REVIEW: Pasolini

12 09 2015

PasoliniNew York Film Festival, 2014

Admittedly, I know very little about Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Italian filmmaker played by Willem Dafoe in Abel Ferrara’s “Pasolini.”  I probably scrolled through the Wikipedia summary of him in the minutes before my screening began (which I only opted for because I had already seen my other option).  But a working knowledge of Pasolini is hardly necessary to get something out of the film.

A good portion of the film is fairly didactic, involving Pasolini giving an English-language interview about his art and craft that provides a baseline of details that can sustain interest throughout.  He talks about the death of narrative art and the right to scandalize, topics relevant in 2015 as they were in 1975.

As Pasolini talks through his upcoming projects, Ferrara visualizes them.  This aspect is significant because Pasolini never got to see them through himself.  The director was brutally beaten to death prior to shooting.  “Pasolini,” then, realizes that vision for the filmmaker.  The film does not just portray his life; Ferrara extends it.

But in order to keep the narrative going for those (like myself) who need something more than glances at a work that could have been, “Pasolini” follows its eponymous figure on the final day of his life in a manner similar to “Fruitvale Station.”  This not only helps Ferrara avoid hagiography but also allows a sense of tragedy to inform the proceedings.  While this two-pronged approach to depicting a major figure in Italian cinema is neither revolutionary nor particularly novel, it certainly manages to keep things interesting for a much wider audience.  B / 2halfstars


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REVIEW: Out of the Furnace

11 09 2015

Out of the FurnaceThe small town, blue-collar workers in Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace” are disappearing both from America and from the silver screen.  They deserve better than what they get here, a gritty realism riddled with clichéd storytelling conventions.

Cooper covers a lot of that up with a great cast that turns in predictably solid, if not dazzling, performances.  The explosiveness of Christian Bale, Woody Harrelson, and Casey Affleck in one movie alone is a sight to see no matter what. But it should be a powder keg, not a few sparks flying.

The film should receive some credit for being one of few to tackle the home-front experiences of Iraq War veterans like Affleck’s Rodney Baze.  He’s completely volatile, a pugnacious time bomb who will detonate if he cannot pulverize someone with his fists.  But everyone else in the Pennsylvania Rust Belt town in “Out of the Furnace” who tries to either defuse him or encourage him just fails to light up the screen in any way, shape, or form.

For a film whose title refers to an object capable of generating high temperatures, “Out of the Furnace” packs remarkably little heat.  C / 2stars


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (September 10, 2015)

10 09 2015

A ProphetThe Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) gets underway today, and plenty of films vying for Oscar glory will be seen for the first time.  Other holdovers from Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, and Venice will also get a moment in the sun, a reintroduction for North American audiences.

One film of the latter variety is Jacques Audiard’s “Dheepan,” the controversial Palme D’Or winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.  Many people chalked up the film’s unexpected victory to its director simply being due for the prize after coming up short numerous times.  One such missed opportunity was back in 2009 when Audiard debuted “A Prophet.”

I first watched the film after it received a nomination for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars back in 2010 … and found myself quite underwhelmed.  For whatever reason, I just could not connect with it.  But once “Dheepan” took the big prize in Cannes, I felt obliged to give it another go.  The second time around, I was actually quite taken by the film.  I still think “Fish Tank” deserved the Palme D’Or, but “A Prophet” is certainly worth of my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.”

Audiard’s film is a patiently paced prison drama that goes for slow, longitudinal change rather than explosive incidents.  Think “The Shawshank Redemption,” but as an art film instead of something so commercial.  “A Prophet” follows Tahar Rahim’s Malik, a most curious double agent, as he games both sides of a Corsican/Muslim prison gang tussle.  He wants to make a big move one day in the future – even though that forces him to assume a subservient position for the ruthless, spineless Corsican ringleader (Niels Arestrup).

Audiard was smart to cast Rahim, a novice actor when he filmed “A Prophet.”  A well-versed thespian might have tried to slip hints towards a greater intellect humming beneath the surface of Malik.  Rahim, however, plays him as a rather ordinary man of no particular intelligence, just sort of making it up as he goes.  He’s playing the long game, not necessarily because he focuses on the ends but mostly because he cannot sufficiently navigate the present.

