Twenty years ago, I nearly walked out of the theater because Independence Day was just so god-awful. Belatedly, it’s getting a sequel – one inexplicably opening a week and a half before Independence Day. But there are other options! Nicolas Winding Refn returns to the screen with another polarizing wonder, and John Travolta’s CBUS shot and based I Am Wrath gets its first real theatrical run. There are also sharks, monsters, documentaries – as well as a Matthew McConaughey Civil War epic and one exceptional Venezuelan drama screening this weekend only at the Wex.
Free State of Jones
Matthew McConaughey stars as Newton Knight, a farmer near Jones County, Mississippi who deserted the Confederate Army. As the numbers of fellow deserters grew, Knight led what came to be known as the Knight Company, a small army that battled the Confederacy in an attempt to establish the “Free State of Jones.”
Historians still argue over Knight’s true motivations, but the film is less than nuanced at the outset, clearly drawing Knight as a poor man refusing to die in a rich man’s war. Newton’s heroically righteous nature, albeit delivered through a committed and moving performance from McConaughey, feels manufactured. Ditto the minimal racial tensions present in a unit mixing runaway slaves and AWOL Confederates.
Ross’s passion is understandable. Truly this is an incredible piece of America’s history, but one so expansive that an approach this broad is almost doomed from the outset. Free State of Jones leaves fine performances and effectively-crafted sequences strewn across the battlefield, but the emotional connection needed to bind them remains just over that next hill.
Grade: C+
From Afar
Welcome to the fringes of Caracas, where a life barely lived collides with vibrant and violent passions in From Afar, the confident feature debut from director Lorenzo Vigas.
Veteran Chilean actor Alfredo Castro plays Armando, a solitary figure who stokes what little longing he still has by paying street kids for company.
Castro’s masterful performance mirrors Vigas’s detached style, but there’s more to this character than meets the eye. Vigas’s deliberate use of focus and carefully observational approach keeps the audience at arm’s length, but this remote tone is frequently punctuated by the brute ferocity of young Luis Silva’s performance. Primal, urgent and impulsive, he bursts through the screen as well as Armando’s emotional walls.
Vigas understands the power in silence. His film explains very little and yet exposes much – about yearning, class divides, human nature, and survival. He and his remarkable cast invite you into lives you couldn’t possibly know to tell a story with no judgment, and the truth in it is devastating.
Grade: A-
Also opening in Columbus this weekend:
- ACCIDENTAL EXORCIST (NR)
- AMERIGEDDON (PG-13)
- THE FITS (NR)
- GURUKULAM (NR)
- I AM WRATH (R)
- INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE (PG-13)
- A MONSTER WITH A THOUSAND HEADS (NR)
- THE NEON DEMON (R)
- RAIDERS! THE STORY OF THE GREATEST FAN FILM EVER MADE (NR)
- THE SHALLOWS (PG-13)
- SWEET BEAN (NR)
Reviews with help from George Wolf.
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