Cinequest

Streaming the best of Cinequest

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Brooke Purdy in QUALITY PROBLEMS

These 2012-2018 Cinequest favorites are available to stream now:

FEEL GOODS AND COMEDIES

  • Quality Problems: A screwball comedy for the sandwich generation. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Venus: Meeting your kid for the first time while transitioning. Amazon, iTunes.
  • The Sapphires: Here’s a crowd pleaser – Motown meets Aborigines. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, Google Play.
  • Threesomething: Original and cheeky. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • The Grand Seduction: An entire tiny hamlet is enlisted in an absurdly elaborate and risky ruse in this Canadian knee-slapper.  Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Hunting Elephants: Apparently, Israelis see just as little generosity, fair-mindedness and decency in their bankers as we do in ours. iTunes.
Andrew Jenkins in Chris Scheuerman’s brilliant debut LOST SOLACE

INDIE DRAMAS

  • The Center: Sliding into a cult. Amazon (included with Prime), Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Lost Solace: a psychopath afflicted by empathy. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Dose of Reality: You won’t predict this ending. For SURE. Amazon.
  • The House on Pine Street: Does she see a ghost? Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Prodigy: She doesn’t LOOK like a monster. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.

 

THERE WILL BE NO STAY

DOCS

  • The Brainwashing of My Dad: When TV changes not just opinions, but mood and personality, too. Amazon, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Meet the Hitlers: Wouldn’t you change YOUR name? Amazon, iTunes, Vudu.
  • There Will Be No Stay: In a society with capital punishment, someone must perform the executions. iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.

 

Mads Mikkelson in THE HUNT

WORLD CINEMA

  • Ida (Oscar winner): Identity rocked at a pivotal time. Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Google Play.
  • The Hunt (Oscar-nominated): Terrifyingly plausible. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play (and Netflix DVD).
  • Wild Tales (Oscar-nominated): Hilariously dark tales of revenge. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu (and Netflix DVD).
  • The Teacher: A peek into Communist dread. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu.
  • Revenge: The web is spun. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Fever at Dawn: Romance, identity and a moral choice. Hoopla.
  • The Wave: Everything you want in a disaster movie. Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play.
  • Magallanes: Some wrongs cannot be righted. iTunes, YouTube, Google Play.
  • The Memory of Water: Grief, exquisitely explored. Netflix.
  • Los Hamsters: Riotously dysfunctional. Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, Google Play.

Movies to See Right Now

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Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski in TRANSIT, playing at Cinequest next Wednesday. Courtesy of Music Box Films

The Oscars are finally over, And I was pretty much OK with the whole shebang – I loved Roma, and I really love Green Book, too. I was and am still grumpy about Rami Malek winning an ACTING Oscar for a performance in which he was often LIP SYNCHING; this was several rungs below Jamie Foxx’ Ray Charles and Joaquin Phoenix’ Johnny Cash; and Bradley Cooper acted as a singer, sang the song himself and even WROTE the song!

Anyway, The Wife and I did enjoy our annual Oscar Dinner, although we had to sub out a Bohemian Rhapsody pub ale because we couldn’t source the novelty teeth in time.

The Movie Gourmet’s Oscar Dinner 2019

Starting this weekend, my coverage of Cinequest will explode on to the Internet. Stay tuned.

OUT NOW

  • In They Shall Not Grow Old, Lord of the Rings filmmaker Peter Jackson has, for the first time, layered humanity over our understanding of World War I. By slowing down the speed of the jerky WWI film footage and adding sound and color, Jackson has allowed us to relate to the real people in the Great War. This is a generational achievement and a Must See.
  • Roma is an exquisite portrait of two enduring women and the masterpiece of Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity, Children of Men and Y Tu Mama Tambien). Won multiple Oscars. It is streaming now on Netflix.
  • Green Book: The Best Picture Oscar winner. Tony Lip is a marvelous character, and Viggo Mortensen’s performance is one of the great pleasures of this year in the movies.
  • Vice: in this bitingly funny biopic of Dick Cheney by writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short), Cheney is played by a physically transformed and unrecognizable Christian Bale. A superb performance, .pretty good history, biography from a sharp point of view and a damn entertaining movie.
  • Stan & Ollie: Steve Coogan as Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly as Oliver Hardy deliver remarkable portraits of a partnership facing the inevitability of showbiz decline.
  • Pawel Pawlikowski’s sweeping romantic tragedy Cold War is not as compelling as his masterpiece Ida.
  • The Favourite: Great performances by three great actresses, sex and political intrigue are not enough; this critically praised film didn’t work for me.

