The latest film releases include The Amateur, Drop, Warfare, and One to One: John & Yoko. Weighing in are Witney Seibold, contributor to SlashFilm and co-host of the podcast Critically Acclaimed, and Monica Castillo, freelance film critic and senior film programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center.
The Amateur
Rami Malek plays a CIA computer decoder whose wife gets kidnapped and killed in London. He blackmails his bosses to train him so he could seek revenge on his wife’s murderers.
Seibold: “This is very typical spy stuff. We've seen it in many, many movies before. It's all very unrealistic. It's all supposed to be very sexy, and it isn't. … Rami Malek is supposed to bring a lot of charisma to a role like this, and he's just not there. In fact, the filmmaking is really gray, and it's really downbeat. The editing is really low. And the Rami Malek character doesn't seem to have any personality whatsoever. … It's like the movie is bored with its own concept.”
Drop
Meghann Fahy plays a widowed mom who goes on a date, but then starts getting text message threats, including “planning the worst night of your life,” from someone else.
Castillo: “I had a hard time suspending … disbelief that she wouldn't or couldn't disable her notifications for the … app, which is where she gets these threatening messages. But all right, so we have to let that happen in order for the rest of the movie to go on. So that aside, I thought actually Drop lagged quite a bit. There's a long time where things are just happening, and they're predictable. … And then in the last 15 minutes, all of a sudden, it remembers it’s a thriller, and oh my gosh, we're back in action.
… I do, however, think maybe Meghann Fahy does a really great job. . … Brandon Sklenar I thought did also a very admirable job of convincing me he was the most patient man in America, accepting the fact that she's just answering these messages on her phone and just constantly being flighty, disappearing for odd periods of time. Finally, he almost seems that he's [at his] breaking point, and then he comes back to the table because he's such a good guy. It's a silly movie.”
Seibold: “This is one of my favorite films of the year so far. … It does have a lot of really clever setups and payoffs when she goes past the maitre d's station that comes into play as a plot point later on. I love the way the filmmakers made the texts that she's receiving from this mysterious criminal loom large on the screen behind her, and as the texts get more threatening, the lettering itself is just larger and larger and larger on the screen. And the two lead performances are great. … I think it came to a really interesting conclusion, and it had some really wonderfully badass action hero lines at the end.”
Warfare
Co-directed by Alex Garland (Civil War), this tries to recreate the real-life battle experiences of American soldiers in Iraq.
Seibold: “There's not a lot of setup. There's not a lot of payoff. It takes place in this one neighborhood in Iraq where some American soldiers invade a home. They force the denizens of that home into a bedroom and just hold them at gunpoint, and they use that home as their base as they try to track down, in their words, ‘bad guys.’ There's no explanation as to when this battle took place during the war, its significance. It's just a battle that took place. And the film focuses so tightly in on these soldiers that we get nothing but their visceral experiences. … There's a lot of blood and screaming through a large portion of this movie. And it's just this process of what they experienced, how they were hurt, how hard it was to get out of there, and then they got out of there. And that's the end of the movie. It's almost like a style exercise. It's trying to see if war can be captured accurately on camera, without any of the trappings that make it jingoistic or propaganda. It's difficult to make an anti-war film because war is inherently cinematic, so it's difficult to suss out what the politics of this film are.”
Castillo: “I left this movie feeling very stressed. … The screaming, it feels like it takes, almost, up a third of the movie. … It is so brutal and so exacting, but also so detailed. So I asked myself, ‘What is the why of the story? What is the purpose of telling the story?’ A lot of this is based on Ray Mendoza’s experience, and he is actually one of the characters played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. He's the communication specialist and was one of the men handling the radio calls for help in the story itself. But it starts with him, and he was the one who told [director] Alex Garland about this experience, and their collaboration together is why we have Warfare. So I do wonder if this is maybe a catharsis because he was able to reunite with members of his platoon to talk about this experience. We see after the film, some of the real-life counterparts of those in the movie actually tour the set and maybe give some pointers, or get to talk about their own memories. So is this a way to talk about violence and the carnage of war, or is this a way to de-glamorize war and show it in its brutal basicness?”
One to One: John & Yoko
This documentary focuses on John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they lived in New York for 18 months. Co-director Kevin MacDonald also did Whitney Houston and Bob Marley documentaries.
Castillo: “I actually really appreciated how much focus is given to Yoko finally, after all these years. Because we've been awash in a lot of recent Beatles documentaries … but she's a periphery character or not really in that story. Here she is actively one half of the story. We get to hear her conversations with John, her business calls. I love how … in-depth [director] Kevin Macdonald goes into to actually flesh out their experience in the early 1970s Greenwich Village. … There was a lot more context that I learned. Even as someone who's been a Beatles fan for quite some time and has seen a number of these documentaries over the years, there was a lot more to learn.”
Seibold: “I did appreciate that approach that Kevin Macdonald is trying to capture the 70s through its media. This is essentially a media collage, the whole film from beginning to end. … For the most part, we're learning about the tone and what was going on … with the Nixon administration, what was going on with the war through old TV broadcasts. And then he will very cleverly cut to the advertising that was very hip at the time. And it all makes the world seem crass and gross as John and Yoko are trying really hard to sell some message. … Yoko … is really aware of how people are talking about her in the pop media, and how unfairly she is being treated. I appreciate the moments when John and Yoko were working together, and all of this footage of the concert … and them talking about what songs they can both perform together and how that's important. It makes them feel a lot more personable than … in other documentaries, which hold them to a sacred light. This one puts them in a little bit more of a human space.”