FilM

Suspicious minds

If you’re a fan of last year’s excellent modern Western Hell or High Water, you have some big reasons to get yourself into a theater for Wind River.

Taylor Sheridan, who writes and directs, has a wordsmith’s way of capturing American dilemmas on par with the likes of Sam Shepard and Cormac McCarthy. The man knows how to pen a great thriller with depth, and his works—he also wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water—have in common a somber tone. This is a guy who knows that many of the people you pass on the street today are dealing with an eternity of grief and loss. They are making it, but it’s a bitch, and it’s not going to get easier.

Wind River marks Sheridan’s second feature directorial effort, after 2011’s low-budget Vile, and it stands as one of the summer’s best films. It’s a solid mystery-thriller and a showcase for two fierce performances from Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen—yes, Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch.

They both offer up career-best work, with Renner searing the screen as Cory, a man with a tragic past, paid to hunt wolves and lions on a Native American reservation. Olsen commands her screen time as Jane, one of cinema’s gutsiest FBI agents since Clarice Starling.

Sheridan, who directs with style and grace, gives us a haunting image to start his movie: Natalie (Kelsey Asbille), a young Native American woman, runs across a clearly freezing nightscape with no shoes on. She’s scared for her life, but we don’t know why. Soon, we will find out.

Cory patrols snow-covered grounds, blowing away wolves from long distances. He’s stoic and level-headed, a quiet man whose emotions never go to a fever pitch, his volume hardly ever changing, no matter what the situation. When Cory discovers the body of the woman we saw in the opening sequence, it’s clear that the woman’s identity strikes a power chord in his heart. It hits all too close to home.

Cory and his ex-wife (Julia Jones) have also lost a child, and they are doing their best to give their living son (Teo Briones) a happy life in the aftermath. Their daughter was the new victim’s best friend, understandably setting something off in Cory. When FBI Jane shows up lost in a snowstorm and looking for answers, he’s more than willing to chip in on the investigation.

Sheridan’s mystery builds from there, as no identity of the murderer is immediately apparent. Since the murder took place on a sparsely populated reservation, there aren’t many suspects, but Sheridan will keep you guessing, and you’ll suspect everybody on screen. The conclusion doesn’t feel like a narrative cheat, as so many murder mysteries often do. The conclusion resonates with horror and bleakness. Be assured, you aren’t going to have a typical good time at this movie.

You will, however, be witnessing a remarkable piece of work by Renner. He’s tasked with some of the more difficult, emotionally brutal scenes an actor has had to handle this year. He’s been impressive before (The Hurt Locker), but this takes his stock to a new level. When he recounts the death of his daughter to Jane, you can relate when the story almost knocks her on her ass. I mentioned that Cory is stoic above. That doesn’t mean he’s one-dimensional. Renner finds nuance and power in this character’s quiet pain.

Olsen matches Renner on all fronts, her Jane being a by-the-book type who must make some major adjustments in the field on how to deal with grief all around her. Jane is supposed to be setting the table for a bigger investigation, but she finds herself drawing her gun more than once, and she’s in it for the long haul. The character goes through many phases in the film’s running time, and Olsen makes all of them intriguing.

Supporting performances from Graham Greene and Gil Birmingham (who also starred in Hell or High Water) round out one of the year’s greater ensemble casts. Ω

“You’d be sad too if your sisters starred in How the West was Fun.”

Wind river 12345

3Annabelle: Creation Annabelle, the creepy doll from The Conjuring movies, gets her second standalone film with Annabelle: Creation, a silly movie that’s nevertheless enjoyable thanks to some deft direction and surprisingly competent acting. The movie holds together thanks to solid performances from Talitha Bateman and Lulu Wilson, the latter being the same child actress who gave incredible work in the also surprisingly good prequel/sequel to a so-so movie, Ouija: Origin of Evil. The film is full of good performances from the likes of Miranda Otto, Anthony LaPaglia and Stephanie Sigman, but it’s Bateman and Wilson who get most of the credit for pulling it off. The film is set many years before the first Annabelle movie, with orphans Janice (Bateman) and Linda (Wilson) on their way to a new home, a group of other girls and happy nun Sister Charlotte (Sigman) at their side. Once at their new home, the doll is discovered, and the resulting playtime totally sucks ass. Last year, director David F. Sandberg delivered a decent genre film with Lights Out, based on his terrifically scary short film. (Talitha’s younger brother, Martin Bateman, starred in that one.) Sandberg also makes good-looking movies. The authentic Southern Gothic look of this film lends to its credibility.

3Atomic Blonde Charlize Theron goes on a tear for the ages in this fun if somewhat shallow venture, another pin on her action hero lapel after her ferocious turn as Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. As Lorraine Broughton, an undercover agent on a mission in Berlin in the late ’80s as the wall begins to fall, she showcases her ability to kick people through walls with the best of them. She also shows how to use a freezer door as a weapon. Directed by David Leitch, one of the directors of the original John Wick and future director of Deadpool 2, Atomic Blonde pops with the same kind of kinetic energy as Wick when the bullets and kicks are flying. Also a legendary stuntman, Leitch knows how to make a hit look real, and the choreographed action scenes in this film stand as some of the year’s best. When Charlize lands a blow in this movie, you feel it in your face. Based on the graphic novel The Coldest City, the film drags at times, especially when Lorraine does the standard interrogation room narrative scenes with Toby Jones and John Goodman drilling her for answers.