ON VIDEO

The Hollywood movie Gloria Bell, starring Julianne Moore, is coming to theaters on March 8. Gloria Bell is a remake of the the Chilean gem Gloria. Fortunately, Sebastián Lelio, the original writer-director of Gloria (and A Fantastic Woman) is also directing Gloria Bell. Here’s your chance to see the original.

ON TV

Great movies abound on TV as Turner Classic Movies concludes its 31 Days of Oscar, but here’s a curiosity that I don’t remember ever seeing. On March 2, TCM plays the 1968 astronaut-lost-in-space drama Marooned with Gregory Peck, Richard Crenna and David Jannsen. A 1970 Mexican audience is shown watching Marooned n ALfonso Cuaron’s Roma; it’s a hint that Marooned may have been an influence on Cuaron’s Oscar-winning Gravity.

On March 4, TCM presents John Huston’s under-appreciated Fat City (1972). Stacy Keach plays a boxer on the slide, his skills unraveled by his alcoholism. He inspires a kid (a very young Jeff Bridges), who becomes a boxer on the rise. Keach and Susan Tyrrell give dead-on performances as pathetic, sad sack barflies. Tyrrell was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.

Susan Tyrrell in FAT CITY
Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges in FAT CITY

CINEQUEST 2019 is just around the corner

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Make your plans now to attend the 29th edition of Cinequest, Silicon Valley’s own major film festival. By some metrics the largest film festival in North America, Cinequest was recently voted the nation’s best by USA Today readers. The 2019 Cinequest is scheduled for March 5 through March 17 and will present almost 100 feature films and dozens of short films and virtual reality experiences from the US and over fifty other countries. And, at Cinequest, it’s easy to meet the filmmakers.

This year’s headline events include:

  • New movies with Elle Fanning, Rebecca Hall, Adam Driver, Emile Hirsch, Bruce Dern, Dev Patel, Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgård, Stellan Skarsgård, Jeff Daniels, Salma Hayek, Martin Sheen,  Jonathan Pryce, Emilio Estevez, Christian Slater, Alec Baldwin, Jena Malone, Jeffrey Wright, Stephen Yeun, Katie Holmes, Elizabeth McGovern Blythe Danner, Levar Burton, Emily Mortimer, M. Emmet Walsh and Richard Kind.
  • New movies by directors Mike Leigh, Terry Gilliam, Christian Petzold, Michael Winterbottom and Kim Nguyen.
  • See it here FIRST:  Sometimes Always Never, Freaks, Hotel Mumbai, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, The Hummingbird Project, Peterloo, The Public, Teen Spirit, The Third Wife, Transit, The Wedding Guest and Woman at War are all slated for theatrical release later this year.
  • For the first time at Cinequest – 5 U.S. premieres of Television series.
  • The 1928 Buster Keaton silent Steamboat Bill, Jr. projected in a period movie palace, the California Theatre, accompanied by world-renowned Dennis James on the Mighty Wurlitzer organ.

Indeed, the real treasure at Cinequest 2019 is likely to be found among the hitherto less well-known films. In the past four years, the Cinequest gems Eye in the Sky, Wild Tales, Ida, The Hunt, ’71, Corn Island, The Memory of Water, Magallanes, Quality Problems, The Sense of an Ending, For Grace, Lost Solace, Class Enemy, Heavenly Shift and Oh Boy/A Coffee in Berlin all made my Best of the Year lists.

Cinequest revels in its Downtown San Jose vibe, with concurrent screenings at the 1122-seat California, the 550-seat Hammer and the 257-seat 3Below, all within 1600 feet of the VIP lounge at The Continental Bar. There will still be satellite viewing in Redwood City.

