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Review by Daniel Lima  The democratization of filmmaking has allowed many people who would otherwise never be able to make a movie the ability to do so. Sometimes, this allows for unique perspectives and the kind of passion projects that would never make it past the studio gatekeepers of Hollywood. Other times, you get something like They're Here, a documentary that reveals absolutely nothing about its subject matter, the people it follows, or those who put time and energy into getting it made. This is nominally a documentary about alien encounters, or more specifically, the people who believe they have made contact with otherworldly beings. Young burnouts who believe they witnessed extraterrestrial activities, retirees who claim a cordial relationship with alien scientists, and one old man who simply wants to believe in something greater than himself. The one thing that unites them beyond their incredible experiences is… well, that gets to the heart of the problem. All these people are residents of upstate New York and even congregate at a small festival for people who have had these close encounters. Strangely, this scene that provides such an obvious and useful structure to all the individual stories is buried thirty minutes into a movie that is barely over an hour long. Instead, the film haphazardly bounces between all these people, with no rhyme or reason and no actual narrative to push forward. It amounts to a bunch of random interviews with a peculiar ensemble.  That lack of connective tissue is an immediate indication of the lack of thematic focus that plagues They're Here. Though the people offering their own experiences often talk about reaching out to others and forming a community that will support each other as they all search for answers, the filmmakers are clearly uninterested in showing that side of these people's lives. One would assume that in lieu of that, there is a deeper interrogation of the participants, exploring who they are and how their experiences have fundamentally changed them or what draws them to make the claims they do (or alternatively, what draws aliens to them). Since the film spends so much time bouncing between all of them, however, no one receives the definition that could prove insightful. As far as this film is concerned, their entire lives began and ended with their fantastic accounts and interest in UFOs. That does not offer a particularly compelling portrait of these people. That manipulation that reduces these people to only UFO cultists is evident through much of the filmmaking craft. The festival shows multiple characters who we have been introduced to talking to each other for seemingly the first time, an obvious construction that would have been less obvious had it been laying the groundwork at the start. Many conversations are shot-reverse shot as if they were in a traditional narrative film, lending each of them a suffocating sense of artifice. Then, there are the abduction sequences, which seem to exist only to get this to feature length.  If there is anything to dissect here, it is the pervading sense of loneliness and sadness that all these people share. Beyond the scorn and disbelief they are met with whenever speaking their personal truth, it's not hard to read into each of them a discontent with their lives, a sense that there needs to be something vast and powerful out there that they have been allowed to make contact with. It just so happens that that need drove them to aliens rather than religion. This is most evident in the younger people interviewed, two men who clearly have very little going on in their lives (and one who might be the least funny person to ever attempt stand-up comedy), and in an older metalworker named Steve.
Steve is an associate of a local UFO group, going to meetings and clearly being fascinated by the idea of abduction. He spends long hours in his machine shop, hoping to retire but lacking the means to do so. At the prodding of his friend who leads the group (or perhaps the filmmakers, hoping for good content), he undergoes hypnotherapy in an attempt to uncover suppressed memories of his own potential abduction. It doesn't work out, and in one of the film's few genuine moments, he expresses his dismay. "You hope that things are going to work out, and in my life, it's like it never does." He laughs, then sags into his seat and gazes at the floor. If the team behind They're Here had any real interest in the people they were covering, regardless of how they felt about the veracity of their claims, this would be what the movie is about: people cast adrift on their home planet, gazing at the stars and dreaming of — or perhaps even touching — something more. However, the shoddy craftsmanship and lack of focus in exploring their lives is a testament to how little the filmmakers were invested in what these men and women had to say. Steve and the rest deserved better than this. They're Here is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1.5/5
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Review by Daniel Lima  The 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City remains the single deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history. In telling its story, it’s not hard to imagine a variety of approaches: a character study of the perpetrator, a slow-burn thriller, a procedural that details everything that went into its execution, even using this one case as an examination of the right-wing libertarian politics of the era. McVeigh studiously and stubbornly resists any of these. The result is a film that does not seem to have a single animating principle beyond having enough footage to make a feature-length movie. Timothy McVeigh, the man who planted the truck with the fertilizer bomb at the site, is played by Alfie Allen. He’s a disaffected Gulf War veteran, slowly radicalized by instances of government overreach that animated many in the 1990s (most notably, the sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge). He lives a quiet existence, but underneath his stoic exterior lies a man burning with passions that have long since congealed into something more hateful. At least, that’s