FINAL PORTRAIT

Directing: C+
Acting: B
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: C

Are you fond of Armie Hammer? Geoffrey Rush? Swiss Italian artist Alberto Giacometti? Still portraits? Well, then Final Portrait might still not be the movie for you! It might be if you enjoy watching people stare off into space though.

Here is one of those films that the critics praise, audiences barely register, and which makes barely more than nothing at the box office. Domestic box office has nearly reached $300,000! Nobody is paying any real attention to this movie, and to be honest, they don't particularly need to. So, neither do you. Is there any point even in continuing to read this review? Whatever, I'll say a few more things about it just for shits and giggles.

Final Potrait clocks in at all of ninety minutes, and it feels like it's an hour longer than that. Rush and Hammer are serviceable as Giacometti and his young friend James Lord, as is Tony Shaloub as Alberto's apparently live-in artist brother, Diego. The trouble is that Stanley Tucci, as director, doesn't give us a whole lot else to hold onto.

I suppose those who enjoy this movie -- and to be fair, there are one or two -- might cite the chemistry between Rush and Hammer, as Roberto and James develop an odd relationship over the course of about three weeks. At an exhibit, Roberto offers to paint James's portrait, promising that it'll be quick. A couple of hours, one afternoon, tops! But then he drags the process on and on, and on, and on -- all the while somehow duping James into spending a fortune changing his flight home to New York, several times.

Evidently we're meant to think of Roberto's lack of focus, his flightiness, and his obsession with a local prostitute (Clémence Poésy) as charming. I found it all, and especially his stringing James along, a steady process between tedious and annoying. The first time I saw Roberto "undo" days of work by painting over my face with broad gray strokes to start all over, I'd have been like, fuck this shit, I'm out of here.

To be fair, I can't quite say Final Portrait is boring. I'd say it barely stops short of that. This is not exactly a ringing endorsement. It all just goes on way too long, these repetitive scenes of largely the same things: artist at a canvas, subject sitting in a chair and staring. Tucci attempts to liven things up with tensions between Roberto and his wife, Annette (Sylvie Testud), and boisterous interludes with Caroline the whore.

With a few exceptions, almost the entire film takes place in Roberto Giacometti's studio. It's all very drab, nothing but varying shades of grey. About the only thing really worth an extended gaze is Armie Hammer's handsomeness. And all he ever does is sit, sometimes get up to stretch. Chat a bit. This movie could have used a little more crackle in its dialogue. There are hints of potential there occasionally, but it never ultimately proves fruitful.

I suppose I should clarify. It's true, I wasn't quite completely bored by this movie -- just almost. But you will be.

You'll love it if you like sitting and staring into space!

Overall: C+

YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

It's not often a movie practically forces you to pay attention to its cinematography and editing. You Were Never Really Here does from its first moment, as writer-director Lynne Ramsay uses close-ups and carefully mixed sounds to drop us in the middle of her main character's world. Most of the story we ultimately see takes place in New York, but we meet Joe (Juaquin Phoenix) in a Cincinnati motel room. He's finished up a job that has something to do with a young girl, packs up and disposes of several small items, and we follow closely behind as he walks out the back door into a dingy alleyway. Lest we forget the violence of the world he inhabits, some random guy attempts to mug him, and Joe just head butts him into submission. Then he takes a taxi to the airport.

This doesn't sound that compelling, but You Were Never Really Here is the kind of movie that makes even the most mundane things compelling. Given the rattling noises constantly bombarding us from around Joe's immediate environments, we are meant to get a taste of the total lack of calm inside Joe's head. Back in New York, we learn, as he does, that his next job involves rescuing another young girl from a life of forced sex work. She is the daughter of a state senator.

Very little in this story is predictable, save for the totally expected element of things not quite going as planned. And as we see Joe, cleverly edited through the lenses of security camera footage, making his way through guards with his trusty hammer, his procurement of Nina (a steadfast Ekaterina Samsonov) seems to go as planned far longer than you might expect. This is the kind of movie in which you expect twists to happen, but then the twists only come just when you begin to think they won't.