1The Dark Tower The uncertainty and delays that plagued this production are immediately apparent in the final picture. This movie is a catastrophe, and a complete slight to fans of the Stephen King books, fans of Matthew McConaughey, and fans of science fiction/fantasy. It looks like a low-level episode of really schlocky, 1970s Dr. Who. The CGI is terrible, the pacing is ridiculously, unnecessarily fast, and the plot is confusing for those who haven’t read the books. I’ve never have, and, after watching this, I don’t really care to. The story involves some kid named Jake (Tom Taylor), a sad teenager who is gifted with “The Shine,” the psychic powers Danny had in King’s The Shining. He dreams of another world where there is a dark tower that acts as some sort of barrier between other dimensions, protecting planets like Earth from evil. He also dreams of a gunslinger (Idris Elba) who is trying to kill the Man in Black, played by McConaughey, whose intention is to hunt people with the Shine because their brains harness the power to shoot laser beams into the Dark Tower, thus destroying it and releasing goofy CGI monsters upon the Earth. You can go ahead and badmouth me all you want if I got any of this wrong but, I assure you, that’s the best I could gather from this hackneyed production.

3Detroit Director Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) directs this uneven yet powerful at times account of the infamous 1967 Algiers Motel incident, part of a race riot that put the city of Detroit under siege. When a man fires off a starter pistol from his hotel window during intense riots, the police and National Guard converge on the Algiers, and a terrible night ensues. It results in three men shot to death, others psychologically and physically tortured, and the sort of judicial rulings in the aftermath that have become all too commonplace. John Boyega plays Dismukes, a security guard who finds himself entangled in the bloody events perpetrated by racist policemen led by Krauss (a legitimately scary Will Pouter). The men and women held captive at the Algiers are played by a strong ensemble cast, including Jason Mitchell, Anthony Mackie, Hannah Murray, Kaitlyn Dever, Nathan Davis, Jr. and Algee Smith. The film feels a bit too fictional in spots. In an odd move, Bigelow incorporates real stock footage along with scenes meant to look like stock footage, much in the same way Oliver Stone did in J.F.K., further confusing fact from fiction. She’s going for a documentary feel, but the script sometimes calls for cartoon caricatures with its bad policemen. No doubt, most of the policemen at the hotel that night were a bunch of monsters, but the portrayals of them (beyond Poulter’s) feel too cliché and, in some cases, aren’t well acted. There are enough strong performances to make it worth your while, and it’s a true story that needed to be told.

3Lemon Eccentric comedic actor Brett Gelman gets a much deserved starring vehicle as Isaac, a theater teacher going through some troubles with his girlfriend (Judy Greer). She starts getting antsy, and his behavior gets weirder and weirder, especially when it comes to student Alex (a very funny Michael Cera). Let’s just say things don’t go well when Alex comes over to hang out, and that occurrence is one of the more normal ones in Isaac’s life. As his relationship and acting career—he’s the spokesman for Hep C—crumble, he tries to date others, and that ends with him escaping a party with his date’s grandma (again … Isaac is weird). The film meanders a bit but, somehow, it all works just fine. Director Janicza Bravo, who co-wrote the script with Gelman, makes an impressively strange directorial debut, thanks in large part to Gelman being her star. Gelman is one of those character actors who basically shows up in everything, cracks you up, and yet you never remember his name. Maybe now we will start to remember him, because he’s been kicking mortal comedy ass for years. Supporting cast includes Jeff Garlin, Megan Mullally and Gillian Jacobs. Available on Amazon.com and iTunes during a limited theatrical run.

2Logan Lucky A gang of losers plots to rob a NASCAR racetrack on one of its busiest weekends, and they do it in a hackneyed way that makes absolutely no sense. Steven Soderbergh comes out of retirement to direct Channing Tatum as Jimmy Logan, a former football player who has fallen on bad times, then suddenly gets it in his head to rob the racetrack in a way that involves sneaking people out of prison, blowing things up with gummy bears, and secret allies within the establishment. Soderbergh did the Ocean’s Eleven movies, the first of which has a reasonably fun and inventive heist. This one is sort of Ocean’s Eleven for rednecks, and their ability to pull off the heist is totally unconvincing. The film is almost saved by some of the supporting performances, including Daniel Craig as an incarcerated safe cracker who digs hard boiled eggs, and Adam Driver as Jimmy’s one-armed brother. But, for every character that’s a plus, there’s a lame one like Seth MacFarlane’s heavily accented millionaire that’s not as funny as he thinks he is. The movie doesn’t come together in the end, and its robbery scheme is too cute to be realistic. The big reveal feels like a cheat. It’s good to have Soderbergh back in action, but this is just a rehash of something he’s done before with a Southern accent. Hilary Swank shows up in the final act, a role that feels entirely tacked on.