Drama

Drive My Car

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: Drive My Car
  • IMDb: link

Movies find you in interesting ways. Drive My Car is the film I’d been searching for through all of 2021, a true cinematic experience that enveloped me, taking me on a completely unexpected journey built on strong storytelling and great performances.

Adapting Haruki Murakami‘s short story, writer/director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi delivers a beautiful look at loss, moving on, and the unexpected relationships that form when you least expect them. Our main character is Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a stage actor and director. The script spends more than a half-hour developing his relationship to his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), including some shocking discoveries by Kafuku, which works as backstory for the main film still yet to come, but is still presented with such care it could easily have been fleshed out into its own film.

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Mass

/ / Home Video
  • Title: Mass
  • IMDb: link

Written and directed by Fran Kranz, Mass offers an intimate setting to delve into two families’ pain. Six years after a school shooting, the parents of two children involved agree to meet in the basement of a local church. On one side we have Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton as the parents of one of the victims and on the other Reed Birney and Ann Dowd as the parents of the shooter who also took his own life. Both couples are still wracked with pain and seeking answers to a brutal event that changed both families forever.

Mass is a film designed to put its four characters, and the audience, through the wringer as both sides work through their pain attempting to make sense of a senseless crime as the family of the victim and that of the perpetrator discover a shared pain.

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The Card Counter

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Card Counter
  • IMDb: link

Writer/director Paul Schrader examines the worlds of gambling and torture, which turn out to not be as mutually exclusive as you may think. In terms of gambling, The Card Counter doesn’t offer any new information or insight we haven’t seen presented before by movies like Rounders and 21.

What makes the movie unique is William Tell’s (Oscar Isaac) past as a disgraced MP who served 1o years in federal prison for torture in Abu Ghraib. His past causes him to befriend a troubled young man (Tye Sheridan), hoping to dissuade him from taking vengeance out on a man (Willem Dafoe) both characters have reason to hate. The relationship between the pair is a peculiar one as Will takes accepts a job on the poker tour to help his new friend who wants a completely different kind of assistance from him.

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The Tender Bar

/ / Movie Reviews
  • Title: The Tender Bar
  • IMDb: link

Adapted from the memoir of J. R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar is a comfortable warm sweater wrapping up the childhood and college life of JR (played by Tye Sheridan and Daniel Ranieri) and his colorful family, most notably his Uncle Charlie (Ben Affleck) in whose bar he learned as much about life as four years at Yale.

Directed by George Clooney, The Tender Bar isn’t great drama, nor outrageous comedy, but it’s a light and breezy look at a young man’s life who would be raised by his mother (Lily Rabe), in the often-overflowing home of his grandfather (Christopher Lloyd), and his uncle who would instill in him a love of books leading to his eventual profession. With solid performances and some witty narration by Ron Livingston as an older, and perhaps wiser, version of JR, The Tender Bar doesn’t ask much of the audience other than to enjoy a good story.

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The Nowhere Inn

/ / Home Video
  • Title: The Nowhere Inn
  • IMDb: link

The Nowhere Inn has one of my favorite opening scenes of the year as American musician Annie “St. Vincent” Clark, playing herself, is being driven by a confused limousine driver (Ezra Buzzington) with no idea who his latest passenger is, or why she’s famous, only to stop in the middle of a desolate highway and disappear. Seeds of the larger themes of the film are planted here, even if it never reaches the same heights.

The film’s plot involves Annie hiring her friend Carrie, also playing herself, to make a documentary about the band which the pair hope will help both of them reach wider audiences. What Carrie soon discovers, however, is life on the road isn’t all that interesting off-stage for the band. Carrie’s attempts to find an interesting hook for the story and Annie drastically changing her behavior slowly devolve into a situation where neither Carrie nor Annie can differentiate what is actually real.

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