Here’s a little Warner Brothers bait and switch.
La Llorona is a Mexican ghost, a spectral menace from South of the Border.
This movie, starring Linda Cardellini, Patricia Velasquez, Raymond Cruz, with Marisol Ramirez as “La Llorona,” doesn’t appear to have anything to do with that.
Spooky looking enough in trailer form. “The Curse of La Llorona” comes out April 19.
“Mid90s'” captures a people and a place with the ring of the authentic, a grimly realistic depiction of skateboard culture in the working class LA where it blew up in the “Dogtown and Z-Boys” era.
Jonah Hill’s writing and directing debut documents transgressing kids at their underage drinking, smoking, trespassing peak in a story that is random and predictable, biting and yet predictably conventional.
It’s a period piece mainly in the sense that Hill, who made his name in foul-mouthed youth comedies like “Superbad,” gives himself permission to use the outdated, sexist, homophobic argot of dead-enders in that specific place and time.
Sunny Suljic (“The House with a Clock in Its Walls”) is Stevie, who admires his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges of “Manchester by the Sea”) when he should probably be fearing him. Our introduction to the siblings sees Ian hurling Stevie against the wall and beating him black and blue. The heightened sound of the pummeling pushes you back in your seat.
The teen is furious at the tween for constantly coming into his room, messing with his carefully organized team jerseys, baseball caps, CDs and mix tapes. Ian is…neat.
And Stevie cannot resist. Every time Ian leaves in a torrent of profane threats, Stevie crosses the threshold and notes what he should be doing to be “cooler,” acting older than his age — attire, music, interests.
Then the fatherless boy finds Big Brothers who aren’t inclined to beat him. They’re skating slackers, teens running a skate shop but mainly just hanging out, showing off with their peers, a whole subculture that Stevie can fit into if only he can trade to get Ian’s old board and master it.
Writer-director Hill loses himself in the funny-gross banter, disgusting off-the-wall “Would you rather” games the boys play and the oddball culture clash questions the cool black skater Ray (Na-Kel Smith) asks the white “Fourth Grade” (Ryder McLaughlin).
“Why do white people love their PETS so much?”
Fourth Grade, named because of his verbal communication skills, is just as tactless.
“Can black people get sunburned?”
Stevie, coached by the one guy close to him in age if not size, Ruben (Gio Galicia) to avoid apologizing or saying “Thank you,” as it paints you as “gay” or the uglier slurs associated with that, gets suckered into that discussion and finds himself welcomed — and with a new nickname — “Sunburn.”
Sunburn seeks acceptance through mimicry and idiotic bravado. He’s not very good on a board, but he takes his spills like a little man — blood and head trauma included.
As the kids climb fences onto school grounds, ride their boards down the middle of busy LA streets, pee in public and provoke any adult authority figure who comes into view including Stevie’s too-young single-mom (Katie Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts” and “Logan Lucky”), Stevie/Sunburn has his first drink, his first drugs, his first taste of sex and his introduction to raging youth rebellion.
Hill makes the quartet Sunburn is initiated into interesting “types.” Fourth Grade is labeled “dumb,” but he’s the one with the camcorder, documenting their exploits. Ray doesn’t know black guys “don’t skate,” but takes what he’s doing as seriously as any other sport that might lift him out of his situation.
The multi-racial punk whose nickname is a combo of his two favorite swear words (F—S–t), played by Olan Prenatt, is the one with the car, the 17 year-old who comes from money, whose future he is sure consists of “Just livin’ life,” avoiding “all that tryin’ hard s–t.” He’s a mouthy pretty boy who attracts girls he uses with extreme prejudice and has access to too many drugs and too much booze for his own good.
Ruben is the member of the pack we know, by rote, Stevie/Sunburn will displace.
Stevie is raising himself, like a lot of kids in his situation. And his new “family” isn’t really a substitute for a real one, though every time he gets hurt, they look after him and encourage him.
Hill doesn’t really give the characters arcs. He just sets up conflicts — Stevie and Ian, Stevie and his Mom, Stevie and Ruben — and resolves them in ways we can see coming the moment we meet the characters.
He goes for a “Kids/thirteen” level of explicitness, jamming a McLovin’ load of taboo underage activities into a film that doesn’t treat them as laughs.
“Mid90s'” becomes, in full flower, a movie with characters more interesting or unusual than its very conventional story and setting, not a bad film so much as an incomplete one.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, some violent behavior/disturbing images – all involving minors
Cast: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katie Waterston,Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt , Ryder McLaughlin, Gio Galicia
Credits:Written and directed by Jonah Hill. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:24
You’d swear that Oscar winner Sissy Spacek is injuring herself, as big as her grin is and as long as she holds it.
