Lily Collias

James Le Gros

Danny McCarthy

Sumaya Bouhbal

Diana Irvine

Sam Lanier

Eric Yates

Peter McNally

Julian Grady

Becca Brooks Morrin

Valentine Black

Sarah Wilson

Wilson Cameron

Graham Mason

Nell Simon

India Donaldson

Neil Champagne

Sara Eolin

Veronica Diaferia

Jaques Black

Roger Donaldson

Riccardo Maddalosso

Lethe Black

Nell Geer

Nicole Boettcher

Breanne Thomas

Autumn Stevens

Gordon Landenberger

Sabina Friedman-Seitz

Will Kempner

Alex Bliss

Jack Sasner

Erica Pearce

Eli Cohn

Will Colacito

Caiya Sanchez-Strauss

Olivia Mastrangelo

Eric Ruby

Maxwell di Paolo

Caspar Newbolt

Sophia Takal

Amy Zimmer

David Gordon Green

Taylor Rowley

Theodore Schaefer

Sarah Winshall

Taylor Williams

Celia Hollander

Drama

Good One

International Pigeon Production

Smudge Films

Tinygiant

Baird Street Pictures

United States of America

CinemaSerf

I think maybe son “Dylan” (a fleeting appearance from Julian Grady) might have had the right idea when he decides to opt out of his dad’s camping trip with his best friend and his daughter. Seems that “Matt” (Danny McCarthy) is having father-son issues amidst a divorce after he strayed with someone quite a bit younger. His travelling companions are lifelong buddy (James Le Gros) and teenage “Sammy” (Lily Collias) who have a more typical relationship. She has known “Matt” for years and for a while their trip, trekking through the beautiful Catskill mountains, seems to pass off amiably enough. They even meet some fellow travellers for some who has been where grandstanding; the tents seems to go up without any slapstick and there’s a little teasing about the nature of her relationship with “Jessie”. “Matt” however, begins to feel a bit melancholy though as he gradually beings to appreciate that his family is disintegrating and after a revealing conversation with “Sammy” and an even more revealing and wholly inadequate one she has with her father afterwards, it becomes pretty clear that she is not without her own problems and her father has quite a bit of growing up of his own to do. It’s a very slowly paced drama this, with most of the dialogue delivered as naturally occurring conversation. That works to an extent as sentences are left unfinished and inferences are made using facial expressions, but what is missing here is any sense of development of these people. We are left to make too many assumptions which rather lets the thing down as the story heads to it’s crunch moment. That rather comes out of the blue and seems contrived to make the very point the auteur wants to make despite it not really fitting the profile or behaviour of the characters we had hitherto been walking through the wilderness with. I suppose, without giving the game away, I just don’t agree with the fundamental message that the latter stages of the film seem to be trying to convey here and so was ultimately a bit disappointed that what started off as an light-hearted, quite wittily scripted, observation of family became something a little subliminally sinister for the sake of it. It’s a gorgeous film to watch and Collias delivers engagingly, too, but films like this risk fuelling a growing misconception of an opportunistic or even predatory male stereotype that most men simply won’t accept and isn’t actually true.

English

Official Trailer

India Donaldson, Lily Collias, and James Le Gros on Good One

Good One Intro by Rajendra Roy