And as much praise as I want to give this movie -- which is very well done -- I must say I was slightly disappointed with the ending. I won't spoil it, except to say that it offers a twist of its own, but in a downbeat, unexpected way. Just when you think something exciting -- or at least shocking -- is going to happen, it's a slight let down, as of the air were suddenly let out of the tires of this movie's tension, which up until that point is nearly relentless. That said, I also have a healthy respect for a subtext that only gets more depressing the more you think about it.

And You Were Never Really Here offers plenty to think about. Joaquin Phoenix has never been better, here embodying a character who has a surprisingly comforting presence given how violent and tortured he is. Ramsay even provides us with a suitably dark reason for the hammer being his weapon of choice -- again, quite effectively revealed through stark visual and sound editing. More than once I jumped during this movie, not because of deliberate jump-scares but just because of the way sound is used.

One of the oddest twists of this story is that it could have benefited from being more unsettling. Or maybe I've just watched too many disturbing movies. I mean, if you're used to family entertainment, then this probably will keep you up at night. Otherwise, Ramsay uses hyper stylization to compensate for the script being, even if only to a minor degree, its weakest element. To that end, though, she does a bang up job.

Joaquin Phoenix and his beard team up as a force to be reckoned with.

Overall: B+

LEAN ON PETE

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

I listened to a guy on a podcast recently insisting he's only interested in movies about people, never movies about animals. Movie animals are always anthropomorphized, he said, as a means of emotional manipulation.

Someone should show that guy Lean on Pete, the movie about a teenager named Charley (a truly excellent Charlie Plummer) who runs away with a racehorse. I'm not going to lie: this movie is a tearjerker. It even goes to some surprisingly dark places, and ends with the kind of cry that is a relief.

But the titular racehorse? Writer-director Andrew Haigh is never at all sentimental about him. This really is a human story, one about a boy with no anchor in his life, an absent mother and a negligent father, who projects his own emotions onto that horse. The jockey he meets, in the form of Chloë Sevigny, who has twenty years experience racing horses, tells him over and over not to get attached to the horse.

The thing is, Charley never lets on to any of the people he runs across exactly what's going on in his life. Before he's even taking off with the horse he learns is otherwise headed to slaughter in Mexico, he's sleeping overnight in one of the stables of the guy he's started working for (Steve Buscemi). His home life takes a suddenly violent turn and Charley can't bear to stay there. There are many more details there that I don't want to spoil.

Maybe the first half of Lean on Pete focuses on the job Charley gets at the horse racetrack, earning money from a potential father figure, of the kind he sorely needs. All the people he's working with know is that Charley is steadily becoming too attached to that horse. They have no concept of why, and once Charley decides to take off with the truck and its horse trailer, they are never seen again.

The second half, then, follows Charley as he attemps to travel from Oregon to Wyoming, where he understands the beloved aunt, who had a falling out with his father four years before, lives. It's a sort of unusual road trip movie, which gets more depressing the more filthy Charley gets. He does sneak into someone's house to use their washing machine.

Call it a spoiler if you like, but I think anyone who sets out to watch Lean on Pete should be warned that things don't exactly bode well for that horse. The revelation of Lean on Pete's fate is jarring, to say the least. Some might call it genuinely disturbing. To the movie's credit, at least, it's not in the least bit contrived -- as can be said for most of the story. What becomes of Pete, and particularly of this horse, is about what could be expected of a wandering teenage boy with little experience.

It's still a while even after that before we find out what's waiting for Charley in Wyoming. There's time for yet another stop along the way for Charley to spend some time in the bad part of a city he's passing through, where he meets a conniving homeless man (Steve Zahn). Lean on Pete never takes the clichéd paths traveled by other movies, but still it does show Charley sinking to some very bad behaviors, just to get by.

