An actor earns serious credit when they not only perform incredibly in a role but perform it in a way that makes audiences believe no one else could have possibly played it better. Not to overly gush about a film others have already gushed enough over, but I was oozing with said respect when exiting Grandma. Not only is it a well-written film with a rare and fiercely defined main character, but its title role fits its perfectly casted actor, Lily Tomlin, in perfect symbiosis. Playing this role at this point in her career is perfect timing, and Paul Weitz casting and utilizing her unique talents is an example of the art of directing at its finest. Though comedy might be the safest genre for allowing septuagenarians to shine (though Grandma is more a part of that ambiguous sub-genre of dramedy), it’s films like this that prove there is a trove of older actors who, in addition to the talent they already bring, provide another level of performance that, when given the chance, can absolutely blow us away.

This secret reserve of talent—likely derived straight from life experience—is something Tomlin displays in abundance in Grandma. A taciturn and grieving widow, Tomlin plays Elle Reid, a feminist poet and movement leader, still revered if not much remembered from her glory days. A year and a half has passed since her partner Violet has died from cancer, and her relationship with a much younger woman, Olivia (Judy Greer), is ending and she deals with it with the same cutting rigidity with which she faces all of life’s challenges, telling Olivia she doesn’t love her, and to leave her key on the table. Elle hardly has time to actually process this breakup when her teenaged granddaughter Sage (the curly-haired goddess Julia Garner) shows up on her front door, pregnant and in need of funds for an abortion.

Elle does her due diligence as a grandma—complaining about the price of an abortion these days—and also as a wizened woman, asking Sage if she’s thought through the decision since she’s likely to think of it at some point every day for the rest of her life, but never tries to talk her out of it. Instead, she grabs the keys to her vintage Dodge and agrees to help Sage scare up the $600 she needs by 5:30 that afternoon. As Elle attempts to collect on old debts and the goodwill of friends, more of her varied and complicated life is revealed. Laverne Cox is a tattoo artist buddy who tells of Elle’s kindhearted gift of loaning her money to fix a botched transgender boob-job. Elizabeth Pena is coffee shop owner who puts Elle in her place by offering $50 for some of her old first edition hardbacks, including The Feminine Mystique (and Sage wonders aloud if the book has anything to do with The X-Men). Elle challenges Sage’s sensibilities, teaching her along the way by standing up to her deadbeat boyfriend when Sage won’t (hilariously kicking the teenager’s ass) and making a scene in a coffee shop when the proprietor asks her to quiet down when discussing abortion.

While clearly pro-choice, the film doesn’t especially try to conventionalize or even trivialize abortion but instead bring it into colloquial terms. Sage’s decision is treated with gravity and respect. It’s even given an interesting dual-perspective by another character in the film, who expresses the sadness an abortion once brought them with sincerity and dignity. The crux of the film lies within a scene between Elle and her one-time husband Karl (Sam Elliott, also absolutely shining), he an unfortunate casualty of Elle being gay at a time when no one was discussing such things and thus part of her path of destruction in her youth.  They chit-chat about lovers and grandchildren, roll a doobie together, and then go on to have a fiercely charged and emotionally revealing series of exchanges that perfectly expresses the complexity of real relationships, the many forms of love, and the way our decisions shape us and stay with us as we mature.

Paul Weitz is a wonder in being able to capture saturated morsels of the different humor associated with different age ranges and genders. In American Pie he nailed the adolescent male mind without demeaning it, and here he’s traveled the length of the spectrum (galaxy?) to home in on the perfectly evolved humor of an aging widowed lesbian academic. I’ve certainly never heard anyone insult another by calling them a “writer-in -residence” but the joke is among the sharpest of the film. All involved should certainly remain in the minds of voters when awards season rolls around.

Filled with laughs, realistic love, and a freedom to emote, Grandma is as cathartic as it is hilarious. Even while seeing the pain that comes from a lifetime filled with loss and experience, the wisdom and humor of a lifetime’s experience is given equal merit. It’s enough to make being a grandma look like the coolest job out there, and a reason to look forward to advancing through our years.

A version of this review was originally published as part of our Tribeca 2015 coverage.

