Bob's Cinema Diary: 4/30/'21 -- 'Outside Story,' 'Percy vs. Goliath' and 'Four Good Days’'

A word on Cinema Diary. You may wonder why some movies receive full reviews and others show up in this abbreviated format. Lots of reasons. Some of the involve the number of movies being released in a given week. Eight this week, for example. Some of the reasons for the Diary relate to when I've seen a particular movie and how many more movies I need to watch prior to the weekend.

At the same time, honesty compels me to say that the directors and actors who made these films didn't make them to be regarded as secondary efforts. I don't. At the same time, I've yet to find a way to cope with weeks that are flooded with new movies.

The Outside Story 

Movies don't get much more streamlined than Outside Story, a look at a man (Brian Tyree Henry) who locks himself out of his Brooklyn apartment, interacts with his neighbors, and wonders whether he should have broken up with his girlfriend (Sonequa Marin Green). Henry's Charles seems to be a nice guy, a film editor who specializes in assembling visual obituaries of celebrities. The key to the movie involves Henry's performance as a stressed-out but nice New Yorker who has encounters with a cop (Sunita Mani), a neighborhood kid (Olivia Edward), and an older woman (Lynda Gravatt) whose husband recently died. Director Casimir Nozkowski, who also wrote the screenplay, has a nice feeling for the idiosyncrasies of neighborhood relationships but he can't prevent the material from feeling a bit thin. Henry, currently on view in Godzilla vs. Kong, holds the movie together. Although the movie contains some conflict, the stakes feel pretty low -- which can be viewed as a blessing or a severe limitation or perhaps a bit of both.

Percy Vs Goliath

After seeing Christopher Walken miscast as an Irish farmer in Wild Mountain Thyme, I was dubious about Percy Vs Goliath, the story of a Canadian farmer who takes on the Monsanto in a prolonged court battle over patent rights involving canola seeds. But damn if Walken doesn't pull it off, doing credible work as Percy Schmeiser, a farmer who inadvertently planted Monsanto GMO seeds that had blown onto his property from a neighbor's farm. The result:  a prolonged suit. Roberta Maxwell portrays Schmeiser's wife Louise. Zach Braff signs on as the small-town lawyer who represents Schmeiser, and Christina Ricci appears as an environmental activist who encourages Schmeiser to challenge Monsanto. She also helps him take is story global with a visit to India. The story of a little man fighting a major corporation isn't exactly fresh but director Clark Johnson does a good job presenting complicated issues as Schmeiser's case makes its way to the Canadian Supreme Court. 

Four Good Days

Familiarity may not always breed contempt, but it can breed fatigue when it comes to movies. Glenn Close and Mila Kunis play mother and daughter in an addiction drama about a young woman (Kunis) nearly ruined by drugs. Kunis' Molly wants to make another stab at kicking her habit so she asks her mother, Close's Deb, to take her in. This time she really means it -- or so she says. Director Rodrigo Garcia doesn't skimp on realism: Kunis has been given rotting teeth and a distressingly scrawny look. Deb blames Molly's addiction on the doctors who prescribed an Oxycontin regimen after a skiing injury. Since then, Deb has left her husband (Joshua Leonard) and her two kids. The title stems from the offer Molly receives from a detox doctor: If she can stay clean for four days, he'll give her a shot that will keep her from getting high on heroin. If she takes the shot before her system has been cleansed, she could die from its effects. Close and Kunis deliver strong performances but the movie can't escape the dogged quality of the storytelling.  It's difficult not to feel a bit guilty about wanting a fresh charge from an addiction movie, particularly one based on a true story. Still, we feel a bit like Deb feels when Molly shows up at her door after 14 failed attempts at rehab. What? You want us to go down this movie road again?

A victim or is she really insane?

Claire Foy plays a woman institutionalized against her will in Unsane. Steven Soderbergh directs.

Filmed with iPhones by director Steven Soderbergh and built around a powerhouse performance by Claire Foy, Unsane offers moments that shock, unsettle and work on your nerves. And in playing a woman who's put through a physical and emotional wringer, Foy wipes out all memories of the dignity and composure she projected as Queen Elizabeth in The Crown.

Unsane also boasts a bit of head-spinning substance: The movie makes us wonder how we might go about defending our sanity if we suddenly were institutionalized, having mistakenly -- or so we believed -- been identified as a danger to ourselves and others.

Foy plays Sawyer Valentini, a banking analyst who's trying to establish herself in a new city. As the story develops, Sawyer is tested at the deepest levels. Unsane hardly qualifies as a small classic, but the movie wouldn't work at all if Foy had failed to communicate a sense of vulnerability and, just as important, a potential for violence.

