Movie Nation

Jason S. plays a temple cantor who has kind of lost the plot, when lo and behold, his former music teacher (Carol Kane) shows up and wants Bat Mitzvah classes.

Oy? Don’t forget the “vey.”

Kane and Schwartzman have made quirky their respective brands over the years, and this Aug.23 release has them at testing the limits of “How screwy can you be and remain endearing?”

Sweet and ever-so-slight, “Confessions of a Wandering Saint” is a dark, deadpan Argentine comedy about a “miracle” and the faithful Catholic who’s willing to risk her fast pass to heaven to “prove it.”

The debut feature of Argentine filmmaker Tomás Gómez Bustillo, “Crónicas de una Santa Errante” is set in a rural village where a quartet of little old ladies tidy the ancient church whose saint gives the crossroads its name — Santa Rita.

The others also serve as a vocal group for Father Eduardo (Pablo Moseinco). But pious Rita (Mónica Villa) stumbles across something that might prove her faith is the strongest of all. An old statue, covered and stored, bears a resemblence to a long missing icon of the saint she and the town are named for.

She starts digging around on the Internet and finds both confirmation and refutation for her theory. Typical.

She gets so wrapped up in this moral dilemma that she neglects her doting husband Norberto (Horacio Marassi), who is on her side.

“If you want it to be a miracle, it is,” he says (in Spanish with English subtitles).

The priest is an even easier sale, especially after the statue is “modified” to fit the old descriptions of it.

How far will Rita go to make her, her saint’s, her church’s and her town’s name? Pretty far.

That’s how she has the accident. The credits roll — full credits — and yet, we’re only 33 or so minutes into this story. The movie’s not over until the saintly statue and the faith that props it up says so.

Rita emerges from the wreck a ghost, trying to find one being who can see her. Norberto and her friends and priest don’t. At least Norberto sneezes in her presence, as if he’s got a clue.

A guy on a scooter seems to know, but he’s got horns and “you’re not my case.” It’s up to an “angel” (English pronunciation), complete with halo (Nahiel Correa Dornell) explains the drill — “express” service to heaven, or “”premium” path, complete with canonization, the works.

Will Rita’s dream come true? Or will she get “stuck,” manifested as a lightbulb or moth or what have you as a form of purgatory?

“Confessions” isn’t exactly Latin American “magical realism.” It’s a lot closer to “Heaven Can Wait/A Matter of Life and Death/Here Comes Mr. Jordan” than anything of great meaning and weight. There are “rules” to this afterlife, because there always are.

It’s a lovely looking film, of rustic rural vistas, pools of light in the evening gloom and whimsical angelic halos for the heavenly, with the dead-on-their-journey glowing in the dark.

But it’s lightweight, vague and a tad obscure, never quite delivering the parable it promises, limiting the young, quarelsome and randy new couple next door as mere decorative titilation, the priest is unrealized comic potential.

Screen veteran Villa, who dates back to “Waiting for the Hearse” in the ’80s, makes Rita a simple woman of faith, cunning enough to figure out what will seal the faked deal, clumsy enough to wreck on the way to her triumph. We kind of like her, but that’s more intuitive than anything this thin script delivers.

Rating: profanity, some nudity

Cast: Mónica Villa, Horacio Marassi, Pablo Moseinco and Nahiel Correa Dornell

Credits: Scripted and directed by Tomás Gómez Bustillo. A Hope Runs High release.

Running time: 1:25

A sweet turn by Amy Smart, Judd Hirsch trotting out another version of “curmudgeonly” and a sensitive take on childhood anxiety are what the kids baseball dramedy “Rally Caps” has to recommend it.

It’s a limp noodle of a “family” film, about as far from “edgy” as you can get. The big message is somewhat swamped by maudlin attention to “Big Game” kids’ sport film formula. But it’s inoffensive, and perhaps a potential mental health conversation-starter in some families.

As Hirsch’s baseball-mad grandpa mutters about his nervous, jumpy grandson, “Who knew kids could get the yips?” Yeah, they can. Children can have anxiety before they can spell the word.

