Got grief? David Cronenberg has an app for that in ‘The Shrouds.'
The Canadian auteur's more-than-50-year run of cinematic inquests into the grotesque anxieties of being human has yielded several signatures — gallows humor and squelching body horrors among them — that have earned him his own adjective. His latest 'Cronenbergian' entry is 'The Shrouds,' a cerebral thriller that certainly fits the morbid, bone-cracking bill.
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San Francisco Chronicle
7 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
Review: ‘40 Acres' is post- apocalyptic thriller with a scene you'll never forget
There's an eye-popping action sequence in the second half of the scintillating post-apocalyptic thriller ' 40 Acres ' that is so creative, so visceral and unlike anything I've ever seen in a movie before that it alone is worth the price of a ticket. Not going to describe it — you'll know it when you see it — but the good news is there's a lot more to recommend in Canadian filmmaker R.T. Thorne's feature debut, which contains yet another great performance by Danielle Deadwyler (' Till,' ' The Piano Lesson '). Unlike ' 28 Years Later,' that other post-apocalyptic genre film currently in theaters, '40 Acres' is not a zombie film but a doomsday prepper movie. Thanks to a fungal pandemic that wiped out many animal species and disrupted the food chain, governments have broken down leading to civil war; growing food is the key to survival. Hailey (Deadwyler) runs a farm that has been in her family since her ancestors escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. She and her Indigenous partner Galen (an excellent Michael Greyeyes) work the land with their blended family, which includes her teenage son Emanuel (Kataem O'Connor) and Galen's daughter Raine (Leenah Robinson). But that farm, surrounded by an electrified fence, is a target. As the movie opens, a militia coveting its food supply attacks the family, and we see just how capable the family is at defending itself. Talk about sustainable farming. Hailey is ex-military, and every member of the family trains in the art of combat daily in addition to their farmwork. It's a tough, insular life, but the family is happy and together, spending evenings eating, talking, and playing music or games. However, tension brews between mother and son. Emanuel bristles at Hailey's overbearing strictness, and longs to assume more adult responsibilities. When he connects with Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), a girl outside the farm's perimeter, the family's security is threatened. '40 Acres' provides a fascinating glimpse into the mindset of doomsday preppers, those people who build underground silos stocked with canned goods, tools and weapons awaiting the breakdown of social order. Hailey gets her news from fellow preppers via CB radio; there's no cellphones loaded with Nextdoor or Citizen apps after the apocalypse. Thorne, who co-wrote the story (with Lora Campbell) and script (with Glenn Taylor), is an impressive visual stylist, as one would expect of someone with a background as a director of music videos and episodic television. But the depth of his characters, brought to life by a terrific cast, and tactile world building are what set '40 Acres' apart. The setting feels authentic; you could imagine yourself living on this farm with this family. That being said, even the most gifted director is helped immeasurably when Deadwyler agrees to be in your first feature. Her Hailey fights and scraps for what she needs with fierceness and conviction tinged with vulnerability. She can handle any kind of weapon, but her most effective is her eyes, which instantly communicate that no B.S. will be tolerated here.
Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Cannibals are coming in the postapocalyptic thriller '40 Acres' — and this family is ready to fight
Plymouth Rock landed hard on the forefathers of Hailey Freeman (Danielle Deadwyler) and centuries later, she's raising her own children to fight back. R.T. Thorne's postapocalyptic thriller '40 Acres' is set some time in the 21st century with humankind at each other's throats. Fourteen years earlier, a pandemic wiped out the animals and now the crops are in blight too. We don't know what's happening in the rest of the world but here in this rural stretch of Canada, hungry cannibals are hunting people in the woods. Hailey, a ramrod military veteran, refuses to be a redneck's lunch. 'Government ain't done nothing but kill, steal and lock up Black folks before they even fell apart,' Hailey says, brushing off a suggestion that she team up with her neighbors or what's left of the Army. The Freemans — Hailey, her partner Galen (Michael Greyeyes) and their blended clan of 20-something Manny (Kataem O'Connor), teen daughters Danis and Raine (Jaeda LeBlanc and Leenah Robinson), and young Cookie (Haile Amare) — are isolationists on a fortified farmstead that's belonged to her family since 1852, when an enslaved ancestor escaped from a Georgia plantation and made it across the Canadian border. For protection, they've got an impressive armory, an electric fence and a steadfast suspicion of anyone who shows up. In the first scene, a band of outsiders trespass on their property and make a big show of being friendly. 'Greetings,' their leader says with a grin. The Freemans don't respond. We just hear a couple whistles and the whoop-whoop-whoop of an ax spinning straight into a stranger's head. It won't surprise you to learn that Hailey prefers to call her kids 'soldiers' and hectors them to obey her rules from 4:30 a.m. until bedtime. In lieu of traditional schooling — those have long since shuttered — she makes them write essays on 'The Proletarian's Pocketbook,' an inspirational book of quotes with contributions from Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and Karl Marx. At some point, one of her three daughters will be lying comatose and Hailey will still be barking commands. 