by Peter Schilling Jr.

For whatever reason, 2016 is seeing a glut of musician bio-pics: Hank Williams Sr., Chet Baker, Nina Simone, and Miles Davis are all getting the Hollywood treatment. Thinking back on this genre, it occurred to me that you could count the number of great movies about musicians on one hand, and that hand would have to be without fingers or clenched in a fist (though I am a sucker for Amadeus.) It makes you wonder: what do filmmakers think of when they seek to make a film about the life of a popular singer, other than dollars? Obviously, there’s an admiration of a great talent, which begs the question as to why so many of these movies seem so bereft of skill, much less imagination. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d imagine it’s the same desire that prompts people to want to make movies from books—if a musician’s life is a great story, why, by all means, transform it into a great movie.

by Peter Schilling Jr.

Noting the near absence of rating stars above, the reader can be forgiven thinking that this reviewer loathes Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s work is certainly controversial, certainly has its vocal critics (perhaps most notably Spike Lee), and seems at times to be created almost deliberately to divide moviegoers and scribes. But know this: I’ve enjoyed tremendously the man’s last three movies, and put Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained on my top ten lists, the former as my favorite picture of that year. But Hateful Eight is different, Tarantino fans—it’s dull, it’s offensive only for the sake of offense (and even then, barely so), and, perhaps worst of all, it’s a “message” movie.

by Peter Schilling Jr.

What can one say about the arrival of a new Woody Allen film? Thanks to enough baggage to fill a dozen Pullmans, Allen’s work cannot stand on its own any more. Nowadays, everyone looks at his main characters and wonders if they’re extensions of the director and whether or not there’s anything untoward going on (in the film or in real life).

Uptown Theatre

Director: Woody Allen
Writer: Woody Allen
Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Edward Walson
Cinematographer: Darius Khondji
Editor: Alisa Lepselter
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Emma Stone, Parker Posey, Betsey Aidem, Ethan Phillips, Jamie Blackley, Tom Kemp,

Runtime: 96m.
Genre: Mystery/Comedy
Country: US
Premiere: May 15, 2015 – Cannes Film Festival
US Theatrical Release: July 17, 2015
US Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

by Peter Schilling Jr.

Comedian Amy Schumer has seen her star rise as fast as anyone in the history of American comedy. Having moved swiftly from the ranks of small-time stand-up to runner up in a pair of televised comedy contests, she hit it big with her show Inside Amy Schumer, a mainstay of Comedy Central.

Inside Amy Schumer is a remarkable show, one that has not only proven to be consistently hilarious—already as great and strange a series as Monty Python, SNL of the 1970s, Kids in the Hall, and Key & Peele—but it is an often profoundly surprising program that exposes this country’s misogynistic underbelly like no other show, I would argue, in television history.

Area Theaters

Director: Judd Apatow
Writer: Amy Schumer
Producers: Judd Apatow, Barry Mendel
Cinematographer: Jody Lee Lipes
Editors: William Kerr, Peck Prior, Paul Zucker
Music: Jon Brion
Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Tilda Swinton, LeBron James, Brie Larson, Mike Birbiglia, Colin Quinn, Norman Lloyd, Vanessa Bayer, Dave Attell

Runtime: 125m.
Genre: Romance/Comedy
Country: US
Premiere: March 16, 2015 - SXSW
US Theatrical Release: July 17, 2015
US Distributor: Universal Pictures

by Peter Schilling Jr

Full disclosure: I really dig Woody Allen movies. Every film critic has certain movies that serve as catnip for their critical facilities—romantic comedies, especially those that take me out of this country (or to New York), have a beautifully curated musical score, reference literature, and whose humor is witty and intelligent tend to make me swoon. Allen’s movies usually to push all those buttons, and even his worst pictures tend to make me at least a little bit happy. I’ll defend his maligned You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger to my dying day, and I even enjoyed Whatever Works, though there’s very little I can do to defend that one. I just had a good time watching it.

Uptown Theatre

Director: Woody Allen
Producers: Letty Aronson, Stephen Tenenbaum, Edward Walson
Writer: Woody Allen
Cinematographer: Darius Khondji
Cast: Colin Firth, Emma Stone, Simon McBurney, Eileen Atkins, Marcia Gay Harden, Jacki Weaver, Hamish Linklater, Jeremy Shamos, Erica Leerhsen

Runtime: 97m
Genre: Comedy
Country: USA
US Theatrical Release: July 25, 2014
US Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics

by Peter Schilling Jr.

I haven’t read reviews for Michel Gondry’s newest flight of fancy, Mood Indigo, but I am willing to bet you that there’s a remark or two—good or bad—about the film’s “whimsy.” Gondry has become, in my mind, a man devoted to stories in which his people cavort in magical lands of their own imagination, tales of grown-ups who have never quite grown up. His work fits in very nicely with the films of Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, all of whom have one or two movies I find sublime, and many, many more that are so saccharine and disingenuous as to make me nearly want to puke.

by Peter Schilling Jr.

In Hamburg on a frosty morning, a man rises from out of the sea, climbs up a ladder, and stumbles onto a filthy dock. He crosses a set of railroad tracks, creeps through dozens of new automobiles, parked in a massive lot en route to German dealerships. Finding one of the cars unlocked, our man climbs inside, cold, probably hungry, obviously exhausted. In no time he is asleep.

