Go through the massive list of stars that appear in Joe Swanberg’s Digging for Fire and it might be easy to claim that one of the most prolific names in modern indie has “gone mainstream.” But actually watch Digging for Fire (or Happy Christmas or Drinking Buddies), and it’s clear that the mainstream has actually come knocking on Swanberg’s door. This is the same low-key, character-based storytelling Swanberg has been honing for years, only now with a plethora of talent and established names thrown into the mix. And, if anything, Digging for Fire shows Swanberg as a filmmaker in total control, using his ensemble and skills at creating a casual, inviting tone to make a subtle and fascinating exploration of commitment, aging and marriage.

Taking place in Los Angeles, the film opens with married couple Lee (Rosemarie Dewitt) and Tim (Jake Johnson, who co-wrote with Swanberg) taking their son Jude (Swanberg’s own son, stealing every scene he’s in) to house-sit for one of Lee’s wealthy clients. While Lee goes off working as a yoga instructor, Tim—a public school teacher—stays at home during the summer break. Soon after arriving, Tim starts poking around the house and discovers a bone and an old gun buried in a yard behind the house. Tim wants to keep digging, but Lee doesn’t want him messing up her client’s property, and a host of other small disagreements between the two (including Tim’s refusal to put Jude in a private school) leads to Lee taking Jude to spend the weekend with her parents (Sam Elliott and Judith Light).

Tim takes the opportunity to invite some of his old buddies over (Sam Rockwell, Chris Messina, Mike Birbiglia and Kent Osborne, to name a few), and before long he’s convincing all of them to help dig up whatever else might be hiding underneath the property. At this point the film forks off into two narrative strands, one profiling Tim’s weekend with his friends, and the other following Lee trying to have a girl’s night out with her sister (Melanie Lynskey). Both Lee and Tim wind up finding themselves conflicted when they each encounter an opportunity to cheat; Lee meets a British restaurant owner (Orlando Bloom), and Tim makes nice with the young, carefree Max (Brie Larson).

Anyone familiar with Swanberg’s previous work won’t be surprised to learn the film’s central mystery is a nonstarter. It’s more of an excuse for getting characters together to casually chat about the themes Swanberg and Johnson really want to explore. “When did you feel like you got back to yourself?” Lee asks her mom at one point, wondering if marriage and motherhood have removed her ability to live her own life, and Tim admits to Max that he feels like he’s not maturing, he’s just getting older. Their brief exchanges with friends, family and strangers around them reveal that both Lee and Max have hesitations about staying in for the long haul of their marriage, with the hypothetical idea of something “better” existing out there tempting them into seeking individuality over partnership.

What makes Digging for Fire such an enjoyable yet fleeting experience is how Swanberg lets these ideas flow organically into the film through his terrific cast and tight editing. Narrative doesn’t mean much here, as it’s more about how Lee and Tim’s actions reflect their concerns. Dewitt and Johnson anchor the film nicely, and there isn’t a single weak spot in a cast that’s as sprawling as LA itself. Shooting on 35mm with cinematographer Ben Richardson (who also shot Drinking Buddies and, most famously, Beasts of the Southern Wild), the film’s keen eye for composition helps give it a cinematic feel that comes across as a surprise given its dialogue-heavy approach. Swanberg has made films for over a decade now, and at a pretty quick pace too (remember when he directed six films in 2011?), but in some ways Digging for Fire feels like the start of a newer, more refined era for him. It’s exciting to watch Swanberg in complete domination of his craft, but it’ll be more exciting to see what he does next.

Fresh off the heels of its world début at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, The Orchard has acquired Joe Swanberg’s latest, Digging for Fire, for its North American release.

Digging for Fire looks to continue Swanberg’s recent trend of higher profile films with more notable casts. The film stars Swanberg vets Jake Johnson, Anna Kendrick and Melanie Lynskey, as well as Rosemary DeWitt, Orlando Bloom, Sam Rockwell, Brie Larson and Mike Birbiglia. The film follows the discovery of a bone and a gun which sends a husband and wife—each full of doubts about their future and anxiety about the present—on separate adventures over the course of a weekend.