Jordy (Carson Minniear) is an Orioles fanatic whose chief baseball skills might be the vast collection of “rituals” and “routines” he picked up from Baltimore Orioles lore — this star tapping each foot five times before a play, that one grabbing the bill of his cap a certain way.

The problem is, Jordy learned all that from his father and grandfather. And Dad died the year before. Now, Jordy’s got a much older brother (Ben Morang) away at college and nobody to coach him but grandpa. Grandpa is all about the “routines.” Jordy takes these rituals to extremes.

One traumatic Little League tryout later has Mom (Smart) nursing Jordy on the field and rushing him to the emergency room. It’s going to take more than a rituals and summer baseball camp with older brother Rob coaching to get Jordy over “the yips” and everything else going on in his head.

A novel touch — Jordy’s into baseball movies, and imagines visits with his dead dad on the field, or in the corn “Field of Dreams.”

Another touch? Several other kids are working through issues — one has cochlear implants, and so on.

Everything else, including the summer-ending “Big Game,” featuring play by play by goofy camp leader Jerry (James Lowe) and a professional baseball announcer, is generic enough to bore anybody older than Little League age.

“Play by play” announcers in Little League games are a lazy screenwriterly conceit of kid sports movies, a way of over-explaining what’s happening and what players are capable of or going through when visuals alone should be enough to get that info across.

When all the kids are “types,” and the camp stuff is a collection of tropes of the experience and cliches from a million other movies (a scary “swim test,” pranks and practical jokes), we know what’s happening, to whom and why and how this all will turn out because the formula is that rigid.

No doubt the book this is based on traffics in those cut-and-paste experiences, character types, etc., as well. Harmless as “Rally Caps” is, you’d kind of hope somebody would put more thought into the story than this.

Even graded on the kid-movie-curve, “Rally Caps” comes up short.

Rating: unrated, fart jokes

Cast: Carson Minniear, Ben Morang, James Lowe, Amy Smart and Judd Hirsch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Lee Cipola, based on a novel by Jodi Michelle Cutler and Stephen J. Cutler. A Crystal Rock release.

Running time: 1:35

The writer-director who gave us “The Lighthouse,” “The Northman” and “The Witch” offers his take on a vampire classic — “Nosferatu.”

Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, Lily-Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe star in the latest cerebral horror from Robert Eggers, opening Christmas Day.

Jessica Alba just sold off her health and beauty company for a nice piece of change. It wasn’t that long ago that the “Dark Angel” alumna finished a run on her latest series, “L.A.’s Finest.” So it’s not like she needs the work.

But when Netflix comes calling with a check and ther offer of another thriller for the veteran action heroine to brawl, stab and head-butt her way through, it’s limber-up time.

“Trigger Warning” is a time-tested vengeance Western given modern combat, arms-smuggling and right wing politics trappings.

Alba plays a special forces commando of some sort, a woman we meet when her team is chased across some piece of Syria because the locals “figured out were aren’t aid workers.”

Parker is a tough broad you want on your side in a scuffle. She’s the type who has to be reminded “You can’t solve every problem with a knife.”

The moment we hear that, we figure that’s exactly what she’s about to do. A call from “back home” tells her that her father died in an accident in an old mine he owned next to the family cantina, Maria’s.

Returning to the desert Southwest, Parker’s old love, the sheriff (Mark Webber) has more doubts about the cause of death than she does. But the suggestion that Dad (Alejandro De Hoyos) might have killed himself, or died because he was clumsy at using grenades to open mine shafts, gets her back up.

Father Frank was a former Green Beret. He knows which end of a grenade to toss and which to keep as a souvenir.

Elvis (Jake Weary), the scumbag brother of our sheriff, drops hints and sets off alarm bells in his belligerent come-ons and Big Man in Town bluster. And since he’s not just the sheriff’s punk sibling, but they’re both the sons of a MAGA Senator (Anthony Michael Hall) running for re-election, Parker starts to piece together clues and connections and wonder what this right wing cabal with a stranglehold on the town and local “justice” is up to, and is capable of.

Alba’s still in fine fighting form and the sound effects team makes every stab, slice, hack and cut “thwick thwick shtick” through flesh with authority. Because Parker’s going to have to blade her way through a lot of minions to get to the truth.

