Review by Sean Boelman

Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are acclaimed for their ability to make highly realistic dramas about important social issues. Their newest film, Tori and Lokita, explores the refugee crisis in a way that is harrowing and devastating — as if one would expect anything less from them.

The movie follows two young refugees who pose as siblings in the streets of Belgium in an attempt to survive the extremely harsh reality of their situation. To no one’s surprise, everything is not peaches and cream for the duo, as they go through a series of stressful and devastating experiences while trying to maintain their status.

The Dardennes are known for making movies that are extraordinarily on anger, and they have gone on record saying that this is their “angriest” film yet. Admittedly, Tori and Lokita isn’t likely to be as incendiary or controversial as some of their more recent work (such as Young Ahmed) because it opts for a more depressing tone.

Indeed, the best way to describe this movie’s tone is something more akin to the work of Ken Loach than what we might used to be seeing from the Dardennes — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The filmmakers appeal to the audience’s emotions by absolutely ripping their hearts out with an ending that will stick with viewers for quite a long time.

If there is a downfall to this approach, it is the movie’s predictability. It’s clear where this story has to end for the Dardennes to be able to make their point, leaving viewers waiting with dread as they know in their gut what is going to happen next. And yet, even though the film lacks the shock value of some of their other work, it’s still staggeringly effective.

Of course, a big part of what makes the movie work so well is the Dardennes’ signature realism. The Dardennes shoot the film almost as if it was a verité documentary, with very intimate, rough cinematography. The emphasis that the filmmakers put on grounding the movie ensures that it feels authentic, even when the narrative beats feel like they are in service of the themes.

To further accentuate the film’s realism, the Dardennes cast two non-actors in the leading roles, and they both do a phenomenal job. Mbundu Joely is fantastic as the older of the two sibling figures, giving a turn that seems mature beyond her years — fitting, given what the character is put through — but the quietly devastating turn of Pablo Schils will leave viewers feeling affected.

Tori and Lokita is somehow one of the more restrained movies by the Dardennes despite also being their angriest. The filmmakers have once again proven to have an uncanny finger on the zeitgeist of society, and delivered a necessary — if overt — commentary on one of the most pressing issues we face today.

Tori and Lokita is now playing in theaters.

​Rating: 3.5/5

Review by Sean Boelman

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to a pretty enthusiastic reception, becoming one of the earliest pick-ups out of the festival. The documentary offers a conventional biography of its subject, and while it is bolstered by its extensive use of Paik’s library of work, it feels much more straightforward than it should be. 

The film tells the story of experimental artist Nam June Paik, who is considered to be the father of video art. Anyone who has worked in the realm of video before knows Paik’s name thanks to his influence (he coined the term “electronic superhighway” after all). That being said, many in the general public might not be aware of his extraordinary work and story, and they are who this documentary is aimed at.

Unfortunately, despite Paik having made a name for himself as an ambitious avant garde artist, filmmaker Amanda Kim’s form is frustratingly conventional. The movie tells its story in exactly the way that one would expect — through a combination of archive materials, talking head interviews, and footage from the subject’s work.

The film also contains narration by acclaimed actor Steven Yeun (Minari, The Walking Dead) — who also serves as an executive producer on the movie — reading Paik’s personal diaries. The practice of having a celebrity speaking the words of a documentary’s subject is nothing new, but it is used too sparingly here to make much of an impact.

Instead, the more impactful moments are those in which Kim allows Paik’s work to speak for itself. The kinetically-edited sequences of Paik’s experimental video art are what is most likely to leave the audience with a feeling of respect and admiration for the film’s subject, more so than hearing his praise sung over and over again by interviewees.

There are also a few interesting ideas to be found in the movie, such as the portions that discuss Paik’s experience as an immigrant or the legacy he had on the art industry as a whole, but these are often neglected in favor of a more broad survey of his career. One of the most interesting bits of the film shows Paik’s work side-by-side with the derivative works it inspired, including some hugely recognizable music videos.

If the purpose of the movie was merely to bring broader awareness to the existence of an undersung figure in the experimental art community, Kim has succeeded at doing so. However, this ultimately feels like the bare minimum that this film should have been. There are so many deeper levels with which Kim could have engaged with this material, yet it feels disappointingly shallow.

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is a straightforward biographical documentary, and while there is nothing poorly-made about it, the fact that it is so straightforward makes it somewhat underwhelming. Someone as revolutionary and ambitious as Paik deserved an equally ambitious cinematic treatment, and this is not that.

Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV is now playing in theaters.

Rating: 3/5

Review by Sean Boelman

The Five Devils is the type of movie where it is easy to see the directorial vision on the screen, even if it’s obvious that it was a little thin on the page. There is no denying the visual prowess of The Five Devils, cementing Léa Mysius as a director to watch, but the narrative certainly leaves something to be desired.

