Movie Nation

He had to look good on a horse so he could make Westerns, be convincing in uniform for his combat films, be sexy in romances and romantic comedies and look like he can take a punch for his boxing picture.
Jake Gyllenhaal is ripped and ready for the body blows in “Southpaw,” a gritty but draggy ripoff of “The Champ” scripted by “Sons of Anarchy” creator Kurt Sutter and bathed in blood and sweat by Antoine “Training Day” Fuqua.
Gyllenhaal is Billy Hope, a mumbling stammering Hell’s Kitchen orphan who has fought his way to the top of his weight division. His fellow ophran/child of the streets Mo (Rachel McAdams) has been there, every step of the way, the wife always in his corner.
“Don’t get hit too much!”
Billy’s main weapons are his rage and his ability to take a punch. He trash talks his foes, even as his face is awash in blood.
But that temper is what sets off an out-of-ring melee with a challenger (Miguel Gomez), and that leads to a shooting and Mo is killed. It’s a wrenching death scene that both Gyllenhaal and McAdams play the hell out of. Enjoy it. The cops have so little interest in this very public murder that they basically drop the matter, as does the movie.
Billy’s life and career go into a death spiral, despite the fact that he’s rich and he has an adorable daughter (Oona Lawrence) who needs him don’t matter. His manager (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson) is no help. His “boys” are pushed aside. One disastrous fight later, and Billy loses the kid, the house, the Bentley and Ferrari, everything.
He turns to blind-in-one-eye trainer Tic (Forest Whitaker) to pull him out of it.
The story arc is entirely too familiar to sustain the two-hours-plus length, the violence, gore and language are the only elements that lift it from the weepy melodrama that “Southpaw” wants to be into “Raging Bull” territory. Fuqua gives us a gloves-eye-view of the fighting sequences, which are more believable than your standard issue “Rocky,” but still strain credulity.
Since we’re already straining to see Gyllenhaal as an inarticulate dead ender and the dearly departed McAdams as anything but a prep school product, that’s a distraction the film doesn’t need.

But Gyllenhaal, covered in blood and tattoos (“Fear No Man” on his back, his daughter’s name and birthday in Roman numerals on his chest) puts the work in and makes us believe, as he always does.
Young Miss Lawrence tugs at the heartstrings, Whitaker gives fair, gruff value and Naomie Harris makes the most of a thankless social worker role that’s frankly beneath her.
The dialogue — that which we can make out — doesn’t reinvent the movies. Gyllenhaal mumbles, Whitaker slurs and 50 Cent, dolled up as a dapper fight promoter, does the same (he’s always been mumbly) and you realize that maybe this one would be better on home video — with the subtitling on.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and some violence
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Oona Lawrence, 50 Cent
Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, written by Kurt Sutter. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time: 2:03

LILA AND EVE – 2015 FILM STILL – Pictured: Viola Davis as Lila and Jennifer Lopez as Eve – Photo Credit: Bob Mahoney / Samuel Goldwyn Film

