Director: Nia DaCosta
Writer: Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, Nia DaCosta
Stars: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo

Plot: A “spiritual sequel” to the horror film Candyman (1992) that returns to the now-gentrified Chicago neighborhood where the legend began.

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Clive Barker wrote the source material for Candyman called “The Forbidden” which dealt with urban legends that come to life. The 1992 film Candyman was created by Bernard Rose who adapted the short story into the Tony Todd and Virginia Madsen film that we know and love today, and with that, the 1992 version is a classic that goes down in the annals of horror, especially in a decade that wasn’t kind to the genre. Not only was the movie genuinely creepy with a solid handful of jump scares, but it had an entire atmosphere that was derived from not only the plotline but the acting and especially the beautifully crafted score that is hauntingly poetic and unnerving in the plethora of infamous horror movie scores. The original film lives on in infamy and is a positive note in database of horror monsters from the moment of its conception and we need to thank the fathers who brought this titan to life- Clive and Bernard, whom without Candyman would not exist, but in doing so we need to also give praise to the man himself who brought the character from words on a page to the guy we know, love, and fear 29 years later, and that is Tony Todd- whose persona non-grata attempt at a ghostly boogeyman actually had us coming back to Cabrini-Green year after year, time and again. 

Now with all that praise, it actually pains me to write the rest of this piece as it won’t be as kind, but truth be told, I will definitely make sure to point out the good as well, not just the bad, and the ugly. It is not in my doing so of writing this review to tear this film down with a one-sided view of the film but to talk about the film on a spectrum of not only my view but me talking to other press members at my screening tonight. So, with that said- let’s start with the good.

Nia DaCosta is a visual genius. With this being my first view from the lens of her world, I will say that I am thrilled to see what else she brings to the table. In fact, the best thing about this film is DaCosta’s vision and what she’s portraying on screen. From the crisp visuals to the sense of intrigue that she allows on the screen to a property we as an audience ( or most of us) should be aware of by now. DaCosta was the absolute right person to make this film. The other best part(s) about this film were a few of the actors- particularly Teyonah Parris as Brianna, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as her brother Troy, and the return of Vanessa Williams as Anne-Marie McCoy- they were the absolute standouts in what felt like a very crowded film. 

With that my praise for the good ends there- I want to get into the bad next- and that’s the score. What made a huge part of the original so iconic, and scary was the chilling score created by Philip Glass, his main theme titled “Helen’s Theme” is the most remembered thing about the movie next to Tony Todd’s performance in the original. It was really lacking in the scoring department. I understand wanting to create your own entity, but when you sign on to make a Candyman sequel you better bring what the fans love from the original- I dare you to try and make a Halloween sequel without a version of the infamous John Carpenter score, or a Saw sequel without a type of “Hello, Zepp”. You’d be laughed off the screen and this Candyman isn’t exempt from that same criticism. Huge missed opportunity, and sure you might be saying “It’s called Helen’s Theme, Joey” and sure I’d say you’d have a point if they didn’t use Helen’s story as heavily as Candyman himself in the film. While Academy Award Nominee Virginia Madsen may not be “personally” in the film, she’s throughout the film in stills, stories, and even new voiceover work. 

Yayha Abdul-Mateen II is also another part of the film that just doesn’t work here. I never actually connect with him in any project he’s done. He never feels like he actually knows what he’s in and I really wanna be won over by him but this performance still doesn’t have me convinced of his talents that many others see.  

Now the ugly of this film, the story. It makes almost no sense going hand in hand with the original. And yes again “Joey it’s a LIGHT sequel!” Okay, well if it’s such a light sequel then why bring Helen into the story at all? Why use Anne-Marie and her son? Why use anything in the realm of the lineage of the original Candyman lore? It feels like there’s a solid 25 minutes missing from this movie because it feels overcrowded with stories it wants to tell instead of the full complete story it’s trying to tell. The film’s story also really fails the myth and lore of Candyman by completely changing the Candyman legacy that we’re taught in the first film. The story of a racist crime that was avenged upon by the ghost of the character to those who believed in him has been changed to a story about the many awful crimes of innocent black men across Chicago. We live in a country today that is completely messed up with injustice done by the police everywhere and innocent people of color are constantly targeted day in and day out, it’s wrong- but my biggest issue with the plot change here is this film causes the first to be completely useless in its storytelling because if all these other men were also “Candymen” than what Helen went through and what Anne-Marie went through was for nothing as at that point Tony Todd’s Candyman was not even the most “recent” terror of injustice, it made Michael Hargrove’s Candyman second rate and not needed, which to his character’s story isn’t fair if we’re supposed to care about this guy as well. It feels like a giant cop out.

