May 3 - 9, 2024 - Music Box Theatre
CCFF Reviews
Writing about film for more than ten years has allowed me to cover movies from blockbusters to indies. It’s also allowed me to attend major events like TIFF in Toronto and Sundance in Park City, Utah. Traveling around the country is a huge privilege, but it’s nice to know a short plane ride (or slightly long car ride) can also get me to a terrific fest a few states over, and as a die-hard cinephile, I was elated to attend the 11th Annual Chicago Critics Film Festival. This year’s lineup promised an extraordinary experience, and it certainly delivered.
It was a whirlwind four days in the city (I fit in two stage shows while I was there, too! Well, I saw the pre-Broadway premiere of the musical Death Becomes Her twice!), but as I left the beautiful historic Music Box Theatre, I was once again struck by an overwhelming sense of gratitude for these opportunities to experience diverse and thought-provoking selections of films, and in some cases engage with the talented individuals who made them.
If we met during that weekend, hello again, and if we didn’t connect, here’s to next time! I can’t wait to see what they have in store for next year! It’s a must-attend event for movie fans from all genres!
Follow along for capsule reviews of the films I’ve seen at the festival.
Good One
On a weekend backpacking trip in the Catskills, 17-year-old Sam contends with the competing egos of her father and his oldest friend.
Complex father-daughter relationships have been bread and butter for fledgling filmmakers back to the silent era, but they’ve evolved from the child needing to learn a lesson to the parent needing an education.
That’s the case in GOOD ONE, writer/director India Donaldson’s debut feature that adds a few more layers to peel back as we join a self-sufficient and perceptive teen who joins her divorced dad (James Le Gros) and his best friend (Danny McCarthy) for a three-day camping trip that brings tensions and grief to the surface.
Dissecting not just the bonds between the dad and his kid but how long-lasting friendships can sour and turn rancid when they aren’t built with mutual respect, Donaldson gives the audience much to unpack over the 89-minute run-time. While that sounds like a brisk endeavor, GOOD ONE is anything but. In fact, with its tendency to drift into the delicacy of the fauna they are trekking through, the film is often achingly slow.
While that may be the perfect arena to examine some awkward moments that wouldn’t play as well outside of the solemnity of the woods, it doesn’t give the audience much to chew on, even if it does force them to live in the awkwardness of the situations Donaldson creates.
Featuring an impressive performance by Lilly Collias, who rarely rises above medium-cool, the movie is a slice of life to chew on but wasn’t packed with enough nutrients to fill me up.
Sing Sing
Divine G, imprisoned at Sing Sing for a crime he didn't commit, finds purpose by acting in a theatre group alongside other incarcerated men in this story of resilience, humanity, and the transformative power of art.
Fortunate enough to be seeing SING SING once more, again having the honor of hearing the filmmakers, actors, and inspirations present after to discuss.
SING SING is one of those films you can tell is going places. Based on the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA) founded in 1986 at Sing Sing maximum security prison, Greg Kwedar’s film uses a handful of professional actors (namely Oscar-nominees Colman Domingo & Paul Raci) but is predominantly made up of real-life former inmates/alums of RTA.
Most of the time, casting non-professional actors can have awkward drawbacks, but it is the key to SING SING’s ultimate soaring success, lending pure authenticity and raw honesty to the semi-fictionalized story as scripted by Kwedar and Clint Bentley. Domingo plays Divine G, a leader of sorts in the RTA who takes a new member, Sean “Divine Eye” Johnson (who unforgettably plays himself and I think will take home Oscar this year along with the movie and Domingo), under his wing as they begin to mount their spring production. At the same time, Divine G is preparing for his next parole hearing and assisting his fellow inmates on theirs, even though many have been resigned that making their case to a blank-faced board won’t change their sentences.
As you may expect, there’s a degree of darkness to SING SING that gives it a weight to carry forward, which can sometimes slow the pace. Still, the beautiful hearts of the performers and the joy they feel from creating and performing are the electricity that energizes the movie.If some have suggested this is more of an advertisement/endorsement for RTA (with its remarkable 3% recidivism from freed participants) and similar programs, then so be it; it beautifully demonstrates the individualized power derived from placing the incarcerated into creatively fulfilling roles while they serve out their time and prepares them for the “after”
Cuckoo
Reluctantly, 17-year-old Gretchen leaves her American home to live with her father, who has just moved into a resort in the German Alps with his new family. Something doesn’t seem right in this tranquil vacation paradise. Gretchen is plagued by strange noises and bloody visions until she discovers a shocking secret that also concerns her own family.