probably the intent. Sadly, most of the insight into McVeigh as a person has to come from outside knowledge of the case because, as portrayed, he, the man, was a near-mute with no discernible personality traits beyond blankly looking into space. Perhaps Allen was the wrong choice for such a subdued role, but as written, there’s simply not much indication of how McVeigh views the world, how he connects with other people, or why the people in his orbit even stand to be in his company in the first place. It’s rare to walk into a biopic and walk out knowing less about the subject than before, but such is the case here. The film structures itself by detailing the inception of the bombing plan up through the day it goes off. To give credit where it’s due, at first, the slow, deliberate pace seems to evoke something like an S. Craig Zahler movie, giving a pronounced weight to something as simple as meeting a strange man at a gun show or being stopped by a police officer for speeding (well, simple for a white man). Unfortunately, setting itself before the bombing does mean there is no tension in any of the situations McVeigh finds himself in. As scenes where there is no danger and no information about the man is being revealed drag on and on, things quickly tip into tedium.  As a sort of fictional document on the process behind planning out such a deadly attack, the movie immediately compromises itself by inventing things whole cloth. A local waitress who takes an interest in McVeigh, an old man in federal custody facing execution for a hate crime who McVeigh visits in prison, a bewildering French-Canadian man looking to recruit McVeigh into a wider movement. One scene shows the man seemingly motivated to murder a Black man simply because he put on rap music in a jukebox bar; multiple scenes seem to go so far as to imply that there was a second bomber with him when he planted the bomb at the federal building.
Fidelity to real life is hardly a prerequisite in making a film like this, though it could be argued there’s a degree of responsibility being flouted in fabricating so much. More aggravating is that all these inventions amount to absolutely nothing. None of the interactions with these characters reveal anything more about McVeigh’s psyche that isn’t already evident: he’s cold, unsociable, and identifies with right-wing grievances of the time. The only thing all these people add is minutes to the run time. What’s most aggravating about the movie’s failure to do anything with this story is how fascinating it actually is. The Oklahoma City bombing was the culmination of years of right-wing extremist agitation about the government’s abuse of police power, a mind-boggling thing to imagine thirty years on with a conservative embrace of state-sanctioned violence. McVeigh himself was a true, passionate devotee, going so far as to end friendships over what he saw as great evils the government perpetrated within its borders and abroad. At least some of his agitations could even be said to be reasonable, even if his actions were not. This level of moral complexity, this snapshot of the time this story provides, the anger and animus of man at its center, is completely absent from this dull, soulless retelling. McVeigh ends with a flurry of news clips from the immediate aftermath of the attack. One, in particular, stands out: at what appears to be a demonstration of what a fertilizer bomb is capable of, a young woman smiles and laughs at the sheer power of the device, then slowly breaks down into heavy sobs as she realizes the horror of what it wrought. When the most emotionally stirring part of your movie is news footage from three decades ago, something has gone horribly wrong. McVeigh is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1/5 Review by Daniel Lima  For the whole of human history, storytellers have explored and exploited the horror of isolation. Be it the lonely echoes of an empty home or the dark recesses in the midst of a vast wilderness, what the mind creates without the comfort of company is often vastly more terrifying than any monster or demon. What the mind creates is also more interesting than anything in The Damned, a period horror film that attempts to be an evocative, atmospheric descent into madness and comes up with nothing at all. Odessa Young plays a young widow in 18th-century Iceland, running a small fishing outpost completely cut off from the outside world in the cold winter months. As they slowly starve through an unsuccessful season, a large ship wrecks within sight of them. Electing not to lend help, the outpost soon finds itself haunted by a being out of old Norse legend, and the inhabitants begin to turn on each other. It is clear that The Damned will not win any awards for originality or screenwriting. From just this premise, anyone with a passing familiarity with modern trends in horror cinema knows exactly what to expect: a slow burn, quasi-supernatural threat that could be interpreted as a manifestation of guilt and trauma, completely within the characters' minds. To that end, the film never tips its hand fully one way or the other and so never allows itself space to distinguish itself from any number of other works, at least on a purely narrative level. This is not, by itself, such a big problem. A film like this lives and dies on the world it can build. On paper, that shouldn't be an issue here: with such a unique setting and a small ensemble forced to spend a lot of time in one location, there is ample opportunity to craft a rich, insular little community with fully fleshed-out characters.  Unfortunately, the immersive quality this breed of survival horror begs for is constantly kept at bay by conventional filmmaking form. The score constantly announces how the audience should feel and ruins the ambiance that the sound design should create on its own. The stark beauty of the Icelandic landscape should be an almost ironic backdrop for such a bleak tale, but the bland cinematography does nothing to capitalize on the grand expanse. Numerous cheap jump scares litter a film that should be all about a creeping sense of dread. All these minor flaws ultimately create a sense of artifice that breaks any semblance of naturalism.