This movie also is “too woke” and that is a direct quote not from ME but from another critic I was sitting next to at my screening. To my left was a white female critic, and to my right was a black female critic, and the person who told me this comment was the black female critic. She mentioned that while she could see what the movie was trying to do, it was completely alienating an entire group of people. The white female critic next to me said she felt completely uncomfortable watching as if she felt like she wasn’t wanted. I have to say- I agree with both sides- I can see what the filmmakers wanted to say here but I agree also with the critics I was seated next to, this movie is Woke with a capital W and it completely takes away from the enjoyment of what I and apparently those women want to see in a Candyman movie when it comes to a continuation of what the original so beautifully laid out. 

Tell your stories, make them uncomfortable, make them your truths, but don’t try to alienate an entire fanbase of people behind a franchise, it feels lazy and disrespectful. Candyman at the end of the day is out there, but I say stick to the original, it’s better on almost every level. This property works best when it is not focused on being a slasher film, but instead, being a horrific love story that leaves you unnerved and afraid of wanting more.

Grade: C- 

Director: Lisa Joy
Writer: Lisa Joy
Stars: Hugh Jackman, Rebecca Ferguson, Thandiwe Newton, Cliff Curtis

Plot: Nick Bannister, a private investigator of the mind, navigates the alluring world of the past when his life is changed by new client Mae. A simple case becomes an obsession after she disappears and he fights to learn the truth about her.

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There’s a terrific scene early on in Reminiscence, written and directed by Lisa Joy, where Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) watches a memory play out before him of his newest client Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a lounge singer who steps before a microphone and belts out an emotional song that clearly cuts into his heart, his fascination in her growing by the second. It’s a gorgeously rendered couple of minutes that draw you in with mystery and intrigue as to what might be coming next.

The problem is that over the next hour and a half, nothing ever comes close to the power of this scene, the derivative plot rapidly sinking into obvious twists and cliches in a confused narrative that amounts to little more than a subpar Twilight Zone episode stretched to feature-length. Joy, who worked in many capacities on the excellent HBO series Westworld, brings in some of the actors from that show and gives them and many others nothing to do throughout this over-long enterprise, one filled with regurgitations of ideas from much better films like Minority Report, Inception, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

In a dystopian future, Bannister is a private investigator of the mind, working in a technologically advanced space with his partner Watts (Thandiwe Newton, sadly wasted in this) where he caters to those wanting to revisit better times from years ago when so much of the world’s cities weren’t half-sunken underwater. Of course, to access those memories, his subjects have to submerge themselves in water, which Mae does one seemingly inauspicious day that ultimately sets Bannister on a dangerous journey into violence, corruption, and heartache.

There are some interesting ideas at play in Reminiscence, but the whole endeavor ultimately feels hollow and tired; hell, Hugh Jackman himself looks tired all the way through, clearly not connecting with this material in a way he has in so many of his better projects of late. Jackman was hit-or-miss in the 2000s, with his appearances as Wolverine and the occasional gem like Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige intermixed with duds like Scoop and Deception. Lately, however, he’s been on quite a roll, his performances in Logan, The Greatest Showman, and particularly Bad Education showcasing his talent in endless exciting ways.

Reminiscence, sadly, is a big step back for Jackman, a film he sleepwalks through with little passion, his performance flat even when he’s over-the-top emoting near the end. He might have been intrigued by the premise and Joy’s spectacular work on Westworld, but this is the perfect example of a film that at some point went haywire not necessarily during production or post-production but during the screenwriting phase, nobody stopping to consider that the words themselves might need another pass. The dialogue throughout the film is clunky, there’s almost no tension, the pacing is extremely slow, and the characters are too thin to ever care about.

