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Agnes Bruckner, Campbell Scott, Christopher Munch, Currie Graham, George Gerdes, Leith M. Burke, Monte Markham, The 11th Green
What if aliens really did walk among us? What if they brought us technology that could solve the world’s thirst for energy without destroying the planet? What if there were government entities whose sole mission, going back decades, was to keep all of this a secret in order to preserve the status quo? What if every American president was in on it, but was prevailed upon to never reveal the truth? What if a gadfly reporter stumbled upon all this? These questions are the starting point for writer/director Christopher Munch’s sometimes intriguing, sometimes silly sci-fi drama The 11th Green.
Munch, who previously made Letters from the Big Man (2011), the tale of a woman’s involvement with a sasquatch, goes X-Files with a film that runs on two tracks. In one, journalist Jeremy Rudd (Campbell Scott) travels to California when his Air Force officer father, Nelson (Monte Markham), dies. Revelations from Laurie Larkspur (Agnes Bruckner), his dad’s comely last assistant, and the old man’s protégé Larry Jacobsen (Currie Graham), a slippery intelligence operative, convince Jeremy he is on to a big story. Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Leith M. Burke) – nameless, but clearly Barack Obama, right down to a childhood connection to Hawaii – communes with President Dwight Eisenhower (George Gerdes) and an ET named Lars (Tom Stokes), receiving the country’s most closely guarded secrets.
While seemingly tailormade for the QAnon conspiracy aficionados among us – that phrase “Deep State” gets bandied about a lot – The 11th Green is entertaining even for those unwilling to buy into its lunacy. The main location in California’s high desert is evocative and occasionally amusing with the golf course the title refers to providing a bridge between the Eisenhower era and the present day. Scott brings his low-key charm to the tale, while Graham is cheerfully sleazy and Burke makes a convincing stand-in for Obama.
At times, one wishes that someone like David Lynch were the director. In particular, it is easy to imagine the scenes involving the President, Eisenhower, and Lars achieving the eerie aura of Twin Peaks and its Red Room, but Munch never quite gets there.
Also, what is the deal with Lars? He looks like white, European Jesus and Stokes’ stilted performance is perhaps meant to suggest an extraterrestrial’s otherness, but he only comes across as jarringly artificial. And a subplot involving James Forrestal (Ian Hart), the United States’ first Secretary of Defense, a man who in real life suffered from depression and committed suicide, is tasteless.
The 11th Green is handsomely shot with exceptional production design, two more pluses in one mixed bag. It is one of those movies that is both entertaining and irritating, sometimes at the exact same moment. Ultimately, Munch manages to avoid most of the sand traps and other hazards he sets for himself and keeps The 11th Green on the fairway. Mostly. –Pam Grady
The 11th Green is playing at the Roxie Virtual Cinema.
Bruno Ganz famously played Hitler in Downfall. Now, in one of his final roles in Nicolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, he steps into the role of Sigmund Freud, a man who might have been one of the Fuhrer’s victims had he not been to flee to England. Ganz’s delightful performance portraying the warm, soft side of the father of psychoanalysis is a ray of light in this otherwise dark drama set in pre-war Vienna.
An icon plays an icon as Catherine Deneuve steps into the role of a French cinema legend who reunites for a rocky reunion with her screenwriter daughter (Juliette Binoche) in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s elegant drama The Truth. The Japanese master delivers his first film made outside his home country, in French and English – two languages not his own, and loses not a step in an intimate drama that unfolds between the family home and a Paris soundstage.
The situation for gays and lesbians in Chechnya is beyond harrowing. They face arrest, torture, and sometimes execution. If they survive that, they are delivered back to their families with the suggestion that their kin finish the job of killing them. Some have joined the ranks of the world’s disappeared. This special project of strongman president Ramzan Kadyrov “to cleanse the blood” of the country’s LGBTQ population has been under way since 2016 with barely any notice from the rest of the world. Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France’s (How to Survive a Plague) tense, devastating documentary reveals the depth of an ongoing genocide and the efforts of Russian activists to rescue the victims of the atrocities.
Theater geeks everywhere will rejoice and many who would consider themselves impervious to the charms of a Broadway musical will find themselves seduced as Hamilton drops on Disney+ on July 3. Filmed four years while the original cast was still intact, but not intended for a theatrical release until the fall of 2021, with COVID-19 putting pause to the Broadway and road companies, the decision to push the date up by over a year and put it on the streaming service is a welcome one. No doubt there is a business calculation involved. Disney+ can expect to gain X number of subscribers through this shrewd move. But ultimately, who cares about the company’s motivation? Hamilton is here.
To adapt the play to the screen, director Thomas Kail filmed several actual live performances along with performances staged strictly for award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn’s cameras, a set-up that included a Steadicam. This is not a Hamilton that even its most ardent fans have seen before. Close-ups reveal nuances to the performances lost to distance from the stage and provides a privileged vantage point from which to view Andy Blankenbuehler’s Tony-winning choreography. Jonah Moran’s editing injects a burst of new energy into an already adrenalin-fueled musical. Every performer, from Miranda and Odom to the ensemble, brings their A-game.
In 1934, a 17-year-old girl with skinny legs and a stained dress ascended to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater for Amateur Night. She wanted to be dancer, but as she watched Apollo stars the Edwards Sisters’ agile footwork during the pro part of the evening, she knew she could not follow that. So, she switched gears, opened her mouth to sing and Ella Fitzgerald began her legend. Leslie Woodhead, who began his documentary directing career in 1969 with The Stones in the Park and has made films on everything from the Polish Solidarity movement to the post-9/11 manhunt for Osama bin Laden to Princess Diana, pays glorious homage to the First Lady of Song with this spellbinding documentary.
Moses (Toby Wallace, Boys in Trees) is every parent’s worst nightmare: A feral, homeless, and heavily tattooed drug dealer with sticky fingers and a terrible mullet. At 23, he is also far too old for 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen, Little Women‘s Beth). But the heart wants what it wants and Milla wants Moses and she is seriously ill, leaving psychiatrist Henry (Ben Mendelsohn, Animal Kingdom) and classical musician Anna (Essie Davis, The Babadook) to feel they have little choice but to let the ebullient felon into their lives. In the world of Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth that accommodation to a situation neither parent wants is a moment of clarity: Henry and Anna cannot fix what is wrong with Milla, but they can allow her a small bit of control in a situation in which she otherwise has none.
42‘s Nicole Beharie and newcomer Alexis Chikaeze deliver incandescent turns as mother and daughter in writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ arresting feature debut. Using a small Texas town’s Miss Juneteenth pageant as the lens from which to view a complicated parent-and-child relationship and a mom’s attempt to secure her progeny’s future, Peoples limns an indelible portrait of family and community life.
There is a sizeable cast in director/co-writer Patrick Vollrath’s breathtaking feature debut, set on a flight from Berlin to Paris in mostly real time, but only one actor who really counts: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the flight’s co-pilot Tobias, an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Hijacking dramas are nothing new but this is not the stuff of a Steven Seagal or Kurt Russell movie. 7500 is not an action picture, but rather a slow-burn psychological thriller in which the hero’s defining trait is an ability to hold fear at bay on the worst day of his life.