Grandma (***)

GRANDMA
Written and Directed by Paul Weitz

***

I can't think of a better time for Lily Tomlin's performance in Grandma to present itself to us. She's reached the beloved third act of her career, has come out on the other side of the I Heart Huckabees portion of her persona which now seems almost endearing. She has a popular Netflix show, Grace and Frankie, in which she stars with Jane Fonda (and for which she was very recently nominated for a Primetime Emmy), and people are ready to see her in the kind of film role that really showcases all of her most outlandish quirks. Who better than a low stakes filmmaker like Paul Weitz - someone who's always been more 'director-for-hire' than auteur - to craft a screenplay for her? Someone who doesn't need to stretch too far, or get in the way of the greatness of his film's star? Grandma has that indie charm, but it only works when Tomlin is given free reign to perform her career-long schtick in a story that truly knows how to utilize it.

Mistress America (**1/2)

MISTRESS AMERICA
Directed by Noah Baumbach

**1/2

Noah Baumbach's image of New York is as romantic as Woody Allen, but he's willing to admit that there are cracks on the infamous visage. He does not treat New York as a place that can do no wrong, and usually the blame falls at the hands of people. There are terrible people all over the world, but Baumbach seems to have an understanding that New York City has a way of producing the kind of terrible people on all levels and classes. His latest Greta Gerwig collaboration, Mistress America, is basically a spiritual cousin to their previous, Frances Ha. Ha was shot in black and white, alluded often to the French New Wave, and showed Gerwig as a twenty-something whose entire idyllic Park Slope existence goes down the toilet when her roommate moves out. Mistress America ponders what would have happened Ha's protagonist were more manipulative, was able to spin her fable of a lifestyle into at least partial success. In Mistress America, Gerwig's Brooke is the quintessential, millennial New York Girl: in her thirties but still single, getting by on a variety of patched together version of employments, and living in a space marked as commercial. She's literally living out a fantasy of most twenty-first century white kids, and yet she still has room for unhappiness. Of course she does, it's a Noah Baumbach movie.

Ricki and the Flash (**1/2)

RICKI AND THE FLASH
Directed by Jonathan Demme

Diablo Cody's preoccupation with outcasted women trying to fit into Middle American normalcy has given us Jason Reitman's two best films, Juno and Young Adult. Her collaborations with Reitman have been the best thing for the two of them. Neither has really amounted to much without the other. You'd think that Cody getting a chance to work with one of the best living American film directors, Jonathan Demme, would count as an upgrade. Not to mention casting the lead in the film with Meryl Streep, an actress whose reputation is so absolutely adored that she can probably die without a single meaningful performance going forward and still be considered the greatest of all time. This seems like such a great mix, and indeed, I do think the level of the talent does help rise what could have been a pretty unspectacular premise toward watchability. None of the players here are swinging for the fences. Ricki and the Flash is a pretty low-stakes film with a lot of emotional fireworks and crowd-pleasing one-liners. Demme views Cody's sardonic humor through a more sentimental lens and strips away all of Reitman's inherent cynicism. And yet, the film works for me. All of its frills and overeagerness paid off as I watched a rather half-baked film evolve into a pretty effective - albeit hackneyed - story of redemption.

Phoenix (**)

PHOENIX
Directed by Christian Petzold

**

The roots of the Holocaust are felt deeply in Christian Petzold's Phoenix, a quaint tale about a Jewish woman named Nelly (Nina Hoss) who survived Auschwitz, but not without suffering wounds so devastating that she requires facial reconstructive surgery. After the procedure - she asked to look exactly as she one had - she still feels like her identity has been wiped clean; her home has been bombed to bits, her face is like something completely different, and her loving husband Johnny (Ronald Zehrfeld) is nowhere to be found. Searching for Johnny, she finds him bussing tables in a club in the American sector. Despite the warnings of her loyal friend Lene (Nina Kunzendorf) that Johnny betrayed her to the Nazis, Nelly still comes face to face with her husband, who doesn't recognize her. Upon seeing her, Johnny finds her similar enough to his wife to propose a plan: pretend to be his deceased wife in order to secure her financial assets. What follows is a twisted narrative of a man transforming a woman into his wife, a woman he does not realize is already his wife. Hoss' performance as Nelly is profound, haunted and painful. Nelly's progressive knowledge of the moral corruption of the husband she used to love is the rock that this narrative is built on, but outside her performance, Phoenix has an austerity that's hard to puncture. Other than a dynamite closing scene that packs an emotional punch unlike anything in the film previous, Phoenix is a droll affair without much to separate it from the dozens of Holocaust-themed films we see every year. It's obvious that Hoss and director Christian Petzold have a great tandem going - this is their fifth film together, and their fourth consecutive - but this is far from their best collaboration.

