We’ll talk about the behind-the-scenes turmoil at Fantastic Fest in another wordpile. In the meantime, here are reviews of some of the notable films that played there. They don’t have U.S. release dates yet (except as noted), but we’ll let you know when they do.
Tigers Are Not Afraid
A tough, beautiful urban fairy tale by Mexican writer-director Issa López, Tigers Are Not Afraid is a perfect example of how genre films can help us engage with real-world crises without being overwhelmed or discouraged by them. It’s set in an unnamed Mexican metropolis from which thousands of men, women, and children have disappeared since the start of the drug war in 2006, with young Estrella (Paola Lara) coming home from school one day to find that her mother is now among them. Reassuring herself with a running fantasy about the courage of tigers and the belief that people have inherent value that gets lost when they’re afraid (“We forget who we are when the things from outside come to get us”), Estrella joins forces with a quartet of younger street boys, led by El Shine (Juan Ramon López), who have stolen an iPhone and a gun from a drug dealer who wants them back at all costs. What separates this from other stories about people running afoul of drug lords isn’t just that it’s about children, but that López presents them as children, brimming with imagination and playfulness even while negotiating for their lives. The kids are irresistibly lovable, and while López uses magical realism (graffiti that comes to life; a trail of blood that leads Estrella around) to soften the blow, she doesn’t shy away from the brutal realities. I’ve seldom seen such lyrical poignance in such a sad setting. Grade: A-
Bodied
My understanding of battle rap — informed entirely by Joseph Kahn’s Bodied, a devastatingly funny social commentary — is that it’s like a no-holds-barred comedy roast except the jokes have to rhyme, with participants insulting each other in loosely metered couplets that may be improvised or prepared. Bodied (slang for killed or defeated) examines this subsection of hip-hop culture through the eyes of a white graduate student, Adam (Calum Worthy), who’s writing his thesis on it and ends up becoming a participant after interviewing battle-rap champion Behn Grymm (Jackie Long) — much to the dismay of his own shrill, scolding girlfriend, Maya (Rory Uphold), who’s offended by the content of the un-P.C. raps and by the very idea of a white suburban kid being involved. Kahn structures the story like a sports movie, culminating in an electrifying showdown between mentor and protege that is at least as exciting as any actual sports movie I’ve watched. But even better, he uses the scenario to crack open and satirize an impressive number of hot-button topics — racism, misogyny, homophobia, cultural appropriation, who can say the N-word, fake outrage from outsiders, the liberal game of calling out other liberals for not being woke enough — AND to discuss the mechanics of brainstorming and joke-writing. Kahn’s writing style, where people don’t have conversations so much as take turns making overwritten pronouncements, requires some adjustment, but it fits the broadly satiric tone and intentionally stereotypical characters. Despite a few comedic misfires (inevitable in a film this densely packed), it’s an explosively funny snapshot of American culture in 2017. Grade: A-
The Death of Stalin
Armando Iannucci has written and directed two films in his career, and they’re both among the best political comedies ever made. First there was In the Loop, an extension of his British TV series The Thick of It (he also created HBO’s Veep) that used fictional U.K. and U.S. functionaries to satirize our two nations’ political dysfunction and eagerness for war. Now he returns (with co-writers David Schneider and Ian Martin) with The Death of Stalin, a breathtakingly dark comedy of errors that holds up the brutal Soviet dictator’s final days as a mirror to current British and American quagmires. The fictionalized plot, which hardly exaggerates the truth, comes from a French graphic novel; Iannucci and company have added comedy to it, replaying horrific events as farce, turning everyone into bumblers, and finding grim laughs in the minutiae of Stalin’s reign of terror. (“Don’t worry!” says the Radio Moscow director cheerily to the audience he’s hastily assembling at Stalin’s command. “Nobody’s going to get killed!”) The masterstroke, however, is in the casting and the decision to have everyone speak in their native accents. So here’s Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev, a loud buffoon and sycophant who keeps track of which of his jokes get the best laughs; Jeffrey Tambor as Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s gullible successor (he weeps hilariously at the sight of Dear Leader incapacitated) whose idiocy makes him useful; Simon Russell Beale as Lavrentiy Beria, a Cheney-like opportunist; Michael Palin as Vyacheslav Molotov, a clueless bureaucrat who was on Stalin’s to-kill list; Jason Isaacs as Georgy Zhukov, swaggering military commander; Rupert Friend as Stalin’s raving conspiracy-theorist son. True to form, Iannucci packs the dialogue with profane insults (it’s the sort of movie where someone shouts obscenities at the burning corpse of a political enemy), but he also performs a delicate tight-rope act, conjuring thoughts of Brexit and Trump without laying it on too thick and mocking political connivers of all stripes with elegant savagery. Grade: A-
