After Truth: Disinformation and the Cost of Fake News
Infuriating documentary about the rise of disinformation as an accepted tool in American politics. Director Andrew Rossi takes a look at a few famous conspiracy theories from the 2010s — including Jade Helm, Pizzagate, the murder of Seth Rich — and dives deep into how they spread through right-wing disinformation, as well as the consequences they had on the people involved. Rossi, along with editor Cindy Lee, does an excellent job of telling all of these stories, and humanizing the people involved so that they resonate as actual people beyond the pages of a news article. It’s truly remarkable how Rossi has managed to get access to so much shocking and incriminating footage — none more so than backstage at a hoax press conference by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl to falsely accuse Robert Mueller of sexual misconduct. Hard to find too much more to say about this film, since its goal is very surface-level: disinformation exists now, and here are some people who have had their lives unfairly disrupted because of it. Rossi doesn’t focus so much on the long-term ramifications of this post-truth era or propose any solutions. The closest the film comes to a solution is to suggest that fake news must be countered with the truth. An absorbing but frustrating watch — ok yeah, this is terrible, so what now?
Distributor: HBO
Release date: Mar. 19, 2020
Grade: B
The Banker
Biopic of Bernard Garrett (Anthony Mackie) and Joe Morris (Samuel L. Jackson), two businessmen in the 1950s American South who strike it rich and buy a bank in Texas in order to help African American people get loans — which they can only accomplish by hiring Matt Steiner (Nicholas Hoult) and training him to be the white face of their operation. A decent if rather unremarkable film that you’ll appreciate then immediately forget. Sturdily directed by George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau), though he and his army of writers — it’s seriously never a good sign when a film has no less than FIVE credited writers — oversimplify this story, effectively ironing out all its nuances and complexities. Take, for instance, the sequence in which Bernard and Joe give Matt a crash course in business and finance so that he can convince white executives of his expertise... and the film makes it seem like he accomplishes this in a matter of days. Convincing period costumes (by Aieisha Li) and sets (by John Collins). Jackson and Hoult are always watchable, while Mackie is as wooden as ever. This film is perfectly fine, though it lacks enough risk or ambition for me to really care.
Distributor: Apple TV+
Release date: Mar. 20, 2020
Grade: C+
Big Time Adolescence
Mo (Griffin Gluck) is a high school boy who’s best friends with his sister’s ex-boyfriend, a twentysomething slacker pothead named Zeke (Pete Davidson). As you’d expect, things get way out of hand — drunken tattoos, being wasted at school, drug-dealing, the cops! — before the inevitable lessons are learned. Writer-director Jason Orley’s film debut (which premiered at Sundance) is pretty formulaic and predictable but amusing enough to be worth your time. Gluck has been a charming TV star for years and deserves more lead roles like this. Another fun role as well for Oona Laurence (for our money, one of the most exciting young actresses currently working in film), as Mo’s love interest. Davidson, though not exactly playing against type here, is a solid movie star — the greatest asset of his performance is that, though he plays Zeke’s dead-end life for laughs, he’s always aware of how tragic the character is underneath it all.
Distributor: Hulu
Release date: Mar. 20, 2020
Grade: B-
Blow the Man Down
In a small fishing village in Maine, sisters Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) and Mary Beth Connolly (Morgan Saylor) operate their family fishmonger business as they grieve the recent death of their mother. Following a drunken night out at the local dive bar, Mary Beth kills a man in self-defense and flees the scene. The sisters’ decision to hide the body and cover up the incident leads them to uncover some of the village’s darkest secrets. There’s a bit of Coen influence in the way first-time filmmakers Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy infuse their rural crime story with black comedy and well-intentioned characters who find themselves in over their heads. There’s also the strange delight of how they punctuate the film with scenes of fishermen singing sea shanties. But what makes this so special is the female gaze the filmmakers bring to their storytelling. This is a town run by its matriarchs — Marceline Hugot, Annette O’Toole, June Squibb, and a terrifying Margo Martindale — and the Connolly sisters soon learn that it’s unwise to step out of line. An exciting debut by Cole and Krudy, who really excel at world-building. This is a fishy New England underworld that’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.
