Blue Film (c) Strand Releasing
Review: Blue Film
In Cinemas
Ever since Elliot Tuttle’s Blue Film opened at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, it has carried an aura of naughty gay sexual content, sharing the same trajectory as the BDSM-themed “Pillion” during the same time frame. Pillion opened earlier this year and got decent reviews—now it’s time to see if Blue Film will get a similar reception or better. Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore, from Boots) is an L.A. sex worker who, at the start of the film, is livestreaming (a la OnlyFans) to his many followers, receiving their adulation while verbally degrading them for it. He boasts that he is seeing one of them tonight for a date for a crazy amount of money. That date/hookup turns out to be with Hank (Reed Birney, of The Humans), an older man who insists on keeping a ski mask on. But as the evening proceeds, the two wear each other’s defenses down, and when the masks are (literally and metaphorically) finally taken off, they soon realize that both are using fake names and they actually know each other from a long-ago chapter in their lives. While the promised blueness of sex and sexual acts are indeed peppered throughout the movie, I was more disturbed by the excessive amount of a casual vaping (which, unlike gay sex, is totally unhealthy). If you’ve seen any episode of Heated Rivalry, you’ve seen more than what’s shown here. But what’s dangerous is the circumstances that the two men find themselves in, making the sex a bit more taboo or psychologically fraught. That the story becomes an understanding (maybe even love) between the two men is thanks to the two actors, the only people in the film. Moore is very charismatic once the rent boy persona is done away with (although there is a moment of Aaron metaphorically shedding his past that is unnecessarily on-the-nose) as his swagger turns to empathy. Birney has the harder role as Hank is (whether self-admitted or not) a sexual predator whose shame has led him to this odd redemption arc; the veteran stage actor is able to find shades of grace in this broken man. Blue Film is a more modest film than Pillion, but its sexual nature, when it arrives, is not sugar-coated for straight audience members, and rather par-for-the-course for gay ones. Ultimately, it is a nicely told character study that will be remembered more than just the physical acts depicted.
The Sheep Detectives (c) Amazon MGM Studios
Review: The Sheep Detectives
In Cinemas
The biggest surprise about The Sheep Detectives is how hard director Kyle Balda and screenwriter Craig Mazin (taking a break from the bleak The Last of Us) invested in the whole murder mystery element of essentially a children’s film about talking sheep. The talented, heavily stacked voice cast of the sheep is to be expected, but the actual human cast has an impressive roster of Oscar nominees, an Oscar winner and a Red, White and Royal Blue Prince. The story revolves around the death of sheep farmer George (Hugh Jackman), who had a better bond with his four-legged wards than the actual humans in his small hamlet UK town. The investigation is being handled on two fronts: by the hapless town constable, Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun), with an assist from a visiting reporter, Elliot (Nicholas Galitzine), looking for a big story; and by head sheep Lily (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), who has learned a lot from the mystery novels George used to read to his flock. A lot of silliness happens on the farm (not unlike the shenanigans in Babe), but the actual murder investigation feels like a decent take on a Benoit Baaaa, A (shearing) Knives Out Mystery. After George’s lawyer Lydia (Emma Thompson) announced that George has revised his will a few days before his death, all the new beneficiaries are now suspects, including a rival farmer Caleb (Tosin Cole); Beth (Hong Chau), an innkeeper with an unrequited love for George; and surprisingly, George’s long-estranged daughter, Rebecca (Molly Gordon). Based on a German novel, Three Bags Full from 2005, there is some odd sheep lore, including the ability to forget something just by willing it out of the minds (very Eternal Sunshine) and the curse of the winter lamb (I’ll let it be a surprise, but not all sheep are created equal). Kids will find the talking sheep of it all fun, but may lose interest in the actual investigation, while their parents (or fans of the cozy murder mysteries) will be surprised by how the intricate the plot is. By the time of the big reveal, and we finally get the big moment of the loose-cannon twin rams Ronnie and Reggie (Brett Goldstein voicing both in his Ted Lasso Roy Kent feistiness), The Sheep Detectives has won the audience over, and makes us hope producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have a sequel in the works.
The Wizard of the Kremlin (c) Vertical Entertainment
Film: The Wizard of the Kremlin
In Cinemas on May 15
In 2024, playwright Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon) brought his West End play Patriots to Broadway and told the story of a Russian oligarch named Boris Berezovsky whose championing of Vladimir Putin in the final years of the Yeltsin regime put the shy FSS agent into the Kremlin, and then he got pushed out. It was a dry piece of the kind of political history play that Stoppard excels at, but hardly anyone else has. Working off the same basic historical Russian milestones, a new film, The Wizard of the Kremlin, focuses on a fictional character named Baranov (Paul Dano), who did a lot of Putin’s bidding while not getting on his bad side, unlike the greedier Boris (Will Keen, who coincidentally played Putin in Patriots). Despite the promise of the title, director and co-writer Olivier Assayas’ film has no real magic in its storytelling as it takes more than a quarter century of Russian history and crams it into an exhaustive 136-minute runtime. The film is in English, using the actors’ natural accents, with only a smattering of accented Russian, which only feels odd in the case of Putin, as played by Jude Law in his British accent, trying very hard to clamp down his natural charm, even with an unfortunate haircut. The main problem is that the script wants to keep the conceit that we are watching the Putin story through the lens of a man who was in the room where it happened. So, we also get portentous narration and the occasional flash forward to the present, where Baranov is telling his story to an American journalist (an underused Jeffrey Wright). There is also a slight hint of a love story between Baranov and the artist Ksenia (Alicia Vikander), whose paths cross throughout the twenty-year span. Dano is fine as the lead, but his character is pretty much a personality vacuum. I also find the very last moment of the film to be, yes, poetically justified, but totally unsatisfying as the images we are left with when the credits roll. French director Assayas, mostly known for his films with Kristen Stewart (Personal Shopper and The Cloud of Sils Maria), should have considered making The Wizard of the Kremlin, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last fall, into a miniseries like his well-regarded Carlos, which told the real-life story of a Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. As it is, this Putin origin story feels both rushed and interminable.
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