God bless NEON’s marketing department because they have a way of creating anticipation around a movie like I’ve never seen. I’d been hearing about CUCKOO since late last summer when its first image was released and have been chomping at the bit to see it ever since.
Not only does writer/director Tilman Singer’s beautifully bizarre horror yarn deliver in the frights department (it’s honestly quite frightening), but it also gives Hunter Schafer a whopper of an emotional journey.
Schaefer is exceptionally, electrifyingly good, along with an eccentric collection of supporting characters that fit in perfectly with the remote Bavarian setting. Something is amiss, and Singer’s script isn’t forthcoming until very late about what is happening – it’s great fun to have to work for your mystery rewards.
In Dan Stevens, Singer has found an actor who knows precisely how to lean into unsettling strangeness while disarming you with a golden glint in his eye. Stevens can be hit or miss, but he’s been cast well, even if his accent sometimes tends to betray him.
If I’m being deliberately vague about the plot, it’s only because I want you to go in as blind as possible and let it develop naturally – thankfully the previews haven’t given away all the scares and secrets. Where most horror films start to disintegrate (all the explainin’, y’know) is right about when CUCKOO finds another chilly gust of wind to carry it to its satisfying finale. This one knows how to find incredibly horrifying moments of terror that will rattle your bones and chatter your teeth.
Pray that you can see it with a packed audience because if they are half as into it as ours, it will only add extra goosebumps to your night at the movies.
Sleep
A young, expectant wife must figure out how to stop her husband's nightmarish sleepwalking habits before he harms himself or his family.
(Republished in part from my review of the Midnight Madness screening at TIFF)
Arriving from South Korea, SLEEP preys on our fear of when we are the most vulnerable…as we get our slumber. Filmmakers have been picking at this scratchy blister for decades (hello, Wes Craven!), but writer/director Jason Yu injects a refreshing dose of dread with this finely crafted creep-fest.
It was rather appropriate to be screening SLEEP at a midnight showing (again!) when I should have been in bed, and you better believe that after it was over, I had a hard time (again!) closing my eyes long enough to convince my mind there was nothing to be afraid of.
Far from your traditional K-horror in that it eschews creating a central figure of terror to thwart, Yu instead builds upon a simple set-up involving historical lore that stretches across borders. When her actor-husband (Lee Sun-Kyun) starts to display strange behavior while asleep, a pregnant wife (the terrifically take-charge Jung Yu-Mi) fears for both her safety and the well-being of her unborn child. Enlisting any help she can after her spouse begins to harm himself physically and develops a taste for a midnight snack of raw meat, the wife even resorts to calling in her mom and an eccentric mystic to clear the apartment of any evil presence.
Is the affliction something physical or truly supernatural? Does it have anything to do with the loud noises that have annoyed the couple and the downstairs neighbors? Or has something else snuck into their lives, something which arrived undetected and has hidden itself within the husband, waiting for the perfect time to strike? Presented in three chapters, Yu wastes no time raising the hairs on your neck and keeps audiences on red alert until the finale. Where SLEEP goes is surprising, funny, and oh-so scary and indicates the arrival of another auteur with a vision conveyed with decisive precision.
Shorts Program
A collection of five short films curated by the programmers. While they didn’t seem to have a thematic link, but they were all uniformly strong examples of filmmakers with a powerful and unique point of view
From festival to festival, if there is one area of programming that will draw a guaranteed crowd, it is a shorts program. Acting like an anthology of sorts in that it gives an audience several options in one sitting with the knowledge that if they aren’t into one film, a new one will be starting in fifteen minutes or less, shorts can be calling cards for longer movies or just a fine display of filmmaking.
ME—First, the latest film by Oscar-nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt (World of Tomorrow) has one of the best scores I’ve heard in ages. Moving from a sick beat opening through stirring soundscapes to land in the ethereal is an excellent way to investigate the film’s core shaking resonance. Expect Herzfeld to land on the best-of-the-year list again.
TRAPPED – a tale with all the ingredients to end on a high note. It follows the story of a night janitor at an elite school who stumbles upon a group of seniors planning a dastardly senior prank. However, just when it should have concluded with a satisfying twist, it veers off into a second act that, while attempting to make a statement, loses its focus and impact.
