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AppleTV+
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Justice Smith and Julianne Moore in Sharper
2023 Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts ****
What an embarrassment of riches in this category, where every one of the five would be a worthy winner.
The Flying Sailor—based on the true story of the survival of a Canadian sailor caught in the explosion of a TNT-carrying cargo ship—employ a terrific mix of stop-motion, conventional animation and live-action snippets to capture a life-passing-before-your eyes experience that takes on cosmic dimensions. Lachlan Pendragon’s
An Ostrich Told Me That the World Was Fake and I Believe It wrestles wonderful dark humor from a journey into existential terror best summarized as “
The Matrix with stop-motion characters.”
Ice Merchants finds phenomenally efficient visual storytelling in the story of a father and son living in a house suspended from a mountainside.
The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse adapts co-director Mackesy’s 2019 graphic novel into a sweet, beautiful odyssey involving a lost child and a trio of animals (voiced by Tom Hollander, Idris Elba and Gabriel Byrne). Best of all:
My Year of Dicks, an adaptation of Pamela Ribon’s memoir about her quest as a 15-year-old to find a worthy beau to take her virginity. It’s hilariously potent in its detail about the mix of romanticism and confusion in that time of life, with an ending that’s delightfully satisfying, and somehow turns it into the sexiest thing imaginable to watch someone helping another person put on their clothes.
Available Feb. 17 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)
2023 Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts **1/2
Short films have the ability to pack the same thematic jab as a short story, but too many of these feel like overly-earnest attempts to explore an issue, only without the necessary time to develop dramatic force. Eirik Tveiten’s Norway-set
Night Ride begins with the quirky premise of a diminutive woman (Sigrid Kandal Husjord) inadvertently hijacking a light-rail commuter train, then getting involved with a bullying episode involving a transgender woman (Ola Hoemsnes Sandum), with a tone that feels a bit too flippant.
Ivalu deals with an indigenous girl (Mila Heilmann Kreutzmann) searching for her missing sister, in a narrative boosted by glorious cinematography, but that deals with its trigger-warning subject matter in a way that loses the humanity of the characters. Cyrus Neshvad’s
The Red Suitcase is most effective in approaching its own serious topic—an Iranian teenager (Nawelle Ewad) sold into marriage in Luxembourg—by effectively evoking its heroine’s anxiety through silence. On the lighter side, Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s
An Irish Goodbye is almost too obvious in its gentle tale of an Irish expatriate to London (Seamus O’Hara) and his special-needs younger brother (James Martin) bonding after the death of their mother. Perhaps most conventionally satisfying is Alice Rohrwacher’s
Le Pupille, set in an Italian Catholic orphanage circa World War II, which rides on the appeal of a mischievous child (Melissa Falasconi) upending the status quo. But are any of them great? Eh.
Available Feb. 17 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania **
See
feature review.
Available Feb. 17 in theaters. (PG-13)
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A24 Films
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Gustav de Waele and Eden Dambrine in Close
Close ***1/2
It would be reductive to describe writer/director Lukas Dhont’s coming-of-age drama and current Academy Award Best International Feature nominee as a “toxic masculinity” narrative, but it would also be foolish not to acknowledge that much of its emotional force comes from the damage done by that concept. Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Rémi (Gustav de Waele) are a pair of young Belgian teens whose best-friendship involves frequent sleepovers and resting on one another’s shoulders. But as they begin middle-school, and classmates begin making insinuations about that friendship, Léo finds himself wanting to distance himself from Rémi. Dhont never explicitly addresses whether either of the two boys might actually be gay, because that’s entirely besides the point; he’s exploring a cultural paradigm whereby males aren’t permitted the kind of intimate same-sex friendship that Léo rightly observes is taken for granted as acceptable for girls. Young Eden Dambrine is simply tremendous at capturing the tension involved in those expectations, wanting to establish himself in more traditionally masculine activities while still conveying how much he misses Rémi’s friendship. There’s an added complexity in the surrogate-second-mom relationship between Léo and Rémi’s mother (Émilie Dequenne), with a nod to the awkwardness that results between families when their kids have a falling out. Dhont repeats certain scenes—specifically, Léo working on his family’s flower farm and at hockey lessons—to diminishing effect, but leaves us with a haunting image of what happens when you realize how much it has cost you to become a person you think others expect you to be.
Available Feb. 17 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (PG-13)
Of An Age ***
It’s a bold gambit to attempt a premise that’s effectively a spin on
Before Sunrise, bolder still to combine that with a spin on
Before Sunset, and thoroughly impressive that writer/director Goran Stolevski manages to pull it off. In 1999 Melbourne, 18-year-old Serbian immigrant Kol (Elias Anton) spends one eventful 24-hour period with Adam (Thom Green), the older brother of his friend and dance partner Ebony (Hattie Hook), as an awakening to his own sexuality; a decade later, Kol and Adam see one another again for the first time since then when they both attend Ebony’s wedding. The first segment gets off to a loud and almost off-putting start, focused on the incident involving drama-queen Ebony that pulls the two men together for that one fateful day. What follows, however, is a wonderfully restrained study of people finding a connection almost entirely through words and shared respect for intelligence, heightened by the tremendous performance by Anton conveying the push-and-pull of Kol’s unexpected feelings through body language and furtive glances. The 2010-set section might have benefitted from enough time to match the length of the 1999-set section, but it does allow Anton to evoke an older version of Kol who is both considerably more mature and still trapped in a long-ago moment. The concept is a simple one, but execution is everything, and
Of An Age wraps its coming-out-of-age narrative in both the whirlwind of young love and the regret of lost opportunity with heartbreaking skill.
Available Feb. 17 in theaters. (R)
Sharper **1/2
I fully acknowledge it as a “me problem” that when a movie makes it clear that the premise is all about con artists and their twisty, turny machinations, it’s impossible to resist trying to stay a step ahead of the narrative. And when you manage to do so successfully, it sometimes feels like there’s not much else left. This one weaves in and out of the stories of four principal characters: Tom (Justice Smith), owner of a small New York City bookstore; Sandra (Briana Middleton), a young woman who walks into that store one day; Max (Sebastian Stan), a veteran grifter; and Madeline (Julianne Moore), Max’s mother, who has become involved with a finance billionaire (John Lithgow). The performances are uniformly solid in permitting for our shifting perspective on them without ever feeling like they’re cheating, and director Benjamin Caron—a veteran of episodic drama like The Crown and Andor—gives the production a perfect dark and silky vibe. The problems emerge in the script by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, which isn’t content to pull the chair out from under you once, but to aim for pulled chair once every 15-20 minutes. Instead of waiting for a build to one big ultimate reveal—and giving that reveal some thematic weight—Sharper becomes all about trying to out-clever its viewers. Only the style remains if you happen to out-clever the movie.
Available Feb. 17 via AppleTV+. (R)