Film Roundup
KEITH UHLICH
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus.
★=SKIP IT; ★★=MEDIOCRE; ★★★=GOOD; ★★★★=EXCELLENT; ★★★★★=CLASSIC
Focus (Dirs. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa). Starring: Will Smith, Margot Robbie, Rodrigo Santoro. Will Smith turns on his considerable charm in this slick con artist romance from Crazy Stupid Love writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. The first two acts are seductive and thrilling as Smith’s charismatic grifter Nicky plays both smarmy guide and burly bedfellow to amateur scammer Jess (Margot Robbie), who desperately wants to break into the confidence game underworld. The highlight is a lengthy setpiece at a New Orleans football game where the deceptions are plentiful and nothing is as it seems on the surface. But this dizzying high-wire act quickly goes slack once the setting changes to Buenos Aires where Nicky and Jess find themselves at odds after they target a race car-obsessed criminal (Rodrigo Santoro) for a lucrative payday. Sad to say, the movie leaves you feeling bilked. [R] ★★1/2
Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Dir: Spike Lee). Starring: Stephen Tyrone Williams, Zaraah Abrahams, Rami Malek. Though it never
quite tops its ecstatic opening credits sequence (in which elastic dancer Charles “Li’L Buck” Riley hoofs his way around Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood), Spike Lee’s sanguine horror romance more than gets by on sheer discordant strangeness. A mostly faithful remake of Bill Gunn’s cult classic Ganja & Hess (1972), this Kickstarterfunded feature tells the tale of an African American archaeologist (Stephen Tyrone Williams) who gets a taste for hemoglobins after he’s stabbed with a pointy ancient artifact. The body count begins (one of his victims is played by a dolled-up Felicia “Snoop” Pearson of The Wire), but then he meets the wife (Zaraah Abrahams) of a recently deceased colleague and falls madly in love… for eternity. Lee throws everything he possibly can into this strange brew: musical numbers, earnest spirituality, lesbian sex scenes, blunt social commentary. It doesn’t “work” exactly, but damned if it isn’t consistently arresting. [UR] ★★★1/2 Jauja (Dir. Lisandro Alonso). Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Viilbjork Agger Malling. Viggo
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Mortensen trudging through the mythical wilds on horseback…is this a stealth sequel to The Lord of the Rings? It’s actually the latest movie from the very talented Argentinean writer-director Lisandro Alonso, who made the sublimely enigmatic drama Liverpool (2008). Beautifully photographed in a square aspect ratio (the effect is not unlike looking through a child’s ViewMaster), this is the surreal story of a 19th-century Danish immigrant (Mortensen) wandering (very slowly, and often silently) across a desolate landscape in search of his missing daughter (Viilbjork Agger Malling). There are several stunning interludes; the best is Mortensen’s run-in with a cave-dwelling enchantress. But there’s also a vaguely misogynist undercurrent that emerges once the film arrives at its cryptic finale. The destination isn’t worth the journey. [UR] ★★★ Queen and Country (Dir: John Boorman). Starring: Callum Turner, Caleb Landry Jones, David Thewlis, Tamsin Egerton. The semiautobiographical Hope and Glory (1987)— about a young boy’s tragicomic experiences
during the London blitz—is one of John Boorman’s finest efforts. So it’s great to be back in the same world, as the writer-director’s onscreen alterego, the now 18-year-old Bill Rohan (Callum Turner), is conscripted into the UK army during the Korean War. He never sees action, but instead has a series of comic-romantic misadventures while stationed at a London military base. The actors are uniformly superb, with Caleb Landry Jones (as Bill’s mischievous best friend) and David Thewlis (as a stuck-up, PTSD-suffering superior) the particular standouts. And there’s a potent sense of melancholy (for both lost youth and a particularly personal kind of cinema) that Boorman mines in tandem with the film’s blithe satire of British mores. This is a deceptively lighthearted work that plays as a wistful valediction to the art form to which Boorman has dedicated his life. [UR] ★★★★1/2 ■
Keith Uhlich is a critic and writer based in New York. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.