Jacob Sahms

During World War II, FDR recognizes that the Allies need help, so the Justice Society of America is assembled: Black Canary, Hawkman, Hourman, Flash, and Wonder Woman, along with the military’s Colonel Steve Trevor. Voiced by the likes of Stana Katic and Matt Bomer, the film has a complex, developed script of a man between two worlds.

Flash from the present day, out for a date with his would-be wife Iris West, finds himself channeling the Speed Force when Brainiac fires a Kryptonite bullet at Superman. Led by Dr. Fate, Flash ends up back in World War II, dealing with time paradoxes as he and the old Flash occupy the same time. The JSA needs the future/present Flash to help them, and in the process, he sees the beauty of teamwork which he’ll end up bringing back to the present.

Together, the older heroes and the new Flash have some pretty grand adventures, and experience a few twists that I’ll leave unrevealed here. While the basis exists in the characters created by Gardner Fox (1941), the script from Meghan Fitzmartin and Jeremy Adams proves to have the panache of a full-length theatrical film.

The 4K HD combo pack includes “Adventures in Storytelling: Justice Society: World War II,” a couple of cartoons from the DC Vault, a look at the next feature (“Batman: The Long Halloween Part I”), and an animated short based on Jack Kirby’s Kamandi, “The Last Boy on Earth.”

The film is available now digitally, and on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Combo Pack and Blu-ray on May 11, 2021.

When we meet Hutch Mansell, he’s in a police station, beat up and under suspicion. This couldn’t be more surprising because Mansell is an everyday guy. He shows up for work, shows up for his family, runs through his routine everyday, like clockwork. But when two hapless thieves break into his home one night, he does nothing – actually, he prevents his teenage son from even doing something, and experiences the scorn of his family for not “being a man.” Suddenly, he’s faced with a midlife crisis of epic proportions. Will he enact justice or will he slink back into the everyday?

Bob Odenkirk (Better Call Saul) plays Mansell as normally as possible initially, at least as well as the actor can after going through years of training in various fighting skills! But when Mansell erupts – and the truth of his character and personality comes out, the film explodes into a funny, violent, impassioned exploration of identity, and midlife crises, in a close-up, almost Coen Brothers sort of way. To be fair, this is what would happen if John Wick hadn’t been pushed until he was twenty years older, or if they’d stolen Bryan Mills’ daughter’s kitty cat bracelet instead of his daughter herself.

Mansell will run afoul of Russian mob boss Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov), accidentally of course. Their collision will bring the lives of Mansell’s father (Christopher Lloyd) and family (Connie Nielsen plays his wife) into the danger zone of violence. Still, this isn’t as much about anyone else — this is about the crisis of Mansell.

I don’t have a particular set of (those kind of) skills, or harbor a secret past, or anything like that. But I did find myself appreciating the script that Derek Kolstad (who wrote the screenplays for the John Wick franchise) puts into the hands of director Ilya Naishuller’s hands. It’s violent with the immediately available tools Mansell finds, with quick quips between characters, but it’s really a study in what it means to be yourself – and to grow older.

Mansell has ‘settled’ for something he thought would make him happy (it didn’t), because he’s tried to be who he thought everyone else wanted him to be (they weren’t happy with it anyway). He has given up the thing he is best at to play a part in a role he wasn’t meant for. He has justified this, and ultimately squelched the talents he had, hiding in plain sight. He has become a nobody by denying the somebody he really is.

How often is this true in our lives? How often do we fail to use our real gifts because we think we’re supposed to be something we’re not, and hide behind the expectations of other people? How often do we deny the God image in us by masking our real selves, afraid that we won’t be accepted for who we really are? How often do we confuse what we’re really meant to do and ignore our call?

I’m not advocating for Hutch Mansell-like chrysalis breaking, but it’s worth considering. You were created individually, uniquely, in the image of Almighty God.

You are SOMEBODY.

In Cosmic Sin, Bruce Willis and Frank Grillo know that bad news is headed toward humanity so they head to space to save the world. It’s not Armageddon; it’s more like if Battlestar Galactica, Pacific Rim, and a zombie movie of your choice got mixed up in a bowl and then spilled over together.

Written and directed by Edward Drake, the film finds humanity under threat from an external alien race. While there are rules of engagement and expected protocols, General Ryle (Grillo) can’t face the race that has already attacked the more peripheral bases of the human race, so he hauls General James Ford (Willis) out of retirement to help him out. They’ll have to put aside the grudge they have over a bomb that Ford dropped, believing it necessary to save the human race.

Together, the two of them join up with a few other soldiers, and go to fight it out with some humanoids, bloodthirsty and dangerous. But the aliens prove to be even more devious because as they attack, they take over the humans they’ve conquered, setting the heroes up for battles with their possessed loved ones.

This one is pretty straightforward, but there is some pseudo-political commentary about the difference between the soldiers who make decisions in a moment and the politicians who prance for the camera and hide when things don’t go smoothly. Is it appropriate for some situations? Absolutely. But the overall mode here is a B-level actioner with punching, kicking, and lots of laser-fired shots.

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.