Jacob Sahms

Mohamedou Ould Salahi was held from 2002 to 2016 in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp off of Cuba. As a result of the 9/11 attacks, the United States government launched the War on Terror, with Salahi swept up due to his relationships with known terrorists. Without identified charges, Salahi was held prisoner, as his pro bono lawyer Nancy Hollander sharpened swords against the Army’s prosecutor, Lt. Colonel Stuart Couch. Salahi’s Guantanamo Diary is now the basis for the cinematic depiction of the events, The Mauritanian.

Directed by Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland, State of Play), the film stars Tahar Rahim as Salahi, with Jodie Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch as the two lawyers at the center of his court case. (Rahim and Foster are nominated for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress at the 78th Golden Globes). The film itself moves slowly, replicating how the grinding of the wheels of justice are not swift, or sure, at times. The tension is primarily accented by the way the audience sees Rahim struggling and suffering as Salahi, Prisoner 760, abused, abandoned, condemned, and imprisoned for no concrete reason.

Foster’s Hollander is clear that they are not fighting in court for whether Salahi has done anything wrong, but whether the court can even prove that he did anything worth considering as evidence. Habeus corpus gets thrown around here, as the elder Hollander attempts to show her talented but green assistant (Shailene Woodley) the ropes. What exists in Gitmo is not necessarily clear, but it is clear that the treatment of Salahi is unfair, and inhumane. Rahim’s portrayal of this deep man is captivating, as he clearly inhabits the world and soul of the author of the diary.

The Mauritanian is long, and at times a struggle, as the audience sees the humanity in Salahi and recognizes from real-world news how long he was imprisoned. But the film is not just an indictment of injustice, or a call to world attention to the handling of crime and punishment, it is a testament to the kind of person Salahi was. In one of his hearings, he tells the judge who holds is freedom in his hands that “the word for free and forgiveness is the same one in Arabic.” He says he is free at Gitmo because he’s forgiven those who hurt him, drawing on his Muslim faith to empower him.

While a high percentage of us will never be imprisoned against our will, we all have a choice to make. Will we forgive those who hurt us or be imprisoned by our inability to let go?

The Mauritanian is in theaters now, and On Demand on March 2.

The Last Vermeer tells the story of how a former Dutch Resistance fighter-turned-investigator, Claes Bang’s Joseph Pillar, investigates painter and art dealer Han van Meegeren (Guy Pearce), who he believes aided the Nazis during World War II. In the novel by Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers, the drama for the film is set up as Pillar believes van Meegeren has sold a Vermeer painting to a leader in the Nazi party, Hermann Göring. Pursuing the elusive painting, Pillar hopes to punish Meegeren for his involvement in the war.

The film has two layers to it in terms of art: the exploration of van Meegeren and the evaluation of art by those who appreciate it. A quick Google search will clear up the audience’s expectation of good and bad (another government/law enforcement figure who looks like Ronald Lacey’s Arnold Toht may tip the audience off prematurely), and while it’s the central tie to the film, it’s not the most interesting one. Some will recognize that there’s a parallel between how characters appreciate (or don’t) Vermeer and other art, as a commentary about how people respond to film. (Is critiquing someone else’s work actually relevant or is simply a matter of opinion?)

But there’s a third, overlapping with the first two, about what it means to survive in war, and how people justify, forgive, condemn, or ostracize people based on their expectations for behavior – and their own decision-making. This one is potentially the most interesting story in the mix.

Is Pillar too hard on his wife? Has he wrestled with what he experienced on his own? How do the things that people do to survive in extreme cases get resolved after the conflict is over, after the war fires have burned out? Can certain things be justified in certain times but not others, or are they always damnable? The Last Vermeer uses art to bring that to the service and challenge us to consider it.

The Last Vermeer is available on Digital, Blu-ray and DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, Nicholas Jarecki loved blockbusters. Back to the Future, Top Gun. As he got older, he watched old videotapes of Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, studying the work of Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, and later Christopher Nolan. But Jarecki’s journey to behind the camera has a singular moment that most other filmmakers lack – before he ever realized he’d be a filmmaker.

As a teenager, Jarecki worked with computers, a Commodore 64, learning basic. He says he found it satisfying, to stay up late and learn how to code, when he should have been doing his homework. He connected with the hackers behind the magazine 2600, meeting with them in the NYC Civic Corps building one day when in walked director Iain Softley and his two soon-to-be stars Johnny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, searching for help for Hackers.

“‘We’re making a movie about hacking, can anyone help us?’ they asked,” the director of Arbitrage and the upcoming Crisis shares with a chuckle. “Someone said, ‘Yeah, talk to Nick!’ It was my job to hang out with them, make props, explain things. I taught them how to make a redbox and get free calls on public telephones. I did prep production, down on set.”

