Culture Representation: Taking place in San Francisco and in Sri Lanka, the dramatic film “Pastor’s Kid” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with some Latin people and Indian people) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A drug-abusing college student has trouble dealing with the anger and resentment she feels toward her pastor mother, who is a born-again Christian and a recovering alcoholic.
Culture Audience: “Pastor’s Kid” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching a faith-based movie that is also a well-made psychological drama.
“Pastor’s Kid” is not a typical faith-based drama because it’s not preachy. The movie has a lot of cursing and drug use. It’s also an absorbing psychological portrait of a troubled college student who’s angry at her pastor mother.
Directed by Benjamin Ironside Koppin (who co-wrote the “Pastor’s Kid” screenplay with his wife Kristin Koppin), “Pastor’s Kid” is being advertised as “based on a true story,” although the movie never says the name of the person whose life story is the basis of this movie. That anonymity does not detract from “Pastor’s Kid,” which has a story that can apply to anyone who’s become caught up in drug abuse and has unresolved feelings about their childhood. Much of the movie shows flashbacks to the unhappy childhood of the movie’s protagonist, as a way of explaining how she ended up being so miserable
People who watch “Pastor’s Kid” should not expect a lot of fast-paced action. It’s a “slice of life” movie that takes place in about a month in the life of a San Francisco college student named Riley (played by Courtney Bandeko), who is also a drug dealer on the side. Riley regularly abuses alcohol and cocaine, the drug that she sells.
The movie opens with a flashback to when Riley’s mother Karen Taylor (played by Krista Morin) has become the executive pastor of an unnamed Christian church when Riley was a teenager. Throughout the movie, more flashbacks (which are not shown in chronological order) reveal that Karen is a born-again Christian who spent most of Riley’s childhood as a single parent the throes of alcoholism. At some point, when Riley was a teenager, Karen got sober and married a Christian man named James (played by James C. Burns), who was very strict with Riley. Predictably, this caused friction in the family.
Riley’s childhood is depicted when Riley was 7 years old (played by Marisol Miranda) and was often left to fend for herself and take care of her younger brother Luke, who is about five years younger than Riley. A flashback shows Karen mentioning that Riley and Luke have different fathers. (Noah Frazier portrays Luke as an adult. Ezekiel Koppin has the role of Luke as a child.)
Riley lives with two housemates, who are also her friends from childhood: Tim (played by Joshua Matthew Peters), who has a messy mane of dreadlocks, is openly gay and very flamboyant. Sarah (played by Peyton Dilweg), another “wild child,” is commitment-phobic when it comes to dating.
For the past year, Sarah has been dating a musician named Lance (played by Samual Charles), but she doesn’t want to describe him her “boyfriend.” Lance is also a college student who plays in a band and has reluctantly gone along with his father’s wishes to major in business, not music. Lance often parties with Riley, Tim and Sarah.
An early scene in “Pastor’s Kid” shows Riley waking up from a stupor at her place, She fnds out that Tim rescued her the night before from being kidnapped and potentially raped by two male strangers who were trying to put Riley in a car parked outside a bar called Smugglers. Riley has only fragmented memories of what happened, but Tim tells her that a Smugglers bartender named James (whom Riley remembers serving her) has a reputation of drugging women’s drinks.
It’s a sinister scenario that could have ended up a lot worse than it did. Riley tells her mother what happened, and Karen is understandably concerned. She tells Riley that she’s knows what she’s going through and offers to help without trying to scold or shame Riley. Later in the movie, Karen invites Riley on a Christian group trip to Sri Lanka.
“Pastor’s Kid” has a very compelling portrayal of emotional damage and how it affects people’s attitudes and outlooks on life. The movie doesn’t pass judgment on Riley or Karen but instead candidly shows their story from Riley’s perspective, as an example of what can happen when a parent and a child struggle to deal with unresolved issues. Thanks to very good acting from the cast (particularly from Bandeko), realistic dialogue and well-edited filmmaking, “Pastor’s Kid” can maintain viewer interest without being pretentious or melodramatic.
Even though Riley is going through a lot of emotional turmoil, the movie offers some comic relief in hallucinations that she has of a man resembling Jesus Christ (played by Jon Ryan McMahon), who freely admits he’s not the real Jesus Christ because the real Jesus (according to the Bible) was not white, and he certainly didn’t wear modern flip-flop shoes. This Christ-like person is not welcomed by Riley. In fact, she’s often irritated by him. Unlike most faith-based movies, “Pastor’s Kid” doesn’t present religion as somehow magically being able to solve problems but instead depicts religion as an optional way to go on a path of healing.
Atlas Distribution Company released “Pastor’s Kid” in select U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Australia in the late 1990s, in the dramatic film “Shayda” features a white and Arabic/Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: While living in Australia, an Iranian immigrant and her 6-year-old daughter stay at a shelter for domestic abuse survivors, as the mother worries for their safety and how her impending divorce from her estranged Iranian husband will affect her immigration visa issues.
Culture Audience: “Shayda” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of are interested in watching movies about issues related to immigration and domestic abuse.
“Shayda” tells a nuanced and meaningful story of an Iranian immigrant woman raising her 6-year-old daughter, as they live in an Australian shelter for domestic violence survivors. The film shows in heart-wrenching details what coping with trauma looks like. There have been many movies about women and children seeking safety from domestic violence, but they are rarely told from the perspectives of immigrants living in a nation where they are not citizens.
Written and directed by Noora Niasari, “Shayda” is inspired by Niasari’s own childhood experiences in Australia of temporarily staying at a domestic violence shelter with her mother. “Shayda” had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and made the rounds at several other film festivals in 2023, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival. “Shayda” was Australia’s official entry for Best International Feature Film for the 2024 Academy Awards but didn’t make it on the Oscar shortlist to be nominated.
In “Shayda” (which takes place in Australia in the late 1990s), a woman named Shayda (played by Zar Amir Ebrahimi) is seeking shelter from her abusive, estranged husband Hossein (played by Osamah Sami), who is also an Iranian immigrant. Hossein and Shadya moved to Australia because Hossein is a graduate student at an unnamed university. Shayda and Hossein’s 6-year-old daughter is Mona (played by Selina Zahednia), who is an inquisitive and obedient child who is a big fan of “The Lion King” movie.
Shayda wants to divorce Hossein, but the matter is complicated because the divorce has to be in Iran. Shayda wants to keep living in Australia after the divorce. Hossein wants to move back to Iran after he graduates from his university program. He also threatens Shayda by saying that she will be killed if she goes through with the divorce.
The movie has some scenes showing Shayda’s frustrations of doing depositions by phone for these divorce proceedings. (Remember, this story take place the late 1990s, when video streaming over the Internet was still very uncommon and not accessible to the average person.) She often has the sinking feeling that the attorneys and judge involved in the divorce are biased against her, because it’s considered to be scandalous in patriarchal Iran for a wife to divorce her husband.
The shelter is operated by a no-nonsense manager named Cathy (played by Bev Killick), who often has to instruct the frightened women at the shelter on what to do, in case their abusers come looking for them or try to violate child custody arrangements. There’s a scene where an unidentified person in a car is parked across the street from the shelter and seems to have the place under surveillance. Cathy goes outside to confront the driver, who quickly drives off. It’s implied that one of the women in the shelter is being stalked.
There are no flashback scenes in the movie of Shayda being abused, nor does she tell anyone the specifics of what Hossein did it her. It’s left up to viewers’ speculation how bad the abuse was. Throughout the movie, Shayda shows signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. She has trouble sleeping. And she’s very paranoid that Hossein is out to get her, to the point where she sometimes hallucinates that he is in the same room, when he isn’t even in the building.
Shayda also has a dilemma of how much she should shield Mona from the truth. There are hints that Mona doesn’t know exactly what’s going on with the divorce, because Mona sometimes complains to Shayda that she wants to go home. Shayda doesn’t want Mona to hate Hossein, but she doesn’t want Mona to completely trust hm either.
Hossein’s visitations with Mona are fraught with tension. Shayda doesn’t say it out loud, but she’s worried that Hossein will go somewhere wth Mona and never come back. Understandably, Shayda gets very upset when Hossein in late in bringing back Monda during a visitation. Shayda doesn’t want to get too upset with Hossein because she doesn’t want to make their divorce proceedings worse. Shayda sees indications that Hossein has been spying on her, either by himself or by getting other people to do the spying for him
Shayda keeps mostly to herself and isn’t very sociable with the other women at the shelter. The other shelter residents include shy Lara (played by Eve Morey), extrovert Vi (played by Jillian Nguyen) and racist “wild child” Renee (played by Lucinda Armstrong Hall), a young single mother who expects Shayda to look after Renee’s toddler, as if Shayda is a servant. Shayda’s closest friend is another Iranian immigrant named Elly (played by Rina Mousavi), who is very concerned about how Shayda’s horrible domestic problems are affecting Shayda’s mental health.
Elly encourages a reluctant Shayda to go to nightclubs and parties with her to meet new people, have some fun, and take Shayda’s mind off of her troubles. It’s at one of these nightclubs that Shayda meets Farhad (played by Mojean Aria), an attractive cousin of Elly’s, who has recently arrived from Canada. Farhad and Shayda are immediately attracted to each other. But if Farhad and Shayda start dating each other, what will happen if jealous and possessive Hossein finds out?
“Shayda” shows in unflinching ways how even though Shayda is a very attentive mother to Mona, the stress and paranoia that Shayda is experiencing can negatively affect her parenting skills. There’s also the valid fear that any decision that Shayda makes regarding the new life that Shayda wants away from Hossein could make Shayda vulnerable to even more abuse from him and possibly murder. “Shayda” doesn’t try to oversimplify these very complicated issues.
The admirable performances of Ebrahimi and Zahednia as Shayda and Mona are at the heart of this tension-filled movie. The other cast members also play their roles quite well. The story takes place during Nowruz, the two-week celebration of the Persian New Year. However, the end of the movie shows in no uncertain terms that what Shayda and Mona experience in these two weeks will affect them for the rest of their lives.
Sony Pictures Classics released in select U.S. cinemas on December 1, 2023, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on March 1, 2024. “Shayda” was released in Australia on October 5, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place mostly in 2018, in the Dominican Republic and briefly in the United States, the dramatic film “Arthur the King” (based on the non-fiction book “Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home”) features a racially diverse cast of characters (white, Latin, black and Asian) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: In 2018, American adventure racer Michael Light comes out of retirement to race with a team in the Adventure Racing World Championship, taking place in the Dominican Republic, and the team has a stray dog who follows them and becomes an unexpected companion.
Culture Audience: “Arthur the King” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Mark Wahlberg and true stories about athletic races and dogs who make a impact on people’s lives.
