frictions, while the marks of immigration and its hardships are exposed with authenticity. Straddling two cultures, Billi is forced to counterpoint her Chinese roots, more focused on family and society, and her real American identity, which leans on individualism.

Just moments after watching this drama, I got the sensation that the film hasn’t had the emotional resonance I was hoping for. But I was wrong. When I think of it today, I see it as a sensitive, witty, and intelligently written immigrant song that develops with an engrossing plot and phenomenal performances.

With the ability to touch us in many ways, The Farewell plays closer to the heart. It’s a very rewarding film assembled with a disarming touch of brilliance.

The Third Wife (2019)

Direction: Ash Mayfield
Country: Vietnam

The Third Wife is meek and melancholic, yet informative. The modest period drama tells the story of May (Nguyen Phuong Tra My), a 14-year-old who inherently accepts her fate of becoming the third wife of a wealthy, polygamist landowner (Le Vu Long) in the late 19th-century Vietnam. Sharing the same will of the other wives, May intends to give birth to a male baby since it would allow her to grow in status within the closed community.

For good or for bad, she develops a strange attraction to Xuan (Mai Thu Huong Maya), the second wife, whose secret she shares and whose freedom she deeply admires.

The film, loosely based on the life of director Ash Mayfield’s great-grandmother, was keenly filmed, capturing idyllic landscapes immersed in gracious hues. These imagery provides a contrasting effect when compared to the emotional disquietness that the characters experience, most of the times, in silence.

Despite clear, the ideas are never vehemently expressed, with Mayfield preferring a subtle flow that may attract some viewers and keep others aside. The approach is simplistic in nature, oozing delicacy even in the toughest moments. Yet, although fumbling from time to time, this is a respectable first work from Mayfield, who didn’t thrill me with her methods of bringing out emotion and intimacy, but revealed a huge capacity to embrace aesthetic filmmaking.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Direction: Robert Eggers
Country: USA

The Lighthouse is a super well crafted psychological thriller set in a remote island of West England in the late 19th century. The film stars Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson as two lighthouse keepers whose disturbed souls clash as their minds grow insane.

Directed by The Witch’s Robert Eggers, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Max, this is a churning examination on isolation and derangement that moves tenaciously toward complete annihilation. It’s also an unparalleled showcase for the two actors, whose characters might cause a certain disturbance in unprepared viewers due to their graceless posture and crude behavior. The aptly tense dialogue is not devoid of humor and the salty, dreary landscape is expertly captured by the sharp lens of cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who was able to increase discomfort all around.

Dafoe is Thomas Wake, an old limping sea wolf whose prepotency is flagrant. He is in charge of the lighthouse and can’t help demeaning, screaming and sneering at his newly arrived aid, Ephraim Winslow, majestically interpreted by Pattinson. With the tediousness affecting the notion of time and the alcohol fueling their darker sides, are these men capable of regaining the control of themselves?

Secrets and torments, symbolism and omens, obsession and mystification are all ingredients of a cinematic invention that, at times, evoke the physical exertions of Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island, the unsettling surrealism of Luis Buñuel, and the dramatic severity of Ingmar Bergman.

Bolstered by the vigorous performances, a great sound design, and the mind-expanding black-and-white imagery, Eggers assembles a legitimate, weirdly fascinating pitch-dark horror picture that spirals beyond human comprehension.

Judy (2019)

Direction: Rupert Goold
Country: UK

Under the direction of Rupert Goold (True Story), Renée Zellweger (Nurse Betty; Chicago; Bridget Jones’s Diary) has a golden opportunity to catapult her acting gifts to a new high, playing the famous American singer/actress Judy Garland with determination. Tom Edge was in charge of the script, adapted from the play End of the Rainbow by Peter Quilter, which focuses in the months that led to Garland’s death in 1969.

Overwhelmed by substance abuse and the absence of her children, who decided to stay with their father - the businessman Sidney Luft (Rufus Sewell) - Garland heads to London in order to reissue a depreciating career with a five-week stint at the restaurant/nightclub Talk of the Town. Standing between an enormous talent and a crescent lack of confidence due to emotional instability, Garland’s shows toggled between brilliant and disastrous.

Despite her fifth marriage with the much younger Mickey Deans (Finn Wittrock), the star of The Wizard of Oz kept struggling with sadness and loneliness, to the point of inviting a male gay couple - complete strangers yet true devotees of her work - to dinner. Over the course of the narrative, there are multiple flashbacks that allow us to understand Judy’s traumatic childhood as a pills-fed vaudevillian under the wing of Metro Goldwyn Meyer’s intimidating producer Louis B. Mayer (Richard Cordery).

Typical biopic procedures are found in a film that, just like its main character, is emotionally wobbly. Despite giving an idea of Judy’s personality and late life difficulties, this compassionate dramatic piece never punches hard. In place, it merely caresses faintly. Zellweger is the one who saves the film from the most terrible defeat.