Danny Glover and Tom Waits may be old pros playing ex-cons, but there’s something just tickled about their performances in group moments.
Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular “The Old Man & a Gun.”
That would be Robert Redford, 82, playing a 61 year-old who only breaks out of prison so he can rob some more banks. He’s been got caught time and again, only to get out, get the itch, break out his police scanner and stopwatch, put on a suit, a hat and a fake mustache and charm some poor teller or bank manager out of all the cash on hand.
“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt,” he’ll purr, “because I like you.”
It’s like Mister Rogers has a drawl and a yen for stickups.
“A gentleman,” the ladies and gents he robs tell the cops. Courtly, well-mannered, with eyes that dance a little, they might add.
Redford plays this guy with all the bemused goodwill his decades in the movies will allow, and we eat it up because of that residual goodwill and good humor. It couldn’t have hurt to remember, before each take, that this real life bank robber shared the name of a famous comic character actor — Forrest Tucker.
Writer-director and frequent Casey Affleck collaborator David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) gives this breezy “mostly true story” nicely spaced moments of whimsy and a touch of romance in between the bank jobs and getaways.
Because this Tucker stumbles into a widowed horse rancher (Spacek) on one of his getaways. Her car trouble gives him a passenger when the cops are looking for a fellow by himself. And her smile lights him up and makes him over-share. Yeah, he robs banks. Nooooo, he’s just kidding.
“What’d be worse, that I’m lying about this, or that I’m not.?
Whatever the motives of his accomplices (Glover and singer/actor Waits), this Tucker fellow only feels he’s really living when he’s doing something daring, dangerous and that requires skill, nerve and cunning to pull off. All those earlier arrests? That was different.
“I know what I’m doing now.”
“The Old Man & the Gun” ambles across half the country, pulling off heists, getting away more or less clean, wooing the Texan with the horses in between jobs. His laid-back, sway-backed zest for life is infectious. He’s got things he wants to do before he dies.
The one guy who could stand to catch what he’s spreading around is John Hunt, a just-turned-40 Dallas robbery detective who has a beautiful wife (Tika Sumpter) and two little kids, but no will to go on.
“I need to start trying a lot harder, or quit,” he says. When he has his kids with him on the day Tucker robs a Dallas bank, right under his nose without him having a clue it’s happening, it really is, as they say in Texas, “Go big or go home” time.
His colleagues (Keith Carradine plays his boss) will never let him hear the end of this if he doesn’t make this “Over the Hill Gang” case. “I’ve already got the AARP on it,” one wag teases.
It’s Redford’s show, and he lays on the genteel charm, even when the fact that he’s got a gun and is robbing a poor clerk on her first day makes her cry. Who wouldn’t wipe away her tears in the face of that kindly grin?
His scenes with Spacek have a simpatico snap to them. He’s swapping lines with a peer, and their matching reddish hair and similar accents (Tucker grew up in Florida) makes them seem just right together. He’s made better movies, but never one more charming.
Lowery never quite takes this into “Elegy for Old Age/All is Lost” territory, even with the epilogue that plays far more sober and downbeat than the lighter half-speed action comedy that precedes it.
Deciding how much of the story to tell (the man’s escapes were a hoot, and allow the filmmaker the chance to recycle young Bob’s turn in the 1966 thriller “The Chase,” in which he played an escaped convict) is a bit of an issue. Short as it is, that epilogue makes “Old Man” feel it’s going on past its curtain call.
But Redford never lets us tire of Forrest Tucker’s presence, never makes him larger than life when life-sized is enough and never allows us to fret too much that somebody’s going to get hurt in this real-life “Going in Style.”
Like Forrest Tucker himself, who figured experience was a good thing even if he’s not nearly as fast or quick to react as he used to be, Redford knows what to let us see and what we can just sense from his familiar, engaging presence.
“I know what I’m doing now.”
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language
Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck
Credits:Directed by David Lowery, script by David Lowery based on a magazine article by David Grann . A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:33
Film fans revere Charlie Chaplin, but they — we — LOVE Buster Keaton.
He was the embodiment of comic stoicism, an often hapless but never rattled “Great Stone Face” who never let on how funny he was or how hilarious his precarious predicaments could be.
Peter Bogdanovich, the film scholar turned filmmaker (“Paper Moon”) has loved Keaton forever, and his documentary “The Great Buster: A Celebration” establishes those bonafides right in the opening moments. He and director Frank Capra chatted at length on “The Dick Cavett Show” in the early ’70s about this then-forgotten genius of the silent cinema.
