August 31, 2020
Henry Page (Austin Abrams) was a high school senior in a sleepy suburban community who aspired to be the editor-in-chief of their school paper. However, his adviser unexpectedly informed him that he was going to share the editorial chores with a new girl who just transferred into their school. She was Grace Town (Lili Reinhart), who walked to her house even if she had a limp and used a cane. She was aloof and unsociable, preferring to immerse herself in Neruda's poetry.
Smitten with her beauty and mystery, Henry purposely missed his bus to walk Grace home. She would then allow Henry to drive her car to his house since she was averse to driving a car herself. Steadily with this routine, Grace's walls slowly broke down and she began to share more of her private life with Henry. However, even as they became more intimate, Henry realized that Grace was still holding back a major secret from him.
This was another young adult romance brimming with teenage angst that we have seen many times. The title refers to the chemicals which get activated in the euphoria of love. The damaged character of Grace was suffering from the physical and emotional effects of a terrible past trauma, and her new friend Henry was trying his naive best to help her. To make the metaphor more obvious (and cheesier), Henry just so happened to be into Kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing broken vases with gold.
This film worked mainly because of the chemistry between the two leads actors which make their romance believable despite some weird details, especially that part about wading in a koi pond in an abandoned building. Otherwise, it was just one of several similar-themed brooding coming-of-age teen romances, nothing really new anymore. 6/10.
This story happened one night sometime in the late 1950s, in the remote town of Cayuga, New Mexico. There was a big basketball game going on at the school gym that night, and almost everybody in town was there watching it. However, 16 year-old switchboard operator Fay Crocker (Sierra McCormick), and her disc jockey friend Everett Sloane (Jake Horowitz) were both working at their respective panels that night.
Fay heard a strange sound that originated from her radio as she was listening to Everett's music show. Everett asked members of his audience to call in if they knew anything about the mysterious sound. Those who called about the sound included Billy, a military man picked up to do a highly classified clean-up mission in the desert, and Mrs. Mabel Blanche (Gail Cronauer), an old eccentric woman who lost her son in strange circumstances.
This compact 89-minute film looked very good with meticulous 1950s era production design and costumes. The crisp filtered cinematography gave a sense of old town nostalgia, as if this was a classic television program -- clearly the effect it was going for based on the bookend scenes. Debuting director Andrew Patterson employed some very long takes in certain scenes, like Fay's frantic duty at the telephone switchboard or that continuous scene where the camera went across town and through the basketball game from Fay to Everett.
Some viewers may be turned off by all the meandering conversations in practically the whole first hour and fifteen minutes of the film when there was nothing actually happening yet. But the impressive style of Patterson with the camera and suspense building, as well as McCormick's electric lead performance, kept me hanging on to the jaw-dropping end. 7/10.
In the desolate fishing town of Easter Cove in Maine, the sisters Priscilla (Sophie Lowe) and Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) are mourning the death of their mother. The late Mary Margaret Connolly was good friends with her fellow town matriarchs, Susie Gallagher (June Squibb), Doreen Burke (Marceline Hugot) and Gail Maguire (Annette O'Toole). But unlike the others, she was still friends with Enid Norma Devlin (Margo Martindale), the powerful woman who owned the local brothel.
The night of her funeral, an emotional Mary Beth went drinking at a bar where encountered a shady character named Gorski (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). When the guy started getting rough on her, Mary Beth panicked and killed her attacker with a harpoon. Instead of reporting the incident to the police, she told Priscilla who then decided to help her sister stuff the corpse in box and throw it into the sea. Priscilla then discovered that she left an incriminating clue at the crime scene.
Like "Fargo" and "Twin Peaks," this film captured the quirky idiosyncrasy of small American rural town, which was immediately apparent. From the very first scene, and for several interludes within, grizzly fishermen sing mournful songs about the sea, which set the moody tone for the whole film. The cinematography of the restless sea, the cold rain and the secretive townspeople was breathtaking in its melancholy. The unusual acting were all in sync with this cold remote atmosphere, particularly those of veterans Martindale and Squibb.
The build-up of claustrophobic tension and suspense by writer-directors Bridget Savage Cole and Danielle Krudy was very effective. However when it came to the abrupt ending, it felt oddly incomplete, like it was a cliffhanger of sorts. It was as if the whole 90 minute movie we watched was just the pilot episode of a mini-series, instead of a complete film. 7/10.
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