The great Viola Davis struggles to bring the gravitas of grief to “Lila & Eve,” a thriller about a mother in search of the people who killed her teen son in a random drive-by.
But when grief gives way to rage and revenge, this promising character piece turns into a real head-slapper. That transformation coincides with the arrival of Jennifer Lopez, playing a fellow mother who has lost her child to violence.
Lila & Eve meet at the Mothers of Young Angels support group. Eve lost a little girl. Lila, her beloved, college-bound son, Stephon (Aml Ameen). Lila confesses to Eve that, as deep in mourning as she is, she wants to know who killed her boy. Why aren’t the cops putting some effort into the case?
“We think about it all the time,” Eva says. “But nobody else does.”
With just a sliver of information from the detective assigned the case (Shea Whigham of “Boardwalk Empire”), Lila, egged on by Eve, sets out to get some answers. She doesn’t know why her boy had a .38 revolver in his backpack, or why he was on that notorious street corner. Maybe she doesn’t want to know. But Eve, given custody of the pistol, isn’t shy about waving it around to the first link in the chain that they run across. She shoots the guy, too. And there, “Lila & Eve” goes right off the rails.
As these two intrepid mothers shoot gangsters and steal their phones (leading them up the food chain), remorse never really sets in. Lila makes mention of the fact that they’re just making more grieving moms, but Eve isn’t hearing it.
Late night stakeouts, a happy, selfie-snapping trip out night clubbing (That Lopez lady can dance!), all lead them down the road to their destiny.
The script plays like a movie that was financed based on spoiler alerts, which either aren’t that surprising or feel like contrived cheats, in this case.
Director Charles Stone III, whose peak moment may have been the cute black marching band comedy “Drumline,” works the many flashbacks with Lila remembering her talks with her son in with a deft touch. But the action beats are jarring and the violence seemingly without consequence.
And Davis has her performance chopped down to something lacking the subtlety she’s known for. This character loses her believability at about the time she loses her humanity. We can root for her all we want, but that doesn’t mean we believe the turn of events that transforms a nurturing Atlanta mom into a cold blooded huntress.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Viola Davis, Jennifer Lopez, Shea Whigham, Aml Ameen, Andre Royo
Credits: Directed by Charles Stone III, script by Pat Gilfillan. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:33

Here’s a Korean thriller ready made for a Hollywood remake.
A detective is summoned away from his mother’s funeral by a panicked call from his office. Internal Affairs is onto the squad-wide bribery and they’re all in the deep stink.
His sister is nagging him to be “a good son” and get to the funeral. She’s using his little girl in the nagging.
His wife has a “We need to talk” moment. That’s never good.
And then, distracted by a cute dog, he hits somebody with his car — kills him. He has to stuff the body into the trunk and dispose of it, running police sobriety checkpoints, accident investigators, his own squad’s interest in the missing dead man, along with finding a way to explain the car damage, his tardiness, all of it.
Kim Seong-hoon’s “A Hard Day” has its share of tense moments — Will Detective Go (Lee Sun-kyun) trip up here, or there? — spread out over 110 somewhat leisurely minutes.
The grabber moments — smuggling the body into a funeral home, using a cop’s wiles to foil surveillance cameras — are spaced out more than one would like. The script is tighter than the direction and editing. 
But the set-pieces dazzle (think Korean war toys) and the performances by the cops have a nice cynicism about them. If Hollywood isn’t in a scrum for the remake rights to this one, somebody’s missing the boat.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Lee Sun-kyun Lee, Jeong Man-shik, Jo Jin-woong
Credits: Directed by Seong-hoon Kim, script by Seong-hoon Kim,
Hae-jun Lee . A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:51