It's hard to take your eyes off of it, though. Its Eastern Oregon desert vistas are well shot, the performances across the board are excellent, and Charlie Plummer, previously seen as John Paul Getty III in last year's criminally underappreciated All the Money in the World, is reason to see the movie on his own. Most notably, it takes an unusually realistic look at the animals it features, presenting them as they really are -- undeserving of suffering, of course, but also not in any way inhuman. Charley's attachment to Lean on Pete is entirely a reflection of Charley and really, all Lean on Pete cares about is getting some needed space and a place to shit.

That doesn't make Lean on Pete any less effective as a film -- and it could be argued it's made even more so by it. All the compassion is aimed at Charley, which is where it should be. You'll cry for the horse as well, certainly, but the cathartic tears are reserved for that poor boy. And that's a good thing. There comes a point in Lean on Pete when it begins to feel like maybe just a little too much despair, but don't fret. This movie will leave you feeling hopeful about the things the truly resilient can survive.

Walking through the Eastern Oregon desert with a horse with a long name...

Overall: B+

FOXTROT

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

Foxtrot is presented in three acts, each pretty radically different from the last, almost as though watching three separate 35-minute short films. They are inextricably linked, however, and as such do not feel so separate, in spite of the jarring change of environments.

The first and third act feature the same characters, but a different focus. The first is on middle-aged father Michael Feldman, played by Lior Ashkenazi, who looks rather like a cross between Christoph Waltz and Steve Carell. Writer-director Samuel Maoz takes an almost uncomfortably intimate look at a father's grief when he is told his son was killed in action, Ashkenazi showing a shattered vulnerability rarely seen with men onscreen.

In this first act, Michael's wife, Daphna (Sarah Adler), has been drugged and spends much of the time incapacitated in bed. I began to wonder if Foxtrot would be a disappointment in its sidestepping of its female characters. But when the story returns to these two in the third act, the focus shifts much more on her.

In between, the story shifts suddenly to the military post where their son, Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray), is stationed with three other young men manning a checkpoint out in the middle of nowhere. Just as often as the gate is raised for Palestinians passing through, it's raised for a camel meandering down the road.

In spite of these soldiers' general lack of emotion, this entire second act is hypnotic in its pacing and in its stark imagery. Grimy computer equipment is used to scan passport photos to check for clearance; makeshift tools are used to keep a run-down radio working. It all feels like an old vision of a dystopian future, distant echoes of films like Blade Runner, as if to demonstrate that such dystopian visions are very real, current realities in certain parts of the world.

The soldiers have an eerily dispassionate approach to their jobs. In one memorable sequence, a middle-aged Palestinian couple dressed in formal attire is asked to step out of their car. They wait as their passports are scanned, drenched quickly under a sudden torrential rainfall.

Foxtrot is full of fairly obvious metaphors, not least of which is the title itself, with separate characters at different times literally dancing the Foxtrot to demonstrate how they always wind up right back where they began. The young Israeli soldiers hang out inside an abandoned shipping container, which is slowly lowering into the ground at one end. One of them says, "We're sinking." Indeed. Somehow, though, obviousness notwithstanding, these metaphors stop short of feeling forced.

With another carload of young Palestinians, something goes terribly wrong, a simple mistake turned into tragically fatal error. Jonathan is involved, but the way he fits into the broader story arc of Foxtrot is not quite what you first expect. Sudden turns of events that alter people's lives and fates can come out of nowhere, quite randomly, with no apparent link to moral cause and effect. In the real world, there is no karma -- only senselessness.

There's a sort of elusive perfection to this movie, a clear precision, a unique finesse, without spelling out exactly what Samuel Maoz is trying to say. Certainly plenty of Israelis feel they understand it, as this movie has proved controversial in its country of origin. That's hardly surprising. For the rest of us, further removed from those cultural biases, it's easier to take Foxtrot as a beautifully artistic portrait of familial grief, and how perception can radically alter meaning. Jonathan's parents observe one of his drawings left behind, of a bulldozer moving a wrecked car, as a representation of themselves. They have no idea the drawing is a straightforward representation of a life changing event.

Foxtrot is the kind of movie that stays with you, both provocative and deeply moving. It reminded me in certain ways of The Hours, otherwise very different but also a portrait of emotional pain, from varying perspectives that click into place like a psychological puzzle. Its themes are definitively depressing, but there's something extremely satisfying about it.