Worse yet, however, is the characters. There are not many of them; they spend basically every moment of screentime with one another, and yet they are all utterly indistinguishable beyond one or two traits: the woman-in-charge, the love interest, the kid, the superstitious crone. These stock archetypes simply do not suffice in a film about the deteriorating mental states of its ensemble, where death is constantly waiting in the wings and would represent a staggering blow to a community without bodies to spare. By the end of the film, I found myself struggling to figure out why I should care what happens to any of these people. Ultimately, this speaks to why The Damned doesn't work. It's an atmospheric film with no sense of atmosphere, psychological horror with no minds to interrogate. It has nothing original to say about the state of the world and no themes to explore that haven't been tackled by a plethora of more engaging films. It's the kind of movie you forget about almost as soon as the credits roll. The Damned is screening at the 2024 Tribeca Festival, which runs June 5-16 in New York City. Rating: 1.5/5 Review by Daniel Lima  In the 1990s, high-concept studio family films were all the rage. From expensive productions about dinosaur metropolises (of which there were somehow more than one) to humble tales of fathers putting their kids in blackface to fabricate an undiscovered African tribe, the decade was the golden age of weirdo movies that earnestly committed to their oddball premises, often to mixed but fascinating results. Though it may lack the polish of those films, Invaders from Proxima B feels very much in conversation with them, showing far more vision than the low-budget DTV dreck of today. Ward Roberts is the producer, director, writer, and — of course — the star of the film, playing both a loving family man who spends an unfathomable amount of time away from his wife and daughter and an alien creature on a mission to save the world. As the alien attempts to coerce the man into helping him, more people are drawn into the plot, and the hijinks and shenanigans quickly stack up in a comedy of errors. The first glimpse of life on Earth is a man stepping out of a van in the dead of night and walking quietly into a home, easing himself into place between a woman and child as they sleep under a “Welcome Home Dada!” banner in the living room in a single unbroken shot. There is no score communicating how the audience should feel; the lack of cuts maintains the stillness and serenity a scene like this calls for. There is deliberate attention paid to how the scene is framed and composed., emphasizing the coziness of the home and the closeness of the family. This is hardly the most complex example of visual storytelling, but it shows that this goes beyond a mere vanity project for Roberts. Where so much family fare today cuts corners on basic craft, there is a level of care here that gives time spent with the core trio — and even the alien — an emotional weight that grounds the film, even as it gets progressively sillier. Perhaps it’s more an indictment of contemporary filmmaking standards than an exemplary quality of Invaders, but the fact remains that the film looks as good as anything at this scale can look, and lacks the shagginess that often comes with such a meager production.  Where the film gets particularly ambitious is in its alien, portrayed here as an Oscar the Grouch-esque puppet with big bushy eyebrows and a Brooklyn accent (at least, I think it’s Brooklyn, do not correct me). Any use of puppetry or practical effects today is inherently captivating, providing a tactile feel that no level of CG can adequately replicate. Touches like the glowing residue he leaves behind, his impressively realized spacecraft, and even the crudely animated 2D effects give this a charm and energy that is incredibly compelling.