'You can't be laid up like this too much longer,' she insists, and it's a credit to Deadwyler that even in this absurdist moment, we see the fear under her armor. Clutching a rifle as she creeps toward danger, Deadwyler looks equal parts intimidating and scared. Yes, she's a badass but her strength is rooted in pain. This is Thorne's debut feature, and he's so determined to impress that things can feel heavy-handed. He's decorated the Freeman's bunker with faded newspapers screaming about famine and bloodshed — facts they know so well that they surely don't need to use them as wallpaper. His allusions can be as distracting as they are resonant. '40 Acres' is an evocative title but how does it tie into this family's story? The boundary between historical fact and dramatic symbolism is blurry. Given that the film is set and shot on location in Ontario, we spend too much time wondering how much Americana the Canadian-born Thorne and his co-screenwriter Glenn Taylor want us to layer over it. When we hear talk of Union soldiers in the woods, the reference is more confusing than anything. Did the country create a new army and coincidentally give it the same name? Yet, Thorne has made a resolute portrait of a woman who can't break free of generational trauma. The same ancestor who founded this homestead left his own family behind in Georgia; that cold resolve is Hailey's inheritance too. At night, she turns on the shortwave radio to eavesdrop on other starving families without being tempted to help. The family has one outside contact: an on-air acquaintance named Augusta (Elizabeth Saunders), who trades her moonshine for their weed at a nearby depot. A tough biddy herself, she brings out Hailey's deadpan (and unprintable) sense of humor. We're glad the script eventually lets us meet Saunders' Augusta so we can see she's as formidable and endearing as her voice. But the eldest child, Manny, needs more from the world. The lonely young man steps forward as the heart of the story after he spots a girl his age, Dawn (Milcania Diaz-Rojas), swimming in the nearby river. Strong and battle-hardened with a white scar down his back, he's grown up getting mocked for flubbing a kill shot to the heart. But O'Connor has a lovely gentleness about him, even when, in a morbid touch, cinematographer Jeremy Benning has him spy on the beauty through the crosshairs of his gun scope. Manny has no idea how to flirt, and he certainly can't bring a date home when his mother's mantra is, 'Shoot first, don't ask questions.' But his hesitant connection with Diaz-Rojas' Dawn is sweet and credible, given the circumstances. She also turns out to be no pushover herself, yet even she sees the Freemans as misanthropic freaks. Todor Kobakov's gripping score is built of swirling notes and low horns that mix well with the hip-hop needle-drops on Manny's old-school yellow-and-black cassette player. The tension in it prepares us from the get-go that violence is coming. The script is family-centric — honestly, it really only cares about Manny and Hailey — so we never know much about the nameless baddies. (The credits list 13 'drifters' and 20 'cannibals.') But I like how they're written as always trying to come across harmless. You're forever on guard. The tone of '40 Acres' is so grim that we seize onto its brief moments of warmth, like when Greyeyes' kind and grounded paterfamilias is aghast that his daughters have disinterred a packet of fast-food BBQ sauce. 'Colonial diabetes!' he snorts. Greyeyes also gets the movie's two flashiest fight scenes, one involving a crucifixion, another lit only by muzzle fire. But if Manny is the film's heart, his brutal mother is its spine. There's not one false beat in Deadwyler's performance, even when she's squashing joy and making us want to strangle her. This future she's battling is figurative, yet her desperate self-reliance — her inability to trust others — is deeply relatable to anyone struggling to get by without a safety net. She's given up on humanity. Still, there has to be a better way to survive.
USA Today
10 hours ago
- USA Today
Judy Rankin says it's 'dreamlike' receiving honorary degree from University of St. Andrews
When Judy Rankin first received an email from the University of St. Andrews last December, she thought it was a prank and asked a couple friends to look it over. Six months later, when her day in Scotland finally arrived, 80-year-old Rankin said it felt like a dream being awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD) from the historic and prestigious school. Previous honorary graduates include Arnold Palmer, Renee Powell, Bob Dylan, Hillary Clinton and Dame Judi Dench. "I think almost anybody can imagine when this comes to your email one day in December, you can't think it's possibly real, why you and what did you do to deserve this," Rankin told Golfweek. "Let me just say I've enjoyed this as much as anything I've done in a very long time, maybe as much as anything I've ever done." Rankin, 80, won 26 times on the LPGA before blazing a trail in television. She covered five Open Championships at the Old Course, including Jack Nicklaus' farewell in 2005 and Tiger Woods' completion of the career grand slam in 2000. "I feel like I know this golf course like the back of my hand, and I only ever played it once," Rankin told the graduates, "but I've been around it with some of the really great players in the world, both men and women." Rankin was accompanied on the trip by good friend Sandra Post, the first Canadian to play on the LPGA, as well as close family friends from Midland, Texas. Her brother, sadly, had some travel woes. Rankin was on her own when she first arrived in St. Andrews. "Here it was OK to be myself," she said. "It was a little coming home of sorts. I'm sure there are lot of people in the game and lot of people in television who feel that way, too." Rankin turned pro at the age of 17 and has said that if she hadn't gone to the LPGA, she wanted to attend the University of Missouri and study journalism. As it turns out, she didn't need a degree to become a broadcast legend. For her speech – Rankin said it wasn't meant to be a "forever talk" – she thought about it a little bit over time and wrote down a few things the day before. 'Find joy in small things; as you age, they will stack up and it'll become a whole library of the small things that made you smile," she told the graduates. "And when you think back on them, they'll make you smile again. "Be grateful. Find contentment, and you will have a good life.'
