Steve Stebbing

Manic – Fifteen years ago this week director Jordan Melamed released his only narrative feature, a look into the journey of a troubled and violent teen played by Joseph Gordon Levitt who is checked into a juvenile mental institution. This was the first onscreen pairing of Levitt and co-star Zooey Deschanel in a story that felt gritty and true to life, another side to the coin that James Mangold’s Girl Interrupted showed us. The film also features a brilliant performance from Don Cheadle as the psychiatrist tasked with trying to figure out the solution to their breakdowns by finding the root of how society wronged them. The contribution of a great soundtrack including Aphex Twin, Deftones and Sleater-Kinney definitely catapulted this one into the memorable category as well.

The Visitor – Tom McCarthy is known as the guy who made Spotlight in recent memory but ten years ago this week this film hit theaters, one that made the world really recognize actor Richard Jenkins. For me, I knew him already as Nathanial Fisher, the deceased patriarch of a funeral home proprietor family in the HBO series Six Feet Under but The Visitor made him an Oscar nominee. The story is pretty simple in nature, following a travelling college professor who returns home to find an immigrant couple squatting in his apartment. Rather than get all xenophobic, our professor embraces these new tenants, befriends them and takes an interest in their culture and daily life. As far as character growth films go, The Visitor is an astounding achievement and would work beautifully in today’s racial climate. It’s also interesting to note that Danai Gurira plays the lead, an actress enjoying massive pop culture success with The Walking Dead and Black Panther.

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas – I’m so happy to give this movie a mention on its twentieth anniversary week because if it weren’t for this Terry Gilliam adaptation of the classic Hunter S. Thompson book I would only be partially the cinema hungry individual I am today. This film was and is everything to me, a story so complex and crazy that only a madman like Gilliam could take it on, and when you add the performances of Johnny Depp and Benicio del Toro to the mix you have a classic film that has been quoted to death by me. This is a film that defines my movie love now and will do so in another twenty years I’m sure.

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid – One of my favorite of the legendary “no longer with us” filmmakers is Sam Peckinpah, a man whose volatile nature may overshadow his great body of work. There are absolute truths when it comes to his work and that is their ability to set themselves apart from the pack. Look at films like Straw Dogs, The Wild Bunch and The Getaway just to name a small few, all classics in their genres. Celebrating its 45th birthday this week, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is no different, a good guy meets bad guy story between two of the biggest personalities in the Wild West. James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson play their respective roles with a brooding brilliance that always keeps me on the edge of my seat, even though I know how it plays out. It’s not just these heavyweights taking the screen but Charles Martin Smith, Jason Robards, Slim Pickens make appearances as well as Bob Dylan who puts the cherry on this Sunday by contributing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” to the soundtrack. Hell, I think I’ve just pushed myself to rewatch this gem.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine – It was a crazily uncertain couple days for the critically acclaimed comedy series as the network it has aired on for five seasons, Fox, gave it the axe in a confusing but slightly predictable move. The very next day NBC made the no-brainer move to save the show and while we won’t see the sixth season until the midseason the entirety of the recently ended season is now on Netflix. If you haven’t gotten on board but heard great things, believe the hype. This cast is incredible, including the proven talents of Andy Samberg, Terry Crews, Joe Lo Truglio and Andre Braugher as well as new favorites of mine Steph Beatriz and Melissa Fumero. Get caught up now and tune in for the midseason so this cancellation stuff doesn’t happen again.

Deadpool 2 – Sequels always have such a large bar to clear when it comes to expectations and recapturing that lightning in a bottle. It gets double hard when your first film slayed all expectations and kicked the door down at the box office for R-rated comic book movies. Amazingly enough, Ryan Reynolds’ “merc with a mouth” returns in a movie that is every bit as good as the original without that pesky origin stuff getting in the way. It is rude, crude, violent and totally self-referential in the way that Deadpool comic fans were wanting and expecting it to be. This movie may well be one of my favorites this year and I will definitely be checking it out more than once. Ryan Reynolds continues to make his city of Vancouver proud and his pride in his hometown is a big driving force of the success of these films.

RBG – There were two biographical documentaries released this past week, both with very different narrative structures. The first, a film about Pope Francis, relies on the “stark room with a talking head” approach to their subject matter which I finding a bit too dry. I want a bit of liveliness to keep me engaged and RBG definitely came through on this. Following the life of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States appointed by the Clinton administration, the film depicts her as a warrior in the courts fighting for women’s rights and human rights which, sometimes, looks like an entirely uphill battle. Lovingly nicknamed the Notorious RBG, Ginsberg is idolized, cosplayed and has risen to be an American icon and, from everything I learned in this documentary, it’s all very deserving. In a sea of toxic masculinity and male indifference that fact that h voice is still so loud is insanely inspiring and empowering for all those who feel snubbed and silenced.

