Monday, November 21

I Am Not Your Negro (Dir.: Raoul Peck; GRADE: B+)

Do not open until 2017.

Demon (Dir.: Marcin Wrona; GRADE: B-)

An admirable but only fitfully successful arthouse horror movie about a Polish wedding disrupted by a “dybbuk,” an angry and dissatisfied Jewish spirit that attaches itself to the Israeli groom.  As the groom’s behavior grows increasingly erratic and dangerous, exhuming not just ghosts but long-buried secrets of atrocities against the Jews, the father of the bride plies his guests with more and more vodka, and soon enough their bacchanal merges with the supernatural suffering.  Wrona favors disturbing compositions and shock cuts over long-winded explanations, but the final act still falls into a navel-gazing tailspin.

The Thoughts That Once We Had (Dir.: Thom Andersen; GRADE: B)

Another wide-ranging, thought-provoking documentary intersecting cinema, politics, philosophy and personal taste from the director of Los Angeles Plays Itself, only far less enveloping and focused as an experience.  Andersen crafts a personal history of cinema through the lens of Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who often wrote about cinema.  I honestly can’t say that I grokked much of what Anderson laid down here, but I dug his rap all the same – it’s a pungently intellectual and marvelously curated cinematic journey.

Jackie (Dir.: Pablo Larrain; GRADE: B-)

Do not open until December 21.  Check out my updated MVFF39 Power Rankings HERE.

Julieta (Dir.: Pedro Almodovar; GRADE: B-)

Do not open until 2017.  Check out my updated Pedro Almodovar Power Rankings HERE.

Under the Sun (Dir.: Vitaly Mansky; GRADE: B+)

Unbelievable.  When Ukrainian filmmaker Vitaly Mansky received government permission to make a documentary about a typical North Korean family, he was followed round-the-clock by bureaucrats who monitored the production and tailored the script to glorify the country, but the b-roll footage smuggled out and fashioned into Under the Sun tells a different story.  North Korea is fascinating not just because it’s a Lynch-ian nightmare parody of fascism, but because it makes us think about how our own country is run in a subtly similar way: like a flashy cult filled with mindless rituals, spotlighting heroism and prosperity while the poor and exploited are rendered invisible.

Wednesday, November 23

Elle (Dir.: Paul Verhoeven; GRADE: B+)

Do not open until 2017.  Check out my updated Paul Verhoeven Power Rankings HERE.

Nerve (Dir.: Henry Joost and Ariel Schuman; GRADE: B-)

Reasonably entertaining idiocy, with Emma Roberts and Dave Franco as “players” in a game controlled by anonymous online “watchers” who push the participants into ever more embarrassing and dangerous stunts.  Think Pokemon Go meets truth or dare meets murder, directed by the “brains” behind Catfish.  It’s breathless and salacious enough to hold your interest, and while the film seems to shed IQ points as it hurtles towards a truly stupid finish, it’s still better than probably half the films that will get nominated for the Best Picture Oscar this year.

Finding Dory (Dir.: Andrew Stanton; GRADE: B)

Thoroughly unnecessary piffle, with a lot of narrative structural integrity issues and some obvious 11th-hour tinkering, but like last year’s similarly strained The Good Dinosaur, it’s pushed over by the usual expert Pixar craftsmanship.  The chameleonic octopus voiced by Ed O’Neill is the one element that unquestionably works, so he gets repeatedly shoehorned into scenes where his presence makes little sense, presumably filling in for excised storylines.  There are a few memorable set pieces, solid voice work and the usual cleverness and beauty you expect from Pixar – this isn’t a Cars 2-level embarrassment, but it’s pretty far from great.  Check out my updated Pixar Power Rankings HERE.

Lion (Dir.: Garth Davis; GRADE: C)

Do not open until December 21.

Thursday, November 24

The Wave (Dir.: Roar Uthaug; GRADE: B-)

I’m obviously running low on viable screener options when I pop in a Norwegian disaster movie on Thanksgiving morning, but you go to war with the army you’ve got.  The Wave was actually a pretty watchable facsimile of American disaster movies, with the emphasis placed on characters rather than carnage, even better than San Andreas if not for the absence of Alexandra Daddario.

Les Saisons (Dir.: Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud; GRADE: C+)

Perrin and Cluzaud previously collaborated on nature documentaries like Winged Migration and Oceans, and their strength has always been their ability to get close to their wildlife subjects without superimposing a contrived human narrative on the creatures.  That appreciation for beauty and persistence, and that restraint in the face of DisneyNature aggression comes across once again in Les Saisons, although a heavy-handed framing device about man’s intrusion into the world’s timeline drags the film down.  There are some gorgeous individual images, but they all feel disconnected from the didacticism at the heart of this thing.

Friday, November 25

The Love Witch (Dir.: Anna Biller; GRADE: C+)

This deliberately retrograde horror satire mimics the clothes and colors of 1960s Technicolor movies (even though the characters use cell phones), and the acting is hugely mannered and bad in a way that I can only assume is meant to evoke the same.  Biller’s film is getting a lot of love from critics, but I felt as alienated and annoyed by this cinematic re-appropriation as I have felt in the past about some of Guy Maddin’s movies. There’s an element of contemptuous superiority and intentional shittiness that I can’t hurdle.

High-Rise ***REWATCH*** (Dir.: Ben Wheatley; GRADE: B+)

No significant insights or changes of opinion from my initial viewing of this pitch-black adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s satire on 1970’s capitalism and convenience.  In a weak year for award-worthy male acting performances, Tom Hiddleston’s sleek showing as the social-climbing Dr. Laing has a good shot of making my SFFCC and Indiewire ballots, while Luke Evans’ highly physical performance as the working-class Wilder still has an outside chance in the supporting actor category.

20th Century Women (Dir.: Mike Mills; GRADE: C)

Do not open until Xmas.

Krisha ***REWATCH*** (Dir.: Trey Edward Shults; GRADE: A-)

Again, no real changes from my first viewing of this sucker-punch domestic drama.  Either cruelly compassionate or compassionately cruel, Krisha feels like the family dinner scene from Punch-Drunk Love developed into a full-length feature – the film practically vibrates with nervous energy.  Shults shot the film in his parents’ house and used friends and family as actors, including his aunt Krisha Fairchild, who gives a devastatingly desperate performance in the title role.  Shults landed a two-picture deal with Krisha distributor A24, so it will be exciting to see what happens once he leaves the nest.

Look for Part III of my 2016 Cramfest Capsules sometime next week. You can read Part I of the 2016 Cramfest HERE.

Read more of Daniel’s reviews at Dare Daniel and Rotten Tomatoes, and listen to Daniel on the Dare Daniel podcast.