In the crowded world of coming-of-age indies, Leah Meyerhoff’s debut feature I Believe in Unicorns manages to stand out. Using highly stylized visuals, the film transforms the Bay area surroundings into a magical fantasy land of a teenage girl’s mind, often utilizing dreamlike hallucinations and stop-motion animation to represent her feelings. Meyerhoff crafts a delicate observation of young lust from a paper-thin but universal story, showing the difficulties of transitioning into adulthood and leaving behind fairy tale fantasies. The film feels deeply personal—even autobiographical—as Meyerhoff uses her actual mother in the film and an opening credit montage of home videos that feel inspired by her own childhood memories.

Free-spirited high-schooler Davina (Natalia Dyer) seeks refuge from the demands of her wheelchair-bound mother (Toni Meyerhoff), whom she’s been the sole caretaker of for most of her life. Early in the film she stumbles upon a cigarette-smoking skateboarder named Sterling (Peter Vack). The attraction to him is immediate. His energetic and rebellious personality is exactly the kind of change Davina hopes will liberate her from her current monotonous routine. They hit it off right away, bonding over the lack of father figures in their lives and the desire for adventure. Soon they’re spending every spare moment together, and one evening in the back room of a punk rock show, she loses her virginity.

Davina overlooks the early warning signs of Sterling’s aggression, even ignoring the trusted opinion of her best friend, Cassidy (Julia Garner). Soon after their first sexual encounter, Davina gets the cold shoulder after expressing affection towards him. His disinterest only arouses her more. And after a half-assed apology of, “I get that way sometimes,” the two move on as if nothing happened. The very next day, they finally do what they’ve always wanted; escape. Expecting the impromptu road trip would lead to self-discovery, they end up learning more about each other than themselves. For Davina, this means facing the ugly side of Prince Charming and realizing life isn’t a storybook.

I Believe in Unicorns captures the uncertainty of being an aimless teenager—still unsure of who you are or where you want to go. When the two leads set out on a road trip, their destination is simply “anywhere but here.” Moments of childish behavior such as giggling water gun fights and applying temporary tattoos are mixed in with sudden sexual romps and violent outbursts. The most important advice the film offers is, just because you want to be an adult—or even act like one—doesn’t mean you are one. And little do they know, the irony of becoming an adult is, once you are one, it’s only natural to miss the days of being young again. But until you hop over the fence, the grass is always greener on the other side.

Davina has always found living in a fantasy world—depicted with mythical creatures like unicorns and dragons—helps her to escape from the troubles of real life. In an opening scene, we watch her neatly organize the contents of her backpack. Then, using stop-motion, the items crawl back into the backpack on their own. There’s also a great tracking shot of the two walking through a carnival while people pass by on unicycles, tossing flamethrowers, and dancing hula hoopers. Davina and Sterling watch these oddities in astonishment, as if they’re seeing the outside world for the first time. The eye-catching animation sequences are combined with Instagram-filter Super 16mm footage, and give Meyerhoff’s film an astonishing aesthetic that would make Michel Gondry (circa The Science of Sleep) proud.

Dyer puts on a brave performance as an innocent teenager experiencing the most vulnerable stage of her life, facing the harsh realities of the real world. Because the film contains very little dialog, Dyer must rely on body language and facial expressions to convey her emotions. And she handles it well. Her naiveté makes watching the struggle heartbreaking, yet brutally honest. It’s like watching an underdeveloped bird ready to leap from the nest, you want to reach out to help, but some lessons are learned the hard way.

The striking cinematography and strong performances make it possible to overlook some of the flaws and clichés found in the script. For instance, we’re not too concerned with who’s taking care of Davina’s mother while she’s away or the awkward kissing scene between Davina and Cassidy. Instead, the atmospheric dreamworld created by Meyerhoff mesmerizes and reminds us of a time in our own life when we’ve felt vulnerable. I Believe in Unicorns is at times rewarding, heartbreaking and chaotic. But then again, so is the real world.

Is it really possible that Lily Tomlin has gone this long without a starring vehicle of her own? The iconic actress has decades of perfectly timed, naturalistic punchlines under her belt, yet for years her parts have been largely reduced to limited arcs on TV shows or small, supporting roles in middling movies. Writer/Director Paul Weitz clearly saw the enormous potential in this market gap. Following his 2013 Tina Fey comedy Admission, in which Lily Tomlin played Fey’s mother, Weitz wrote an entire movie with Tomlin in mind.

