PETE’S DRAGON wrecked me. All on its own, David Lowery’s reworking of a forgotten Disney property justifies that studio’s recent policy of remaking every title in its vaults. Most of those films – Maleficent, Cinderella, The Jungle Book – have simply restaged their animated predecessors scene for scene, assuming that’s all that audiences want. (And they’re not wrong: each of those movies has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars.) (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
MIDNIGHT SPECIAL is a master class in the screenwriting maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Take Shelter writer/director Jeff Nichols and star Michael Shannon reunite for a tense thriller about a father desperate to keep his unnaturally gifted son (Jaeden Leiberher) out of the hands of various parties intent on exploiting him. (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
LIFE, ANIMATED is a moving testament to the power of film. Owen Suskind was diagnosed with autism at three, and it took years for his parents and doctors to realize that he made sense of the world through Disney animated movies. His first words after four years of silence concerned The Jungle Book and Peter Pan, and a tiny line of dialogue from The Little Mermaid expressed his desire to communicate. (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
THE WAILING is a genre work as ambitious as they come. A fusion of police procedurals and social drama with an undertow of bone-deep horror, it’s the kind of cinematic experience that drapes itself over you while you watch –you can feel its weight on you the next day. Set in the rural community of Goksung (which is also the film’s Korean-language title), The Wailing traps us with a group of entirely ordinary people grappling with a force they can’t fully understand. Something is driving their friends and neighbours to murder one another in a particularly brutal manner – but to what end? And in a culture steeped in legends of curses, what have they done to deserve it? (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
Anomalisa delivers lots of stop-motion surprises.
ANOMALISA, a stop-motion picture co-directed by award-winning writer and director Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, is a masterpiece, but the less you know about it the better. I don’t want to give away anything that will spoil your sense of discovery. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis) is a successful middle-aged author and motivational speaker who flies to Cincinnati to deliver a talk about customer service. He’s unhappily married, and once at his hotel he looks up an old flame, but the reunion doesn’t go well. Then he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and they fall for each other. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix, iTunes
DO NOT RESIST explains the horrific state of the American policing system and why it’s been destroying civil liberties over the past decade: arms manufacturers are using a Homeland Security grant program to sell their surplus weapons to domestic police. The result is an over-militarized police force itching to use their shiny new toys and trained to see every civilian interaction as a life-or-death throwdown. Atkinson eavesdrops on a motivational speaker whose entire pitch is that cops are superheroes battling “monsters” and follows a small-town SWAT team on drug busts that display an unnerving level of testosterone and ordnance. (See full review).
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Available to watch: iTunes
DHEEPAN will strike a nerve not just for the many Tamils in Toronto, who will see shards (and open wounds) from their own lives reflected on screen, but also for all who share or empathize with the immigrant experience. Audiard’s beautiful and furious story about three Tamil refugees posing as a family to escape Sri Lanka’s brutal civil war and build new lives in France understands displacement on a sensory level. Adjusting to new customs and languages feels like stumbling in the dark every face looks judgmental, suspicious or mocking the guilt for what was left behind lives deep inside and the longing for a home is hard-wired with a sense of defeat. The film also makes room for hope, humour and compassion. (See full review).
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Available to watch: Netflix, iTunes
