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Review: The King’s Man

The King's Man (2021)

review | The King’s Man

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This roots-of-the-Kingsman story is less breezy than the other entries in the series but is still a solid actioner 

by Roger Kanno
February 28, 2022

The King’s Man brings us the origin story of the Kingsman film franchise, whose previous films starred Taron Egerton and Colin Firth as operatives in a fictional British secret service agency. This prequel stars Ralph Fiennes as Duke Orlando Oxford, a British spy at the turn of the century who establishes the Kingsman organization around the time of World War I. Unlike the first two films, which take place during modern times, The King’s Man eschews much of the breezy comedic feel and use of pop music to augment the fast-paced action. There are still comedic elements but this latest installment is more serious in tone. And as it tries to find its own identity, I couldn’t help but feel it would benefit by more fully committing to its darker narrative and leave behind the light-hearted elements of its predecessors. (Think James Mangold’s Logan and what it did for the X-Men franchise.) 

Still, Fiennes does an admirable job as the upper-crust gentleman who secretly protects England and the world from the evil plans of a group known as the Flock led by the Shepherd, even though his understated and sophisticated demeanor sometimes seem a bit out of place amongst all the action. He is joined by accomplished actors such as Djimon Hounsou and Daniel Brühl, but it is Gemma Arterton who shines as the strong-willed and intelligent former member of Orlando’s household staff whom he has recruited into his spy ring. She plays her character with both style and humor while always maintaining proper British restraint. As with the previous films, The King’s Man is written and directed by Matthew Vaughn who has worked on X-Men prequels as well as Layer Cake, Stardust, and Kick Ass, so there is definitely no lack of style or flair in the film’s production.

The King’s Man began streaming on HBO Max and Hulu and made available for purchase or rent from other services on February 18. I accessed it through Google Play, which allowed me to view a 4K version with a 5.1-channel Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack. The picture quality was very good even though it lacked HDR when streamed in this. During a particularly challenging, fast-paced fight sequence, the highly choreographed, ballet-like action showed little artifacting. Even as the villainous Rasputin leaps and pirouettes repeatedly in rapid succession, I could still make out the fine details in his long hair and flowing beard.

When we see the mountain top hideout of the Shepherd, the sun-bathed, snow-covered precipices look stunning, with steely blue and grey rocks contrasted by sparkling white frost and ice. As the scene moves inside the hideout, the picture could have benefitted from HDR enhancement as it loses some sharpness and detail. There was a lack of gradation in shadows as the edges of dark articles of clothing blended together into singular black objects, appearing smooth as they lacked texture on their surfaces. Other than the lack of some highlights in these darker scenes, the overall picture quality was quite satisfying.

The soundtrack is very active, with excellent use of Matthew Margeson’s music score. Throughout action scenes, the orchestral music is used to effectively to fill the soundstage, while sound effects and dialogue remain clearly audible. During an extended battlefield sequence, the constrained but ominous sounds of hand-to-hand combat combined with discordant, driving rhythms, then transitioned to an all-out aural onslaught. As the music surged with strings, horn and choir, mortar shells and automatic gunfire rang out all around as the voices of German and English soldiers were easily discernible amidst the din, which placed me palpably amidst the intense action. 

This third installment of the Kingsman is a bit of departure from the previous two but action fans will likely be drawn to the slickly made prequel. And for those yearning for the return of Eggsy (Egerton) and Harry Hart (Firth), they’re slated to be back in 2023 with the release of Kingsman: The Blue Blood.

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | The image quality is very good, even though it lacks HDR when streamed on Google Play. Particularly challenging action scenes showed little artifacting.

SOUND | The 5.1 Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack is very active. Throughout action scenes, the orchestral music is used to effectively to fill the soundstage while sound effects and dialogue remain clearly audible.

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Review: CODA

CODA (2021)

review | CODA

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With many of its characters deaf, you’d expect this film to veer into inspiration porn, but it turns out to be both feel-good & socially aware at the same time

by Dennis Burger
February 23, 2022

Sian Heder’s CODA is a tricky film to write about insofar as anything I could say to define it for you will, I fear, give you exactly the wrong impression, and the more I prattle, the more wrong your impression will be. So I’m inclined to keep this brief in the interest of doing as little harm as possible, but there’s just so much I want to dig into. 

CODA is an acronym for Children of Deaf Adults, and in this case that label applies to Ruby—played to perfection by Emilia Jones—who is the only hearing member of her immediate family. She’s also a gifted singer, to the surprise of everyone including herself, and although the trailer would lead you to believe that the movie’s major source of conflict is her family’s failure to understand her desire to join the school choir and even audition for a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, that’s far from the whole story. 

A far bigger problem—and one largely glossed over by the film’s marketing—is that Ruby and her family are working poor, and their attempts to scrape together a meager living are hampered by everything from climate change to bureaucracy to neoliberal regulatory forces. CODA is, in short, one of the most subtle and compelling anti-capitalist films in ages but I wouldn’t be surprised if many viewers miss that fact, as well as the irony of its being distributed entirely by Apple. 

That it manages to explore this territory without being overtly political is a neat trick. But by far CODA‘s niftiest sleight-of-hand is that it deals with issues of disability without devolving into inspiration porn of the sort the trailer sells it as. Deafness is certainly a characteristic of three of its four main characters but it’s not a defining one. 

The film is irreverent without going for cheap shocks, adorable without being cloying, sentimental without being schmaltzy, awkward without being affected, and fits firmly into the tradition of feel-good cinema without being overly manipulative emotionally. My only criticism is that it plays it safe in terms of broader story structure. Let’s call it what it is—the Hero’s Journey. And as a result, by the end of the first act you’ll probably have an accurate sense of how it ends. 

But given how specific its scenario is—lower-class fishing family, three-quarters of whom are deaf, fight a constant battle to find balance between the desires of the individual and the needs of the collective—the tried-and-true narrative template serves mostly to add a much-needed dose of universal relatability. And in that sense, it very much succeeds. I’d be shocked if you can’t find some common ground with these characters, no matter your station. 

CODA is a remake of a French film called La Famille Bélier, which I’ll admit I wasn’t aware existed until I saw it listed in the closing credits. That does make some sense of a few things—notably the fact that American filmmakers rarely know what to do with class struggles, if they even bother to grapple with them. Whether La Famille Bélier is a better film, I can’t say. But CODA stands on its own as a very good one. 

The Apple TV+ presentation is a lovely thing to behold. Shot on location in Gloucester, Massachusetts, it certainly looks like no soundstages were employed. The Rossi family cottage has the sort of grit and clutter that reads as authentic whether it is or not, and it gives the entire picture a ton of texture and a warm cast overall. 

Even before we get our first peek at the home, though, the image is packed with the sort of chaos that makes me somewhat nervous when viewing at streaming bitrates. That never ends up being a problem, though—a least not when watched on Roku Ultra. The opening shot is of a rickety trawler bouncing around on choppy seas, with a flat sky above that’s broken up only by a few clouds on the horizon. 

