Tesla, written and directed by Michael Almereyda (Hamlet [2000], Majorie Prime), explores the famous Serbian inventor with an ostensible inventiveness in both narrative and form. While the experimentation is welcome and even appropriate, its application is uneven and questionable, and leads to an uncertain overall thesis.
Giant Little Ones is a very sweet movie about confronting and dealing with homophobia as a teenager. If that reads like I’m patronizing the film, I don’t mean to be. This is an important coming-of-age story with a unique voice, and filmmaker Keith Behrman should be proud of his accomplished indie. It’s a hopeful movie that will hit home with audiences.
Netflix’s sports drama High Flying Bird is exactly the film you expect from Academy Award winning director Steven Soderbergh (Traffic). Using the experimental “look” of last year’s underrated Unsane and the foreboding “feel” of Contagion, High Flying Bird gives a fly-on-the-wall perspective of a sports agent (André Holland) as he senses fast-forming cracks in his career during an NBA lockout.
There’s been a modest resurgence of oddball, family-friendly fantasies. We were reminded of it with Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and now with Eli Roth’s The House with a Clock in Its Walls. While I’m more of a fan of how the former balanced all of its supernatural factors, I still really liked and admired Roth’s kooky flick about an uncle teaching his nephew the tricks of the trade to sorcery.