Worse, the film has murky, overly slick cinematography that makes it appear like a pilot for a new HBO series and not like a feature film. I know movies and television are blending together more these days than ever before, but everything from the awkward staging of scenes to the numerous fake-looking overhead shots of a future Miami submerged in water ultimately gives the endeavor a feel of TV, and not the good kind. If this were the first episode of a new series, I wouldn’t recommend anyone continue, and as a self-contained feature, it’s somehow even more underwhelming.

The supporting cast does what it can, particularly Ferguson, always a charismatic and welcome presence on screen even when given an underwritten character like this one. Cliff Curtis has some fun in a villainous role, and Angela Sarafyan, so great on Westworld, makes an impression even with screen-time that amounts to little more than a cameo. There’s also some joy at times purely in watching Jackman and Ferguson together on-screen again following their pairing in the much more crowd-pleasing The Greatest Showman.

But for the most part, Reminiscence is a painful slog, a tragic misfire, easily one of the giant turkeys of 2021 that no one will be talking about a year from now. It will be one of those titles on an actor’s resume that many people will later on scratch their heads wondering what it even was. On a cruise ship awhile back I played a movie trivia game where you had to guess film titles based on seeing part of the poster, and the only title out of forty I missed was Transcendence from 2014, the forgettable Johnny Depp effort that along with this similarly titled film has ties to Christopher Nolan. Odds are if the poster to Reminiscence ever makes its way into that cruise ship trivia game in the future, achieving a perfect forty out of forty will still be out of my grasp.

Grade: D-

Director: Ruth Meehan
Writers: Jean Pasley, Ruth Meehan
Stars: Gemma-Leah Devereux, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Karen Egan, Derbhle Crotty, Siobhan Cullen, Derbhle Crotty

Plot: A cynical stand-up comedian is diagnosed with breast cancer and decides to die, but as she meets 4 fellow breast cancer patients, she begins to question her beliefs.

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There may be no one better at judging death than the Irish. Throughout its history the people of Ireland have suffered immense tragedy; its recent history marred by civil war and strife; its past blighted by famine and colonialism. Yet the Irish have an incredible sense of humor, dryly tipping off the Grim Reaper with an anecdote or quip, mining pathos in the morbid. Everyone fears death, but on the Emerald Isle they know how to give the middle finger to it as well.

It’s in this rich vein that Ruth Meehan makes her fantastic debut feature, The Bright Side. While dealing with heavy material – that in other hands, or cultures for that matter, could’ve been a far starker experience – Meehan finds wonderful depth to her characters, often emphasizing the absurdity of life and the tough spirit it takes to see it through. Instead of a deathly tone, perhaps introspective and emotionally draining, we’re treated instead to dick jokes, talking breasts, pot brownies, and brightly colored wigs. It would take a hard heart to come out of this experience without feeling uplifted.

Kate (Gemma-Leah Devereux) is a stand-up comedian struggling with life. She is cynical, world-weary, and suicidal. She muddles through the day with a mix of casual sex and an addiction to prescription drugs, which she procures through the help of an illegally obtained doctor’s prescription pad. Early scenes of Kate’s stand-up routine – typically sarcastic, abrasive, and tinged with a bitterness that tell of deeper issues – fill the audience in on her early life: a father who seemed to care very little about her and a growing sense of self-loathing guided her, and now in adulthood, she sees no reason to live, but can’t go through with the act of taking her life. Her comedy is taken from her failed social life: an inability to form relationships, or perhaps just bad choices in men, a caustic relationship with her mother. She is constantly on guard and defensive, ready to fight everyone and anyone she encounters, including her pharmacist who is beginning to realize he’s been conned into dispensing drugs Kate doesn’t need.

Everything changes after a fall from a trampoline results in bruised ribs and a breast cancer diagnosis. While at first stunned by the diagnosis, Kate begins to see it as a “guilt-free way out” of life. She promises her worried brother she’ll go through with the chemotherapy but secretly opts out of the mastectomy which would save her life if the chemo should work. She begins her treatment alongside a group of women, most of whom are far more positive about life than Kate herself. As she begins to integrate within the group and grow closer with the other women, Kate begins to find there are more reasons to stay alive than she initially thought.