Malik’s rise to power, when watched in the right state of mind, makes for truly riveting cinema.  While it might not always be pulse-pounding action, the novel-like breadth of its narrative provides a rich experience for serious-minded movie lovers.


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REVIEW: The Visit

9 09 2015

The VisitM. Night Shyamalan might be moviegoers’ favorite punching bag, but for his latest outing as writer/director, he brought something to deflect the blow.

In “The Visit,” a found footage horror film, all action comes from the camera of teenaged Rebecca Jameson (Olivia DeJonge).  She’s an aspiring Albert Maysles who thinks she and her brother Tyler’s (Ed Oxenbould) upcoming trip to their grandparents’ rural Pennsylvania home might make a good subject.  Since their mother Paula (Kathryn Hahn) has been estranged from them for years, this visit will mark the first time they meet.

Don’t like a turn the movie takes?  Blame it on Rebecca, then.  It’s a pretty smart way for Shyamalan to avoid criticism.  And if moviegoers land one more punch on the battered director, it might be enough to push him into oblivion for good.

But “The Visit” looks like the first step toward the rehabilitation of his reputation.  The film demonstrates a rigor of style and storytelling not seen from Shyamalan since at least 2002’s “Signs.”  The limitations of his chosen narrative technique force him to exhibit more creativity and less bombast, both of which he does decently well here.

At times, the script feels a bit retrofitted for the found footage format; various scenes feel unnatural to film but unfortunately necessary to move the plot forward.  The scares are a bit on the conventional side, too.  Overall, though, “The Visit” proves a satisfying move in the right direction for a director once hailed as the heir to Spielberg.  He taps into anxieties about America’s growing gray population while also capturing something true about the current generation of teenagers and how the omnipresence of video guides their every action.  B / 2halfstars


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REVIEW: The Fifth Estate

8 09 2015

Ripping the story from the headlines seems to be the most compelling action in “The Fifth Estate,” a fictionalization of WikiLeaks’ history from director Bill Condon and writer Josh Singer.   The film feels irrelevant in the wake of Alex Gibney’s documentary “We Steal Secrets,” a more thrilling and intelligent treatment of these people and ideas that does not even have to resort to fictionalization or melodrama.

The film begins modestly (ha!) with a brief history of worldwide communications, from hieroglyphs to Guttenberg’s printing press all the way to the iPad newsstand.  Then, it proceeds to cut between the WikiLeaks team led by anarchist Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and the U.S. government’s response to their destabilizing revelations.

It might have been better off just focusing on its titular estate rather than including subplots involving the second (government) and fourth (press) estates; the tension between the old guard of reporting at institutions like The Guardian and the WikiLeaks “hacktivist” style of citizen journalism feels like a topic for an entirely different film.  Sure, this is an excuse to bring in an ensemble of supporting characters portrayed by talented actors like Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci, Anthony Mackie, Peter Capaldi, and David Thewlis, these accomplished thespians are unable to do much to elevate the material.

As Assange and Daniel Domscheit-Berg take steps to increase worldwide transparency, their tendency to think more about the information and less about the people leads to conflict.  Plenty of innocent people are taken as collateral damage by WikiLeaks, and their servers offer flimsy protection for the whistleblowers who dare to release sensitive information.  Assange’s personality gets in the way of the story he pushes – a worry that seems to inspire caution in the next major leaker, Edward Snowden, as shown in Laura Poitras’ documentary “Citizenfour.”

Condon uneasily balances Singer’s script that cannot decide whether to focus on who they are or what they did.  For the former, at least Cumberbatch nails Assange’s vocal cadences.  For the latter, though, “The Fifth Estate” cannot even turn one of the most important events of the decade into compelling cinema. Even with one of the newest tricks in the book, adding an M83 song for dramatic impact, the action falls flat.

When the film awkwardly acknowledges its own shortcomings in its odd finale, it feels almost like the creative team saying sorry.  Apology accepted, I guess?  C / 2stars


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REVIEW: Mistress America

7 09 2015

Mistress America posterThe lively creative partnership between writer/director Noah Baumbach and writer/star Greta Gerwig produced one perfectly pleasant piece of cinema in 2013’s “Frances Ha.”  That film appropriated the techniques of the French New Wave greats and applied their general vibe to an (un)happy-go-lucky New York twenty-something.