This is stress-test material for any video codec, even one as good as HEVC. But amidst the chaos of the waves and the nearly imperceptible gradations of the sky, I never saw any of the misplaced textures or banding you’d have to keep an eye out for even on UHD Blu-ray. The only perceptible flaws in the image are a couple instances of unnecessary edge-enhancement you might not even spot depending on when you blink. 

While the picture doesn’t live or die based on razor sharpness, you can definitely see the benefits of the 6K shooting resolution and the 4K DI. Apple presents the film in Dolby Vision, and while you won’t notice many scenes with high overall brightness, the pinpoint bursts of specular intensity—especially on the seas—give the image a nice amount of pop. There’s also a lot of breathing room at the lower end of the value scale, which really helps with dimly lit interiors.

Apple delivers the film with a Dolby Atmos mix (AC-4, if your hardware supports that codec; Dolby Digital+, if not) that serves the material well. There’s one scene early on where the overhead effects were slightly gimmicky for about two or three seconds, but other than that it’s a nicely immersive mix that seems more concerned with accurately portraying interior and exterior spaces than with stressing your amps or subs. The school music room in which so much of Ruby’s story unfolds, for example, has its own sonic fingerprint, with exactly the sort of modes and other resonances you would expect of such a space, along with the consequent vocal colorations. The mix avoids the mistake of switching over to dry studio vocals during music numbers, and as such it all just sounds that much more authentic. 

In the end, it’s little authenticities of that sort that make CODA such an enjoyable film, despite the predictability of its larger structure. Yes, from a bird’s-eye view you’ll know how this one ends as soon as you settle into it, but there are oodles of little moment-to-moment surprises that make it a journey very much worth taking anyway. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The Dolby Vision presentation is lovely to behold, with pinpoint bursts of specular intensity giving the image a nice amount of pop. A lot of breathing room at the lower end of the value scale really helps with dimly lit interiors.

SOUND | A nicely immersive Atmos mix that’s more concerned with accurately portraying interior & exterior spaces than it is with stressing your amps or subs

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Review: Belfast

Belfast (2021)

review | Belfast

This Best Picture nominee uses black & white to evoke the late ’60s but features a surprisingly active—and modern—Atmos mix

by Ryan Rutherford
February 23, 2022

Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast (recipient of seven Oscar nominations) tells a semi-autobiographical tale of growing up in the turbulent Belfast of the late ‘60s. At its core it’s about a small community of people looking after one another and of one family’s struggle over whether to stay amid the violence around them or leave their home and extended family behind. 

Branagh’s had an up-and-down filmography from the start (I have a soft spot for Dead Again), but this is clearly among his strongest films. He garners fantastic performances from novices and veterans alike (the film has earned nominations for vets Judy Dench and Ciaran Hinds), yet centers the movie on the performance of young Jude Hill. It’s through his eyes that we see the neighborhood and the talks with family members and friends but also the several bursts of violence that propel the family into its dilemma. 

Belfast deserves the Oscar nods it’s received but I was surprised it wasn’t nominated for cinematography. The film is artfully shot in black & white by Branagh’s frequent collaborator Haris Zambarloukos, with unique splashes of color thrown in to remind the characters that there’s life beyond all the turmoil. Compared to the many weak movies of the past couple of years, this is clearly a quality effort by someone with a personal investment in seeing it made with care and an authentic eye.

Shot digitally, the 1.85:1 aspect-ratio picture is beautiful to behold. The movie opens with modern shots of Belfast awash in color and then goes to black & white as it transitions to 1969. Black levels are deep and unlike most similar period movies. The images have an artful gleam, with no artificial grain introduced to fake traditional film, and have a smooth look throughout, with extraordinary detail at all levels, from the sharpness of fabrics to the richness of textures.  

When the characters go to see a movie, we’re shown what they’re watching in vivid color, and it’s an interesting juxtaposition (if not a bit showy). The HDR10 image displays strong contrast, with almost every frame transitioning from deep black to bright highlights of sunlight beaming through windows. Torches and other lighting effects pop off the screen and blacks are rich with fantastic delineation and shadow detail. This is a top-level video presentation, and the encode enhances the black & white in the way HDR has always promised.   

Also nominated for Sound, Belfast doesn’t disappoint here, either. This film doesn’t have strong dynamics or the kind of bass that will challenge a system, but it does have such a wonderfully natural and room-filling Dolby Atmos track that it’s shocking at times. You wouldn’t expect this type of movie to have an active object-based surround track, but the filmmakers made it a priority to immerse you in the neighborhood’s goings-on, and at that it succeeds immensely. 

Dialogue is natural and well placed in the center, and Atmos effects are almost constant when characters venture out into the streets. Belfast sounds like a contemporary movie but its period bent makes the well-recorded effects and surround mix stick out from time to time. Helicopters swarm overhead in a warm and full-bodied effect, fires burn from surrounds, and explosions burst from the main channels in a very modern way, much like the Van Morrison soundtrack. 

The music is the weakest element here, and by foregoing his usual collaboration with Patrick Doyle, Branagh missed out on tying the score to the moment emotionally. The Morrison tracks burst out almost at random, taking me out of the movie. Aside from that one gripe, this is a strong soundtrack that further enhances being pulled into the characters’ world, taking me by surprise with its warmth and inventiveness.

Ryan Rutherford is a 20-year home theater sales & installation veteran who owns Northstar Audio Video in Altoona, Pa. In between designing & installing systems, he loves his time with his two children and beautiful wife while obsessing about how much better the next TV/receiver/speaker will perform in his home.

PICTURE | This is a top-level video presentation, and the encode enhances the black & white in the way HDR has always promised

SOUND | The film has such a wonderfully natural and room-filling Dolby Atmos track that it’s shocking at times

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Review: Tick, Tick . . . Boom!

Tick, Tick . . . Boom (2021)

review | Tick, Tick . . . Boom!

Lin-Manuel Miranda acquits himself nicely in his directorial debut with this musical tale of the final days of Rent creator Jonathan Larson

by Anthony Savona
February 22, 2022

He’s not well known in the wider world but in the musical theater domain, Jonathan Larson is considered a tragic genius. The creator of Rent (the Tony Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning ’90s Broadway show that inspired a whole generation of theater fans and creatives), Larson died of a sudden aortic dissection the night before the show was to have its first preview, never knowing the tremendous success his work would receive or the influence it would have. 

And while his life story is ripe for the telling—a starving artist who dreams of changing musical theater and does so but passes away just before he can see his dream become a reality—that isn’t the tale Tick,Tick . . . Boom! tells. It’s more of an origin story for Rent, based on a one-man musical written and performed by Larson himself. And, as the film’s opening narration says, “Everything is true . . . except for the parts Jonathan made up.”

In Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, Larson (played by Oscar nominee Andrew Garfield) shares the stresses he’s under preparing for a first reading of a musical he’s been working on for eight years (not Rent), his best friend and roommate Michael (Robin de Jesus) moving out of the dumpy downtown NYC apartment they share, and his girlfriend Susan (Alexandra Shipp) looking to move out of the city and settle down. Oh, and he’s about to turn 30 and still hasn’t made a name for himself on Broadway, unlike his hero Stephen Sondheim (Bradley Whitford).

The film moves between a stage version of the musical—which includes Larson, a small band, and two singers, Roger (Joshua Henry) and Karessa (Vanessa Hudgens)—and his life at the time, juggling the pressures of his creative and personal life with shifts at the Moondance Diner to scrape a living together until he hits it big.

Garfield is a marvel and deserves all the attention and awards love he’s receiving. He’s no stranger to Broadway, having won a Tony for the play Angels in America in 2018. But he admits he had no deep knowledge of Larson prior to this film, and that keeps his performance from being a star-eyed tribute. His Larson is charming and talented but also so driven that he’s often blind to everything else happening around him.

The film’s director, Lin-Manuel Miranda—yes, of Hamilton fame and composer for seemingly every Disney animated film of late (including Encanto)knows quite a bit about the business of Broadway and what it takes to break through. Having been deeply influenced by Rent and Larson, he’s the perfect person to tell this story, which is clearly important to him—and it shows in the care he’s taken to present it.

Thanks to Miranda’s well-connected address book. two scenes feature cameos from Broadway’s best. In one—a musical number at the diner where Larson works—stage stars from the ’60s through today harass Larson for brunch, including Miranda himself along with fellow Hamilton alums Phillipa Soon and Renee Elise Goldsberry. In  the other, Larson is presenting his songs in a workshop where the class is made up of some of Broadway’s biggest writers, composers, and producers. (You can read up on who’s who here.)

Miranda works in several homages to Rent, including the answering machine “beep!,” Larson riding his bike past the Cat Scratch Club (where one of the characters worked), Jonathan lighting a candle while speaking with his girlfriend in the dark, and a rooftop scene where numbers on a nearby building add up to 525,600. (Anyone who knows the song “Seasons of Love” just sang that number instead of reading it.)

All of that is fantastic for theater fans but what if you could care less? Tick, Tick . . . Boom! still has you with a gripping, well-paced story of a frustrated artist trying to decide whether to give it all up or keep on trying. That we already know what Larson chooses doesn’t make the story any less compelling, and knowing how little time he has left only adds to the urgency, punctuated throughout by the sounds of a persistently ticking second hand.

Shot in 7K resolution, Tick’s transfer is taken from a 4K digital intermediate. On paper, this should translate into truly stunning image quality but it didn’t feel like the Netflix stream was able to deliver on all of its visual potential. It looked more like it was shot on film than having the hyper-clear sharpness and detail of video, and often felt more like I was watching a 1080p Blu-ray. One scene that really delivered, though, was the haunting ballad “Why?,” which was beautifully shot in the empty Delacorte Theater in Central Park. It hits you right in the feels, and the image quality has great depth and sharpness, letting you clearly see the sharp lines of the theater and count the rows of seats.

The HDR grade isn’t overly aggressive, with the focus on making natural, lifelike images with good depth and shadow detail. We do get some nice highlights of bright sunlight streaming in through windows, glowing street lights and lamps, and white-hot stage lighting. 

Of course, a musical is only as good as its songs. Fortunately, Larson knew how to write a good rock song, Garfield knows how to deliver them, and Miranda knows how to handle the multi-layered delivery. The Dolby Atmos track makes the music the worthy star of this performance. Audio is kept across the front, except when the musical numbers begin; then the soundstage expands, filling the room with the score, occasionally placing some vocals out in the surround channels. The mix also gives a bit of ambience to other scenes, such as the spaciousness and echoes in the open rehearsal room where the reading happens or street noises in the city. Don’t expect a lot of action out of your subwoofer, though it does come to life courtesy of some drums.  

“I’m the future of musical theater,” Larson tells one obnoxious party-goer. Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see the truth of that statement. All in all, this is an encouraging directorial debut from Miranda and another star turn for Garfield, making it an easy recommendation the next time you’re wondering what to watch on Netflix. 

Anthony Savona is the Editor of Residential Systems and the VP of Content Creation for Future’s B2B—AV Tech Group. He is also the keeper of a wealth of useless knowledge in topics such as comic books, modern Broadway, ’90s punk music, and outdated AV media.

PICTURE | The Netflix stream doesn’t deliver on all of the 4K transfer’s visual potential, looking more like it was shot on film than having the hyper-clear sharpness and detail of video 

SOUND | The Atmos track makes the music the star of the performances, with the audio kept across the front except when the numbers begin. The soundstage then expands, filling the room with the score. 

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Review: The Power of the Dog

The Power of the Dog (2021)

review | The Power of the Dog

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One of this year’s big Oscar favorites, this Netflix western leans more on character and atmosphere than action

by Roger Kanno
February 18, 2022

The Power of the Dog (written and directed by Jane Campion, and based on the novel by Thomas Savage) has received many accolades, including 12 Academy Award nominations, the most of any film this year. It tells the story of the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), two successful Montana cattlemen in the 1920s who meet Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst), a widowed innkeeper, and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) during a cattle drive. While the kind-hearted George falls in love with and eventually marries Rose, Phil is unnecessarily cruel to everyone he meets, especially Rose and Peter. 

It is sometimes difficult to watch Cumberbatch, so convincing is his portrayal of the wholly unpleasant Phil, but his performance is never over the top; rather, it’s nuanced and fascinating in an unnerving manner. Real-life couple Plemons and Dunst are just as convincing and no less captivating as the subdued counterparts to the volatile Phil. Smit-McPhee is excellent as the meek, studious young Peter, seemingly out of place among the rough ranch hands. All are deserving of their Oscar nominations. Campion is also nominated for her adapted screenplay, as one of the producers for Best Picture, and as Best Director. The Power of the Dog is both a period piece and a psychological drama, as well as a finely crafted character study of complex individuals. 

Outdoor scenes filmed on location in New Zealand have an austere look, wonderfully capturing the rustic atmosphere of cattle ranching at the end of the Wild West era. The color palette is on the cool side, with dusty cattle-wrangling scenes sometimes showing slight aliasing, but otherwise the picture (shot in ArriRaw at 4.5K and presented in Dolby Vision on Netflix) has excellent sharpness and detail. While the exterior shots are bright and sharp, the dimly lit interiors can look a little soft, but the lighting has a natural organic quality even though the interiors were shot entirely on soundstages. 

Ari Wegner’s cinematography, which was also nominated for an Oscar, is breathtaking, with the untamed New Zealand landscape looking both stark and dazzling. Images are framed with the picturesque scenery in mind, and wide shots will look truly majestic on high-quality video displays. There aren’t a lot of bright primary colors to be seen as exteriors are dominated by dry, prairie-like landscapes and the characters wear mostly earth tones, but the film’s UHD presentation is simply gorgeous in an understated manner.