It's a dance that just brings you back to where you started.

Overall: A-

OUTSIDE IN

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

It's too bad when an indie movie is shot locally in a small town, and even reflects pretty positively on that town, and yet the movie does not show in any theatres close to that town. Outside In is set in Granite Falls, 15 miles northwest of Everett, and was shot both there and in Snohomish county -- director Lynn Shelton (Humpday, Your Sister's Sister) grew up in Seattle and tends to set her films in the area. It's too bad any of the roughly 3,000 people who live in Granite Falls would have to travel 43 miles to see it at the one theatre it's playing at in Western Washington, SIFF Cinema at the Uptown on Lower Queen Anne.

Lucky for me, I only life two miles from there! And I'm just one degree removed from residents of the area where the story takes place -- I have an aunt and cousin from Granite Falls. I have no idea if this would hold any interest to them, except to recognize their hometown. And of course, people from Snohomish County will quite easily be able to see this movie on some streaming service before long -- if they think to look for it. Well, take note: this Lynn Shelton woman makes consistently lovely movies, and this one, like the aforementioned ones, is worth looking for. I'm just a bit of a cinema snob myself, and it's always nice to see Pacific Northwest greenery, soggy with rain, depicted on a big screen.

This particular story features Jay Duplass as Chris, a 38-year-old man just out of prison after serving twenty years (in Walla Walla!) for having been associated with a crime in high school. It's made clear he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," but due to sentencing minimums he was given an unfairly long prison sentence. He's only been released even now thanks to the tireless legal work of his high school English teacher, Carol (Edie Falco).

Outside In examines the struggles of such a person re-entering public life after two decades behind bars, including an understandable infatuation with Carol, his one true friend on the outside through all that time. Acclimating to smart phones is the least of his troubles.

Carol, for her part, is stuck in a lifeless marriage and feels increasingly distant from her daughter Hildy (Kaitlyn Dever), who herself takes an interest in Chris, although that interest never quite crosses over into the romantic. Chris also has a brother (Ben Schwartz, very convincing as a Duplass brother) who feels very guilty, and is thus surrounded by people who desperately want the best for him, don't quite know how to help him get it, and find themselves enmeshed in his life in variously awkward ways.

And if there is anything Outside In traffics in, it's awkwardness. I squirmed in my seat at this movie more than I do at many horror movies. Edie Falco is excellent in her depiction of a conflicted woman who can't really decide whether she feels the same way Chris unabashedly feels about her.

Beyond that, the story here unfolds both organically and pleasantly, and in spite of all the awkwardness, in the end it's rather sweet. With the exception of Carol's husband (Charles Leggett), who is kind of a clueless dipshit, these characters all offer their own reasons to make you wish you could just give them a big hug. Jay Duplass is very well cast for this sort of thing.

And getting back to that setting, this is also of note: Lynn Shelton is one of the few directors who knows how to present the Pacific Northwest, and particularly its precipitation, in a realistic way. No claps of thunder! No torrential rainfalls! It's actually raining in only a few of the scenes, and then only lightly; the rest of the time it's -- well, green, gray and damp. For about three quarters of the year around here, that about sums it up. But the camera in this movie also shows effectively how beautiful that leaves the region, especially the rural areas, roads cutting through hills thick with pines.

The small town people are depicted realistically and respectfully, for the record, with no particular agenda in representation. The most political this gets is Carol's tireless work to combat unfair sentencing. This is a simple story of a duck out of water, or maybe more specifically a duck that's been away from water too long and no longer quite knows what to do with it. It makes for a refreshingly unique story, and an ultimately heartwarming one at that.

I guess you could call it a May-September romance.

Overall: B+

🐓 BLOCKERS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

One can only hope word of mouth will provide some assistance to 🐓 Blockers, because, inexplicably, the marketing for this film isn't doing it many favors. If you saw the trailer, you might understandably think it looks like another cornball teen comedy just like countless that came before it, and why bother? That's certainly how I responded at first, until I started paying attention to surprisingly good buzz as its release date neared.