The plot from hereon out is typical: Kate finds a new lust for life among her friends, learning to appreciate things she failed to do before. However, even though you may know where the story is going, that doesn’t mean you won’t enjoy the journey. Each of the women involved are wonderful in their own rights: Fiona (Karen Egan) is perennially upbeat and positive, but ignores her own feelings about mortality; Helen (Derbhle Crotty) spent the majority of her life in the closet and had only come out a few years before her diagnosis, which effectively stopped her first opportunity to explore her sexuality;  Roisin (Barbara Brennan) is the wise old mother of the group, deeply religious and more concerned about how her husband will survive without her; and Tracy (Siobhan Cullen) is a young woman furious about her diagnosis and desperately trying to survive so she might one day have kids.

Though the plot may be predictable, each of these women are worth the admission alone. Meehan handles the tone of proceedings perfectly, never allowing the drama to become cloyingly emotional, nor allowing the dark humor to detract from the very real problems these women face. A scene featuring all the women drunkenly laughing in a hotel room as they recount stories of their sex lives is punctured by Roisin, who goes from laughter to sobbing in a way that catches your breath. As all the women crowd around to comfort her, you’re reminded of how the specter of death is ever-present in their lives. It’s sobering but poignant.

Elsewhere the cinematography is gently poetic, capturing the rolling green hills of Ireland among the staid white of the cancer ward. Close-ups of Kate, specifically during a recurring motif where she uses her breasts as a ventriloquist might a dummy, are deftly handled, rocking slightly back and forth. There’s something intimate about that, as though we’re in Kate’s own world as she navigates through it.

The Bright Side is a beautiful meditation on loss and life. It may be cliched in its plotting, but the characterizations are what make it all worthwhile. Devereux will make you feel deeply for Kate and her struggle, as she begins to challenge her view on life and grow.

Grade: A

Director: David Bruckner
Writers: Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski
Stars: Rebecca Hall, Sarah Goldberg, Evan Jonigkeit, Stacy Martin, Vondie Curtis-Hall

Plot: A widow begins to uncover her recently deceased husband’s disturbing secrets.

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Many of us know the fear of the things that go bump in the night. However, what if that bump might just be the one person you wish to see the most? A loved one who has recently passed? Would you retreat or push forward in the hopes of somehow being reunited with a person you never thought you’d see again?

That’s the dilemma that begins to plague Beth (Rebecca Hall), a teacher mourning the unexpected death of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) in David Bruckner’s The Night House. Already grappling with the weight of trying to understand how the person most precious to her could be taken so young, Beth begins to experience troubling signs that maybe his presence hasn’t quite left their lakeside home. When night comes, Beth’s dreams turn to frightening visions, sounds, and images distorting reality to a point where she no longer knows truth from fiction.

Haunted house films are nothing new, yet Bruckner manages to make the classic horror trope feel alive again with an unnerving approach that knows exactly the right buttons to push at the right time. An image of Owen, lurking in the water, staring up at Beth, sends a chill down your spine. A stereo turning on from the other room makes you shriek in terror. Jump scares have (often rightfully) earned a negative reputation over the last two decades. Bruckner is able to demonstrate that when utilized properly, they can land in a way that feels earned, as opposed to cheap and easy manipulation.

Part of that comes from the way in which the filmmaker is able to set the pitch of The Night House at a steady unease. As Beth begins to investigate these strange happenings, exploring her husband’s life and the secrets he was keeping from her, every scene starts to hold a sense of discomfort, a feeling that things aren’t quite right. Events as seemingly serene as Beth going to a bookstore begin to hold the fear that something demonic could be right around any corner. Mainstream horror simply doesn’t get as persistently unsettling as this.

A veteran of genre films such as The Signal and The Ritual, Bruckner is no stranger to getting under an audience’s skin, but it’s his collaboration with Hall that truly takes The Night House to the next level. An actress who somehow still doesn’t get the credit she deserves (her performance in Christine remains one of the best of the past decade), Hall has an innate ability to sink into her characters in a way that allows the audience to feel every single thing that she is feeling. That’s never more crucial than in the realm of horror, a genre that can quickly become silly if a wrong step is taken.

While the film’s script, by Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, opens up doors to some interesting questions regarding how much we can ever really know a person, The Night House is, on paper, a bit conventional. Haunted houses as metaphors for trauma can be seen in a few dozen films or television series released each year, but it’s Bruckner and Hall’s combined forces which elevate this to something that demands attention, getting under your skin like few other pieces of horror in recent memory.