Woman At War (2019)

Direction: Benedikt Erlingsson
Country: Iceland

Icelandic-Ukrainian comedy Woman At War is another smart move, the second, from writer/director Benedikt Erlingsson, the one who conceived the memorable Of Horses and Men in 2013. He co-wrote this one with Ólafur Egilsson and also produced with a bunch of associates, including Lars Von Trier's regular choice, Marianne Slot. Besides peculiarly humorous, the film works as an environmental eye-opener and stands as a symbol of resistance to all the atrocities our planet is being subjected to.

Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir), a middle-aged choir conductor and a secretive activist on climate change, hides in the mountain as a true warrior when in environmental mission. Solely armed with bow and arrow, she causes a massive outage that puts on hold important negotiations for industrial development between the Icelandic government and the Chinese. This is her unorthodox way to oppose a dangerous expansion of the aluminum industry in the country. While in the run from the authorities, she fights chasing drones with primitive instinct and proud honor. These particular scenes are smartly handled with resonant detail.

Seen as a heroine for some and an impish saboteur for others, this brave, controversial woman also learns that her long-forgotten application to adopt a four-year-old Ukrainian orphan was accepted. Her positive twin sister, Asa (double role for the talented Geirharðsdóttir), a devoted yoga teacher, will play a crucial role in the adoption process, but Halla must find a balance between the new responsibilities and her illegal activism.

This wildly improbable yet utterly engrossing tale packed with political connotations is very much recommended. Fully embracing the adventure, the director does a great job in designing a solid narrative based on currently compelling topics that gain extra force through funny and entertaining moments.

The young Greta Thunberg is real, whereas Halla is unreal. It’s so refreshing to see these women in action, playing their roles with fierce determination in the real life and in the cinema, respectively. Halla, a fictional sympathetic heroin of our times, symbolizes the deep concerns of conscious individuals.

Firecrackers (2019)

Direction: Jasmin Mozaffari
Country: Canada

Consistently involving and skillfully sketched, Firecrackers gives a natural development to the 2013 short film of the same name written and directed by Canadian Jasmin Mozaffari, who demonstrates confidence in her feature debut. The story follows two best friends and frustrated teenagers, Lou (Michaela Kurimsky) and Chantal (Karena Evans), who are stuck in their small and isolated rural Ontario hometown. Dissatisfied, they dream to leave for New York, but the anxiety grows as they realize that all the arrangements to make that step become compromised by unexpected circumstances.

Both girls work as motel cleaners, saving all their wages for the planned road trip. Their environment at home is not inviting at all. Whereas Chantal almost never sees her parents and is trying to get rid of her possessive boyfriend, Lou seems more independent and confident, but often clashes with her mother (Tamara LeClair), a former drug addict turned religious devotee. Negligent toward her children, the latter focuses all the energy on her boyfriend Johnny (David Kingston), who has half her age.

Finely calibrated and charmingly low key, Firecrackers is an undoubtedly strong effort at many levels, even when its cinematic realism borrows elements from Andrea Arnold’s filmmaking style. The raw emotions sometimes take the proportions of an avalanche in the lives of the protagonists, whose unambiguous point of view and determination are paired with dangerous impulsive behaviors.

Praised with the Canadian Screen Award, Mozaffari doesn’t really innovate, but recreates known atmospheres and moods with new characters that constantly search for a way out in spite of the obstacles and pitfalls. Formidable performances from the young actresses.

Hard Paint (2019)

Direction: Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon
Country: Brazil

The Brazilian drama Hard Paint is set in Porto Alegre and tells the story of a taciturn young man with no mother, father, or friends, who lives apart from the real world, completely immersed in a gay-oriented chatroom on the Internet. The traumatized, anti-social character, Pedro, is terrifically played by the newcomer Shico Menegat, who makes a remarkably assured debut under the guidance of directors Filipe Matzembacher and Marcio Reolon (Seashore, 2015).

The title comes from the fact that Pedro, who was expelled from school because of violent behavior, uses neon paint to cover his body during performances in front of a webcam. Under the name NeonBoy, he keeps waiting for monetary gifts from his devoted fans and voyeurs. However, his audience is being stolen by Leo (Bruno Fernandes), an extroverted college student who, using the identity Boy25, employs the same performing techniques. The two of them end up falling in love after meeting up and performing together, but Pedro has a difficult personality, heavily marked by long-term bullying, isolation, and abandonment. While learning with his own mistakes, he becomes more and more depressed, especially when he realizes that his supportive journalist sister, Luiza (Guega Peixoto), is moving to a new job in Salvador, a city located on the other side of the country. Moreover, there’s a chance that Leo might get a scholarship to study in Germany.

Pedro seems unable to get out of the darkness that enshrouds his life and starts panicking when both uncertainty and adversity knock on his door, making his personal little world to fall apart. The absorbing final section shows a somber, desolate, and disoriented person exposing himself to dangers and seeking consolation in his grandmother (Sandra Dani).