Anna and the Apocalypse
Anna and the Apocalypse is a Scottish zombie high school musical comedy set at Christmastime. Does it fulfill every magical possibility of that delicious combination of themes? No, but let’s be reasonable. It’s a remarkably self-assured and polished second feature by director John McPhail (expanding on a 2011 short by Ryan McHenry), with tuneful, rhyme-full pop songs by Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly, game performances by a likable cast, and an acceptable amount of undead gore. (It’s the sort of zombie movie that has a scene set in a bowling alley so it can show a severed head come up through the ball return.) The dead begin rising on the night of the school Christmas program (there’s a wonderfully naughty song parodying the sensuality of “Santa Baby”), which only adds to the existing drama: bright, spunky Anna (Ella Hunt) is contemplating what to do after graduation; her father (Mark Benton), also the school’s janitor, wants her to go to college; her platonic friend John (Malcolm Gunning) is pining for her. McPhail has a merry old time with the juxtaposition of Christmas and horror (as in the optimistic, what-a-wonderful-world song that Anna sings as she walks down the street, oblivious to the zombie chaos emerging around her), but he conjures real emotion, too, as Anna’s dad and the campy-mean headmaster (Paul Kaye), barricaded in the school, debate the merits of working together versus deciding who’s most important. The film’s energy falls off a bit in the latter stages, but this plucky and funny holiday treat shouldn’t be ignored. Grade: B+
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
If you’ve seen Yorgos Lanthimos’ other films, like Dogtooth or The Lobster, you enter The Killing of a Sacred Deer braced for uncomfortable hilarity with touches of deadpan violence. In that respect, Lanthimos does not disappoint. With regular co-writer Efthymis Filippou, the Greek absurdist here presents what might be his darkest morality play yet, involving heart surgeon Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell), his wife, Anna (Nicole Kidman), and two children, and a 16-year-old boy named Martin (Barry Keoghan). We do not immediately understand the nature of Steven’s relationship with Martin — there’s an uneasy feeling as we wonder just what kind of unsettling this movie is going to be — but we learn that the boy’s father was a patient of Steven’s and that his mother (Alicia Silverstone) has the hots for the doctor. Martin, a squirrelly, messy kid, ingratiates himself with the Murphys, befriending teenage daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) before finally spelling out his intentions (which I won’t spoil for you). What follows is a perverse Twilight Zone scenario about an impossible choice, made grimly funny by everyone’s stilted delivery (as if they’re bored with a very un-boring situation) and Lanthimos’ commitment to his premise. I wish it ended with more flourish instead of simply resolving the plot; on the other hand, Keoghan (recently seen suffering a head injury in Dunkirk) gives a performance of remarkable subtlety and creepiness. Grade: B+ (In theaters Oct. 20)
Thelma
Thelma, a reserved but piercing supernatural coming-of-age drama from director Joachim Trier (Oslo, August 31st), begins with a young girl hunting a deer with her father in the snow. Her eyes fixed on the oblivious animal, the girl doesn’t see that for a brief yet unmistakable moment her father has the rifle aimed at her. Well, then! Except for a few key flashbacks, Thelma is about the title character (played by Eili Harboe) as a college freshman, away for the first time from her controlling, fundamentalist Christian parents. Martha, socially awkward and mocked for her sheltered background, is relieved when she’s befriended by cool girl Anja (Okay Kaya), but alarmed by the sudden onset of occasional, inexplicable seizures accompanied by mental acuity she doesn’t understand. Thematically, Thelma is reminiscent of Raw (which had cannibalism as sexual-awakening metaphor) and Carrie (the repressed girl discovering what she’s capable of), enhanced by Trier’s intimate direction and Harboe’s intense central performance. If it drags a bit, it’s worth it to gobble up the morsels about Thelma and her family’s history that bring the story all together. Grade: B (In theaters Nov. 10)
Hagazussa
Etymology time! “Hagazussa” (“hedge sitter”), an Old High German word that gave us witchy terms like “hag” and “hex,” refers to the old women who would sit near the hedges that separated cultivated land from wild forests, gathering herbs and such while the menfolk did agricultural labor. The movie called Hagazussa is about a medieval Alp-dwelling goatherd named Albrun (Aleksandra Cwen), whose name comes from roots meaning “elf, supernatural being” and “secret, magic.” Albrun has a baby despite there being no (other) evidence that she’s ever had a man in her life, and she keeps to herself in a shack in the mountains, where she encounters (causes?) unnatural phenomenon. You can see why the bratty children in the village think she’s a witch. Also, maybe she is one? Hagazussa (subtitled: A Heathen’s Curse), a gorgeously photographed, almost dialogue-free debut feature from German writer-director Lukas Feigelfeld, tells Albrun’s story elliptically, ambiguously, letting the tension and sinister omens build almost unbearably. I wasn’t totally satisfied by the eventual release, but I suspect I missed some of the significance of the film’s folkloric elements and other imagery. Even so, it’s a singular tone poem that evokes powerful unease. Grade: B