The Look of Silence (****)

THE LOOK OF SILENCE
Directed by Joshua Oppenheimer

****

When I saw Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing in 2012, it completely transformed the concept I had for what contemporary human beings were capable of. That film explored the killing of one million Indonesian 'communists' (pretty much anyone who even appeared to threaten the new military regime) in the span of a year. It focused specifically on the men directly responsible for the slaughter, and it's main star was Anwar Congo, an elegant self-proclaimed gangster who not only personally killed hundreds of people, but did it in horrifically grotesque ways, speaking of it proudly. The ending of that film - with Congo finally, in advanced age, coming to grips with the absolute horror of his actions and literally retching on his own porch - is one of the most powerful images I've seen in any piece of nonfiction filmmaking. The Look of Silence is another film from Oppenheimer, a companion piece and a film that takes less of an objective glance of the killings, and becomes actively confrontational. When we meet Adi, a 44-year-old ophthalmologist, we learn that he was born only a year after the killings, and that his brother Ramli was one of the victims. Ramli's death, a death that took place over several days and included particularly brutal details such as the extraction of intestines and castration, we understand why the intellectual Adi would want to seek an explanation. Adi visits the numerous men who played a part in his brother's death, asking only for a small gesture, an expression of regret or even an apology. The responses he does receive are both fascinating and sobering, a bleak picture of humanity's ability to distort history to comfort their own demons.

The End of the Tour (***1/2)

THE END OF THE TOUR
Directed by James Ponsoldt

***1/2

The concept of David Lipsky's 2010 book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself always felt a little gross to me. The book consists solely of a weekend-long interview between Lipsky and legendary author David Foster Wallace toward the end of his epic book tour after the release of his brilliant, maddening, excessively long novel Infinite Jest. The interview was meant to be part of a cover story for Rolling Stone magazine, Lipsky wanted to capture the zeitgeist that was Wallace at the height of that fame, but the magazine dumped the story and this interview didn't see the light of day until after Wallace's suicide in 2008, over twelve years later. The whole thing felt like an exploitation of a tragedy, like when Riverhead Books decided to publish Kurt Cobain's agonizingly personal journals and distribute them for all the world to see. Lipsky's book has now been transformed into The End of the Tour, the latest film from indie director James Ponsoldt, and has morphed into a surprisingly poignant view of one of our most fascinating writers. The script, written by Pulitzer-prize winning playwright Donald Margulies, finds pockets of humanity and moments of tension within Lipsky's interview, drafting a view of two different kinds of writing celebrity: the moderate success story who wants to be a rock star and the rock star who wants to be anything but.

Trainwreck (**)

TRAINWRECK
Directed by Judd Apatow

**

Since Judd Apatow's 2005 masterpiece The 40-Year-Old Virgin, his feature debut, the comic's films have been spinning closer and closer to the sun. His insistence on indulging his and his friends' egos has left his films bloated and ponderous. His films are still funny, he allows his performers - all of them - to play to their strengths, regardless of whether those strengths mix well into a fully-formed film. Once he made Funny People in 2009, his films began to feel like a lazy puree of solid comedy bits searching for a plot. Trainwreck is a little bit more of the same, but there is one new element here and that's Amy Schumer. The comedienne has evolved over the last decade from a poor man's Sarah Silverman to a truly astute, intelligent comedic performer, supported by a hilarious Comedy Central show Inside Amy Schumer. Schumer is credited with writing the script here, but I'd like to believe that she didn't pen this film as the cameo-riddled, NBA athlete showcase that it eventually became. Apatow's tastes for big names who might not exactly have any talent in front of the camera rears its ugly head in Trainwreck in the worst way. It's almost as if he didn't understand that the star of his film is enough.

Tangerine (****)

TANGERINE
Directed by Sean Baker

****

The spirit of a film like Tangerine is contagious. It's lack of shame and sense of thrill is hard for even the biggest prude to resist. The film is the latest from Sean Baker, always a fan of the more depraved corners of American culture, and it burned through the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. Though it left the festival without any awards, it definitely won the word-of-mouth battle, and luckily won distribution. The film is a marvelous comedy focusing on those parts of Los Angeles that most people do their best to avoid. It's three main characters are two transgender prostitutes and an Armenian cab driver - not exactly a recipe for commercial success - but Baker finds hilarious pockets in these outrageous lives, exposing the secrets of a lifestyle that a lot of people try to keep secret. Baker famously shot this entire film on an iPhone 5S; that detail has helped a lot in building this film's reputation as a breath of fresh air in the American independent film scene. But whatever "camera" Baker chose to use for this film is pretty irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. There are movies that are shot on film that don't look as good as this film. That he's able to craft his opus with a smartphone and a pair of amateur performers as his stars shows the kind of artist he truly is.