“I had wonderful experience as a young man. I said I wanted to become a director. I was fascinated by all the different things that directors did. I wanted authenticity like the directors I appreciated who went to the community and did a lot of research.”

In 2012, Jarecki directed Arbitrage, a thriller about a New York City hedge fund manager (Richard Gere) who manages funds with his daughter (Brit Marling), but whose success masks a loan of over four hundred million dollars. He researched the Wall Street crisis, interviewed hedge fund managers, preparing for something detailed and intelligent, while also entertaining and thrilling.

“That approach to filmmaking, like Michael Mann or Catherine Bigelow, was about living in the details,” he explained. “It makes the films feel bigger than they would otherwise.”

The young filmmaker saw how directors told multiple stories from different viewpoints, like 21 Grams, Traffic, and L.A. Confidential. While that storytelling has shifted mostly to television, it’s the style he loves and the one he chose for Crisis, the thriller coming out this week about the opioid crisis.

Boasting a cast that includes Gary Oldman, Armie Hammer, Evangeline Lilly, Greg Kinnear, Michelle Rodriguez, and Luke Evans, the film follows a university researcher who discovers that the drug his team has been researching has dangerous side effects, an undercover agent seeking to take down a drug smuggling scheme, and a woman desperate for answers about her son’s overdose. It’s complicated and seemingly disparate, but the director wrote the intricate plot using real-world details he discovered.

As he researched the script, Jarecki met with a variety of individuals involved with opioids, but nothing was as personal as his own reflections on friends who were alive one day and gone the next thanks to an overdose. He met with the actors to hear their ideas, concerns, and experiences, and then shot the film on 35 mm, planning for the big screen. In shooting the film, he ended up with a three-hour cut, but instead of discarding elements of the film, he edited them into montages, using Raphael Reed’s score to build the emotion and keep the audience connected throughout. But the thriller has teeth, challenging the audience to consider the opioid crisis and how close to home it really is.

“It’s insidious,” the director said. “The recovery rates are one or two people in ten. I think we’re coming to understand that addicts aren’t the enemy but the victim. We have a failure to supervise in our environment or society. I lost people close to me to the opioid crisis many years ago but didn’t understand, ‘why isn’t my friend here?’”

The pills that his friends became addicted to were created in a lab, and Jarecki knows that there’s great hope for the pain they can take away but there is also “corporate product motive.” He says that twenty to fifty percent of the people who use opioids become addicted, and asks questions about the research and incentives.

Crisis is a gripping, tautly designed thriller, but it leaves the audience asking, as Jarecki had hoped, ‘how did we get here?’

Crisis is in theaters on February 26 and On Demand March 5.

Two films from Paramount share different viewpoints of pursuing dreams, and figuring out how to move forward. Jungleland and Dreamland both tackle the angst of a community or specific character in dealing with their frustrations.

In Jungleland, Jack O’Connell and Charlie Hunnam play brothers Walter “Lion” Kaminski and Stanley Kaminski. Lion has significant fighting skills, as a once-promising boxer, but his brother’s management of his career has ended in poverty and frustration to this point. When the brothers are forced to transport a young woman named Sky (Jessica Barden) across the country, they discover that they haven’t actually hit rock bottom.

In Dreamland, Finn Cole plays a Midwestern farmboy, Eugene Evans, who discovers that the outlaw Allison Wells (Margot Robie) has taken refuge in his little town. He must figure out whether to become her ally or pursue her capture for the bounty. Complicating factors include that Evans’ stepfather George (Travis Kimmel) is a local sheriff’s deputy, with whom Evans already has a contentious relationship.

All of these young people want something different for their lives than what they’re getting. They want something better for their lives, better for their future, better financially, emotionally, and relationally. In each story, the decisions that the young people take leads them into a collision course with other characters, with the system, with their own mortality. As one might expect from an external view, each of these stories finds the people at a crossroads, with violence in the collision.

As a fan of O’Connell, Hunnam, and Robie, they proved to be solid yet again, with strong performances. The films aren’t happy-go-lucky, but they are both entertaining, and thought-provoking.

Honest Thief may be Liam Neeson’s most redemptive role since he played Jean Valjean. It’s not that he hasn’t played the dark angel of vengeance or been a character we rooted for, but here, he’s the kind of guy who looks back over his life and realizes that he’s made several missteps and wants to make it right. Even if life doesn’t want to cooperate.

Neeson returns, as the latest incarnation of the older action hero. Here, he’s the In-and-Out Bandit, Tom Dolan, a bank robber who finds love with Annie Wilkins (Kate Walsh), a storage rental clerk studying to become a counselor. When Dolan decides to go straight, to return the $9 million he’s stolen, two rogue FBI agents (Jai Courtney and Anthony Ramos) kill another agent and steal money from Dolan. Framed for murder, Dolan and Wilkins go on the run, but while this is an elder Neeson film, he’s still playing characters who won’t give up easily.