On the other hand, the current audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is all of 57% of viewers liking it. What the hell? Okay, how about on MetaCritic? 6.8 out of ten average user score is a little better, I guess. I don't often mention these things, except that word of mouth is the best chance this surprisingly funny and sincere movie has going for it. Fully understanding that critical consensus rarely moves most movie-goers the way it does me, 83% and 69 ratings on the two aggregate sites, respectively, is actually quite fair.

A quick look at the user reviews -- always a mistake, honestly -- confirms some of my suspicions: the people who hate it have no understanding of nuance, give the lowest possible ratings and thereby lower the average, and are "offended" by so-called "leftist propaganda." Jesus Christ, lighten up!

If you want to call this "leftist propaganda," so be it. It's insane how many people think of "feminist" as a fatal flaw, but I do not: 🐓 Blockers is feminist by default, without ever being preachy or positioning itself as a "message" movie. It's a teen sex comedy for the 21st century, truly progressive and -- gasp! -- actually sex positive. Ironically, hardly any sex actually happens -- in sharp contrast to all those sex comedies from the eighties and nineties with wall-to-wall sex in them, much of their content deeply sexist.

The premise is admittedly hokey, the kind of thing that keeps movie snobs from seeing "dumb Hollywood movies." But give it a chance and it might just surprise you. Three best friends, Julie, Kayla and Sam (Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan, and Gideon Adlon, all of them great) have all made a "sex pact," to lose their virginities on Prom Night. Julie is set on doing the deed with her sweet boyfriend of six months; Kayla up and decides, basically, why not? -- and sets her sights on her stoner Chemistry class lab partner. Sam makes the choice just to be a team player, and finds a lovable doofus of a guy for herself,  even though she's actually a closeted lesbian.

This is just one aspect of many where the script, the most delightful surprise of this movie, must be commended. Written by brothers Brian and Jim Kehoe, with a bit of steering with the female perspective of director Kay Cannon (she was the one to say Kayla needed to state she wanted to have sex before drinking alcohol, as otherwise it's not consensual), something as potentially hacky as a "sex pact" gets presented with believable realism and sincerity.

And the kids are just half the equation. The "cock blockers" of the title (and that title -- calling it just Blockers with a 🐓 above the word on posters is awkward at best) are three of the kids' parents: This Is Forty's Leslie Mann as Julie's fawning single mother, Lisa; John Cena as Mitchell, Kayla's lovable crybaby of a dad; and The Mindy Project's Ike Barinholtz as Hunter, Sam's distant divorcée father.

In lesser hands, the rest of the parents would be reduced to afterthoughts, but even with pretty small parts, they are given plenty of dimension, and even some humor. Although we never do meet Julie's apparently not-in-the-picture dad, we do meet Kayla's mom (and Mitchell's wife -- who does get some lines that are pretty sternly feminist -- played by Sarayu Blue), as well as Sam's mother (June Diane Raphael) and stepfather (Hannibal Buress, who doesn't get to be as funny as he could be, but makes the most of it anyway). The trio of Lisa, Mitchell and Hunter wind up teaming up together when Lisa gets wind of the "sex pact." Lisa is convinced Julie will make a mistake of the same magnitude she made at the same age, and Mitchell is too deluded by his protectiveness to realize Kayla can protect herself. Hunter, to his credit, starts off believing they should all stay out of it, but gets involved when he realizes Sam may do something she doesn't want to do with a boy, when he knows better than Sam does that she's gay.

The thing is, even though people -- okay, really just the grown-ups -- make a lot of stupid mistakes, none of the characters in 🐓 Blockers are stupid people. The kids have all been raised well. They're well put together and have a sense of sophistication and maturity increasingly becoming clear of real-life kids these days but rarely depicted onscreen. The grown-ups can be bone-headed but out of sincere love more than typical parental oppression.