IF I DIE IN AMERICA – Shorts can be little slices of life that let us into the world of characters that an entire film may not support. I don’t think that’s the case here because it feels like the prologue of a more expansive movie I’d like to see. A man who recently lost his husband in a tragic accident is put in an uncomfortable position when his partner’s family in the Middle East wants the body back. I hope to see this back in a longer format at some point.
PATIENT—I had to look up again how this film was described on the website to make sure I didn’t reveal too much about Lori Felker’s skillfully assembled doc, which follows a standard training program for doctors at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Once you feel you’ve got your footing, Felker has one more surprise in the credits.
BOB’S FUNERAL —the Short Film Nonfiction Award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Jack Dunphy’s documentary is billed as him sneaking “a camera into his estranged grandfather’s funeral.” It’s so much more than this, though. It’s a partly animated mini biography, an insightful commentary on family, how we form connections to those who love us, and finally, a tribute to those we lose. It’s a tearjerker in super stealth mode.
Babes
When Eden, an aggressively single woman, gets pregnant from a one-night stand, she turns to her best friend Dawn, a married mother of two, for help.
I always hate when critics start a review comparing one movie to another, even favorably, because it sets a lot of expectations.
So I’m going to do it anyway.
Multiple times during this new film, co-written by star Ilana Glazer, I was transported back to my first screening of Bridesmaids before it became an Oscar-nominated benchmark in female-led comedies.
It has the same themes of friendship being family, insightful knowledge of the inner workings of complex dynamics in long-lasting bonds of togetherness, and a commitment to making a “warts-and-all” approach mean more than gross-out humor. It’s all familiar, yet under Pamela Adlon’s razor-sharp, no-BS direction, Glazer and co-star Michelle Buteau (better here than ever before because she’s allowed to show her range for more than delivering perfect one-liners) go deeper into roles that provide them depth and dimension.
I feel like Glazer is giving one of those performances that take an already successful career to a massive next level. There are more LPM (laughs per minute) in this impeccably cast gem than you can likely process in one viewing, a fact NEON is likely counting on to propel the film into an early summer hit. See it with everyone you know. It’s one of the few can’t miss, R-rated comedies I could ever recommend to you.
Read my full review here
In a Violent Nature
When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it.
As a connoisseur of sorts of slasher films, I’ve seen my share of filmmakers attempt to deconstruct and reconstitute the slice-and-dice genre to put their stamp on to varying degrees of ingenious success.
Now along comes Chris Nash (a veteran special effects technician) with IN A VIOLENT NATURE, a Canadian film made on a slim budget (and shot twice due to production quality issues) that switches the perspective on the viewer, asking us to be more of a casual observer on the action of a resurrected killing machine.
Through Pierce Derks’s alternately languid and stunning cinematography, we hover behind the hulking maniac as he walks (and walks and walks and walks) through the wilderness, hunting down a group of kids that have made off with an item that holds great importance not only to him personally but with the ability to confine him to the woods. As is his trade, Nash has orchestrated some gruesome kills from his bag of tricks, obviously ideas he’d been saving for this occasion. The violence is extreme and, at times, almost nauseating and applied with such a cruel matter of-factness that it rises to a level of bone-chilling haunting you’ll have a tough time shaking.
All that being said, it has a disastrously poor ending that bewilderingly extends the film nearly ten minutes longer than necessary, all but destroying whatever impact the previous 80 minutes had earned.
Recommended for fans of the genre who can handle the tremendous brutality and have patience to understand what Nash is doing by flipping the perspective to what’s going on with the slasher while his victims are unaware they are the prey.
Oddity
In this supernatural spectacle, a blind medium uncovers the truth behind her sister's death with the help of a frightening wooden mannequin.
Winner of the Midnighters Audience Award at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, ODDITY is an Irish horror film you’ll either hear about from your #horrorfriends or be the one suggesting to anyone looking for some primo scares.
It’s relatively easy to jangle viewers with a few well-timed score spikes and cats that jump out of nowhere, but it takes a particular skill to make them feel as if they’re leaving their skin in fright. Director Damian Mc Carthy knows the difference and demonstrates it multiple times in this frequently terrifying tale of a blind medium investigating the death of her twin sister at the isolated country estate she was renovating with her husband.
Carolyn Bracken pulls double duty as the sisters, clearly defining one from the other but making the psychic especially memorable for her ability to see through touch. Anyone trying to hide the truth from her better steer clear of her hands, or she’ll discover what lies beneath. If that were all of ODDITY, Mc Carthy would have had a solid thriller, but he adds an extra layer of fear by introducing a wooden mannequin the surviving twin gifts to her brother-in-law, a mannequin that appears to be able to move independently. Or is someone manipulating it to discover a wicked truth…or conceal their crime?
