Buzz Blog

2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films – Animated ***1/2
Though narrative components can certainly be a significant part of animated shorts, this impressive collection of nominees emphasizes the spark of visual artistry that’s possible when not one of them employs now-ubiquitous CGI. Each of the four nominees available for preview (the Russian entry Boxballet was not confirmed at press time to be part of the program) brings a unique sensibility to the table: the rotoscoped scenes of everyday life in Alberto Mielgo’s mediation on love and loss, The Windshield Wiper; a stop-motion figurine with a ceramic, emotionless face capturing the grim occupation of the protagonist in Hugo Covarrubias’s Chilean entry Bestia; the gleeful grotesquerie of the Bill Plympton-esque hand-drawn people in Joanna Quinn & Les Mills’ amusing character study Affairs of the Art; and a softer brand of stop-motion in the Aardman Animation offering Robin Robin, a musical Ugly Duckling-like story about a bird adopted by a family of mice. Of those four, Robin Robin is certainly the most conventionally crowd-pleasing, and a likely winner with its recognizable voice cast (including Richard E. Grant and Gillian Anderson) and Netflix/Aardman pedigree. But Windshield Wiper may be the more memorable achievement, bouncing between scenes that are often melancholy, while also capturing the weird realities of digital-age connection (and disconnection). Overall, it’s a great reminder of how many different ways can choose to tell a story through animation, including armature that’s physical rather than virtual. Available Feb. 25 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films – Live Action ***
As has been true in many other categories over the years, the Academy Award nominees for live-action shorts have tended to favor earnest message-delivery over distinctive filmmaking style. There’s a little bit of both on display in this year’s crop, though the best of them—K.D. Dávila’s Please Hold—provides a great mix of the two, turning the story of a Latinx man arrested in a case of mistaken identity into a Kafka-esque science-fiction yarn where a callous and racist criminal justice system is played for dark humor. Other nominees are much more blunt instruments in addressing their respective issues, like Aneil Karia’s The Long Goodbye, with Riz Ahmed rapping about anti-immigrant violence in England, and Maria Brendle’s Ala Kachuu (Take and Run), dealing with a young Kyrgyz woman whose dreams of higher education collide with traditional expectations. Tadeusz Lysiak’s The Dress—about a Polish woman with dwarfism wrestling with her feelings of isolation and loneliness—at least benefits from Anna Dzieduszycka’s potent, flinty central performance to balance the pathos and grim worldview. The unusual outlier is Martin Strange Hansen’s Danish entry On My Mind, about a man determined to finish a particular karaoke song in a bar; the narrative feels unnecessarily stretched out to create a conflict with the irritable bar owner, but there’s raw emotion on display here that’s not connected to an “issue”—and that’s a welcome change of pace. Available Feb. 25 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Butter **1/2
It’s possible for a movie to deal with a delicate subject in a way that’s not at all exploitative, but also doesn’t feel like it adds enough to the conversation to justify that subject. Writer/director Paul A. Kaufman adapts Erin Jade Lange’s young-adult novel focused on an obese Arizona high-school junior mockingly referred to by classmates as Butter (Alex Kersting). Tired of being the subject of mockery, Butter posts a social-media message announcing that he’ll live-stream eating himself to death on New Year’s Eve—only to find that his newfound notoriety is turning into popularity. Most of what works here comes down to Kersting’s performance, which combines a unique naturalism with a charm that makes it plausible peers will like him once they actually get to know him. But there’s a flatness to Kaufman’s direction that rarely makes it feel like there are actual life-and-death stakes here, and Butter’s key relationships—with his parents (Mira Sorvino and Brian Van Holt), with his music teacher (Mykelti Williamson), with the classmate he has a crush on (McKaley Miller)—feel too thinly drawn to connect to his sense of despair. The third act takes a surprisingly long look at the aftermath of a suicide attempt, in a way that feels thoughtful and earnest. It simply isn’t dramatically compelling enough, or willing enough to deal with the messiest possible ramifications, to make it feel like this tale of bullying and its consequences has much new to offer. Available Feb. 25 in theaters. (PG-13)