“Arthur the King” is exactly what it appears to be: an unapologetically sentimental drama about a team learning to work together during a grueling adventure race and the stray dog who becomes the team’s unexpected companion. A movie like “Arthur the King” doesn’t have to be award-worthy to be effective for its intended audience. Although certain things in this movie are completely predictable, what will probably affect viewers the most is knowing that it’s based on a true story. Some parts of the movie were changed to make this a Hollywood version of the story, but the outcome in the movie is true to what happened in real life.
Directed by Simon Cellan Jones and written by Michael Brandt, “Arthur the King” is based on Mikael Lindnord’s 2016 non-fiction book “Arthur: The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home.” The title of this book should tell you that this dog has an extraordinary story. However, the namesake of “Arthur the King” (a terrier mix dog named Arthur) doesn’t get a real storyline until about 50 minutes into this 107-minute movie. Some viewers might be irritated that the movie takes this long to prominently feature the dog in the story.
In real life, Arthur was a stray dog who followed Lindnord (who is Swedish) and his team, as they were competing during the 2014 Adventure Racing World Championship in Ecuador. The dog was sick and injured from abuse because of his rough life on the streets of Ecuador. But remarkably, Arthur trekked across 435 miles over 10 days, in various rugged terrains, to be the team’s companion.
In “Arthur the King,” the film’s main human character was changed to be an American named Michael Light (played by Mark Wahlberg), a professional adventure racer, who meets Arthur while Michael leads a team competing in the 2018 Adventure Racing World Championship in the Dominican Republic. “Arthur the King” was filmed on location in the Dominican Republic. Lindnord was in his late 30s when he met Arthur. Wahlberg was in his early 50s when he made this movie, and he looks his age in his face, although Wahlberg’s younger-looking athletic physique in the movie is not typical of men in their 50s.
The Adventure Racing World Championship is a grueling competition that involves navigation, all-terrain cycling, mountain biking, rope work, climbing, trekking, night running and kayaking. The race is open to adults of all genders and has cash prizes that can range from five figures to low six figures. Teams can choose their own paths and strategies in competing in each stage of the race.
“Arthur the King” begins by showing Michael and his team competing in the 2015 Adventure Racing World Championship in Costa Rica. Michael has done this race several times, but he has never been on a team that came in first place. And it will be no different in 2015. Michael is very hotheaded and stubborn (in other words, a typical character portrayed by Wahlberg), and he doesn’t listen to advice from his equally arrogant team member Leo Sun (played Simu Liu) on which path to take. It’s one of many clashes that Michael and Leo have when they work together.
As a result of Michael’s decision, the team gets stuck in a mud bank and doesn’t even place in the top three in the race. Leo takes a photo of a defeated-looking Michael stuck in the mud during this distrastrous experience. Leo is an avid social media user, so he posts this photo on his Instagram account as a way to shame Michael. The photo goes viral, much to Michael’s embarrassment, although Michael is too proud to admit to most people that he’s embarrassed.
The movie then fast-forwards to 2018. The dog who will be named Arthur is briefly shown living on the streets of Santo Domingo, the capital of the Dominican Republic. The movie mentions later that this dog had several injuries from abuse, but fortunately for animal fans, none of this abuse is shown in graphic details in the movie. The dog is seen being shooed away by some people on the streets as the dog looks for food.
In real-life, the dog who portrays Arthur in the movie is named Ukai, who was found at an animal shelter. Ukai had two stunt doubles named Beau and Hunter, but Ukai “performed 90% of the scenes himself,” according the “Arthur the King” production notes. Ukai’s lead trainer is Mathilde De Cagny, who works with Birds and Animals Unlimited in Los Angeles.
Meanwhile, in the fictional city of High Springs, Colorado, a brooding Michael is shown moping in his home about how he didn’t come in first place the 2015 Adventure Racing World Championship. After that race, Michael decided to quit being a professional adventure racer to help raise his daughter Ruby (played by Cece Valentina) with his wife Helen (played by Juliet Rylance), another former professional racer who retired to focus on raising a family. Ruby is about 4 or 5 years old in the movie.
As much as as Michael loves his family, several things are bothering him. First and foremost, Michael still has the urge to achieve his goal of coming in first place at the Adventure Racing World Championship. Second, he wants to redeem himself from his humiliating loss in the race in 2015. After nearly 20 years of being a professional adventure racer, Michael says to Helen, as he looks at the “stuck in the mud” photo: “This is not the end for me.” And third, Michael wants to gain back the respect of his father Charlie Light (played by Paul Guilfoyle), who has gotten fed up with Michael being an unemployed grouch.
Helen has also gotten tired of hearing Michael’s whining. She’s loving and supportive when she tells him that if he really wants to compete in the Adventure Racing World Championship again, he should do it and find sponsors. That’s all Michael needs to hear to get back in the racing game again.
Michael first travels to Big Sur, California, to reconnect with his former teammate William “Chik” Chikerotis (played by Ali Suliman), whose best team racing skills are in navigating. Chik has a knee injury that prompted him to retire from adventure racing. When Michael finds Chik, after not seeing each other since 2015, Chik is operating a camping business whose clients are mostly spoiled urban dwellers. Michael can see that Chik isn’t happy in this job, so it doesn’t take much to convince Chik to be on Michael’s resurrected team, although Chik is somewhat skeptical that Michael can get sponsors.
Next on Michael’s list in assembling his “dream team” is expert climber Olivia Baker (played by Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of a famous climber named Hugo Baker (played by Oscar Best), who is Olivia’s coach. Michael goes to Oahu, Hawaii, to ask Olivia to be on his team. Olivia needs a lot more coaxing because she doesn’t want to go back to adventure racing. She changes her mind and later reveals the very poignant reason why she decided to be on Michael’s team.
Michael then has a business meeting with a fictional corporate company named Broadrail that Michael has worked with in the past as a sponsor. In this meeting, the executives in the group listen to Michael’s pitch, fully aware that Michael has never won the Adventure Racing World Championship. The biggest skeptic in this corporate group is a smirking executive named Tucker (played by “Arthur the King” producer Tucker Tooley, in an uncredited cameo), who questions if middle-aged Michael and knee-injured Chik can handle the athletic challenges. Decker also wants Michael’s former teammate Leo to be on Michael’s team again, because Leo has a few million followers on social media.
Michael’s biggest supporter in the group is an earnest executive named John (played by Alani Ilongwe), who tries to smooth things over when Michael inevitably gets riled up and has a temper tantrum in response to Decker’s naysaying attitude. Michael also dislikes the idea of working with Leo again. Michael asks for $100,000 in sponsorship money. In the end, Michael has to settle for an offer of $50,000, on the condition that Leo is a member of the team.
Michael then travels to West Hollywood, California, where he finds Leo at a photo shoot, because Leo is now a well-known social media influencer. Michael has some disdain for social media, but he understands why the sponsor wants Leo on the team. Michael has to swallow his pride and admit (at Leo’s insistence) that Michael made a mistake in not listening to Leo’s advice in the 2015 Adventure Racing World Championship. Michael also says that if Leo is on the team, Michael will take Leo’s opinions into account, but Michael as the leader will still make the final decisions.
With this team of four confirmed, they call themselves Team Broadrail and go to the Dominican Republic to prepare for the race. Unrealistically, they only have five days to get used to the environment where they will be racing. The excuse is that they didn’t have the money to travel to the Dominican Republic earlier to fully prepare in the way that they wanted. It’s just the movie’s way of making Team Broadrail look more like underdog. It’s mentioned multiple times that th race will take place in sweltering humidity.
Every sports movie has a main rival that the “hero” wants to defeat. In “Arthur the King,” that team is Team Arc’teryx, led by a cocky Australian named Decker (played by Rob Collins), who likes to taunt Team Broadrail with snide remarks, any chance that he gets. You can easily predict which two teams will be close to the finish line in a climactic scene. Still, each stage of the race has its share of suspense. TV personality Bear Grylls has a cameo as himself in the movie.
As for the story of Arthur, he doesn’t endear himself to the team right away. At first, Michael just sees Arthur as a mangy stray dog that he feeds sausage scraps to when he first sees the dog at a transition area in the race. The members of Team Broadrail don’t see this dog until a few hundred miles later. They are amazed that he was able to follow them and continues to follow them. (This isn’t spoiler information, since it’s in the movie’s trailer.)
Michael names the dog Arthur, after King Arthur. This mutt isn’t just a travel companion. Arthur’s keen senses help Team Broadrail get out of some dangerous situations. And he obviously has a great sense of direction. The performances by the principal cast members (including the dog) are very realistic, even if you know some scenes were fabricated for the movie. The bickering between Michael and Leo adds to the realism. The movie’s action scenes are competently filmed and acted.
The best parts of “Arthur the King” are in the last third of the movie. There’s a life-or-death situation that is meant to be both tearjearking and heartwarming. “Arthur the King” is not subtle at all in its message about how life’s disappointments can unexpectedly lead to even greater rewards. However, this message is easier to take when knowing that it happened in real life and involved a very special and adorable dog.
Lionsgate released “Arthur the King” in U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in 1938, 1939, 1987, and 1988, in the United Kingdom, Poland, and the country then known Czechoslovakia, the dramatic film “One Life” (based on the non-fiction book of the same name) features an all-white cast of characters representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: In 1938 and 1939, British stockbroker Nicholas “Nicky” Winton leads a crusading group of people who rescue 669 Jewish children from an impending Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, and he gets recognition for these heroic deeds about 50 years later.
Culture Audience: “One Life” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Anthony Hopkins and true stories about rescuing people from the horrors of the Nazi-led Holocaust.
If you can tolerate filmmaking that’s a bit stodgy and old-fashioned, “One Life” is worth a watch for its meaningful true story. Anthony Hopkins is memorable in a film that is often undercut by its messy timeline jumping. The movie needed a more cohesive narrative, but the story is still easy to understand and requires patience to get to the movie’s best parts toward the end of the film.
Directed by James Hawes, “One Life” was written by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake. The movie is based on the 2014 non-fiction book “If It’s Not Impossible…: The Life of Sir Nicholas Winton,” which has been retitled “One Life: The True Story of Sir Nicholas Winton,” written by Nicholas “Nicky” Winton’s daughter Barbara Winton, who died in 2022, at the age of 69. “One Life” had its world premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. The movie was filmed in the Czech Republic and in the United Kingdom.
“One Life” jumps around in the timeline from 1938 and 1939 to 1987 and 1988. In 1938, Nicky Winton (played by Johnny Flynn) is a 29-year-old stockbroker living in London, when he hears from his friend Martin Blake (played by Ziggy Heath), who has been helping refugees in Prague, Czechoslovakia. The refugees want to escape, as Nazi Germany prepares to invade Czechoslovakia. Just as Nicky was going to join Martin in Prague, Martin has called to tell Nicky that Martin is going back home to London. Nicky plans to go to Prague as planned.
