‘The Reason I Jump’ Review: The experiences of a person with autism are explored in colorful, spirited, lightly profound new doc

This review was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Tell someone that the documentary they’re about to watch is an education on the experiences of those diagnosed with autism, and their expectation may be a movie of convention—of clearly defined talking head subjects and a rigid structure that more effectively snoozes rather than informs.

Not so in the case of director Jerry Rothwell’s captivating and occasionally cosmic new effort “The Reason I Jump,” which benefits from some remarkable source material in the form of Naoki Higashida’s 2007 book of the same name to address direct queries with poetic coherence and a light metaphysical touch. In that hugely successful book (which has also, it should be noted, been met with some skepticism over the context of its creation), the then-teenage Higashida attempts to enlighten readers about how an autistic person sees the world by answering a series of common questions. Attempts at communication, he writes, are like “drowning in a flood of words.” Elsewhere, Higashida says memories float through his mind like a sea of dots rather than flowing along a chronological current.

To say this prose finds its way into Rothwell’s movie (via translated voiceover from the actor Jordan O’Donegan) would be understating things. More demonstrably, Higashida’s writing informs the documentary’s stylistic approach, somewhat justifying its boneless structure as Rothwell transposes the book’s firsthand accounts against vignettes of several autistic individuals’ daily lives. As one teenager suddenly recounts details of years-old, O’Donegan recounts Higashida’s musings about the boundlessness of time. As a girl elsewhere, accompanied by a spirited score, toys with the same gadget over and over, we listen as Higashida explains how comfort is found in repetition. During a market visit in India, the cinematography gorgeously focuses on the most minute of observations – pedaling feet operating machinery, food simmering loudly on hot griddles, peppers lying in some place that seems unreachable – after we’ve learned that Higashida tends to zero in on the details one by one so that “gradually the whole image comes into focus.”

‘I Blame Society’ Review: Cheeky movie-within-a-movie experiment will keep you on your toes

This review was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

In the playfully rebellious new movie “I Blame Society,” the young filmmaker Gillian Wallace Horvat steps in front of her camera to give one of the most unpredictably self-aware performances since, well…whatever it is the last thing Nicolas Cage did. Whether that makes it a great performance is a different question. But if one barometer of an actor’s effectiveness is how confidently they skate right up to the edge of incredulity without slipping over, then the answer is leaning towards the affirmative.

Embodying a cheerily anarchic reflection of herself come undone by the routine compartmentalization of women in a male-dominated movie industry, Horvat deploys the practicality and studiousness of a haven’t-quite-made-it-but-not-for-lack-of-trying director as her fictionalized persona crafts sketchy schemes with a smirk and a twitchy wink. She’s also a stiff presence on the screen, at times maneuvering physical spaces on what seems to be an invisible swivel, and if you’re unconvinced by the way Horvat breaks down into tears early on, that’s part of the point—in riffing on what we think we’re talking about when we talk about “creative differences” in modern moviemaking, “I Blame Society” blurs the line between sincerity and artifice, documentary and autofiction, conforming to the norm and reveling in individual artistic liberty. Horvat’s motivations feel personal, and indeed they are; the experiences of a tireless artist are stretched into the territory of genre as Horvat turns re-enactment into its own kind of cinematic vengeance.

The best movies of 2020

This article was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Though 2020 has been a year of unprecedented struggle – and partly, I think, because of it – it was somewhat of a contradiction when it comes to the movies, an enigma worthy of our most deceptive storytellers.

Theaters remain largely devoid of the crowds that have filled them; the year’s most anticipated blockbusters were largely punted to 2021; the industry finds itself at a turning point with implications of a magnitude that are still too hazy to make out as of this writing; and the virtues and values of an entire medium are up for debate. We all feel primed for the next domino to fall on the cracked glass floor of traditional moviegoing that every “Avengers” adventure seemed to assure us was bulletproof, but even Marvel’s box office champions have bolted for the future—whatever that may look like.

And yet, cinema experienced a spectacularly strong start to the new decade. The best documentaries provided a guiding light and stretched a guiding hand. The best dramas helped us make sense of strange times while the best thrillers provided escape by estranging our senses. Spike Lee and Steve McQueen channeled the tensions of our time into works that may very well stand the test of time. And a slew of young filmmakers created stories justifying excitement for the future when reasons for such optimism seemed scarce.