The Overnight (**)

THE OVERNIGHT

Written and Directed by Patrick Brice

**

Earlier this month, Grantland published a piece about new-arriving filmmaker Patrick Brice and his interesting predicament: his first two features were coming out on the same day. His first film, Creep, is a mumblecore thriller starring Brice and Mark Duplass, which got released on June 19th in select theaters, but also on VOD (it will be on Netflix by mid-July). His other film is The Overnight, a ridiculous sex comedy with a formidable cast and a lot of buzz after its successful festival run earlier this year. I mention the Grantland piece because it paints the picture of a young director with cinematic ambitions who meets powerful independent film producer Mark Duplass and is told basically to make a Duplass brothers movie. Brice, a man who sites Wim Wenders' beautiful Wings of Desire as his inspiration for becoming a cinephile, was taught that he should make his films look as uninspiring as possible. The Duplass brothers have an entire pipeline of independent filmmakers that they give voice to, and that they allow these young men (and its almost exclusively men) to find their own voice is admirable, but The Overnight is another example of Duplass as producers conceiving a filmmaker who is basically a copy of Duplass as director. The Duplass model is stooped in the belief that independent film is supposed to look cheap and shabbily thrown together - as if Cinema Verite and DOGME didn't have visual purpose. The Overnight is another film in that model and another indie that succeeds at "looking shitty".

Dope (***1/2)

DOPE
Written and Directed by Rick Famuyiwa

***1/2

You watch a film like Dope and it makes it very clear just how uninspiring most mainstream films can be. When a film this fresh comes along, it's hard not to be enthused by its very energy, even if that energy leads you into complicated situations. The film is like John Hughes by way of Spike Lee, a broad high school comedy that still manages to make coherent, thoughtful comments of serious socioeconomic issues. It's a movie that doesn't allow the shallowness of some of its jokes to reflect on the intelligence of its script. It stars Blake Anderson from Workaholics and still comes off looking smart. Films about race are difficult to make in this country, because so many members of the American elite still don't believe in the existence of white privilege or institutional racism. Movies have to be put through a non-threatening filter , and Dope pulls this off brilliantly before hitting you over the head with its real message by the time we see the conclusion. The film's director, Rick Famuyiwa, is a Hollywood veteran with several titles under his belt, including Our Family Wedding and Brown Sugar (neither of which I've seen). Those films were studio-produced stories with bottom-line intentions, while Dope feels grittier, more personal. The film showcases high school on the wrong side of the tracks but does so with an adult's wide perspective - it's details refined and sharp. It's the best comedy that I've seen so far this year.

Inside Out (***)

INSIDE OUT
Directed by Pete Docter and Ronaldo Del Carmen

***

The preciousness of Pixar Studios - the wholly brilliant subgroup of Disney Films that's created several classics, including WALL-E and The Incredibles - is nothing new. It's one thing for a single director to possess the talent to produce films that consistently entertain an audience with intelligent filmmaking. To have an entire studio with a seemingly endless supply of talent frequently pumping out material of superior quality is starting to feel rarer by the day. We complain that major studios are no longer interested in smart movies for adults, and that's true, but Pixar is continuously making smart movies for children, and it's often the best thing that adults get to see as well. Inside Out is Pixar's first wholly original movie since 2012's Brave; only Monsters University - the sequel to 2001's Monsters, Inc. - stands between the two. The usually prolific studio slowed down a tinge, and were even surpassed for a short moment by their parent company, Walt Disney Animation, when 2013's Frozen ruled the box office and the air waves, to become the film studio's biggest moneymaker in a good while. Other animation studios have upped their game, recognizing that audiences have clung to Pixar's top-notch screenwriting and cinematic ambitions. It's possible that Pixar, the former trailblazing behemoth, has become just one of many animation studios producing quality content. Inside Out shows that they're still up to the challenge.