Nicky has a strong-willed and opinionated mother named Babette “Babi” Winton (played by Helena Bonham Carter), a widow who is originally from Germany. The family of Nicky’s father was also originally from Germany. Nicky’s parents on both sides of the family are Jewish. Nicky identifies as an agnostic and a socialist. Babi doesn’t think it’s a good idea for Nicky to go to Prague, because she fears that his life will be in danger. Nicky can be just as stubborn as his mother, so he goes to Prague, despite her objections.
While in Prague, Nicky meets two British people who will change his life: Trevor Chadwick (played by Alex Sharp) and Doreen Warriner (played by Romola Garai), who both work for the British Committee for Refugees in Czechoslovakia. Doreen tells Trevor that she first came to Prague 10 years earlier for a university study trip. She returned to Prague because of love of the people of Prague. Nicky, Travor and Doreen decide to what they can to help as many children (with permission from their parents) relocate to the United Kingdom and be placed in foster homes until it’s safe for them to come back to Prague.
When they tally up the numbers, there are more than 1,000 children who could potentially be rescued. Although the vast majority of the children are Jewish, Nicky says he wants to rescue children of any or no religion. In a race against time, Nicky and his allies have to not only find enough funding for these relocations, but they also have to find enough families in the United Kingdom who will be willing to be foster families. Nicky says these foster families can be of any religion.
Many of the potential foster parents have specific requirements, such as only wanting a child of a certain gender and only being able to take care of one child. An unfortunate reality was that many siblings were separated, in order to be placed in foster homes. And and even harsher reality was that many of the children’s parents and other loved ones would be murdered in the Holocaust.
Nicky eventually returns to London to raise money and awareness (with the help of his mother) for these child refugees. He faces an uphill battle, since many British people at the time did not want to get involved in Eastern European politics. Nicky also gets some skepticism about his intentions from Jewish leaders in Czechoslovakia and in the United Kingdom, until Nicky makes it known that he has Jewish heritage. The rescue mission, which is called Kindertransport, ends up saving 669 children.
“One Life” shows these rescue efforts in a perfunctory manner, often in montages. These scenes are intercut with elderly Nicky (played by Hopkins) in 1987 and 1988, when he is living in suburban Maidenhead, England. Senior citizen Nicky is finding some of his Kindertransport mementos and records while he is cleaning up his cluttered study. The reason for the cleanup is that Nicky’s wife Grete Winton (played by Lena Olin) has been complaining that Nicky’s mementos and records have been taking up too much space in their home, and they need room for an upcoming visit from their pregnant daughter.
Nicky was an amateur photographer who took a lot of photos of the children he rescued, as well as their Czech neighborhoods. He kept these photos, as well as meticulous records of the refugees, without knowing what happened to them. His wife Grete tells Nicky about these memories that haunt him, “You have to let go, for your own sake,” but Nicky can’t really let go. Going through these photos and records of these refugees bring these memories back to him.
Jonathan Pryce has a small role as the elderly Martin Blake, who meets Nicky for lunch and comments to him about Nicky’s Kindertransport rescue efforts in the late 1930s: “It’s incredible what you achieved.” (It’s an on-screen reunion of Prye and Hopkins, who both starred in 2019’s “The Two Popes.”) Nicky humbly says that Trevor and Doreen took more of the risks in the rescue efforts, because they stayed in Prague. “One Life” doesn’t really extend that acknowledgement, because the rest of the movie is all about Nicky getting recognition for this rescue mission.
It all starts when Nicky gets a call from a library in England saying that they’re interested in the archives that he wants to donate. At his wife’s urging, Nicky decided that these records were better off in an official institution instead of in their home. When he meets with Holocaust researcher Elisabeth “Betty” Maxwell (played by Marthe Keller), she is amazed at Nicky’s collection and says that it’s too big and important for a library and should belong in a museum.
And what do you know: Betty just happens to be married to Robert Maxwell, the Czech-born British media mogul who owned the Mirror Group Newspapers at the time and who got the publicity machine going to tell Nicky’s story. The movie doesn’t mention the later scandals associated with Robert Maxwell (who died at age 68 from a boating accident in 1991), including his history of fraud and the fact that his socialite daughter Ghislaine Maxwell became a convicted sex offender due to her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. The publicity over Nicky’s Kindertransport archival collection results in him getting invited on the BBC talk show “That’s Life!,” which leads to the most tearjerking parts of the movie.
“One Life” is certainly an inspirational story. However, the movie could have been a little bit more gracious in showing that happened to Trevor and Doreen, instead of reducing them to brief updates in the movie’s epilogue. Hopkins and Bonham Carter give very good performances, but there’s nothing award-worthy about this movie, which has a formulaic style and at times a manner that is too plodding. The movie is called “One Life,” but the real lives from this story are at the heart of the movie and what viewers will be thinking about the most.
Bleecker Street released “One Life” in select U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024. The movie was released in Italy and in Australia in December 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Los Angeles (and briefly in New York City), the comedy/drama film “The American Society of Magical Negroes” features a racially diverse cast of characters (with a African American, white and a few Asian and Latin people) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.
Culture Clash: A struggling artist is recruited to work for the secretive American Society of Magical Negroes, whose purpose is to make white people comfortable, in order to prevent Black people from getting harassed and killed.
Culture Audience: “The American Society of Magical Negroes” will appeal primarily to people who don’t mind watching inept and borng racial satires.
“The American Society of Magical Negroes” could have been a clever and incisive comedy/drama about how racial stereotypes on screen can affect people in real life. Unfortunately, this dull and mishandled racial satire has bland characters, a weak story and stale jokes that repeatedly miss the mark. This terrible misfire also fails at spoofing romantic comedies.
Writer/director Kobi Libii makes his feature-film debut with “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” which had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. “The American Society of Magical Negroes” squanders the talent of its impressive cast by putting them in a movie that is as timid and insecure as its lead character. A movie poking fun at racial stereotypes needs to be bold and self-assured in what it has to say, instead of lazily filling up the story with derivative and unfunny scenes that have nothing interesting to say. Many of the movie’s cast members who are supposed to have chemistry with each other don’t have any believable chemistry, resulting in too many awkwardly acted scenes. That’s mostly the fault of the director and anyone else who made the casting decisions.
In “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” Aren Mbado (played by Justice Smith) is a 27-year-old struggling artist who is based on Los Angeles. Aren’s specialty is making sculptures out of yarn. The movie’s first scene shows Aren at an art gallery exhibiting his work. At this gallery event, there are hardly any buyers. The spectators don’t seem to understand Aren’s art. It doesn’t help that constantly stammering Aren has trouble articulating to people what his art is all about.
Aren (who is African American) experiences a racial microaggression when a white male attendee (played by James Welch) mistakenly assumes that Aren is a waiter, not the artist whose art is on display. Gallery owner Andrea (played by Gillian Vigman) notices this insult and tells Aren, “If you don’t stick up for your art, I can’t do it for you.” Because the exhibit is a sales flop, Andrea also threatens to cancel Aren’s exhibit before the end of its scheduled run. Aren begs Andrea not to cancel because he says he spent more than $3,000 on yarn and can’t afford any more.
This isn’t how Aren (who is a graduate of the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design) thought his life would turn out to be. Aren is nearly broke, and he has no other job prospects. He doesn’t want to do work that doesn’t involve his artistic skills. Someone who is quietly observing Aren at the gallery is a bartender, who is also African American. The bartender will eventually introduce himself to Aren and reveal why he has been watching Aren.
After leaving the event, Aren goes to an outdoor ATM in a dark alley and sees he only has $17.31 in his bank account, which is below the minimum ATM withdrawal of $20. A young white woman named Lacey (played by Mia Ford) walks up to the ATM to make a transaction, but she’s having trouble using her ATM card. She asks Aren to help her. It turns into a very clumsily written scene of Lacey loudly accusing Aren of trying to steal her ATM card.
Just at that moment, two young white men named Brad (played by Eric Lutz) and Ryan (played by Kees DeVos) happen to be walking by and they come to the “rescue” of Lacey, as Aren vehemently denies that he was doing anything wrong. It’s supposed to be the movie’s way of showing a “Karen” incident, where a white woman wrongfully accuses a person of color (usually someone black) of a crime, and the white woman is automatically believed.
Just as it looks like there might be an altercation and police might be called, someone comes to Aren’s rescue: the bartender from the gallery event. He had been secretly following Aren and now is able to smooth-talk Lacey, Brad and Ryan, by showing them it was all a misunderstanding. As a way to placate them, this mysterious stranger starts talking about how great the neighborhood is and recommends that they go to his favorite barbecue restaurant nearby. Lacey, Brad and Ryan then amicably leave.
Aren thanks the stranger, who then reveals who he is and why he is there. He says his name is Roger (played by David Alan Grier), and he is a recruiter for the American Society of Magical Negroes, a secret group of black people whose purpose is to make white people comfortable and less likely to cause harm to black people. As Roger says to Aren, the “most dangerous animal” on Earth is “a white person who is uncomfortable,” especially around black people. Roger also says that “officially,” the society is a “client services industry.” But “unofficially, we’re saving the damn world.”
Roger tells Aren that Aren seems to have the qualities to be an ideal member of the American Society of Magical Negroes. Aren has to go through a vetting process first. Aren is very skeptical about what Roger is saying, until Roger teleports them to the headquarters of the American Society of Magical Negroes, which looks a lot like an African American version of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the “Harry Potter” book/movie series.
In real life, the term “magical Negro” was invented by filmmaker Spike Lee as a way to describe a black character whose main purpose is help and uplift the central white character in a story. This “magical Negro” usually has extraordinary abilities that are implemented to make the white protagonist’s life better. Some examples include the characters played by Will Smith in 2000’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance” and 2005’s “Hitch”; Whoopi Goldberg in 1990’s “Ghost”; and Michael Clarke Duncan in 1999’s “The Green Mile.”
At the American Society of Magical Negroes, the recruits are told that their white clients don’t know and aren’t supposed to know that they are clients. The recruits are taught what a “magical Negro” is supposed to do and are shown hologram-like examples, which are usually not-very-funny scenes of black men being subservient and fawning to white men. Oddly, and with no explanation, the movie has multiple scenes of black men grabbing white men’s crotches in these “magical Negro” scenes. There’s also a magical stop watch that is used to gauge the level of “white tears” that a white person has, in order to determine how likely the white person will cause a racist incident that will make the white person look sympathetic.