At Cinequest, you can get a festival pass for as little as $165, and you can get individual tickets as well. The express pass for an additional tax-deductible $100 is a fantastic deal – you get to skip to the front of the lines!  Take a look at the entire program, the schedule and the passes and tickets.

As usual, I’ll be covering Cinequest rigorously with features and movie recommendations. I usually screen (and write about) over thirty films from around the world. Bookmark my Cinequest 2019 page, with links to all my coverage (links on the individual movies will start to go live on Sunday, March 3). Follow me on Twitter for the latest.

Stream of the Week: LOST SOLACE – a psychopath afflicted by empathy

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LOST SOLACE
LOST SOLACE

The Canadian psychological thriller Lost Solace takes a highly original premise and turns it into a pedal-to-the-metal thriller. It’s an astonishingly successful debut for director and co-writer Chris Scheuerman.

Co-writer Andrew Jenkins stars as the psychopath Spence, whose life is devoted to exploiting women, stealing their stuff and emotionally devastating them to boot. Spence is remarkably skilled and seems unstoppable until he unwisely ingests a recreational drug – he starts suffering hallucinatory episodes that are intensely emotional. Here’s the brilliantly original core of Lost Solace – having the occasional fit of feelings and empathy really gets in the way of being a coolly cruel psychopath.

Spence targets the emotionally fragile rich girl Azaria (Melissa Roxburgh). Melissa is burdened both by the care for her violently psychotic brother Jory (Charlie Kerr) and by years of verbal evisceration by her prick of a father, Chuck (Michael Kopsa). Able to peg Spence as a scumbag, Jory offers Spence a share of his inheritance to kill Chuck. It’s a plan hatched by a psychotic – what could possibly go wrong? Add an ambitious physician (Leah Gibson) who is eager to cash in on a cure for psychopathy, and we’re off to the races.

Scheuerman is an economical story-teller who lets the audience connect the dots. Spence doesn’t even speak until well into the movie. But Scheuerman spins a great tale, and as he reveals his characters, we see that Chuck may be every bit as fiendish as Spence and that Betty the doctor, may be just as greedy. There’s plenty that can unravel Spence’s Perfect Crime, and that’s what keeps us on the edges of our seats.

Andrew Jenkins is completely believable as both the supremely confident Spence and, later, as the Spence determined to steel his way through his unexpected confusion. The rest of the cast is exceptional, too, especially Kopsa and Gibson.

Lost Solace was my personal favorite at Cinequest 2016 and can be streamed from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

WHAT THEY HAD: caring for Mom and a resisting Dad

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WHAT THEY HAD
Blythe Danner and Hilary Swank star as Ruth and Bridget Keller in WHAT THEY HAD, a Bleecker Street release. Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street

In the family drama What They Had, two siblings (Hilary Swank and Michael Shannon) face their mom (Blythe Danner) sinking into Alzheimer’s, and their father (Robert Forster) refusing to take action. To heighten the pressure, the out-of-town daughter wants to give the old folks more slack than does the local son. He’s been dealing with this situation up close, and he’s fed up. The dad is used to always being in charge, and he doesn’t cope well with needing help.

Despite the subject, What They Had is not a depressing movie, mostly because of the sunniness of Danner’s character. This is a character-driven story that benefits from this stellar cast. This is the first feature for writer/director Elizabeth Chomko, and she delivers an authentic and well-crafted story.

I saw What They Had at Cinequest. Here’s a clip.

Stream of the week: BRIMSTONE & GLORY – people who blow stuff up

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BRIMSTONE & GLORY
BRIMSTONE & GLORY
BRIMSTONE & GLORY

Life in Tultepec, a city of about 90,000, just north of Mexico City is dominated by the main local industry – fireworks manufacturing.  That’s the subject of the documentary Brimstone & Glory, which is alternatively jaw-dropping and visually amazing.