The film follows a young girl with seemingly magical powers whose calm life is thrown into disarray when her aunt is released from prison and comes to stay with her and her parents. As Léa Mysius’s sophomore feature, The Five Devils is an ambitious swing-and-a-miss, failing to live up to its potential.
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The bigger draw of the movie is likely to be its fantasy elements, which are frustratingly ambiguous. It’s an interesting concept, but Mysius seems so unwilling to adhere to genre conventions that the film instead ends up feeling grossly underdeveloped and a shell of what it could have been.

That being said, the character elements don’t fare much better. The dynamic between the three characters — the child, her mother, and her aunt — is intriguing and shows a lot of promise, but ends up falling into a lot of melodramatic trappings. The issue is less with how the characters are written, and more with how the conflict is written.

That being said, the movie does boast some pretty consistently good performances. Although the role is a bit suspect — coming dangerously close to white savior-adjacent territory — Adèle Exarchopoulos is quite good here, as always. The real star of the show, though, is young actress Sally Dramé, whose performance is quiet and nuanced.

The visual style is also quite impressive. Paul Guilhaume (who co-wrote the screenplay with Mysius) is the cinematographer of the film, and he has a keen eye for framing and lighting. The result is images that are transfixing — at times even hypnotic — creating a great atmosphere, even when the script isn’t able to maintain its tension.

Indeed, even though the movie is quite visually alluring, the narrative is so sleepy and meandering that it will lose many viewers’ interest nonetheless. It’s the type of film that requires patience from the viewer, but it fails to realize the key factor in audiences accepting a slow burn: it has to earn that pacing.

Ultimately, The Five Devils is the type of movie that offers some pretty undeniably great vibes, but from a narrative standpoint, it’s disappointingly hollow. Léa Mysius directs the absolute hell out of a script that may leave viewers feeling more confused and unfulfilled than satisfied.

The Five Devils is now playing in theaters.

Rating: 2.5/5

Review by Cole Groth

The quirkiness of Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out’s title sums up the movie pretty well. This coming-of-age film, directed by Jake Van Wagoner and based on a script from Austin Everett, details the lives of two diametrically opposed teenagers who go on a journey of self-discovery while trying to find out if aliens stole one of their parents. While the premise is promising and — if handled by a better crew — could’ve been a truly amazing experience, this coming-of-age dramedy struggles with a bad script and weak characters.

Aliens Abducted My Parents has a fairly basic premise. Itsy (Emma Tremblay) is your everyday teenage girl. She’s just moved into a new town with her overbearing little brother (Kenneth Cummins) and her loving parents (Matt Biedel and Hailey Smith). She meets space-obsessed Calvin (Jacob Buster), who’s dedicated to finding out what happened to his parents (Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) after an alien force seemingly stole them from him years earlier. While she finds him to be nerdy at first, she bonds with him over time.

High-school characters are almost always undermined by their scripts, and this time, viewers will find themselves incredibly frustrated with the relationship between the two. Calvin is very annoying because of how ridiculously nerdy he is. His dialogue is so obnoxiously nerdy that you can’t help but roll his eyes whenever he opens his mouth. While his dialogue is bad, it’s not as bad as his bully’s (Landry Townsend), who is so incredibly mean that it doesn’t feel realistic. Instead of putting any nuance into the script, Everett’s script makes every character’s intentions too apparent. It’s so amateur that the audience will certainly question how this got turned into a script at all.

It’s a shame that the actors don’t do a good job of elevating the weak source material. Like the dialogue, every actor turns into a caricature of a natural person. While this film has a sci-fi twist, it should be believable as a film grounded in reality. Unfortunately, audiences will be unable to connect to any of the characters, which is a big problem for coming-of-age stories like this. Families will enjoy a few cute moments, mainly the bonding between Itsy and her brother or the relationship between Itsy and Calvin. However, beyond that, it’s still a cringe-worthy experience.

Indie coming-of-age movies shouldn’t be this embarrassing. That nobody questioned the unbearable nature of the script is a shock to me. Emma Tremblay is only a few days younger than me, which made me wonder if she ever spoke up about how unrealistic the script was while she was making this. There has to be a better way for dialogue to be written because even if this was a well-intentioned story, it’s frustrating to watch teenagers speak like they are the aforementioned aliens.

If you’re a big fan of coming-of-age movies, be prepared to be disappointed by Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out. It has an overall nice message and shines in a few moments through its quirkiness, but is by far and large an unrewarding experience. You’d be much better off watching The Edge of Seventeen, 10 Things I Hate About You, or any other coming-of-age dramedy because this is only a shell of many superior films.

Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out screened at the 2023 Make Believe Film Festival, which runs March 23-26 in Seattle, WA.