So, given the astonishing number of things 🐓 Blockers does right, is it funny? Yes, it is! The laughs are rarely especially hard-hitting, but they are consistent and satisfying. It does make the always-unfortunate assumption that any R-rated comedy must include gross-out gags, from a sequence involving "butt chugging" beer (admittedly amusing, but a rare case of relatively lazy, easy laughs) to a whole lot of puking in a limo. That said, the uber-sex-positive parents of Julie's date (Gary Cole and Gina Gershon) appear for a pretty great sequence involving a sort of "Marco Polo" nude sex game using blindfolds.

Kay Cannon flips the script of typical teen sex comedies in a whole lot of ways, not least of which a couple of full frontal shots with a male actor, and none with the women. The women in girls are treated with a respect in 🐓 Blockers almost never seen in the movies, and especially in comedies. If nothing else, this proves a whole bunch of effective jokes can be made about women without degrading them.

Okay, I guess this whole review is my own "leftist propaganda." I can only hope it works.

🐓 Blockers decode emoji.

Overall: B+

GOLDSTONE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B-

Who is Goldstone for, exactly? Who are the people for whom it holds lasting appeal? People who appreciate perspectives from outside the U.S., perhaps -- it's an Australian crime thriller, a sort of Western noir set in the outback. Certainly critics, for those same reasons, although to be honest, its ending is a bit overwrought. To be honest, the original score is trying a little too hard. Do we really need these sweeping and emotionally manipulative crescendos here?

The director, Ivan Sen, seems to think so. Well, here's a curious tidbit: Ivan Sen is also credited with the original music. How often does that happen? Well, this guy also wrote the script, served as cinematographer, and editor. Is there anything he doesn't do?

He should have delegated. Goldstone is a movie with great potential largely unrealized. It's a good movie, and very impressive for one man doing all those things, but it could have been great. It's always great to see Jacki Weaver, as the mayor of the titular town, but the part she is given is criminally underdeveloped, none of her lines given lasting impact.

Boy, though, does this movie look good. For a setting out in the middle of nowhere, nearly nothing but flat land and dust, it's beautifully shot. If only everything else could have been given this level of attention. The editing could have used some tightening, taking maybe ten minutes out of this rather leisurely paced story. I was never bored, mind you, but I can think of few people I know who would not have been.

There is a climactic shootout, when things get genuinely exciting after about an hour and a half. The sequence is expertly shot, though, the camera gliding overhead of a bird's-eye view of two law enforcement officers weaving through a maze of trailers in pursuit of criminals. For me, this was nicely satisfying. For most, it will be too little too late.

Sen wants us to be thinking about the sociopolitical landscape of the Australian outback, the lingering effects of history between colonizers and Aborigines, distilled down to a tiny town run by corrupt people across the board with an understandably weary native population. These issues aren't examined with great clarity, but I suppose their acknowledgment is something.

The first characters we meet are Goldstone police officer Josh Waters (an endlessly handsome Alex Russell), who happens upon state police detective Jay Swan (Aaron Pedersen), drunk behind the wheel of his truck. Before long we learn that one of Swan's parents was Aborigine, giving him a curious position between the town leadership's eagerness to expand the nearby mining operation, and the native population being pressured into granting consent. 

In the middle of all this, Swan is in the area investigating a missing person -- a young Asian girl likely connected to the Asians being flown in for brief periods for sex work. How much truth is there to this scenario, I wonder? All these young women appear to be there under duress, although in execution it feels more like plot device than cinematic realism.

It's entirely possible there is some massive context I am missing, which prevents me from recognizing Goldstone's greatness. To be fair, I did like it, for the most part, until the very end, which falls prey to a few too many Hollywood clichés -- unfortunately ironic for a movie not at all out of Hollywood. In any case, Sen creates a tone and an aesthetic that is unique and specific. To be honest, an Outback-set film that succeeds better on all those fronts would be The Rover (2014). It may not be quiet as pretty, but it's both quiet and better paced, with superior performances.

These are movies with limited reach, but with their own rewards. Those of Goldstone are sufficient, to varying degrees even impressive, if in the long run relatively unmemorable.

Jay and Josh strike a pose in the outback.

Overall: B