Whether you’re seeing The Night House in a crowded theater or in the comfort of your own home, it’s sure to be effective. Be wary, though, of watching it alone at home late at night, as the specific ways in which Bruckner manages that lakeside living space are sure to make you distrust your own environment in a way you never thought possible. If you’ve ever walked around your home in the middle of the night and thought for a second that you saw a person standing on the opposite end of the room, only to discover it was just a coat rack or a bookshelf lit in a peculiar way, Bruckner sees you and wants to exploit that experience for maximum impact.

Architecture becomes a vital component of The Night House in more ways than one. While the home Beth is living in holds special meaning to her, it also becomes her living nightmare, as Bruckner structurally warps the environment in subtle ways that are practically incomparable to anything we’ve seen before. Great care in production design and cinematography craft images that cause the audience to focus in on specific areas, some of which they’re bound to regret once a wall shifts and sends them into a frenzy of terror. A warning to all who enter The Night House: this isn’t the film to watch before bed.

Grade: B+

In Lars von Trier’s 2000 masterpiece Dancer in the Dark, the female hero Selma Jezkova makes the confident assertion that “In the musicals, nothing bad ever happens,” contradicting what film lovers familiar with the work of the Danish director know: everything that can go wrong will. Beginning with the opera-like overture reminiscent of Bergman’s Swedish adaptation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” punctuated by a series of abstract images, this film promises to be true to form.

Selma, played flawlessly by Icelandic musical artist Bjork, is a kind-hearted Czech immigrant in the mid-1960s who has brought her son to America to have an operation to correct a congenital, degenerative ophthalmological condition he inherited from her. Renting a backyard trailer from a police officer and his wife in Washington State, Selma works long shifts at a factory doing manual labor while daydreaming of having a leading role in a Hollywood musical. With the help of her friend Kathy (played by Catherine Deneuve), a French immigrant who, like Selma, takes a Marxist view of community and friendship, Selma navigates her job and evenings spent rehearsing “The Sound of Music” for a community theater production while rapidly—and secretly—losing her eyesight. Bill (played by David Morse), the cop from whom Selma rents her home, initially seems interested in Selma and her son Gene, taking Gene under his paternal wing. As the story approaches its climax, however, it becomes clear that Bill’s intentions are not as altruistic as they appear: his capitalist greed leads to an operatic finale more “Tosca” than “The Magic Flute.”

The tension between the tragic storyline and the whimsically choreographed, quintessentially Bjork musical numbers takes a film that would be hard to watch and renders it unbearable. Instead of allowing viewers to settle into a parable of American avarice in its meanest and most destructive form (as he does with his next film, Dogville [2003]), von Trier uses the music he co-wrote with Bjork to distract and entertain them, disarming their defenses, before delivering the next cinematic gut punch, making “Dancer in the Dark” the ultimate anti-musical musical.

Naively celebrating Dancer in the Dark as a moralizing work of art that brilliantly plays with genre in order to expose the ugliest aspects of American culture is no longer an option. Gone are the days when art lovers were allowed to separate the artist from their art. Who relaxes anymore into listening to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” immune to its political history as a musical accompaniment to the march to the gas chambers? After the 2011 Cannes Film Festival interview that got Lars von Trier permanently banned, it will strike many as inappropriate to elevate any of his work for its moral teachings. When asked by a journalist about the inspiration he took from German Romanticism while making his film Melancholia (2011), von Trier joked about being a Nazi. Whether or not Lars von Trier is actually an antisemite is impossible to say, but his comments at Cannes ten years ago undermine his credibility as a moralist.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised when artists we’ve revered turn out to be deeply flawed, even detestable human beings. Centuries-old, the notion of the “maverick” artist seems to have permeated the world of cinema, giving permission to directors like Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and maybe even Lars von Trier to embrace their worst impulses. “Dancer in the Dark” is a film that masterfully explores the dangers of human impulse. In a time when the world is staring down the realities of such human-made crises as social injustice and climate change, Dancer in the Dark could serve as a cautionary tale. Sadly, the director’s own impulses have made that impossible.