After a disturbing incident with a man she picks up at a bar, Sawyer decides to see a counselor. She's fearful of being followed by a stalker. Why someone as capable as Sawyer would seek psychological help at an institution rather than in a more traditional setting -- the privacy of a psychiatrist’s office, for example -- never is made clear, one of several tests of the story's credibility.

An intake officer decides that because Sawyer has thought — albeit tenuously — about suicide, she should be admitted on a 24-hour-hold. Sawyer signs a few papers thinking that she’s signing up for counseling. Without realizing what she's done, she ascents to her own commitment.

The more Sawyer aggressively protests, the more the attendants believe she really needs help. After a few violent outbursts, Sawyer's 24-hour hold is extended to seven days. Her mother (Amy Irving) is sympathetic, but can't obtain Sawyer's release.

Unsane functions on at least two levels. The first involves a social dimension: Is this institution committing people against their will in order to collect insurance money? When such monies run out, the supposedly insane suddenly become sane again. Mental health care becomes a profit-oriented scam.

On a second level, the movie pushes Sawyer to wonder whether she really might be insane. If all the people around you seem to be insane — why else would you find yourself in their company?

Working from a screenplay by Jonathan Bernstein and James Greer, Soderbergh effectively keeps us wondering about Sawyer for quite some time.

The story takes a turn toward horror when a new attendant (Joshua Leonard) shows up at the hospital. Sawyer accuses the attendant of being the man who stalked her in Boston, forcing her to move to Pennsylvania to escape his reach.

No one believes Sawyer, who finds only one ally inside the institution. Nate (Jay Pharoah), a man who has been committed for opiate addiction, has managed to smuggle in a cell phone which he shares with Sawyer.

Initially, Soderbergh’s use of iPhones gives the movie’s images an off-kilter feel that creates a mood of disconnection from the ordinary. Overall, though, I’m not sure there was a great deal of gain in making the movie this way — unless it was to keep costs to a minimum.

Despite some plot leaps that are difficult to swallow and a reveal that arrives too early, there’s enough in Unsane to keep it watchable, providing you don’t mind a surrender to horror-movie ploys before Soderbergh calls it quits.

I don't imagine that Unsane will be a major box-office performer, but it serves as a clear announcement that Foy is more than a regal presence. As Sawyer, she’s vulnerable, frightening and assertive. Her performance goes a long way toward saving a movie that isn’t always able to resist its less imaginative impulses.

Life, death and a teen-age cellist

Another young adult novel finds its way to the screen.

If I Stay, a big-screen adaptation of a 2009 young-adult novel by Gayle Forman, proves something you may already know. The talented Chloe Grace Moretz can carry a movie, hardly a surprise after Moretz scored a big-screen breakthrough playing Hit-Girl in 2010's Kick-Ass . Moretz also held her own in 2010's Let Me In, and occupied the center of an unfortunate 2013 Carrie remake.

Moretz, who's a mere 17, doesn't look as if she's quite grown into adulthood yet, but you can see her beginning to blossom.

There's no faulting Moretz's performance in If I Stay, but the movie qualifies as a near-perfect example of a drama that provokes neither scorn nor admiration, a true middle-of-the-road effort.

Moretz plays Mia, an Oregon teen-ager and budding cellist who falls for Adam, a slightly older rock musician (Jamie Blackley).

If you've seen the movie's trailer you already know the story's gist. A terrible automobile accident involving Mia and her family sets the story in motion and determines its structure.

While languishing in a coma after an extensive surgery, Mia has an out-of-body experience. Her non-corporeal self wanders around the hospital checking in on her father (Joshua Leonard) and her younger brother (Jakob Davies), as well as on relatives and friends who've gathered to keep watch.

Generating more predictability than excitement, flashbacks arrive, most focusing on Mia's developing relationship with Blackley's Adam. We also get a couple of scenes with Mia's mother (Mireille Enos); she encourages Mia to pursue her relationship with Adam.

At first blush, Mia and Adam seem mismatched. She's demure and devoted to classical music. He's a rocker and chick magnet.

Unfortunately, the unfolding romance seems too serious for a girl who has yet to graduate from high school, undermining its power as a central story element for anyone past the age of 30.

Two questions develop: Will Mia pursue her cello dreams at Juilliard or will she hang back to maintain her relationship with Adam? The second question, of course, centers on whether Mia will pull out of her coma, whether -- in the movie's argot -- she'll choose life?

If I Stay seems intended by director R.J. Cutler as a tearjerker with serious overtones, a story designed to allow young adults to think about death while swooning over a romance.

Fair enough, but the movie comes off as too predictable to feel truly weighty and too weighty totally to dismiss. In all, this late-summer movie manages to cauterize highly dramatic events and, in the process, drain them of some of their much-needed emotion.