The writers/directors adopt a simmering, low-key approach delineated with a mix of tension and languidness that works incredibly well, and the film grows emotionally as it should. The story, evenly complex and meaningful, reflects honesty in all its magnitude and was handled with attention and gravitas.

Ad Astra (2019)

Direction: James Gray
Country: USA

Ad Astra means ‘to the stars’ and that’s exactly where Brad Pitt, in the role of Major Roy McBride, is sent to save humanity and the Solar System from catastrophic power surges and search for his long gone father, Clifford (Tommy Lee Jones), a pioneer astronaut that vanished mysteriously in a delicate mission occurred 16 years before.

The highly classified mission to Mars and then Neptune might be narrated in a monotonous cadence, but there are attacks of raging monkeys in addition to ambushes and battles on the lunar soil that briefly make us disregard the Malick-ian slow-motions and resplendent effects.

Roy deals with anger, frustration, and apprehension in a tale that felt limited for the possibilities showed. By the halfway, this intergalactic journey starts to feel like a mere exercise, with the film never exceeding expectations.

Directed and co-written by James Gray (The Lost City of Z; Two Lovers; The Immigrant), the film is an introspective tale of intergalactic loneliness and yearning, whose pragmatic approach brought some ambivalence in regard to its possible success. Moreover, and partly due to the nature of the plots, Pitt shines much less here than in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Far from mind-blowing in its hidden secrecies, Ad Astra is only modestly engaging, benefitting from the finely crafted visuals - great cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema (Interstellar and Dunkirk) - but failing to achieve dramatic grandeur.

Joker (2019)

Direction: Todd Phillips
Country: USA

Todd Phillips will be forever remembered with this stylish, bitter, and visceral Joker, a story set in Gotham City in the early 80’s that elucidates about how the downcast Arthur Fleck, magnetically played by Joaquin Phoenix, became the DC villain that we all know from the Batman saga.

Arthur, who struggles with a condition that makes him laugh compulsively during tense situations, is a punching bag of a society corrupted by money and power. Victim of severe childhood abuses, he earns a living by performing in parties as a clown or holding store signs on the streets. He lives with his mother, Penny (Frances Conroy), a fragile woman who ironically calls him Happy and lives obsessed with Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen), her wealthy former boss who is now running for mayor. The latter’s son is the young Bruce Wayne, who would become Batman in the future in order to avenge the death of his parents and fight the crime in the streets.

Heavily medicated to combat mental illness, Arthur still dreams in becoming a stand up comedian, a tough task with his condition. He is an innocent victim of a bleak world and is wounded both in the heart and in the head. It’s so, so weird to see one of the saddest persons in the world cackling without control whenever in trouble. It has a disquieting effect. The bitter circumstances of life deteriorate his fragile state to the point of making him commit murder and feel good with it. It’s his instinctive and emotionless response to a poisonous society, the dangerous chant of the displaced and the dispossessed. The malevolent act has the support of the miserable people of Gotham, who starts a revolution against the corrupt system.

Arthur’s creepy side makes him unpredictable and his tortuous mind has lots of room for imagination. With a killer gaze and that broad smile in his face, he premeditates his next step: victimize Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), the popular host of a talk show who contributes to his downfall by making fun of him on the TV.

Simultaneously gripping and unsettling, Joker is a win for Todd Phillips, an unremarkable director until now, who co-wrote the screenplay with Scott Silver (The Fighter; 8 Mile) and had dedicated his directorial career to comedies such as the Hangover trilogy (2009,2011,2013) and War Dogs (2016). Without a hint of hesitation, he injects mordantly funny moments among the torrents of sadness and makes the film thrive both as a noir drama and a clever psychological thriller. Digging deep into his role, Phoenix was the secret weapon required to make us understand the human pain behind the Joker’s wickedness.

Hustlers (2019)

Direction: Lorene Scafaria
Country: USA

Directed and scripted by Lorene Scafaria, Hustlers is an inept, synthetic dramatization of a true-life story that intertwines the worlds of capitalism and erotic entertainment. The director sought inspiration in a 2015 article published in New York Magazine and written by journalist Jessica Pressler, describing the illicit practices of a group of New York lap dancers in order to extort large sums of money from their well-heeled Wall Street clients. Starring Constance Wu, Jennifer Lopez (who also produces), and Cardi B, and boasting an unnecessary appearance by R&B/pop singer Usher, this film employs wear out formulas to promote celebrity worship.

Stretching my patience for nearly two hours, Hustlers is the type of film that agitates very little the intellect, relying on endlessly replicated scenes to the point of making me want to scream: “Enough! I got the idea.” Terribly mounted, the narrative is simply discouraging, with practically every scene being coated with that superficial gloss that distracts us from any potential interest the story may have.

The best this film has to offer is some well-choreographed pole dance moves, dexterously apprehended by Lopez in her pre-shooting classes with the professional dancer and choreographer Johanna Sapakie. Sadly, none of the performances stood out, with Wu being the biggest disappointment.

There is no originality, tension, or creativity in Scafaria’s account, which roundly fails to succeed in both the erotic and the drama departments.