But the story’s “twists” don’t merit the use of the word, and the action beats are generic in the extreme — big explosions here and there, shoot-outs, sniping and fist-fighting and pissed-off beat-downs.

There’s no reason the willowy Alba shouldn’t enjoy a long, two-fisted career thanks to her mastery of fight choreography. She’s more credible in a brawl than “Resident Evil” model/actress Milla Jovovich, if perhaps less convincing than the brawnier Gina Carano.

But Alba’s been around long enough to know good scripts from crappy ones. And she’s rich enough to be choosier — getting better writers, seeking out the best fight choreographers, insisting on bigger name co-stars.

Why have the clout and the luxury of a big bank account if you’re not going to use it to up your game?

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Jessica Alba, Mark Webber, Tone Bell, Jake Weary and Anthony Michael Hall.

Credits: Directed by Mouly Surya, scripted by John Brancato, Josh Olson and Halley Wegryn Gross. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:41

No household names star in this upcoming disaster movie. And the trailer doesn’t show everybody as alarmed as they might be as the Earth opens up in the middle of the continent, the famed overdue-for-a-quake New Madrid fault that changed the course of mighty rivers and knocked the few buildings in America’s midsection back then down, some 200 years ago.

But you never know with a B-movie. Novel idea, decent effects. Maybe a few folks look more terrified in the full movie.

“Young Winston,” an epic of the “Patton” and “A Bridge Too Far” era, was a big hit in 1972 Britain, where nostalgia for “The War” was nearing its peak and the memory of the titanic figure, Winston Churchill, was still fresh as he’d only passed away seven years before.

The story goes that Churchill was a fan of writer-producer Carl Foreman’s “The Guns of Navarone,” summoned him for an audience, and pitched him on how good a movie his swashbuckling memoir of his youth, “My Early Life: A Roving Commission” would make.

And whatever Winston wants, Winston gets.

Actor turned director Richard Attenborough had impressed with his own blast of WWII remembered, “Oh! What a Lovely War.” Foreman pitched him this project and offered him the role of Churchill’s father in the bargain. Attenborough turned down the acting gig, recognizing the responsibility of his first real “epic” and first historical biography.

The list of actors who turned down leads in the film is legion — Malcolm McDowell was offered the title role, Albert Finney as well. Attenborough and Dirk Bogarde were the first choices to play Lord Randolph, Churchill’s quixotic and syphilitic father, a role eventually taken by Robert Shaw.

But it all came together, a sprawling, “Zhivago” length epic with a star-littered cast (Oscar winner Anne Bancroft is Lady Churchill, Winston’s American mother, with John Mills, Jack Hawkins and Anthony Hopkins in support, and future stars Ian Holm, Edward Woodward, Nigel Hawthorne and Jane Seymour also on the payroll).

Yet box office success aside, “Young Winston” was always a stiff, a movie too stately, choppy and staid in its first half (pre “intermission”), a picture that picks up with more action in its later acts only to peter out by the finale.

The aim was to tell of a privileged-birth-to-more-privileged rise to immortality tale, setting up our nanny/boarding school Winston as the victim of a neglected childhood and unremarkable, distracted academic career that turned into a driven pursuit of fame, military and political glory, all to atone for the fall of his father.

Relatively unknown Simon Ward plays Churchill from his college years, through service (usually as a “correspondent” in uniform) in three conflict zones in the late 19th century. Ward’s not bad, and he also convincingly narrates as the elderly Churchill, discounting his “bravery,” admitting his need for attention and “medals medals medals” with which to launch a political career.

But that narration, almost incessant, weighs on the film and just kills its narrative momentum and any sense that the visuals and actions are “telling” the story. No, it’s just a young actor doing your standard issue Winston impersonation. Attenborough would later include such narration in “Gandhi” and “Chaplin,” but never to the degree he lets this script rely on it here.

Young Churchill relies on his father’s influence to get him into schools, sometimes taking two or three attempts to succeed, and family connections to get him an Army commission in the last epic overreaches of British imperialism of the late 1890s — the Indian frontier, Sudan and the Boer War in South Africa.

We see a young man whom other officers sniff “wants to get noticed,” and hear Churchill admit as much. His father was a second son of an aristocrat, and thus he grew up in a family on a lower tier of “rich” and “privileged.”