The main teacher for these classes is a stern instructor named Gabbard (played by Aisha Hinds), while the society’s president is a wizard-like character named Dede Booker (played by Nicole Byer), who looks and acts like a low-rent fortune teller. Gabbard says of white people: “The happier they are, the safer we are.” Roger tells Aren: “White discomfort is your nemesis.” The number-one rule for the American Society of Magical Negroes is to keep the client happy.
One of the reasons why “The American Society of Magical Negroes” is so poorly written is that it never really shows why Aren is an ideal candidate for this group. The opening scene at the gallery is supposed to be the movie’s questionable “proof” that Aren would be perfect for this “magical Negro” job. But all the scene really shows is that Aren is a sad sack who’s terrible at selling his art. Nothing about Aren’s background is shown or explained, except a brief mention that his father is black and his mother is white.
The recruits for “The American Society of Magical Negroes” are told that if at any time, they show negative emotions to the white people who are assigned to them, then they will be expelled from the society and lose their magical powers. It’s supposed to mean that these expelled people will be more vulnerable to getting racist harm from white people. Dede tells the recruits that black people who aren’t part of the American Society of Magical Negroes will have a shorter life expectancy. It’s a faulty concept from the start, because racist harm can happen under a variety of circumstances, no matter how nice people are to the racists who want to harm them.
During a break from these training sessions, Aren goes to a coffee shop, where he accidently bumps into a woman in her 20s, and her coffee spills all over her clothes. They exchange banter in a “meet cute” conversation, where Aren tries to deny that he’s flirting with her, and they both try to act like they aren’t immediately attracted to each other, even though it’s obvious that they are. And then, Aren suddenly leaves without getting her name. You know where all of this is going, of course.
Aren needs the money that this “magical Negro” job is offering, so he agrees to be part of the tryout process, with Roger as Aren’s wryly observing mentor. One of these tests involves (not surprisingly) a white male cop named Officer Miller (played by Tim Baltz), who feels easily threatened in the presence of black men. When Aren passes the necessary tests, he becomes an official member of the Society of Magical Negroes. Aren is then assigned his first client: a design engineer named Jason (played by Drew Tarver) at a social media company called Meetbox, which is obviously a parody of Facebook. Aren magically gets a job at Meetbox as a graphic designer who happens to have his desk workspace right next to Jason’s desk workspace.
Almost everyone at Meetbox doesn’t seem like a real person but is portrayed in the movie as a stereotype. Jason is a tech dweeb with mediocre talent and almost no charisma, but the movie makes several un-subtle points that Jason is perceived as better than he really is, just because Jason is a white male. Jason has an attractive co-worker named Lizzie (played by An-Li Bogan), who just happens to be the same woman who met Aren at the coffee shop. More awkward conversations ensue.
The founder/CEO of Meetbox is an egotistical Brit named Mick (played by Rupert Friend), while the immediate supervisor of Lizzie, Jason and Aren is prickly Linda Masterson (played by Michaela Watkins), who cares more about being a sycophant to Mick than being a good boss. Meetbox gets embroiled in a racial scandal when people in Ghana get rejected from joining Meetbox because Meetbox’s facial recognition technology gives preference to white people. The movie never explains why only Ghana has this problem, as if black people only live in Ghana.
Several situations occur that show how Jason is unaware of how his white male privilege gives him advantages. Jason feels entitled to being thought of as superior to a more talented co-worker such as Lizzie, who wants the same job promotion that Jason wants. The movie shows that Linda is part of the problem too, since she uses coded terms such as Jason is a “better fit” than Lizzie to give an important presentation for an idea that came from Lizzie. Jason has no qualms about being unfairly chosen to lead this presentation.
Not surprisingly, Jason shows a romantic interest in Lizzie. Much of the movie is about a love triangle where “magical Negro” Aren isn’t supposed to let Jason know that he’s also interested in dating Lizzie. It all becomes so tiresome and tedious, because a lot of the movie’s dialogue and scenarios have no wit or charm.
Lizzie’s racial identity is not mentioned in the movie, except for Jason calling Lizzie “ethnic.” However, actress Bogan’s ethnicity in the movie’s production notes is described as Taiwanese/Irish. If “The American Society of Magical Negroes” really wanted to have more edge to its limp satire, it would’ve made the Lizzie character unambiguously white, in order to increase the racial tension between Aren and Jason.
It should come as no surprise that “The American Society of Magical Negroes” makes Jason a racist who doesn’t think that he’s racist. You can do a countdown to the “big racial confrontation” scene where someone goes on a rant about racism, as white people in the room get uncomfortable and try to deny racism. This scene falls flat, because Aren still ends up being sheepish and apologetic.
“The American Society of Magical Negroes” then goes off the rails into fantasy with teleporting scenes, as it seems to forget all about the movie’s original concept, and then takes a silly detour into wrapping up the conflicts over the love triangle. The performances in the movie aren’t terrible, but they aren’t impressive either, mainly because the writing and directing are so substandard. A “twist” at the end is an underwhelming commentary on sexist stereotypes. “The American Society of Magical Negroes” wants to tell some hard truths about racism, but the movie’s approach is woefully inadequate and lacking in credibility.
Focus Features released “The American Society of Magical Negroes” in U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in an unnamed city in New Mexico (and briefly in Las Vegas), the dramatic film “Love Lies Bleeding” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latin people and African Americans) representing the working-class, middle-class and criminal underground.
Culture Clash: A gym employee and an aspiring professional bodybuilder meet, fall in love, and get involve in deadly criminal activities.
Culture Audience: “Love Lies Bleeding” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of star Kristen Stewart and intense movies about outlaw lovers.
Gritty and suspenseful, “Love Lies Bleeding” is a rollercoaster ride of a crime drama that has unexpected moments of fantasy and horror, along with a co-dependent love story between two women. The outcome of this love story is intended to be as impactful as the results of all the murder and mayhem that take place in this intense thriller. It’s a well-acted and artfully made film about desperation, revenge and the lengths that people will go to in order to fulfill ambitions or protect loved ones.
Directed by Rose Glass, “Love Lies Bleeding” was co-written by Glass and Weronika Tofilska. The movie had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. “Love Lies Bleeding” is the second feature film from Glass, who made her feature-film directorial debut with the 2020 horror movie “Saint Maud,” a story about a fanatically religious and mentally ill woman.
There are some elements in “Love Lies Bleeding” that are similar to “Saint Maud,” particularly when twisted horror-like hallucinations of a main character seem to come to life. However, both movies are very different from each other overall. “Love Lies Bleeding” is not for people who are easily offended by bloody gore or explicit sexual content. “Love Lies Bleeding” is an above-average noir thriller that brings some unique twists to what’s usually seen in movies about outlaw lovers.
“Love Lies Bleeding” takes place in 1988, mostly in an unnamed small city in New Mexico, where the movie was filmed. The movie’s opening scene is at a grungy local fitness studio called Crater Gym, where gym employee Louise “Lou” Langston (played by Kristen Stewart) does menial tasks, such as attending to customers and doing janitorial duties. A co-worker named Daisy (played by Anna Baryshnikov) has an obvious crush on Lou and tries to get Lou to go on a date with her, but Lou politely rejects Daisy’s advances.
Lou, who is in her early 30s, is an introverted loner who is a chronic smoker and lives with a cat. She’s the type of person who will listen to anti-smoking audio recordings, perhaps as a way to try to quit smoking or as an ironic way of rebelling against what the recordings are saying. During the course of the movie, more of Lou’s background and her family are revealed.
Lou’s father Lou Langston (played by Ed Harris), also known as Lou Sr., is a scummy and ruthless crime lord who lives in a mansion and owns a gun club as a way to launder money. Lou’s mother has been missing for the past 12 years. Lou won’t come right out and admit it, but she’s pretty sure that her mother is dead, and she suspects her father had something to do with this disappearance. Lou is estranged from her father for this reason and many other reasons.
Lou is closest to her older sister Beth (played by Jena Malone), a married mother of three sons. Lou despises Beth’s husband JJ (played by Dave Franco), because JJ is very abusive (physically and emotionally) to Beth, who won’t get help for this problem out of fear and loyalty to JJ. JJ works at Lou Sr.’s gun club and is involved in Lou Sr.’s criminal activities.
One day, a stranger comes to town who will capture Lou’s attention and Lou’s heart. Her name is Jackie (played by Katy O’Brian), an aspiring professional bodybuilder, who has arrived from Oklahoma. Jackie, who is also in her 30s, is passing through Oklahoma on the way to a bodybuilder competition in Las Vegas. She visits Crater Gym to work out. And it’s at Crater Gym where Lou first sees Jackie and has an instant attraction to her.
Before Lou and Jackie meet, Jackie has a sexual hookup with JJ in his car because she heard that JJ works at a gun club and hopes that he can help her get a job there. Sure enough, after their sexual encounter, when Jackie asks JJ if there are any job openings where he works, he gives her a business card and says yes and tells her that he’ll put in a good word for her. At the gun club, JJ introduces Jackie to Lou Sr., who hires her as a waitress, because she says she doesn’t like being around guns.
Shortly after Lou and Jackie meet and flirt with each other at the gym, they become lovers. Jackie soon shows herself to be a skilled hustler, because she charms Lou into letting Jackie temporarily live with Lou until Jackie goes to Las Vegas. Lou is not happy at all when she finds out that Jackie is working at the gun club. She comes right out and tells Lou that Lou’s father is a “psycho,” but she says that Jackie is free to work wherever she wants.
Jackie tells Lou a little bit about her background. Jackie says she was adopted at age 13, and she used to be a “fat kid,” who was bullied. Jackie also hints that she is estranged from her family when she says she doesn’t really have anyone who supports her bodybuilder dreams—a fact confirmed in a later scene when Jackie calls her adoptive mother. Much more details also eventually emerge about Jackie’s troubled past.
Lou finds out that Jackie and JJ hooked up after JJ tells Lou about it during an argument that he has with Lou. When Lou angrily confronts Jackie about it, Jackie (who says she is bisexual) admits to hooking up with JJ. Jackie is able to smooth things over with Lou, because Jackie says that the sex with JJ was meaningless and only happened because she used JJ to get a job. Jackie also reminds Lou that she hooked up with JJ before Jackie met Lou.
Even though Lou is a quiet introvert and Jackie is a talkative extrovert, they both know without saying it out loud that they are both emotionally damaged from family problems. It’s a big reason why they are attracted to each other but also why they develop a dangerous co-dependent relationship. Soon after they become lovers, Lou offers Jackie free steroids, which Jackie is reluctant to take, but she gives in to Lou’s pressure to let Lou inject Jackie with the steroids. Jackie then becomes hooked on using steroids.
It’s hinted that Jackie’s steroid abuse could be the cause of Jackie’s hallucinations where her muscles become abnormally enlarged and she sees herself as turning into the size of the Incredible Hulk. There are other hallucinations she has that are pure grotesque horror. But observant viewers will notice that Jackie’s steroid abuse might not be the only reason for her delusions, as she appears to have some type of undiagnosed mental illness.