The Oscar-nominated sound design by Richard Flynn, Robert Mackenzie, and Tara Webb is similarly subdued. The opening scenes start off with well recorded, rambling plucked strings and the atmospheric sounds of a cattle drive on the open plains setting an appropriately melancholic tone. But much of the rest of the film consists of only dialogue, occasional Foley effects, and very limited use of the music score. Foley is often mixed at low levels but is well suited to the onscreen action, and the minimalist sound design meticulously captures the feeling of the story’s setting during simpler times.

The lack of surround presence during most of the film serves to highlight a scene where Phil’s banjo playing emanates from the right surround channel then moves to the front speakers once his presence is established. This sudden use of the surrounds is unexpected and helps to heighten the significance of Phil’s actions. There is more liberal use of Jonny Greenwood’s haunting, Oscar-nominated score near the end of the film as the story builds to its deliberate and satisfying conclusion. 

The Power of the Dog is Campion’s first film in more than ten years, during which time she created two limited television series, Top of the Lake and Top of the Lake: China Girl. Both are slow burns like The Power of the Dog and worth seeking out if you’re a fan of her work, but her return to the big screen is beautiful to look at and an absolutely compelling film. 

Roger Kanno began his life-long interest in home cinema almost three decades ago with a collection of LaserDiscs and a Dolby Surround Pro Logic system. Since then, he has seen a lot of movies in his home theater but has an equal fascination with high-end stereo music systems. Roger writes for both Sound & Vision and the SoundStage! Network.

PICTURE | While the exterior shots in Netflix’ Dolby Vision presentation are bright and sharp, the dimly lit interiors can look a little soft, but the lighting has a natural organic quality even though the interiors were shot entirely on soundstages

SOUND | The Oscar-nominated sound design is subdued, with much of the film consisting of only dialogue, occasional Foley effects, and very limited use of the music score

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Review: Flee

Flee (2021)

review | Flee

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This unique documentary uses animation creatively to both tell the story and protect the identity of its subject

by Dennis Burger
February 17, 2022

You can’t help but get the sense filmmaker Jonas Poher Rasmussen began work on Flee with no firm idea of where it was going or even what it was about at anything other than the 30,000-foot level. That may seem an odd statement to make about an animated film, given how meticulously most of those are pre-engineered. But Flee, as it happens, wasn’t animated for aesthetic reasons—it was animated to protect the identity of its subject, Amin, for reasons that become clearer and clearer as the story unfolds.

Amin is an Afghani refugee who fled to Denmark during the Afghan Civil War that followed the Soviet–Afghan War of 1979-1989. The exact circumstances of his circuitous journey were a closely guarded secret for many years—even from his closest friends—and when he finally started to open up about his past, Rasmussen recorded the conversations, sometimes on his phone, sometimes with professional equipment, but always in fits and starts. 

I hesitate to say much more than that since Flee is largely about self-discovery and the nature of suppressed memories and unspoken truths. And the twists and turns Amin takes in not only unpacking but accepting his past add up to an incredibly compelling human drama that needs to be experienced in real-time, as unspoiled as possible.

Make no mistake, though—it can be a frustrating journey, worthwhile as it is in the end. The animation occasionally acts as a barrier between the viewer and the subject, and although the insertion of unanimated and unaltered newsreel footage serves as a consistent reminder that these were real events that happened to real human beings, there are times when the umbilical between the cartoonish imagery and the reality lying beneath it is stretched almost to the point of snapping. 

It’s easy to make criticisms of that sort. It’s not so easy to think of another way this project could have come to fruition. So don’t take any of the above as a reason to skip Flee. Just know that you’ll occasionally need to do some work here. This isn’t a passive viewing experience; nor is it entertainment. It’s a shocking look at geopolitical and societal forces of the sort most of us have never been subjected to, filtered through the lens of one man’s memories and experiences, then filtered through yet another lens of two-dimensional artwork. 

Thankfully, given the attention the film is getting due to its various Oscar nods for Animated Feature, Documentary Feature, and International Feature Film, Flee isn’t hard to find. It’s available to Hulu subscribers with both its original soundtrack (a mix of several languages but primarily Danish and Dari, with a good bit of Russian and English sprinkled in) or in an English dub. I instead rented it from iTunes and viewed it via the Apple TV+ app on Roku, as I find that’s often a safer bet in terms of image quality. 

Doing a quick spot-check between various scenes in the Hulu and Apple presentations, though, I honestly found only one meaningful difference, in a live-action establishing shot of New York City. Apple-by-way-of-Roku renders this brief shot with a little less aliasing and a bit more detail. Aside from that, they’re practically identical. 

By that I mean that both look quite good, given the material they’re working with. Flee does benefit from artful character design and very nice background animation but it’s not super-detailed nor is its color palette nuanced. As such, the HD/SDR presentation available on most streaming retailers is more than up to the task. I know we’re not quite to the point where high-def looks consistently great at streaming bitrates—certainly nowhere near as great as UHD/HDR—but Flee is aided by the fact that there isn’t quite as much to compress here as would normally be the case with animated features. 

The picture is often animated on the fours or sixes, and at times as low as one or two frames per second. It’s also largely devoid of texture for long stretches. So aside from that aforementioned shot of NYC, there isn’t much that would trip up any reasonably modern video codec. But if you’re overly concerned with any of the above, you’re missing the point. The animation is employed as a tool, not a treat. The question is: Does it get the job done? And the answer  is: Yes, undeniably.

The film’s 5.1 sound mix is utterly fascinating. Again, keep in mind that some of the audio was sourced from smartphone footage shot from the back of a moving car and some of it was from spur-of-the-moment recordings done in hotel rooms and bedrooms. In a weird way, this results in the audio being the strongest anchor to reality throughout the film. There’s also a lot of creative mixing, and the shape of the soundfield is frequently used to mark the transition between the present and the past, between the reality of the conversation between Jonas and Amin to the memories of the latter—sometimes crystal clear, sometimes hazy and nebulous. 

Weirdly enough, the 5.1 sound also upmixes beautifully into Atmos, a fact I stumbled upon purely because I forgot to turn off my system’s Atmos processing before pressing Play. There’s one scene—a recreation of Amin’s memories of being smuggled out of Russia in the belly of a rickety boat—that’s so sonically immersive it’s hard to believe it wasn’t mixed in Atmos proper. 

