Shared Darkness

Atiq Rahimi’s The Patience Stone is a unique, intimately scaled and enormously affecting dissection of patriarchal culture. The French-Afghan filmmaker’s drama, which debuted at last year’s Toronto Film Festival and was Afghanistan’s Best Foreign Language Academy Award submission, serves as a wonderful showcase for star Golshifteh Farahani, and if there’s any justice will deliver even more success her way.

The film’s story is extraordinarily plain, yet still gripping. In contemporary, war-torn Afghanistan, a young wife (Farahani) and mother of two children, after around a decade of marriage, tends to her wounded husband (Hamid Djavadan), who’s been rendered comatose by a bullet to the neck. Abandoned by his family and facing mortal uncertainty with the encroachment of resistance fighters, this unnamed woman, frustrated and largely alone, she begins to pour out her heart. The very act of confessing harsh, long-secreted-away truths to her husband — of her lack of sexual pleasure in their marriage, of her utter disconnection from him given his lack of even basic kindness — delivers her from a burden, transforming her on an almost religious level.

Rahimi, adapting his own award-winning novel with Jean-Claude Carrière, offers up a script that is sometimes a bit schematic. But he also provides economical and eloquent glimpses into the pathology of women raised and abused in this social system. Farahani (Body of Lies, Just Like a Woman), meanwhile, has an engaging presence — conveying both woundedness and the blooming of an intelligence suppressed too long. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. (Sony Pictures Classics, R, 102 minutes)

A true crime period piece that interestingly eschews a lot of investigatory grind in favor of moral certitude and throwback, cat-and-mouse tension, The Frozen Ground stars John Cusack as Alaskan serial killer Robert Hansen and Nicholas Cage as the state trooper who doggedly brings him to justice. Winding its way to justice in thorny fashion, this black-and-white genre tale doesn’t reinvent the wheel but, courtesy of some intriguing casting and its unique setting, it more than adequately checks off base-level boxes of entertainment.



Getting a bit of a theatrical release in advance of its home video bow, The Frozen Ground unfolds in 1980s Alaska, where the aforementioned Hansen would eventually confess to 17 murders and more than a dozen other kidnappings and rape. The film opens with a 17-year-old runaway and prostitute, Cindy Paulson (Vanessa Hudgens), escaping from her captor, and trying to tell the local police in Anchorage about her ordeal. They don’t much believe her, but when a string of unsolved homicides lands on the desk of Sergeant Jack Halcombe (Cage), he immediately puts the dots together, hones in on Hansen as a suspect, and undertakes a massive effort to first locate Cindy and then bring her in as a cooperating witness.

Like Zodiac, part of what makes The Frozen Ground interesting, or at least different from a lot of its cops-and-killer brethren, is the fact that it unfolds absent the advances in criminal forensics and other technology that we see even on the small screen now every week. Walker’s film is nowhere near as dense and intricately crafted as David Fincher’s opus, of course, but it does track emotionally along somewhat the same lines, summoning forth moments of flabbergasted viewer frustration over some detail ignored, piece of key evidence unexamined or alibi unchecked.

In Cage and Cusack, Walker has a pair of invested leads who deliver grounded and in some instances subtle work; they’re the movie’s pillars. Other actors fare a bit less well. Hudgens, on the heels of Sucker Punch and Spring Breakers, continues to noisily throw off the make-believe shackles of Disney-dom, and seemingly work through some sort of off-screen personal issues; as Cindy, she has a lot of the outwardly manifested traits and behaviors of trauma down pat, but struggles with a skating alley monologue which is meant to color her character’s tragic backstory. She opts to bring the emotion to the fore, but offhanded and flippant would be the more heartrendingly believable choice, as a self-destructive coping mechanism on Cindy’s part.

Air-quote intense camerawork, from Walker and cinematographer Patrick Murguia, often substitute for deeper characterizations. And while the story necessarily condenses an insurance fraud strand that helps reel in Hansen, along with other choice tidbits, Walker, as a screenwriter, sometimes struggles with dialogue and other details. (Radha Mitchell plays a shell of a character, obliging Halcombe a home life that would have been best excised, along with a terrifyingly awkward throwaway line about his “last two weeks” on the job.)

What works about The Frozen Ground stems from the relative uniqueness of its setting. The location shoot takes advantage of the dull greys of winter skies, and everything about the production design feels appropriately second-hand or just slightly out-of-fashion — new two autumns ago. There isn’t much mystery here — we know who did it, and this isn’t the movie for sympathetic psychological examination — but when Hansen goes to the ground, hops in his commuter plane and starts trying to squirrel away evidence, damn if The Frozen Ground doesn’t un-thaw a pessimist’s heart and catch them up in this tale. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. In addition to its theatrical engagements, The Frozen Ground also premieres today on VOD platforms. (Lionsgate, R, 104 minutes)

A spare, streamlined, desert-set psychological thriller that doubles as a study in masculine relationship drift, Scenic Route, scripted by Kyle Killen (The Beaver) and directed by brothers Kevin and Michael Goetz, is a reminder that smart writing and solid execution can lend wings to any concept that on the surface seems trite and familiar.



