film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Category: REVIEWS

Here is where you would find our film reviews on BRWC.  We look at on trailers, shorts, indies and mainstream.  We love movies!

  • Archenemy: The BRWC Review

    Archenemy: The BRWC Review

    Tackling the grandiose superhero genre with a micro-sized budget appears to be a tall task, but thoughtful filmmakers have thrived under these rigid conditions. Whether it’s James Gunn’s darkly comedic venture Super or Julia Hart’s wildly overlooked feature Fast Color, directors have shown that there’s no ceiling even with limited assets. Daniel Isn’t Real director Adam Egypt Mortimer continues this spirited trend with Archenemy, a viscerally bold subversion of superheroes’ normative appeals. Simply put, Mortimer’s electrifying vision reaches soaring new heights for the beloved genre.

    Archenemy follows Max Fist (Joe Manganiello), an outsider who claims to be a superhero from another dimension. Without his powers, no one believes his stories except for an upcoming journalist Hamster (Skylan Brooks). Together, they take to the streets to wipe out the local drug syndicate and its vicious crime boss known as The Manager (Glenn Howerton).

    Max’s fish-out-of-water presence isn’t played with your typically hokey presentation. Instead, Mortimer utilizes Max’s super-powered origins to juxtapose Earth’s dog-eat-dog setting. The dual worlds mesh into one uniquely drawn landscape, as Mortimer creates a sonically surreal visual dynamic with arresting animated sequences (the blending of cosmic colors and dreamy imagery is a joy to consume).

    I love how Mortimer blends the two styles simultaneously, with the animation highlighting the ways pulp storytelling embellishes real-world dynamics (it also creates an intriguing psycho-drama conflict, with Max’s human form still seeing himself as a super-powered entity). The marriage between comic serial and gritty realism works through the director’s keen eye. His creative visual verve enhances narrative beats into alluring, sensory-drawing experiences. What Mortimer accomplishes on a shoestring budget is far more impressive than the bombastic scale of major blockbusters.

    Archenemy also builds a colorful world for audiences to indulge in. Mortimer walks a finite tonal line with relative ease, conveying our protagonists’ dire straights while understanding the genre’s vibrant appeals. The personable cast also helps solidify this balance. Joe Manganiello offers some of his best work to date as the gruff Max Fist, delving beneath the character’s rigid exterior to explore his hidden pains. Max’s straight-man persona is a fitting contrast to Skylan Brooks’ cheerful delivery. As Hamster, Brooks brightens the screen with his effortless charisma, while Glenn Howerton and Paul Scheer make great additions as hilariously unhinged antagonists.

    There’s so much to like about Archenemy, but that bounty of appeals becomes a problem. Mortimer spins so many plates throughout the tight 90-minute run time, leaving several facets somewhat untapped in the process (a third act twist offers an interesting switcharoo, but its dramatic impact becomes somewhat limited). It’s like a beautiful sketch that isn’t quite shaded in. Perhaps a larger budget could’ve allowed Mortimer more time to explore his character dynamics and intriguing thematic conceits, but his offering still impresses as stands.

    I’ve always had an affinity for spirited, low-budget offerings, but Archenemy is one of the few that’s never burdened by its financial limitations. I was enamored by Mortimer’s bright world from jump street, and I can’t wait to see what the upcoming filmmaker has up his sleeves going forward.

  • Banging Lanie: Review

    Banging Lanie: Review

    Lanie Burroughs (Allison Powell) is an introverted and somewhat abrasive teenage girl. She thinks that her studies are the only thing that’s important so that she can have a good future, and while that’s commendable, it also means that she doesn’t really have any friends.

    Lanie also has no interest in sex, she sees it as an unnecessary distraction from what matters to her and doesn’t see the appeal – until she meets Jordan (Damien Alonso). From that moment on she feels that she has to have the full teenage experience. Meaning she wants to have sex with Jordan, but the only person that she can talk to is Steven (George Whitaker) who pays her to teach him maths. However, an insider’s view on what teenage boys like may be just what she needs.

    Banging Lanie is a teenage romantic comedy written, directed by and starring Allison Powell. With comparisons in its premise to movies such as Easy A and Booksmart, Banging Lanie similarly shows a teenage romance from the perspective of an outcast teenager. Although it can be a little uneven when talking to its audience.

    Powell manages to deliver a performance that’s likeable, funny and like many movies that have come before, may strike a chord with many of its intended audience. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of a plot that would open up the movie to a wider audience beyond a teenage girl exploring her sexuality for the first time.

    There are many moments that audiences come to expect from a movie such as Banging Lanie and while it mostly delivers, there are times that it feels little forced.

    With moments where the movie feels a bit too self-aware with dialogue that seems to directly speak to the audience and a final act that adds a little enforced drama, it may not work for everyone.

    However, Banging Lanie may be the type of movie that’s good for teenage girls to watch as they get to an age where they feel like they want more. Also, despite its tendency to oversell its message at times, Banging Lanie may still be a strong enough experience for its target audience.

