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    Loveless Kaiju Madness in Theaters

    Needless sequels, disturbing dramas, hilarious political satire—a breathtaking array of middling to excellent films available across Columbus this weekend. Let’s sort through them.

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    Pacific Rim: Uprising

    I like to think it went down this way…

    After hours, in a dimly lit Hollywood bar, the makers of Pacific Rim: Uprising met up with Michael Bay and his crew (let’s call them the Bay-o-nettes) for a good old-fashioned excess-off. As the final challenge was accepted, Uprising director/co-writer Steven S. DeNight had agreed to break the record for use of the phrase “save the world,” and include a bit of the “Trololo” viral video guy.

    Done and done. And there’s some Transformer-type robot fighting.

    This unnecessary sequel to Guillermo Del Toro’s lackluster original picks up 10 years after the invading kaiju were defeated by giant Jaeger robots and their skilled pilots. Stacker Pentecost (Idris Elba) died cancelling that apocalypse and now Stacker’s son Jake (John Boyega) and his frenemy Nate (Scott Eastwood) must whip a rag-tag bunch of new recruits into shape just in time to battle a brand new threat and …pause for close up and crescendo…save the world (ding!).

    After a number of TV projects, Uprising marks DeNight’s feature debut, and it shows.  Most every frame succumbs to an invasion of empty dialogue and the cliche of least resistance. The actors pose more than they move, and even the cheapest of attempts at emotional manipulation seem too much for this film to handle.

    But hey, who cares, we’re here for the robot throwdown, amirite?

    Probably, but even that, minus Del Toro’s stylish pizazz, becomes a confusing and repetitious snooze. Seriously, the guy down the row from me at the screening was snoring (which was confusing at first and then repetitive).

    Too bad, he totally missed the part when Pikachu showed up and slaughtered everybody.

    Okay, that didn’t happen.

    Dammit.

    Grade: D+

    Unsane

    Sawyer Valentini (Claire Foy) is living your worst nightmare.

    Having recently moved 400 miles from Boston to suburban Pennsylvania to escape her stalker, she begins seeing him everywhere. Shaken and without a support network, she visits an insurance-approved therapist in a nearby clinic.

    She’s grateful for the ear, but upon completing her paperwork Sawyer finds that, due to the therapist’s diagnosis that Sawyer is a danger to herself or others, she is held involuntarily for 24 hours.

    After punching an orderly she mistakes for her stalker, that 24 hours turns into one week. And now she’s convinced that the new orderly George is, in fact, her stalker David (Joshua Leonard—you know, doomed Josh from The Blair Witch Project!).

    There are a number of factors hard at work in Unsane‘s brisk 98-minute ride. Director Steven Soderbergh, by way of Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer’s script, lays bare some terrifying facts about our privatized mental health industry.

    Seriously and deeply alarming.

    He structures this critique with a somewhat traditional is-she-or-isn’t-she-crazy storyline. Anyone who watches much horror will recognize that uneasy line: you may be here against your will, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be here.

    And the seasoned director of misdirection knows how to toy with that notion, how to employ Sawyer’s very real damage, touch on her raw nerve of struggling to remain in control of her own life only to have another’s will forced upon her.

    Part of the film’s success is Soderberg’s ability to put you in Sawyer’s headspace, which he does primarily through the use of iPhone 7. He claims to have filmed entirely on these phones, and whether or not that’s true, the shallow, oversaturated aesthetic creates the sense of delusion.

    Foy’s performance is refreshingly unpleasant. Sawyer is tough to like, but she’s damaged and savvy in a way that feels authentic.

    Leonard’s cloying neediness and bursts of violence match Foy’s formidable if brittle performance, and a strong supporting cast including Juno Temple, SNL’s Jay Pharoah, Amy Irving and a spot-on Polly McKie.

    Soderberg relies on familiar tropes to say something relevant and in doing so creates a tidy, satisfying thriller.

    Grade: B+

    Death of Stalin

    Opening with a madcap “musical emergency” and closing with a blood-stained political coup, The Death of Stalin infuses its factual base with coal back humor of the most delicious and absurd variety.

    The film cements director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (Veep, In the Loop) as a premier satirist, as it plays so giddily with history while constantly poking you with a timeliness that should be shocking but sadly is not.

    So many feels are here, none better than the sheer joy of watching this film unfold.

    It is Moscow in the 1950s and we meet Josef Stalin and his ruling committee, with nary an actor even attempting a Russian accent. Those British and American dialects set a wonderfully off-kilter vibe.

    Iannucci has a confident grip on his vision, and the impeccable cast to see it through,

    Who else would play Nikita Khrushchev but Steve Busemi? Then there’s Jeffrey Tambor and Simon Russell Beale as committee members jockeying for power after Stalin’s death, Andrea Riseborough and Rupert Friend as Stalin’s manically desperate kids, and Jason Isaacs arriving late to nearly steal the whole show as the uber-manly head of the Russian army.

    As enemies lists are updated (“new list!”) and constant assassinations whirl, the hilarious barbs keep coming in dizzying succession, each delivered with bullseye precision by lead actors and walk-ons alike. Monty Python vet Michael Palin is a fitting face in the ensemble, with Iannucci structuring a few bits (like Buscemi and Tambor trying to slyly switch places at Stalin’s funeral-classic) that recall some of the finest Python zaniness.