The film opens with a jolt that tells viewers, yes, there will be blood. What will the cause and exact nature of that bloodletting be, however? Longtime friends who’ve drifted apart, Mitchell (Josh Duhamel) and Carter (Dan Fogler) are on a road trip through the dusty American southwest when their truck breaks down. Carter is a scruffy, failing writer who lives on the societal fringe. Mitchell is family man, albeit one with a presently busted-up knee, who in the wake of a painful break-up put a ring on the finger of his hectoring rebound relationship and promptly abandoned his dream of music; Carter resents him for seemingly both of those decisions. Needling and questioning ensues while the pair wait for help. Rather quickly, Carter confesses that he actually staged the breakdown to try to actually manufacture some conversation time with his old pal. Needless to say, this revelation doesn’t please Mitchell.

Scenic Route is shot through with the same sort of wounded, howling masculinity that director Mark Pellington‘s I Melt With You, starring Rob Lowe, Thomas Jane, Jeremy Piven and Christian McKay, was aiming at. One big difference, though, is that Scenic Route lacks any of that fratty film’s druggy, bleary-eyed excess and sexual acting out — polarizing elements that effectively threw a blanket over more substantive or sincere discussions of its thematic explorations. It’s a movie which probes mid-life dissatisfaction in frank and sometimes uncomfortable ways, as when Mitchell confesses a marital infidelity to his friend, and despairs over the condition of his wife’s post-pregnancy body.

Killen’s script elevates things, and gives Duhamel and Fogler a nice range of material with which to play. Killen exhibits keen instincts for the sort of pinpoint emotional attacks that really get under a friend’s skin, and he has a smart sense of where and how to escalate arguments and even physical attacks and yet then pull back, which gives Scenic Route an intriguing, yo-yo-like sensibility. After much time and respective individual soul-searching in the desert, Scenic Route resolves its main situation, but not without a pleasant twist and some corresponding ambiguity. In going to such extremes, Killen again proves he can juggle disparate tones and deliver movies lined with a certain bruised grace. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. Scenic Route opens this week in Los Angeles at the Chinese 6 Theatres; in addition to its theatrical release in top regional markets, the film is also available across various VOD platforms. (Vertical Entertainment, R, 86 minutes)

Burning Man, an annual week-long event held in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada, would seem to be a great subject for a documentary. After all, the festival — which was originally envisioned as a utopian getaway and rebuke to the constrictive nature of modern life’s duties and norms — now draws in more than 50,000 participants, nominally known as “Burners,” each year. It’s become an alternative pop culture touchstone in and of itself, in the process spawning more than 50 regional festivals around the globe — all based on the same 10 operating principles, which include radical inclusion, participation, decommodification and self-reliance.

Spark: A Burning Man Story wants to be that definitive nonfiction offering, trying to impart the event’s origin story and history. Co-directed by Steve Brown and Jessie Deeter, the film paints in vivid colors, undeniably, but comes up short in delivering a coherent vision statement.

First, what Spark gets right: it captures the amazing can-do spirit and energy of almost all of its participants, from its San Francisco-based planners (yep, sorting out the infrastructure is a year-round thing) to its artistic-minded attendees. Spotlighting everything from drag costumes and huge projects (a five-building, #Occupy-style wooden mock-up of Wall Street excess overseen by an ex-Marine who goes by the name Otto von Danger) to the burning of a 35-foot tall titular sculpture that closes each festival, Spark lights up the imagination.

Other parts of the film are wildly interesting, too, because they dig into the organizational minutiae of trying to tame and shape this developing beast. Interviewees honor Brown and Deeter’s effort by engaging in some honest, big-picture, philosophically rooted arguments regarding issues like condoning “curated” or packaged tour experiences seemingly at odds with its participatory ethos and roots.

Still, as beautiful as a lot of the captured spectacle is, Spark could also benefit from cleaner through lines, and certainly a more rigid and structured chronological telling of the festival’s development. All of the co-founders are interviewed, but Brown and Deeter assemble the movie in jumbled fashion. Spark seems torn between behind-the-scenes perspective and a more experiential document — something 2009’s Dust & Illusions delved deeper into, chronicling the event from attendees’ perspectives. As such, it loses steam and its hold. There’s a spark here, but Brown and Deeter’s film doesn’t truly catch fire for the layperson. For the full, original review, from ShockYa, click here. To view the film’s trailer, click here; for more information on the film, which is also available across VOD platforms, click here to visit its website. (FilmBuff/Paladin, unrated, 90 minutes)