Amy Schumer, America’s new R-rated sweetheart, wrote and stars in what should be her break-out film, “Trainwreck,” playing a sweeter and funnier version of the comic persona she’s created.
She plays a woman who has taken Dad’s “Monogamy isn’t realistic” speech (delivered when she was about 5) to heart. Amy Townsend has grown up to live the love life of a player, a hit it and quit it who drinks too much, smokes too much weed, wakes up in a lot of strange beds and is long past the day when she thought anything of a “walk of shame.”
She’s doing it the way guys (in the movies, at least) dream of doing it — sex without commitment, purely for sport and pleasure. Her muscled boyfriend (wrestler and comic marvel John Cena) doesn’t know they’re in an open relationship until after he’s humiliated himself attempting the “dirty talk” she so covets during sex.
“You can’t spell VICTORY without ‘T.R.Y.’!”
Amy writes for “S’Nuff” magazine, a lad mag given to cover stories like “You’re not gay, she’s boring,” and the impact of garlic on the taste of semen. Tilda Swinton plays her self-absorbed Brit-boss, the one who sends her out to profile the surgeon to the sports stars, Dr. Aaron Connors. Bill Hader plays this guy like a deer caught in Schumer’s omnivorous headlights — scared, shocked, overwhelmed, smitten.
Brie Larson is the sister who’s opted for the conventional life — husband, “Big Bang” nerdy stepson, a real disappointment to Amy.
And Colin Quinn is the Dad, who like the real Amy Schumer’s father, suffers from Multiple Sclerosis and is in assisted living. But not without a fight.
Schumer’s not-model-thin-s0-what swagger shimmers through every scene, even the ones where she’s straining too hard to top the last one liner. She hates sports, and notes that her doctor/interview subject treats “a lot of black people.” Is she racist?
“I like black people! I PREFER black people!”
She’s perfect as the bull in the china shop at her sister’s baby shower, the reporter who never hesitates to cross the line and bed the people she’s interviewing, the woman who has never let herself get emotionally entangled with a guy. Best of all, she’s not some caricature of a “train wreck” or “semi-hot mess.” She’s made this woman real, flawed, funny and carnal.
Director Judd Apatow still lets every single scene run too long, past its payoff, past the point where it’s funny. The opening reporters’ “pitch meeting” stumbles on and on, a finale involving cheerleading routines exhausts its possibilities. The minutes add up and this unconventionally conventional 90 minute rom-com stretches to two hours plus.
But Colin Quinn, who has never been funny in a movie before, scores laughs.
Tilda Swinton, tanned and coarse and ready for action, kills.
Cena is hilarious, Hitchcock veteran Norman Lloyd steals scenes with funny lines in the assisted living facility, and comic Dave Attell zings as the witty homeless guy living on Amy’s stoop.
And Lebron James, playing himself, practically steals the movie. Playing it straight, “concerned” and split-the-check cheap around his go-to surgeon, you can see Hader fight back the laughs as he stares down King James in some moments.
Schumer, writing and performing a character close to the one she’s been presenting to the public, may never be this funny again, but funny she is. If she’s lucky, she’ll graduate from that edgy but clumsy and coarse TV show, the Comedy Central one propped up by ads for phone-sex lines. R-rated or not, she’s America’s sweetheart –2015 edition.

MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and some drug use

Cast: Amy Schumer, Bill Hader, Colin Quinn, John Cena, Tilda Swinton
Credits: Directed by Judd Apatow, script by Amy Schumer. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:05

Paul Rudd brings his Everyman/Funnyman humor and humanity to the Marvel Universe in “Ant-Man,” a formulaic comic-book thriller enlivened, a bit, by his engaging lead performance.
It’s yet another “origin myth” within Stan Lee’s empire, and much of its nearly two hours is overwhelmed with the tedious touchstones of such movies — how “Ant-Man” came to be “Ant-Man.” But a lively, silly opening and a deft and daft finale rescue it from all its Avengers/Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. back-engineering.
Rudd is Scott Lang, whom we meet the day he gets out of prison. A likable lunk with an advanced degree but a long “cat burglar” rap sheet, he falls in with his old cell-mate (Michael Pena, hilarious). And that’s how he comes to meet Professor Pym, inventor of the “Pym Particle” and a fellow who had a serious falling out with Tony Stark’s dad, back in the day. He’s played by Michael Douglas.
Pym’s particle reduces the distance between atoms, maintaining density as it does. The upshot? A guy can shrink to ant-size, retaining his relative strength and throw-weight. That will be handy if Pym wants to tear his company from the clutches of his evil protege, Dr. Cross, given some lip-smacking gravitas by Corey Stoll (“House of Cards,” “Glass Chin”).
Scott’s solution to Pym’s problem?
“I think we should call The Avengers!”
Evangeline Lilly is Pym’s daughter, Hope, all bangs and generic “adult in the room” lines.
“Do you think this is a joke?”
During the many scenes where Scott has to train with an army of carpenter ants, bullet ants, “crazy” ants and fire ants, not so much. But entrusting this to director Peyton Reed, known only for comedies (“The Break-Up”) occasionally pays dividends. Pena’s scenes where he relates, in convoluted flashbacks, how he learned about this potential heist or made that connection, are narrated by the actors in those flashbacks in Pena’s manic Hispanic-accent. But Rudd’s wry way with a line is put to little use, despite the half-dozen or so writers brought in to joke up the script.
This is mostly special effects — a digitally shrunken guy in the Ant-Man suit running and playing with ants — and Marvel Universe housekeeping, fitting this story in with the larger one of next generation Avengers.
Whatever its cheerful B-movie charms, “Ant-Man” never feels like it can play with the big boys. We’re drifting into the comic book B-list, and nearing that long-anticipated moment of comic book movie overkill. Rudd or no Rudd, without the goofball finale, “Ant-Man” would be the runt of Marvel’s ever-growing litter.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sci-fi action violence

