Film

End game

10 Cloverfield Lane

Just as he did with the first Cloverfield, producer J.J. Abrams has managed to sneak a movie into multiplexes under a shroud of secrecy and mystery. With little more than a couple of months notice, a film shot under the code name Valencia became 10 Cloverfield Lane. What’s the significance of “Cloverfield” in that movie title? Abrams is calling this film a blood relative to the original foundfootage monster movie. The new film is not a found-footage film (and thank god for that). After seeing it, I can tell you that the title is not misleading, but don’t go to this thinking you will see the Cloverfield monster laying waste to middle America. It’s a much different kind of movie. The film starts with Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) having an urgent phone call with somebody. She grabs her keys, hits the road, and drives for what appears to be many miles out of the big city into the cornfields. After stopping for some gas, her car crashes for mysterious reasons. She wakes up from said crash with an IV drip and her leg cuffed to a bar. Shortly thereafter, she meets Howard (John Goodman). Howard seems a little bit anxious and tells her she needs to hydrate, practice using crutches and, oh yeah, the end of the world is nigh. No one really knows why, but the air above is now contaminated, and they must reside in his emergency bunker for what could be years. There’s another inhabitant of the bunker, and that’s Howard’s soft-spoken neighbor Emmett (John Gallagher Jr.). Emmett allegedly helped Howard put the bunker together, and he’s not really sure why the world is ending, either. All of this leaves the beautiful Michelle, in the captive hands of two questionable strangers, suspicious and desiring to be outside, even if the world is dying.

Is the world really ending? Howard seems to think so, citing nuclear war and alien invasion as possibilities. Emmett is this way or that way about it. He just seems really happy to be around Michelle all day putting puzzles together. Is it just a grand plan for two creepy guys to imprison a beautiful woman for their perverted ends? by Bob Grimm First time director Dan Trachtenberg does a nice job keeping you guessing. I bgrimm@ went into 10 Cloverfield Lane with my own newsreview.com suspicions, based on the trailers, of how everything would pay off and how the film 3 would tie into the “Cloverfield Universe.” My suspicions were, for the most part, confirmed, with a few deviations. Winstead is an acting treasure who doesn’t get enough opportunities to shine. Her performance in Smashed (2012) is proof of that. She’s equally good here, playing a strong-minded hostage justifiably brimming with paranoia. She’s very easy to root for, even when the screenplay tries to tilt sympathies toward Howard and Emmett. Getting perhaps his meatiest role in years, Goodman is golden as the “maybe he’s a monster, maybe he’s a savior” survivalist. There are nuances in his work that will keep you guessing every second he’s on screen. As for Emmett, no knock on Gallagher Jr., but his character seems tacked on. The film is a slick thriller with a few plot holes that might nag you in its aftermath. For me, it offered very few major surprises, although that has much to do with me seeing basically every movie that comes out and being savvy to many directorial tricks. When the movie did “get” me on occasion, it did so competently. Above all, 10 Cloverfield Lane is an acting exercise for Winstead and Goodman, who play really well off of each other. As more mysteries about Howard and the outside world are revealed, the tension ratchets up, and Trachtenberg proves himself a fine handler of all the elements. I’m guessing 10 Cloverfield Lane is not the last we will see of the “C” word in a movie title. Think of Cloverfield movies as an anthology series with a few plot machinations tying things together. So far, two movies in, it’s proving to be a relatively stable endeavor. Ω

"And then, during the sixth season of Roseanne..."

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1The Brothers Grimsby Sacha Baron Cohen delivers his first bona fide bomb with this, a tired action comedy with no comedic nuance to speak of. In the past, Cohen has thrived with his mockumentary format, or simply in the service of a good comedic director (most notably Adam McKay on Talladega Nights). Now, he’s penned a screenplay for director Louis Leterrier, a man mostly known for action fare like The Incredible Hulk and Clash of the Titans, although his lousy Now You See Me was more of a drama. This colossal mess has Cohen playing a soccer-loving idiot in search of his long lost brother (Mark Strong). It turns out the brother is a spy, and when the two get together, they are a regular old odd couple. The plot is nothing but a setup for scenes like Cohen and Strong stuck in an elephant’s vagina, resulting in them getting fucked by many large elephant penises. Sorry folks, there was really no delicate way to describe that scene to you. In fact, I cleaned it up a bit, for what actually happens in the movie is far more disgusting and raunchy than my description. Now, I do believe there’s a director somewhere who could’ve made the sight of Cohen and Strong covered in elephant cum hilarious. Leterrier isn’t that man, and most, if not all, of the jokes in this movie bomb big time. I’ve been a Cohen fan in the past, but if this is a sign of things to come, I’m renouncing my admiration as of this date.

4Deadpool After a false start with the character of Wade Wilson in 2009’s uneven yet unjustly maligned X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Ryan Reynolds gets another chance at superhero—albeit unorthodox superhero—stardom. This time he scores big in this twisted film from first time director Tim Miller. The movie establishes its weirdness with scathing opening credits that poke fun at Reynolds’s stint as Green Lantern. It then becomes a consistently funny tragicomedy involving Wade, a mercenary who comes down with terminal cancer, dimming the lights on his future with girlfriend Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). He submits himself to an experiment that leaves him disfigured yet superhuman, bent on revenge against the criminal who made him this way. Reynolds finally gets a good movie to match his charms, and Deadpool gets the nasty film the character beckons for. The film gets an R-rating for many reasons, and there was no other way to make a Deadpool film. It needed to be depraved, and it is. T.J. Miller provides nice comic support as a weary bar owner, and a couple of X-Men show up in a hilarious way.

