While it might be hard to make a general audience care about something as rare and expensive as white truffles, The Truffle Hunters radiates a unique energy that permeates through the runtime, despite a lack of substantial material present in the film. The film focuses on a group of aging truffle foragers and their loyal dogs in Northern Italy. While there is also a narrative undercurrent of the truffle foraging practice becoming oversaturated and even potentially dangerous, the weight of the film rests on the shoulders of its quirky subjects, as watching these aging men and their companions traipse about the picturesque Italian countryside offers a great deal of enjoyment. Although, after the credits have rolled, it leaves a little to be desired. The greater point about a younger breed of truffle foragers running these men out of their jobs is mostly lost on the viewer, as that arc is much less developed than the foragers themselves, and the occasional scene involving the business-and-consumer-ends of the truffle industry feel fairly out of place, as they consume so little of the conversations and screen time of the film. 

The film in subject feels very similar to the documentaries of the Ross brothers, as it contains no narration or subject interaction with the filmmakers, but, unlike the Ross’ films, has a very refined and cinematic look. This makes for an interesting contrast between the formalist style and realist content, with moments at which one crosses over into the other, such as the scenes where one of the dogs has the camera mounted directly on them, or where the old men enact obviously very staged conversations and actions for the camera. While a documentary that remains either entirely dedicated to one or the other, such as 45365 or Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up, may provide a more cohesive experience, the stylistic experimenting in The Truffle Hunters does not go unnoticed or unappreciated, as it is refreshing to see filmmakers Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw attempt to break free from the trappings of documentary conventions. While a bit scattered in both content and form, The Truffle Hunters manages to find moments of joy and interest in its subjects and keeps the viewers entertained throughout with occasional unconventional stylistic choice.

Score: ★★★ / ★★★★★

    It’s often difficult to translate a stage play into a motion picture. Although the mediums may seem similar at a first glance, there are several factors which can make a successful theatrical production seem hollow on film. The two major factors stem from temporal and spatial manipulation. A play must proceed linearly, with a number of factors such as visual effects, timing, and physical stage space limiting the extent of immersion for the viewer. A film, on the other hand, can openly create and invite you into a fabricated reality where anything can be manipulated. Think of Memento, Mulholland Drive, or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Time, space, and memory themselves are abstract concepts, so in the hands of a deft filmmaker, they can be used as tools to draw you into a novel story. This brings us to Florian Zeller’s filmmaking debut, The Father, adapted from his own 2012 play Le Pére. Despite being his first film, there is remarkable intuition displayed which elevates the material past linear constraints.

    The Father follows the story of an elderly Welshman as he struggles with the increasingly bleak effects of dementia. Anthony Hopkins, at the age of 82, gives the performance of a lifetime as the film’s protagonist, Anthony. Despite being in nearly every frame of the taut 97-minute runtime, he constantly reveals new layers to his character. In a particularly astonishing sequence of the film, he enters a room and charmingly wins over a potential caretaker, before launching into a merciless tirade against his eldest daughter (who is in the room with them), lambasting those who he believes are trying to tear him away from his beloved flat, and then curtly dismissing the shocked young woman. Hopkins is a master like no other of the mood shift. Throughout his career, he has been able to swing the tone of conversations with a single look or line, and that remarkable power is in full display here.

    Although this film could likely have functioned just off Hopkins’ devastatingly empathic performance, the rest of the crew rises to the challenge of matching him. Olivia Colman is reliably fantastic in the role of Anthony’s eldest daughter, Anne. She is caught between a rock and a hard place. She loves her father and respects his drive for independence, but she can no longer see him continue down a path where he can genuinely no longer function on his own. Anthony’s caretaker Laura, played by Imogen Poots, also finds it difficult to deal with his mercurial disposition. She resembles his youngest daughter (and favorite, as he makes no secret of), he says, but he can switch between doting on her to rejecting her on a dime.

    This, in fact, is the greatest strength of the film. Although we have seen many films centering around memory loss, many of them were from the perspective of a loved one or caretaker. Zeller places us squarely into Anthony’s perspective, and we see how his world is crumbling around him. Despite his protestations that he can live independently, we see him, again and again, flailing about to find some constant he can tether himself to. Everything which he takes for fact - the appearance of his daughter, the identity of her husband, the whereabouts of his wristwatch - is revealed to be something entirely unknown. He cannot even take time as a constant. What he believed to be 8:00 AM was, in fact, 8:00 PM. Or was it? Zeller’s editor, Yorgos Lamprinos, is an invaluable contributor here. The presence of cuts is nearly invisible as we wander around this labyrinth of unreliable memory along with Anthony, unsure of what is real or false anymore. 

