‘In the Earth’ Film Review: Don’t Mess With Mother Nature, Says Ben Wheatley

Christina Anstead showed her social media followers that she is in good graces with her former mother-in-law. The HGTV star shared an Instagram photo of herself with one of her children and her first ex-husband’s mother, Dominique El Moussa-Arnould.The trio are pictured donning ski attire and are posed in front of snow-covered slopes.

Let's get something out of the way first: While it has a few incidental felicities to admire, by and large Music is a sentimental atrocity so cringe-inducing it should come with an advisory warning for anyone with preexisting shoulder or back injuries. Now for some background that must be addressed before we can go further.

Much of Erin Vassilopoulos’ moody, something’s-wrong-in-the-suburbs directorial debut, Superior, takes place in a Reagan-era Barbie Dreamhouse come to life. Within its mint and pink-punch walls live Vivian (Ani Mesa) and Michael (Jake Hoffman), a young couple who are dismayed when her estranged twin sister, Marian (Alessandra Mesa, Ani’s own twin), a touring rock musician, drops by unannounced during a thawing winter and asks to stay for a few days.

In writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples' debut feature, Miss Juneteenth, Nicole Beharie stars as Turquoise Jones, a single mom to teenager Kai (Alexis Chikaeze) living in a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas. Balancing two jobs, Turquoise does her best to set high standards for her daughter, hoping Kai will stray from her own path and go off to college and seek a career.

The 1969 killing at age 21 of Illinois Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton was a potent secondary plot point last year in Aaron Sorkin's The Trial of the Chicago 7. That same government hit job gets expanded treatment and wields proportionately explosive impact in Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, a historical thriller with an urgency that speaks even louder more than half a century later.

The Studio Ghibli faithful will unlikely be swept away by Earwig and the Witch (definitely not to be confused with Hedwig and the Angry Inch), a pronounced departure from tradition that proves dispiritingly generic in both appearance and tone.

Fox Mulder made the slogan "I Want To Believe" iconic with his UFO poster on The X-Files, but the reason it has spawned so much memorabilia and so many memes is that it speaks to a very human desire. We're a credulous species, even if we're aware that con men and fraudsters abound.

Debuting writer-director Fran Kranz's years as an actor show in the powerful performances he draws from his tight ensemble in Mass, a drama of searing intimacy that trades the political for the personal in its reflections on gun violence and mental health. With laser focus and unflinching emotional candor, the film approaches the seemingly unending horror of school shootings in America from the viewpoint of devastated parents on both sides of the tragedy, six years later.

Also Read: Rodney Ascher's 'A Glitch in the Matrix' Acquired by Magnolia Ahead of Sundance PremiereAscher takes a similar approach, wandering through as many musings that’ll elicit a “What?” as much as a “Whoa.”Speaking of which, it may not surprise anyone to learn that Keanu Reeves is the icon of this ideology, just as “The Matrix” trilogy is its Bible.

Also Read: 'Handmaid's Tale' Star Ann Dowd on the Power of 'Shame and Humiliation' in Aunt Lydia's BackstoryKranz sets his stage well, even crafting an uncomfortably funny prologue in which an overaccommodating church employee (Breeda Wool) shows the room to grief counselor Kendra (Michelle N. Carter), who has set up the meeting.

An ominous score by Clint Mansell mixing electronic dread with insidious melody toils in search of a more coherent horror scenario in Ben Wheatley's disorienting slog, In the Earth.

What does one even make of Ben Wheatley, at this point? That the same director is responsible for films as wildly divergent as “Sightseers,” “A Field in England,” “Free Fire,” “Happy New Year, Colin Burstead,” and last year’s “Rebecca” remake should be impressive – the variations present, in genre and tone, indicated a good old-fashioned journeyman director, and three cheers for that.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The story is specific to one group of women at one particular time, but five decades later, it’s certainly applicable to current questions about the role of religion in society, about the place of tradition and rigor in the Church and about how social justice movements intersect with biblical teachings.

The one thing you can say on behalf of In the Earth is that it is almost certainly the first dramatic feature film to emerge from the Covid era that is explicitly about the worldwide plague that has sidelined and fractured international filmmaking—not to mention the world at large–as we’ve always known it.

Also Read: 14 Buzziest Sundance Movies for Sale in 2021, From Questlove's 'Summer of Soul' to Rebecca Hall's 'Passing' (Photos)The film was one of the opening-night presentations at the virtual Sundance Film Festival on Thursday, occupying the same position as previous music-focused docs like “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” “Searching for Sugar Man,” “What Happened, Miss Simone?” and last year’s “Miss Americana.” No doubt it left some viewers wishing that it had been the Eccles Theatre moving to the

Kourosh Ahari's debut feature proves an accomplished psychological chiller that impresses far beyond its historic status as a U.S. production featuring primarily Iranian or Iranian-American talent.

The psychological toll of investigative police work seeps into the bones of John Lee Hancock's gritty neo-noir The Little Things, which captures Los Angeles County's flat urban sprawl and snaking freeways to highly atmospheric effect.

Watch Video: Denzel Washington and Rami Malek Are Out to Catch Jared Leto in 'The Little Things' TrailerOne senses that Hancock (“Saving Mr. Banks,” “The Founder”) wants to bait and switch the audience with what at first seems like a straightforward policier but then pivots into a character study of Deke and Jim — respectively, an aging lawman who’s literally haunted by his mistakes and an ambitious young climber who may follow in Deke’s footsteps for better or for worse.

We finally have an update concerning that “Tomb Raider” sequel. There was some concern when director Ben Wheatly attached himself to direct “The Meg” sequel for Warner Bros., he might have to exit the “Tomb Raider 2” sequel he was developing with actress Alicia Vikander set to reprise the Lara Croft role.