Again, though, to focus on such issues is to put the cart before the horse. Amin’s is a story that needed to be told, and it’s one you need to hear. It’s a story about acceptance, dealing with trauma, and self-sabotage and the nature of memory. In short, despite all the artifice, it’s a film rooted in the messiness of life and the juxtaposition between the forces of history and the individual human spirit. And all of that makes it very much worth your time.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Aside from one brief live-action shot, there’s no meaningful difference between the film’s HD presentation on Hulu and AppleTV+

SOUND | The 5.1 mix is deployed creatively, providing the strongest anchor to reality throughout the film, and upmixes to Atmos surprisingly well

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Review: Summer of Soul

Summer of Soul (2021)

review | Summer of Soul

This documentary of a 1969 Harlem music festival is less about the performances and more about the culture & politics of the time

by Dennis Burger
February 11, 2022

To describe Summer of Soul ( . . . or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) as the best documentary I’ve seen in recent years would be a disservice to it and to you. It is, without question, one of the best films I’ve seen in ages, regardless of genre. It’s a masterclass in film editing, although it’s never ostentatious in its cutting. Its pacing is hypnotic, resembling the timing and tempo of an album more so than a film (and not for the reasons you might suspect given its subject matter). It manages to be shockingly comprehensive and broad without losing focus. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, going straight onto my exceedingly short list of truly perfect films. 

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know already that it’s a film about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, held at Mt. Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). It has been described as the Black Woodstock, and although clips from the festival have surfaced from time to time—perhaps most notably in What Happened, Miss Simone?, one of the few legitimately good documentaries on Netflix not starring David Attenborough—no one could muster the will or the financial backing to do an entire film about it until Roots drummer and frontman Questlove took it on. 

While all of the above is a perfectly satisfactory summation of the heart of the film, it’s so much more than that. Summer of Soul is the most intersectional film I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. I hesitate to use that adjective and would have instead substituted literally any other descriptor that might have worked. But none does. Make no mistake about it, though: Despite being defiantly and unapologetically political, the film isn’t tainted by modern political biases. 

What do I mean by “intersectional”? In short, the main thing Questlove seems to be saying is, “You can’t understand X if you don’t understand Y,” and the variables he plugs into that equation range from the political and societal to the spiritual and secular, from fashion to art to civil rights to the heroin epidemic that ravaged Harlem at the time. As a Tolkien nerd, perhaps my favorite intersection Questlove plants a street sign into—before driving right on by, confidently and casually—is that you can’t understand shifts in culture without understanding shifts in language. And vice versa. 

It’s interesting that the film doesn’t dwell on this—or any point, for that matter. And I can’t know for sure if there simply wasn’t time to linger or if Questlove simply respects the intelligence of the audience too much to belabor anything (an all-too-rare treat these days), but it hardly matters. The thing is, while you’d think the breadth of topics would be too much for one film to chew on, Summer of Soul manages to be cohesive and focused largely due to its use of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival as its center of gravity. Literally everything ties back to it. 

In his audio commentary—available on Kaleidescape—Questlove discusses a much longer first cut that ran close to three and a half hours, and how it differed from the final edit. It seems clear that most of what got excised—aside from additional performances by Sly and the Family Stone and so many other acts on the verge of exploding into the public consciousness shortly thereafter—involved side journeys that got too far away from the festival itself in an attempt to provide an even larger, though less concise, historical context. 

Part of me wants to see that extended cut and part of me doesn’t because as both a historical document and a work of art, the 118-minute cut is not only a complete statement but also an incredibly tight and rhythmically fascinating jam, and it’s borderline impossible to imagine it being improved upon by additional material. 

Bottom line: I’m kicking myself for not watching Summer of Soul sooner. It was made as a Hulu exclusive and originally released last summer. And although I do subscribe to that service for reasons I don’t quite understand, I’ve never been able to bring myself to watch a proper film on it, as  its video quality is unacceptable in most cases. As it turns out, this isn’t a film where image quality makes much difference. The festival was shot on video and not well preserved, so it’s riddled with aliasing, moiré, clipping, chromatic aberrations, and mosquito noise, and no attempt has been made to clean it up à la Get Back. 

Because of that, Kaleidescape’s UHD presentation is practically indistinguishable from Hulu’s for large swaths of its runtime. Only the modern interview segments with attendees and performers reveal any meaningful differences in image quality, largely due to the fact that some lost high frequencies in the Hulu presentation result in a slight dulling of textures and some minor loss of the finest details, all of which Kaleidescape allows to shine. 

Kaleidescape also presents the film with a Dolby TrueHD Atmos soundtrack, which is a little baffling given that the 5.1 mix on Hulu was overkill to begin with. The audio is sourced from mics on the stage, of which there weren’t many, and although fidelity and tonal balance are surprisingly good, there just isn’t much going on in either the surrounds or—in the case of the Atmos track—the overhead channels. Thankfully, the Atmos mix does no harm to the experience, which was my biggest fear. It’s largely unnecessary, but at least it’s never gimmicky. 

But none of the above really matters in the moment. The material is so engaging that you quickly forget about the rawness of the footage or the limitations of the audio recordings. But it does raise a question: Why buy it on Kaleidescape instead of watching it for free on Hulu? 

It comes down to the aforementioned commentary track. This is a commentary for people who hate commentaries. It is, in effect, an alternate version of Summer of Soul, packed with historical perspective beyond the scope of what could be shown in the film, and crammed full of anecdotes that run the gamut from hilarious to elucidating. It feels like a two-hour hangout session with the smartest person you know, just without the laborious pedantry. 

One of my favorite bits involves Questlove describing his creative process, specifically all the little things he did to make Summer of Soul his own without inserting himself or his biases into the work. For one thing, he chose to start the film with a Stevie Wonder drum solo. For another, while he discusses his struggles with resisting the urge to cheat in the editing process, he does reveal some of his few sleights of hand, including the fact that he occasionally re-synced the sound with the footage because he couldn’t bear to see some of his black brothers and sisters clapping on the 1 and 3 instead of the 2 and 4—although he did leave in many instances of such because to remove them entirely would have been dishonest. 

In short, this is a version of the film you absolutely need to experience, and the Kaleidescape download is one of the few ways of doing so, outside of buying the Blu-ray. What’s more, the only extras included on the disc that aren’t available on Kaleidescape have long since been released to YouTube. 

Even if I can’t convince you to check out the commentary, you owe it to yourself to watch the film at your earliest convenience. Again, I’ve barely nicked the paint on this incredible experience, which centers on a wonderful but forgotten music festival but also touches on everything from the moon landing to the repercussions of the assassinations of MLK and JFK to the power of music and the purpose and nature of art. The fact that it does all of this elegantly and with a cohesive narrative thread is itself something of a minor miracle.

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | The recent interview segments look fine but the music festival was shot on video in 1969, so it’s riddled with aliasing, moiré, clipping, chromatic aberrations, and mosquito noise. 

SOUND | The audio for the Atmos mix was sourced from mics on the festival stage, and although fidelity & tonal balance are surprisingly good, there isn’t much going on in either the surrounds or the overhead channels.

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Review: House of Gucci

House of Gucci (2021)

review | House of Gucci

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Ridley Scott serves up a stinkburger so bad it gives the impression it was directed by committee

by Dennis Burger
February 9, 2022

Let it be stated for the record that Ridley Scott has directed the worst movie I’ve suffered through since 1993’s Super Mario Bros. It’s simply undeniable—his name is right there in the credits. But had you removed that credit and tried to convince me House of Gucci was the product of 10 or 15 directors haphazardly chopping up the mess of a script and filming their scenes in isolation with no knowledge of what comes before or after, I might have been inclined to believe you. If you then told me they had slapped Scott’s name onto this lazily assembled dumpster fire out of spite, I’d have been convinced your theory was the only one that made any sense at all. Because even after he’s turned in so many atrocious films in recent years, it’s hard to believe a director with Scott’s experience could deliver a final product this unwatchable. 