  • Greenland: The BRWC Review

    Greenland: The BRWC Review

    Whether he’s saving the president (again and again in the Has Fallen series) or leading a shirtless Spartan army, Gerald Butler has established himself as a premier action star. He may not be a critical darling, but Butler’s sturdy gravitas deserves praise for carrying even the most middling of screenplays. His latest B-movie vehicle Greenland attempts to relish in the destruction of our planet, a set-up that could be oddly distasteful given the current times. Taking away the lousy timing, this middling disaster film rarely embraces the strengths of its dopey subgenre.

    Greenland follows John Garrity (Butler), a family man who embarks on a perilous journey to find sanctuary when a planet-killing comet hurtles toward Earth. As the countdown to the global apocalypse approaches zero, the Garrity’s incredible trek culminates in a desperate and last-minute flight to a possible safe haven.

    No one plays a gruff, straight-laced everyman like Butler, but his compelling presence can only take this emotionally vacant thrill ride so far. Oddly enough, Greenland attempts to establish its own voice among its bombastic peers. Director Ric Roman Waugh opts away from grandiose setpieces to convey a murky realism, a sensibility that has served him well with prison dramas like Snitch and Felon. Waugh’s shake-ridden framing lacks the creative edge to compensate for the cheap visual veneer, while his hyper-realistic presentation makes a clunky accomplice for the genre sensibility. I’ve enjoyed Waugh’s previous work, but disaster movies’ inherent cheesiness don’t mesh with his filmmaking identity.

    Chris Sparling’s sparse screenplay double downs on the edgy identity. Vignettes of semi-realistic world-ending scenarios attempt to place audiences in the boots of our everyman protagonists. In a cerebral apocalyptic offering like Contagion, frames like these can serve as a stark reflection of our fragile humanity, ruminating on how people are pushed in times of fear and vulnerability. Here, Sparling’s greeting card-level of depth only speaks contrived motifs about our desire to put ourselves over others in times of need.

    Greenland tosses out the kitchen sink of B-movie trappings to form a shallow connection with audiences. The opening frames establish a soap-opera level of melodrama that permeates throughout every clunky interaction, with the Garrity’s cliche-ridden origins being unengaging to invest in (this movie rips the maudlin divorce subplot right from Roland Emmerich’s 2012). Butler and Morena Baccarin hold their own with the material, but the vanilla family figures never evolve past vapid cardboard cutouts. Once the characters get on the road, they run past a myriad of desolate survivalist-types to reach their salvation. Whether they are kind-hearted or cruel, they all just become road bumps for John’s macho-man mission to save his family.

    By meshing the borrowed tropes of disaster movies with an inauthentic grit, Greenland doesn’t satisfy any of its audience’s desires. Even bloated misfires like 2012 and Geostorm found ways to embrace the innate appeal of their sandbox destruction. Everything in Greenland is presented with a dour self-seriousness that becomes tiresome to endure, as it’s not like the material has anything of substance to say. Once the action finally starts to fly in the third act (Butler outdrives a wave of falling asteroids), I had lost interest as I awaited the inevitably saccharine conclusion.

    While admittedly competent, Greenland never achieves much of note with its well-trudged premise. As a fan of Butler and Waugh’s track record, I hope the duo return to their well-established action roots.

  • Farewell Amor: Review

    Farewell Amor: Review

    Farewell Amor: Review. By Trenyt Neely.

    This film from writer/director Ekwa Msangi follows an Angolan family reunited after 17 years apart. Father and husband Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), his wife Esther (Zainab Jah), and their daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson). Upon initially reuniting, all are filled with an understandable mix of joy and trepidation given the years that have gone by. Walter has been working as a cab driver in New York City, waiting and petitioning for the immigration process to be finalized so his wife and daughter could join him. It is soon revealed however, that Walter had a serious relationship with another woman during his separation from Esther and  Sylvia, causing him great guilt.

    Compounding his guilt is the fact that during their time apart, Esther has become a strict Christian. She spends the film regularly listening to sermons and forcing Walter and Sylvia to attend church and pray fervently, even though they do not share her level of zeal for the faith. For her part, Sylvia finds herself in conflict with her desire to pursue her passion for dance and her mother’s disapproval of it, as she views it to be immodest. In addition, Sylvia does not have a lot of memories of her father. Not only is she far from her friends and what is familiar as she is thrust into American society, but she has to develop a bond with a man she hardly knows. The film follows this family as they seek to navigate the American experience, deal with their personal struggles, and build their family and life together after such a lengthy time apart.

    One of this film’s greatest strengths is how much care and time it takes with its three protagonists. Msangi chooses to have the film separated into three sections, each one titled and focused on one member of the family. This allows for the full depth and complexity of each character to shine through and minimizes the degree that a character is reduced to cliches or simplistic interpretations.  

    Consequently, such a character-centric approach requires strong performances, and the actors here more than meet the challenge. Mwine as Walter perfectly captures the struggle of a man who has sacrificed and worked for years to build a future and a life for his family, while at the same time wrestling with the fact that he has lost a lot of time with them and must therefore rebuild those relationships. Also, he must reconcile that while he loves his family,  he developed a genuine love and bond with another woman. Mwine portrays this effectively by delivering a lot of his dialogue in hushed tones and with his head down. This goes a long way in showing the audience a man of a caring nature, and also one who carries a lot on his shoulders.

