Digital Week – February 11

In Sam Raimi’s slickly effective thriller, Rachel McAdams sinks her teeth into one of her juiciest roles yet as Linda, a frumpy tech-firm genius bypassed for a promotion who ends up on a deserted island with her boss after a plane crash and who turns the tables on him with her unknown survival skills. Raimi shows he hasn’t lost his directorial chops, especially in the terrifying but tongue-in-cheek crash sequence and the teasing way he builds to a violent and ironic conclusion. The director has a superb foil in McAdams, whose convincing physical performance also drips with dark  humor. 

In 1990s Iraq, poor 9-year-old Lamia is chosen to make a cake for President Saddam’s birthday—she goes off to find ingredients with her grandmother and soon find herself befriended by an equally adventurous boy who becomes her partner in (literal) crime as they brush up against several (mostly) unsavory characters. Director Hasan Hadi’s fleet-footed drama shows a complex society that most think of oppressively monolithic, but even though it skirts melodrama in our young heroine’s journey, the remarkable performance of Baneen Ahmed Nayyef as Lamia always keeps it humorously and humanely grounded.

The complicated relationship of Hanna, a woman living in a cult, and Jakob, her younger brother who visits her for the first time in years, is the focus of Jeppe Rønde’s tense but self-consciously provocative character study, in which the vices and abuses of their childhoods return and their incestuous tendencies become too much even for a cult that revels in reliving past traumas. Despite the committed performances of Jonas Holst Schmidt as Jakob and especially Cecilie Lassen, who brings a fiery aliveness to the troubled Hanna, Rønde’s film only skims the depths of their abusive connection, ending with the predictable result of their physical intimacy.

Poor Olga Kurylenko has been stuck in B movies for awhile, including this by-the-numbers entry, and it shows in her lackluster performance as Sara, one half of a couple trying to pay down a massive mob debt by executing a string of heists, only to meet their match in their latest victim, David (Frank Grillo), a defense attorney who causes a rupture between the couple. Director Kevin Lewis tries desperately to elevate what’s simply a mechanical cat-and-mouse game, but since it plays out almost exclusively in David’s bedroom, it remains static, and Grillo, Kurylenko and Oliver Trevena (as Jason, Sara’s other half) are unable to help.

French composer Charles Gounod, best known for his opera “Roméo et Juliette,” has made his adaptation of Goethe’s famous Faust more romantically melodic but less memorable than Ferruccio Busoni’s take on the same subject, “Doktor Faust.” Still, Gounod’s version is easier to stage, as director Àlex Ollé’s sparkling 2018 production at Madrid’s Teatro Real demonstrates. The cast comprises a bunch of persuasive singers and actors, led by Pcaiotr Beczala (Faust), Luca Pisaroni (Méphistophélès) and Marina Rebeka (Marguerite), while the orchestra and chorus—conducted by Dan Ettinger—provide trenchant musical accompaniment. There’s first-rate hi-def video and audio.