    Zeller, however, is not even content with the nonlinear temporal shifts or the excessively unreliable narration. He embraces the medium of film and pushes it to its boundaries. With no foreshadowing, he changes the space of Anthony’s flat itself. The living room, the kitchen, the doorway, and every other feature in the house can change in an instant. Anthony believes he is living in his own flat, but then why is his daughter’s husband saying he’s living in their flat? He looks out his bedroom window, but why does he see something different today? Every single element of this film - the layout of furniture, the presence of Anthony’s hiding spots for valuables, the color of paint on the kitchen wall - serves to further disorient the octogenarian. While he attempts to fight back at first, and reassert what he knows as the truth, we see him increasingly lose himself in despair as he no longer has the strength to question his surroundings. He knows he is walking a fine line. By questioning the madness around him, he can either assert his independence or convince those around him that he is truly beyond their help. He can see it in their eyes; they question his sanity as he tries to rationalize his surroundings.
​
    The Father, in short, is a truly remarkable feat in filmmaking, as deserving of praise as Memento or Pulp Fiction. In the pantheon of films about dementia, it stands far above its competitors. Reality and fiction, opinion and fact, family and stranger blend together and contradict each other as both the audience and Anthony attempt to orient themselves. Just as we think, ‘Aha, I understand what is going on now,’ Zeller delights in pulling the rug out from under us again in a completely new way. This is the potential cinema has to offer that no other medium can. For 97 minutes, we enter a world which may well be an entirely different reality, and yet is no less precise than our own. Hopkins continues to remind the world why he is one of our greatest living performers, and we look enthusiastically towards what Zeller does next.

Score: ★★★★½ / ★★★★★

SPOILERS AHEAD
 
"Shazam!" flawlessly captures the playfulness and creativity of being a kid. It follows fourteen-year-old foster kid Billy Batson (Asher Angel) — who receives magic powers from a wizard named Shazam (Djimon Hounsou) — and his foster brother and superhero fanatic Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer), as they fight a villain named Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong), who harnesses the power of seven deadly sins, in the form of large demonic creatures, and aims to steal Billy’s powers for himself. The film also features many of Billy’s other foster brothers and sisters who, along with Freddy, end up getting magic powers as well.
 
"Shazam!," the latest film in the D.C. Extended Universe, solves many of the problems that critics and fans identified in the series’ previous installments. Most notable is that in “Shazam!” the characters are actually relatable.  We learn in the film that Billy’s mother had left him at an early age, after which he shuffled from foster home to foster home. As a result, Billy is motivated by a desire for a family and a sense of belonging. Billy’s motivations are grounded and sympathetic, making him an engaging and endearing protagonist.  Moreover, while previous installments like “Justice League” and “Suicide Squad” juggled too many tones and couldn’t settle on an overall character and feel for their films, “Shazam!” sticks to a silly and playful tone (the continuous stream of well-paced jokes will keep viewers laughing throughout), which fits the original tone of the character Shazam from D.C. comics — unlike “Man of Steel” which took the inherently optimistic and happy character of Superman and placed him in a dark and gritty film. 
 
Additionally, the film humanizes the villain, Dr. Sivana, and doesn’t portray him as a one-dimensional, uniquely evil stock character. The very first scene of the movie shows us a young Dr. Sivana, who just like Billy, doesn’t feel at home, and is hated by his family. In Billy’s case, these experiences of being without a home gave him the desire to help people.  In Dr. Sivana’s case, very similar experiences made him angry and resentful, which inspired him to harness the power of the seven deadly sins. As a result, viewers can sympathize will Dr. Sivana, and understand what motivates him.
 
It was really hard for me to find anything bad about "Shazam!," but there are a few things that could be improved.  The special effects could be better, but on a relatively low budget (at least for a superhero movie) of only $80 million, the shortcomings are understandable. As a regular watcher of C.W.’s “Arrowverse” shows, I can sympathize with having to pull of a lot of big scenes with superheroes on a shoestring budget. The soundtrack didn’t blow me away either, but it still fit the movie well. The positives overwhelmingly outweigh the negatives; taken as a whole, “Shazam!” is a fun, nostalgic movie that will make viewers feel like they are a 14-year-old kid having fun again.

Grade: A/A-

In case you couldn’t tell from the train wreck of a title, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald is an utter mess of a movie. It really seems like J.K. Rowling just threw a bunch of her leftover worldbuilding notes from Harry Potter together, adding only the bare minimum of connective tissue needed to assemble a somewhat logical narrative.