The Orchard is a music, video and film distribution company, founded in 1997. It previously released 2015 horror film Preservation and the upcoming documentary Point and Shoot, which has found acclaim on the festival circuit.

The release strategy and date is not immediately known.

After two movies worth of Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman) and his stubby dwarf friends trudging across Middle Earth to the lair of the fearsome dragon Smaug, Peter Jackson’s distended Hobbit prequels come to an end with The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, an action-packed last hurrah that sadly feels too reiterative and scattershot to chalk up the trilogy as anything but unworthy. Those who (understandably) come expecting a massive battle royale between hoards of dwarves, elves, men, and orcs will no doubt be satisfied, but those of us less inclined to settle for mindless decapitation, long battlefield camera swoops, and Orlando Bloom surfing on random objects will feel underwhelmed by the film’s lack of emotional depth.

Five Armies opens on a rousing note, with what could have (or should have) been The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug‘s climax: the vain, malevolent dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, whose voice booms out of the speakers like thunder) torches the village of Lake-town, whose ill-equipped denizens have been dreading his arrival, with fiery vengeance (and breath), threatening to reduce every inch of the seaside locale to ashes and embers. Smaug is a remarkable achievement in digital effects, almost on par with Gollum. After raining hellfire and brimstone on the poor villagers, a heroic family man and archer (Luke Evans) manages to best the beast in a one-on-one showdown. From here the film sadly takes a permanent dip.

The charismatic Smaug’s end is a fitting one (it’s the film’s most exciting sequence by far) but with him out of the picture, it leaves us without a lead villain. Dwarf leader Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) takes up the “Big Bad” throne, as he rescinds his promise to share the dragon’s treasure (whose dark properties seem to have corrupted him) with the survivors of the Lake-town attack, who desperately need the gold to rebuild what’s left of the village. They helped him get to the Lonely Mountain in the first place, after all.

The elven army, led by Thranduil (Lee Pace), shows up to claim a piece of the treasure, too, but Thorin’s having none of it, ordering his handful of loyal dwarf warriors to barricade the doors and calling for reinforcements from back home to fight the men and elf armies off for him. Then, a hoard of Orcs (and later, an army of…bats, or something; it isn’t really clear) shows up to crank the intensity up to eleven. It’s a massive, all-out skirmish for the rest of the film, and if you’ve seen The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, you’ll probably be hit with a big whiff of deja vu at this point.

It’s hard not to get caught up in all the sword clashing, giant military formations, grunting orcs and dwarfs (the elves don’t grunt as much), and other battle scene ridiculousness, especially if the thought of arranging five buckets of army men on your living room floor on Christmas morning and then smashing them all to hell in your pajamas still sounds fun to you. I’m still a kid at heart, so how could I resist a good melee? I can’t deny that I had a good bit of fun. The problem here is, it all feels very much like the open-field battle scene at the end of The Return of the King, and has inherited most of the same problems: it’s frantic, hard to follow (there are too many protagonists to keep track of), and way, way too long. It’s all so overblown that the (halfway decent) character work that builds up to the war almost feels like a means to an end, a 90-minute excuse to show you giant CGI orcs toppling over onto CGI warthogs.

There’s another issue I’ve had with Jackson’s Hobbit movies that’s as rampant as ever in Five Armies. The way Jackson films deaths, specifically when the good guys kill the bad guys, is so over-sensationalized and exploitative that at some points it feels as mind-numbing one of the Saw films. An orc vaults up toward Legolas, who’s standing on a higher platform in Lake-town. He uses his two short swords like scissors to behead the baddy and lets the severed head rest on his blades as the rest of the carcass falls to the water. I can understand how this can come off as pretty cool to some people, but to me, kills like this feel a little…trashy.

The Hobbit movies sure do look and feel like their Lord of the Rings big brothers, but there’s something off about them. It’s the little things: while some the original trilogy’s scenes glow with a majestic golden hue (like the ones in Rivendell), Hobbit‘s golden hues look more piss-yellow. (Gross, I know, but watch the films and tell me I’m wrong. Looks like piss.) But the larger issue here is that Hobbit‘s heroes and their plights aren’t all that compelling. Ian McKellen looks tired as hell in his sixth series outing as Gandalf; Freeman, who’s barely in the movie, can’t touch Elijah Wood’s brilliant turn as Frodo; Evangeline Lilly’s elf-lady has a crush on a dwarf that ends awkwardly; and Bloom’s just thrown in there to look pretty and perform unnecessarily acrobatic mass murder.

