Category: 2010s

While housesitting with his wife Rosemarie DeWitt, Jake Johnson discovers a rusty gun and a bone in the nearby landscape. After Rosemarie goes away to spend time with her parents for the weekend, Jake invites over friends to dig up the yard in search for clues to a mystery that may or may not exist. They both explore affections outside their strained marriage while they are apart and not much of anything else happens. For such a slight movie, it has an impressively well known cast that includes Sam Elliott, Sam Rockwell, and Anna Kendrick, though none of them put to much use.

Ignoring his live-in girlfriend Kerry Washington’s reluctance to introduce him to her family, Craig Robinson follows her to her family’s annual gathering in Sag Harbor. Relying on mostly cheap jokes, it comes across as a milder version of Meet the Parents. Its entertainment value rests mostly in the appeal and interactions of its cast. Luckily, supporting the leads is a talented cast that includes S. Epatha Merkerson and David Alan Grier as Washington’s parents and Diahann Carroll and Melvin Van Peeples as her grandparents.  

The sole member of his department, Eddie Marsan’s job concentrates on attempting to locate the next of kin for dead residents. Living an entirely solitary life himself that parallels the lives of the people he researches, it all gets disrupted when his last case is for a neighbor at the same time his job is being downsized for being too expensive and time consuming. It’s premise is very similar to the novel How Not to be Alone. The film manages to be a gentle reflection on loneliness and death. The film rests entirely on Marsan’s shoulders and he does an incredible job conveying the closed off loneliness of his character as he slowly begins to open to something more.

For over 60 years, Betty White has spent Valentine’s Day at the train station where she last said goodbye to her husband who went missing in action during World War II. When cynical journalist Jennifer Love Hewitt is assigned the story as a personal interest piece, she gets caught up in the romance and helps Betty learn what happened to her husband. I had very low expectations for this Hallmark movie, but went in just wanting to see White’s performance. It delivered on almost all points. It’s overly sentimental and dramatic with an added dose of unnecessary Christianity thrown in for measure, but Betty is quite lovely in the dramatic role of a grieving widow. Unfortunately Hewitt’s character and her story arc, as cliched as it possibly can be, is the main focus and is very limited in interest.  

Two planets are situated in extreme proximity to each other so that one’s inhabitants can look up and see the inhabitants of the other. Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess live on opposite planets, but manage to develop a friendship by meeting at high points on their respective worlds. I had been curious about this for awhile, but bad reviews kept me away. The romance is a really generic take on Romeo and Juliet and the entire premise requires a complete suspension of belief, but it is a really beautiful film with vague ideas that kept it interesting enough.    

In the shadow of the 2008 Presidential election and the Great Recession, Scoot McNairy and Ben Mendelsohn are hired to rob a mob poker game in imitation of another robbery perpetrated by Ray Liotta, who runs the game, years earlier. Hitman Brad Pitt is called in who in turn calls in James Gandolfini to perform the parts he feels he’s too close to. A violent, cynical, and probably all too accurate portrayal of the United States and its values that spends a bit too much time emphasizing that point, I was mostly surprised to see Pitt and Gandolfini working together two films in a row when I had no idea they shared the screen so often.  

Life on the Pine Ridge Reservation is told through the experiences of a young girl and her brother after the death of their absentee father. Each of them are trying to find their way with the brother working through a growing desire to leave while his sister searches for roots and role models in her community. Director Chloé Zhao again beautifully captures the middle American landscape and shines light on a culture that is often forgotten. The performances of Jashaun St. John and John Reddy as the siblings are very natural and realistic. I was surprised to learn that despite an extreme problem with alcoholism, alcohol is illegal on the reservation.