The overwhelming majority of Mexico’s fireworks are handmade in Tultepec.  Brimstone & Glory traces the townspeople’s march toward their annual National Pyrotechnic Festival. At the festival, giant toros are set afire as they roll blazing down the commercial streets.  People actually dance within a cacophony of fireworks.

This may not sound entirely safe to you.  Indeed, Brimstone & Glory takes us into the pre-festival training sessions, where paramedics review their triage protocols.  During the festival, we’re in the medical tent as the actual injuries flood in.

One of the festival highlights is a competition with 75-foot high towers embedded with fireworks.  As a lightning storm approaches, one guy climbs the metal tower to repair some wind damage.  It’s clear that Mexican safety regulations, if they exist, are quite relaxed.   Brimstone & Glory is probably a fantasy movie for American personal injury lawyers.

Remember that the manufacturing is by hand.  Without comment, Brimstone & Glory observes an old fireworks craftsman working with three digits left on one hand and none on other.

Brimstone & Glory follows one local kid, the boy Esau (“Santi”).  Everyone expects him to follow in the family fireworks tradition, but his own feelings about fireworks are very ambivalent.

Cinematographer Tobias von dem Borne and director Viktor Jakovleski deliver a feast for the eyes, as you can tell from the photos above.  Slo mo is used very effectively, and the night photography is very special.

Brimstone & Glory can be streamed from Amazon (included with Prime), iTunes and Vudu.

Stream of the Week: THREESOMETHING – original and cheeky

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Isabelle Chester and Sam Sonenshine in THREESOMETHING

In the cheeky and original comedy Threesomething, Charlie (Sam Sonenshine) and his buddy Isaac (James Morosini) invite Charlies’ friend Zoe (Isabelle Chester) to engage in a three-way sexual encounter. That pitch alone is one of the funniest three-minute, fifteen-second, openings to a film I’ve seen in years. But then Threesomething finds the ridiculous moments in both the sex itself and in the all-consuming passion of new infatuation. After a crisp 72 minutes, Threesomething‘s ending is very fresh and non-formulaic, posing just enough ambiguity about the characters’ futures.

Co-writers Morosini and Sonenshine have identified the comic possibilities within the notion that a threesome is more or less symmetrical. Let me explain it this way. What if your idea of a threesome is three participants, but it evolves into two participants and a spectator?

Lust and love are such ripe sources of comedy because we humans are our most ridiculous when we are the most absorbed and single-minded – and that is definitively the case while having sex. And everyone’s sexual fantasies and fetishes – even if shared with one’s sexual partner – are laughable or creepy to someone else. Threesomething reaps the laughs from these situations without being sit-commy.

This is the Are you good? generation. Threesomething’s commentary on the compulsive over-checking in and over-supportiveness is all very sharply witty. And over-sharing is the core of Charlie’s relationship with his mother (Dru Mouser, who steals all of her scenes).

Sonenshine is just about perfect in his reactions during the threesome. He is fantastically gifted at playing both awkward discomfort and contained frustration.

Chester’s performance has several highlights, beginning with Zoe’s takes on the initial proposition and a particularly ill-timed outburst of weeping (inspired). As the story concludes, watch Chester’s face as Zoe considers and reconsiders how comfortable she really is in her choice of partner(s).

Threesomething is Morosini’s directorial debut and the first feature screenplay for both Morodini and Sonenshine. Comedy is hard to write, especially comedy as smart and original as this. I saw Threesomething’s world premiere at this year’s Cinequest.  It is available to stream on Amazon, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube and Google Play.

Stream of the Week: DOSE OF REALITY

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Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY
Fairuza Balk, Ryan Merriman (rear) and Rick Ravanello in DOSE OF REALITY

I’m sure that you’ve never seen this week’s video pick because I don’t think it got a theatrical release.  It’s the indie thriller Dose of Reality, which I saw at Cinequest in 2013.

Dose of Reality packs wire-to-wire intensity and a surprise ending that no one will see coming. A woman is found in a bar’s restroom after closing time, apparently beaten and raped, but unable to remember by whom. Two bar employees are the only possible suspects. Both deny it, and the woman launches a series of searing mind games to determine her attacker.