Jurassic World (***)

JURASSIC WORLD
Directed by Colin Trevorrow

***

Before Jurassic World even starts, we know that the logic here is all wrong. If we're meant to believe that all of the Jurassic films exist in the same universe (and there's no reason why we shouldn't) then it's patently ridiculous that at this point - after three separate, horrible incidents involving genetically-engineered dinosaurs killing multiple innocent people - to contemplate that within this same universe, intelligent people would think that it is, in fact, okay to fill a theme park with these same dinosaurs. Is there anyway you can even fathom this happening in our current reality? One of the smartest things that Jurassic World does is acknowledge its franchise's violent past, but only with the original, iconic Jurassic Park from 1993. Jurassic Park is still, in 2015, a fascinating film that still has the capacity for wonder; it's about as logical as it can be, considering its subject matter. It's two subsequent sequels, The Lost World and Jurassic Park III, are failures because they exist within that logic - mainly, that we'd still be trying to keep dinosaurs in controlled captivity after the tragedies in the first film. Luckily, Jurassic World, coming out twenty-two years after Park, doesn't hold itself to that same standard. It understands its own ridiculousness, and wears it like a badge of honor. It doesn't aspire toward intelligence, it aspires toward adventure, and the result is probably the best film in the franchise since the original classic.

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (**)

ME AND EARL AND THE DYING GIRL
Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon

**

The first half-hour of Sundance indie Me and Earl and the Dying Girl was close to unbearable to me. It's overwhelming supply of indie dramedy snark felt suffocating. Here's Nick Offerman inexplicably cuddling a cat. Here's the inspiring history teacher with forearm and neck tattoos. Here's a voiceover narration that allows you to see just how sardonic and self-deprecating our protagonist can be (hint: very). This is a movie that tries to incorporate aspects of satire and absurdity in what is ultimately a YA melodrama about leukemia. The mix doesn't always feel right. But once Dying Girl gets past its incessant need to impress us (there's a lot of movie posters in the background, close-ups of book spines, classic movies playing randomly on screens in front of a passing camera), it allows us to realize how charming its characters are. This is a film told from the point-of-view of a male high school senior, not exactly unexplored territory, but the film's tale of unorthodox friendship in the face of mortality has moments of poignancy and deliberate frankness that felt refreshing compared to most teenage dramas. The film itself hides behind an austere idea of what this film should be, but that veneer doesn't effect its actors, who give the film its most effective presence.

Spy (***)

SPY
Written and Directed by Paul Feig

***

After I saw Welcome To Me, I was impressed by Kristen Wiig's continued efforts to carve out a filmography within quirky independent films, as opposed to taking advantage of the commercial appeal of her breakout hit Bridesmaids. On this very blog, I mentioned how Wiig could have easily cashed in with more mainstream projects like her Bridesmaids co-star Melissa McCarthy (both actresses were nominated for Oscars for Bridesmaids - McCarthy for Best Supporting Actress; Wiig for co-writing the screenplay). After seeing McCarthy's latest star turn, Spy, I find myself pleased with the two, differing approaches these comedic performers have chosen. Wiig's appeal goes hand in hand with her self-molded image as an oddity, she likes playing the emotional house of cards. McCarthy has a much broader appeal. She can be funny on screen in so many different ways, it's almost intimidating. She's transformed herself into a legit movie star, and one who has a deft understanding on how to play each scene to her advantage. Almost anyone in a scene with her can come off funny just by her presence, and yet, she's almost always the true star of any scene she happens to be in. Spy allows her to both show off her whirlwind improvisational abilities and perform the physical comedy she's notorious for. It's a true star vehicle and one that might show that America is ready for something new in the movies.

Mad Max: Fury Road (***1/2)

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD
Directed by George Miller

***1/2

Mad Max: Fury Road is demented poetry; watching it is probably the closest I'll ever come to mainlining amphetamines. The film is the fourth of the Mad Max series, and while all have been directed by Australian filmmaker George Miller, it's the first film in the franchise in 30 years, since 1985's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. This is also the first one in which the titular Max is played by Tom Hardy, replacing Mel Gibson who built his stardom on the character of Max Rockatansky. Hardy isn't the movie star that Gibson was, but neither was Gibson when the initial Mad Max film arrived. I should admit early: I've never seen any of the previous Mad Max films. Fury Road is my inaugural stroll through George Miller's dystopian universe and it's a doozy. This film doesn't care much about characterization, but it doesn't completely ignore it either. It's the rare film that can tell you all you need to know about its characters through its action sequences, and Fury Road has plenty of those. More than anything, Fury Road is a trademark of a smart director, a person who sees that a car chase and a story don't have to be mutually exclusive, that you can make an action film with above average intelligence without alienating your intended audience.