The problems with this movie are many and I won’t even begin to try parsing them all, because who has time for that? But one of the biggest things working against it is the screenplay, which purports to be about the marriage of Patrizia Reggiani and Maurizio Gucci and the eventual assassination of the latter by the former. I barely know anything about the real-world events that inspired the film but I know enough to know screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna couldn’t be bothered to get any of it right.

Mind you, that’s not always a bad thing. Spencer is evidence you can concoct a wholly fictional story about real-world personas and still create a gripping film. Johnston and Bentivegna did not. They apparently had no idea what they intended to convey in terms of meaning or narrative momentum, nor the passage of time. 

You could forgive some of that if the acting were better, but if you manage to pull a bad performance out of Adam Driver, you’ve done something horribly wrong. My first inclination was to say that Driver comes across as if he’s slogging through a bad SNL sketch, but I’ve seen him slog through some bad SNL sketches before. He was pretty good at it. 

Lady Gaga, meanwhile, seems to have been given the impression she landed the starring role in a trashy telenovela that would ultimately be dubbed in Russian; somebody forgot to tell Jeremy Irons that Rodolfo Gucci wasn’t an Englishman; Al Pacino, who plays Aldo Gucci, apparently intended to wander onto the set of the latest Scorsese gangster pic but took a left turn at Albuquerque; and a wholly unrecognizable Jared Leto . . . hell, I don’t even know where to begin with that one. I think maybe he was trying to audition for a sequel to the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. Had he looked straight into the camera and exclaimed, “Mamma mia! That’s a spicy-uh meat-uh-ball-uh,” I wouldn’t have batted an eye. If there hadn’t been a director present on set—if someone merely turned on a camera and walked out of the room, then prompted the actors to stroll by and deliver their lines based on their own instincts—I think every one of them would have turned in infinitely better performances than what we’ve ended up with.

The one person who seems to have understood the assignment is cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, who shot the movie on an Arri Alexa Mini LF cameras, with Panavision 65 Vintage Series lenses for the most part. It’s a lovely image, captured at 4.5K and finished in a 4K DI, packed with pitch-perfect contrasts and oodles of detail. The color timing does seem a bit odd at times, occasionally exhibiting a sumptuously warm vintage-like patina while at other times seeming like you’re looking out a window, and there’s no real consistency to these shifts. Still, Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR10 presentation is flawless, so much so that you might be inclined to load the movie up and let it play with the sound off while you’re doing anything more interesting. 

You won’t be missing much with the sound off. Despite having a Dolby TrueHD Atmos mix, the soundtrack is a cluttered and messy affair that almost seems like someone tried to cram as much into the front three channels as possible on a dare. As a result, dialogue intelligibility suffers at times. Not that it matters. Even the soundtrack music is a pile of anachronisms assembled so inartfully that it infuriated me, and I love a good anachronistic needle drop when done competently with a hint of intentionality. 

I guess what I’m saying is, you can safely avoid House of Gucci unless you simply loathe Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, or Jared Leto and want to see them humiliate themselves. If any other filmmaker turned in a movie this irredeemable, they would spend the rest of their career shooting commercials for local flea-market malls. 

Dennis Burger is an avid Star Wars scholar, Tolkien fanatic, and Corvette enthusiast who somehow also manages to find time for technological passions including high-end audio, home automation, and video gaming. He lives in the armpit of Alabama with his wife Bethany and their four-legged child Bruno, a 75-pound American Staffordshire Terrier who thinks he’s a Pomeranian.

PICTURE | Kaleidescape’s UHD/HDR10 presentation is flawless—so much so that you might be inclined to load the movie up and let it play with the sound off

SOUND | The Dolby Atmos soundtrack is so cluttered and messy that it almost seems like someone tried to cram as much into the front three channels as possible on a dare

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Oscar Nominees 2022

Oscar Nominees 2022

reviews | Oscar Nominees 2022

Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Sound, Original Song

“Kenneth Branagh has had an up-and-down filmography but this is clearly among his strongest films. He garners fantastic performances from novices and veterans alike, yet centers the movie on the performance of young Jude Hill.”    read more

Picture, Film Editing, Original Score, Original Screenplay

“I’m glad we don’t do star ratings  at Cineluxe because I would be crippled with analysis paralysis in attempting to encapsulate the merits and demerits of Don’t Look Up. It’s simultaneously one of the year’s best films and one of its worst. It’s as fascinating as it is frustrating. It tries to be NetworkDr. Strangelove, and Veep all at the same time, but more often than not, those allusions serve to remind you it’s not as good as the works that inspired it. Seriously, though, watch it for DiCaprio’s and Lawrence’s performances, if nothing else.”    read more

Animated Feature, Original Score, Original Song

“This film offers a wonderful opportunity to round everyone up in your home theater and share an experience. With a message that speaks to the strength of family, gorgeous images that will highlight your video display, and a catchy soundtrack, Encanto offers tantos razones to give it a watch.”    read more

Makeup & Hairstyling

“You can safely avoid House of Gucci unless you simply loathe Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, or Jared Leto and want to see them humiliate themselves. If any other filmmaker turned in a movie this irredeemable, they would spend the rest of their career shooting commercials for local flea-market malls.”    read more

Actress, Supporting Actress, Adapted Screenplay

“Olivia Coleman’s masterful performance as Leda will stay with me for a long time, but much of this film’s impact can also be attributed to the supporting performances and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s talented direction and screenplay. It may be unsettling to watch at times, but The Lost Daughter reminds us of just how complex and fractured family relationships can be and is well worth seeking out.”
read more

Picture, Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design

“Guillermo del Toro had to doff his anti-cynicism hat for this adaptation, and that—far more so than its rejection of the supernatural—is what makes Nightmare Alley feel so different. Del Toro has certainly flirted with cynicism in the past only to ultimately reject it; but to fully commit to this noir adaptation, he had to embrace it. And if there’s anything that keeps the film from knocking it completely out of the park, it’s that he seems uncomfortable doing so. It’s still a very good film, just not a great one.”   
read more

Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Production Design, Film Editing, Sound, Original Score

The Power of the Dog is both a period piece and a psychological drama, as well as a finely crafted character study of complex individuals. If you’re a fan of Jane Campion’s work, her return to the big screen is beautiful to look at and an absolutely compelling film.”    read more

