CERTAIN WOMEN – the latest intimate character study from Kelly Reichardt, will have you wondering why she isn’t more successful, while acknowledging that what she does is so precise and specific that she can never really be a mainstream smash. Adapted from the short stories of Maile Meloy, the film contains three studies of women in and around the small Montana town of Livingston.
In the first, a single lawyer (Laura Dern) labours to help a frustrated client (Jared Harris) in the second, a wife and mother (Michelle Williams) wants to buy some sandstone for the house she’s building with her husband (James LeGros). (See full Certain Women review).
Available to watch: iTunes
THE VOID directors Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski are still operating in their referential comfort zone, but this time they’re playing it straight. A thriller about a small-town cop (Aaron Poole) who delivers an injured man to a remote hospital only to find himself besieged by inexplicable horrors within and without, it’s a savvy mashup of at least four John Carpenter pictures. But it’s also its own entity: an effective, resourceful nightmare that convinces you the apocalypse is clawing just out of sight, beyond the edge of the screen. (See full The Void review).
Available to watch: iTunes
T2 TRAINSPOTTING catches up with Irvine Welsh’s Edinburgh rebels 20 years later to find them older but not necessarily wiser. Renton (Ewan McGregor) comes home after the death of his mother, Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller) is stuck in a cycle of petty scams, Spud (Ewen Bremner) is still a junkie, and Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is stewing in prison and dreaming of revenge. All of them are on a collision course with one another, because of course they are.
Fans chasing the same high of Boyle’s 1996 breakout may be disappointed to find this long-awaited sequel slower and more introspective than the original, but that’s the point: you can’t go home again, and there’s no future in acting like you’re young when you’re 46. (See full T2 Trainspotting review).
Available to watch: iTunes
GET OUT is a straight-up horror movie, which might confuse people who know the guy as one-half of TV’s Key & Peele and their action-comedy Keanu. What’s he doing trying to scare people? As in a dozen other horror movies, Get Out follows a young man who accompanies his girlfriend home to meet her parents, and finds unimaginable horrors behind the pleasant façade. But this one’s loaded: our hero Chris (Sicario’s Daniel Kaluuya) is Black his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) and her parents (Bradley Whitford, Catherine Keener) are white, and the rot spreads well beyond one household. (See full Get Out review).
Available to watch: iTunes
DF-09788 – Hugh Jackman as Logan/Wolverine in LOGAN. Photo Credit: Ben Rothstein.
LOGAN takes place in 2029, and the erstwhile Wolverine – whom Jackman has played nine times in all since Bryan Singer’s X-Men – is an older, emptier mutant. His vaunted healing factor is sputtering out, leaving him an exhausted, battered husk. Spending his nights driving a limo around the American Southwest and his days in Mexico caring for a decrepit Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Logan is once again pulled into a conflict he’d rather avoid when he becomes the grudging protector of a feral little girl (Dafne Keen) with abilities remarkably similar to his own.(See full Logan review).
Available to watch: iTunes
THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS follows our hero is Melanie (terrific newcomer Sennia Nanua), a little girl being held at a military base with some other children as part of a desperate attempt to find a vaccine for the fungus. Melanie and her schoolmates aren’t mindless beasts, though they’re still capable of feral violence. And when the base falls (in rather spectacular fashion), Melanie, her teacher (Gemma Arterton), a driven scientist (Glenn Close) and a military escort are thrust into a scary new world. (See full The Girl With All The Gifts review).
Available to watch: iTunes
David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike in A United Kingdom (2016)
A UNITED KINGDOM is about a couple following their hearts in the face of prejudice, a story we’ve seen told time and time again. And while Asante does have the unavoidable scenes of parental disapproval – from both sides – and political gamesmanship, she finds a new angle that makes the whole thing immediate and real.
As played by David Oyelowo and Rosamund Pike, Khama and Williams aren’t stoic martyrs or noble heroes, just two people who are utterly blindsided by the depth of their love. They’re scared and awed by one another, and that vulnerability makes them into human beings rather than icons. The result is an intimate romantic drama that just happens to play out on the world stage. And it’s all the richer for it. (See full A United Kingdom review).
Available to watch: iTunes
PATERSON follows a week in the quiet life of a bus driver and poet named Paterson in the town of Paterson, New Jersey. Jarmusch and Driver – who won the Toronto Film Critics Association’s award for best actor for his fully present performance – create a character with a palpable history and an active, engaged soul. Paterson is a man who’s fully aware of the world around him, and delighted by it his poems are hymns to his own sense of wonder. Not much happens really. Paterson drives his bus and refines his poems, goes home to his wife and their dog and repeats the cycle the next day. But while the pace is sleepy, the movie is alive to every interaction, every possibility. (See full Paterson review).
Available to watch: iTunes
Niko Tavernise
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JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 is as much of a dark delight as the original, finding a pretty good reason to send Keanu Reeves’s stone-faced widower on a new round of rage-killing and expanding the secret global fraternity of assassins in some very clever ways. In addition to an ever-expanding lineup of guest stars, the movie builds a terrific running joke about the way New Yorkers will ignore literally anything that happens around them if it means getting to work on time. (See full John Wick: Chapter 2 review).
Available to watch: iTunes
TONI ERDMANN is structured as a battle of wills between an impulsive retiree and his stressed-out corporate-consultant daughter, the film is a comedy of anticipation and anxiety as well as a heartfelt examination of two people trying to forge a proper connection after years of estrangement. It’s your basic farce plot: after visiting his daughter Ines (Requiem’s Sandra Hüller) in Bucharest, where she’s working to close a lucrative deal, Winfried (Peter Simonischek) invades her professional world disguised as a life coach named Toni Erdmann, inventing increasingly unhinged challenges for her and refusing to break character. (See full Toni Erdmann review).
Available to watch: iTunes
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