Midnight Special Movie Review

The enticement of big studio backing, larger budgets, and wider distribution must be great to successful indie filmmakers. Jeff Nichols had a string of well-received films that did well on the festival circuit and then got a lot more money for his fourth feature, Midnight Special. Unlike what often happens with directors who display talent on the small scale, Nichols didn’t move on to the latest superhero movie or some other blockbuster. Instead he took the money to make his own story and make it without the limitations he surely faced in the past due to budget constraints.

Mud Movie Review

Through its association with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone, the Mississippi River evokes something distinctly American, although even Twain was seizing upon the sense of adventure wrought by explorers from Lewis and Clark onward who ventured west in search of the country’s Manifest Destiny. The River is a dividing line between the east with its magnificent cities, institutions of higher learning, tamed land, and civilization, and the new frontier, lawlessness, and new beginnings of the east. More than that, the Mississippi is a mighty river, flowing hard and fast, washing away the junk people don’t want or try to hid, and occasionally carrying people southward, like Huck Finn and Jim, to escape.

Take Shelter Movie Review: Truly Mad, Deeply

The gathering storm.

Madness, true madness, is a terrible thing. I’m talking about clinical disorders, the kind that most people know little about, even if they talk a great deal about them. Even scientists would probably admit they’re only now scratching the surface of psychological disorders, their causes and their treatments. As laypeople we tend to think of madness as the prototypical depictions we see in movies or even occasionally in real life on the street. We see a man muttering to himself in a park, or maybe he’s even shouting at no one, or everyone, and we point to him and say, “That guy’s crazy.” Movies have given us the lunatic cast of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the depraved insanity of sociopathic killers in countless thrillers. But the truth is that very few people are afflicted the way pop culture would have us believe, and many more suffer quietly through conditions that might be benign to outsiders or as debilitating and difficult to witness as schizophrenia.

Michael Shannon shot to mid-level stardom with an Oscar nomination for playing the emotionally disturbed neighbor in Revolutionary Road, a performance that, while very good, was still based on a conventional approach to mental illness. Now take his latest movie, Take Shelter, which is a character study painting a portrait of a man named Curtis who slowly unravels before his family and friends. Curtis is a kind of blue collar everyman. He lives in Ohio, works for a mining company, has a lovely wife and dutifully learns sign language to communicate with his deaf daughter. But something is not quite right in his world, signaled by the first image in the film of Curtis staring toward distant gathering clouds and then hanging around while the rain soaks him.