Maus
Maus is mostly in English (it’s the language the two main characters have in common), written and directed by a Spaniard, about a Bosnian woman and her German boyfriend who run afoul of Serbs in the forests of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It may not surprise you to learn that Yayo Herrero’s debut feature is a political allegory, and while he uses horror/suspense tropes effectively to makes his points, the film couldn’t stand on its own as a straightforward genre film. When Selma (Alma Terzic), a Muslim whose family were killed by the Serbs during their war, and her boyfriend Alex (August Wittgenstein) have car trouble and must walk through a forest to get help, Selma is reluctant — not for the usual fairy-tale reasons to avoid forests (bears, wolves, witches, etc.), but because of leftover landmines. They encounter one of those, but worse, they run into two Serbs who claim to be friendly but whom Selma cannot trust because of her past traumas. Selma’s (and our) perception of reality becomes questionable as she and Alex and the Serbs take turns turning the tables on each other, violently. Alex keeps telling Selma, “Don’t worry, I’m here for you. We’re here for you.” (The film’s title is his nickname for her.) Passing knowledge of recent world history clues us in that Alex — whom the Serbs call “Europe” (hint, hint) — won’t be able to live up to his promises, culminating in a climax and resolution that coalesce Herrero’s message in unforeseen ways. Maus may not be as insightful as he thinks it is (his points about the world turning its back on atrocities are not revelatory), but he shows promise. Grade: B-
Mom and Dad
Brian Taylor, who co-directed the Crank movies, Gamer, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance with Mark Neveldine, strikes out on his own with Mom and Dad” demonstrating that he doesn’t need any help coming up with bonkers ideas for movies and executing them with maniacal glee. Of course, it helps to have Nicolas Cage, patron saint of bonkers movies, in the cast. The premise is one any parent can relate to: What if you wanted to just straight-up murder your stupid kids? In this case, there’s a virus (or something; the movie doesn’t elaborate) that infects an entire city’s parents with an insatiable desire to kill their offspring — only their own, though; they would never harm another child. Cage and Selma Blair are a bored couple who fall victim to the hysteria, with Anne Winters and Zackary Arthur as the son and daughter who have to defend themselves. Though Blair is actually the main character (and handles the black comedy with aplomb), Cage gives a few vintage line readings that will be added to the canon of quotations and GIFs, and his presence gives the cheerfully distasteful story some credibility. Taylor wisely doesn’t get too graphic with the child deaths (yes, there are some), going for gonzo thrills rather than cheap exploitation and getting laughs by turning familiar, wholesome sights — like new fathers gazing through the window into the hospital nursery — into horror. Story threads like the Selma Blair character fretting about aging and a schoolteacher talking about “planned obsolescence” feel like dead weight, lacking the thematic resonance Taylor intended. But then Lance Henriksen shows up as Nic Cage’s father, and all is well. Grade: B-
Dan Dream
When Fantastic Fest programmer Zack Carlson introduced Dan Dream, he told the audience it was from the taboo-busting Danish comics behind the Klown TV show and movies, only “with way less toilet and genital stuff.” When this was met with boos, Carlson reassured us that Casper Christensen and Frank Hvam had simply found other sources of humor. “Don’t worry,” he said, “you’ll still feel like a bad person for laughing.” Unfortunately, the laughs are scarcer in Dan Dream, perhaps because Christensen and Hvam (who wrote the screenplay and take two of the lead roles) were trying to inject their provocateur humor into a true story that didn’t need it. The story, set in 1983, is about a Copenhagen man, Thorkil (Christensen), who assembles a team and moves to a small town to design, manufacture, and sell an electric car. (Yes, in 1983.) His partners include Jens (Hvam), a pathetic cuckold; Vonsil (Magnus Millang), who has one arm but can play Space Invaders with his mouth; Henrik (Niclas Vessel Kolpin), a flamboyant is-he-gay? designer with a pet rabbit; and Per (Peter Gantzler), a cocaine-hoovering attorney. The “clueless dopes try to do something” scenario yields some good, painful laughs, but the story is incredibly thin, and most of the humor comes from unrelated sources: humiliating the town’s fatuous mayor; addressing the Danes’ breathtaking racism; Jens accidentally pooping in a bidet. But few of the characters’ quirks ever pay off, narratively or comedically, giving the impression they were squeezed in as window dressing. A more straightforward comedy about this unusual real-life comedy of errors might have been more rewarding. Grade: C+
Eric D. Snider lives in Portland, only murders his own children.