It’s enough to say that Jackie and Lou get caught up in murder and desperate cover-ups. Even before this happened, Lou was already on edge because two FBI agents working together—one named William O’Riley (played by Orion Carrington) and one named Dave (played by Matthew Blood-Smyth)—have her under surveillance. FBI agent O’Riley approaches Lou at the gym to question her about her father and her mother. Lou says she no longer speaks to her father and has no information about where her mother is.
“Love Lies Bleeding” has a lot of familiar storytelling about crime, betrayals and revenge. However, it’s not very often that these stories are told in movies from the perspectives of queer women characters, one of whom happens to be a bodybuilder. Lou and Jackie go to many extremes out of an underlying desperation and unhappiness that they have about their lives. There are clues about this discontent throughout the movie, such as when Lou seems to enviously admire Jackie for traveling to Las Vegas by herself, because Lou has never been anywhere outside of her small city. Jackie has convinced herself that becoming a rich and famous bodybuilder will make her own life happy and fulfilled.
Stewart has made a career out of playing fidgety and insecure characters. She gives one of her better performances as this type of character in “Love Lies Bleeding.” O’Brien has the harder and more complex role as Jackie, who will keep viewers guessing about how “good” or “bad” Jackie really is. Harris, Franco and Malone handle their roles capably, although their respective characters in “Love Lies Bleeding” are not very well-developed. Baryshnikov doesn’t have a lot of screen time, but she skillfully portrays Daisy, who is not as ditsy as she first appears to be.
“Love Lies Bleeding” has a few things that require suspension of disbelief. For example, if Lou Sr. is such a powerful crime lord, then there would be more than just two FBI agents snooping around. But this factual flaw can be overlooked because “Love Lies Bleeding” is a low-budget movie and the story is focused more on the relationship between Lou and Jackie than on any law enforcement investigating any crimes. “Love Lies Bleeding” doesn’t pass judgment on all the awful and cruel things that happen in the movie, but instead invites viewers to ponder if all of this destruction is worth it in the name of love.
A24 released “Love Lies Bleeding” in select U.S. cinemas on March 8, 2024, with an expansion to more U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024.
Some language in Portuguese and Spanish with subtitles
Culture Representation: Taking place in the 2000s (with re-enacted flashbacks to the 1960s and 1970s), the animated docudrama film “They Shot the Piano Player” features a predominantly Latin cast of characters (with a few white people and African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: American music journalist Jeff Harris (a fictional stand-in for “They Shot the Piano Player” director Fernando Trueba), investigates the mysterious 1976 disappearance of Brazilian piano player Tenório Jr., who was an highly respected musician in the Bossa Nova musical movement.
Culture Audience: “They Shot the Piano Player” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching unusual documentaries about Brazilian music or true crime cases.
“They Shot the Piano Player” mostly succeeds in its intention to be an unconventional documentary, but much of the story gets bogged down in repetitiveness. Overall, this animated film is watchable for people interested in Brazilian music or true crime. It’s a hybrid of a fictional narrator telling a true story, with audio recordings of real interviews featured in the documentary.
Directed by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal, “They Shot the Piano Player” was written by Trueba. After screening as a work in progress at the 2023 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, “They Shot the Piano Player” had its world premiere at the 2023 Telluride Film Festival. The movie then made the rounds at several other film festivals in 2023, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the BFI London Film Festival.
In the production notes for “They Shot the Piano Player,” Trueba (who is a Spanish filmmaker) says that sometime around 2019, he discovered the talent of Brazilian pianist Tenório Jr. while listening to a Brazilian album from the 1960s. Trueba became fascinated with finding out more about Tenório after discovering that Tenório (whose full name was Franciso Tenório Jr.) had vanished while on tour in Argentina in 1976, when Tenório was 35. Trueba went to Brazil and Argentina to interview family members, friends and associates of Tenório to try to solve the mystery of what happened to Tenório. Many of the resulting interviews are featured in “They Shot the Piano Player.”
“They Shot the Piano Player” creates a fictional narrative around these real interviews. In the movie, which takes place in the 2000s, the person doing the interviewing is a fictional New York City-based journalist named Jeff Harris (voiced by Jeff Goldblum), whose quest to find out the truth begins when he writes an article in The New Yorker about Bossa Nova, the music genre that combines Brazilian music and jazz. Bossa Nova, which originated in Brazil in the late 1950s, flourished in Brazil and in other countries.
As a result of this article in The New Yorker, Jeff gets a book publishing deal to write a nonfiction book about the history of Bossa Nova. While listening to a 1960s Brazilian Bossa Nova album, Jeff discovers Tenório Jr. when he hears a piano solo on the album. Jeff is intrigued to find out that Tenório Jr. hasn’t been featured on any musical recordings in more than 30 years. Jeff (who only speaks English) wants to know why, so he travels to Brazil to interview people. Jeff is sometimes accompanied by his Brazilian friend João (a fictional character, voiced by Tony Ramos), who is a tour guide/language interprerter of sorts during these trips.
Through a series of interviews, Jeff finds out that in 1976, Tenório disappeared in the Argentinian capital of Buenos Aires, during a tour as a band member with singer Vinicius de Moraes and guitarist/singer Toquinho. Jeff then becomes obsessed with solving the mystery of what happened to Tenório, so he travels back and forth between Brazil and Argentina to get answers. (It’s not that much of a mystery, since the title of the movie says it all.) Tenório’s disappearance happened around the same time of the 1976 coup d’état that ousted Isabel Perón as president of Argentina, so it’s not much of a surprise that this political turmoil (and the thousands of innocent people who were victims of it) are part of this story.
Most people who knew Tenório tell Jeff that it was widely believed that Tenório was murdered in Buenos Aires in 1976. But who murdered him and why? Those questions are answered by some people who are interviewed in the movie and an archival interview that Jeff hears. The interviews also reveal what type of person Tenório was by the surviving people who knew him best. Jeff also visits several of the places where Tenório used to go, such as recording studios and nightclubs.
Jeff’s book editor Jessica (a fictional character, voiced by Roberta Wallach) sees how enthusiastic Jeff has become about solving the mystery, so she tells Jeff that instead of writing a book about the history of Bossa Nova, he should instead write a book about what happened to Tenório Jr. “They Shot the Piano Player” actually begins in 2009, after the book is published, and Jeff is doing a book reading at The Strand bookstore in New York City. The rest of the movie is a flashback to Jeff tellng the story about his journey in writing the book.
Through stories and descriptions from interviews, a portrait of Tenório emerges as a highly respected and talented musician who was passionate about music, who didn’t really care about becoming rich and famous, and who had a messy personal life. At the time of his disappearance, married man Tenório had a mistress and a pregnant wife, who was expecting their fifth child. His mistress Malena Barretto (who is interviewed in the movie) was staying with Tenório at a hotel in Buenos Aires on the night of Tenório’s disappearance. She had been feeling sick at the time, so he left the hotel to find a pharmacy to get some medicine for her. That was the last time she saw him.
“They Shot the Piano Player” is packed with several interesting interviews, but after a while, many of them say the same things over and over about how talented and sweet-natured Tenório was. The movie could have used better editing in reducing some of this repetitiveness. There are also some extraneous scenes that look like nothing but travelogue footage.
Most of the people interviewed are musicians who knew Tenório, such as Toquinho, Chico Buarque, Gilberto Gil, Ben Shank, Caeton Veloso, Milton Nascimento, Jorge “Negro” Gonzales, Ian Muniz, João Donato, Laércio de Freitas, Raymundo Bittencourt, music producer Roberto Menescal and sound engineer Umberto Candardi. Family members interviewed include Tenório’s widow Carmen Magalhäes, his sister Vitoria Tenório and his uncle Manuel Tenório.
Also interviewed are several of Tenório Jr.’s friends in the Rio de Janeiro’s arts community, including Alberto Campana, the owner of Bottle’s Bar and Little, the nightclub where Tenório Jr. got his first big break; poet Ferrreira Gullar, who says that a psychic named Mrs. Haydée told Tenório Jr.’s father that Tenório Jr. was murdered; and family members and associates of de Moraes, such as his ex-wife Marta Santamaría, ex-brother-in-law Carlos Santamaría and friend Elena Goñio. Experts who weigh in with interview include Agrentina’s National Memory Archive coordinator Judith Said, human rights lawyer Luiz Eduardo, filmmaker/university professor Rogério Lima and journalists John Rowles, Nano Herrar and Horatio Verbitsky.
The animation is eye-catching and looks like painting art come to life. However, some people might not like the animation style that’s in this movie. The scenes where Jeff is visiting nightclubs to watch performances are enjoyable. And his investigation will keep viewers interested. It’s especially impactful when Jeff finds out what reportedly happened on the last day of Tenório’s life.
There are pros and cons to Goldblum’s constant narration in this movie. On the one hand, he gives a very good voice performance that remains engaging throughout the film. On the other hand, Goldblum has such a distinctive and famous voice, a lot of vewers might find his celebrity voice distracting. You never forget that you’re listening to Goldblum, which makes it harder to believe the narration is from a character named Jeff Harris.
Despite these narrative flaws, “They Shot the Piano Player” is a very good history lesson about Bossa Nova and about a fairly obscure and underrated Bossa Nova musician. The movie also tells a tragic story of someone who died simply because of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. “They Shot the Piano Player” doesn’t make any statements about all the political turmoil in South America, but it tells a compelling human story about someone affected by this turmoil who left an influential legacy in Brazilian music.
Sony Pictures Classics released “They Shot the Piano Player” in select U.S. cinemas on November 24, 2023, with a wider release in U.S. cinemas on February 23, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Tunisia, the docudrama film “Four Daughters” features an all-Tunisian group of people discussing a family whose two of four daughters became terrorists.
Culture Clash: Through re-enactments and interviews, the women’s mother and the other two sisters take a candid look at their family dynamics that led them to this point.
Culture Audience: “Four Daughters” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in movies about how families are torn apart when members of the family leave to become radical terrorists.
“Four Daughters” is an impactful movie that layers documentary elements with dramatic acting to make a film within a film. By using some of the real-life people in the re-enactments, it’s both an examination and cinematic therapy of a family’s love and painful fracturing. The transitions between the documentary-styled interviews and the dramatic acting are mostly seamless, although it all might be a bit disorienting to some viewers.
Directed and written by Kaouther Ben Hania, “Four Daughters” had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where the movie won three awards: L’Œil d’or (the prize for Best Documentary), in tie where the award also went to “The Mother of All Lies”; the François Chalais Prize (the award for journalistic excellence); and Prix de la Citoyenneté (the Citizenship Award). “Four Daughters” also won Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 Film Independent Spirit Awards and was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 2024 Academy Awards.