Grandma premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival to slew of praise for Tomlin (Way Too Indie caught up with it at Tribeca and had glowing things to say, too). Despite its title, Tomlin’s character is far form a withered, weakened old lady. In Grandma, Tomlin plays Elle Reid, a misanthropic lesbian poet, whose granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up broke and in need of an abortion. Together, the two journey to collect cash, confront their pasts, and hit Nat Wolff in the balls with a hockey stick.

Grandma also stars a collection of familiar faces, many of them in the trailer, including Sam Elliott, John Cho, Marcia Gay Harden, Judy Greer and Laverne Cox. While New Zealanders will get a early chance to see Grandma at the New Zealand International Film Festival in July, Americans everywhere will have to cope with Granmda‘s August 21st release date by watching and re-watching the pleasant new trailer below:

Jim Mickle’s We Are What We Are (a remake of the 2010 Mexican horror film of the same name) received a lot of buzz from its Sundance premiere earlier in the year though we first saw the film a few months later when it played during the Directors Fortnight at Cannes. More recently we had the opportunity to sit down with Mickle to chat about his film in our interview. The film is now starting to make its way into a wider public release and to give a little more background on the film they have released a short featurette.

The featurette gives some insight on how important it is to question certain traditions, especially growing up. We Are What We Are centers on a creepy family who carries out a disturbing family tradition which leads to some nauseating images towards the finale. The film is essentially an exploration into fundamental religion mixed with in a throwback to the horror genre of a few decades back.

Watch the We Are What We Are featurette:

Jim Mickle loosely remakes Jorge Michel Grau’s 2010 horror flick, Somos lo Que Hay, with We Are What We Are, an American Gothic mutation of Grau’s well-received tale about a family of cannibals. More family drama than gore fest, Mickle’s film is driven by atmosphere and mystique, more concerned with creeping you out than making you hurl…until the abominable grand finale, that is.

The film opens in a small town outside of the Catskills, with Emma Parker (Kassie DePaiva), the matriarch of the cannibalistic Parker family, dying of a freak accident, leaving behind her husband, Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Isis (Ambyr Childers, The Master) and Rose (Julia Garner, Martha Marcy May Marlene), and young son, Rory (Jack Gore) to carry out their creepy family traditions, the ambiguously religious origins of which are revealed in time. Mama Parker was responsible for preparing a ritualistic mortal gumbo for the family to chomp on, so now the burden of the slaughter falls on the shoulders of the eldest daughter, Isis. Papa Parker drags home a hapless victim for Isis to butcher, but she and Rose (constantly frazzled and paranoid) begin to buckle under the immense gravity of the task at hand when they discover that the poor soul they’re meant to mutilate is a girl from school.

Frank is a menacing man of few words, unpredictably snapping in bursts of rage, employing intimidation (both physical and psychological) to raise his children. Sage is eerily understated and an imposing force of nature, evoking a sense of tight-lipped dread–you’ll be on edge every second he’s on screen. Garner and Childers, both exceedingly talented for their age, put forth absolutely heartbreaking performances, though, to no fault of their own, their wholesome, Disney-kid good looks seem to sap the terror out of certain scenes, perhaps because their beauty distracts from the grisly atmosphere rather than juxtaposing it. Tarantino favorite Michael Parks is as dependable as ever, playing a good-hearted doctor who begins to catch on to the Parkers’ bloody history as he finds “clues” (i.e. human remains) floating down the flooded river, and his encounter with Mr. Parker when he finally puts the pieces together is the best scene of dialog in the film.

For the most part, Mickle uses the same quiet, lingering creepiness that pervades Martha Marcy May Marlene (much of his crew worked on that film, as well), allowing the stillness and ambiance of the moment to buzz in your ear a bit, needling at your nerves. Oddly, there are certain scenes that would have been elevated by this “silent treatment” (most notably the spectacularly gory ending), but instead have bizarrely melodramatic music plastered all over them, muffling the shocking immediacy of it all. In the films most egregious dip in artfulness, an inexplicable sex scene (it’s so out of the blue you’ll laugh) cartoonishly screeches to a halt with a splash of Platinum Dunes-style gore. Against the palpable, pitch black atmosphere Mickle and company create, the sequence feels a little silly, though the stumble doesn’t hurt the film all that much.

