Movie reviews: Cowboys offers a male bonding experience with a difference
Cowboys
★★★★☆
The cowboy represents the American archetype of rugged self-sufficiency, but Anna Kerrigan’s (PG) offers a male bonding experience with a difference.
As the movie opens, Troy (Steve Zahn) and 11-year-old Joe (Sasha Knight) are just another father and son heading off into the Montana mountains for a camping trip, albeit one slightly complicated by the fact that Troy, an ex-convict, is estranged from his wife Sally (Jillian Bell), and takes Joe without her permission. Meanwhile, Joe idolises his father, in part because Troy is a no-nonsense outdoorsman, but also because Troy was the only person to take his son seriously when Joe, born and raised as a girl, realised that he was really a boy. Writer-director Kerrigan delivers a faithful homage to the classic Western – the self-proclaimed ‘outlaws’ are pursued by a police posse headed by Faith (Ann Dowd) – but employs the genre’s conventions to explore the limitations and possibilities of masculinity. To a large extent, this is achieved by inverting audience expectations: Sally is unable to countenance the fact that her daughter is really her son, whereas the bluff, gun-toting Troy, who has a history of violence and manic episodes, is the parent who proves most sensitive to Joe’s lived experience. The always reliable Steve Zahn turns in another sturdy performance as the mercurial Troy, a man whose good instincts are undermined by his faulty chemistry, while Sasha Knight is superb as the physically delicate but emotionally robust Joe, and the pair work well together as the characters work out how best to reveal their private truths to the world. Anna Kerrigan directs with a deft touch, and she gets excellent support from cinematographer John Wakayama Carey, who brilliantly captures the stunning backdrop of Montana’s unspoiled lakes, forests and mountains. (digital release)
★★★★☆
(12A) opens as a conventional psychological horror, as New Yorkers Catherine (Amanda Seyfried) and George (James Norton), along with their young daughter Franny (Ana Sophia Heger), move upstate to Saginaw to live in an old farmhouse with a history of tragedy.
Soon Franny is seeing ghostly figures and being plagued by lights that mysteriously flash as she tries to sleep, but – unusually – the bump-scares play second fiddle to a story that charts the sharp decline of Catherine and George’s marriage. Adapted by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini from Elizabeth Brundage’s novel All Things Cease to Appear, with Springer Berman and Pulcini co-directing, Things Heard & Seen is an ambitious variation on the contemporary horror flick. That ambition is clear from the opening credits, which play out over a sequence of famous paintings, one of which eventually morphs into the film’s ‘reality’: George, who teaches art appreciation, and Catherine, an artist and a restorer of paintings, are both well versed in skilfully manipulating artistic representations to achieve an idealised version of what’s real. That concept is given an added twist by repeated references to the Swedish theologian and mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, which allows the writers to explore ostensibly old-fashioned notions like heaven and hell, although the most intriguing aspect of the story is the way in which, having lured the audience in with its hints of the supernatural, the mood gradually changes to suggest that Catherine and her young daughter have more reason to fear George than they do any ghostly presence. Amanda Seyfried is terrific at the heart of a complex web of relationships that lift this film above the run-of-the-mill horror, and while the latter stages of the story overreach in a bid to justify the conflicting narrative elements, it’s a gripping tale that proves haunting in a most unexpected way. (Netflix)
★★★☆
(12A) opens with Frank (John Hawkes) collecting his son Sean (Logan Lerman) from an Alabama prison and informing him that his mother’s dying wish was that Frank and Sean unite to scatter her ashes on a remote lake in Ireland. Unfortunately, Sean still bears a hefty grudge against Frank, who he believes abandoned him when the teenage Sean needed him most. It’s not the most original set-up you’ve ever seen, but Hawkes and Lerman make for an enjoyably dysfunctional pair, constantly rubbing one another up the wrong way as they bicker all the way to Dublin. The story loses its way a little at this point, when Sean encounters Jewel (Sarah Bolger in scene-stealing form), who claims to be fleeing an abusive boyfriend (as any self-respecting femme fatale would on first sighting a gullible mark). Written by Michael Armbruster and directed by Elfar Adalsteins, End of Sentence is a rather meandering road-trip movie, and only partly because its writer seems to have a rather shaky grasp of Irish geography. (digital release)