Back in the 20th Century, we might have looked upon this man as merely a refugee seeking a new life—perhaps a Soviet dissident pushing past the Iron Curtain, or maybe someone seeking asylum just because conditions are horrible back home in Iran. But this is the 21st Century, and this is Hamburg, which was home to a key terrorist cell that included many participants in the 9/11 attacks. And so this man, with eastern European features and a scraggly beard, who later is seen praying at a mosque, now carries incredible symbolic and political weight. Is he a terrorist? Or is he just a man, seeking, as many immigrants do, safety from oppression?

Lagoon Cinema

Director: Anton Corbijn
Producers: Andrea Calderwood, Simon Cornwell, Stephen Cornwell, Gail Egan, Malte Grunert
Writers: Andrew Bovell, John le Carré (novel)
Cinematographer: Benoît Delhomme
Editor: Claire Simpson
Music: Herbert Grönemeyer
Cast: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Rachel McAdams, Willem Dafoe, Nina Hoss, Robin Wright, Homayoun Ershadi

Runtime: 121m
Genre: Drama/Thriller
Country: UK/USA/Germany
Premiere: January 19, 2014 – Sundance Film festival
US Theatrical Release: July 22, 2014
US Distributor: Roadside Attractions

by Peter Schilling Jr.

When you go to the theaters this summer, you could seek heroes that go flying about in tights and capes straight from the pages of DC and Marvel comics, saving the world from bad guys that look a lot like they do. You could watch the planet get ripped apart by Transformers or Japanese monsters, run from CGI apes, chortle at comic cops, or weep while beautiful people battle life-threatening diseases.

Uptown Theatre

Director: Lukas Moodysson
Producer: Lars Jönsson
Writer: Lukas Moodysson, Coco Moodysson (graphic novel)
Cinematographer: Ulf Brantås
Editor: Michal Leszczylowski
Cast: Mira Barkhammer, Mira Grosin, Liv LeMoyne, Anna Rydgren, Charlie Falk, David Dencik, Ann-Sofie Rase, Jonathan Salomonsson, Mattias Wiberg

Runtime: 102m..
Genre: Drama
Countries: Sweden/Denmark
Premiere: August 31, 2013 – Venice Film Festival
US Theatrical Release: May 30, 2014
US Distributor: Magnolia Pictures

by Peter Schilling Jr

For a person who grew up in the Midwest, traveling to Europe or New York—places that seem to be full of attractive people all falling in love while dining at sidewalk cafes—makes my mind spin. Films that bring this vision to life are like catnip to me. Even the worst Woody Allen movie—and for the most part, they’ve been pretty awful lately (yes, that includes his recent Oscar winners)—is still appealing with its curated score of old Dixieland jazz and philosophical discussions in Manhattan or London or Paris or Barcelona. Who doesn’t want to frolic in those cities?

Lagoon Cinema

Director: Cédric Klapisch
Producer: Cédric Klapisch, Bruno Levy
Writer: Cédric Klapisch
Cinematographer: Natasha Braier
Editor: Anne-Sophie Bion
Music: Christophe Minck
Cast: Romain Duris, Audrey Tautou, Cécile De France, Kelly Reilly, Sandrine Holt, Flore Bonaventura, Li Jun Li, Peter McRobbie, Jason Kravitz, Adrian Martinez, Sharrief Pugh

Runtime: 117m.
Genre: Romance/Comedy
Country: France
US Theatrical Release: May 16, 2014
US Distributor: Cohen Media Group

by Peter Schilling Jr

One evening in East Texas, in the last year of the 1980s, a burglar breaks into a home. The homeowner, a mulleted, buff, though clearly baffled man nervously digs up his revolver (his hands shake as he loads the thing) in order to protect his wife and child. As the homeowner creeps into the living room, he sees the shadow of man ransacking his living room. Shots are fired. The burglar is dead.

From this seemingly simple premise emerges a complex—at times ridiculously complex—and compelling little thriller, Cold in July, from director Jim Mickle, and based (loosely, I’ve heard) on a novel by Joe R. Landsdale (who wrote the novel on which Bubba Ho-Tep was based—that was a novel?) Mickle is the director of two moderately acclaimed horror films (Stake Land and We Are What We Are) and his love of 1980s drive-in and straight-to-video fare shows in Cold in July, which features a pulsating electronic score that John Carpenter himself might have scored and plenty of period detail.

Lagoon Cinema

Director: Jim Mickle
Producers: Adam Folk, Linda Moran, Marie Savare
Writers: Nick Damici, Jim Mickle, Joe R. Lansdale (novel)
Cinematographer: Ryan Samul
Editor: John Paul Horstmann, Jim Mickle
Music: Jeff Grace
Cast: Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, Sam Shepard, Vinessa Shaw, Wyatt Russell, Nick Damici, Lanny Flaherty, Kristin Griffith, Dorothea Swiac, Joe Lanza, Rachel Zeiger-Haag, Laurent Rejto, Happy Anderson, Tim Lajcik, Brogan Hall, Ken Holmes

Runtime: 109m
Genre: Thriller
Country: USA/France
Premiere: January 18, 2014 – Sundance Film Festival
US Theatrical Release: May 23, 2014
US Distributor: IFC Films