Mc Carthy has one scare in his follow-up to 2021’s CAVEAT that had our audience practically leaping onto the ceiling, and he gets that reaction because of a brilliant build-up of suspense sustained throughout. Superbly spooky and anxiety-inducing, it continues 2024’s trajectory as the year of superior horror releases.
I Saw the TV Glow
Teenager Owen is just trying to make it through life in the suburbs when his classmate introduces him to a mysterious late-night TV show — a vision of a supernatural world beneath their own. In the pale glow of the television, Owen’s view of reality begins to crack.
In January, while at Sundance, the only film people routinely asked about was Jane Schoenbrun’s I SAW THE TV GLOW. It was the movie some had come to Sundance to see, and while the reactions I heard were mixed once the sold-out screenings were done, the consensus was that Schoenbrun’s gifts as a one-of-a-kind storyteller were unmatched. I didn’t get to see the film earlier this year because it would have meant sacrificing other movies to do so, but here in Chicago, there was more festival fervor to get into the one screening.
Having seen it, I can see why Schoenbrun has already amassed a following that spans preferences because their films are unclassifiable, in the most positive use of the word.
An unhealthy obsession with a popular YA program in their own life serves as the basis for Schoenbrun’s sinewy narrative following a boy who becomes mesmerized by an upper-level student and the bond they form over a TV show, The Pink Opaque. An outlet for both to escape the reality of their lives, their lifeline is severed after she vanishes and the show is abruptly canceled. When she appears nearly a decade later, it will change the course of the now young man’s life, asking him to question not just where the truth lies but where he fits into the stereotypes of society.
No capsule review can get to the heart of what Schoenbrun is conveying here, and I think a second watch is needed to take in the material and process it fully. Fans of tidy storytelling should beware; you’ve come to the wrong colorful, sonically beautiful party…but at least you’ve been invited. Make sure to accept.
Read my full review here
The Last Stop in Yuma County
While stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop, a traveling salesman is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.
How strong of a feature debut is Francis Galluppi’s THE LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY? Strong enough to get the producers of one of the spin-offs to the EVIL DEAD films to hire him before Galluppi’s breathless crime drama even opens in wide release.
You can see why a business-minded person would put their faith in the upcoming director; this original movie is a feast for lovers of sweat-on-the-brow suspenseful atmosphere and detailed dialogue that trims off any unnecessary excess.
A traveling salesman (Jim Cummings, a hidden gem of an actor) is low on fuel and stops at a remote service station only to find their tanks empty and waiting for a gas delivery later that day. Before he turns it off and heads into the diner next door, his radio announces a nearby robbery and to look out for a car with a distinguishing feature. He’s barely had time to make small talk with the waitress when guess who shows up also looking for fuel?
Galluppi essentially utilizes one set as the stage for a tension-filled showdown between crooks, both known and unknown. More people arrive, and with each patron that takes a seat, the stakes get raised until the sixty-minute mark when the film changes course to something slightly less intriguing but no less carefully constructed.
Galluppi has cast the film to perfection, from Jocelin Donahue’s plucky waitress to the fantastic Richard Brake as an evil man whose voice alone can cut through you like a knife. It’s so refreshing to see a script and a filmmaker who understands the dynamics of cinema and how precision ultimately wins out over spectacle.
And both the soundtrack and score give the Tarantino tingles without feeling like someone copying that style.
Read my full review here
The Dead Don't Hurt
Two pioneers fight for their lives and their love on the American frontier during the Civil War.
(Republished from my TIFF Review on September 8, 2023)
Is the Western dead? Check-in with Viggo Mortensen on the genre’s status, and he’ll sit you down to show you a print of THE DEAD DON’T HURT as an example of how the Western can thrive with the right creatives in command.
Mortensen takes on a multi-hyphenate role in the film, serving as producer, writer, director, and star. Oh, and he composed the original score, most of it before the movie even started filming because, in his mind, the movie was matched to the music, not the traditional other way around.
The result is a beautifully rendered take on the Western, free from the usual leathery garb of dusty horses and nooses. Instead, Mortensen etched out a love story and let his co-star shine brightest. As if I didn’t love Vicky Krieps enough, she does enough acting with a single tear in this gah-orgeous dream of a Western to more than justify the TIFF Tribute Performer Award she received at the festival.
