A brutal look at slavery and beyond

   

     In the heat of our endlessly fractious moment, Antebellum — a movie about the lasting consequences of slavery  — should have scored a direct hit.

     Too bad directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz  squander some of their movie's power with a gimmicky Twilight Zone flourish that pushes the movie from its purposefully strange moorings into a lesser world, one in which contrivance smothers insight.

     Bush and Renz get off to a strong start with a beautifully orchestrated sequence that takes place on what appears to be a prototypical plantation. 

     An eerily bucolic mood prevails. Horses move slowly. Enslaved women, all uniformly dressed, hang the wash. Every trace of spontaneity seems to have been banished, something on the order of what Margaret Atwood accomplished in Handmaid's Tale.

    It doesn’t take long for the directors to reveal the horror that underlies the plantation's placid surface.  Antebellum understands that it's possible and perhaps even necessary to treat parts of American history as a horror story.

    The repellant brutalities of slavery are shown in painful detail, but even at that, this plantation seems slightly off-kilter.

     The enslaved aren't tormented by the genteel but twisted southerners typically associated with the Old South of movies. Instead, Confederate soldiers run the plantation. 

     They're  led by an officer (Eric Lange) whose quietly expressed sadism sets the tone. Not only is Lange's character a rapist, but he leads group chants of “blood and soil” that sound as if they've been borrowed from a Third Reich playbook.

     Imbuing her role with ferocity and conviction, Janelle Monae plays an enslaved woman named Eden. Eden's only objective: To escape her tormentors.

     A malicious white woman (Jena Malone) helps oversee the non-stop brutalization of those consigned to picking cotton and trying to avoid the smirking arrogance of Captain Jasper (Jack Huston), the officer who enforces the plantation's draconian rules.

    Because the enslaved workers aren’t allowed to speak to one another without permission, the encounters between Monae’s character and new arrival Julia (Kiersey Clemons) are fraught with tension. The normal made illicit by oppression.

    Those who haven’t read much about the movie deserve to approach Antebellum's plot without spoilers. 

    Know though that Gabourey Sidibe shows up in a small, lively role and that the directors take a leap that's obviously intended to throw an audience off guard as the movie tries to connect past and present.

      Unfortunately,  the story’s big reveal proves a letdown and some of the final images try so hard to become iconic that they play like quotations, poster-ready illustrations drawn from the cinematic language of revenge.

    Antebellum opens with a familiar high-minded quote from William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

     The malodorous vapors of American's "original sin" are still with us, but too often, Antebellum fails to live up to the seriousness to which it evidently aspires.  

     As a result, the movie's boldness -- and it has some -- jars more than it illuminates. 

A relaxed, enjoyable father/daughter tale

Heart Beats Loud is one of those laid-back movies that isn't out to oversell you on anything. Set in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, the movie tells the story of a father and daughter who make music together. The twist: The daughter (an appealing Kiersey Clemons) has ambitions that go beyond music. She's about to start college and wants to be a doctor. Dad (a relaxed but sometimes dour Nick Offerman) thinks the two should try to pursue a musical career together, particularly because Clemons' Sam has an obviously potent talent. But it’s Offerman's Frank who dreams of striking musical gold. A hit record could liberate him from the failing, vinyl-only record store over which he presides. He'd like to make music, not sell it. The songs -- pleasing enough -- are interrupted by whispers of a plot involving Offerman’s character’s mom (Blythe Danner); his landlady (Toni Collette) and his bartender friend (Ted Danson). A romance between Clemons' character and a young woman played by American Honey's Sasha Lane doesn't add much, but the movie is relaxed enough to accommodate a bit of meandering. Offerman has a sly way of commanding the screen, avoiding any of the ingratiating gestures that would have turned Frank into an off-beat role model. Director Brett Haley (I'll See You in My Dreams) may not dig deep, but his movie wanders into summer buoyed by the odd couple chemistry of a father who may have more growing up to do than his brightly ambitious daughter.

He's a nerd with eyes on Harvard

Flawed but fresh, Dope revolves around an appealing cast.

Several critics have said that director Rick Famuyiwa's Dope is a bit of a mess. They're right, of course.

Dope is one of those scattered movies that fills its 115-minute running time to the bursting point, but Famuyiwa -- who also wrote the script -- may have an excuse. He's trying to capture the raggedy spirit of 90s hip-hop culture as reflected in the life of a high school senior who lives in the hardscrabble Bottoms Neighborhood of Inglewood, Ca.

Famuyiwa builds his movie around Malcolm (an appealing Shameik Moore), a young man who's obsessed with 90s Hip-Hop and who treats his expansive knowledge of the period with exacting discipline.

A smart kid whose main aspiration is to get into Harvard, Malcolm is no idle dreamer. He has the right kind of grades and off-the-charts SAT scores.

Still, the question of whether Malcolm can make it out of his neighborhood looms over the movie.

Malcolm has only two friends: Jib (Tony Revolori), a Latino kid; and Diggy (Kiersey Clemons), a lesbian who's sometimes mistaken for a boy.

Together, these characters form a trio of outliers in a world that's not big on encouragement. Malcolm's high-school adviser, for example, thinks Harvard aspirations are a product of Malcolm's delusions.

That's not how Malcolm sees it. At one point, he tells a girl that he's met (Zoe Kravitz) that she shouldn't accept a limited image of herself. It's more than a pep talk; it's a way of saying that she doesn't have to live down to the expectations of others.

Now, before we go any further, let me assure you that I'm making all this sound a bit more serious than it is. For the most part, Dope is a profane comedy, but one that's built around the kind of entanglements that can develop in a tough neighborhood.

A convoluted plot forces Malcolm into the world of drugs. He meets and impresses a drug dealer named Dom (rapper ASAP Rocky), finds himself at a party where a fight breaks out and inadvertently winds up with a bunch of MDMA. During the chaos, someone stuffs the drugs into Malcolm's backpack.

Knowing nothing about the world of drugs, Malcolm and his pals must find a way out of their jam. Dom, now under arrest, wants his drugs back. Dom's rivals are also after the drugs.

Enough about the plot, which tends to resolve into a series of complications that wrap up with in a breezy style that's not entirely fresh.

Intricacies of plot aside, Malcolm's drug adventures bring him into contact with folks as varied as a shady Harvard grad businessman, the businessman's wild-ass son and his sexually hyped up daughter.

Moore negotiates all of this with a sense of naivety and wide-eyed confusion that's both credible and engaging. With a flat-top haircut and thrift-store fashions, Malcolm seems out of his depth until the movie snaps to attention with a strong and biting finale. Think of it as a bracing coda to what can feel like a less-than-riveting, drug-oriented plot.

Famuyiwa seems intent on shattering racial stereotypes, on providing live-wire jolts of entertainment and lacing it all with social commentary. That's a tall order, and he doesn't entirely deliver, but, when Dope is clicking, it's winningly sure of itself and fun.