Rating: 1.5/5

Review by Adam Donato

Review by Sean Boelman

With some of the most popular creative talents on Broadway working behind the scenes, the new Hulu series Up Here seemed destined to be a hit. While it’s charming enough to get by, the derivative nature of Up Here — both of other series and itself — causes the initial intrigue to wear off rather quickly.

The show follows two New Yorkers who, discontent with their lives, spark up an unexpected romance only to find that they are getting in the way of their own happiness. Although the core premise is a pretty basic rom-com set-up, there are some ambitiously surreal elements that promise to make Up Here stand out. Unfortunately, these aspects are largely left underdeveloped.

Ultimately, as is the case with a lot of half-hour comedies these days, this did not need to be as long as it was. The structure is quite literally repetitive, and it grows monotonous in the back half. It’s light and breezy enough that it’s still easy viewing, but it feels very much like they had a good concept and just did not know what to do with it.

One of the most confusing things about this show is its tone. Although it’s mostly enjoyable as a whole, the show often seems to struggle to understand exactly who it is made for. In some parts, it’s an idealistic, almost wholesome comedy a la Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt; but in others, it’s a cynical raunchy comedy in the vein of Trainwreck. It gets a decent amount of laughs, but still would have benefitted from more consistency.

Viewers’ opinion of the show will likely be made or broken by their opinion of the characters. And while the characters aren’t exactly frustrating, they also aren’t particularly likable. You may find yourself rooting neither for nor against them, which is about the worst spot this could be in. It doesn’t help that — despite being excellent performers on their own — Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdez have no chemistry together.

The biggest draw of the show is the music by Kristen-Anderson Lopez and Robert Lopez, but even that peaks relatively early. The first song in the series is extremely catchy — and they seem to know it, because it’s repeated throughout the show quite a few times. The rest of the songs are good, but the only other one to wow is a show-stopping solo by Brian Stokes Mitchell.

The directors also manage to direct the hell out of the show, but it’s no surprise given how heavily Hamilton director Thomas Kail was involved. The musical sequences are shot in a way that is fun and creative, giving the series a much-needed boost of energy. Even if the writing leaves something to be desired, the visuals and choreography give it sufficient vibrancy.

Up Here gets a pass due to a few catchy tunes and inspired choreography and direction, making it just fun enough to be worth watching. Still, viewers’ interest will likely take a sharp nosedive after the first couple episodes, and they’ll likely forget it rather quickly.

Up Here streams on Hulu beginning March 24. All eight episodes reviewed.

​Rating: 3/5

Review by Dan Skip Allen

Review by Camden Ferrell

Review by Sean Boelman

After becoming a bit of a sleeper hit, HBO’s Succession is now one of the most acclaimed shows on television right now. It was recently announced that the fourth season is set to be the last, leaving fans with anticipation to see how the saga of the Roys will fall out. If the first episode is any indication, this may be the best season of the best series ever created.

As is the case with previous seasons, we start the first episode of the final season in medias res, as the Roys continue their power struggle to determine who will control the Waystar Royco empire. This episode again takes place during one of Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) birthday soirées, but it makes “Dundee” look like child’s play by comparison.

For the first twenty minutes or so of the episode, it’s dryly funny and sharp. However, it quickly begins to escalate and turns into one of the most exhilarating episodes of television that you will ever see in your life. The negotiations that happen in the last thirty minutes of the episode are so delectably petty that they will have fans giggling with glee.

The most interesting thing about this season — at least for the first episode — is that it features the siblings in an uneasy alliance, as the finale of season three hinted at, rather than each other’s throats. It’s a very different dynamic than we are used to seeing from the characters, but it is still devilishly fun and feels like an entirely natural progression of their arcs.

This episode really returns Cox to the spotlight after a couple of seasons that were arguably more dominated by the performances of the actors playing the Roy kids. Cox has such a commanding, confident screen presence that is virtually unrivaled by anyone else in the cast. He delivers every single line with the sharpness of a razor blade.

Of course, the rest of the cast does a great job too. Sarah Snook shows her cold side as Shiv yet again, while Jeremy Strong plays it much quieter than usual — but seemingly deliberately so. Matthew MacFadyen and Nicholas Braun are at it once again too, bringing fans’ favorite dynamic duo to increasingly wacky heights.

Mark Mylod’s direction in the episode is among the series’s best. There are so many power dynamics at play that have to be captured through the performances and editing, and they’ve never been done better. And, as if anyone expected anything less, Nicholas Brittell’s iconic score slaps as hard as ever, creating the tension masterfully.

The first episode of the final season of Succession hits the ground running, setting the bar extremely high for the remaining episodes. It’s always good when the creators of a series are able to end the show on their own terms — because the result is a conclusion that feels as deliberate as this.

Succession debuts on HBO on March 26 at 9pm ET/PT. One out of ten episodes reviewed.

​Rating: 5/5

Review by Dan Skip Allen