Their reteaming on “Mistress America” yields something both more ambitious and fulfilling.  Baumbach and Gerwig weave together elements from theatrical, literary, and cinematic antecedents to create one truly insightful comedic masterpiece.  The finished film is nothing short of “The Great Gatsby” for the Google generation.

New freshman Tracy Fishko (Lola Kirke) arrives to Barnard without a clue or many friends.  She aspires to write but cannot crack the top literary society nor connect with peers also in need of external validation.  The vastness of Manhattan nearly devours lonely Tracy, but before it can, she makes a last-ditch phone call to future stepsister Brooke Cardinas (Gerwig).

Brooke is like Tracy, a transplant in the city, but she seems to have found some way to fake it until she made it.  (Or, at least until she could pay some bills.)  On one wild night bopping across town, Tracy becomes fascinated with her future next of kin.  And given the way Gerwig plays Brooke, she would be be a fool not to get drawn into her larger-than-life personality.

Brooke is an odd hodgepodge of Williamsburg hipster, Silicon Valley self-help maxim spouter, and that newest breed of social media-crazed narcissism.  With her motormouth, she converses with her own train of thought first and others around her second.  Chief among her ramblings is rampant self-mythologizing to a disturbingly hilarious degree; perhaps Brooke fears that if her lips were to close, she might have to think through the words that come out of them.

Read the rest of this entry »


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REVIEW: Grandma

6 09 2015

GrandmaPaul Weitz’s “Grandma” gets underway once teenaged Sage (Julia Garner) shows up to humbly solicit funds for an abortion from Lily Tomlin’s Elle Reid, her estranged grandmother.  While Sage might be necessary to kickstart the story, there is no doubt the titular character really drives the engine of this compact road trip.  The journey is for Sage, but it is about Elle.

Weitz wrote the role of Elle for Tomlin, and the part fits like a glove.  Among the many traits of this multifaceted character, Tomlin gets to play up two qualities present in her most memorable performances: intelligence and idiosyncrasy.  Elle is a poet who peaked professionally in the ’60s and never quite found her footing again, scrapping together income to stay afloat from teaching and lecturing.

Now, widowed and still grieving the loss of her beloved partner Violet, the kooky Elle is even more stuck in the past than ever before.  She cuts up her credit cards for fun and tosses around the phrase “pod person” as if “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were as recognizable a cultural touchstone as “X-Men.”  Sage needs the most immediate help to procure her procedure, to be sure, but Elle also requires an attitude adjustment of her own.

As she drives her vintage car around town to solicit funds – and giving Sage a boot camp in Second Wave feminism in the process – Elle has to confront the pains of her past and decide the face of her future.  Decades-old layers of resentment frequently lead to some acerbic interactions, especially with her own daughter Judy (Marcia Gay Harden).  But the brilliance of Tomlin’s performance is that she never loses track of Elle’s raw emotion or her beating heart; she and Weitz nail the balance between sardonic and sincere.  The voyage with Elle proves all too short (only 79 minutes?!), though each moment along the way feels poignant and completely fulfilling.  B+ / 3stars


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REVIEW: Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

5 09 2015

Steve Jobs The Man in the MachineAlex Gibney has made his career as a documentarian by holding powerful institutions accountable for their misdeeds, be they the Church of Scientology, the U.S. Military, the Catholic Church, or Enron.  On the less frequent occasion when he covers individual subjects, the films have never become personal portraiture.  “Casino Jack,” “Client 9,” and “The Armstrong Lie” were not about their subjects; they were about power and the corrosive effects it can have on capable men.

The same dynamic does not necessarily apply to Gibney’s latest effort, “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine.”  The film feels more like a project the director explored out of curiosity rather than his usual genuine righteous anger.  Without such indignation, the documentary plays a little bit like one of the actual smartest guys in the room picking on an icon as a pure intellectual exercise.  His aim appears not to be uncovering some unsavory truth about human vice; instead, Gibney just brings a god among men back to mere mortal status just to show he can.