Distributor: Amazon Prime Video
Release date: Mar. 20, 2020
Grade: B+
Go Karts
OK, friends, it’s safe to say that I’ve found my favourite new sub-genre. Three months into the year, and this is already our second cheesy teen sports comedy from Australia. A teenage boy (newcomer William Lodder) moves to a new town in coastal Western Australia with his widowed mother (the great Frances O’Connor, wasted in concerned mom mode), where he falls in love with go kart racing. This is a movie where a boy can compete in the regional, state, and national championships without seemingly ever leaving his hometown. It’s a movie where a boy can skid off the road and crash, but still place fourth in the race. Along the way, he encounters plenty of stock characters — a disgruntled coach struggling with old traumas (Richard Roxburgh), a bumbling cop (Dan Wyllie), and even a cartoonish evil bully with Draco Malfoy hair (Cooper van Grootel). And don’t miss the emotional climactic speech in a sudden torrential rainstorm that only lasts ten seconds. As far as movies go, this has all the originality and ambition of the photograph that comes with the picture frame, but there’s something about this kind of bad, charming movie that I just find delightful. First-time feature director Owen Trevor (best known for directing a bunch of Top Gear episodes) had me invested in go karting; screenwriter Steve Worland had me groaning at his high-school-English-class dialogue. Junky comfort food at its most endearingly banal.
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Mar. 13, 2020
Grade: C-
Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America's Elections
Can you tell this was released in an election year? This is the second documentary this month alone from HBO that details the systematic ways that democracy is under attack in the United States. Follow-up of sorts to the 2006 HBO documentary Hacking Democracy, which demonstrated how vulnerable voting machines in the U.S. are to hacking. Returning directors Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels (this time alongside Sarah Teale) examine the vulnerabilities exploited by Russian cyber warfare in the 2016 election, as well as which vulnerabilities are still present in 2020. They also bring back cybersecurity expert Harri Hursti, who successfully hacked a voting machine in the previous film — this time around, he shows how easy it is not only to buy decommissioned voting machines on eBay, but also how their out-of-date technology can be exploited by bad actors to change votes already cast or alter voters’ identifying info in order to make it more difficult for them to vote. Just like After Truth, this film doesn’t provide any solutions, but in a culture defined by complacency, it’s a film that reminds the viewer how easily democracy dies and so how urgently we must remain informed. To their credit, the directors present this exceptionally well-researched film in a way that makes its complex topic easy to understand — and terrifying.
Distributor: HBO
Release date: Mar. 26, 2020
Grade: B
Lost Girls
Mari Gilbert (Amy Ryan) is a single mother in small-town New York whose estranged eldest daughter disappears. When the police don’t take her case seriously, she begins a one-woman crusade to solve this mystery — leading to a media circus and the discovery of the bodies of other missing girls. Ryan brings great conviction to this role, while Thomasin McKenzie and Oona Laurence offer strong support as her other daughters, though none of these characters feels especially well-defined. Director Liz Garbus is an Academy Award-nominated documentarian (What Happened, Miss Simone?), and she brings a no-frills gritty realism to her narrative debut. She and screenwriter Michael Werwie have such a worthy goal here: illustrating how women are failed by the American justice system — particularly when they’re poor, and especially when they do sex work. Story based on the real-life victims of the Long Island serial killer, who remains at large, so this is definitely an important work of public service that’s worth your time. If only Garbus’s somewhat sleepy filmmaking had the urgency to match the story she’s telling.
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Mar. 13, 2020
Grade: B-
The Platform
Two prisoners sit on either side of a dimly lit cell. A slab descends through the ceiling from countless levels above containing the remains of a feast. The prisoners have only a few minutes to eat as much as they can before the slab moves down to further levels in the pit below. What hell is this? And what happens if you’re on level so low that the food is all gone by the time the slab gets to you? Spanish filmmaker Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia makes his feature debut with this dystopian thriller that I felt in my body in a primal way — at one point, I realized that I’d been clenching my stomach and not breathing for... a while. Terrific production design by Azegiñe Urigoitia that truly sells this horrific world. Screenwriters David Desola and Pedro Rivero have so many fascinating and intellectually distressing ideas — the abuses of capitalism, the difficulties of revolution in complacent society, the inherent selfishness of humanity — but they don’t really have a developed central thesis, and that hurts the film’s ability to land its ending. Nevertheless, I was really invested in these characters and their stories. Iván Massagué an excellent protagonist who sells the confusion and terror of all of this. But it’s Zorion Eguileor as his first cellmate whose performance will haunt my dreams, obvio.