A child of vaudeville, trained to take a punch and a fall from infancy, named “Buster” by no less than Harry Houdini, a giant of the silent cinema, creator of some of the most enduring and repeated-to-this-day sight gags in film history, director of “The Boat,” “Seven Ages” and the greatest epic of silent comedy, “The General,” Keaton undergoes a revival every decade or so simply because his antiquated black and white/silent movies remain hilarious to this day.
“Great Buster” turns Bogdanovich’s lifelong appreciation into cinematic adoration, using generous clips of Keaton’s short films, features and late-life TV appearances to remind us that, as Johnny Knoxville says in the movie, “he was funny then, he’s funny now and he’ll be funny 100 years from now.”
Stuntman/actor Knoxville is one of the legions of Keaton fans Bogdanovich rounded up to give testimonials, with Knoxville most admiring that the man did his own deathly-dangerous (and funny) stunts right up to the end. Actor James Karen was a friend, Paul Dooley (“Breaking Away/Popeye”) was such a fan he fought to get into a TV commercial Keaton did for Ford Econoline vans in the 1950s (He’s one of the “Keystone Cops” in this spot).
Dick Van Dyke knew Keaton, learned how to take pratfalls from him and admits, “I stole as many moves from him as I could…He was like a ballet dancer, incredible control of his body.”
The clown Bill Irwin gushes at Keaton’s single-take brilliance in a classic “Candid Camera” bit, admirer Richard Lewis befriended Keaton’s widow and treasures a porkpie hat she made him just like the one that was Keaton’s trademark.
Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks and “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts use Keaton as a filmmaking reference and inspiration.
“He always had that quiet tragedy which is very, very funny,” Werner Herzog says. And about Keaton’s role as a founding father of motion pictures, “He is the essence of cinema.”
Cybill Shepherd vouches for his acting, Keaton’s mime-face realization that “Acting’s all in the eyes.”
Bogdanovich shows us a sequence, the facade of a house falling over Keaton or him grabbing a passing car to make his getaway in “Cops,” and Carl Reiner, Bill Hadar and others marvel at “How’d he DO that?”
Comic actor Nick Kroll dissects the deadpan Keaton persona with this spot-on take — “In these heightened comic scenarios, playing them incredibly seriously raises the stakes of every scene he plays.”
And Bogdanovich as narrator relates Keaton anecdotes, describes the arc of his personal life — triumph to tragedy, to revival — and analyzes scenes, Keaton’s penchant for long takes allowing an entire gag to develop without tricks or cuts, what film critic Leonard Maltin means when he says “The best special effect in a Buster Keaton movie is Buster himself.”
Back in 1987, PBS filmmakers David Gill and Kevin Brownlow presented a three part “American Masters” tribute titled “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow.” Narrated by the great British director Lindsay Anderson, it was thorough, sweeping and at close to three hours in length, pretty much the definitive Keaton biographical documentary.
It was itself a hard act to follow as Bogdanovich’s film covers the same ground in much the same way. But Bogdanovich found different scenes from Keaton’s movies, fresher TV commercials from Keaton’s later years and lots of funny people to marvel over their idol in this fresh, lively and thoroughly entertaining remembrance of a great clown, a “Great Stone Face” and a brilliant filmmaker.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Buster Keaton, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Carl Reiner, Cybill Shepherd, Richard Lewis
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. A Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:42
A child sitting with a psychotherapist (Colm Feore), hypnotized by the sound of his voice and the metronome he uses to put patients under.
Not saying this trailer is particularly scary, but the concept is killer and it is most certainly chilling.
Jackson Robert Scott of the “It” remake has the title role. Taylor Schilling and Brittany Allen also star in “The Prodigy,” which opens Feb. 8.
This Nov. 16 thriller has a hint of Jekyll and Hyde about it.
Ansel Elgort plays two brothers trapped inside the same body, living separate, contradictory lives. Elgort was just cast as “Tony” in the Spielberg “West Side Story” remake.
“Jonathan” also stars Patricia Clarkson as the shrink trying to help him “manage” this situation, and Suki Waterhouse (“Assassination Nation”) and Matt Bomer.
A seventeen day wonder built on the premise “What if the Bling Ring had stumbled into a convention of serial killers?”
Robin Tunney and Lance Reddick and Erin Moriarty and Julian McMahon are among the stars of “Monster Party,” making the rounds of horror film festivals as we speak. Maybe IFC Midnight or Magnet will get their hands on it.
Bunch of good looking young actors dressing up in ’60s wear live out Lloyd’s character’s past in this romantic fantasy, which premiered at Woodstock.
As Rev. Jim, Lloyd’s most famous TV character would put it, “Okeydoke!”
No release date for this one yet, still traveling the film festival circuit. Keep an eye out, because truly, who doesn’t love Christopher Lloyd?