Actress

“The music and sound mixing were by far my favorite things about Spencer, which is saying a lot given that I was captivated from beginning to end. It isn’t a great film. Not quite. But it is a very good one, marred only by the occasional slip into melodrama, a few editing flubs, and an ending that’s too much of a tonal shift to swallow. For a movie that’s built on tension, tone, and shockingly tasteful body horror (seriously, who even knew that was possible?) to end with a singalong of Mike + The Mechanics’ “All I Need is a Miracle” over a bite of KFC was just a stretch too far for me. But don’t let that turn you off. Spencer is absolutely worth your time. Maybe rent it instead of buying it sight unseen, though.”    read more

Actor, Cinematography, Production Design

“I often find film adaptations of plays and musicals to be tedious, especially if they’re literal adaptions of the source material as I feel that film requires unique visual elements to engage the viewer. But The Tragedy of Macbeth succeeds in bringing the play to life with a wonderfully surreal vision of medieval Scotland and the treacherous tale of its protagonist.”    read more

Yet another drab year, but you might be able to find a few gems strewn among the rubble

by the Cineluxe staff
updated March 24, 2022

Last year’s Oscar winners were the least interesting bunch in a while, but this year’s stand a good chance of taking it all down yet another notch. Sure, there are some interesting films up for awards, but nothing galvanizing and certainly nothing to change the sense of Hollywood treading water as it tries to figure out what the world wants to watch as everyone stumbles their way out of the far side of the pandemic. Still, there’s a chance we could discover a truly rare jewel as our staff continues to put the movies vying for consideration in 2022 through their paces. Check back as we add more reviews to this page.

Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Supporting Actor

CODA is irreverent without going for cheap shocks, adorable without being cloying, sentimental without being schmaltzy, awkward without being affected, and fits firmly into the tradition of feel-good cinema without being overly manipulative emotionally. My only criticism is that it plays it safe in terms of broader story structure. Let’s call it what it is—the Hero’s Journey. As a result, by the end of the first act you’ll probably have an accurate sense of how it ends.”    read more

Picture, International Feature, Director, Adapted Screenplay

“I wish Drive My Car was an hour shorter, a little less repetitive, a lot less austere, and had more faith in its audience to connect with its themes without belaboring them half to death. Looking back on the experience of the film as a whole, I have to say I appreciate the hell out of it. But I just can’t bring myself to love it.”    read more

International Feature, Documentary Feature, Animated Feature

“This isn’t a passive viewing experience; nor is it entertainment. It’s a shocking look at geopolitical and societal forces of the sort most of us have never been subjected to, filtered through the lens of one man’s memories and experiences, then filtered through yet another lens of two-dimensional artwork.”    read more

Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress, Original Screenplay, Film Editing, Original Song, Sound

King Richard is entertaining, well-made, and well-acted, and with Rotten Tomatoes critics’ and audience scores of 91 and 98% respectively, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Will Smith up for his third Best Actor nomination. Other than a few uses of the n-word, it’s definitely family friendly and kept my 15 year old—who has no interest in tennis—engaged. It’s certainly worth giving a watch.”   read more

Animated Feature

“It’s not that Luca is a bad film. In fact, you could easily say that while Soul was a Pixar title made for adults, Luca sets its sights squarely on a younger audience, with a coming-of-age story about friendship, acceptance, childhood dreams, and overcoming fears that never gets too deep or strays too far away from safety and cuteness that kids will be drawn to. And if Luca came from any other studio (with the exception of Disney Animation, Pixar’s parent company), it would likely be heralded as a triumph. It’s just that Pixar has come to make us expect so much more.”    read more

Sound, Original Song, Visual Effects

No Time to Die is a fantastic experience at home, visually and sonically, and with its lengthy run-time, you’re able to pause if need be for a bathroom or snack break to ensure you don’t miss a moment of action”    read more

Animated Feature

Raya and the Last Dragon looks gorgeous, and the voice acting—especially the always-likable Awkafina, who brings the right level of humor and quirkiness to Sisu—is on point. While the lack of any songs and intense scenes might limit its replay value for younger viewers, its an entertaining film that will appeal to many viewers, as attested to by its very favorable 95% Rotten Tomatoes criticsrating and 85% audience score. I have two daughters—ages 14 and almost five—so for us, a movie night where we can all get together and enjoy a new Disney animated film was an easy yes.”    read more

Documentary Feature

“You owe it to yourself to watch this film at your earliest convenience. I’ve barely nicked the paint on this incredible experience, which centers on a wonderful but forgotten music festival but also touches on everything from the moon landing to the repercussions of the assassinations of MLK and JFK to the power of music and the purpose and nature of art. The fact that it does all of that elegantly and with a cohesive narrative thread is itself something of a minor miracle.”    read more

Picture, Director, Supporting Actress, Cinematography, Production Design, Sound, Costume Design 

“It isn’t really fair to compare West Side Story to modern Broadway musicals, and the songs here might not be as catchy for some contemporary listeners as what they’d hear in Hamilton, Phantom, Les Miserables, or Jonathan Larson’s pop-rock fueled numbers. But if you typically shy away from musicals, Spielberg’s cinematic touch should be enough to tempt you to give this one a try.”    read more

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Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling

Cruella is one of the most original live-action films to come out of Disney in recent years, and if it didn’t grab your attention in the theaters or on Disney+, now is the perfect opportunity to enjoy it in highest-resolution at home!”    read more

Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Production Design, Costume Design, Makeup & Hairstyling, Original Score, Film Editing, Sound, Visual Effects

“Let’s set aside for a moment the question of whether Denis Villeneuve’s Dune works as a partial adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel. A much more relevant question is whether or not it works as cinema on its own terms. And thankfully that ends up being the much easier question to answer. Yes—a thousand times, yes. As if he hadn’t proven it already with films like Arrival, Prisoners, and Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve demonstrates with Dune that he understands cinema as an art form in a way few other modern directors do.”    read more

Visual Effects

Free Guy definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously and is just a load of fun to sit back and enjoy. Unless you belong to that sub-section that just hates Ryan Reynolds—and, come on, get over Green Lantern already!—this makes a great night at the movies, with a bunch of little Easter eggs that look great up on a large home-cinema screen and reward repeat viewing. ”    read more   

Picture, Director, Original Screenplay

“Overall, Licorice Pizza is as meandering and unfocused an experience as you might expect but it’s worth the journey if only for Alana Haim’s performance. She is an utterly effortless and hypnotic screen presence—the sort of actor who makes you forget she’s acting at all. I found myself shocked at times that co-stars the likes of Sean Penn and Tom Waits could come close to matching her natural energy.”   read more

Animated Feature

“Maybe the best thing I can say about this movie is that it’s legitimate family fare. That’s generally used as a euphemism for children’s entertainment but in this case, the label deserves to be taken at face value. There’s a lot of dessert here to keep the young ones in your family engaged, but there’s also enough meat to appeal to audiences of all ages. It might not be the height of profundity and it’s a little uneven in its execution but the good far outweighs the bad. And that alone elevates The Mitchells vs. the Machines way above the baseline for kid-appropriate movies distributed by Netflix.”    read more