Five Armies‘ saving grace is Thorin, whose inner-struggle with his lust for power and gold is delivered incredibly well by Armitage. What bigger villain is there than greed itself? The war at the foot of the Lonely Mountain is nothing compared to the war going on inside Thorin’s mind and soul. It’s a great, intimate story told by a fine actor, but it unfortunately gets drowned out by all the noise.

Zulu, the film that closed the Cannes Film Festival this year, now has its first (NSFW) trailer. The movie stars Forest Whitaker and Orlando Bloom in an intense crime thriller set in South Africa in the aftermath of Apartheid. Director Jérôme Salle (Anthony Zimmer, Largo Winch) makes his English language debut in a somewhat familiar genre; high speed nail-biters certainly aren’t foreign to him, even if the language is. He also adapted the script himself (another exercise he is familiar with) from a Carol Férey novel of the same name.

The movie follows Whitaker and Bloom playing homicide detectives on a case in Cape Town which leads them on a brutal, winding investigation of deadly drugs, nefarious science experimentation, and the remnants of a race war. Judging from this preview, there will be action and twists in large supply.

Acclaimed film composer Alexandre Desplat handles the score. After his work on, among other well-received productions, Moonrise Kingdom, Zero Dark Thirty, and Fantastic Mr. Fox, I am excited to see what he does with this.

This Pathé, M6 Films, and Lobster Film joint production has yet to receive an American release date, but check out the trailer below (again, not at the office) and keep an eye out.

Watch the trailer for Zulu:

The Good Doctor is about a lonely young medical resident who has high aspirations to be a well-respected good doctor, but he has hurdles to clear before obtaining such status. The intention of the film is to be a dark psychological thriller but there were too many missteps for it to be an effective one. The Good Doctor contains all the right pieces for a puzzle but fails to connect the pieces to complete one.

Dr. Martin Blake (Orlando Bloom) recently moved into his beach-side condo in Southern California, which is minimalistically furnished, similar to the sterile hospital environment he works in. He is just six days into his residency and already he has started off on the wrong foot by mistakenly giving a Spanish-speaking patient penicillin when he is allergic to it. Having an incident like that does not look good on his record considering he is trying to stand out from his peers to win an infectious disease fellowship.

One of his other patients is a young attractive woman named Diane Nixon (Riley Keough), who cultivates an instant crush on him. He explains to her that her kidney infection is not serious thus making her hospital stay short lived. In order to show gratitude for the quick recovery, the Nixon family invites the doctor over for dinner. Because he began to develop romantic feelings for Diane, he knows the ethical implications of pursuing this means he is treading on thin ice. Despite all of this, he will do whatever it takes to ensure seeing Diane again.

This is when the train begins to derail from the tracks as the potentially fascinating story begins to show its flaws. When he shows up to the dinner, the whole family is there except for Diane. That should have raised more flags than it did, but instead it is more or less shrugged off by everyone involved. Because situations are too conveniently set up and largely implausible, the film results in a lot of eye-rolling.

The largest offender of the film is the writing itself; specifically lacking direction of the lead character. At first he seems really determined to further his career by being the best doctor that he can. Then the character is suddenly content with jeopardizing everything in order to stay closer to this girl. His motives were never fully realized or explored.

Most of the flaws in The Good Doctor can be linked to the poorly written script but Orlando Bloom’s performance did not enhance the film at all. Typically, Bloom is a decent actor but in this film he does not look like the veteran that he is. Because there was no conviction from the character, the audience is not able to believe in any decision he made. Which is funny because someone tells him, “You know what the secret is to being a good doctor, don’t you? You act like one”, too bad he did not follow that advice.

The Good Doctor starts off with an interesting concept but quickly suffers from lack of direction and implausible circumstances. There is no better way to describe the last act other than atrocious. Acting performances and the story get noticeably worse, making the flawed film even more problematic. Instead of deciding on one ending, the film opts to show two distinct outcomes; although neither one of them are satisfying.