Fairuza Balk (American History X, Almost Famous) commands the screen as the woman. Her character, starting from a place of utter victimization, becomes totally dominant over the men. The most interesting of the guys is played by veteran TV actor Rick Ravanello (106 acting credits on IMDb). Ravanello’s eyes have an uncommon capacity to credibly take the character through dimness, cunning, tweaked impairment, guilt and terror.

It’s a plenty compelling movie for the first 75 minutes, but Dose of Reality is all about the Big Surprise at the end – which is a shocker on the scale of The Crying Game. Afterward, I was able to reflect back and identify at least four clues in the story, but every one of the 250 audience members at Dose of Reality’s Cinequest world premiere was rocked by the surprise on first viewing. Actor Ravanello recounts that when he first read the script, he got to the end and blurted “No Fucking Way!”.  It’s a success for writer-director Christopher Glatis.

Dose of Reality is available to stream on Amazon.

Stream of the Week: LEVINSKY PARK – refuge for refugees?

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LEVINSKY PARK

In honor of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, now underway, my this week’s video pick comes from last year’s festival. Israel was created as a home for refugees. What happens when African refugees overwhelm a neglected Tel Aviv neighborhood is the subject of the topical documentary Levinsky Park.

Director Beth Toni Kruvant takes us to Tel Aviv’s hardscrabble Hatikva neighborhood, now burdened with an influx of African refugees from sub-Saharan Africa. The refugees aren’t Jewish, they don’t speak Hebrew and they sure aren’t white. Discouraged from working legally, the refugees encamp on the streets and do what they need to survive. The Israeli government senses a lose-lose media profile on the issue and tries to duck it entirely.

So how do the local Israelis react? There is a wide spectrum. Some welcome and try to help these people fleeing for their lives. Others tag the newcomers with the loaded pejorative “infiltrators” and try to kick them out. We see some ugly, overt racism in Levinsky Park, but nothing unlike what we’ve seen in the US in the Trump Era.

It’s the same question that confronts all countries in the West about political asylum-seekers – who will actually invite them in? What’s different about Levinsky Park, of course, is that this is Israel – the one nation created by and for refugees.

A leader emerges from the refugees, the charismatic and articulate Mutasim Ali. He frames their plight as a movement, and they strive to regain some control over their own futures.

This year’s SFJFF runs from July 19 through August 5 at theaters in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Albany, San Rafael and Oakland. You can peruse the entire program and buy tickets and passes at San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

Levinsky Park, which originally played in the Bay Area at Cinequest, is available to stream from Amazon, iTunes, YouTube and Google Play.

THE TWINNING REACTION: research playing with lives

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From L:R – Subjects Doug Rausch and Howard Burack in a still from THE TWINNING REACTION. Photo courtesy JFI.

The startling and moving documentary The Twinning Reaction tells the story of a Mad Men-era research project and its profound human impact. To perform a longitudinal study of nurture vs. nature, researchers INTENTIONALLY separated identical twins and placed them with families that the researchers kept in the dark. The placements occurred AFTER the twin babies had bonded together in the crib for many months. Legally and ethically sketchy at the time, this is monstrous by today’s standards, and, in fact, caused harm to the adoptees.

Somehow, some of these twins learned the truth as adults and located their birth siblings. In The Twinning Reaction, we meet three sets of separated identical siblings. Because we meet the subjects of the study, the effects of separation are clearly apparent and highly personalized.

Writer-director Lori Shinseki has found an amazing story and source material to match. In a gripping 52 minutes, she weaves it into a coherent and compelling story.

THE TWINNING REACTION
THE TWINNING REACTION

The most astonishing set of sibs are triplets which are the subject of a film in current theatrical release, Three Identical Strangers. The Twinning Reaction focuses on the study; we meet several sets of twins, and the triplets are the jaw-dropping final act.   Three Identical Strangers focuses on the triplets and then takes a more current dive into the study.

The Twinning Reaction’s world premiere was at Cinequest two years ago. The Twinning Reaction is not yet available to stream, so your only chance to see it will be at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival this July and August.