‘News of the World’ Review: Tom Hanks travels across post-Civil War Texas in airy, occasionally intelligent Western

This review was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Words carry a heavy burden in Paul Greengrass’s shaky new pseudo-Western “News of the World.” They can bring communities together for the possibility of shared knowledge, and they can forge bonds where bonds aren’t expected to be forged. They can also spread fear and prejudice, deliver a threat as precursor to bloodshed. The movie understands these truths as well as a simpler one: When Tom Hanks speaks, you listen. And it synergizes them for a picture that is – in its best, rarest, unfussiest stretches – gently intuitive about the world-changing potential of sharing stories and communication.

And what a time it is, in the context of the movie, to buy into the prospect of communication as unifier. Adapted from Paulette Jiles’s novel of the same name, “News of the World” opens in 1870s north Texas as political tensions continue bubbling five years after Civil War’s end; a dusty air of cataclysm hangs over rugged settlements as Union soldiers look to keep order and tug the state into a post-slavery future. Denizens shuffle through the period of historic transition, apparently too busy to inform themselves of the latest goings-on about the country. That task is happily taken up by Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks); once a captain in the war, he’s now a modest loner who travels from town to town on a modest wagon, collecting newspapers and narrating their contents for anyone who will pay 10 cents to listen in. They’re the sort of community events that feel like fantasy in 2020, unfolding in close confines where folks gather shoulder to shoulder, transitioning with ease from cheers to jeers as Kidd brings news about floods and railroad construction, epidemics and politics. And because it’s Tom Hanks, we listen. Keenly.

Every Pixar movie, ranked

This article was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

There’s perhaps no major studio more hard-pressed to contend with the weight of its own legacy than Pixar. Twenty-five years ago, the American animation giant reset audiences’ expectations with an 80-minute movie about toys who came to life when no one was around, and Pixar’s storytellers have worked every year since to meet them—in turn raising their own standards further and further. That passion is to be expected from a company that gambled on an entirely new way of making movies, earning acclaim, box office success and Oscars recognition as a result. 

Twenty-five years later, the Pixar story is one reflected in the journeys of its characters. In examining it we find triumphs and occasional missteps, continued evolution and conforming to norms, the impossible being made possible and hints of a defiant spirit. In that spirit, and on the occasion of the impending release of Pixar’s 23rd movie, “Soul,” on Disney+, we’ve ranked every feature the studio has released below. 

‘Another Round’ Review: Mads Mikkelsen experiments with endless drinking in bittersweet Danish drama

This review was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” opens with a scene that splits the difference between ethereal and anarchic, and over the following two hours this Danish drinking dramedy tasks us with determining what exactly that difference consists of. The primary tool in that endeavor? Shots. Lots and lots and lots of shots, along with some swigs of wine, beer and vodka for good measure.

(For the movie’s characters, to be clear, although you’re welcome to indulge in the safety of your own home once “Another Round” releases on on-demand platforms Friday.)

The resourceful Mads Mikkelsen plays Martin, a bleary-eyed history teacher who’s barely starting to catch up to what his family probably thinks and what his students absolutely think of him: He’s rather dull. Indifferent. Boring. A bit corpse-like at the dinner table and in the classroom, where – in a funny but endearing reversal of convention – Martin’s students would like for him to apply himself, for his sake and for theirs as year-end exams loom.

‘Soul’ Review: Pixar prioritizes concept over character in its most literal meaning-of-life tale yet

This review was first published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Pixar last month turned 25 and, perhaps like those who can glimpse images from “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life” among their earliest movie-watching memories, the studio finds itself going through a quarter-life crisis. If we can imagine an entertainment company as humanistic (stick with me; I promise this isn’t more high-concept than the premise behind their newest movie), we can also imagine the questions Pixar may be asking of itself: “Why am I here? What is my purpose? Who am I trying to satisfy first and foremost?”

It only makes sense for Pixar to weave those questions explicitly through its storytelling. And so the studio does with its latest feature, “Soul,” co-directed by Pete Docter, a veteran Pixar guru and its current chief creative officer (Kemp Powers is his directing partner, and the first Black director in the company’s history). It’s become enticing in recent years to consider the studio’s place on the filmmaking landscape, not only because more and more companies are inspired to meet the standards of a genre that Pixar revolutionized in the ‘90s, but also because no one can definitively say whether the existence of such a thing as “the Pixar standard” is more a curse than simply a marker of success. Is the company still soaring, or falling with style? And who is the best audience to determine an answer: The twenty-somethings who have grown up alongside Woody and Buzz, or the tykes for whom animation is ostensibly primarily expected to serve?