Taking “Young Winston” from age 7 to 27 — 1881-1901 — required three actors (Russell Lewis and Michael Audreson precede Ward) — as we’re treated to that challenging childhood, school canings, a speech impediment to overcome if he ever wants to be an orator in Parliament like his father. All of this is cast as under the disinterested disapproval of that House of Commons Tory tyro father who almost reached the very pinnacle of British government before a rapid, self-induced fall.

The most interesting material in this epic has to do with Churchill’s early mastery of self-promotion and burnishing his brand. As a correspondent, he could cover military actions and write about them from a first person perspective. As an officer, he could inject himself into that action and ensure he is “mentioned” in the dispatches. And as a child of privilege, he can get a book about his exploits into print, with a few criticisms of military leadership adding to his notoriety.

But for all that, all his hustling and medals-craving comes to little. The fortunes of war — a timely capture and prisoner-of-war imprisonment after some admittedly heroic derring do — accomplishes what all his scheming and publishing never could, giving him notoriety and a fame based on heroism that he can ride into public office.

Foreman’s script delicately dances around honorarily-titled Lord Randolph Churchill’s fatal sexually transmitted disease and the fact that Winston was born somewhat less than eight months after his parents’ marriage. He manages to squeeze in a blunt suggestion of Jeanette Jerome Spencer-Churchill’s indiscretions. A bit sexist, actually.

Hopkins makes a dark impression as the future PM and Lady Churchill-ogler David Lloyd George. Holm plays the Conservative newspaper editor who advises and declines to support Lord Randolph Churchill in a final gamble on “Tory Democracy” re-branding. Seymour plays Winston’s first love, an actress a year away from her James Bond “Live and Let Die” big break, and Attenborough’s daughter-in-law at the time this film was made.

The pre-blockbuster cinema got a tad drunk on epics in the ’50s and ’60s, trying to lure back moviegoers from their new TV-addiction with long, historical, Biblical or literary epics filmed in wider, wider and widest screen processes. But for every “Sound of Music,” “Doctor Zhivago” or “Patton,” there were plenty of “Cromwell,” “Star!” and “El Cid” overreaches.

“Young Winston” was too close to its subject, too trusting of its narrator and too serious to find the silliness of some vainglorious striver risking his neck on the battlefield to ensure future immortality. “Oh! What a Lovely War” hints at the touch Attenborough might have been hired to deliver, but didn’t.

But taken as another bit of on-the-job training from the epic actor (“The Great Escape”) turned director Attenborough, one can see this big cast, scenic vistas, sprawling humanity (and combat) period piece as one more trial run — he’d also helm “A Bridge too Far” — on the road to making the movie he devoted years to planning, the one he’d be most remembered for as a filmmaker, his long-planned life of “Gandhi.”

I dare say he could never have pulled that off without the lumbering stumbles that led up to it, “Young Winston” included.

Rating: PG, violence

Cast: Simon Ward, Anne Bancroft, Robert Shaw, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Patrick McGee, Jane Seymour and John Mills.

Credits: Directed by Richard Attenborough, scripted by Carl Foreman, based on “My Early Life” memoir by Winston Churchill. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 2:04, 2:25 or 2:37

This “true story” caper comedy set on the rough side of the music business in Northern Ireland is sung and joked mostly in Gaelic, the Mother Tongue of Ireland.

Fassbender trying comedy again? This looks daft enough to play, and too esoteric to get theatrical distribution outside of Old Eire.

But we’ll see. Surely it’ll come to streaming.

I have little memory of watching the Italian “empty nest” comedy “The Price of Family.” I reviewed it, but it left little to no impression at all.

I dare say in a week or two I won’t remember much about the sequel “The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance,” a “Granny’s gonna marry a lout who’ll steal all her money” caper comedy, in which the “caper” is killing Nunzio, Nonna’s ne’er do well actor, mooch and possible “Merry Widow Murderer” fiance.

Yes, writer-director Giovanni Bognetti is borrowing from Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” for this one. Just a little.