2008’s Taken was the launching of the new Neeson, and over the last twelve years, Neeson has delivered two sequels, Non-Stop, A Walk Among Tombstones, Run All Night, The Commuter, and Cold Pursuit. Sure, he’s been doing other projects like Ordinary Love and Made in Italy, but he’s still “thriller material” as a sixty-eight-year-old. Maybe it’s the gravelly voice, the way he walks, or simply what we’ve come to understand about him. He still does enough to chew up the scenes he’s in, but there’s a bit of distraction here when it comes to the tone of The Good Thief.

Part of it is the lack of real chemistry between Courtney and Ramos; some of it is that the FBI agent in charge of the murder is Agent Sean Meyers (Jeffrey Donovan) doesn’t seem to know what tone he’s playing. The Burn Notice alum, who IS from Massachusetts, hams up a Boston accent that doesn’t always seem in play, while carting around a dog that he seems to have acquired from Meyers’ ex-wife. The tone goes from Courtney’s simmering corruption to Donovan’s wounded over-the-top fed to Neeson’s, well, Neeson.

While the story isn’t particularly new, and it follows the earmarks of the average thriller, it’s still got Neeson, and in a 2020 pandemic year where things aren’t as they should be, that’s enough.

Can a corrupted person, born out of woundedness and frustration, rise above his situation to actually be the best person he could be? There’s no way I’d count out a Neeson lead – he’s already proven over and over again to have the resilience of a champ.

Love and Monsters might sound over-the-top, but it’s one of the most entertaining films of the year. It doesn’t care if you’re bogged down by a global pandemic, it wants you to know you could have it worse — you could be pursued by giant ridiculously-morphed creatures in hopes of finding your one true love. 

You’ve heard some of this before: an asteroid aimed at Earth draws worldwide attention, and Earth responds with less-than-high standard results. Chemicals rained down all over the world, and ninety-five percent of the population was killed off by mutated bugs and other mutated live forms. In one of the surviving colonies, Joel (Dylan O’Brien, Maze Runner, Teen Wolf) provides little additional value in the underground bunker in Fairfield, CA, because he often freezes up when he’s scared, so he’s regularly left behind when the bunker’s inhabitants venture out for supplies. But he still pines for his pre-apocalypse girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick, Iron Fist, Game of Thrones, Underwater) to whom he writes letters he can’t send, until the day he decides to leave the colony to reconnect with her.

Against all advice, good sense, and incredible odds, Joel sets out across the wilds between his colony and Aimee.  “Run fast, and try to hide. Don’t fight,” the group recommends, when Joel proves intent on leaving with his map, a crossbow, and adolescent optimism… even though he doesn’t know what direction to go in. O’Brien’s Joel is earnest and amusing, and he plays well with the dog he nicknames ‘Boy,’ against the hardened likes of The Walking Dead’s Michael Rooker, another survivialist named Clyde, who travels with the child Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt). Rooker provides some hilarious wisdom (and criticism) in this stage of Joel’s journey, a sort of coming-of-age, survival, romance mash-up, with a dash of monsters thrown in for good measure.

The film spectacularly integrates the actors and the CGI world (and monsters) around them, providing a Tim Burton/Lewis Carroll-like world for Joel to explore. There might be jump scares but this is more energetic and funny, like one of my favorites, The Princess Bride, or my kids’ favorite, The Last Kids on Earth. Certainly, we won’t interact with crazy enlarged bugs, but we all need to venture out of ‘safe’ to see what’s possible, and the journey toward love is certainly one we all need if we’re going to figure out who we are. We’ll suffer loss and grief along the way, but living in a bubble isn’t going to last as a longterm choice – even if 2020’s pandemic makes some of us think it will. 

Special features here include some deleted scenes, a look at how director Michael Matthews’ created his world, and what the cast has to say in “Bottom of the Food Chain.”

In the sophomore feature of director Jim Cummings (Thunder Road), a series of vicious murders rocks a small ski town isolated from civilization. Cummings, who directs, wrote, and stars in the film about Officer John Marshall’s crumbling life, negatively impacted by the murders, his sheriff father’s poor health, his divorce, his teenage daughter, and more. Watching Cummings interact with Robert Forster’s Sheriff Hadley, the interpersonal dimensions of the film create an organic sense of grounding that lift the film above the horror niche (or even the comedic horror niche) into which the film might be marginalized.

The well-crafted plot, the blend of funny and smart and thrilling, the nifty camera work that keeps the audience on edge about what things look like and what they actually are, between the grounded human-based decisions and the supernatural… all of this is incredibly well done. From a craft perspective, The Wolf of Snow Hollow must be considered one of the best films of the year because, like it or love it, the film is masterfully connected. (I imagine that multiple viewings would only reveal an even deeper level of spectacular interconnectedness.) But Cummings’ focus on relationships stand out afterward.