Cast: Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas, Michael Pena, Judy Greer, T.I.
Credits: Directed by Peyton Reed, script by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay, Paul Rudd, script by . A Marvel Studios/Walt Disney release. release.

Running time: 1:57

The Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal always seems on the lookout for movies with a message. And in films such as “No,” about an ad writer who concocts a strategy for defeating the Chilean dictatorship at the polls, or “Babel” or “The Motorcycle Diaries” or “Rosewater,” that paid off.
But with “Ardor,” about an avenger protecting threatened peasant farmers from the murderous predations of Big Ag, that instinct lets him down. A cheat of a thriller about rescuing a young farm woman (Alice Braga) after hired thugs make her father sign over his land at gunpoint, then kill him and kidnap her, it pitches itself as something more mystical and higher-minded than it actually is.
The “cheat” begins with the opening titles, a myth about “beings” summoned by jungle people to aid them against “invaders.” Then we see those invaders — mercenaries (Claudio Tolcachir plays their leader,  Tarquinho ) who lose one of their number (or a hostage) to some savage jungle beast.
“Tiger,”  Tarquinho says, in subtitled Spanish. “Jaguar” he meant to say.
He and his small band of lightly-armed murderers visit jungle farmers, force them to sign over their land and commit the occasional atrocity just for fun.
Kai (Bernal), the Bare Chested Avenger, walks up to such a farm. He has mysterious tattoos on his back and legs. The farmer (Chico Diaz) warns him, “They will come.”
“Good,” Kai replies. But when the men come, he is no help. All he can do is hide, and set out to free the farmer’s kidnapped daughter (Braga) before the inevitable rape scene.
There’s nothing mystical or mysterious about what follows. Kai strains to outwit and outfight the kidnapper/murderers. The daughter yearns to have sex with him after she is almost raped by the bad guys.
As the story unravels, the action beats take over. A farmstead firefight is arrestingly staged like an Old West (movie) showdown. And Bernal broods, brawls and tells us bits of his story, how he came to be this Shirtless Shane of Amazonia.
“Ardor,” in the end, has little ardor, or originality or magic about it. It’s just a mundane C-movie action picture that tries to pass itself off as something deeper.

MPAA Rating:  R for violence, some gruesome images and a scene of sexuality

Cast: Gael Garcia Bernal, Alice Braga, Claudio Tolcachir
Credits: Written and directed by  Pablo Fendrik. A Participant release.