“Soul,” if you allow it metatextual leeway, shows Pixar wrestling with these questions. But taken on its own terms, it’s also a serviceable, pretty funny, slightly ostentatious movie concerned with some of the most spiritual concepts a movie can possibly concern itself with.

‘Farewell Amor’ Review: Ekwa Msangi’s tale of African immigration is modest and contemplative

This review was originally published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Dance can be a most liberating (and cinematic) form of self-expression, as a large swath of 2020’s better films have attested to. In Steve McQueen’s evocative “Lovers Rock,” young Black people groove and jive to the sultry step of their souls. In Levan Akin’s devastating “And Then We Danced,” an aspiring Georgian dancer’s dream of joining the national troupe gives him purpose. In Fernandro Frías’s melancholy “I’m No Longer Here,” a Mexican teenager relies on cumbia to sustain his identity after he’s forced to flee across the U.S.-Mexico border.

“I’m No Longer Here” is a particularly apt comparison for the subject of this review: “Farewell Amor,” the debut feature of Tanzanian-American filmmaker Ekwa Msangi and an expansion on her own 2017 short movie “Farewell Meu Amor.” Msangi’s film is also about an immigrant’s adjustment, one in which a young woman, Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), uses dance to maneuver strange new surroundings where schoolmates raise an eyebrow at her style and form reductive generalizations about where she came from. But while “I’m No Longer Here” is laser-focused on the psychology of one protagonist, “Farewell Amor” has wider narrative ambitions. It unfolds through a trio of perspectives – that of Sylvia; her mother, Esther (Zainab Jah); and her father, Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), who has already been in New York City for 17 years – to tell a modest but poignant story about a family unable to connect with a new home until they reconnect with each other.

‘Let Them All Talk’ Review: Steven Soderbergh takes a vacation, returns with a delightful romp about art and life

This review was originally published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

Jazzy melodies underscore a montage of characters embarking the regal ocean liner Queen Mary 2 early in Steven Soderbergh’s newest movie, “Let Them All Talk,” and you can owe it to the presence of acting royalty Meryl Streep confidently striding through the ship’s spacious confines if you find yourself thinking back to images of a suave George Clooney surveying the Bellagio ahead of an ambitious heist in “Ocean’s 11.” “Let Them All Talk” is also a heist movie of sorts, although one in which the thing to be heisted isn’t gold bricks or poker chips but the minutiae of ambiguous agendas.

If that sounds like the stuff of a heady psychological watch, well…you’re sort of sailing on the right path. Remember: This is Soderbergh. Ever the flexible filmmaker, his newest work is his most light-footed and funny work since 2017’s “Logan Lucky,” even as it touches on ideas as weighty as the socioeconomic themes that drove his two 2019 offerings, the incredible “High Flying Bird” and the underwhelmingly overexaggerated “The Laundromat.” Witty, spry and a bit hazy, “Let Them All Talk” splits the difference of those two films while confirming that the director’s playfulness remains ocean-deep as his career enters its fourth different decade, to say nothing of his near-unmatched artistic restlessness (only two years this century have passed without a Soderbergh movie).

‘Anything for Jackson’ Review: A grieving couple is in over their heads in this creeptastic, subversive horror flick

This review was originally published on KENS5.com, and can be viewed here.

When it comes to “Anything for Jackson,” the only thing more amusing than getting caught up in the ghastly, ghostly thrills of this often squirm-in-your-seat-disturbing horror joint (now streaming on Shudder) is perusing the past works of its director, Justin Dyck. Here are a couple: “Love By Accident.” “Baby In a Manger.” “Love Alaska.” “Christmas With a Prince.” “Christmas Catch.” “Christmas in Paris.” “A Christmas Village.”

That’s definitively how Dyck’s busy career shakes out up to this point. Even if those thirty-some projects created in just six years (!) are largely TV movies cashing in on the enduring candy-cane sweetness of the holidays, the sheer consistency has fully earned him and screenwriter Keith Cooper, a frequent collaborator, the right to experiment in other genres. What the highly effective “Anything for Jackson” proves is that, for all that time in Christmasmovieland, Dyck and Cooper clearly found time to remain versed in the language of modern horror. Their first contribution to it is a small-scale tale of Satanic suspense that finds success in how self-aware it is. Two committed lead performances anchor the movie, and the range they’re asked to cover (and cover it they do) is wonderfully summed up with this line: “We have to keep up appearances.” It’s equally something a grieving family may say and the potential words of a couple that has kidnapped a pregnant woman. Here, it just so happens that both are true.