The Parker household–and the entire film, in fact–feels of another time, with candlelight flickering against the deep shadows of its corridors, contrasting brilliantly with the biblical rainstorms pouring outside the windows. There’s a not-so-subtle knock on fundamentalist religion that’s ever-present in the film, but the storytelling is effective whether you choose to digest it as a religious parable or not. Mickle and his crew deserve a lot of credit (especially cinematographer Ryan Samul) for exercising a great measure of finesse and deliberateness in crafting We Are What We Are, which could have easily become a throw-away jump-scare machine in less caring hands. Though the Salo-level gore of the final act doesn’t repulse so much as it confounds, the well-executed slow burn that leads us to it is worth the price of admission.

We Are What We Are trailer:

You might have seen movies about teenage pregnancy before, but you’ve never seen them done like this. In a refreshing take on the topic, Rebecca Thomas’ debut Electrick Children gives us a story of immaculate conception that is easy to love and wonderfully unique. Though it begins in a religious community, whether the pregnancy in question truly was immaculate conception or not is inconsequential; in a world of heightened possibility, we’re asked to suspend our disbelief in a far more uplifting manner than usual.

The film begins in a conservative Mormon colony in Utah, where 15 year old Rachel (Julia Garner) is interviewed about her faith by her pastor and father (Billy Zane). Rachel, who has never seen a tape recorder before, sneaks into the basement that night and finds herself listening to a blue tape, with a cover of The Nerves’ hit song “Hanging on the Telephone” recorded on it. The next thing we know, Rachel’s pregnant, and convinced that it was immaculate conception – that the holy spirit came to her through the man’s voice on the tape. Her mother, who caught Rachel and her brother Mr. Will (Liam Aiken) grappling over the tape on the floor that night, is not convinced, instead believing that Mr. Will forced himself on his sister. Mr. Will is exiled from the community, and an arranged marriage is organised for Rachel; but the young girl with a rebellious streak is convinced of her innocence and drives off in the night in hopes of finding the man on the tape, not realising that Mr. Will is asleep in the back of the truck.

And so, with her wide, curious eyes, we come to meet Las Vegas as though for the first time. A land of promise and electric paradise, it’s everything Rachel needs and more as she encounters a young group of skating stoner musicians, believing one of them to be the man on the tape. The contrast between her hometown in Utah, shot in nostalgic desaturated colour, and Vegas, with its neon lights and enchanting atmosphere, only serves to highlight the beauty of both, rather than display one as better than the other—and this consistent refusal to take the easy route of cutting down fundamentalist faith is what makes Thomas stand out even more as a director. There are plenty of comedic moments, as one would expect when two young traditionalist children are suddenly faced with the wasted youth of Sin City, but this humour never comes at the expense of Mormon culture.

As the story progresses, things do seem to be rather convenient, with one particular revelation seeming a little too felicitous for us to openly accept it, as the characters do. Though all of the characters are believable, they exist somewhere out of our reach, in a world of fantasy and exhilaration. Nevertheless, Rachel’s naivete is surprisingly believable, thanks both to her unwavering faith and to Julia Garner’s amazing performance. Garner is always naive without being stupid, and her big eyes and innocent face are more than perfect for the endless curiosity she portrays. The supporting cast are also fantastic, with a convincing Aiken as a boy newly discovering the pleasures of the world, and Rory Culkin’s surprisingly endearing performance as a forlorn runaway. With the intimate development of these characters and such genuinely unexpected turns throughout, it’s not hard for us to forgive any failures to fully reach its potential.

There have been many comparisons of this film to the 2011 drama Martha Marcy May Marlene, but though both films deal with fundamentalist religious communities in a way, the similarities end there. Electrick Children is far less condemning of such societies, instead rising above judgement to provide us with a film that is simply a tale of adolescent discovery wrapped in the warm glow of innocence. It lifts us up beyond issues of virtue and honour, into a sun-kissed kingdom so genuine it’s hard for us to be cynical. The story of a child growing up, it allows us to leave behind our own adulthood and the pessimism that comes with it, if only for a moment. Rachel tells us, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” But if I had to sum up this film in one word, that word would not be God, but beauty.

Electrick Children trailer: