Deep Woods film poster
Blaze
(Limited Theatrical Release & Streaming on AppleTV, January 20)
Blaze (Julia Savage) is a 12-year-old whose imaginary world both soothes and shocks. Her splendid visions spring from award-winning Australian artist, Del Kathryn Barton. In her feature film directorial debut, Barton wonders how a fragile, highly creative preteen might process having witnessed a terrible sexual attack. She notes that to abuse one woman is to injury many others. One of those injured is Julia’s father (Simon Baker). Desperate to help his daughter, he agonizes over her pain. But Julia has powerful coping mechanisms. In one instance she unleashes a miniature dragon to incinerate the perpetrator. Unlike Tim Burton, whose colossal visions defy the bounds of reality, Barton grounds her heroine within a real world that is altered only inside her mind. Barton examines the terrors that plague us and the mechanisms we use to beat them back. (Lisa Miller)
Deep Woods
(Streaming on Apple TV and Vudu)
The familiar sights of busy Wisconsin Avenue and the rustling forests of Northern Wisconsin are juxtaposed in the opening sequence of Deep Woods. We tend to like Nick (Eddie Spears), the working class Native American, and be wary of Ty (Jilon VanOver), his slick architect buddy from years earlier. Ty wants to go hunting in the wilderness with his old friend before the wilderness is gone—is he planning to pave over the north Woods and build condos?
Directed by Milwaukee’s Steve Laughlin, Deep Woods is full of regional references, including woodsy rural bars with stuffed fish on the wall and dinners with taxidermy pheasants. When the county sheriff advises Nick and Ty to “stick to the trail,” it sounds like the warning by the Southern sheriff of Creature from Black Lake. Coupled with Nick’s fireside stories of the monstrous wendigo, we’re ready to meet a creature in the woods. But humans are usually the most dangerous creatures. Our sympathy shifts as the hunting trip goes wrong.
Deep Woods is an engaging thriller about corruption hiding behind the beautiful scenery. The cast includes many familiar faces including VanOver (“Better Call Saul”), Spears (“Dreamkeeper”) and Tony Denison (“The Closer”) as the sheriff. (David Luhrssen)
Missing
(In Theaters January 20)
Aneesh Chaganty, the writer-director of 2018’s Searching, created the storytelling technique that inspired Missing. Written and directed by Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, who were editors on Searching, their film is like a cousin to its predecessor. That film followed a single father (John Cho) as he scoured his missing teenage daughter’s Internet presence for clues to her whereabouts.
In Missing, it’s the teenage daughter, June (Storm Reid), who does the same to locate her missing mother Grace (Nia Long). Mom went to Colombia with her boyfriend (Ken Leung) and failed to return to Los Angeles. June cracks passwords to explore Grace’s posts on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and TikTok, and to discover which events and connections led to Grace’s disappearance. Rated PG-13 and clocking in at just under two hours, these films suggest that anyone with sufficient time and motivation can uncover our secrets using our digital footprint. (Lisa Miller)
On the Yard
(Cohen Film Collection Blu-ray)
Raphael D. Silver’s On the Yard (1978) arrived at the tail end of an era when Hollywood was willing to consider gritty, mature stories. It’s a prison film, adapted by writer Malcolm Braly from his novel, and explores the system’s dual hierarchies and the divisions within them. The guards and their superiors form the top level, but below—not unlike school—the population is manipulated by bullies and hustlers. This being the ‘70s, cigarettes were the common currency and sports betting was the illicit activity.
The story concerns a new prisoner, the odd man out, Juleson (John Heard), an idiosyncratic loner determined to maintain his code of self-regard despite the terrible thing that landed him in prison. He doesn’t want to play ball with the bullies, and he doesn’t want to snitch. His character is depicted with sympathy but without the sentimental gloss that soon became de rigeur in Hollywood. (David Luhrssen)