Cyrano **1/2
Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is almost too perfect as a libretto for a musical, but a musical still needs a couple of key things in order to really work: good songs, and good singers. Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett reprise their roles from the original stage production as, respectively, the soldier Cyrano with a unique physiognomy, and the lady Roxanne he loves from afar, with the tongue-tied Christian (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) providing the third point on the romantic triangle served by Cyrano’s proxy poetry. Director Joe Wright (Bennett’s real-life partner) mounts a lovely production, with only a few flourishes of choreography and a great villain in Ben Mendelsohn as the lecherous, petty duke DeGuiche. But the emotions here are tied up almost entirely with the original songs (by The National’s Matt Berninger, Aaron Dessner and Bryce Dessner, with Carin Besser), and they generally range from unmemorable to on-the-nose to stuff that seems trimmed from a first draft of Les Misérables. The exceptions are those performed by Haley Bennett, who also has the only thing even resembling a compelling voice in this cast (not counting an unexpected cameo as a doomed French soldier). Dinklage makes for a wonderfully soulful Cyrano, nailing both the despair for his own unrequited love and the joy he takes from Roxanne adoring his words. It’s just kind of a problem when you make a musical version of Cyrano and it only really works during the times when it’s not a musical version of Cyrano. Available Feb. 25 in theaters. (PG-13)

The Desperate Hour ***
It’s not easy to wrangle cinematic tension out of a premise that consists almost entirely of running through the woods, talking on a cell phone, or running through the woods while talking on a cell phone. So all credit to director Phillip Noyce and star Naomi Watts for executing that premise as well as they do. Watts plays Ann Carr, a widowed mother still dealing with the trauma of her husband’s death a year earlier when another horrifying situation strikes her family: an active shooter at the high school where her son, Noah (Colton Gobbo) is a student. Out in the woods in the middle of a long run when she finds out, she tries to gather information while painstakingly making her way several miles back to town. Watts is left to carry virtually the whole narrative, and navigates through multiple levels of terror, including contemplating whether it would be worse if her son was threatened by the shooter, or was the shooter. Meanwhile, Noyce does his best to mix up the shot options, including the ominous build-up of police cars driving past Ann before she has any idea what’s happening. The plot feels stretched thin even at only 84 minutes, and goes a little astray when Ann’s sleuthing makes her part of the police action. There’s still an emotional punch here, as the simple act of Ann being connected via her phone to other people willing to help makes this one-woman show feel less like something the character is enduring alone. Available Feb. 25 in theaters. (PG-13)

Let Me Be Me ***
The roots of the real-life story in Dan Crane & Katie Taber’s documentary suggest a feel-good “triumph over adversity” tale, but many of their formal choices avoid the sense that it’s merely a real-life tear-jerker. The “me” of the title is Kyle Westphal, whom we meet as he’s preparing to graduate from a fashion design program at Drexel University. But the bulk of the narrative involves how he got there: being diagnosed with autism as a child, then participating with his parents Jennifer and Jeff in the Son-Rise program, which focused on embracing the world in which children with autism live, rather than trying to force them into the box of mainstream “normalcy.” The filmmakers’ structural choice lets us know from the outset that Kyle is on the road to being a fully functioning adult, so there’s no coyness about whether Son-Rise will yield results, and access to footage taken during the sessions with young Kyle provides fascinating insight into its methods. Crane & Taber also make a savvy choice when they represent some moments from Kyle’s inner life through stop-motion animation with knitted figures, their tactility connecting with Kyle’s love of fabric. In a way it feels almost too simple and straightforward, rushing full-speed-ahead through 23 years of its subjects’ lives in just over 70 minutes. It shouldn’t be underestimated, however, when non-fiction filmmakers can offer a narrative with emotion, creativity and efficiency. Available Feb. 25 via SLFSatHome.org. (NR)

No Exit **
No, it’s not an adaptation of the Sartre “hell is other people” classic, but rather an attempt at a claustrophobic suspense thriller that might have been much better if it hadn’t overemphasized its character beats. Havana Rose Liu plays Darby, a young recovering addict estranged from her family, and who flees a rehab facility when she learns her mother is seriously ill. On the road from Sacramento to Salt Lake City, Darby gets caught in a blizzard, and is forced to take shelter at a rest stop with four other stranded travelers (Dennis Haysbert, Dale Dickey, David Dysdahl and Danny Ramirez)—and the discovery of an abducted child (Mila Harris) in one of the vehicles in the parking lot. Director Damien Power offers plenty of feints, dodges and suspicious glances regarding which of the suspects is our villain, along with enough pointed cutaways to various inevitably-to-be-employed weapons that it would make Chekhov blush. The real problem, unfortunately, is that Liu isn’t a particularly compelling center of the story from a performance standpoint, and the narrative would have played out almost identically if none of the familial discord/"trying to stay clean" stuff had been included—and it’s particularly weird given a scene in which using drugs might literally save Darby’s life. All the basic isolated-location genre material works reasonably well, with a few effective surprises and solid execution in the tension-building scenes. Sometimes, you just wish that writers would stop overthinking the kind of backstory required to give us a rooting interest in the protagonist staying alive. Available Feb. 25 via Hulu. (R)