Review: The Dressmaker (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Starring: Kate Winslet

If you think that they don't make 'em like they used to anymore, then you've never seen Kate Winslet in The Dressmaker, vamping like Rita Hayworth, snarling like Bette Davis (perhaps the only actress who could have made more of her character's first line, "I'm back, you bastards."), and mixing strength and vulnerability like Vivien Leigh. But while it sometimes feels like a cross between Bad Day at Black Rock and Johnny Guitar, it wouldn't really be accurate to call the film, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Rosalie Ham, a throwback to a different era. It is very much its own creature, one which defies easy classification, and one which is perhaps either the kind of movie that you embrace completely, or whose charms just completely escape you. It's an oddball, to be sure, but it's glorious in its weirdness.

Review: Central Intelligence (2016)

* * 1/2
Director: Rawson Marshall Thurber
Starring: Kevin Hart, Dwayne Johnson

Central Intelligence looks like it was a lot of fun to make. I'm not sure it's ever quite as much fun to watch, but I'm glad that some millionaires got to have a good time. Though the film is sometimes quite funny, it's also strangely inert given the high volume of action sequences spread throughout, and it inspired nothing more in me than indifference. Though indifference is probably better than massive disappointment, which is what I would have felt had I realized beforehand that its director, Rawson Marshall Thurber, is also the director of Dodgeball, a movie as silly as it is funny and had the benefit of Vince Vaughan at the height of his powers. Central Intelligence has the benefit of Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart at the height of their powers, but somehow never makes as much of them as it could. Maybe next time will be better, and there certainly will be a next time given that Central Intelligence made a whole lot of money during the summer when just about nothing seemed to make quite enough money.

21st Century Essentials: Adaptation (2002)

Director: Spike Jonze
Starring: Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper
Country: United States

Few films have ever danced closer to the edge than Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman's dramatization of the impossible task of adapting Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" for the screen, as told by Spike Jonze. In addition to its daring gambit of taking characters based on real people, who share the same names as those real people (real people who could have declined permission for the portrayal), and having them straight up try to murder two people (and succeeding in one case), it also runs the very real risk of disappearing up its own ass as it as it reflects on, dissects, and makes a jest of the creative process. At once an intimate story about the struggle to create itself, and an expansive story that's about everything, really, Adaptation is one of the most interesting and creatively breathtaking films of the last 16 years, confirming (if any further confirmation was truly needed) that Charlie Kaufman's brain is one of the most fascinating places on Earth.

Review: Amanda Knox (2016)

* * *
Director: Rod Blackhurst, Brian McGinn

"We have here this beautiful, picturesque hilltop town in the middle of Italy. It was a particularly gruesome murder, throat slit, semi-naked, blood everywhere. I mean, what more do you want in a story?" That question, posed by journalist Nick Pisa (who somehow and effortlessly manages to emerge from this documentary as the most odious person in this story, which feels like an accomplishment in a perverse sort of way), finds its answer later in the film, when Pisa notes that the story also had two attractive young women and a hint of sex. "Girl on girl" crime, is how he puts it. That's what sells papers. Though Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn's Amanda Knox is being advertised as Knox's story in her own words, the documentary isn't really about Amanda Knox the person, nor is it ultimately about the murder of Meredith Kercher. It's more about the idea of "Amanda Knox," a hot commodity for a frenzied media dying to tell a story that combined murder, sex, and an American abroad. Whether you believe that Knox has gotten away with murder or that she was unfairly persecuted, Amanda Knox is a fascinating look at how narratives are shaped for the public and how fact can become so knotted up with rumor that they can seem impossible to separate.

Review: City 40 (2016)

* * *
Director: Samira Goetschel

Here's the premise: there's a city that is closed to outsiders and has, historically, been kept off of maps by the government. For generations people have lived and worked inside of its enclosures, their work (and lives) a carefully guarded state secret. For decades they were provided access to goods and amenities that the people living outside the city could only dream of, the only downside being that they're all basically guaranteed to either end up with cancer themselves or to lose most of their family to same. It sounds like science fiction. It's the reality of the place codenamed "City 40," home of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme since 1945 and only designated as a town, and granted the name "Ozyorsk," in 1994, though it remains closed to this day. It's a place that non-residents can only enter with special permission from Russia's secret police, and in which filming is prohibited. But, where there's a will, there's a way, as Samira Goetschel's documentary City 40 proves.