    It all flows so fast and furiously funny, it’s easy to forget how hard it is to pull off such effective satire. We end up laughing through a dark and brutal time in history, while Iannuci speaks truth to those currently in power with a sharp and savage brand of mockery.

    Stalin is still dead.

    Long live The Death of Stalin!

    Grade: A-

    Loveless

    There is a deep and deeply Russian melancholy to the films of Andrey Zvyagintsev.

    Loveless opens on a sweet-faced boy meandering playfully through the woods between school and home. Once home, Alexey (Matvey Novikov) stares blankly out his bedroom window while his hostile mother (Maryana Spivak) shows the apartment to two prospective buyers.

    Alexey’s parents are divorcing. Each has gone on to another relationship, each indulges images of future comfort and bliss, each bristles at the company of the other, and neither has any interest in bringing Alexey into their perfect futures.

    So complete is their self-absorption that it takes more than a day before either realizes 12-year-old Alexey hasn’t been home.

    Zvyagintsev’s films depict absence as much as presence. His dilapidated buildings become emblematic characters, as do his busily detailed living quarters. They appear to represent a fractured image of Russia, whose past haunts its present as clearly as these abandoned buildings mar the urban landscape where Alexey and his parents live.

    TV and radio newsbreaks setting the film’s present day in 2012 concern political upheaval and war in Ukraine. They sometimes tip the film toward obviousness, Zvyagintsev’s allegory to the moral blindness of his countrymen becoming a little stifling.

    Alexey’s parents Zhenya and Boris—thankless roles played exquisitely by Spivak and Aleksey Rozin—border on parody in their remarkable self-obsession. But this is a tension Zvyagintsev builds intentionally, and it is thanks to the stunning performances as well as the director’s slow, open visual style that his film never abandons its human drama in favor of its larger themes.

    Like the filmmaker’s 2015 Oscar nominee Leviathan, another poetic dip into Russian misery, Loveless does offer small reasons for optimism. The volunteers—led by a dedicated Ivan (Aleksey Fateev), who has no time for bickering parents—brighten an otherwise exhaustingly grim look at familial disintegration.

    Loveless doesn’t balance intimacy and allegory as well as Leviathan did, and its opinion of the Russian people feels more like finger wagging this time around, but Zvyagintsev remains a storyteller like few other. His latest is a visually stunning gut punch.

    Grade: A-

    Mohawk

    How many Westerns are told from the perspective of the American Indian?

    None, basically. When First Nation filmmakers (Chris Eyre, Sydney Freeland, Neil Diamond, Sterlin Harjo, Adam Garnet Jones, among others) create, they seem to ignore the genre that has, for most of Hollywood’s history, defined them in popular culture.

    Jim Jarmusch’s brilliant Dead Man comes closest, as Gary Farmer’s character Nobody informs William Blake’s (Johnny Depp) journey. Though Farmer’s not the lead, it is his character’s perspective of the West that guides the film.

    For co-writer/director Ted Geoghegan (We Are Still Here), that’s not enough. His sophomore effort Mohawk spins a far more typically Western story: battle lines drawn between Mohawks and new Americans, each trying to secure a piece of American soil.

    But Geoghegan changes things up in important ways, and the result is a dramatic departure from traditional fare.

    Oak (Kaniehtiio Horn) hopes to convince her mother that the dwindling Mohawk nation needs to side with the English in the War of 1812. If Wentahawi (Sheri Foster) can’t be convinced, Oak and her lovers, Mohawk Calvin Two Rivers (Justin Rain) and Englishman Joshua Pinsmail (Eamon Farren), will find her uncle and cousins at the mission and convince them.

    What follows is an often brutal, certainly mournful look at a chapter in our national history no American should be proud of.

    Essentially, as a small batch of white soldiers follows the trio through the woods, it is simply by altering the point of view—not by making any individual faultless or wise beyond measure—that Geoghegan shakes up the genre.

    Horn’s Oak stands in stark contrast against garden variety Western heroes by virtue of her sex and her race, though Mohawk does not go to great lengths to make a “woman-centric” effort. Oak is simply another warrior, another survivor, a participant who happens to be our guide through this slaughter. This change of perspective is very simple and utterly revolutionary.

    The sexuality of the three on the run from the military is another surprisingly subtle and quietly effective change.

    Performances are solid—Horn and Ezra Buzzington as military leader Hezekiah Holt are particularly strong.

    Geoghegan’s story (co-written with novelist Grady Hendrix) is as sadistic and brutal as we’ve come to expect from a Western—certainly from the burgeoning Western/horror mash-up. But if the plot chooses not to break new ground, the film still manages to offer a much-needed sting of rebellion.

    Grade: B

    Also opening in Columbus:
    Claires Camera (NR)
    The Insult (R)
    I Kill Giants (PG-13)
    Midnight Sun (PG-13)
    MLA (Telugu) (NR)
    Paul, Apostle of Christ (PG-13)
    Pyewacket (NR)
    Sherlock Gnomes (PG)

    Reviews with help from George Wolf.

    Read more from Hope at MADDWOLF and listen to her weekly film podcast THE SCREENING ROOM.

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    Hope Madden
    Hope Maddenhttps://columbusunderground.com
    Hope Madden is a freelance contributor on Columbus Underground who covers the independent film scene, writes film reviews and previews film events.
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