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Mar. 20, 2020
Grade: B
The Room
In this sci-fi thriller from French director Christian Volckman (Renaissance), a couple moves into an old house in rural New York state and discovers a hidden room that makes all their material desires come true. Based on this premise, I fully expected a predictable careful-what-you-wish-for monkey’s paw kind of story, so I was quite happy to see the plot of this become increasingly unhinged. Volckman’s in a hurry to get to the good stuff, though; we barely get a sense of who these people are before they’re off wishing for everything under the sun. Murky sense of place too — this film is a co-production of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg and stars Olga Kurylenko (who is Ukrainian-French) and Kevin Janssens (who is Belgian) as Kate and Matt, who live in New York and speak to each other in stiff, difficult-to-place European accents. It’s just hard to believe that these two would speak to each other privately in English. Great production design by Françoise Joset who takes us inside the walls of this house, and somehow even beyond those. Interesting premise and execution, but Volckman should have made this in French, and with a screenplay that develops these characters more substantially.
Distributor: Shudder
Release date: Mar. 12, 2020
Grade: C+
Spenser Confidential
Ever wish you could watch a movie where Mark Wahlberg plays a former criminal who kicks ass and takes down the shady guys he used to trust who have set him up? What’s that — I’m describing half of Wahlberg’s movies? Ah, well, if you’re into that kind of thing, boy does Netflix have a delightful treat for you! Wahlberg reunites with director Peter Berg for yet another tired collaboration featuring the star playing yet another badass whose oversize muscles try to compensate for his lack of character development. Alan Arkin, meanwhile, phones it in as his friend and mentor. Berg has been an occasionally interesting filmmaker, but here it feels like he’s assembled a bunch of pieces churned out by the Hollywood content factory and slapped his name on it. This movie is not even terrible — it’s just 100% formulaic and forgettable, as if everyone involved had to promise to put in their absolute minimum effort before they could sign their contracts. There is one actor who didn’t get that memo, though, and unexpectedly it’s Austin Post (aka Post Malone), who brings a frightening, unpredictable energy to his role as Wahlberg’s unhinged fellow inmate. Unless you’re a Mark Wahlberg Mega-Fan, there really isn’t any reason you’d need to watch this.
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Mar. 6, 2020
Grade: C-
Stargirl
Oh boy, is this Disney+ teen romance ever dreadful. Leo (Graham Verchere) is a sad, introverted teenage boy, still mourning the recent death of his father. His life is changed forever when a mysterious girl named Stargirl (Grace VanderWaal) arrives at school, teaches him about love and kindness, then disappears without a trace forever. Perhaps the most eye-rolling example ever of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope — I never once believed this “character” has a private life of her own. She performs good deeds for strangers and says things like: “Scream, Leo. Don’t you want the universe to hear you?” Many times, I wondered if Stargirl even exists outside of Leo’s imagination. Not that Leo is a believable character either — director Julia Hart and her co-writers seem never to have met a teenager before. They sure work hard to be cute and quirky, though. (Leo is besties with an adult paleontologist, don’t you know — hi, Giancarlo Esposito!) Marketed as a jukebox musical... but that’s actually really insulting: the only musical numbers involve Stargirl strumming her ukulele and singing gentle songs while students watch. Not sure if the massive storytelling issues were lifted straight from Jerry Spinelli’s novel, or if Hart and co. accomplished those all by themselves. Either way, there are far better films out there for you to watch with your own teens.
Distributor: Disney+
Release date: Mar. 13, 2020
Grade: D
Uncorked
Likeable but mediocre drama about Elijah (Mamoudou Athie), poised to take over his family’s BBQ restaurant in Memphis, but who secretly dreams of being a sommelier. Narrative arcs for Elijah and his parents (played by Courtney B. Vance and Niecy Nash) are 100% formulaic, but I did enjoy spending time learning about what it takes to be a world-class wine expert — it honestly seems like sorcery to me. Really dumb recurring joke has Elijah’s dad confusing ‘sommelier’ with ‘Somali’: “You really wanna do that African wine thing, huh?” Yikes. This is writer-director Prentice Penny’s film debut, after years of writing sitcom episodes and directing HBO’s Insecure, and you can tell that he’s still developing his filmmaking aesthetic. Like so many of Netflix’s non-prestige films, this is formally bland and excessively lit. As appealing as much of this is, one hopes that Penny will gain the confidence to take more risks with his craft. Athie a cute and charming lead.
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: Mar. 27, 2020
Grade: C+
