Smart look at brothers
First-time feature writer and director John Magary’s virtuosic indie “The Mend,” about a pair of oil-and-water brothers in free fall, is by turns opaque, harsh, selfaware, indulgent and wickedly funny. It’s never dull, pummeling you with its prickly smarts.
A bearded, shaggy Josh Lucas stars as Mat, a caustically self-destructive nomad who crashes a New York party thrown by his tightly wound brother Alan (Stephen Plunkett) and his livein girlfriend, Farrah (Mickey Sumner). When Alan and Farrah leave for a hiking trip, Mat stays behind and moves in his single-mom girlfriend (Lucy Owen) and her son for a weird kind of domestic roleplaying.
Act 3 brings Alan back, embittered and mournful about the state of his relationship, for a boozy and angry night of the broken souls. Inspired by the interpersonal tension of Arnaud Desplechin’s emotional epics, yet also the macho vaudeville of John Cassavetes and maybe even family sitcoms, Magary engineers his cramped sibling-bond comedy with a refreshingly precise visual formality. It’s a style that showcases the surgical humor but also evokes a percolating sense of danger. Magary is someone to watch.
The cast is up to the task too, with the coiled Lucas and weary Plunkett walking a fine line between being charismatically damaged and simply too awful to consider.
— Robert Abele “The Mend.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 49 minutes. Playing: Sundance Sunset, Los Angeles.
Teens chase golden dreams
In Spanish-born filmmaker Diego QuemadaDíez’s “La Jaula de Oro” (The Golden Dream), about three Guatemalan teenagers making their way to America, the line between constraint and escape is ever shifting, and the promise of a better life up north must always contend with the reality of what it takes to get there.
Quemada-Díez, a former protégé of British social realist filmmaker Ken Loach, takes a similarly naturalistic approach in telling the story of slum breakaways Juan (Brandon López) and tomboy-disguised Sara (Karen Martínez) and sweet-faced Indian boy Chauk (Rodolfo Domínguez), who tags along and doesn’t speak Spanish. Sara warms to Chauk, sensing a kindred spirit, but Juan, ever practical and determined, would just as soon ditch him.
Through little dialogue, mostly improvised by the nonprofessional cast, Quemada-Díez creates much compassion toward his young travelers and the emotional truths they uncover. Cinematography by Maria Secco makes great use of natural light and the view from migrant-packed trains.
Much of “La Jaula de Oro,” which won an award at Cannes two years ago, has the feeling of a living, breathing photo essay on perseverance, but the journey is also treacherous in ways that create ugly shocks to the heart. The movie exists in a space beyond arguments about immigration policy and border security, and while sometimes a little too willfully pokey, it speaks to something indelibly human about dreams and their costs.
— Robert Abele “La Jaula de Oro.” No MPAA rating. Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes. Playing: TCL Chinese, Hollywood; Cinepolis Pico Rivera.
Atmospheric werewolf tale
The crisply barren, beautiful terrain of coastal northern Jutland in Denmark forms the backdrop for Jonas Arnby’s first feature, “When Animals Dream,” an atmospheric horror story with a compelling main character.
Sullen, gangly 19-year-old Marie (newcomer Sonia Suhl) lives with her parents, a reserved dad (Lars Mikkelsen) and a wheelchairbound, sickly mute for a mom (Sonja Richter). Marie endures razzing at the fishery where she works but also has received kind attention from cute co-worker Daniel (Jakob Oftebro).
When a blotchy rash on her chest begins to sprout hair, and Marie notices her personality becoming more aggressive, she makes a startling connection between her mother’s “illness,” the stares from towns folk and a collusion between Dad and the family doctor.
There’s more than a bit of “Carrie” to this Scandinavian werewolf tale, but Arnby is less interested in arty melodrama than the tension between an individual and society as played out in the revelation of a family secret. Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby’s ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity, by turns watchful and vulnerable, fearful and forthright as she often wordlessly brings to life a transformation she would rather own than see shame in. Her eyes alone convey the fraught world of “When Animals Dream” as much as that cold landscape.
— Robert Abele “When Animals Dream.” MPAA rating: R for violence, sexuality/nudity, drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes. Playing: Laemmle’s NoHo 7, North Hollywood. Also on VOD.
‘Z’ ends in disappointment
An intriguing set-up yields a disappointingly ponderous payoff in Craig Zobel’s post-apocalyptic drama, “Z for Zachariah.”
Set in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, the film concerns a young rural American woman (Margot Robbie), fending for herself on her family’s oddly unaffected farmstead. She forms a fragile bond with a scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) whom she nurses back to health from radiation sickness.
But the possibility that they’re the last two people on Earth proves unfounded with the arrival of a mysterious, handsome stranger (Chris Pine), whose shaded motivations provide the decidedly dystopian framework for a tense triangle.
Adapted by Nissar Modi from the posthumously published novel by YA author Robert C. O’Brien, the film boasts a trio of thoughtfully considered performances. Zobel, who directed the controversial 2012 film “Compliance,” sets an undeniably fertile ground, but he proceeds to let it lie fallow.
What should be a sexually and emotionally charged atmosphere instead ends up feeling like an intellectual exercise, with the actors attempting mightily to simulate chemistry that simply doesn’t exist.
Although some will undoubtedly respond to Lobel’s intensely studied approach to the biblical allegory that is “Z for Zachariah,” others will be inspired to catch some Zs.
— Michael Rechtshaffen “Z for Zachariah.” MPAA rating: PG-13 for a scene of sexuality, partial nudity, brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes. Playing: ArcLight Hollywood.
‘Zipper gets caught by a snag
Another cautionary yarn about a political hopeful whose adulterous behavior catches up with him, Mora Stephens’ “Zipper” hits a snag from the get-go.
Patrick Wilson plays Sam Ellis, a hotshot federal prosecutor with an eye on the attorney general seat, whose insatiable addiction to a high-end escort service comes back to bite him in his aspirations.
This isn’t exactly uncharted terrain. Instead of taking the audience in unfamiliar directions, filmmaker Mora Stephens (who wrote the script with Joel Viertel) is in such a heated rush to get to all the salacious bits, the story doesn’t build crucial dramatic tension.
More problematic: The dependable Wilson, an actor whose screen charisma allows him to get away with playing slightly darker characters, has been given insufficient time to earn viewer sympathy, resulting in a character that comes across primarily as a smug, hypocritical jerk.
Also squandered here are Lena Headey as Wilson’s wronged wife and Richard Dreyfuss channeling Karl Rove, while the intrusive, sinister-sounding score would have been a better fit for a cheesy horror flick.
“The Ashley Madison Story” starring Elvira, perhaps?
— Michael Rechtshaffen
“Zipper.” MPAA rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity, language, brief drug use. Running time: 1 hour, 52 minutes. Playing: Sundance Cinemas, Los Angeles; Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena.