Strong women were everywhere at Sundance last week -- and they flourished in three of the festival's standouts: Smashed, The Surrogate, and Middle of Nowhere. What's perhaps most interesting is that these women are in more traditional "caretaker" roles, not "I-am-woman-hear-me-roar" ones -- and yet they manage to prevail, to care not only for the men around them but also, ultimately, for themselves and their own narratives.
When you hear that director Josh Trank and writer Max Landis (son of John) are out to reinvent the superhero origin story via Chronicle, their found footage sci-fi film effort, all kinds of warranted warning flags go up. After all, this is a genre that can't decide between making one anxious (via the whole 'you are there' narrative) or nauseous (thanks to all the shaky camera antics). Worse still, there's the nagging "why are you filming everything?" element that never seems to be addressed. Finally, many of these movies avoid big, lavish special effects in order to maintain a level of lo-fi "realism." Thankfully, Trank and Landis are prepared to address these concerns and then some. The result is one of the best uses of the filmmaking format since a trio of documentarians entered the Burkittsville Woods, looking for a certain witch.
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Say this for director Ken Kwapis: he must know how to make actors comfortable. He's directed great episodes of some of the best TV shows ever made, including Freaks and Geeks, The Office, Parks and Recreation, and The Larry Sanders Show, while cultivating a side career making inferior big-screen vehicles for small-screen stars like Jason Alexander (Dunston Checks In), Fran Drescher (The Beautician and the Beast), and every young female on network TV in 2005 (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants). Big Miracle is his second feature starring his Office-mate John Krasinski. That Krasinski came bounding back after their previous collaboration, License to Wed, which in addition to being terrible failed to boost the careers of anyone involved, must speak to Kwapis's professionalism, friendliness, and excellent work helming a dozen golden-age Office episodes, among other qualities that have little to do with License to Wed itself (again: just terrible).
To their credit, Big Miracle is a lot better than License to Wed; rather than waste its talented (and once again TV-heavy) cast's time, it merely kills it, honorably. Krasinski plays Adam Carlson, a local TV newsman out of Anchorage stuck doing human-interest stories in Point Barrow, Alaska, who stumbles across a family of California gray whales trapped underneath some ice. His report gets picked up nationally, and attracts the attention of Adam's ex-girlfriend Rachel (Drew Barrymore), a Greenpeace rep who flies in, determined to save the creatures.
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Near the middle of Madonna's aloof period romance W.E., King Edward VII (James D'Arcy) encourages his lover, American socialite Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), to stand up before a gathered crowd and entertain with a dance. A crunchy Sex Pistols guitar riff fills the back beat - never mind (the bollocks) that the band recorded a full four decades after Edward and Wallis married - and Johnny Rotten passionately screams his way through the punk staple "Pretty Vacant." Ironically, both words describe Madonna's feature to a tee.
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As far back as the earliest days of cinematic macabre, the haunted house has been a staple of the scary movie. From ghosts roaming a spooky manor to unexplained noises that are often much more than "bumps" in the night, these places are creepshow classics. Up until recently, few films have delivered the entire paranormal package -- atmosphere, acting, mythology and menace. Enter The Woman in Black. Adapted from the novel by Susan Hill (which was also turned into a stage play and a 1989 British TV movie), it stars Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe as a young lawyer sent to the outskirts of England to clean up the messy estate of a recently deceased client. There, he learns of the area's terrible curse and the title figure, who seems to be behind a rash of unexplained killings.
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The law of unintended consequences gets a gentle working-over in Laura Israel's good-natured but dismayingly thin documentary about a windfarm project that divides the small town of Meredith in upstate New York. The controversy will strike many as patently absurd: Who would have a problem with wind power? "I was naïve," says Frank Bachler, the town supervisor, who starts the film off talking about what a good idea it seemed like. Money for the town, clean energy, etc. That was before people started realizing that the windmills would be 40 stories tall and emit a near-constant drone. Then people started going on the Internet, and if the modern age has proven anything, it's that the online research will provide reasons to be terrified of anything.
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There are certainly things that go bump in the night in Ti West's The Innkeepers, the young filmmaker's fourth feature following the nerve-singeing House of the Devil. Floors are creaking, doors are slamming, and pianos are playing inexplicably at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a small-town inn getting ready to close its doors for good. For the inn's two lone remaining on-site employees, Claire (Sara Paxton) and Luke (Pat Healy), these spooky instances prove essential to distracting themselves from not only their impending unemployment but also the wasted days that have led them to the Yankee Pedlar.
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Fans of the former Grey's Anatomy star needn't worry -- Katherine Heigl's self-guided descent into career irrelevance continues unabated with the god-awful crime rom-com One for the Money. After equally appalling efforts like 27 Dresses, Life as We Know It, and The Ugly Truth, the Knocked Up beauty is here adapting mystery writer Janet Evanovich's popular character Stephanie Plum in a combination of uncouth Jersey Shore shrillness and overwritten narrative tripe.
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