Those marketplace masters Roadside Attractions got their hands on this Tebow Brothers-produced football drama in the “Friday Night Lights” tradition.
Two Truett brothers, trying to ride athletics out of the dead-end town where they live, screw up and pursue second chances in this Chris Dowling (“Priceless,” “Where Hope Grows”) family drama.
Tanner Stine and Evan Hofer play the brothers, Dowling’s go-to athletic looking guy Kristoffer Polaha is the drunken dad they could never please.
Frances Fisher (as Grandma?). Myleti Williamson (as a coach) and Mario Van Peebles (A preacher!) also star.
Most Westerns are, by default if not definition, “picaresque” in nature.
Our hero or anti-hero wanders and roams, an itinerant cowboy, gambler or gunfighter in the saddle, stirring up trouble or righting a wrong, often through the barrel of a six-gun.
Which is why “picarseque” in the Western sense is distinctive for its blood and bullets.
“The Sisters Brothers,” based on Patrick DeWitt’s novel, follows two amusing yet violent, pitiless and murderous rogues — guns for hire — as they pursue their prey down the West Coast in the Gold Rush Era 1850s.
All it takes is an order from the mysterious, never-explains-himself Commodore (Rutger Hauer) and they’re off, punishing, retrieving but mostly killing those this Oregon oligarch deems have “cheated” or otherwise wronged him.
But these siblings — Charlie and Eli (Joaquin Phoenix and John C. Reilly, King of the Buddy Picture) — just appear to be without conscience or remorse, dealing death wherever they go. They’re both undergoing a sort of existential crisis, wrestling with awful childhoods, fretting over the “bad blood” passed down from their drunken, violent father.
They have a lot of time to ponder that in between blasts of mayhem, mishaps on the trail, drunken visits to the brand-new towns springing up on their route and arguments about their past.
They’re hunting a chemist named Hermann Kermit Warm (Riz Ahmed of “Nightcrawler” and “Rogue One”). Actually, they’re following the tracker, John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) the Commodore also hired to do the difficult work of finding a thin, dark-skinned educated man in a world of white mountain men, miners, murderers and roughnecks.
Morris is also an educated man, and he recounts his tracking via journal entries and the occasional note he leaves behind for the brothers, who are to do the dirty work at the end of this quest. Their quarry, he relates, “made a precipitate departure,” in one note.
Hotheaded, drunken Charlie isn’t suffering such “pretentious bull—t” gladly. Morris, whom he calls “Mau-RICE” in his rants, gets under his skin.
Eli? He’s just trying to survive the spider who crawled into his mouth and bit him, the grim injuries to his horse, the double-dealing madam Mayfield (Rebecca Root) who gave her name to the town they stop in, a place that could be their last stop ever.
Eli pines for the schoolmarm who gave him her shawl as a talisman while Charlie hunts for that next drink or hooker. Hermann, meanwhile, has connected with John Morris and enlisted him on his own quest for a less violent future financed by his chemical shortcut in the panning for gold process.
Director and co-screenwriter Jacques Audiard (“A Prophet, “Rust and Bone”) stages unforgettable gunfights. None of this old Hollywood “day for night” filming of late-night ambushes. The only thing illuminating the pitch-black darkness of pre-civilization is the flash of a firearm.
He goes to some pains to mimic DeWitt’s novel’s pacing; deliberative passages, comic exchanges and hilariously florid turns of phrase (via Morris) interrupted by carefully spaced-out spasms of violence. That tends to slow the picture. And in showing us the consequences of a .45 bullet to the head or the mauling of a horse, he’s giving us detail that is more unpleasant than most Westerns would include.
But the casting is startling in how spot-on it is, from the pairing of Reilly (producer of the film) with Phoenix to reuniting Gyllenhaal with his “Nightcrawler” co-star, to the mother of the brothers, a shockingly moving (and a tad funny) turn from Carol Kane, most recently seen as daffy neighbor to Netflix’s Kimmy Schmidt.
“The Sisters Brothers” sneaks its messages in the back door, how a world built on justifiable fear and firearms makes life cheap and souls hollow, how the amorality and violence numbed one and all and how lives back then could be just as angst-ridden as they are today, no matter how quick the “hero” is on the draw.
And if you spill enough blood, and “picaresque” just doesn’t cover it.
MPAA Rating: R for violence including disturbing images, language, and some sexual content
Cast: John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal, Joaquin Phoenix, Riz Ahmed, Rutger Hauer, Carol Kane
Credits:Directed by Jacques Audiard, script by Jacques Audiard and Thomas Bidegain, based on the novel by Patrick DeWitt. An Annapurna release.
Running time: 2:01
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