Review: JOHNNY MAD DOG

JOHNNY MAD DOG (3-Stars): No Good Advice, Butterfly, Chicken Hair, Johnny Mad Dog. These are just some of the names in a band of rebel killers fighting a civil war in an unnamed African nation. Oh, and they’re all kids. Shot in Liberia and incredibly authentic with its cast of convincing young actors and mass mayhem, this is powerful but brutal stuff, well-made and way too unpleasant for mass consumption.

-Matthew

Review: HUMPDAY

HUMPDAY (4-Stars): Can you say bro-mance? The first “buzz” film of the festival, this frequently hilarious comedy is about two old college friends at wildly different points in their lives who are reunited. Ben (Mark Duplass of THE PUFFY CHAIR) has settled down and is ready to start trying to have a baby with his wife, while Andrew (Joshua Leonard, BLAIR WITCH) is an artist-type with no ties who has just returned from Mexico. Andrew’s visit and a night of drunken revelry leads to a mutual dare that neither wants to back down from: as two straight guys, they decide to make a gay porn film as an art project for “Humpfest.” Filled with wonderfully natural performances, awkward silences, and clever dialogue, this one got the first ovation at a press screening so far.

-Matthew

Review: MOON

MOON (3-Stars): The always excellent Sam Rockwell stars in this good looking but derivative philosophical sci-fi film. He plays an astronaut working alone on a lunar mining base, and his only interactions are with his station’s robot computer (voiced by Kevin Spacey) and transmissions from his wife and baby on Earth. As he gets within a couple of weeks of his scheduled return, things start to get a little weird. Throw in some apparitions or hallucinations, a clone or two, and a government conspiracy for good measure, and you’ve got an OK mash-up of 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY and SOLARIS and probably a couple of other titles I can’t think of at the moment.

-Matthew

Review: LOUISE-MICHEL

LOUISE-MICHEL (3-Stars): A jaw-dropping, politically incorrect revenge comedy from France that’s inspired in its lunacy but eventually goes off the rails. The day after getting new smocks and a pep talk about their company’s future, the female work force of a small-town toy company show up to find the whole building’s been cleared out and their employers are nowhere to be found. For revenge they decide to hire a hitman to kill the company owner, but the person they choose isn’t quite what he says he is, nor is the illiterate worker that finds him. Brutally funny in spots, unfortunately the film just can’t sustain its momentum.

-Matthew

Review: MARY AND MAX

MARY AND MAX (5-Stars): Audiences were mixed on this claymation feature from Oscar-winning Australian Adam Elliot (the short, HARVEY KRUMPET) but I loved it. Beautiful, dark, funny, and surprisingly moving, the story follows the 20-year pen pal relationship between a lonely 8-year-old Australian girl with a drunk of a mom and a severely obese, mentally unstable, even lonelier 44-year-old Jewish man living in NYC in the 1970s. The characters are voiced by Toni Collette and an unrecognizable Philip Seymour Hoffman, and their performances are terrific as the ingenious stop-motion animation.

-Matthew