The love story created between the characters Krieps and Mortensen play is familiar but far from simple, and it’s played out by two ace actors. That makes some of the narrative blandness excusable because the characters are rich in flavor.
Thelma
When 93-year-old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her.
(Republished from my Sundance Review on March 4, 2024)
Prepare for a mild-to-wild rollercoaster with Josh Margolin’s lovable THELMA, a delightful ode to his grandmother, brought to life by the effervescent June Squibb.
If you would, bear with me as I draw a crazy comparison—Margolin’s film reminded me often of Jason Statham’s recent thriller, THE BEEKEEPER, but with a jollier twist. Squibb, a cheerier counterpart to Statham’s grim killer, takes off on a perilous mission to unmask a scam artist preying on seniors. While Statham’s style involves a healthy amount of skull-cracking, Squibb’s motor-scooter-fueled pursuit of the truth had me far more on edge, fearing broken bones.
Joined by the late, great Richard Roundtree in a fantastic final role, THELMA is centered squarely on Squibb, who, at a spry 93, takes on her first leading role. Her magnetic charm could sell water to a stone, elevating this caper movie into a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Casting Clark Gregg and Parker Posey usually would be a cause for celebration, but they’re caught in a subplot Margolin hasn’t scripted as tightly as Squibb’s, turning them into distracting detours when the focus shifts.
A previous Oscar nominee, Squibb, if positioned right and catching on as I anticipate, might find herself the toast of the town a year from now. THELMA isn’t just a film; it’s a testament to the enduring charisma of its leading lady and the unpredictable joys that come with a spirited pursuit of justice—on a motor scooter, no less!
Flipside
When filmmaker Chris Wilcha revisits the record store he worked at as a teenager in New Jersey, he finds the once-thriving bastion of music and weirdness from his youth slowly falling apart and out of touch with the times. Flipside documents his tragicomic attempt to revive the store while revisiting other documentary projects he has abandoned over the years.
(Republished from my MSPIFF Review on April 21, 2024)
Like many members of Generation X, Chris Wilcha didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but he knew he didn’t want it to be the same one his parents lived. This wasn’t the result of negative feelings toward them, just the desire to break out of the norm. For a while, it looked like his career as a mold-shattering filmmaker with something to say would come true, but the universe had a different plan for how Wilcha could share his gift for capturing real-life stories…and it was a long game.
Wilcha’s documentary FLIPSIDE is more than a coming-home look at the New Jersey record store he worked at as a teen and his efforts to revive its rapidly waning popularity. It’s a jumping-off point for Wilcha to look back at numerous projects he started but never finished and examine why the memories we have freeze-dried in our brains can, once thawed, take on a poignant potency. Wilcha’s talent for catching life quirks is a boon to this endlessly entertaining, frequently laugh-out-loud funny film packed with characters that are real, well, characters.
In the hands of another filmmaker, swapping between clips of an unfinished documentary of the late jazz photographer Herman Leonard and Wilcha’s father raiding a hotel maid’s cart for toiletries to feed his hoarding habit would seem incongruous. Still, his work with This American Life/Ira Glass and Judd Apatow has fine-tuned his frequency for showing humanity in all walks of life. When you think Wilcha has dangled too many of his historically loose threads in front of us, he performs a bit of magic (the kind found in the best documentaries, of which this undoubtedly is) and turns the tables on audiences.
What You Wish For
A down-on-his-luck chef gets more than he bargained for when he steps into the life of an old culinary school pal, a private chef for the über-rich
Republished from my review from September 27, 2023)
For once, I found myself leaning forward in a movie about a man’s lies getting him deeper and deeper into trouble. Usually, I recoil the longer a charade goes on at the absurdity of not just telling the truth. Still, stars Tamsin Tomnay and a terrific Nick Stahl subtly sell it that Ryan would need to maintain his cover as long as possible in these circumstances. A level of danger is inherent in what’s taking place, and the stakes only get higher as the night progresses. The film takes a few giant leaps as it nears the conclusion that doesn’t jive with the established realism of the rest of the movie, but that can be forgiven because so much of the film is captivating.
As a critic, you wish for movies that will shake up the norm in a genre and give you something new to digest. What You Wish For may have some twists you can smell coming from a few paces away, but I’m guessing it will keep you hungry to discover what happens in the final course. Stahl and Topolski are lethally good together; you are reminded again how strong of an actor Stahl has always been, and I found Topolski’s cool-as-ice performance to be top-notch. If you see this one on your (video) menu, order it up!
