Drama - Cinema Crespodiso

Review: ‘Bridge of Spies’

Based on a pretty amazing true story, “Bridge of Spies” is an old school style Cold War era thriller, a movie about spies and geopolitical tensions and the ominous specter of a full blown thermonuclear war threatening to break out at any moment, but more specifically it is about some of the hidden and secretive actions of rival governments, and also how these governments view the populace and use them to their own ends, and how the populace could in term actually find a way to use their governments.

James Donovan (Tom Hanks) is a successful insurance lawyer at a large law firm in New York City, and one day he shows up to work to find that he has been elected by seemingly every other lawyer in New York to be the defense counselor for Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), a man arrested and charged with multiple counts of espionage and accused of being a Soviet spy. Drawing the short straw, he in convinced rather easily that this is in the best interest of the justice system itself, as it needs to appear obvious to everyone that this accused Soviet spy is still getting the full benefit of the American constitution, and Donovan sets out defend this man, all the while suffering anger and vitriol from the public at large.Continue Reading …

Review: ’99 Homes’

Hey Orlando, Florida, congrats on being in a movie starring Michael Shannon and Andrew Garfield! Too bad it’s because you had one of the biggest mortgage foreclosure markets in the country, but at least they filmed the movie there and brought some much needed economic support to the region. Oh…the movie was filmed in New Orleans, Louisiana? Well…better luck next time, I guess.

“99 Homes” is the story of a man trying to provide for his family during a very tough time, and what that man is willing to do to both himself and others so he can care for the ones he loves. It is one thing to sit in relative comfort and say to yourself that you have certain moral lines and ideas about ethics and legalities, it is another to have your comforts taken away and to be put into a dangerous position, one which makes you reevaluate what you may be willing to do.

Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield) is such a person, a honest and hardworking family man who finds himself without work due to the worldwide economic collapse of 2007, and due to the lack of work and lack of funds, finds himself on the receiving end of an eviction, one from his long time family home that is packed with memories, which makes it all that much harder. But now the bank owns the home, and working as a rep for the bank is asshole realtor Rick Carver (Michael Shannon), who spends all of his time pressuring families to sell their homes for a few thousand dollars so he can flip them, and if they don’t take the pay out, he just waits for the eventual eviction process and takes the home then.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The Walk’

“The Walk” is an okay movie for about an hour or so, and then it ramps up and spends most of the second half of its runtime being great, though with caveats. To simply compare this to the excellent documentary “Man on Wire” is to miss the point of this dramatic recreation of events told first in memoir form and then via nonfiction film, as this is a movie all about making you feel what it is like to do what happens, how it would have been perceived, what it would have been like for the audience to be the man on the wire. It is a just a bit of a shame, then, that “The Walk,” in setting out to accomplish this, instead beats the audience about the head with its insistence on the feeling of creating such a feat, the transcendence that we are supposed to feel, shoving down our throats the notion that this is important. This could have been whittled down a bit and reshaped and it could have then become a great piece of moviemaking, but instead we have to settle for something that is merely good, with problems that it regularly threatens to overcome and rise above but never truly does.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Sicario’

“This is the land of wolves.”

“Sicario” sets itself apart from other drug movies by taking such an intense, in your face, this is how it really is approach to the story; this is about the ongoing drug war here in the Americas, where an outrageous demand for an illegal product in one country results in a massive amount of casualties in another, where governments take whatever approach they can to try to minimize the damage, and in which there are people willing to do some very questionable things for an outcome that ultimately may, if they are lucky, only chip away at the overall problem. How far are you willing to go for something you truly believe in? What can you sacrifice, in terms of those you know and even just yourself? Hard questions have hard answers, and sometimes arriving at those answers ends up being worse than simply not knowing. Ignorance is bliss, but it also exacerbates the situation because how can a problem be fixed if one pretends it doesn’t exist?Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Grandma’

“Grandma” is the rare kind of movie, a film in which the lead character is a woman “of a certain age,” which is refreshing and wonderful because of the well documented plight of actresses in Hollywood and movies at large and how hard it is for women to get decent roles in good movies which amount to more than just “wife” or “girlfriend” or “prostitute.” Now of course this is a low budget film made outside of the system, but naturally often times the system must be fought from the outside, and this movie is a noble blow in that fight. Funny and heartfelt, this is exactly the kind of indie festival darling that has the power to break out and be seen by more people than expected, and deservedly so.

Widowed poet Elle (Lily Tomlin) starts her day by breaking up with her girlfriend of four months Olivia (Judy Greer) because Elle is incapable of saying whether or not she loves her, driving Olivia away, and before she can even recover from this trauma, she gets another surprise – her granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up on her door asking for $630 so Sage can pay for an abortion later that evening. As Elle is broke and has no credit cards, she agrees to help Sage raise the money. And from there they go around town, visiting friends and acquaintances from whom they might be able to get the money they need. Meanwhile they naturally learn a little bit about each other and themselves along the way.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Black Mass’

“Black Mass” is the story of James “Whitey” Bulger, a small time Irish mobster in South Boston who used an unlikely connection through the FBI to become the biggest crime lord in the whole city. But really this movie is about how crime can be perpetuated from either side of the law and sometimes these supposedly opposite factions team up and cause some real damage. And of course it is always a matter of time before one’s sins catch up to them, but when they do, is it already too late?