Disobedience – Already on a high this year with his film A Fantastic Woman, Sebastián Lelio is back, this time making his first English language feature. A deep drama with guarded emotions, the story follows a shunned Jewish woman named Ronit, played by Rachel Weisz, who returns to the strict Orthodox Jewish community she was sent away from after the death of her father, a prominent Rabbi in London. The reason for her imposed exile was the forbidden relationship she had with a childhood friend Esti, played by Rachel McAdams in a soul-stirring performance. Upon her return, it is evident that the time and distance hasn’t lessened the yearning between these two women. The blend of passion and restraint is played so beautifully between these two actresses in possibly the most understated performances I’ve seen this year. If you’re in the mood for a drama filled with human complexities, this is a can’t miss.

Wonderstruck – I got to check this one out on one of the final days of last year’s Vancouver International Film Festival and was, many times, nearly brought to tears. Director Todd Haynes follows up his masterpiece Carol with this children’s book adaptation that, loosely speaking, follows two deaf kids from different eras who’s stories run in parallel to each other, sometimes crossing over. Hayne’s visual command that we know him for gives way for a new flourish for his growing bouquet of skills in the form of incredible sound design used for storytelling. As the audience, we feel the full embodiment of what it is to be deaf. With the first kid Rose, who lives in the year 1927, she has been deaf all her life and navigates her world more easily but the other timeline in 1977, our main character is newly deaf and struggles with the isolation. This is how we feel watching, pulled out of our depths into a realm devoid of the things that make us comfortable in cinema. To be truly out of our element is made so refreshing by a master filmmaker and, as the film never got anywhere near a wide release, you can now see it for yourself on demand and DVD.

The Party – Simple, slight and with a run time of only just over an hour, it’s hard to believe a film like this would have sticking power. With an all-star cast featuring Kristin Scott Thomas, Timothy Spall, Cillian Murphy, Bruno Ganz and Patricia Clarkson, the banter flies so quickly that sometimes a moment to digest what you’ve just heard is not there. The story has Thomas as a politician who has just been appointed to a position in the shadow cabinet and has organized a dinner party to celebrate. What she doesn’t know is that all of her guests she has coming each has a loaded bag of problems to unleash as well as her depressed husband who’s revelations might take the cake. Everyone is so phenomenal in this film but, for me, it’s all about Patricia Clarkson who delivers each of her biting lines with such a vinegar-filled venom that even the audience recoils in pain. A quick home watching of this film will have you in stitches of shocked laughter and I have to praise writer-director Sally Potter for shooting this one in black and white. It makes it that much more interesting.

Revenge – Coming from first-time feature writer and director Coralie Fargeat, this is a film you will not forget and one I may have sitting in my top ten at the end of this year. A film in the vein of I Spit On Your Grave but with a “never say die” feminist edge, this movie kicked my ass with its unrelenting blood and violence coupled with its beauty, both in the savage sense and the awesome vibrancy it gives off. The story follows a rich man’s mistress who, while at his beautiful remote mansion in the wilderness, is sexually assaulted by his friends and, when she threatens to tell his wife of their activities in an ultimatum to get airlifted back home, things get ugly. He ends up tossing her off the cliff where she is impaled on a tree and, believing that she is dead and their problems are over, the trio goes on their planned hunting trip. Our main, played by Rings’ Matilda Lutz, is definitely not dead and hunts our three hunters down and to say they get their due might be an understatement. Textured in a way that is both gorgeous at times and horrific at other times, Revenge is a film that felt absolutely satisfying in the art film sense, has the gore to abate those craving it and one of the most bad ass women on screen since Imperator Furiousa.

The Little Prince – Talk about a beautiful film for all ages that was completely lost in a petty studio shuffle. This movie was an adaptation of a beloved French children’s book, one that many in the know were looking forward to, and then, just one week before release, the distributor Paramount Pictures drops the film entirely. This is totally tragic as the film is gorgeous, inspiring and contains a beautiful message for the whole family to pick up on. Loosely, the film follows a little girl whose mother constantly pushes her to be the best in all of her academics leaving her no time for imagination. Her neighbor, an old aviator, tries to open her mind to the possibilities locked within by introducing her to the stories of the Little Prince and his world. The good news is now, thanks to great minds at Netflix, this movie will be available as of Thursday the 17^th of May on the streaming service. I do believe that with a good theatrical push this movie would have found a sizeable audience but now it has a new opportunity to find this and more through the discussion I hope it will bring.

Black Panther – Wakanda piece would this be if I didn’t mention that the highest rated solo superhero film was now on Blu-Ray? Definitely, one that reused that overused pun, which I apologize for, but the opportunity to own this fantastic actioner from the Marvel Cinematic Universe should be a no-brainer. Director Ryan Coogler makes the third film in his stellar career, following Fruitvale Station and Creed, but this one is his biggest yet and kind of the new standard to hold him by. This is the first to solely focus on a black hero in this long list of Marvel films and does it with such original flair that it really sets itself apart from what came before. It does suffer a bit from origin film tropes but Chadwick Boseman continues his great command of T’Challa, the King of Wakanda, and main Coogler staple Michael B. Jordan creates a villain that is not only completely devoid of the one dimensional MCU bad guy problem but makes one that in another light could be the hero. Other than the actual movie being the main seller of why to pick this up, it features extensive behind the scenes features, a gag reel, a look at the upcoming Ant-Man & The Wasp, as well as, my personal favorite, feature commentary by Ryan Coogler himself. If nothing, this will definitely tide you over until Infinity War hits the shelves.