Handling the Undead
On a hot summer day in Oslo, the newly dead awaken. Three families faced with loss try to figure out what this resurrection means and if their loved ones really are back.
Enough people convinced me HANDLING THE UNDEAD was D.O.A. I nearly skipped out on it, not wanting to waste precious at-home time on a title that wouldn’t fill my cup. I’m so glad I didn’t turn fickle in my final hours of the festival and stuck to my guns because this Norwegian-Swedish offering being released by NEON in the coming months was an unsettling gem. Directed by Thea Hvistendahl, who adapted the 2005 novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist (the writer of Let the Right One In), the marketing for this one is going to be tricky because it’s a horror film about those no longer alive but not zombies in the way we have come to think of them.
Though ostensibly an ensemble film, celebrated actress Renate Reinsve is shown prominently on the poster and trailers, and her plotline features the most terror-centric developments as the movie progresses. However, the stellar cast truly sells the dread overtaking the town as they see their loved ones coming back to life only to gradually become something monstrous. I found several passages of HANDLING THE UNDEAD to be genuinely frightening, and often, nothing of much note was even happening; it was how Hvistendahl let the camera linger just long enough for your mind to imagine the worst outcome possible. The cinematography from Pål Ulvik Rokseth is impressive; an opening shot tracks a character walking with such benign stealth that you don’t realize how suspenseful it has become until you notice you’ve been holding your breath waiting for the tension to break. I can see where others found this too slow and meandering for their instant deliverable taste, but the creep of this one did a wonderous number on me.
National Anthem
A young construction worker accepts a job with a group of queer rodeo performers and discovers formerly dormant parts of himself in photographer Luke Gilford’s captivating feature debut.
Republished from my TIFF review from November 27, 2023)
Armed with a frankness, authenticity, and respect for tone that most queer-facing cinema lacks, there is a simple beauty in much of what we see in Luke Gilford’s first feature. Part of that comes from Gilford’s journey growing up in the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association with his father. This world provided context for the community he creates in National Anthem. Forced to grow up faster than he’d like to support his mother and small brother, a young man takes up odd jobs around his home in New Mexico, eventually landing one on a ranch where a queer rodeo lives and trains. Drawn by some unknown pull to this foreign world, emotions he has tamped down, and his boss’s girlfriend create less of a coming out story and more of a coming home journey that is told with sensitivity.
Charlie Plummer (who plays a similar role in 2017’s Lean on Pete) has the right mix of curiosity and tension recognizable to anyone who’s been on a similar path, and Eve Lindley is a breath of fresh air as the catalyst for his willingness to be vulnerable. The real revelation of the film is Mason Alexander Park as a rodeo chanteuse who doesn’t sugarcoat words but conveys great care all the same. The script gets a little thin near the end and probably falls too quickly into the traps of a generic third act, but Gilford’s eye for detail throughout (and the stark beauty of the untouched New Mexico land) is a sight to see.
Ghostlight
When a construction worker unexpectedly joins a local theater's production of Romeo and Juliet, the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life.
(Republished from my Sundance review from 1/18/24)
When a construction worker unexpectedly joins a local theater’s production of Romeo and Juliet, the drama onstage starts to mirror his own life. Tender, raw, surprising, and filled with moments of organically grown humor that could only spring from the seasoned pros directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson have cast, GHOSTLIGHT is the heart-on-its-sleeve weepie audiences brought their Kleenex to Park City for.
There are some terrifically played emotional beats in this (I was choking back sobs early. Like, first act early.), and while the cast is uniformly excellent in every way, this is star Keith Kupferer’s show from the quiet start to its blazing finish. With his wife and daughter playing his onscreen family, Kupferer goes on a journey that’s honestly played and fully lived in. O’Sullivan’s script offers dignity instead of digs at the amateur theater troupe Kupferer joins, and when he winds up playing Romeo opposite the exquisite Dolly De Leon’s Juliet, it becomes an opportunity for the blue-collar worker to heal a wound that has grown infected and is slowly poisoning his life.
A celebrated actress who had flown under the radar for years, De Leon arrived on the scene with 2022’s Triangle of Sadness, but with GHOSTLIGHT she’s established herself as a formidable leading lady. Edited to give it expert shape and directed with intelligent freedom, this is proof on film of the healing power of theater. Acquired by IFC, I’m hoping they can give this moving film the release (and awards push) it deserves.
Leave a Reply