Whitey Bulger (Johnny Depp) was just doing some small time stuff with his modestly sized crew when a friend from the old neighborhood got in touch with him. This friend was John Connolly (Joel Edgerton) and he just happened to be a special agent with the FBI, and having been assigned to Boston to stop the organized crime problem, he decides that he can enter into a mutually beneficial relationship with Whitey, convincing him to help find ways to ensnare Whitey’s Italian mafia rivals. Pretty much telling himself and his crew that the enemy of their enemy is their friend, this alliance starts some really bad stuff for everyone else around them.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘The End of the Tour’

“The End of the Tour” is the exact kind of movie that people like to claim never get made anymore. Folks like to complain about superhero movies and blockbusters and spectacles and studios cranking out product instead of art, and the best is when they insist that nothing original gets made, oh woe is us, why can’t we get movies made for adults anymore, just people talking about ideas and the inherent drama that comes from different people coming together, why oh why can’t we get more movies like this? And then this movie comes along, and everyone is like “The End of the what? David Foster who? What Stone magazine? Just pass the Cheetos, will ya?” People, please, put down the fucking snack foods, shut off the reality television, get in your shitty car and go to the nearest theater showing “The End of the Tour” and do your part to support solid, well made, adult-minded entertainment.

Funny enough, “The End of the Tour” even goes a little into “good seductive entertainment,” the type of movies that DO involve action and spectacle and aren’t meant to change the world or even the way you look at the world (“Die Hard” gets specifically name dropped as an example) and this gets compared to eating candy and junk food and drinking soda, which is indeed pleasurable albeit not nutritious. We can consume this kind of middle of the road, for-entertainment-only type of movie (and television and music and literature and so on) but we can’t make it the basis of our diets, we can’t subsist on this alone and expect any sort of personal growth; on the contrary, we can only expect to die a very real death in a very meaningful way, which is how this movie describes what happens to a person when their primary sexual relationship is with their own hand and images on a computer screen as opposed to with an actual person. It all ties together in a way that asks basically what is this life all about and how can we all navigate this thing in the best way possible.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Straight Outta Compton’

“Straight Outta Compton” is the kind of movie that manages to serve multiple purposes. On the surface it is a normal biopic, the stereotypical rise and fall (and sometimes rise again) story of a musician or group of musicians, but it also gets into deeper societal issues that unfortunately still resonate today. Racial tensions, unfair policing, government censorship, the power of The Truth, it is all here in this tale of a group of rappers who tapped into a raw nerve in this country and became one of the biggest things going on in all of pop culture.

The opening scene of “Straight Outta Compton” is a grabber, as Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell) is involved in what appears to be a gun deal going south, and just as the tension becomes unbearable, here comes a fully militarized police squad knocking down the door of this drug house in the hood, and Eazy has to ghetto parkour his way out of that house before the police catch him, and as he gets away, the title card SLAMS on to the screen in huge letters, saying “Straight Outta Compton,” immediately telling you that this shit is serious.

This is what makes this movie really work because they take the time to really establish their neighborhood and the nature of their lives, the poverty, the struggle, the self doubt, the crime, this is all important to understand, so that when Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins) and O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) start talking about “reality rap,” we know what reality they are talking about. When we see them get harassed and almost arrested by the police foe the umpteenth time for literally standing while black, and then the very next scene is Ice Cube showing everyone his lyrics for “Fuck the Police,” we totally get why he would go that route, we all know what has compelled him to express himself in such a manner.Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Southpaw’

Every couple of years we get a new boxing movie, usually a tale of a book-dumb but street-wise hustler who is either trying to claw his (or her) way out of poverty or already got out of poverty and claimed fortune and fame only to lose it all and have to work back up from the bottom again. Either it’s achieving the American Dream or seeking redemption for losing that Dream. Usually our lead pugilist has a family to provide for or a life partner to lean on, and usually these things are taken away in some capacity so our hero can, ahem, fight for them. Throw in a training montage or two, some punch-drunk pseudo philosophy, and a few gallons of red-dyed corn syrup, and you have yourself an honest-to-god boxing movie. And in 2015, that movie is called “Southpaw.”Continue Reading …

Review: ‘Dope’

“Dope” has a common and basic skeleton of a story that should be instantly familiar to just about everyone. We’ve all heard stories and read books and seen movies and TV shows about a “good” person stuck in a bad situation, who usually has to resort to something they normally wouldn’t do in order to survive. Whether its a kid growing up in a bad neighborhood or a person working for a shady company or a person stuck with their shitty family, this is a go-to story because it is quite common and often relatable. What sets “Dope” apart is the specifics, the details, the little things that all add up to give this particular movie its own identity.

“Dope” centers on Malcolm (Shameik Moore), a high school senior living in a stereotypically rough Los Angeles neighborhood, where he spends most of his time with his single mom and his two best friends, and with the latter he has a pop-punk kind of band, and they also spend a lot of time delving into 1990’s hip-hop culture, lamenting that this was the golden age of rap music (though the movie doesn’t state it, I bet Malcolm is not a Young Thug fan). After a long set up establishing who Malcolm is and what his normal day-to-day plight is like, we gets himself invited to a club for a local drug dealer’s birthday party which turns into a shoot out which turns into Malcolm unwittingly making off with a couple of bricks of powdered MDMA and a gun. He (and his two friends) then find themselves having to sell the drugs for a local drug dealing big shot so that Malcolm can get a solid recommendation for his Harvard application (long story), and also so they don’t die.Continue Reading …