To be fair, maybe some of that needed to happen.  The somewhat excessive mourning that sprung from Jobs’ early passing in 2011 does raise some questions about how our society conflates the man with his machines.  Gibney does his best work when he can isolate Jobs from the gadgets we now treat as appendages.  His curated archival footage shows Jobs as a testier, feistier figure than the avuncular wizard who waltzed on stage once a year in the first decade of the 2000s to radically transform our communicative capabilities.  In one deposition to which Gibney frequently cuts, Jobs can barely sit still, constantly adjusting his position and scarcely concealing his disdain.

When he attempts to make a larger statement about our technology-addled world, though, Gibney’s reach exceeds his grasp.  It would be better not to invoke Sherry Turkle’s “Alone Together” than to have such a cursory conversation about it – that’s a topic for an entirely different film.  These deep, intellectual ideas just feel out of place in a film mostly devoted (especially in its back half) to rattling off a litany of underreported transgressions.

Did you know that Apple sheltered its profits from taxation in Ireland?  Or that their factory conditions in China are beyond deplorable?  That Apple participated in some sketchy hiring collusion?  That Jobs ended charity programs at the company?  Yes, prepare to have any pedestal on which you put Steve Jobs severely undercut.  But why one of America’s greatest documentarians took the time to do this research – rather than a dedicated YouTube user – escapes me.  B / 2halfstars


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REVIEW: Fresh Dressed

4 09 2015

Fresh DressedSacha Jenkins’ documentary “Fresh Dressed” fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the style industry that sprung up concurrently with the rise of hip-hop.  But beyond that, it serves little effective purpose.

Sure, he interviews plenty of distinguished scholars who add some valuable two cents, such as how the black tradition of dressing to impress originated on the slavery plantation.  Later, these talking heads come back to speculate that the beginning of the end for a golden age of black style was precipitated because black businessmen could not catch up with their counterparts who got a head start.

But most of “Fresh Dressed” is a time capsule, preferring to show us the era in all its decadence rather than really unpack it beyond the two big pillars of meaning: self-esteem and class consciousness.  Jenkins lands some huge names for interviews, including Sean “Puffy” Combs, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, and A$AP Rocky, all of whom parrot these major themes excellently.  At the end of the throwback, though, the documentary feels more like a storefront window display than a curated museum exhibit.  C+ / 2stars


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F.I.L.M. of the Week (September 3, 2015)

3 09 2015

Afternoon DelightJill Soloway appears in just about any feature being published these days about the changing face of television for women behind the camera and trans representation in front of it.  Even before “Transparent” landed at Amazon, she was making waves as a writer and producer on shows like “Six Feet Under,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” and “United States of Tara.”  And somewhere in her schedule, she found time to make a narrative film.

Had I been paying attention to her feature debut, “Afternoon Delight,” I would surely have run instead of walked to “Transparent.”  This character-driven dramedy lives up to the latter word in its title … and would suffice at any time of day, for that matter.  Soloway serves as writer as well as director, and her voice shines through in the movie, my pick for the “F.I.L.M. of the Week.”

“Afternoon Delight” might mark the first film to fully realize the wealth of talent possessed by Kathryn Hahn, an actress dangerously close to becoming the next Judy Greer.  She’s almost too good at making her presence felt without overpowering the lead, be it dramatically in “Revolutionary Road” or comedically in a movie like “We’re the Millers” or television’s “Parks and Recreation.”  But Soloway grants her lead status here, and she runs away with the film.

Hahn’s character Rachel, a stereotypical L.A. Jewish carpool mom, needs something to get her out of a rut.  A lethal cocktail of sexual frustration and the white female savior complex leads her to “rescue” a stripper, Juno Temple’s McKenna.  If Rachel wanted something to shake up her relationships with her husband and friends, she certainly gets that and more with her new “nanny.”  McKenna becomes an object of pity for Rachel, yet her presence also draws out the green monster of jealousy.

The cumulative effect manages to spark some major changes, not all of which are good.  But if you need any indication of just how gifted a storyteller Soloway is, watch how much more you feel for Rachel as her behavior goes from erratic to desperate to practically indefensible.  Her characters, be they small or silver screen, never lose their solid steeping in humanity.  I can only hope “Afternoon Delight” is not the full extent of Soloway’s venture into feature filmmaking.  The world of indie cinema needs her gifts too much.