“Four Daughters” begins by introducing the three women who portray themselves in the re-enactments: Olfa Hamrouni is the divorced mother of the four daughters who inspired the name of the documentary. Eya Chikhaoui (born in 2003) and Tayssir Chikhaoui (born in 2005) are Hamrouni’s two youngest daughters, who were living with her at the time this movie was filmed. Hamrouni’s two eldest daughters are Ghotrane (born in 1998) and Rahma (born in 1999), who both became raidical terrorists, and left Tunisia to go to Lybia. A caption in the movie’s introduction says that Ghotrane Chikaoui and Rahma Chikaoui were “devoured by the wolf,” which is a euphamism for saying that they became consumed by the radical ideology that took them away from their mother and sisters.
“Four Daughters” has several scenes of Hamrouni, Eya and Tayssir acting in scenes with and getting to know the actresses who are in the re-enactments: Hind Sabri has the role of Hamrouni; Ichraq Matar has the role of Ghofrane; Nour Karoui has the role of Rahma. Sabri is seen early in the movie getting makeup applied before she is about to meet Hamrouni. Sabri admits that she feels “stressed,” as if it’s her first movie and that she’s nervous to meet the woman she has the responsibility of portraying.
The first meeting between Sabri and Hamrouni goes very well. Hamrouni assures and warns the anxious Sabri about what “Four Daughters” director Ben Hania has planned for the movie: “Kaouther isn’t going to invent anything in the story. It’s all true. And that could be disturbing for you.”
In a separate scene, Hamrouni admits in an interview that acting in a movie about her life has made her feel like the heartbroken-but-resilient character of Rose in “Titanic.” Hamrouni gets more emotional when she, Eya and Tayssir meet Matar and Karoui. At first, the mother and daughters are in awe of how much the actresses resemble Ghotrane and Rama.
But then, Hamrouni breaks down in tears as they all sit on a sofa together. Hamrouni begins to cry after asks Matar to sit next to her on the sofa, because Hamrouni says she was the real Ghofrane would have sat next to her if she were there. Eya says, “That’s what’s going to be so painful. We are going to relive it all. It’s going to open the wounds.”
Ghofrane is described as having a calm presence, and she was closer to her mother than Rahma was. Later in the movie, the family says that Ghofrane was the one who became a religous fanatic first and started wearing a hijab at all times. Rahma then followed and became a more hardcore radical than Ghofrane. For a while, Hamrouni and youngest daughter Tayssir also wore hijabs, but they never became radicalized. Eya was the only one in this family of women who refused to wear a hijab and become a fundamentalist Muslim.
Viewers of “Four Daughters” will have to be patient before the movie gets to the story of how Ghofrane and Rahma drastically changed. The first two-thirds of the movie are a combination of showing and telling how the family was before Ghofrane and Rahma reached the point of no return in becoming estranged from their mother and sisters. What emerges is a portrait of the family that was already splintering from generational trauma and abuse.
Hamrouni begins by talking about and re-enacting her unhappy marriage. It’s implied that it was an arranged marriage because Hamrouni makes it clear that she was never in love with her husband. On their wedding night, which is re-enacted in the movie, she resisted having sex with her husband, whose first name is not mentioned in the film. They got into a physical fight, and blood ended up on her wedding dress.
Hamrouni proudly says that she got her way and avoided having sex with her husband that night. However, Hamrouni’s sister scolded her that night and told her that she needed to be a good wife and do what her husband expected her to do. Hamrouni then says that for the rest of her miserable marriage, on the rare occasions that she and her husband had sex, it was only to conceive children.
“Four Daughters” has only one actor portraying all the movie’s male characters: Majd Mastoura. He portrays the abusive men in Hamrouni’s life: her husband (whom she eventually left) and an ex-con boyfriend named Wissem, who was in prison for murder but escaped from prison during the chaos of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011. Mastoura also has roles as a boyfriend of a teenage Ghofrane and as a police officer who takes a report when a frantic Hamrouni reports Ghofrane missing after Ghofrane ran away from home.
“Four Daughters” takes a brutally honest look at the problems in the family. Hamrouni says that her ex-husband was physically and verbally abusive to her and her daughters. Ghofrane got the worst of the abuse, her sisters say, because Ghofrane was the eldest child. However, Hamrouni admits that she physically abused her daughters too. She would often whip them out of anger. A tearful and regretful Hamrouni says that she ended up mistreating her daughters in the same way that Hamrouni’s abusive mother mistreated Hamrouni.
Hamrouni acknowledges that she was overly strict and paranoid about her daughters dating or being interested in sex. Part of that paranoia stems from Hamrouni’s own childhood, when she says that she and her sisters were raised by a single mother, and men would try to force themselves into the home to sexually assault them. Hamrouni says she had to disguise herself as a man to protect herself, her mother and her sisters. Hamrouni’s bad experiences with her male partners also undoubtedly affected her attitude in how she tried to instill in her daughters a fear of men.
Hamrouni says that her relationship with Wissem started off as a fairy-tale romance, where she fell in love with him like a giddy teenager. She said the fact that Wissem (who was a butcher as his job) was in prison for murder didn’t bother her because he treated her so well. But a dark family secret is revealed in the documentary: Eya and Tayssir say that Wissem was far from the “nice guy” he appeared to be, because he sexually abused all four of the sisters.
Hamrouni doesn’t comment in the documentary about this sexual abuse, but when it’s mentioned, her eyes and facial expression give away that she knows that it happened, and she feels ashamed that she didn’t protect her daughters. Apparently, Wissem had her fooled, and Hamrouni was blinded by her love for him. Rahma and Ghofrane say that their mother blamed them for Wissem going away. A scene briefly shows actor Mastour as Wissem in a prison cell, which implies that Wissem went to prison for these sex crimes.
In the movie, Eya is more talkative and expressive than Tayssir, although Tayssir later says that Eya is less likely to stand up for herself than Tayssir is. The family also experienced hunger and poverty. A re-enactment of a family dinner scene reveals that even when the family was starving, Ghofrane was very picky about what she would eat. By contrast, Rahma would eat almost anything that she was given.
An emotionally powerful re-enactment scene happens when Eya and Tayssir, portraying themselves, are sitting on the same bed as Mastoura, who portrays the predatory Wissem in this scene. Eya tells Wissem, “I hate you” with an intensity that affects actor Mastoura so much, he has to leave the room, and he asks to have a private conversation off-camera with director Ben Hania.
Meanwhile, Eya is clearly feeling some kind of catharsis from doing this scene, because she seems very proud of herself for doing this scene without breaking down and crying. After actor Mastoura asks to take a break because of how he was affected by this scene, Eya says that Mastoura should understand that she’s only acting. However, the painful memories are all too real for Tayssir, who quietly cries during this emotionally heavy scene.
During “Four Daughters,” the actresses are seen observing the real-life people they are portraying and practicing things such as mimicking their voices and body language. Old videos of Ghotrana and Rahma are shown to the actresses portraying them. All four daughters were in a parade for then-Tunisian president/dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who was ousted in 2011. Hamrouni says that she and her daughters were loyal supporters of Ben Ali.
It’s unclear when the family really began to experience financial hardships, but Hamrouni says the family’s life got worse after the Tunisian Revolution. Hamrouni went to work in Libya as a house cleaner. And that meant her daughters were often not under her supervision.
Older daughters Ghofrane and Rahma started to rebel by doing things such as skipping school. They began listening to heavy metal and dressed in Goth style, much to the disapproval of Hamrouni, who thought that Ghofrane and Rahma were becoming satanists. The movie has a re-enactment of an exorcism on Rahma.
And so, when Ghofrane and Rahma began seemed to have religious awakenings by ditching their Goth lifestyles and dressing in hijabs, Hamrouni says that she was initially relieved because she thought that it meant that her two oldest daughters were on the right track to turn their lives around. Little did the family know that this switch from one extreme to another would turn out to cause a permanent family rift.
There are moments in “Four Daughters” that are not easy to watch, especially scenes involving abuse. Rahma became so fanatical, she would whip Eya and Tayssir for things such as being late to prayer sessions. Rahma would also frequently accuse her younger sisters (especially Tayssir) of being “infidels.”
All four sisters had a fixation on death and would play games where a sister would pretend to be dead, and they would pretend to have burial and funeral rituals. Eya says these games were “fun” for the sisters, like “going to Disneyland.” But these morbid games are indications of severe emotional turmoil.
“Four Daughters” also shows how these family members see how they are perceived by the actresses who are spending time getting to know them. Karoui, who has the role of Rahma, keenly observes that Rahma’s religious fanatacism was a way for Rahma to control and manipulate the sisters’ overly strict mother after Rahma’s Goth rebellion phase didn’t work.
There are also indications that the actresses want to keep a certain professional distance when the family members start to blur the lines between wanting to get to know the actresses and treating them like real family members. Hamrouni essentially admits that she was closest to eldest daughter Ghofrane. But when Hamrouni asks actress Matar (who has the role of Ghofrane) if Matar would want Hamrouni to be her mother in real life, Matar looks uncomfortable and doesn’t answer. Matar’s non-response says it all, and Hamrouni tries not to look hurt and embarrassed.
For better or worse, “Four Daughters” doesn’t reveal until toward the end of the film what happened to Ghofrane and Rahma after they became terrorists. Some viewers might think this information comes too late in the movie. However, the buildup to these final scenes is meant to show that this family—even with their problems before the separation—had a certain unity that is now gone. “Four Daughters” might not heal the family’s heartbreak over the two daughters who left the family. The movie is a cautionary tale of what can happen when people lose loved ones to radical ideologies that can destroy family relationships.
Kino Lorber released “Four Daughters” in select U.S. cinemas on October 27, 2023. The movie was released on digital and VOD on December 19, 2023.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Guangzhou, China, the comedy/drama film “YOLO” (based on the 2014 Japanese film “100 Yen Love”) features an all-Asian cast of characters representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: A reclusive woman in her 30s gets close to a boxer who works at a gym, and she decides to train with him to become a boxer.
Culture Audience: “YOLO” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of Jia Ling, boxing movies, and stories about underestimated people who change their own lives for the better.
“YOLO” is undoubtedly inspired by the first “Rocky” movie, but this is no “Rocky” ripoff. The movie has some unexpected moments amid some predictability, along with heartfelt drama and a notable transformative performance from writer/director/star Jia Ling. The first third of the movie might be frustrating to watch because the protagonist is portrayed as pathetic, in a way that might appear to be almost insulting to this character. However, as “YOLO” progresses and the protagonist evolves, there are some twists and turns to the story that will take viewers on journey that becomes an emotional inspiration by the end of the movie.