Running time: 1:41

August of 1971, 24 male students of Stanford University acted out the roles of guards and inmates at a “prison” created for a psychological experiment. “The flip of a coin” determined who was to be a guard and who portrayed inmates in this study of human behavior under the duress of confinement or the duress of confining, degrading and abusing other people.
The results of “The Stanford Prison Experiment” are still taught in psychology courses today. You want to understand Gulags, “reeducation camps,” Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo or San Quentin, it’s all there in Dr. Philip Zimbardo’s eye-opening exercise in power, control and psychosis.
A very good cast headed by Billy Crudup, Michael Angarano and Tye Sheridan stars in “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” a film as straight-forward and clinically chilling as its title.
Crudup is Zimbardo, leading a team of graduate assistants in grilling potential candidates for this $15 a day job of play acting.
“Have you ever attempted to kill yourself?” they want to know, among other details. Important screening questions, as it turns out.
Twenty-four young men are chosen. The “prisoners” are “arrested” at their homes — the first in a series of humiliations. They’re stripped and ordered to wear nightshirts that look like dresses. The others, given only the most rudimentary instructions (“No hitting.”), put on uniforms and sunglasses and become guards. Zimbardo and his grad students watch on video as the experiment begins and the guards figure things out as they go.
“Don’t we have to de-louse them first?”
Some of the “guards” are visibly uneasy at having this power over their peers. The prisoners smirk at the routine efforts to feminize and dehumanize them. At first.
Angarano has the showiest role, that of a prison guard who affects a drawl and has a little too much of “Cool Hand Luke” memorized. He slides into intimidation, degradation and punishment with psychotic ease.
Within hours, dynamics are established. Punishments are being doled out. Men find themselves doing push ups, or are stuck in “The Hole.” Some act out and resist. Some submit. Within a day, things turn abusive. Prisoners started conspiring to fight back, or began to crack up.
This story has been told in a couple of earlier films, but this one benefits from a “found footage” veracity and age-appropriate cast. Nelsan Ellis is sharp and guarded as a “consultant” brought in to verify the authenticity of the prison experience. Olivia Thirlby is the student-girlfriend of Zimbardo who acts as his conscience when the stress of this research — sleep deprivation goes on inside and outside of “the prison”– gets to him.
It’s not a new story, but it is one that holds up on the retelling. And in sticking closer to the actual facts of the event make this “Stanford Prison Experiment” worth showing in the very classrooms where the actual experiment and its ground-breaking conclusions are taught.

MPAA Rating: R for language including abusive behavior and some sexual references

Cast: Billy Crudup, Michael Angarano, Tye Sheridan, Olivia Thirlby, Nelsan Ellis, Thomas Mann.
Credits: Directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, script by Tim Talbott. An IFC release.

Running time: 2:02

The striking desert around Joshua Tree National Monument and the lovely lighthouses of California provide postcard pretty settings for “Safelight,” a tepid romantic melodrama about two young people looking for one shot at being normal.
Evan Peters is Charles, labeled “Cripple” by his high school classmates, a guy bullied with the old “You think you’re better than us” rationale.
Because he is. Because he’s sensitive and a photographer. Because making movies give screenwriters the last laugh on unpleasant childhoods.
Juno Temple is Vicky, a young prostitute who plies her trade at the truck stop where Charles works. Kevin Alejandro is Skid, her abusive pimp/boyfriend. Christine Lahti is Charles’ sassy boss, and Jason Beghe plays his dying but sensitive dad.
Charles sticks up for Vicky with Skid, Vicky sticks up for Charles with the bullies. She comes to grip with her past and the boy breaks out his late brother’s camera for a photo essay contest, with Vicky driving him to the Lighthouses of California. She does it in vintage muscle cars because this is an early ’80s period piece.
In fairness, “Safelight” sounds more trite than it is. But there’s not much surprising writer-director Tony Aloupis’s tale. Temple and Peters don’t have any special chemistry, and neither character is a stretch.
The film shows flashes of life around the edges, in Alejandro’s mercurial and mean Skid and Lahti’s been-around-the-track-few-times barfly.
Mainly, though, “Safelight” is just a California tourism travelogue — See Scenic Joshua Tree, Visit the Lighthouses of Southern California. Which we do, in 80 odd-but-not-odd-enough minutes.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references

Cast: Evan Peters, Juno Temple, Kevin Alejandro, Christine Lahti, Jason Beghe
Credits: Written and directed by Tony Aloupis. An ARC Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:22