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REVIEW: Happy Valley

2 09 2015

Happy ValleyAmir Bar-Lev’s “Happy Valley,” a documentary account of the fall and rebirth of the Penn State football program, initially unfolds as a pretty straightforward chronicle of events.  We get a definitive look at how Jerry Sandusky managed to use his charitable organization as a front to sexually abuse young, underprivileged children as well as how the university’s athletic program turned a blind eye to his exploits.

Establishing this baseline of information takes about 30 minutes, which is fine.  It plays like a really good ESPN “30 for 30” program.  But once it moves past the firing of head coach Joe Paterno and resignation of university president Graham Spanier, “Happy Valley” starts to get significantly more interesting.  By spending the majority of the film exploring the aftermath, Bar-Lev shows an interest in more than just recounting events.  He wants to interrogate them.

The film explores the lingering question of how to handle the legacy of Paterno, the winningest coach in college football – and also a man who aided and abetted a criminal act.  Not unlike what has happened in the wake of all the allegations against Bill Cosby, people must confront the dissonance between the memory of a man who provided them years of happiness and the reality of a person who committed a deplorable act.  How do we reconcile that?  How do we weigh legal guilt against a greater moral guilt?

These are tough issues to resolve, and Bar-Lev shows people on both sides of the aisle.  He interviews a student who rants angrily from his dorm room about how no action Paterno took should ever scrub his coaching record.  Yet he also shows a man who stands in front of a statue erected in Paterno’s honor, refusing to let those who want to take a picture with it leave without fully understanding the weight of his actions.

Ultimately, these two sides of the coin point to a larger dichotomy Bar-Lev explores: individual vs. social culpability.  How much are we, the fans of the sport, willing to excuse in the name of victory?  Again, this is not easy to answer.  But it is necessary.  B+ / 3stars


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REVIEW: Digging for Fire

1 09 2015

Digging for FireAs writer/director Joe Swanberg wanders the corridors of marital discontent in his latest film, “Digging for Fire,” I could not help but wonder if this is what Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” would look like when refracted through the lens of low-budget indie cinema.  Over the course of a weekend spent apart, previously unknown rifts and fault lines appear between Tim (Jake Johnson, also a co-writer on the film) and Lee (Rosemarie DeWitt) while they amble and converse freely.

Each’s journey appears cross-cut with the other’s, and the spouses might as well be occupying entirely different films.  Tim hangs out to drink beers and smoke pot with his buddies – one of whom arrives with a young woman on each arm – but proves unable to put his mind at ease about some suspicious bones he spotted in the yard.  Lee, meanwhile, drifts between scenes and choose mostly to let the words of others trigger her thought process.  He is aggressively verbose in expressing his own frustrations; she reacts to hearing those from others.

At moments, “Digging for Fire” shows real insight into the listlessness of marriage and parenting.  Johnson feels especially at home since he gets to speak (presumptively) dialogue he helped write.  When Tim expresses his frustrations and anxieties, they clearly come from someplace personal and resonate accordingly.  For all those looking to use art to deal with their own life, try to model this to avoid self-indulgence.

Swanberg, though, sometimes gets carried away by his posse of ever-ready actor pals.  Since his movies shoot so quickly and efficiently, it makes sense that these stars want a chance to flex their muscles in between the paycheck gigs.  In this case, the ensemble of comedians and dramatists alike can detract attention from what might have played more effectively as a tighter two-hander.  Between the screen time allotted to Orlando Bloom, Brie Larson, Sam Rockwell, Mike Birbiglia, and Anna Kendrick, “Digging for Fire” can sometimes feel like a party at the Swanbergs for which he provided a loose plot and great camerawork.  B / 2halfstars


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REVIEW: Meru

31 08 2015

Meru“Meru” feels like something I might stumble across while channel surfing through the outdoor networks.  It would grab my interest for a few seconds based on the strength of an image but then lose me within the minute on the nature of its specialized interest story.

Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi comes across as a rather niche film, one unwilling to pander to the uninitiated such as myself.  And in a way, I admire that even as I feel indifferent about the film.  I appreciate some films that alienate viewers of lesser cinematic literacy, so it is only healthy for filmmaking that some films can exclude me.  For mountain-climbers and adventure seekers, my rather nonplussed reaction might signal that you will love “Meru.”