    Jah also does a great job taking on a role that could have proved to be somewhat limiting. It is easy at the start of the film to view the character of Esther as overly fearful and controlling due to the severity of her religious convictions. However once one gets to the portion of the film focused on her and sees the history and context surrounding her, it is understood that her faith is her anchor during a turbulent time in her life as she is adjusting to this new country. In addition, she has a layered view of America as a land of opportunity, but also a land of corruption if one does not stay vigilant. As a result, she views it as her Christian duty to remain prayerful not just for her own sake, but the sake of her husband and daughter. Jah has the added challenge of spending a lot of screen time isolated as her character is home alone while Walter works and Sylvia attends school. This means Jah must convey these complex emotions largely through prayers that serve as monologues, and phone calls where her speech and facial expressions are her main tools, which Jah uses to great effect.

    Similarly, Lawson imbues Sylvia with a maturity not always present in teen characters. Sylvia wants to pursue dance and ordinary teen experiences, we see the joy on Lawson’s face when she is lost in music. At the same time,  she does not wish to upset her mother by dancing, who has been her sole source of comfort and stability during her life. Ironically, Sylvia’s relationship with Walter really begins to grow when he encourages her to pursue dance, even though both of them know it upsets Esther. When Sylvia upsets her mother, the sadness and pain is as clear on Lawson’s face in these moments as the moments of joy are when she dances.

    The film’s cinematography also does a great job of showing the complex relationships between the three characters. For the scene of their reunion at the airport that opens the film, cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole keeps the camera far away from the action and refuses to cut the opening shot for a long time. This allows the apprehension and stiffness the characters are experiencing to be conveyed succinctly and stronger than dialogue probably could. Even as film progresses, Cole frequently uses wide-angle lenses for dialogue scenes,  so even when characters are in a relatively small space, it feels like there is a great distance between them. Again using the power of visuals to show how difficult it can be to rebuild relationships after long periods of absence.

    If you are looking for a film that offers a deep, nuanced, character-driven look at the immigrant experience and how that affects a family, seek this film out if given the chance.           

  • Sound Of Metal: The BRWC Review

    Sound Of Metal: The BRWC Review

    Ever since breaking out in 2014’s moody thriller Nightcrawler (his mumbling charm is one of the film’s unheralded strengths), Riz Ahmed’s profile continues to be on the rise. Along with being a sturdy supporting player, Ahmed flexed his versatile talents in HBO’s The Night Of, generating massive award buzz for his vulnerable take as an incoming prisoner. Ahmed’s latest starring vehicle Sound of Metal boasts his best performance to date, as his talents carry an emotionally raw character study bristling with authentic truths.

    Sound of Metal follows Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a heavy-metal drummer whose life is thrown into freefall when he begins to lose his hearing. Alongside his girlfriend/bandmate Lou (Olivia Cooke) and his new mentor Joe (Paul Raci), Ruben attempts to adjust to his drastic lifestyle change through therapeutic means.

    Writer/director Darius Marder (who collaborated on the screenplay with Place Beyond the Pines director Derek Cianfrance) wisely morphs this story of loss into a tale of meaningful rehabilitation. His filmmaking verve is established from jump street, opening with an electrifying showcase of Ruben’s passionate musical drive (I’m not a metal fan, but the sequence’s explosive intensity exemplifies undeniable artistic merits). The early emphasis on sound morphs into a nightmarish reality when Ruben’s hearing becomes dulled and distorted. Marder’s scaling audio mixture places audiences right in our protagonist’s frenzied shoes, utilizing thoughtfully-constructed techniques without over-straining their impact (this is a movie made to win sound awards, with the delicate audio profile holding significant narrative weight).

    Even with Ruben’s life-changing discovery, Marder’s film never wallows in a pit of despair. Along with conveying the internal pains of addicts (Marder cleverly evolves Ruben’s past drug addictions into a craving for sound, with the character’s personal journey becoming one of self-acceptance), Sound of Metal articulates a spirited voice for its marginalized community. The screenplay empathetically conveys the sentiments of the deaf community, a group that doesn’t view their hearing loss as an impediment. The well-textured authenticity enhances Marder’s dramatic narrative at every turn, surrounding Ruben with compassionate and lived-in figures to aid him in his transition.

    Sound of Metal’s ultimate showstopper comes in the form of performance work. Riz Ahmed reaches impressive new heights as the chaotically unwieldy Ruben, a man whose volatile passion often overwhelms his search for inner peace. Ahmed’s performance dials the character’s juxtaposing states with understated emotionality, never striking a false chord as he drives the narrative forward. Olivia Cooke is great as Ruben’s supportive partner, while unheardled character actor Paul Raci steals the show as the film’s soulful center.

    While the film doesn’t quite hit every note (the 2-hour runtime is admittedly shaggy, with the third act straining before reaching its heartfelt conclusion), Sound of Metal operates as a compassionate character piece enhanced through its brazen artistic drive.