Actress, Original Score

“Hopefully by the time Sony Pictures prepares the film for a proper North American home video release, the issues with the noise and funky textures will have been resolved, because this one is a keeper for me. It’s probably Almodóvar’s best film since 2006’s Volver, and it’s a damn sight better than most of this year’s Best Picture noms.”    read more

Visual Effects

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was just OK. It was fun to watch, looked great, the fight scenes were dynamic and visually interesting, and the actors—particularly Leung, who brings some real depth to the villain character—did a fine job, but the story itself felt thin. And it just didn’t feel like a Marvel movie. But with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 92% and an Audience Score of 98%—the highest combined score of any film in the MCU—it seems like I’m in the minority, and maybe my opinion will change on future viewings.”    read more

Actor, Film Editing

“All in all, this is an encouraging directorial debut from Lin-Manuel Miranda and another star turn for Andrew Garfield, making it an easy recommendation the next time you’re wondering what to watch on Netflix.”    read more

Documentary Feature

Writing with Fire isn’t perfect, even ignoring the technical shortcomings. At 96 minutes, it positively whizzes by, and there are several story threads I wish we could have sat with for another 15 or 20 minutes here and there. But I’d far rather spend time with a film that leaves me wanting more than one that overstays its welcome, even when the subject matter is as important as this.”    read more

© 2023 Cineluxe LLC

Review: Raya and the Last Dragon

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021)

review | Raya and the Last Dragon

Disney rewrites the princess playbook with this effort to play to the girl-power crowd

by John Sciacca
March 8, 2021

Raya features the classic elements of Disney princess fairy tales: A girl loses her family and is forced to grow and trust in herself to solve some major problem, having to enlist others along the way to aid in her struggle. She even passes many of the “princess tests” from Ralph Breaks the Internet. What kind of princess are you? Do you have magic hair? (No.) Magic hands? (No.) Do animals talk to you? (Kind of.) Were you poisoned? (No, but it’s mentioned.) Cursed? (There is a curse on the land.) Kidnapped or enslaved? (No.) Made a deal with an underwater sea witch where she took your voice in exchange for a pair of human legs? (Ummm, no.) Have you ever had true love’s kiss? (Big no.) Do you have daddy issues? (Yep.) Don’t even have a mom. (Yep.) Do people assume all your problems got solved because a big strong man showed up? (A big strong man does join her quest and helps, but he doesn’t solve her problems.)” Also, put a checkmark in the “stare at important water” category.

But Raya is also definitely not your typical Disney princess or princess film as Raya (voiced by Kelly Marie Tran) is indisputably Disney’s most bad-ass, girl-power princess ever, featuring a lot of attitude and swagger. She never backs down from a fight and engages in various forms of hand-to-hand combat throughout. In fact, Raya reminded me of the live-action Mulan remake, including the fact that there’s no singing. (Another break for your typical Disney princess.) 

The story takes place in the once prosperous land of Kumandra, where dragons co-exist with humans and bring water, rain, and peace to the land. Evil spirits called the Druun come, turning all humans to stone, and the dragons sacrifice themselves in order to save humanity, placing all of their spirits into a single magic gem. A power struggle to possess the gem causes the once peaceful land to split into five tribes: Fang, Heart, Tail, Spine, and Talon. 

After 500 years, Raya’s dad, Chief Benja (Daniel Dae Kim) of the Heart tribe, holder of the gem, tries to reunite the tribes but the Dragon gem is broken into five pieces, with each tribe taking a piece and causing the Druun to return and turning many to stone. 

Raya escapes, and armed with her father’s sword and riding atop her combination pill bug/armadillo/hedgehog creature Tuk Tuk (Alan Tudyk), she embarks on a quest to find Sisu (Awkwafina), who is said to be the last surviving dragon. With hopes of ridding the Druun once and for all and bringing her father back, Raya’s quest leads her to all of the villages, which have their own visual style, and have Indiana Jones-like elements to complete.

Disney animation is top-notch so the fantastic visuals shouldn’t come as any surprise. There are amazing levels of detail in closeups, with rich texture in fabric, wood, stone, and hair. Water—which plays an important role in the film—also looks photo-realistic, with incredible movement and reflection. Closeups of Sisu in human form reveal strands of hair that seem to be individually colored in her purple-pink-blue-white ombre style. And the care the animators took in the way fabric drapes and moves on characters has lifelike realism. The computer animation style is different from Pixar’s, but equally top-shelf

HDR provides beautiful depth, highlights, shadow detail, and rich colors, especially when viewed on a Dolby Vision-capable display. The magic Dragon gem has a real Arkenstone quality, internally lit by shifting, glowing, sparkling shafts of light, and the Talon village at night is especially gorgeous, glowing with rich, warm, and vibrant lighting and lamps that leaps from the screen. Raya features a frequently bright and saturated color palette that is visually arresting and a treat to look at.

Having watched Raya twice—once on my 115-inch JVC 4K projector and again on a 65-inch Sony 4K LED—I did notice that backgrounds frequently have a bit of a grainy/noisy/cloudy haze. As this is computer animation, it’s obvious it isn’t actually grain or noise, so it must be a stylistic choice the animators took to keep the world from appearing too perfect. They also frequently chose to use “portrait mode” styling on closeups, where objects not close up in frame are defocused. 

The soundtrack was pretty lackluster—unfortunately, a common complaint with many recent Disney transfers. Even played back at reference volume on my Marantz processor, dynamics were heavily compressed and rarely delivered any impact. It wasn’t until the climax that it seemed like the subwoofers really kicked in, and even then, they were restrained and didn’t deliver the impact I expected. Whether this was a shortcoming of the film itself or my Apple 4K TV, I can’t say, but I was disappointed with the sonics. However, judging by the quality of the song “Lead the Way” (performed by Aiko) played over the end credits with a lot more dimension, dynamics, and space, I feel like it is the mix itself. There are some atmospheric surround effects—particularly at the very beginning and end—such as wind, rain, forest sounds, and echoes, and the score is expanded across the front of the room, but primarily this is a front-channel-centric mix that feels like it is designed to be listened to through a TV or soundbar.

Raya and the Last Dragon looks gorgeous, and the voice acting—especially the always likable Awkafina, who brings the right level of humor and quirkiness to Sisu—is on point. While the lack of any songs and intense scenes might limit its replay value for younger viewers, it’s an entertaining film that will appeal to many viewers, as attested to by its 95% Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating and 85% audience score. I have two daughters—ages 14 and almost five—so for us, a movie night where we can all get together and enjoy a new Disney animated film was an easy yes. 

Probably the most experienced writer on custom installation in the industry, John Sciacca is co-owner of Custom Theater & Audio in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, & is known for his writing for such publications as Residential Systems and Sound & Vision. Follow him on Twitter at @SciaccaTweets and at johnsciacca.com.

PICTURE | HDR provides beautiful depth, highlights, shadow detail, and rich colors, especially when viewed on a Dolby Vision-capable display

SOUND | The soundtrack is lackluster. Even played back at reference volume on a Marantz processor, dynamics were heavily compressed and rarely delivered any impact.

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