If you ever get bored watching “Meru” (and that was fairly frequently for me), just take a step back and think about how these three climbers actually filmed this incredible journey!  On top of survival, they have to think about getting the action in focus, framing it nicely, and getting a good angle.  The peak of Meru requires an essentially straight vertical climb, so the fact that they can capture great images is nothing short of astounding.

The same could not be said, however, for the talking head backstories that fill in the lives of climbers Chin, Conrad Anker, and Renan Ozturk.  Every time “Meru” turns its attention away from the mountain itself, the movie becomes less interesting.  Rather than enhancing the drama of the climb, it distracts from it.  C+ / 2stars


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REVIEW: Z for Zachariah

30 08 2015

Z for ZachariahIn Craig Zobel’s last film, 2012’s “Compliance,” the director showed the collapse of civilization and social order in a situation where tremendous external stress agents forced people into making unthinkable choices.  He returns to ponder similar questions of the base impulses guiding our actions in “Z for Zachariah,” albeit in an entirely different setting: a post-apocalyptic world.

Margot Robbie’s country girl Ann Burden thinks she may the last survivor of an unspecified nuclear disaster, somewhat because of her farm’s odd location in a valley but also due to an act of providence from God.  The serene, bucolic landscape soon welcomes a visitor in the form of Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Loomis, a civil engineer who stumbles upon Ann’s place.  The two work together, albeit uneasily, to restore the harvest and even potentially regain electricity.

These scenes play out at a patient pace, at once stage-like in their delicacy but cinematic in their intimacy.  Zobel and editor Jane Rizzo find a way to stretch Nissar Modi’s script, which probably runs a roughly normal length (if not a little bit shorter), into something that feels practically like a miniseries.  The adult cousin of “The Last Man on Earth,” if you will.  At times, “Z for Zachariah” droops under the weight of its measured tone, but Zobel does impressively calibrate the picture to enervate without aggravating.

The film does get a shot of energy when Chris Pine’s Caleb emerges.  With his messy hair and scruffy beard, this marks the most unkempt character the normally Prince Charming-esque actor has played in a straight drama.  A bit of a love triangle emerges, sure, but not in a stereotypical kind of way.  (Since Caleb is a fellow believer, he has the clear upper hand.)  The desolately populated space around them reverts the dynamic between Caleb and Loomis to resemble that between Cain and Abel sparring for dominance.  These biblical undertones, as well as one of the most mature and nuanced portrayals of faith in recent memory, lend “Z for Zachariah” a thematic heft that helps it earn much of its restrained pacing.  B / 2halfstars


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REVIEW: Felt

29 08 2015

FeltJason Banker’s “Felt” portrays the ongoing trauma of a sexual assault survivor as she struggles to reintegrate with society.  The bizarre character of her behavior, including her habit of donning a full-body felt costume complete with a large dildo, alienates even her closest of friends.  But, against the odds, a saint of a man decides to give her a chance romantically.

The film stars Amy Everson as a fictionalized version of herself, which makes the film admittedly a little tougher to criticize.  I know many friends who have survived the traumatizing ordeal of sexual assault, and everyone has to deal with it in their own way.  As the support system for them, it is our duty to stand by them through thick and thin.

But for people who might not be as sensitive to intricacies of sexual assault, “Felt” might send a different message.  The film does not spend enough time abhorring rape to have earn a character like Amy, the only known survivor in the film – and is portrayed as absolutely psychotic.  Are Banker and Everson trying to tell people to support rape survivors or steer clear of them altogether?  Their intention might be the former, but the content of the film seems to argue the latter.

“Felt” does make a clearer indictment of rape culture, demonstrating the false myths men perpetuate about women going to duplicitous ends in their quest to get attention.  In order to arrive at those, however, Banker and Everson force us to endure some painfully stilted improvised dialogue.  The whole film just feels lacking in focus and precision, which is a shame since the artists likely had a lot to say.

Anyone looking to really provide support for sexual assault survivors might be better off watching Kirby Dick’s excellent documentaries “The Invisible War” and “The Hunting Ground.”  C / 2stars


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