“The Adderall Diaries” opens Friday at AMC Fitchburg. R, 1:45, one and a half stars out of four.
Stephen Elliott’s “The Adderall Diaries” would be a beast of a book for any filmmaker to try to adapt. The hazy brew of addiction memoir and true-crime nonfiction may have worked well on the page, but writer-director Pamela Romanowsky’s confused and easily distracted film feels like several first acts jammed together with nowhere to go.
“The Confirmation” is now playing at AMC Johnson Creek 16. R, 1:37, three stars out of four.
I want to live in the depressed Washington State town that’s the setting of Bob Nelson’s “The Confirmation,” because it seems to be populated entirely by great character actors. Clive Owen, Maria Bello, Robert Forster, Tim Blake Nelson, Patton Oswalt, Matthew Modine, and Stephen Tobolowsky all live here. While you don’t see him, you just know Paul Giamatti presides as mayor.
I’m guessing all these fine actors were drawn to the film by Nelson’s low-key but utterly convincing screenplay, which lets these performers convey a lot with just a little. Nelson wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska,” and there are definitely areas of overlap here — a focus on a strained father-son relationship, an unsentimental view of small-town town life. But “The Confirmation” might be a little less bleak, a little more forgiving of its characters and their shortcomings.
“The Boy & The Beast” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 1:59, three stars out of four.
The Japanese anime film “The Boy & The Beast” begins with a thunderous intro, as we see part-human/part-animal warriors battling for supremacy, their silhouettes wreathed in fire.
It may seem a strange intro for a movie that, at heart, is as much a tender drama about blended families as it is a martial arts saga. Writer-director Mamoru Hosoda (“Wolf Children,” “Summer Wars”) expertly blends emotion and action into a gorgeous and enchanting anime film aimed at older children and adults.
THE LADY IN THE VAN
“The Lady in the Van” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. PG-13, 1:44, three stars out of four.
What would possess a man to not only help a homeless person, but to let that person live on his property for 15 years? Heroism? Selfessness? Generosity?
Timidness, Alan Bennett insists.
The British playwright and essayist really let a homeless woman park her van in his driveway for 15 years. He turned the experience into a play and now a movie, “The Lady in the Van,” in which the dyspeptic Bennett (played to a T by Alex Jennings) recoils at the notion that he’s being kind “It’s just easier,” he insists almost defensively to a neighbor. “It’s not kindness.” Sure.
“A Perfect Day” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. R, 1:46, two and a half stars out of four.
War is hell, and cleaning up afterwards is no picnic either.
That’s the message coming from “A Perfect Day,” a black comedy that’s the English-language debut from Spanish writer-director Fernando Leon de Aranoa (“Mondays in the Sun”). The film is set in the Balkans during the 1990s, but focuses not on those who fought in the conflict, but humanitarian aid workers who came from other countries to help the innocents caught in the middle.
“2016 Oscar Nominated Films — Live Action” opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas. Not rated, 1:30, three stars out of four. I’ll be doing a post-show chat after the 7:15 p.m. Tuesday show.
The five nominees contending for an Oscar for Best Live-Action Short are usually a dour lot. Searing but hopeful drama about a child caught in a war zone? Check. Quietly comic tale featuring hesitant cooperation between two sides in a protracted, seemingly impossible conflict? Miserablist European drama about a family in crisis? Check.
Which is not to say the films are bad. Some of this year’s offerings, which opens Friday at Sundance Cinemas, are quite good. But when so many inventive short films are being made and distributed, it’s a little tiring to see the same familiar storylines, the same conventional narratives, repeating themselves.
“Mojave” opens Friday at AMC Johnson Creek. R, 1:37, two stars out of four.
You know how, sometimes, an actor will be on some kind of golden streak, with one great performance and one great film after another, until you think that there’s no physical way they will ever make a bad movie ever again?
Oh, hi, Oscar Isaac in “Mojave.”
Isaac has had an incredible run lately, from “Inside Llewyn Davis” to “Ex Machina” to, of course, “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” But that run comes to a screeching halt with “Mojave,” a limp and pretentious thriller that plays like the “Entourage” guys tried to make a Hitchcock movie: The Brah Who Knew Too Much.
“Lamb” opens Friday at the AMC Desert Star in Baraboo. Not rated, 1:37, three stars out of four.
A few years back, I went up to Door County to write a story on the filming of a movie there, “Feed the Fish.” Although Green Bay native Tony Shalhoub was the big name on the film, the stars were two affable actors I had never heard of before, Katie Aselton and Ross Partridge. They seemed like nice, affable people, suited to a fun lightweight romantic comedy.
But Aselton went on to write and direct the dark thriller “Black Rock,” while Partridge has now written, directed and stars in the beautiful and unsettling new drama “Lamb.” Don’t judge a book by its affable cover, I guess.
From the outset, you think you know what sort of independent movie John Magary’s “The Mend” is going to be. Two brothers, one a straight-arrow, the other a ne’er-do-well rebel type, have been estranged for years, but manage to bond over one crazy weekend in New York City. The rebel learns to be a little responsible and, hey, maybe that stuffy straight arrow learns to loosen his tie and be a little more spontaneous, right? Maybe one of them could be played by Josh Lucas, the blandly handsome actor from the NBC version of “The Firm” and doing voice over ads for Home Depot.
“The Mend” does have many of those elements in place, including Lucas. But it is a bracingly different sort of film, a funny and scabrous look at family dysfunction that lives many loose ends both narrative and visual untied. Magary always wants to show rather than tell, suggest rather than show, and it makes for a film that gets its hooks in more deeply than you might anticipate.
“In the Heart of the Sea” opens Friday at Point, Palace, AMC Fitchburg and Sundance. PG-13, 2:02, two stars out of four.
“If I don’t write it, I fear I shall never write again. If I do write it, I fear it won’t be good enough.”
That’s a young Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) agonizing over writing the novel that will be “Moby Dick,” but I wonder if director Ron Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt had similar misgivings about making “In the Heart of the Sea.” Technically the film isn’t a straight adaptation of Melville’s novel, but based on the real-life events that supposedly inspired it (made into a nonfiction book of the same name by Nathaniel Philbrick). But the shadow of the whale and of the Great American Novel loom large over a weak screenplay and some stock seafaring characters.
Madison Movie 