The film’s plot is ostensibly quite simple. Magizoologist Newt Scamander and his friends, with guidance from the legendary Albus Dumbledore, try to find and protect Credence Barebone, a young but terrifyingly powerful wizard, as he is hunted by both the harsh and overbearing Ministry of Magic and a group of violent extremists led by outlaw Gellert Grindelwald.

Unfortunately, the story ends up being incoherent, both by over-complicating the plot and some remarkably poor storytelling choices. After an inoffensive opening sequence, the film starts to go downhill, with two early reveals that undo all of the consequences of the first film’s conclusion. The film then splits into roughly half a dozen different plot threads, tied together in some of the most contrived ways imaginable. It’s a shame too, because each of the storylines probably would have been compelling had they been properly fleshed out. Poor editing exacerbates the clumsiness of the already convoluted narrative. Some of the scene transitions are so abrupt that I wondered if there was something wrong with the copy of the film being shown at the screening.

The film doesn’t manage to stick the landing either. Most of the last half hour is taken up by a series of plot twists, each more over the top and less meaningful than the last. And the climax of the movie should have massive repercussions for the film’s heroes and the wizarding community as whole, but Rowling apparently didn’t think it was important to actually show us how the protagonists deal with events that just irrevocably changed all of their lives.

The film also does a less than stellar job at handling its large cast. All of the significant characters from the first film return, and the film introduces a gaggle of new ones. Theseus Scamander (Newt’s brother), Leta Lestrange (Newt’s ex and now Theseus’s fiancée), Nagini (yes, really), and Nicholas Flamel (an immortal alchemist) are all jammed into the movie. None of them are well developed or necessary to the plot. Nagini, especially, is completely extraneous. Not only is it absurd to reveal that Voldemort’s pet snake from the Harry Potter series was actually a cursed human witch the whole time, she serves absolutely no purpose in the movie. Her only role is standing around and looking mildly horrified at the events unfolding around her. Leta comes the closest to having a coherent arc, but the mangled storytelling robs her character development of the emotional heft it should have.

Newt and his allies, the non-magical human Jacob Kowalski and the Auror (wizard cop) Tina Goldstein, fair a little bit better, but only because they are already established characters. These weirdos with hearts of gold are pretty much exactly the same as they were the last time around. If you found them charming in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (I certainly did) then you’ll find a lot to enjoy here. The exception (and not in a good way) for the returning characters is Queenie Goldstein. In a pretty significant departure from her previous characterization, the telepath comes off as consistently selfish, manipulative, and gullible with no real redeeming qualities.

But you know what? Despite the movie’s many, many flaws, I didn’t hate it. Newt, Jacob, Tina, and Dumbledore are delightful, most of the jokes land well, the creatures and magic spells are clever and stylish, and the wizarding world is as fascinating as ever. Grindelwald, too, is deftly handled. He is a far more human monster than Lord Voldemort, but that makes him an incredibly effective villain. His softer approach to fascism and skill at presenting a compelling message makes it all too clear why his brand of bigotry would appeal to the wizarding populace. In particular, his speech to the witches and wizards of Paris, a chilling depiction of the malleability of the truth and the capacity humans have for violence, is  J.K. Rowling’s best piece of writing in the film.
 
Grade: C+/B- (I can’t decide and these grades are meaningless anyway)

Bohemian Rhapsody? More like Bohemian Crap-sody, am I right?
 
I really thought this was going to be a good one. A bio-pic of Freddie Mercury had a lot of potential. But the more I think about it, the more I realize director Bryan Singer took a great story and watered it down to the point of intense blandness.
 
There seems like a lot of material available regarding Mercury that could make for an interesting film. He was the son of immigrant parents who seemingly didn’t approve of his career, which compounded upon his feeling like an outsider. He was a closeted gay man and had a complicated relationship with a woman to whom he was married before he came out. He engaged in the kind of sex and drugs that we generally associate with rock gods of that era. And he famously contracted AIDS at the height of the initial epidemic, and his death from the disease increased attention on finding a cure.
 
Well what if I told you the movie barely addresses any of these elements of his life? Rhapsody acknowledges all of these issues, sure. But it never feels like the film takes the time to talk about any elements of Mercury’s life substantially. Everything is glossed over in this hard-to-place sheen that makes the whole movie feel unfocused and impersonal. I don’t feel like I learned anything about Mercury, the person or the character.
 
And Mercury is really the only character in the movie with even an attempt at depth. Rami Malek’s performance is good, but the lack of focus on any elements of Mercury’s life fails his efforts. No one else in the movie even comes close to interesting. The other members of the band are relegated to tertiary characters, and the rest of the supporting cast are either lifeless nothings or unremarkable stereotypes.
 
