Buzz Blog

Bring Them Down ***
In both narrative structure and thematic undercurrents, writer/director Chris Andrews takes familiar “revenge thriller” elements and twists them into something both viscerally gripping and heartbreaking. In contemporary Ireland, sheep farmer Michael O’Shea (Christopher Abbott) finds himself in a dangerous battle with his neighbor, Gary Keeley (Paul Ready), when he suspects that Gary has stolen two of Michael’s valuable rams and tried to pass them off as his own. The first half plays out fairly conventionally, if still filled with great moments of tension, as the conflict escalates between the two men. But at around the halfway point, Andrews shifts perspective to tell the same story from the perspective of Gary’s son, Jack (Barry Keoghan), with the circumstances facing the Keeley family complicating the sense of where audience sympathies should lie, and Andrews proves terrifically efficient in his filmmaking at capturing the moments where those two points of view intersect. What emerges—including the prologue that frames the relationship between Michael and Gary’s wife, Caroline (Nora-Jane Noone), as well as his own father (Colm Meaney)—is a sense of the way families in this place are broken by the precarious economics of their lives and the way it turns the patriarchs into damaged men. Through the harrowing moments and the bloodshed, there’s a sense of a place in which nobody emerges unscathed. Available Feb. 7 in theaters. (R)

I’m Still Here ***
It probably sounds like an odd kind of criticism to suggest that the only thing wrong with Walter Salles’ fact-based drama is that it’s too good at evoking exactly the kind of emotions experienced by his protagonist. It opens in 1970 during the military dictatorship in Brazil, as ex-politician Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), his wife Eunice (Oscar nominee Fernanda Torres) and their children try to live a normal life—until Rubens is taken away for “interrogation,” and Eunice finds herself focused on finding out what has happened to him. Salles and the screenwriting team are willing to take their time establishing the familial normalcy of the Paivas, making the terrifying disruption of that normalcy all the more disturbing; there’s a particularly great sequence capturing the dislocated sense of time Eunice experiences while she is also incarcerated. Torres’ performance wonderfully evokes the flinty determination of a woman trying to hold her family together emotionally and financially, but eventually the story shifts forward 25 years to Eunice’s family in the mid-1990s, and then another 20 years again (with Eunice now played by Fernanda Montenegro, Torres’ own mother and Salles’ Central Station star). And while those jumps are useful at capturing the lingering psychological burden of uncertainty, the narrative loses its momentum and the effective interaction between they young actors playing the Paiva children. Lack of closure can wreck people—and it can have an effect on the movies about them, too. Available Feb. 7 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (PG-13)

Kinda Pregnant ***
Everyone has their preferences when it comes to comedic actors—if I say to you “Adam Sandler comedy,” you’re probably already three-quarters of the way to either “in” or “out”—so I guess it’s fair to say I’m in the tank for Amy Schumer in “messy bitch” mode. Here she plays Lainy, a Brooklyn high-school teacher with a life-long desire to be a mom who finds herself spiraling after her best-friend (Jillian Bell) gets pregnant. While impulsively wearing a prosthetic baby-bump to a prenatal yoga class, she befriends Megan (Brianne Howey) and falls for Megan’s brother Josh (Will Forte), and has to carry through on the charade. Plenty of slapstick shenanigans ensue, most of which involve people freaking out over likely trauma to a non-existent fetus, plus a great part for Urzila Carlson as a demented, chain-vaping school counselor. But mostly, it’s a great showcase for Schumer, cruising in a similar writer/star mode as Trainwreck (with a different Saturday Night Live alum as her nice-guy leading man) but just as deft at delivering the hilarious cringe with a dash of earnest emotion. While some of the relationship/friendship stuff never lands quite the way it should—it feels like both Bell and Forte are buttoning up their talents at over-the-top to play it straight—it’s still plenty funny, assuming you’re one of those people for whom “Amy Shumer comedy” means you’re in. Available Feb. 5 via Netflix. (R)

Love Hurts **
“From the producers of Nobody and Violent Night” touts the marketing for Love Hurts—and yes, it’s another entry in the seemingly endless parade of movies about “person you wouldn’t expect to be a badass killing machine is, in fact, a badass killing machine.” In this case, the not-so-mild-mannered protagonist is Marvin Gable (Ke Huy Quan), a Milwaukee-based real-estate agent whose history as an enforcer for his mobster brother (Daniel Wu) re-emerges with the return of Rose (Ariana DeBose), the former colleague he was supposed to have eliminated but whose life he secretly spared out of unspoken love. Veteran stunt coordinator/first-time director Jonathan Eusebio packs plenty of carnage into 83 minutes, which also involves a poetry-minded assassin (Mustafa Shakir) and ex-NFL star Marshawn Lynch as yet another killer, though the action rarely manages to be as creative as it is constant. But it’s a weirdly over-stuffed narrative for a genre effort of this kind, in theory about seizing the things that really matter in life yet completely muddled about how sincere it wants to be on that front. It’s nice to see Quan cashing in on his Oscar win with an actual leading role, and he does the most he can with a character delighted to have found a purpose beyond violence. He’s simply stuck in something uninspired and unable to find a point beyond being a continuation of a played-out premise. Available Feb. 7 in theaters. (R)

The Seed of the Sacred Fig ***1/2
Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof' Best International Film Oscar nominee isn’t exactly subtle about the central metaphor of the film’s title—a theoretically “religious” thing that instead becomes a parasite crushing the life out of its host—but that doesn’t mean the narrative surrounding it isn’t cracking suspense yarn. Inspired by real-life protests in 2022 Tehran, it follows a newly-promoted investigating judge for the Iranian government named Iman (Missagh Zareh) and his family—wife Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), 21-year-old daughter Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and teenage daughter Sana (Setareh Maleki)—whose dynamic is forever shifted when Rezvan’s friend is injured during the protests. For a while, it feels like the central conflicts will be mostly psychological, involving Iman’s own moral qualms about sentencing people to death and the easy-to-identify-with tensions between radicalized young people and their conservative parents. Then a specific inciting incident takes place—anyone who knows their Chekhov will see it coming—and the film takes a turn toward more external threats, including car chases and interrogations, emphasizing the literal existential dangers faced by those in an authoritarian country. The character motivations at times feel a bit murky, and the third act starts to feel particularly drawn out as the film nears the three-hour mark. It’s still a potent study of what happens when the need to tell yourself that you’re acting in the name of God actually destroys your soul. Available Feb. 7 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (PG-13)