Of course, this is still obviously intended to be a showcase for Roberts’s skills as an actor, and he doesn’t disappoint. Through certain plot machinations, he is given ample opportunity to embody multiple characters and personalities, and he handles them all with a frankly surprising level of nuance. The rest of the ensemble is every bit as committed, regardless of how outlandish and outsized their roles are. This earnestness goes a long way in making the most cartoonish antics tolerable… which, unfortunately, gets to the heart of the movie’s one great flaw. Unfortunately, this is a family comedy that isn’t very funny. That isn’t too much of a problem at the start when the lowkey drama and the world-building around the alien take up a good amount of screen time. As the film goes on, those elements — the most interesting — begin to recede, and instead, new wacky characters take over the narrative in a most unwelcome way. They are, almost to a one, intensely aggravating, relying on being goofy rather than actually constructing jokes and gags. Add in some off-color jokes that seem at odds with the rest of the film, and by the time the credits roll, these characters have largely outstayed their welcome. Yet it’s hard to be too upset at Invaders from Proxima B. There is a genuine sense of passion and purpose here, which eludes films with budgets that astronomically dwarf it. Even at its worst, it maintains a focus and attention to craft that smooths over its roughest edges. Three decades ago, this could have been a studio project that overcame its most abrasive elements through the impressive production design that that level of funding allows for. As it stands, you could do far worse today. Invaders from Proxima B is now available on VOD. Rating: 3/5 Review by Daniel Lima  How much one gets out of In Our Day may depend as much on their relationship with the director’s body of work as their response to this film. Hong Sang-soo has been making films for the past three decades, and by all accounts, they have tackled many of the same themes in many of the same forms. As someone with only a cursory familiarity with his oeuvre, it’s not hard to see the appeal, but there’s only so much to be gleaned from what is presented here. Like most of his other works, the film follows artists: an older poet experiencing a late-career resurgence and a middle-aged actress who recently returned to Seoul after becoming disenchanted with her craft. The two narratives — though that is perhaps too lofty a phrase to describe them — never actually intersect, though there are common elements reflected in both. Through conversations with friends and admirers, the two reflect on art, life, and loss. Also, there is a cat. Formally, this is as bare bones and rudimentary as you can get. Shooting on what appears to be consumer-grade cameras, two locations for each story (one of which is just outside the door of each artist’s home), each scene just a single, continuous, locked-down shot, and heavily improvised dialogue. With no prior knowledge of the director, it’d be easy to mistake this for a student production; even having only seen his 2011 film The Day He Arrives, I was a bit taken aback by just how pared down this movie is.  While the conversations are meandering, with lots of repetitive small talk about the food they’re eating and games of Rock Paper Scissors, they both hit familiar beats. The poet has found some measure of success that had eluded him for so long, but he finds himself more preoccupied with everyday concerns. When pressed to offer some sage wisdom, he implores his audience to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Similarly, while she struggles to offer a young fan any advice on breaking into the industry, the actress has a clear understanding of what convinced her to leave it behind, explaining the exact moment that she felt her art lost its luster. Both harbor regrets over misspent youths and pleasures that are now closed off to them, but they have an appreciation for the life they lead now.
The amateur quality of this film is impossible to ignore, particularly coming from a filmmaker who regularly shows up at big international film festivals and has been making movies since the 1990s. Though his work clearly resonates with many, and these themes are certainly self-reflective as he ages into his twilight years, there is something to be said about how much should be expected from an artist of his caliber. Considering how low rent this is, how vaguely these ideas are actually explored, and how often he explores them in this way, should it be judged more harshly? Should someone with his stature be expected to show more growth, to take more care, to offer… more? There is something to be said for that. However personal this film might be, when you’re three minutes into just watching people eat dinner, repeating that they like the food in every possible permutation the improving actors can think of, staying within that moment can be difficult. A sharp, focused script could have lent this a more hand-crafted quality, a sense of intention that would make spending time with these characters more resonant and meaningful, even if they’re still just eating and enjoying each other’s company. Yet, I can’t say that In Our Day is an unpleasant time. As tossed off as it may feel to some, there is something admirable about an experienced filmmaker who so commits to such an unobtrusive style, stripping away the craft to only the bare essentials and then going further still. It makes for a calming, serene experience, albeit one with a definite ceiling for how much it can actually achieve. Also, there is a cat. In Our Day hits theaters on May 17. Rating: 3/5 |