“YOLO” (which is an acronym for “you only live once”) is based on the 2014 Japanese film “100 Yen Love.” “YOLO” (which takes place and was filmed in Guangzhou, China) starts off as mostly a comedy, but then it makes a credible transition to a more dramatic film as changes occur in the protagonist’s life. If the movie has any “feel good” moments, they are earned, because there’s a lot heartache and personal challenges along the way.
The opening scene of “YOLO” takes place right before a boxing match starts between two women at the Xiangjiang Boxing Club. The reigning champ is Liu Hongxia, while her challenger is revealed later when “YOLO” circles back to this scene in the last third of the film. The coach for the challenger can be heard off-camera saying about the boxing match: “Your rival is a pro. If it’s too hard, I’ll stop it.”
The next scene takes place in a convenience store, where store owner Mrs. Du (played by Zhao Haiyan) and her daughter Du Ledan (played by Zhang Xiaofei), who’s in her late 20s, work in the store. Mrs. Du (whose first name is not mentioned in the movie) and Ledan are showing a live surveillance video to Ledan’s distant cousin Doudou (played by Yang Zi), who is an aspiring TV producer/host. The surveillance video is showing Mrs. Du’s older daughter Du Leying (played by Jia), who is 32, as she is sleeping on a couch in the apartment that is located in the same building, behind the convenience store.
Mrs. Du explains with dismay and concern to Doudou that unemployed Leying typically lounges around and does a lot of sleeping during the day. Mrs. Du, her daughters, and Ledan’s daughter all live in the apartment. Ledan is a divorced mother of a daughter named Zhuzi, who’s about 3 or 4 years old. Mrs. Du and her husband Mr. Du (played by Zhang Qi) are separated, and he rarely communicates with his estranged wife and their children.
It’s later revealed that Leying has been chronically unemployed and living an aimless life for about 10 years, ever since Leying graduated from college and had problems keeping a job. Any casual observer can see that Leying is depressed. Leying says she can’t keep a job because she’s not good at communicating with people. Leying doesn’t say it out loud, but she is also self-conscious about her body size.
Meanwhile, Leying’s mother and sister are beginning to get fed up with Leying being unproductive. Doudou works as an intern for a reality TV show about giving chronically unemployed people a chance to turn their lives around. Doudou has been invited by Ledan to interview a reluctant Leying for an audition video for the show. Doudou sees this interview not only as a way to help Leying but also as a way to impress Doudou’s bosses at the TV show and hopefully be offered a permanent job on the show. Leying doesn’t do well during this interview, which frustrates her mother and sister even more.
Leying feels like a misfit and an outsider in her own home. Can her life get any worse? Yes. Leying has a boyfriend named Wei Dong Feng (played by Wei Xiang), who works as a delivery bike rider. Dong Feng has been secretly having an affair with Leying’s best friend Li Li (played by Li Xueqin), who is now pregnant. Li and Dong Feng also plan to get married in the near future.
Li and Leying have been friends since their childhood, when they were both bullied at school. Leying is invited to have lunch with Dong Feng and Li at a restaurant. Dong Feng breaks up with Leying during this lunch. Leying guesses correctly that another woman is the reason for the breakup. She grabs Dong Feng’s phone to find out who it is. And that’s how Leying discovers the truth that Li is “the other woman.” A devastated Leying also finds out about Li being pregnant and about the marriage plans.
On the night of this breakup, a very sad Leying walks around the city. One of the places she passes is a boxing gym. Through the gym window, she sees a man in his late 30s or early 40s who is practicing on a punching bag. Leying doesn’t know it yet, but his name is Hao Kun (played by Lei Jiayin), and he is a former professional boxer who gives boxing lessons at the gym. Leying and Ku will soon meet each other under some embarrassing circumstances.
Leying is unemployed but she isn’t completely broke. She has inherited an apartment from her grandmother that is worth an unnamed amount of money. There’s some jealousy that Leying’s mother and sister have about this inheritance, because Leying is the only one in the family who received this apartment as an inheritance. There’s also a hint of other family turmoil, because it’s mentioned at Mrs. Du is suing her sister for reasons that aren’t detailed in the movie.
Ledan asks Leying to transfer the apartment deed to Ledan, so that Ledan can sell the apartment and use some of the money to send Zhuzi to an elite private school. Leying says no to the request, and the two sisters get into an argument. Ledan’s pent-up resentment comes out at that moment, as she physically attacks Leying by punching Leying and tackling her to the ground. Leying doesn’t put up much of a fight, but this assault is the last straw for her.
Leying moves out of the apartment and finds another place to live. She needs to find a job to pay her rent. She becomes a server at a casual barbecue restaurant owned and managed by an unnamed man (played by Xu Jun Cong), who is very rude and condescending to Leying. It’s because of this restaurant job that Leying meets Kun.
One night, Leying is working at the restaurant, when a drunk customer gives Leying his car keys and asks her to get a pack of cigarettes from the glove compartment of his car, which he describes. The car is parked on a street right outside the restaurant. Leying gets in the car at around the same time that Kun is urinating on an outside wall of the gym, which is next door to the restaurant.
Leying sees Kun urinating and gets flustered. She accidentally turns on the car headlights, which shine directly on Kun. When she tries to turn the headlights off, she accidentally turns on the windshield wipers and the car blinkers. Even though no one else can can see what Kun is doing, he thinks Leying is trying to humiliate him for urinating outside in public.
Kun angrily goes over to the car to confront Leying, and she explains what she’s doing in the car. Kun advises her to ask the car owner what to do. He also tells Leying that he works at the gym and wouldn’t normally urinate in public, but the gym is closed, and he didn’t know where else to urinate.
After this tense conversation, Leying notices that Kun accidentally left his boxing gloves at the front of the building. She takes the gloves for safekeeping, and the next day, Leying goes to the gym to return the gloves to Kun. A female worker at the gym tries to persuade Leying to take boxing lessons at the gym, but Leying declines the offer.
Meanwhile, Kun is under pressure at his job to bring in more gym memberships. His boss tells Kun that Kun is underperforming in gym membership sales, and Kun could be at risk of getting fired. Kun just wants to do boxing at the gym and not be a salesperson. When Leying accidentally tags Kun on social media, he asks her out on a date, with the ulterior motive to try to sell her a gym membership. And so begins the unlikely relationship between Kun and Leying.
Although the trailer for “YOLO” shows Kun training to become a boxer, most of that doesn’t happen until the last third of the movie. The middle of the movie is about Kun training to make a comeback as a boxer. Things get a little complicated when Kun and Leying become sexually intimate, and there’s some uncertainty about how much of a romance they want to have in their relationship.
“YOLO” isn’t a typical boxing movie because it has many issues that are not in most boxing films. Leying is often body shamed because of her weight, which usually has harsher consequences for women than it does for men. For most boxing films, the boxers are not fat when they begin training.
There’s also a turning point for Leying’s self-esteem after she reacts in a certain way to sexual harassment from her boss. And then there’s the matter of Leying being sexually involved with her coach, which is something that is definitely not in most boxing movies. “YOLO” treats the consensual relationship between Leying and Kun with no judgment.
The relationship between Leying and Kun is not “only in a movie” cute. It’s messy, with both tension and warmth. Kun and Leying have arguments, but they are also supportive of each other. He can be very tough on her inside and outside the gym. And all that training results in Leying transforming physically as well as emotionally.
“YOLO” doesn’t shy away from any comparisons to “Rocky,” because there’s a training sequence that is a blatant homage to “Rocky,” including using Bill Conti’s “Gonna Fly Now” theme song from the movie. Are some moments in the move sentimentally earnest? Yes, but not in a way that’s overly cloying.
The heart and soul of “YOLO” is in Jia’s emotionally versatile and physically demanding performance—she gained and lost 50 pounds of body weight for this role—which is a testament to how it’s never to late for anyone to make improvements in life. Leying goes from someone who hides from life because she’s afraid of getting hurt to someone who finds the courage to live life to the fullest, no matter what the risks. “YOLO” might start out looking like a lightweight boxing comedy, but it ends up packing a powerful punch in the dramatic moments that show how having healthy self-confidence and inner peace are more valuable than external rewards.
Sony Pictures International released “YOLO” in select U.S. cinemas on March 8, 2024. The movie was released in China on February 10, 2024.
Culture Representation: Taking place in Nebraska City, Nebraska (and briefly in Iowa), the comedy/drama film “Snack Shack” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few Latin people and African Americans) representing the working-class and middle-class.
Culture Clash: Two 14-year-old boys, who are best friends and who want to be “get rich quick” entrepreneurs, rent a concession stand at a public swimming pool for a summer, and they compete for the affections of a visiting teenage girl.
Culture Audience: “Snack Shack” will appeal primarily to people who are interested in watching teen movies set in the early 1990s and don’t mind if the movie can’t figure out what it wants to be in its very inconsistent storytelling.
Erratic and unfocused, “Snack Shack” is a silly comedy for the first two-thirds of the movie and then tosses in serious drama in the last third of this sloppily edited film. It’s a derivative teen buddy tale that makes all of the female characters annoying. The movie’s abrupt turn into tearjerking territory looks very out of place, because it’s an obvious and unearned attempt for “Snack Shack” to manipulate emotions out of viewers, before the movie shrugs it off and ends in a “business as usual” way.
Written and directed by Adam Rehmeier, “Snack Shack” takes place in 1991, and was filmed in Nebraska City, Nebraska, where the story occurs. Rehmeier says in the movie’s production notes that “Snack Shack” was inspired by memories of his own teen years in the 1990s in Nebraska City. Those memories seem to be very fragmented, based on the choppy narrative of this substandard movie. Scenes are built up with suspense and then abruptly cut away to the next scene. It happens enough times to be noticeable and aggravating.
“Snack Shack” begins by showing the two 14-year-old guys who are best friends and are at the center of the story. AJ Carter (played by Conor Sherry) is gangly, awkward and mild-mannered. Bruce “Moose” Miller (played by Gabriel LaBelle) is bossy, arrogant and short-tempered. Yes, it’s another buddy movie where the two best pals have opposite personalities. “Snack Shack” mostly takes place during the boys’ summer break from school.
Moose and AJ both have dreams of being business partners in a “get rich quick” scheme. The problem is that they haven’t figured out yet what type of business they should have to become wealthy. First, they travel to Iowa to go to an off-track betting parlor to try to make some cash. But someone who knows AJ’s parents sees Moose and AJ at the betting parlor, and reports it to AJ parents. AJ had lied to his parents by saying that he and Moose were on a field trip.