There are moments where the film distracts you from it's monotony. The cinematography is pretty interesting, with a few stylistic shots and angles that give Queen the vibe it deserves. Seeing the band put together some of their most iconic songs is interesting, especially “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You”.
 
The last 20 minutes of the film are just a recreation of the Live Aid performance from 1985. And while this is kind of dope, because it’s just 20 minutes of listening to Queen perform, the minute it is over you remember that you could have just watched the actual Live Aid performance on YouTube for free. You then realize that the only interesting part of the movie is Queen’s music and that you could be in your living room listening to A Night at the Opera and not in a movie theater trying not to sing along because you are surrounded by strangers trying to watch a mediocre movie.
 
I really believe that a documentary about Queen would have been better than this. Talking to the actual band mates about Freddy and the band might have added to some energy to this sloppy, boring mass. I was entertained, sure. But not because the movie is good. Because Queen is awesome and it’s hard to fuck that up.
 
Grade: C

​It’s a tale as old as time: Aspiring Entertainer Female meets Established Entertainer Male, they fall in love, Established Entertainer Male elevates Aspiring Entertainer Female’s career, he becomes Declining Entertainer Male and she becomes Established Entertainer Female. Well, it’s at least a tale as old as 1937, and screenwriters Bradley Cooper and Eric Roth did the bare minimum to update it for Cooper’s directorial debut A Star Is Born.
 
The impetus of the relationship in this film hinged on questionable power dynamics that feel sexist and inappropriately timely. Jack (Cooper) wields his power as a famous musician to relentlessly try to woo Ally (Lady Gaga) until she abandons her life to travel with him after they spend a single night together. Ally’s position as a budding singer herself made Jack’s advances and belief in her talent hard to resist. No matter Jack’s intentions, which prove to be fairly altruistic, it was easy to feel unsettled by this all-too-familiar Hollywood story which usually ends differently. I’d like to forgive these outdated gender politics because this film is, of course, based on a story that originated in 1937. It perhaps wouldn’t have been a true remake if Cooper and Roth had veered from this, but they each hold enough clout to champion a film that feels a bit more modern.
 
Setting all this aside, Cooper and Gaga had palpable chemistry that was hard not to root for. Though both of their performances were uneven, Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga each had scenes that made me question whether I was being too critical. Cooper’s character Jack is a charming piece of shit, which he believably embodies. Jack is tragically and frustratingly flawed, which somehow endears him to the audience and Ally even more. But save for a few emotional peaks, Cooper’s performance was pretty flat and showed minimal depth. I was much more impressed with Gaga, despite her character Ally coming off as a caricature at points. The film often felt autobiographical to Gaga (and many pop stars), as Ally struggles to be accepted as a musician because the industry likes the way she sounds but not the way she looks. The moments that touched upon that issue felt the most genuine. And it almost goes without saying, but any shaky acting was instantly excused whenever she took the stage to perform.  
 
There are a handful of elements to this film that I wanted more of, and some that I wanted less of. The few minutes when Anthony Ramos was on screen were completely joyous. He is an incredibly talented multi-hyphenate who we will be seeing more of very soon (Monsters and Men, out soon), but I wanted to see more of his sweet character Ramon in a film whose turbulent leads quickly become daunting. This is definitely a personal preference, and one that not every viewer will agree with, but I wanted more music. It is clearly the strongest part of the film. “Shallow” is a safe Oscar bet for Best Original Song, and will be fodder for so many covers that I am not looking forward to. Even though he probably wouldn’t have written, directed, and starred in a musical movie if he didn’t, I was still impressed to see that Cooper had genuine musical chops. Every time Ally and Jack play “Shallow” (yes, it obviously happens more than once) is a high for the film, and I am so excited for the Oscars and/or Grammys performance of this song.
 
The aspect of the film I wanted the least of was actually the story. I found myself completely apathetic to Ally and Jack’s backstories, which served mostly to suffocate the narrative and artificially acquaint us with the characters. It was easy to connect with Ally and Jack even if their stories began when the film did. The inclusion of their families as secondary characters felt extraneous. My main issue is actually that I wanted less movie, which is a recurring pattern for almost every iteration of A Star Is Born. Cooper’s version is around two hours and fifteen minutes, and could’ve easily been ten to fifteen minutes shorter without detriment. The 1954 and 1976 versions both come in at an unreasonable three hours and two minutes, which is essentially inadmissible in today’s short-attention-span society. The original 1937 version is just under two hours, which is the absolute longest any of these films should be.
 
Going into the film, I was convinced that A Star Is Born would be either my favorite or least favorite film of the latter half of 2018. But after watching it, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s just an okay film with incredible moments that make its flaws forgivable.
 
Grade: B+