4Hail, Caesar! The latest from the Coen brothers follows a day in the life of Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), a studio enforcer at Capitol Pictures in the 1950s tasked with keeping stars out of trouble and assuring moving pictures stay on schedule. In the middle of filming a biblical epic, huge star Baird Whitlock (George Clooney) is kidnapped by Hollywood communists, who demand ransom money. Mannix must figure out how to get his star back while dodging two gossip columnists (both played by Tilda Swinton in increasingly hilarious wardrobe), navigating the latest scandal of studio star, DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) and comforting hot director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes), who has had a marblemouthed stunt actor named Hobie Doyle (Alden Ehrenreich) forced into his romantic comedy. The plot is paper thin, but it does give the Coens a chance to do their quick interpretations of old timey movie Westerns, screwball comedies, Esther Williams pool epics, overblown Bible movies, Gene Kelly musicals, and more. The whole thing is a blast but, admittedly, will probably go over best with diehard Coen fans.

5The Revenant For the second year in a row, director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu has delivered the year’s best film. The best movie of 2015 is The Revenant, an eye-popping Western thriller that gives Leonardo DiCaprio, the winner of the Golden Globe for Best Actor, the role that should finally score him that first Oscar. DiCaprio gives it everything he’s got as Hugh Glass, a scout working with fur traders on the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Glass, while doing his job, gets a little too close to a couple of bear cubs, and Mama Grizzly is not all too happy about such an occurrence. What follows is a lengthy and vicious bear attack where Glass tangles with the nasty mother not once, but twice. Inarritu, DiCaprio and some amazing visual technicians put you in the middle of that bear attack, minus the searing pain of actually having a bear’s claws and teeth rip through your flesh. DiCaprio is incredible here, as are Tom Hardy as a villainous fur trapper who wants to leave Glass behind, Domhnall Gleeson as the commander forced to make horrible decisions, and Will Poulter as the compassionate man who makes a big mistake. It’s a revenge tale amazingly told.

3Whiskey Tango Foxtrot Tina Fey makes a seamless transition to more dramatic fare with this, the story of a female journalist dropped into the middle of the war in Afghanistan. Based on the book The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Kim Barker, the film has a MASH vibe to it when it’s at its best. Fey gets plenty of chances to be funny, but this is her meatiest role yet, allowing her to show off a promising more serious side as an actress. When her life in New York gets too humdrum, Kim (Fey) winds up in Afghanistan with no major field reporting experience, dodging RPGs and filing stories nobody cares about. She has standard long-distance relationship problems on top of that, along with an on-site romance with a freelance photographer (Martin Freeman). Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (Crazy, Stupid, Love and Focus) the film pops on occasion, but spends a little too much time in dusty apartments rather than out in the field. Margot Robbie is great, if a little underused, as another field reporter, while the likes of Billy Bob Thornton and Alfred Molina perform admirably in supporting roles. The film doesn’t always click, but it stands as an interesting turning point in Fey’s career.

5The Witch Unlike The Blair Witch Project, this Sundance award-winning directorial debut— and total masterpiece—from Robert Eggers, who also wrote the script, actually has a witch in it. She makes her first appearance very early on in the film, and she’s doing a bad thing. A really, really, horribly disturbing, oh-that’s-how-thismovie-is-really-going-to-start bad thing. Set in 1630s New England with an exceptional attention to detail, there are plenty of ways to interpret the events and themes of The Witch—the mark of a good, heady horror film. Eggers has made a horror movie with some major meat on the bone that stands in league with such classics as The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby. And, oh lordy, is this film creepy. The sense of dread kicks in immediately after William (Ralph Ineson) is banished from his New England settlement for getting a little too over-the-top with his religious beliefs. He, his wife Katherine (Kate Dickie), their little baby, their oldest daughter, Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy), son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), and creepy twins Mercy and Jonas (Ellie Grainger and Lucas Dawson) must head out into the gray forests and fields to make a life away from government and society. What follows are hellish encounters with different incarnations of the witch, talking goats, possessed kids, and a bunch of other stuff that will unsettle you. Eggers has made a great movie that can be interpreted many different ways. If it doesn’t scare you, you are far braver than me.

3Zootopia Disney delivers another winner with this cute, uplifting story with a surprising dark side. It’s the sort of movie that’ll have kids asking their parents a few questions about some tough topics, while also being a movie that should entertain just about anyone who sits their butt in a theater seat to watch it. Judy (Ginnifer Goodwin entering the Voice Acting Hall of Fame) is a little bunny determined to be the first bunny cop on the force in Zootopia, a metropolis populated by animals. On the road to joining the force, she faces a lot of opposition for being both a bunny and a girl. Judy beats insurmountable odds, and winds up on the force, much to the chagrin of Chief Bogo (Idris Elba). She soon finds herself on a missing mammals case and enlists the help of a sly fox (Jason Bateman) for investigative work. The film is co-directed by three guys: Byron Howard (Tangled), Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph) and Jared Bush (his feature debut!). Directing by committee certainly works in this case, as the film has a nice unified feel while sustaining a surprising depth for an animated movie. The animation is top notch and inventive, with cute little touches throughout. When a cop chase winds up in a rodent community, it becomes a funny Godzilla riff. There are little witty touches throughout, and the movie is just another animated home run for the Disney catalog.