What does it mean for us to navigate all of our levels of responsibility, even under incredible stress? For Snow Hollow, it’s the brutal murders, while for most of us, it’s COVID-19. And yet, we still have to deal with the ‘normal’ stressors like competition for raises and promotions at work, broken relationships that need mended (or sometimes cut out of our lives), financial issues and mental breakdowns and loneliness and identity and … The film almost comes across as a parable, a mirror to our lives that demands us to consider what we do (and are doing) in the midst of everything else.

Have I mentioned it’s brilliant?

On the Blu-ray, special features include “The Story and the Genre,” “The Impetus,” “Working with Jim Cummings,” and “The Design of the Werewolf.”

Twenty-two years ago, Wesley Snipes was on top of the world. The first successful Marvel film – sure, there was Howard the Duck and a few direct-to-video films – Blade provided the world with a black hero, and the first in a line of reasonably successful films (c’mon, they’ve taken the world by storm). Based on one of Marv Wolfman’s (New Teen Titans, Crisis on Infinite Earths), the film was written by David S. Goyer (Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, Man of Steel) and directed by special effects expert and director of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Stephen Norrington.

Blade (Snipes) is a vampire who isn’t hampered by vampire weaknesses, who has teamed with older vampire hunter Abraham (Kris Kristofferson) and hematologist Dr. Karen Jenson (N’Bushe Wright). They are fighting vampires, but their real enemy is Deacon Frost (Stephen Dorff), who doesn’t just want to drink human blood to survive – he wants to dominate the human race.

The action is fast and furious, but there are some clever ideas here, given that Blade is both human and vampire. He’s an insider/outsider at the same time. His willingness to fight, to put himself at risk, to be hated by both humans and vampires alike, that’s heroic, even if the film is billed as a horror/hero film. Blade is one of the things that goes bump in the night – and he’s not afraid of the other things bumping around out in the shadows.

Even if vampires aren’t your thing, Blade is remarkable for the way that it launched the Marvel machine as we know it. Films about Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Black Widow, The Hulk, and others are all directly tied to the success that Snipes’ antihero thrived. Even if the reviews weren’t incredible, the popular response was financially worthwhile for Marvel, and led to all of the other films. While Iron Man is commonly understood to be the “first,” ironically starting outside of the mainstream characters, it was actually someone even more on the periphery … even one in the shadows … who started it all.

Special features on the 4K HD, which makes the film look significantly slicker than you’d expect from a twenty-two-year-old movie, include audio commentary by the notables, plus “La Magra,” “Designing Blade,” “The Origins of Blade: A Look at Dark Comics.”

J.R.R. Tolkien never imagined that his work would ever be made into moving pictures and played in spectacular visual faction thanks to the extraordinary vision of director Peter Jackson. But from 2001 (The Fellowship of the Ring) to 2014 (The Battle of the Five Armies), the director delivered a strong take on the goings-on of Middle Earth. Now, Warner Bros. has delivered all of the films that make up the storyline in two three-film collections. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy includes The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; The Hobbit Trilogy includes The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in stunning 4K HD (and digital). The films themselves are included on 4K HD discs in both their theatrical and extended versions, and digitally.

While the LOTR trilogy was created for theaters first, for the unaware, The Hobbit actually provides the earliest Middle Earth stories, with hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) adventuring with wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and a team of dwarves under the leadership of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage), battling the dragon Smaug. Then, in LOTR, we meet Frodo (Elijah Wood), Bilbo’s nephew, who must travel with Gandalf and others to destroy the one ring to rule them all. He’s joined by fellow hobbit Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin), the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) and the human warrior Aragorn (Vigo Mortensen), among others over the course of the three films.

I’ve written before about the Hobbit series here, The Desolation of Smaug and The Battle of the Five Armies, but the reality is that I’ve always had a softer spot for the later installments (in the books, earlier in the films). When Gandalf tells the fiery demon that it shall not pass, Sam tells Frodo he’d carry him up Mount Mordor, when Aragorn implores the ghost army to fight, when the soldiers of different races join together for one final battle… I get goosebumps. I feel what the characters feel, and I feel something more. Quite frankly, the way that these allegories speak to Christian images that Tolkien was familiar with, they provide encouragement for the way I believe we’re called to live our lives.

We need to be as wise as Gandalf.

We need to be as loyal as Sam.

We need to experience renovation and redemption like Aragorn.

We need to be as unified as the warriors called to fight.

Watching the 4K HD version, it’s like experiencing the stories once again in the way I saw them in the theater. These are elements brought more clearly, with better articulation than we have ever seen at home before. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, they make a great gift for fans of the stories, or those who we want to introduce to these legendary stories.