Anna (Angela Finocchiaro) is buttonholed by boorish Nunzio (Antonio Bruschetta, funny) at a class reunion. Nunzio goes on and on, an aged actor on the make remembering their time as lovers back in high school, that “loser” Anna wound up with, regaling her with exploits as a Gypsy thespian, touring the world, in and out of jails as he goes.

By the way, your mother, Giulana. “Is she still acting? Could I have her number?”

Next thing Anna knows, Nonna Giulana is in love, ready to marry Nunzio on Spanish Menorca in the Balaeric Islands. That six million Nonna inherited? It’s as good as gone.

Nunzio’s heading for his third wedding, both of the earlier outings were short South American marriages. His brides died…suddenly.

There’s nothing for it but to stop this wedding. But not just by warning the smitten Nonna.

“We must MURDER Nunzio,” Anna declares. Pushover husband Carlo (Christian de Sica) goes along. He, like 30something daughter Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and lives-with-his-parents Emilio (Claudio Colica) already has that six million spent.

They’ll do the deed on Menorca.

“We haven’t done anything together in so long,” Mama Anna enthuses. As Alessandra and Carlo scheme up plans and Emilio brings his cowardice and morality into the conversation, the boorish Nunzio keeps giving us more reasons to hope they “save” Nonna by “killing” Nunzio.

As if this dysfuctional quartet of quarelling, buck-passing slackers ever follows through on anything.

There is one clever visual bit of business in this comedy, which tries to wring laughs out of a blind Serbian wedding planner and best man, and the euphemism “moving the furniture” to describe Nunzio and Nonna’s noisy love-making.

The family figures they can make it look like Nunzio is depressed and suicidal as a cover for his coming death. So they con him into diving into the pool and holding his breath. It’ll look like a suicide attempt to the rental villa’s CCTV cameras, which they figure will record the incident and back them up.

The silent movie miming Ale, Emilio, Anna and Carlo engage in to make that CCTV footage convincing is straight out of “The Perils of Pauline.”

The rest of the movie? Barely a grin in it, much less an actual laugh. Considering the effectiveness of the one mimed comic scene, perhaps the insults, inept scheming etc. lose something in translation (in Italian, or dubbed into English).

Either way, Nonna’s “price” is marked down and the movie about it is as instantly forgettable as its predecessor.

Rating: TV-MA, attempted murder subject matter, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Christian de Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Dharm Mangia Woods, Fioretta Mari, Claudio Colica and
Antonino Bruschetta

Credits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Bognetti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

This week “Inside Out 2” set an all-time Juneteenth box office record, some $30 million, raced by “Dune 2” to become the biggest blockbuster of 2024 ($340 million+ by weekend’s end) and is on a pace to clear another $95 million+ this post-Juneteenth weekend, its second week of release.

It’s a global phenomenon, clearing some $724 million already. 

Think there’ll be an”Inside Out 3?”

“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” is still holding audience and will clear the $150 million mark by Tuesday or Wed. of next week, with $18-19 million coming in this weekend. Not exactly a masterpiece, but that’s all money in the bank for the studio and its 50something stars.

Focus Features’ gamble on an aimless, tame and dull biker thriller/bio-pic, “The Bikeriders,” isn’t paying off. A $9.5 million opening weekend isn’t terrible. As Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer and Austin Butler aren’t box office stars, and director Jeff Nichols (“Mud”) is closer to his indie roots than anybody you make bank with, it’s looking like this won’t earn back its $40 million budget. Inexplicably, it got good reviews in some quarters.

That damned dirty apes of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” are setting a franchise mark for box office, marching on with another $3.5-$4 million this weekend, closing in on the $170-175 million mark before this spring hit finally surrenders its screens.

Tiny distributor Vertical tried to pull a fast one with Russell Crow’s “The Exorcism.” He’s not playing “The Pope’s Exorcist,” a cute, roly poly priest tootering around Europe on a Vespa in papal livery. This isn’t a sequel. Vertical opened it wide betting that people wouldn’t figure that out. Crowe plays an actor in it, and he might have guessed that he was soiling his “brand” by doing another exoricism movie that isn’t a sequel. But whatever.

He and his movie and Vertical Releasing are facing utter audience indifference, as “The Exorcism” won’t clear $2 million by much.

June Squib’s action debut “Thelma” cleared $2 million in limited release.