When AJ and Moose go back to AJ’s house, AJ’s parents yell at them about crossing state lines to gamble, and then they tell AJ that he’s grounded. AJ’s mother Jean (played by Gillian Vigman) is overprotective, but she’s depicted as an irritating nag who’s ready to punish without trying to find out the real reason for a child’s discontent. AJ’s equally strict and rigid father (played by David Costabile) is a county district court judge. His first name is never mentioned in the movie; he’s just called Judge by AJ and other people.
AJ has a sister named Chrissy (played by June Scarlett Gentry, also known as June Gentry), who is about 12 or 13. Chrissy is so one-dimensional, her only purpose in the movie is to tattle on AJ to get him in trouble, and then gloat when he does get in trouble. If Moose has any siblings, they’re not seen or mentioned in the movie. The only glimpse into Moose’s family life is a brief scene of Moose’s mother Sherry (played by Kate Robertson Pryor) encountering AJ’s mother Jean in a grocery store while AJ and Moose are with their respective mothers.
AJ and Moose are friendly with a man in his late 20s named Shane (played by Nick Robinson), who gives them rides in his truck and encourages them to rebel. There’s a brief mention of Shane being on leave from the military, which is why he’s never shown in the movie working at any job. Shane is never shown hanging out with adults, only teenagers.
“Snack Shack” doesn’t mention or acknowledge how it’s creepy and weird for a man in his late 20s to be spending so much of his free time and his social life with these 14-year-old boys. That’s because the movie aggressively pushes the narrative that Shane is supposed to be a “cool older guy” whom AJ and Moose look up to and respect.
Shane is also conveniently there when AJ needs advice on dating, even though the movie presents no evidence that Shane knows what it’s like to be in a healthy love relationship. And who in their right mind would want to date a man who hangs out so much with underage teenagers for his social life? But don’t tell that to the people who made “Snack Shack,” because it would ruin the narrative that Shane is supposed to be a quasi-hero of the story.
“Snack Shack” repeatedly shows and tells that Moose and AJ are supposed to be “rebellious” because they smoke marijuana and nicotine cigarettes. Shane is the one who gives AJ and Moose their first marijuana experiences. Shane also gives alcohol to AJ and Moose and invites them to underground parties.
Somehow, Shane has fooled AJ’s parents into thinking that Shane is a responsible role model, but it still doesn’t explain how the parents don’t see it as odd that Shane doesn’t seem to have any friends his own age and is hanging out so much with these children. Later in the movie, Shane invites AJ to go with Shane on a road trip to Alaska for the following summer, in July and August 1992. Shane tells AJ that the trip will cost AJ about $2,000.
AJ and Moose try starting their own homemade beer company called Real Beer, but that idea (just like the storyline for it) goes nowhere. The plans to start their own beer company end up being demolished when a neighbor angrily tells AJ’s father that the two teens have been illegally tapping into his pipe water supply to make the beer. Before the beer company idea went kaput, AJ and Moose gave Shane a sample taste of their homemade beer, which Shane described as “drinkable as fuck.”
There are a few very contrived and not-very-funny scenes of AJ mowing the front lawn of his family house as part of his chore punishment, but he keeps sneezing, because apparently AJ is allergic to the smell of freshly mowed grass. It’s during one of these sneezing bouts that AJ first sees the teenage girl who will be his love interest for the entire movie. Her name is Brooke (played by Mika Abdalla), who is supposed to be 16 or 17, but she looks like she’s in her 20s.
LaBelle as Moose also looks too old for his “Snack Shack” character’s age. He is never convincing as a 14-year-old in this movie. Sherry (who resembles a teenage Justin Bieber) was also in his 20s when he filmed “Snack Shack,” but he’s believable as a 14-year-old because of his baby face and the way he portrays AJ as an insecure and vulnerable teenager.
Brooke is visiting Nebraska City, and is temporarily staying with her cousin: a teenage girl named Leah (played by April Clark), whose family lives next door to AJ and his family. (Cue the predictable scenes of AJ being a voyeur when he’s ogling Brooke as he looks at her from his bedroom window.) Leah is supposed to be about 14 or 15 years old. Leah’s barely-there personality is only on display in a scene where she whines about being afraid to jump off a diving board into a swimming pool.
Brooke’s father is in the military, so Brooke moves around a lot. Brooke mentions at one point that it’s hard for her to maintain relationships because of all these relocations. It’s supposed to make viewers feel sympathy for Brooke, but it doesn’t excuse her frequently obnoxious personality.
Brooke happens to be outside when she sees AJ having one of his sneezing fits while he’s mowing the lawn. She immediately taunts AJ and calls him “shit pig,” which is what she calls him during the entire movie. Brooke thinks she’s being cute and clever with this derogatory name, but she’s just being disrespectful and stupid. She does a lot of things in this movie that are thoughtless and cruel, but “Snack Shack” wants viewers to ignore all that because Brooke is supposed to be the movie’s “dream girl” just because she looks physically attractive.
AJ is instantly smitten with Brooke, and she knows it. Brooke’s nasty attitude with AJ sets the tone for most of their relationship. She does what can be described as “insult flirting,” where she tries to get a rise out of a guy she likes by pretending that she doesn’t really like him and insulting him to his face. Brooke doesn’t even tell AJ what her name is until after they’ve talked to each other a few times. Brooke takes photos as a hobby and likes to snap pictures of people when they’re caught off-guard.
Moose and AJ gripe to Shane about their woes in finding a way to make money for the summer. That’s when Shane tells AJ and Moose that the local public swimming pool called Steinhart Pool has a concession stand called Snack Shack, which is owned by the city and overseen by the city’s parks and recreation department. (In real life, Steinhart Pool’s name is Steinhart Aquatic Center.) Snack Shack is up for rental to the highest bidder every summer. Whoever wins the bid is responsible for operating Snack Shack for the summer.
In one of the movie’s most illogical plot holes, Shane says Moose and AJ are too young to be lifeguards at the pool (the minimum age to be a lifeguard is 16), so he suggests that Moose and AJ bid for the Snack Shack instead. The movie wants viewers to not know or forget that people under the age of 18 (even in 1991) can’t get a contract for this type of business without a parent or guardian’s permission and co-signature. Needless to say, AJ and Moose don’t want their parents to know about their plans to bid for Snack Shack.
But there would be no “Snack Shack” movie if these realistic details about contracts were in the movie. Moose and AJ scheme to outbid two local brothers named Jeff Bravo (played by Dawson Mullen) and Chris Bravo (played by Christian J. Velez), who are in their 20s and who have been operating Snack Shack for the past few years. Moose and AJ meet up with Jeff and Chris to find out how much they plan to bid, without letting the Bravo brothers know that AJ and Moose want to bid on Snack Shack too.
It leads to a moronic sequence of events where Chris and Jeff tell Moose and AJ that they plan to bid $3,000. Moose and AJ go to a bank to withdraw $3,000 from AJ’s savings account that had money saved for his future college tuition. AJ and Moose arrive at the bank “disguised” in matching business suits and sunglasses to look like adults, but they just really look like pathetic teen Blues Brothers wannabes. And what is the point of these disguises when the bank employees don’t seem to care that Moose and AJ are under 18 and withdrawing this amount of cash?
Moose and AJ go to the city council meeting, where the bidding will take place. Moose and AJ bid $3,001—and find out too late that the Bravo brothers bid only $300. This isn’t spoiler information since all of the movie’s marketing materials show that AJ and Moose end up operating Snack Shack.
AJ’s parents find out that he foolishly blew his savings on this overinflated bid. They get even angrier with AJ over this screw-up than they did about the homemade beer and gambling fiascos, but that doesn’t stop AJ from eventually coming and going as he pleases. What happened to AJ being grounded? Don’t expect any answers to that question. There are so many inconsistencies and plot holes in this mindless movie, it’s ridiculous. That’s why it looks completely unbelievable when AJ’s mother makes vague threats to send AJ to military school.
To make matter worse, dimwits AJ and Moose bid on Snack Shack before even knowing what it looked like on the inside. They find out that they’re stuck with a filthy dump that has no refrigerator and no stove. Moose and AJ end up getting these appliances by buying them as used discounts. The refrigerator they buy is dirty and was previously used by a mortuary. Ick.
In addition to buying appliances, AJ and Moose have to pay for the food and drinks they’re gong to sell. The movie never really explains where they get the extra start-up money. Moose sees himself as the “alpha male” wheeler dealer and AJ as the “beta male” who’s supposed to take orders from Moose. AJ ends up cleaning up Snack Shack by himself during the refurbishing process, while Moose vaguely says he has to be somewhere else to “make deals.” You will see a lot of AJ being treated like a doormat in this movie.
And what a coincidence: Brooke mentions to AJ that she’s looking for a summer job, shortly after AJ finds out that Steinhart Pool has a job opening for a lifeguard. Guess who will be the lifeguard at Steinhart Pool for the summer? It’s all just a contrivance so that Brooke will be close by on the job when the inevitable love triangle happens.
The movie is titled “Snack Shack,” but most of the movie does not take place at Snack Shack. Don’t expect “Snack Shack” to show anything substantial about the customers who are regulars at Snack Shack, because this unimaginative movie isn’t about any interesting relationships that AJ and Moose could have developed by getting to know their customers. Don’t expect anyone in the movie to question why a city would allow two 14-year-old, inexperienced children to operate a city-owned concession stand by themselves. (Can you say, “Insurance disaster waiting to happen”?)
“Snack Shack” doesn’t care about those pesky, realistic details. It’s too preoccupied with regurgitating teen movie stereotypes. At least half of the story is about the rivalry that AJ and Moose have over Brooke. Moose knew from the beginning that AJ had a crush on Brooke, but Moose puts the moves on Brooke anyway. Brooke plays mind games with both of them. Arguments and a lot of pouting ensue. It all becomes so tedious after a while.
And here comes another teen movie cliché: the bullies who are supposed to get their comeuppance. In “Snack Shack,” these lunkheads are muscular brothers Randy Carmichael (played by Michael Bonini) and Rodney Carmichael (played by Christian James), who both have some kind of past feuding with AJ and Moose that’s never really explained in the movie. You just know that every time one or both of the Carmichael brothers show up, it’s only to start a fight with AJ and Moose.
Because AJ is the only one of the two pals whose home life is shown, and because he’s such a passive pushover when it comes to his relationships, viewers are obviously supposed to root for him the most. Of all the “Snack Shack” cast members, Sherry gives the best performance in a sea of mostly mediocre performances. However, “Snack Shack” goes overboard in pushing the sympathy card for AJ before you start to wonder if he has any kind of self-esteem deserving of respect. AJ has trouble finding a spine, just like “Snack Shack” doesn’t have a backbone of a cohesive and well-written story that doesn’t fumble the balance that was needed for the movie’s comedy and drama.
Republic Pictures and Paramount Global Content Distribution will release “Snack Shack” in select U.S. cinemas on March 15, 2024.